Chapter One
Jonathan Stride watched the knife fall to the floor.
It was a simple thing, the knife falling. His hand laid it on the counter wrong; it slipped off, blade pointed down. But in the past month, nothing had been simple for Stride. His eyes followed the downward path of the knife and just like that, he was falling, too.
He was no longer in the cabin where he had gone to recover from his injuries. He was over Superior Bay, hurtling through one hundred and twenty feet of air to the hard water below. He felt the speeding rush of his body as it became a missile; he endured the helplessness and fear of those three long seconds; he suffered the excruciating pain of impact, his bones breaking, the water choking off his oxygen, the lights around him extinguishing to blackness and cold. Everything he had tried to forget, he remembered.
Stride's eyes sprang open. He stood in the cabin's small kitchen with his palms flat on the granite counter. He felt on his neck for his pulse; his heart was racing. He wondered how long he had been gone this time. The knife stood straight up, its point jabbed into the wooden floor, but it wasn't vibrating like a tuning fork. He had been standing there frozen, caught up in the flashback, for a minute or more.
He grabbed the back of a chair to keep his knees from buckling. He sat down and propped his chin on his clenched fists. Gradually, the longer he sat, the more the memory retreated. His breathing slowed down. He studied the cabin and let his eyes linger on the furnishings id remind himself that he was far away from the bridge. The brown tweed sofa. The deer head trophy with its antlers and staring eyes on the wall. The 1920s photo of grimy workers in the iron mines. The oak door to the master bedroom, where Serena slept, unaware that he was awake for the tenth night in a row.
Stride pushed his hand back through his messy shock of black-and-gray hair. He got up, retrieved the knife from the floor, and opened the refrigerator to grab a half-full bottle of water. He shook a few Advil tablets into his hand and washed them down with a long swallow from the bottle. When he closed the refrigerator door, he caught sight of his face reflected in the black oven and didn't like what he saw. The skin on his craggy face was pale. His dark eyes were tired.
He favored his left leg as he walked into the great room. The fall from the bridge had broken his leg and left him in a cast for six weeks, and although he was walking on his own again, the lingering pain was a daily reminder that he wasn't fully healed. He drove into the nearby town of Grand Rapids for physical therapy four times a week. He used breathing exercises to restore full capacity to his lungs, which had collapsed as he hit the water. He was getting better, but slowly. What he hadn't admitted to Serena was that, as his physical injuries healed, his mental health had been deteriorating.
Two months ago, as he climbed into his Ford Expedition, he had dropped his keys. Out of nowhere, the sight and sound of the keys hitting the ground had triggered a storm of memories from his fall. The panic attack was debilitating, like a fire sucking the oxygen out of a room. He'd told himself that it was a one-time occurrence, but then it had happened again several days later. And then again.
Stride decided to get out of town in the last month before he returned to his job as Lieutenant in the Duluth Police. He and Serena had escaped to a getaway cabin outside the city to fish, hike, and make love. But they had done almost none of those things. Instead, he had tunneled deeper inside himself, pulling away from his job, his life, and even from Serena. Now he was supposed to go back to the Detective Bureau in another week, and he wasn't sure he was in any shape to do so.
Stride saw the red light flashing on his BlackBerry. A new email had arrived. He slid the phone out of its holster and saw a message from his Duluth partner, Maggie Bei. The subject line read: Number Four.
Stride stiffened with unease, because he knew what Maggie meant. When he opened the message, he saw a brief note: Get your ass back here soon, boss. We've got a body near the Lester River.
In the past month, three women had disappeared from their homes in the rural farmlands north of Duluth. Despite a massive search, no trace of them had been found, but the evidence suggested they had cach suffered a violent assault. Now the assailant had struck a fourth time and left behind a body.
Stride was frustrated that one of the most disturbing strings of crimes in the city in recent years had been laid at Maggie's feet while he struggled with his injuries in the woods more than an hour away. He trusted her instincts as an investigator, but they both preferred working as a team. Without him, she felt adrift. He felt the same way without her.
Maybe he should go back early. Tomorrow.
Or maybe not at all.
He didn't text her back. He never got the chance. Before he could key in a message, he saw headlights cut through the room. He looked Out the front window and saw an Itasca County Sheriff's vehicle parking in the damp ground near his Expedition. As he watched, the lights disappeared, and a woman in uniform climbed out and walked up to their front door.
He knew her. In her uniform, she could have passed for a beat cop, but Denise Sheridan was the Deputy Sheriff for Itasca County. She was as close as Stride had to a counterpart in the sprawling, sparsely populated countryside northwest of Duluth. He opened the door. It was a freezing night, and the wind scattered oak leaves on the hardwood floor as he waited.
'Hello, Stride,' Denise said, marching past him into the great space of the cabin without an invitation.
'Hello, Denise.'
She smelled of sweat and smoke. The knees of her trousers were wet, and her boots tracked mud across the floor. Denise did a quick survey of the cabin as he shut the door.
'What are you doing out here?' she asked, chewing on the stump of a fingernail. 'It took me twenty minutes to find you on these back roads.'
'Recovering,' he said.
'Yeah, I heard about your fall. Nice to see you're not dead.'
Denise didn't waste time on sympathy. For as long as he'd known her, she had been a no-nonsense cop, full of rough edges and discipline. She had recently turned forty, and her face had the spider's web of wrinkles at her eyes and lips to prove it. She was tall, only a couple of inches shorter than Stride, who reached six feet one in his bare feet. She wasn't heavy, but her muscular arms and legs stretched out the fabric of her uniform. Her brunette hair fell to the middle of her neck, and she kept it parted in the middle and shoved back behind her ears. She wasn't wearing make-up. Dark crescents sagged under both eyes.
'It's three in the morning,' Stride said.
Denise shrugged, as if the time didn't need any explanation or apology. 'Maggie told me where you were hiding.'
'Did she send you here to hijack me back to Duluth?' he replied. 'The guy struck on another farm tonight. He left a body this time.'
'I heard. No, it's not about that.'
'Then what?'
'It's a different case. I need your help.'
'I'm on leave, remember?' Stride said.
'I remember. I also remember we were partners once upon a time. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important.'
That was true. Denise had started her police career in Duluth fifteen years earlier. She and Stride had spent four years working together after Stride was chosen to lead the Detective Bureau. Then Denise married her high school boyfriend and moved back home to Grand Rapids. The next cop Stride had hired to work at his side was Maggie Bei.
'Don't keep me in suspense,' Stride said. 'What's the case?'
'Look, get dressed, will you? There's no time.'
'If you want my help, you can tell me what the hell is going on,' Stride retorted.
Denise folded her arms in impatience. She cocked her head and frowned. 'A child is missing. A baby.
