She finally looked up, and her blue eyes were vacant. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of. Honestly, if it weren’t for a private detective threatening me with blackmail, I would have kept it to myself.’

Stride frowned. ‘What was this detective’s name?’

‘Melvin Wiley.’

‘And why was he trying to blackmail you?’

‘I was having an affair,’ Janine told him.

Stride said nothing. He looked at Janine and then at Gale. Finally, he said: ‘With whom?’

‘Someone my husband hated,’ she said. ‘And someone you know very well. A former cop named Nathan Skinner.’

12

12

Maggie parked on ice-covered ground and climbed down from her yellow Avalanche. A freight train clattered under the overpass of Highway 2 thirty yards away. Its cars were streaked with rust and graffiti. She was near a gritty industrial park in Superior, Wisconsin, in a residential neighborhood butting up to the train tracks. The land around her was piled high with plowed gray snow.

She saw the house she wanted to visit on the corner, protected by a soaring arborvitae that was twice the height of the roof. It was a small house, two stories, with vertical wooden siding painted in sea-foam green. A tall fence protected the yard, so she couldn’t see inside. The storm door had bars.

A white Toyota Rav was parked on the side street.

She and Guppo had already talked to more than two dozen Rav owners in the Twin Ports over the past several weeks. The interviews had produced nothing useful. There had been a white Rav parked near the base of the hill leading to Janine Snow’s house on the night of the murder, but they were no closer to discovering who owned it, or whether it had any connection at all to the death of Jay Ferris.

Maggie crossed to the house. The steps on the deck were slick with ice, and she gripped the wobbly railing to keep from falling. She knew her block heels weren’t made for winter, but she didn’t care.

A black man in his late twenties answered the door.

‘Seymour Pugh?’ Maggie asked.

He considered her with coal eyes. ‘What about it?’

‘That’s your Rav on the street, right?’

‘So?’ he asked.

She introduced herself. ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.’

Pugh said nothing, but he stepped outside into the cold. Rule number one, Maggie thought: Never let cops inside your house. She took pride in the fact that she could size up a suspect as guilty or innocent within a few seconds, but Seymour Pugh’s face gave nothing away except calm distrust. That was no surprise, because he’d dealt with the police plenty of times in his life.