Finn was gone.

Ten minutes later, the interrogation room still smelled of Finn’s body. Stride leaned back on the desk until his head banged against the wall. Maggie jumped off the desk, took the chair in which Finn had been sitting, and propped her feet up.

Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of her pocket and answered. Stride recognized the voice of Max Guppo, the overweight detective who had been leading the search team at Finn Mathisen’s house, along with cops from Superior. Maggie asked a few questions and then hung up. She didn’t look happy.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Come on.”

She shook her head. “They didn’t find a damn thing to link him to the peeping cases. His room looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned of anything potentially incriminating. The computer had no hard drive, for God’s sake. Just a big hole in the tower. His shoes were all new. His clothes had been washed.”

“Rikke,” Stride said.

Maggie nodded. “She knows what he’s been doing. Maybe we can lean on her.”

“She’s been covering for Finn for thirty years. She’s not going to stop now. What about the car? The silver RAV?”

“Ditto. Cleaned and pressed. Even the tires had been hosed down.”

Stride sighed. “So where are we?”

“I think we’ll be able to make a charge of interference with privacy stick. If we can tie him to the other victims, a jury will make the leap.”

“If.”

“He had to find them somehow. We’ll track it down. Hell, he delivered to four out of the nine households where a girl was peeped. That’s a big coincidence right there.”

“Big, but still a coincidence,” Stride said. “If we can get six or seven, okay. Four’s not enough. Even with the silver RAV. He has no priors. We’ll never get the stuff from Minneapolis or his old janitorial job admitted in court. A defense lawyer can blow smoke and make a jury believe Finn is just a victim of circumstances.”

“And Mary’s murder?”

Stride shook his head. “You know that’s going nowhere. We’ll be lucky to pin the peeping charge on him. We can’t put him at the scene with Mary, and even if we could, we can’t establish what really happened.”

“At least we can charge multiple counts. He’s done it ten times that we know of. If we get the right judge, we can go for two years a count.”

Stride put a hand gently on Maggie’s leg. “I know this case means a lot to you, Mags, but you’re dreaming. With no priors? He’ll get a year for everything and be out in three months. If he sees the inside of a jail at all. That’s life.”

“That sucks.”

“I know it does.”

“What the hell do I tell Clark Biggs?”

“That we’re still working on the case. We’re not done yet. If we get the DNA test back and can prove that Finn was at the scene where Laura was murdered, we can take another run at him. Maybe he’ll confess. He might not go down for Mary’s death, but if we put him behind bars for Laura’s murder, that’s some justice.”