‘Have the Denver police been able to trace her movements?’ he asked.

‘She charged a bus ticket from Denver to Minneapolis on her credit card. That’s nineteen hours of hell. The police talked to the drivers on the route, but no one remembered Kelly specifically.’

‘How about on the Minneapolis end?’

‘Nothing. There are no other charges on her credit card. If she took another bus to Duluth, she paid cash.’

‘She was obviously coming here to meet someone,’ Serena said.

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, one of her co-workers thought Kelly had hooked up with an online boyfriend. The Denver police dug into her phone records and say she was texting hot and heavy with someone, but all the details he gave her were completely fictitious. Name, location, occupation, all made up. They’re going to e-mail me a transcript. The number connected to a throwaway phone, and it hasn’t been used since the murder.’

‘He lured her,’ Stride said.

‘Looks that way. She got catfished.’

‘How’d she hook up with him?’

‘They don’t know. Probably a chat room, but they haven’t found it yet. This girl was easy prey. Very naive. The guy texted her photos of himself, but it’s really some male model you can find all over the Internet.’

Maggie held up a photograph of a twenty-something man with moptop brown hair and a trimmed, wispy beard. He wore a simple white T-shirt and had dreamy blue eyes that belonged in a boy band. He was good-looking but not threatening.

‘And that’s who she thought she was going to meet?’ Serena asked.

‘Yeah. Must have been a shock. You think you’re about to hook up with your Prince Charming. Instead, some stranger robs you and kills you.’

‘This was more than a robbery,’ Stride said. ‘Nobody goes to that much trouble to grab a wallet.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, we may have something else here. Something bad. Troy Grange called me today. He heard about our case. He thinks there may be a connection to a query he got from Interpol about security for outbound ships at the port.’

Stride’s face darkened. ‘What kind of query?’

‘Homicide. Troy says there’s another victim.’

‘Why haven’t we heard about it?’

‘Because the murder didn’t take place here,’ Maggie explained. ‘They found this other woman in Amsterdam. Her throat was slit, and she was dumped in one of the canals. But guess what she was wearing? A Grandma’s Marathon T-shirt from Duluth.’

*

By midnight, Cat hadn’t come home. They knew she’d turned off her phone, because their text messages weren’t being delivered, and the tracking app didn’t show them where she was. The girl was deliberately pushing boundaries and buttons.

‘I don’t get it,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t understand her behavior.’

‘That’s because you were never a teenage girl,’ Serena replied with a smile.