Maggie was already halfway to the door. “I’m on it.”

42
___________

Less than an hour later, Stride and Maggie sat in the East End living room of a frightened teenager named Angela Tjornhom. Her parents sat on either side of her. Angela wore a gray Spartans T-shirt and pajama bottoms, with bare feet. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap. She was as waiflike as a model, with a pretty face and tiny frame. Stride could see that Rikke was right. If he looked for it in her face, he could see that Angela bore a faint resemblance to Laura.

“So this guy had pictures of me?” Angela asked.

“I’m sorry, but yes, we think so,” Maggie told her.

“That is so creepy. I mean, like, nude pictures even?”

“We don’t know.”

“I am never opening my blinds again, you know? I can’t believe this.” She nestled her head against her mother’s shoulder.

“Where the hell is this bastard?” Angela’s father demanded. He was small, with a thin ring of black hair around his bald head. His cheeks flushed red with rage. “Is this the pervert who was on the news?”

“We’re trying to locate him right now,” Stride said. “We’d like your permission to search your backyard.”

“Do it,” he told them. “Do whatever you have to.”

Stride nodded. “Angela, can you tell us if anything happened tonight?”

The girl had been crying. She tugged at her shirt and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I got a couple hangup calls on my cell phone.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. Sometime after midnight.”

“What did you do?”

“I turned on the light. The calls woke me up. I looked out the window, but I didn’t see anybody. It’s not like I could really see anything with all the rain, though.”

“Has this happened before?” Maggie asked.

Angela nodded. “Yeah, two or three times. Always at night. I just figured it was somebody with a wrong number, you know? I knew one of the other girls at school who got peeped, but I never thought about it happening to me.”

“Someone will come by tomorrow to take a full statement from you,” Stride said.

Maggie put a hand on the girl’s knee. “You should talk to someone, Angela. It’s natural for girls who experience something like this to be frightened. You shouldn’t deal with it alone.”

Angela shrugged and hid a little deeper inside her mother’s arms.

“We’ll get her help,” her father said.

Stride and Maggie left the family and returned to the pounding rain outside the house. Both of them switched on flashlights and swept the beams like searchlights ahead of them as they made their way to the backyard. The grass was sodden under their feet. Streams poured out of the swollen gutters. Behind the house, the lot was large and flat and dotted with evergreens. Stride could see the next street more than a hundred feet away. As he shined his flashlight through the grass, pools of standing water glistened back at him.