Stride took spiral stairs down to the next level of the house. The staircase was modern, made of chrome and stone. Janine and Jay had built the house less than a year earlier, but according to Cindy, it was Janine’s baby. Her dream. She’d worked with an architect for months on the design. The mansion on the hill was one of the perks of being a surgeon.

Janine’s home office was about the square footage of Stride’s whole house. She had a huge and impeccably clean desk near the windows. He could see the lift bridge in Canal Park shimmering far below. An entire wall of the office was dedicated to built-in bookshelves stocked with medical volumes, and she had another wall filled with photographs of ordinary people. These were her heart patients. People whose lives she’d saved. He didn’t think it was an accident that she was waiting for the police here. She wanted to remind him who she was and how important she was to the city of Duluth.

It also wasn’t an accident that she wasn’t alone. Archibald Gale was with her, and Gale was the northland’s leading criminal defense attorney. As Stride entered the office, Gale sprang up from the leather sofa. For a large man – 6 feet, at least 275 pounds – he was nimble on his feet. He had receding gray hair, curly and short, and blue eyes that twinkled behind tiny circular glasses. Despite the hour, he was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit, with a tie neatly knotted to pinch his thick neck.

‘Lieutenant!’ Gale exclaimed cheerfully, as if they were old friends. Which, to some extent, they were. They were on opposite sides of the game, but Gale was also a difficult man to dislike.

‘Archie,’ Stride replied. ‘Nice suit.’

Stride’s own tie was loose at his neck, and he’d pulled an Oxford shirt out of the dirty clothes basket. He still wore his old leather jacket, which had seen more than a decade of use and had a bullet hole in one sleeve.

‘I was still at the office,’ Gale said. ‘Lieutenant, I believe you know Dr. Janine Snow.’

Stride nodded at the surgeon. ‘Dr. Snow.’

‘Lieutenant Stride.’

It was strange, being so formal with her. They were otherwise on a first-name basis. She’d been in his house. She had lunch or played golf with his wife a couple of times a month. They’d done community fundraisers together. Even so, she was a crime victim now. And a suspect. They both knew it.

The first thing he noticed about Janine was that her blond hair was wet. She’d showered. That was what you did when you arrived home from a party, sick and disheveled. Or it was what you did when you had just shot your husband and you wanted to make sure your skin and hair kept no residue chemicals from firing a gun.