call. We nearly lost her.'
'What prompted it?' Stride asked.
'If you ask me, she was so lonely she couldn't handle it anymore. That's when she told Marcus she wanted a baby.'
'What did he say?'
'Your wife's in the hospital promising to kill herself if she doesn’t get a child? He said yes.'
'So maybe Marcus changed his mind about kids,' Stride said.
'No, nothing changed. Valerie didn't get pregnant for almost three years. I was worried she was going to go over the edge again. But Marcus? He didn't care. He could barely contain his annoyance when Valerie finally got pregnant. After Callie was born, he hardly touched that girl. It was like she was an unwanted house guest who was messing up his perfect life.'
'He could have divorced Valerie.'
'Yeah, and how much of his fortune would that cost him?'
Stride shook his head. 'You're not giving me anything, Denise. This is all smoke and no fire.'
'I know. All I'm saying is that you need to take a cold, hard look at Marcus Glenn. I'm a cop and a mother, and I'm telling you, there was something not right about his relationship with his daughter. It chilled me whenever I saw them together, because there was
'Do you honestly think Glenn could have harmed his own child?' Stride asked. 'Is that what you're saying?'
'I think he's capable of anything. I think this whole thing doesn’t add up. Someone breaks into the house without leaving a trace, takes the baby, and then vanishes? Come on. It makes no sense.'
'Children get abducted all the time,' he told her.
'Of course they do. But they get grabbed off the street, not whisked out of their lakeside mansions in the middle of the night. Look, I can't prove it, and it's not my case anyway. I'm just telling you what I think in my heart of hearts. OK?'
'I understand.'
'There's one other thing,' Denise added. 'Marcus said he was alone tonight, right? Just him and Callie?'
'That's right.'
'Well, if that's true, it would be the first time ever. Valerie took care of her. The babysitter took care of her. Not Marcus. No way. Don't you find it a little odd that Marcus is alone with the baby for one night, and she disappears?'
Chapter Four
Maggie Bei parked her yellow Avalanche on the outskirts of the crime scene near the Lester River. She could see the abandoned cinder block dairy illuminated under the light poles erected by her team, and she watched her evidence technicians pawing through the grass surrounding the building and in the woods on the other side of the rapids. The crew from the medical examiner's office had a more gruesome task. Two of them, in white scrubs, attended to the dead body in the field.
The fourth victim.
Maggie steeled herself to join them. For years, she had built up an immunity to the grisly discoveries of her job, but the assaults in the previous month, one after another, had tested her objectivity. She knew she could have been any one of these women. It was too easy to imagine herself on the ground, lifeless and humiliated.
Fingernails tapped on the passenger window of her truck, interrupting her thoughts. Maggie saw the round, cherubic face of Max Guppo, who waved at her and pulled open the door. She held up her hand, stopping him in his tracks.
'Freeze! What did you have for dinner?'
Guppo thought back. 'Chili con carne.'
'Shit, what are you trying to do to me? Don't you dare get in this truck.'
'I take Beano now,' Guppo protested. 'The commercials all say, 'Take Beano before, there'll be no gas.''
'Beano never met your digestive tract,' Maggie told him. 'Stay where you are, I'm getting out.'
Maggie hopped down from her truck. She cursed as her square-heeled boots landed in the wet dirt and splashed mud on to her jeans. She slammed the door and bent over with her hands on her knees and sneezed. She sniffled, yanked a tissue from her pocket, and blew her nose loudly.
'You got a cold?' Guppo asked, coming around the front of the Avalanche.
'Yeah. Just what I need. I'm hopped up on vitamin C.'
Guppo pointed at the tiny diamond stud in Maggie's nose. 'Doesn't that hurt when you sneeze?'
'I shot it halfway across the room once.'
'So why not take it out?'
'Because I like how it looks.' Maggie whiffed the air as Guppo came closer. 'Did you think I wouldn't smell that?'
'Sorry.'
'Chili con came,' Maggie told him. 'Unbelievable.'
The two of them headed across the Strand Avenue bridge over the river. They were an odd couple. Max Guppo was in his mid-fifties and had led crime scene investigations for the Detective Bureau for as long as Maggie could remember. He was only four inches taller than Maggie, who barely made it to five feet tall in her boots, and he waddled through life with cannon-sized thighs and an oversized snow tire permanently anchored around his waist. He had worn the same three suits — brown, brown, and blue — on any given day for the past decade. Maggie, by contrast, was a diminutive Chinese cop who snagged Hollister fashions off the racks for teenage girls. The closer she got to forty years old, the more she dressed as if she were twenty-five.
As they neared the dirt road that led to the white dairy building, Maggie pointed her thumb and forefinger like a pistol at Kasey Kennedy, who sat in the rear of a patrol car twenty yards away. 'How's the kid?' she asked Guppo.
'She's shaken up.'
Maggie nodded. Kasey had the door of the squad car open and sat with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She wore a baggy blue sweatshirt and ripped jeans. She stared into space with eyes that were nervous and shell-shocked.
'Wow, check out that red hair,' Maggie said. 'Is that natural?'
'Beats me,' Guppo replied, smoothing down the strands of his comb-over.
'No way that's natural,' she continued. 'Did Kasey give you a statement?'
'Yeah. She thinks you're going to fire her.'
'I'll calm her down,' Maggie said. 'Have you pieced together how this all happened?'
Guppo nodded. He led Maggie along the shore by the river. The water tumbled frantically over the rocks in the narrows and then calmed as the valley widened below the highway bridge. Maggie tested the ground with her boot. It was soft.
'The three of them came across the river here,' Guppo said, pointing to the spot where the current was fastest. Twenty feet separated them from the opposite bank that led sharply uphill to the dead woman's farmhouse. 'The victim, the perp, and then our girl Kasey.'
'They came down that hill?' Maggie asked.
'Yeah. Kasey took a header.' He dug in his pocket. 'Here's her badge. We found it in the weeds on the other side.'
'Then what?'
