went down on me. Made him watch as she held my head to make me go down on her. He’s still watching. He can’t stop.”
“Where is he?” Stride asked her.
“I told you, I have no idea.”
“We’ve sent cops to the homes of all the girls who were involved in the peeping incidents,” Stride said. “There’s no sign of Finn or Clark at any of them. So he probably found someone new. A girl we don’t know about yet.”
“We know you sanitized his room before we searched it,” Maggie added. “We need to know if you found anything.”
Rikke put the cup down and folded her hands as if she were praying. “If you find him, you’ll put him in jail.”
“If we don’t find him tonight, he may wind up dead,” Stride said.
“There were pictures,” Rikke murmured. “Lots of them. Teenage girls. Some naked, some not. Taken through bedroom windows.”
“Did you destroy the photos?”
She nodded.
“Did you recognize any of the girls?” Maggie asked.
“Yes, I had seen some of them on the news,” Rikke admitted. “Including the retarded girl. The one who died.”
“Was there anyone recent? Someone he might have found since Mary?”
“Yes, he had new pictures. They were still on his camera. Another blonde. She looked young, maybe fifteen or sixteen. She looked a little like Laura did back then.”
“Do you know who this girl is?” Stride asked.
“I don’t.”
“Do you have any idea how he found her?”
“No.” Rikke thought about it and said, “She probably goes to Superior High School. In one of the photos, she was wearing a Spartans T-shirt.”
Stride turned to Maggie. “Talk to Ristau outside. See if we can track down a current yearbook from Superior High ASAP. Rikke might recognize this girl in the class photos.”
Maggie was already halfway to the door. “I’m on it.”
42
Less than an hour later, Stride and Maggie sat in the East End living room of a frightened teenager named Angela Tjornhom. Her parents sat on either side of her. Angela wore a gray Spartans T-shirt and pajama bottoms, with bare feet. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap. She was as waiflike as a model, with a pretty face and tiny frame. Stride could see that Rikke was right. If he looked for it in her face, he could see that Angela bore a faint resemblance to Laura.
“So this guy had
“I’m sorry, but yes, we think so,” Maggie told her.
“That is so creepy. I mean, like, nude pictures even?”
“We don’t know.”
“I am never opening my blinds again, you know? I can’t believe this.” She nestled her head against her mother’s shoulder.
“Where the hell is this bastard?” Angela’s father demanded. He was small, with a thin ring of black hair around his bald head. His cheeks flushed red with rage. “Is this the pervert who was on the news?”
“We’re trying to locate him right now,” Stride said. “We’d like your permission to search your backyard.”
“Do it,” he told them. “Do whatever you have to.”
Stride nodded. “Angela, can you tell us if anything happened tonight?”
The girl had been crying. She tugged at her shirt and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I got a couple hangup calls on my cell phone.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. Sometime after midnight.”
“What did you do?”
“I turned on the light. The calls woke me up. I looked out the window, but I didn’t see anybody. It’s not like I could really see anything with all the rain, though.”
“Has this happened before?” Maggie asked.
Angela nodded. “Yeah, two or three times. Always at night. I just figured it was somebody with a wrong number, you know? I knew one of the other girls at school who got peeped, but I never thought about it happening to me.”
“Someone will come by tomorrow to take a full statement from you,” Stride said.
Maggie put a hand on the girl’s knee. “You should talk to someone, Angela. It’s natural for girls who experience something like this to be frightened. You shouldn’t deal with it alone.”
Angela shrugged and hid a little deeper inside her mother’s arms.
“We’ll get her help,” her father said.
Stride and Maggie left the family and returned to the pounding rain outside the house. Both of them switched on flashlights and swept the beams like searchlights ahead of them as they made their way to the backyard. The grass was sodden under their feet. Streams poured out of the swollen gutters. Behind the house, the lot was large and flat and dotted with evergreens. Stride could see the next street more than a hundred feet away. As he shined his flashlight through the grass, pools of standing water glistened back at him.
The room on the corner was Angela’s bedroom. The light was on, and the blinds were shut. Stride examined the grass underneath her window.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Maybe the rain washed away his footprints,” Maggie replied.
Stride shook his head. “He can’t have been this close. If he was standing here, she would have seen him.”
He examined the rest of the yard. Lightning turned the night to day for an instant. Stride saw disarray in the wet ground, twenty feet from Angela’s window. He used the flashlight to guide his footsteps to a soggy patch of mud and lawn beneath one of the fir trees, where tree roots bulged from the wet soil. In the cone of light, he saw a mess of footprints and crushed grass.
Maggie bent down and studied the overlapping tread marks. “Two different sets,” she said. “Looks like a fight.”
Stride spotted a single line of tracks leading away from the scene toward the street. He followed them with his flashlight. Where they passed through a bare patch of dirt, the prints in the mud were deep and clear.
“He was carrying someone,” Stride said, pointing to where the heel marks sank like weights into the soft earth.
“I think we’re running out of time, boss,” Maggie said.
They followed the footprints to the street, where they disappeared. Water overflowed from the sewers and poured along the curb in a river. Stride wiped rain from his eyes. He jogged to the vacant lot on the opposite side of the block to see if the footprints started again, but he couldn’t find the trail. Clark and Finn had both vanished.
Stride gestured to Maggie, pointing her to the south, while he followed the street to the north, running down the middle where the flooding was lightest. Twin rivers surged through the gutters. He used intermittent bursts of lightning to see between the houses and down the long stretches of asphalt. Each
