‘Eight guns,’ Gale murmured. ‘Mr. Skinner, did you make a statement to Lieutenant Stride that if you had committed this murder, you would have simply dropped the murder weapon through the ice? That the police would never find it?’

‘Yeah, I did, but it was a joke—’

‘That’s all, Mr. Skinner. Thank you.’

26

26

‘I found him,’ Cindy told Stride.

It was late, and he was surprised that she was still up. He’d spent most of the day at the trial and then caught up on the job in the basement of City Hall until nearly midnight. His wife sat at their small kitchen table with a laptop open in front of her. Only the light over the sink was on. She wore a nightgown, and her feet were bare. The house with its open windows was warm and humid, and he smelled old coffee. A stiff wind made the lake roar like a lion not far from their back door.

Stride sat down across from her. Like him, she was nearly forty, and yet in his eyes, she could have been seventeen. She was the same teenager he’d met in school. He could barely remember what his life was like before she came into it. School, college, career – all that time, it was him and her together.

‘I found him,’ Cindy repeated, pushing a photograph toward him across the table.

‘Who?’

‘The guy at the mall.’

Stride studied the photograph and saw a crowd shot taken downtown during Grandma’s Marathon. His wife had circled a man with a black marker, and he held the page close and squinted at the face. She’d enlarged the photograph, but the image was crisp and clear. The man was overdressed for the warm June day in a camouflage jacket.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘I know a photographer who covered the marathon. I’ve spent the last six hours analyzing every one of her pictures.’

She passed him the original photograph, before she’d zoomed in on the crowd. The picture had been taken from a second-floor window near the corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street, facing northeast. Swarms of runners filled the street in the center of the frame; they were the jubilant, exhausted ones, within two miles of the finish line in Canal Park. Crowds twenty deep on the sidewalk cheered them on. Cindy had drawn an arrow to show the man in the original photo. He was little more than a stick figure standing by a lamp post in a brick-lined park well behind the flood of people.

The crowd watched the runners.

He watched the crowd.

Stride’s eyes snapped back and forth between the two pictures. ‘You’re certain this is him?’

His wife nodded. ‘I don’t know if this is the guy in Jay’s photos, but it’s definitely the man I followed at the mall. No question about it. I haven’t forgotten him, Jonny.’

‘I know.’