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Stride had never seen her as anything but a daughter, of whom he was fiercely protective and proud. Maybe it was because he had first met her when she was barely out of her teens, at a time when he was happily married to Cindy. He mentored Maggie and watched her blossom, and soon, she fell in love with him. Cindy warned him about the huge crush that Maggie was developing, but he pretended that the attraction wasn’t there, and eventually, Maggie did the same. It was still the elephant in the room between them—invisible but something they always had to dance around.
    She didn’t carry much of her past with her anymore. She was bubbly, sarcastic, funny, sharp-tongued, and foul-mouthed. It had taken years for all her rough edges to blend together. She was more like a machine in her early days, not revealing any trace of her emotions, because she thought cops didn’t do that. But Stride knew that you needed emotion to succeed in this job. You couldn’t divorce yourself from your feelings, and you couldn’t let them dominate you. It was a delicate balancing act.
    He still remembered the investigation where Maggie took the first big leap, becoming someone new and whole. It was the kind of case detectives hate, the kind that haunts them. That was something Maggie didn’t understand. She was accustomed to solving cases. She figured she was smart enough that if she simply brought enough brainpower to bear, and studied all the details, she would dig her way to the truth. Usually she was right. But not always.
    She and Stride had been working together for more than a year when a girl’s body was found one late August morning on the dewy grass of the golf course near Enger Park. She was nude, and the rape kit came back positive. Her head and hands had been hacked off and were never found. The coroner concluded that she was about seventeen years old, and from the bruises on what remained of her neck, she had been strangled. The only identifying marks on her body were a collage of tattoos from rock bands and video games, like Bon Jovi, Mortal Kombat, Aerosmith, and Virtua Fighter.
    They tried everything to solve the case, but in the end, they weren’t even able to find out who the girl was. They reviewed thousands of missing person reports from the entire Midwest. They ran DNA from the semen found in the girl’s body and came back with nothing. They worked with a local psychiatrist on a profile that got them nowhere. They contacted hundreds of tattoo parlors. They checked video game fan clubs. They got in touch with each of the bands. Weeks went by, and the case got cold.
    She was simply the Enger Park Girl, and that was who she was going to stay.
    He remembered Maggie pacing back and forth in a City Hall conference room a month after they had found the body. She kept rerunning everything they had tried, looking for something they had missed, or some other angle they could pursue. Finally, her face serious and confused, she looked at Stride and asked him how they were going to solve the case. As if he had been deliberately holding back the answer.
    He had to tell her the truth. Unless someone came forward with new information, they weren’t going to solve it. A murderer was going to walk away free. A young girl wasn’t going to get justice. Sometimes that was how the world worked.
    It was as if the idea had never occurred to Maggie before.
    She dropped down in a chair, looked him dead in the eye, puffed out her cheeks in frustration, and said without a trace of an accent, “That really sucks, boss.”
     
     
     

Chapter 4
     
     
    Stride and Serena lived in an area of Duluth known as Park Point, a narrow finger of land that separated the churning waters of Lake Superior from the ports where the giant cargo boats loaded and unloaded shipments of coal, taconite, and grain. They lived on the lake side, steps from the beach. He arrived home before dawn on Thursday morning, and in the windy darkness, he heard the roar of waves