‘I think that’s what the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood,’ Maggie replied, but she wandered into the cottage, handed off copies of a Colorado driver’s license to the two of them, and sat down on Stride’s sofa with her feet propped on the coffee table. It was like the old days, but it wasn’t.

A palpable frost chilled the air between her and Serena. The two of them had nursed an uneasy friendship since Stride and Serena began a relationship four years earlier, but the fractures between them had split open the previous fall. In the wake of a near-fatal accident that left him struggling with flashbacks and nightmares, Stride had made the one mistake in his life that he’d always sworn to avoid. He’d slept with Maggie. Within days, Serena moved out, and he and Maggie launched a short-lived affair.

But things changed, and then they changed again. That was the way of the world. He and Serena were back together. They shared the cottage with a pregnant teenage girl named Cat Mateo, whom they’d rescued from the Duluth streets. And Maggie, who was in many ways still his best friend, was an outsider now.

‘Where’s the kid?’ Maggie asked, glancing into Cat’s empty bedroom at the front of the house.

Serena rolled her eyes. ‘Out. Again.’

‘We think she has a boyfriend,’ Stride added, ‘but she won’t tell us who it is.’

‘Welcome to parenthood,’ Maggie said.

Stride knew that Maggie didn’t trust Cat. She was also still pretending that everything was fine between her and Stride, when it clearly wasn’t.

‘Kelly Hauswirth worked at a telemarketing company in Centennial,’ Maggie went on. ‘She told her co-workers she was going on vacation. Didn’t say where or with who. Word is, she kept to herself, didn’t socialize much. It was almost two weeks before anyone reported her missing, and it took the Denver police a while to connect the disappearance to our report.’

‘What about family?’ Serena asked.

‘Her parents are in Montana. They don’t talk with her more than once a month. The Denver cops sent a pic of the body to the police in Missoula, who ran it by Mom and Dad. They confirmed it was their daughter.’

‘Do they know what Kelly was doing here in Duluth?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Nope.’

Stride studied the driver’s license photo of Kelly Hauswirth. Serena had described her as the suburban girl next door, and she was right. The woman’s blond hair was straight, her eyes wide and blue, her face round. Pretty, but not a stunner. She didn’t flirt with the camera. However, she’d left behind lace thongs and ribbed condoms in her baby-blue suitcase. The shy cheerleader type was in town for a man.

A man driving a stolen Grand Am.

A man who’d shot her in the back of the head.