The window in the rear of the house was dark. Finn brought a hand to his head, and Clark realized that Finn had a cell phone. He was making a phone call. A few seconds later, the window flashed with light, and Clark understood. Finn was calling the girl. Waking her up.

Clark could see through the vertical blinds on the window. The girl in the photo, no more than sixteen, climbed out of bed and padded in her gray half-shirt and pajama bottoms to a white desk. She picked up the phone. Spoke into it. Hung up. She headed back to bed, but before she could turn off the light, Finn called again, and Clark saw the girl answer, her face cross with annoyance.

She hung up again, but she was awake now. She approached the window to stare at the storm and the rain pelting down. Finn was enraptured, staring at the girl framed in the bright square, with her flimsy shirt and her flat expanse of midriff. She was awkwardly beautiful, stroking her messy hair, biting a fingernail. Unaware that she was vulnerable and on display. Clark took advantage of Finn’s obsession to come up behind him. All he wanted was for the girl to turn away.

For almost a full minute, all three actors in the play were motionless. The girl, inside, staring with huge blue eyes at the rain and the night. Finn, watching from beside the evergreen. Clark, so close he thought Finn might smell his breath.

Then the blond girl wheeled around abruptly, and a moment later, the window went black again.

Before Finn could move, Clark was on him. His huge forearm encircled Finn’s neck with the crushing grip of a snake, and he lifted the man bodily off the ground. Finn couldn’t breathe. He struggled, kicking his legs spastically, landing harmless blows on Clark with his fists. Clark thought about choking him, feeling the life drain out of his body, but instead he dropped Finn and backhanded his skull with a swift blow of his fist. Finn collapsed onto the wet ground, unconscious.

Clark slipped off his belt and tied Finn’s ankles, then grabbed the man’s shoulders and pulled him up in a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. He didn’t notice Finn’s weight. Instead, through the swirl of the storm, he hauled Finn back toward his truck.

41
___________

“Donna’s right,” Maggie said unhappily. “Clark must be going after Finn Mathisen.”

Stride took his eyes off the road. “Do you think Clark would throw his life away over a nothing like Finn?”

“To get vengeance for his daughter? Yeah, I do.”

“Add Finn’s silver RAV to the ATL on both sides of the border. Let’s hope Rikke can tell us where Finn went.”

“That would mean admitting he’s guilty.”

“To save his life,” Stride said.

Maggie punched the buttons on her cell phone while Stride drove.

As they sped through the driving rain, the St. Louis River twisted like a dragon on their right. Walls of water sprayed from under his tires as Stride shot through deep, fast-moving rivers that poured off the hills and flooded across the highway. He skidded onto the railway bridge that crossed from Minnesota into Wisconsin over the marshy river lands. Wind howled through the canyon created by the river, and an ore train thundered the opposite way on the trestle above him. He hung on to the wheel. The entire superstructure of the bridge shuddered as if it would come apart in pieces.