The room on the corner was Angela’s bedroom. The light was on, and the blinds were shut. Stride examined the grass underneath her window.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Maybe the rain washed away his footprints,” Maggie replied.

Stride shook his head. “He can’t have been this close. If he was standing here, she would have seen him.”

He examined the rest of the yard. Lightning turned the night to day for an instant. Stride saw disarray in the wet ground, twenty feet from Angela’s window. He used the flashlight to guide his footsteps to a soggy patch of mud and lawn beneath one of the fir trees, where tree roots bulged from the wet soil. In the cone of light, he saw a mess of footprints and crushed grass.

Maggie bent down and studied the overlapping tread marks. “Two different sets,” she said. “Looks like a fight.”

Stride spotted a single line of tracks leading away from the scene toward the street. He followed them with his flashlight. Where they passed through a bare patch of dirt, the prints in the mud were deep and clear.

“He was carrying someone,” Stride said, pointing to where the heel marks sank like weights into the soft earth.

“I think we’re running out of time, boss,” Maggie said.

They followed the footprints to the street, where they disappeared. Water overflowed from the sewers and poured along the curb in a river. Stride wiped rain from his eyes. He jogged to the vacant lot on the opposite side of the block to see if the footprints started again, but he couldn’t find the trail. Clark and Finn had both vanished.

Stride gestured to Maggie, pointing her to the south, while he followed the street to the north, running down the middle where the flooding was lightest. Twin rivers surged through the gutters. He used intermittent bursts of lightning to see between the houses and down the long stretches of asphalt. Each subsequent drumbeat of thunder was closer and longer. The storm was getting worse, not better, and the atmosphere felt violent around him, as if the pressure in the air were building toward an explosion. Wet cold worked its way inside his bones. Trees bowed over his head with the rotating winds, and when he stopped in the dead center of an intersection where two wide streets met, he felt small.

Another branch of lightning cut open the sky, looking like a hangman drawn by a child. Right then and there, Stride saw it. Three blocks away, glinting in the white light, was a silver RAV, parked under the sagging branches of an elm tree. He splashed through deep water. His feet sloshed inside his boots. As he got closer, he saw Maggie, sprinting for the RAV from the opposite direction. They arrived at almost the same time and slowed to study the ground around the truck. Both of them shot their flashlight beams inside the RAV, expecting to see Finn’s body slumped in back. Instead, the truck was empty.