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she’d closed down Arthur Pender’s gang of professional kidnappers in Detroit. Someone saw her picture in the paper, taped it to her cubicle with
Supercop
scrawled across, highlighted in pink. Soon every G-man and -woman in the Minneapolis office had picked up the nickname. Whether it was meant to be praise or an insult, Windermere wasn’t sure, and after two years in Minnesota she still didn’t know anyone well enough to find out.
    She turned back to her computer, paged through more open-case files.
This would be easier,
she thought,
if I’d
worked any of these cases before.
She hadn’t. Rachel Hill, the Minneapolis office’s bank robbery whiz, was off on some vacation cruise on the Mayan Riviera, and Drew Harris, Special Agent in Charge of Criminal Investigations, had dumped Windermere in bank robberies until Hill returned. “Or,” Harris had said, winking, “another Supercop case emerges.”
    Windermere sighed and looked up from her computer again. For all of the Supercop bullshit, the Pender case remained her proudest achievement as an FBI agent. For weeks straight, almost a month, she’d tracked Arthur Pender and his roving group of kidnappers, teaming up with a Minnesota state cop named Kirk Stevens as she followed Pender and his gang from Minneapolis through Seattle and Florida toward a bloody shoot-out in Detroit. It had been a blockbuster case, a career-maker, and working thirty-five-thousand-dollar bank scores seemed a tedious anticlimax, even with assault rifles and ski masks thrown into the mix.
    And she still missed Kirk Stevens. The security office in the Bank of America had triggered a memory that Windermere had since been unable to shake. She’d grown fond of her colleague, though he was more than a decade her senior and happily married, and kind of corny besides. He was a hell of a cop when it mattered, insightful and decisive and brave, the rare kind of partner Windermere could trust. They had promised to keep in touch after the Pender case ended, but they’d broken that promise quickly; apart from a quick, awkward cup of coffee a month or so later, they’d fallen out of contact.
    Of course they had. Stevens was married and had his family to take care of. And Windermere, face it, had dedicated her life to the Bureau in the year since Mark, her last boyfriend, had finally walked out the door. She’d kept herself busy, took on as many cases as possible, and worked hard to keep the past from her mind. Now, though, holed up in her tiny cubicle and enduring Mathers’s FBI Super Bowl while she paged through a seemingly endless string of wanted-bank-robber pictures, Windermere let her mind wander to Stevens again and wondered if he ever longed for another shot at the glamorous life.

9
    K IRK STEVENS SAT at his desk in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension headquarters in Saint Paul, staring at the stack of cold homicide files on his desk and trying to dredge up some enthusiasm.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t like working cold cases. In his fifteen years as a BCA agent, Stevens had learned to enjoy the challenges they presented. They were puzzles, all of them, old and dusty, invariably missing a couple key pieces. If you had the time and a little bit of luck, you could sometimes put something together that looked right. And when you did manage to solve a cold homicide, well, the feeling of accomplishment almost matched the satisfaction of taking down an Arthur Pender. Almost.
    These files, though, these ones on his desk, were the oldest, dustiest cases on the shelf, the puzzles missing half of their pieces. The unidentified, buckshot-filled bodies pulled from some godforsaken northern lake. The severed hand in a mailbox in Monticello. These were the puzzles nobody could solve.
    Stevens paged through another cold file, a fifteen-year-old homicide. A drifter with his throat cut behind a liquor store outside Detroit Lakes. No witnesses. No murder weapon. No suspects. Stevens flipped through the slim file.