He thought: these people. He knew what she meant, but he wanted to hear her say it.
“So what exactly are you looking for? Are you asking if I have a mole inside the Muslim community in Duluth?”
“Do you?”
Stride turned away from the crime scene in Canal Park and focused on the young agent in front of him. Maloney said she was smart, but she was also ego driven and impulsive. He knew about her background. A brother killed by Islamist extremists. An emotional response with a terrorism suspect that almost got her fired.
“I know the FBI’s job is to find whoever did this,” Stride said. “But part of my job is to make sure this city doesn’t tear itself apart. We’re the locals. We still have to live here after you guys have packed up and gone home. That means building trust with different communities, and that’s not easy when some of the people in Washington seem intent on setting us at one another’s throats.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not trying to undermine relationships you’ve built, but let’s not kid ourselves, Stride. We know where we need to start asking questions, and it’s not at the Lutheran prayer breakfast.”
“Aren’t you skipping a few steps?” he asked.
“I’m not jumping to any conclusions. We’ll go where the evidence takes us. But a bombing in a city that’s had weeks of protests over a ‘free-speech’ conference that openly insults Islam? It would be naïve not to reach out to contacts in the Muslim community and find out if there’s been any buzz. I’m assuming you have someone you can talk to.”
“Yes, I do,” Stride acknowledged.
“Good. Call him. Set up a meeting. I want to be there.”
He shook his head. “I’ll call him, but the meeting is just me.”
“This is what I do, Stride. I read people. I know if they’re lying.”
“I’m sure you’re good at it, but I’ve spent three years getting this man to trust me. Our politicians haven’t exactly been helping me make my case. If I bring in a stranger, from the FBI, particularly someone with your personal history, that trust is gone. You won’t get what you want from him.”
“Then tape it. I’ll use the inflections in his voice to analyze whether he’s telling the truth.”
“No. No surveillance.”
Durkin exhaled, long and slow. She hid her anger, but Stride could feel it like a cold lake wind. “I could get the SAC to order you to do it.”
“Go ahead and try, but Maloney will back me up,” Stride told her.
He’d read her correctly. Durkin was bluffing.
“Okay, fine, do it your way, but I want to know every word your mole says and how he says it,” Durkin told him.
“Of course.”
Stride heard a voice calling to him. He spotted Maggie Bei approaching from between the lakeshore hotels. She always had the same cocky, clip-clop walk in her chunky-heeled boots. Her bangs bounced. She stopped in front of him and dangled a plastic evidence bag before her. The bag contained a mangled piece of steel, blackened by scorch marks, about eight inches by six inches in size.
He noticed that Maggie’s pants were soaking wet from the thighs down. The plastic gloves on her hands were wet, too.
“You guys need to see this,” Maggie said.
Durkin studied the tiny cop from behind sunglasses. “It’s Sergeant Bei, right?”
“That’s me. And you’re the FBI liaison? Special Agent Gherkin?”
The agent’s face was stone. “Durkin. Gayle Durkin.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Durkin reached for the evidence bag and examined the contents while holding the seal with two fingers. “What is this?”
“You guys are the experts, but it looks like part of a pressure cooker to me,” Maggie replied.
“Where did you find this? And why did you move it? Next time don’t touch a thing, Sergeant. If you see something, get someone over there from the Evidence Response Team. We can’t afford to have anything contaminated.”
Maggie, who was also wearing sunglasses, blew the bangs out of her eyes. She showed more patience than Stride expected. Maggie made no secret of her dislike for the arrogance of the FBI. Not that she was short on arrogance herself. “I found this in the lake. I was afraid it was going to wash away if I waited to call for one of your techs.”
“In the lake?” Durkin asked.
Maggie pointed at the Inn on Lake Superior across the street. “Yeah, given the power of the blast, I figured some of the debris might have shot completely over the top of the hotel, so I’ve been climbing around on the rocks next to the boardwalk. I saw this chunk in the water near the shore, and I climbed in to retrieve it before the waves carried it away.”
Durkin frowned but didn’t say anything more. She didn’t offer thanks. She marched away with the bag in her hand toward the head of the FBI’s evidence team. Stride stood next to Maggie, and he waited until the FBI agent was out of earshot.
“Special Agent Gherkin?” he murmured.
A smirk played across Maggie’s lips. “Innocent mistake,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Play nice, Mags.”
“Always,” she replied.
“Look, nobody likes this, but we knew the FBI was going to take over. It’s too high profile to leave it to the locals. And the fact is, they have resources and experts for a case like this that we don’t.”
“Yeah, but this is our town, boss,” Maggie replied. “Some bastard killed our people and blew up our marathon. I don’t like playing second fiddle to the feebs on this one, and I don’t like the idea of this investigation becoming another political football.”
Stride understood. For many people, Duluth was the marathon, and the marathon was Duluth. Everyone was emotional about what had happened.
“I hear you, but I know Patrick Maloney. He’s solid. He doesn’t blow with the political winds on either side.”
“What about Durkin?”
“Maloney tells me that Durkin is bright, even if she can be a little headstrong. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“In other words, you don’t like her, either,” Maggie said.
Stride smiled. “No, but I want you and Serena to work with her, okay? Share whatever you find. I don’t need the chief accusing us of hoarding information.”
“You know it’ll be a one-way street, right? We tell them everything, they throw us crumbs?”
Stride knew that was true, but he couldn’t change it. “It is what it is, Mags.”
Maggie sighed. “Where’s Serena?”
“I told her to go home. Cat wasn’t in any shape to be alone, and Serena already ran a marathon today.”
“You want me to call her with an update?”
“Thanks. I doubt I’ll make it home tonight.”
He was grateful that Maggie had volunteered to call Serena. He knew that the relationship between the two women was complicated. They’d started out as friends, and then, for a while, they’d become enemies. At one of the lowest points in Stride’s life, he and Maggie had had a short-lived affair that temporarily derailed his relationship with Serena. After he and Serena put their lives back together again, the two women had spent a year of cold separation, until some of the bitterness finally wore off. Now that he and Serena were married, the two women were trying to coexist peacefully as cops and friends.
“Good find on the pressure cooker,” Stride told her.
“Thanks. I want to show you something else, too.”
Maggie led the way to the other side of the street. The two of them picked their way among the FBI evidence team toward the Duluth Outdoor Company shop. The store was a ruin inside and out, its windows gone, the cobblestones in front of the store torn up, its brick walls seared. Nothing had escaped the devastation.
“The bomb went off here,” Maggie said. “Ground zero.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but check this out.” She took him inside. The floor of the shop was scattered with remnants of the store’s merchandise. Burnt and to
rn clothes. Shredded satchels. Stride saw colorful shards of plastic water bottles that had been imbedded like knives in the rear wall by the sheer force of the bomb.
“What am I supposed to see?” Stride asked.
“It’s what you don’t see. Glass.”
He looked down and realized what Maggie was showing him. Amid the debris, there was very little glass on the floor of the shop. Outside, glass fragments littered the entire street—but not here. He realized immediately what Maggie was suggesting.
“You think the bomb was inside the store,” he said. “The windows shattered outward.”
“Right. Leave a backpack with a bomb inside a store that sells hundreds of backpacks. Who’s going to notice? Somebody brought it inside and left it behind. Either they used a timer or a radio trigger to set it off.”
“What about the people who were inside the store?” Stride asked.
“Two dead, one critical, a couple others with serious injuries. They won’t be talking to us for a while.”
“Does the FBI know about this?”
“Yeah, they have it figured out, too. I heard them talking. I wasn’t sure when we’d get the news.”
Stride wandered back outside the store. The street was filled with police and FBI, not the people who should have been there on marathon day. Runners. Tourists. Locals and visitors who would have crowded Canal Park in the aftermath of the race. That night, there was supposed to be an awards ceremony and live entertainment, but it had all been cancelled.
Cancelled because of a madman with a bomb. Or madwoman—terrorism was becoming an equal-opportunity profession.
Stride didn’t know who the bomber was, but he could see a shadowy image of that person in his mind’s eye, walking into the Duluth Outdoor Company shop with a heavy backpack casually slung over one shoulder. And then leaving without it. How far away was the bomber when the explosion went off? Fifty yards? One hundred? Far enough to be safe but close enough to witness the trauma caused by the attack.
“The FBI is gathering up cameras and video footage from Canal Park,” Stride told Maggie. “Somewhere in all those photos, we’ll find the person who did this. They can’t hide for long. Whoever it is has a face.”
8
Michael Malville loved the long summer evenings in the Northland. Daylight lingered into the late hours like an old friend. The scent of flowers blew in the air, and hawks circled overhead. This should have been a perfect Saturday night, but a strange emptiness ruled in the aftermath of the bombing. Even in the town of Cloquet, which was twenty miles outside Duluth, people stayed inside. The grassy land across from Michael’s front porch typically bustled with children playing baseball until it was nearly dark, but not tonight.
He lived in a historic district, with roots going back to the town’s lumber milling days a century earlier. The homes were expensive; his neighbors were wealthy. A few years ago, he and Alison had built a mansion in a rural area much closer to Duluth, but they’d sold it after Alison’s violent encounter with the serial killer there. Alison had never wanted to go back to that place. In a small town like Cloquet, they now had neighbors who looked out for one another.
Their home was two and a half stories, built on a slope above a cul-de-sac, with white clapboard siding and columns lining the porch. The lawns were lush. Evergreens ringed the neighborhood. Sometimes it felt as if they’d gone back to a simpler time. Alison loved it here, and so did Michael, but he was restless.
He’d spent most of his life building a successful technology business, but he’d sold it two years ago, along with their Duluth house. For a year, he and Alison had focused on putting their marriage back together and putting the Spitting Devil nightmare behind them. She still had the occasional panic attack, but she was better, and they were sleeping together again, which had taken months of therapy to achieve. Evan, caught up with his cartoon monsters and TV zombies, seemed unaffected by his close encounter with a real-life monster.
They had plenty of money. The sale of his company had given him enough assets to retire comfortably, but Michael wasn’t the kind of man who could play golf every day. Alison had thrown herself into projects at Evan’s school and into the Cloquet arts community, but Michael was adrift. He’d made a few angel investments, but making money on top of money didn’t appeal to him. He felt as if he had no purpose in life, and every man needed a purpose. Without it, he didn’t know why he was here.
He stared at the lengthening shadows in the cul de sac. Lights had come on in the other houses around them. On the porch, citronella candles burned to keep away the mosquitoes. He sipped a gin and tonic. He’d hoped, by loosening his mind with alcohol, that the image of the man on the street would come back, clear and sharp, but it didn’t work that way. Every time Michael dug into his memory, the recollection came out muddier than before. The man’s face changed. His clothes changed. He wasn’t sure of any of the details now.
The man had collided with him; he’d looked back; they’d shared a glance. Face. Eyes. Hair. Expression. Skin tone. Clothes. Michael had seen it all, but the moment had tiptoed in and out of his brain without leaving clear footprints. Every day contained more than eighty-six thousand seconds, and if you didn’t know that one of them was going to be important, you didn’t really pay attention.
“Are you okay?”
Alison stood in the doorway. His wife cupped a glass of Riesling.
“I’m still thinking about it,” he said. Then he added, “It makes me mad.”
She came and sat in an Adirondack chair beside him. Once upon a time, she’d had long, natural red hair, but now she colored it blond and kept it in a bob. Her long legs were bare below her shorts, and she wore a tan blouse with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. She was slim, and she preferred to go without makeup. To him, her natural face was even more attractive, with its laugh lines and freckles.
They were both forty-one years old. He didn’t know where the time had gone. Just yesterday, he’d been thirty.
“I really don’t understand how any human being could do this,” Alison murmured. “It makes no sense to me. Some person had to plan this. Someone had to make it happen, knowing what it would do.”
“I know. It’s insane.”
“I don’t want Evan playing alone outside until they catch whoever did this,” Alison said.
“We’re safe here in Cloquet,” Michael told her, but he didn’t want to argue with her. After what they’d gone through two years earlier, it didn’t take much for Alison to feel threatened. “But yeah, okay, we’ll stay home with him.”
He grabbed his phone from his belt. He used his thumb to swipe through the Twitter time line. Everyone was talking about the bombing. He wasn’t used to Duluth being the center of the universe, but the world now had its eyes trained on Canal Park. He watched a video clip from the FBI press conference. Next to the agent in charge, he recognized the Duluth police lieutenant, Jonathan Stride, who’d called Michael a murderer two years before.
“I want to caution everyone not to jump to conclusions,” the FBI agent, Patrick Maloney, warned the public.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
Jonathan Stride should have thought about that before he nearly destroyed Michael’s life in a single night. Later, when the real killer was dead, the lieutenant had apologized. The sergeant, Maggie Bei, had apologized, too, but it didn’t matter. The damage to his life and his marriage was already done.
A serial killer targeting redheaded women who looked like Alison? Michael must be guilty.
A pressure-cooker bomb at a marathon? Don’t jump to conclusions.
Michael had heard the same song before, over and over, around the world. San Bernardino. Paris. Brussels. Fort Hood. London. Sydney. Don’t jump to conclusions. And in the end, it was always the same. Islamic names. Islamic faces. People got tired of being told to believe everything except their own eyes.
He thought again: I was there. I saw him.
“Twitter?” Alison asked.
/> Michael looked up from his phone. “What?”
“I always know when you’re looking at Twitter. Your face gets so angry.”
“Come on, Alison.”
“You should look at yourself in a mirror sometime. See what I mean. That’s why I prefer Facebook. On Facebook, it’s mostly about the cat videos, you know? But you and Twitter—I don’t like it, Michael. I really don’t.”
“Okay, yes, I’m angry. This guy killed people. I was there. You expect me to be smiling about it?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Alison said.
“Then what do you mean?”
His wife reached for his hand. “When I heard about the bombing, the only thing I wanted to do was hold on to you and Evan. We are blessed to be alive at all. Didn’t what happened two years ago prove that to you? I needed you with me today, Michael, and you didn’t come home. Where were you?”
“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t leave.”
“Why not? Everyone else did.”
“I know that, but you weren’t there. I saw—”
His wife interrupted him. “I know. You told me. You saw someone with a backpack. It’s fuzzy, and you can’t really remember the person’s face. Hundreds of other people who were at the marathon are probably saying exactly the same thing right now. It’s okay, Michael. You told that police officer about it. You did the right thing. Now you have to let it go.”
“How can I let it go? His face is in my head somewhere. Maybe they could hypnotize me or something, and I could remember. It drives me crazy to have them stand up and say they don’t know what this is, when I know what I saw. A Muslim guy with a backpack heading toward Canal Park. And fifteen minutes later—boom.”
“The fact that he was there doesn’t mean he did it,” Alison pointed out.
“Okay, sure, maybe not, but what if he did? He bumped into me on the street, Alison. The bomb could have gone off right there. I’d be dead. Evan would be dead, too.”
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