Jay was a Duluth lifer, like Stride. He’d grown up in the city’s Lincoln Park area and tangled with the police as a teenager over drugs and theft. Even so, Jay was a smart, ambitious kid. He’d studied at UMD on a scholarship, got a journalism degree with honors, and worked his way up at the Duluth News-Tribune from the copy-editing desk to a gig as a daily columnist. He knew that controversy sold newspapers, and he supplied a lot of it. In a city that smoothed over its racist past, Jay was a crusader against the white-bread elite. Stride didn’t mind that – there were skeletons in any town’s closet that needed to see the light of day – but he resented the carelessness with which Jay used his bully pulpit to destroy ordinary people.

One of his own cops had wound up in Jay’s crosshairs. A young police officer named Nathan Skinner had gotten drunk in the Wisconsin Dells and been pulled over on the highway. That was bad enough, but Skinner used an ugly racial epithet in the course of the arrest. It was outrageous, drunken behavior, and Stride suspended him for a month and sent him to diversity training in Minneapolis. That didn’t satisfy Jay, who beat the drum over Skinner’s arrest in his newspaper column. He made Skinner the poster boy for racism inside the city’s police ranks, and the chief finally ordered Stride to fire Skinner as a way to get the story out of the papers. Stride didn’t excuse what Skinner had done, but he didn’t think the mistake justified taking a young man’s entire career.

Neither did most of his other cops. Jay Ferris wasn’t popular with the Duluth Police.

Stride examined Jay’s body. The full report would come from the St. Louis County medical examiner, but he’d seen enough gunshot victims to recognize the obvious details. Powder tattooing on the forehead indicated an intermediate-range wound; the shooter had been within a couple feet of Jay when firing the shot. Based on the location of the body, the shooter had stood between Jay and the front door.

A glass of wine lay tipped on the rug beside him, leaving its own stain of red. Another glass, smeared with lipstick, sat on a mahogany coffee table.

‘No gun,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re still searching.’

‘Search harder,’ Stride said. ‘We need that gun. Where’s Janine?’

‘Downstairs in her office. Archie Gale is already with her. She wouldn’t say a word until he got here. Smart.’ Maggie rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll talk to her.’ He added again: ‘Find the gun.’