In the Dark Read Free

own silky dark hair. “You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting.”
     
“She reminded me of someone,” Stride said.
     
“Sure she did.”
     
Serena was an ex-cop and now a private investigator. She and Stride had shared a bed for almost two years.
     
Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. “Is this five-second thing commonly known?” he asked.
     
“Absolutely,” Maggie said, with a wink at Serena.
     
Stride knew when he was on the losing end of an argument. “Okay, I was flirting,” he admitted.
     
Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride’s cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.
     
“Most animals mark their territory by urinating,” Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.
     
Stride laughed. “Can we get back to work?”
     
“Go ahead,” Serena told him. She swiped a French fry from Maggie’s plate and bit into it while baring her teeth.
     
“What’s the latest on the peeper?” Stride asked Maggie. He stole a sidewaysglance across the restaurant at the other woman and noticed that she was doing the same thing to him from over her menu.
     
“He struck again on Friday night,” Maggie replied. “A sixteen-year-old girl in Fond du Lac noticed a guy in the trees outside her bedroom when she was getting undressed. She screamed, and he took off.”
     
“Did she get a look at him?”
     
Maggie shook her head. “She thought he was tall and skinny, but that’s it. It was dark.”
     
“That’s nine incidents in the last month,” Stride said.
     
“It’s summer. Time for the perverts to come out.”
     
The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn’t be dark until after nine o’clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma’s Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.
     
Plus a peeping tom with a fetish for blond high school girls.
     
Stride had overseen the city’s Detective Bureau, which handled major crimes in Duluth, for more than a decade, and he had steeled himself to human behavior that defied all rational explanation. Sexual abuse. Meth labs. Suicide. Homicide. The peeper had shown no inclination to violence, but Stride didn’t minimize the danger of someone who liked to watch young girls undress in their bedrooms. It was a short trip through the looking glass to molestation and rape.
     
“He’s been stalking the south side, right?” Stride asked.
     
Maggie grunted affirmatively and pushed her black bangs out of her eyes. She was a diminutive Chinese cop who had worked side by side with Stride since he took over the major crimes unit.
     
“Yeah, all the reports have been south of Riverside,” Maggie said. “He’s crossed the bridge into Superior a couple times, too.”
     
The great lake that loomed over Stride’s shoulder narrowed into thejagged bays and harbors of the St. Louis River as it wound southward between the cities of Duluth and Superior. On the scenic drive along the river, Duluth broke up into small towns like Riverside, Morgan Park, Gary, and Fond du Lac. None of the towns was