“Finn never made it back here,” Maggie said.

“Did you spot Clark’s truck?”

She shook her head and got down on her knees. “Hang on, there’s something caught under the tire.”

Stride saw it, too. Maggie reached around beneath the chassis of the RAV and extracted something white from under the rubber of the tire. When she held it up, they saw that it was a wallet-sized photograph, dirty and wet. She illuminated it with the beam of her flashlight.

“It’s Clark and Mary Biggs,” she said.

“Do you think he left it there for us?”

Maggie shook her head. “It probably fell out of his pocket.”

“If Clark grabbed Finn, where would he take him?” Stride asked.

“I don’t know. Unless he already killed Finn and dumped the body somewhere else.”

Stride put himself in the shoes of a despondent father, confronting the man who had driven his daughter to her death. “I think if he was going to kill him, he’d have done it outside Angela’s window.”

“I’ll get more cars on the street, but we’re at a dead end.”

“What about Perch Lake Park?” Stride asked. “That’s where the girl died.”

“That was my first thought, but the parking lot was empty,” Maggie said. “I’ve got a car waiting in case he shows up.”

“What about Donna? She might know where Clark would go.”

Maggie nodded. “I’ll call her.”

She reached into her pocket for her phone, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, shining a light on the picture again. “Where do you think this photograph was taken?”

Stride leaned closer. “It’s a beach somewhere around here. Probably along the Point. You can see the lake in the background.”

“We’re not too far from the Wisconsin Point, are we?”

“It’s just a few miles to the south.”

Maggie shoved the photograph in her pocket. “Clark told me that he used to take Mary out to the Point. It was one of their favorite places.”

“You think that’s where he took Finn?”

“It’s isolated, it’s close by, it reminds him of Mary.”

“That sounds like our best bet,” Stride said.

“How fast can you go?” Maggie asked.

43
___________

Clark dragged Finn’s body one-handed through the wet sand by the belt tied around the man’s ankles. In his other hand, he dangled the baseball bat over his shoulder. As the uneven ground jolted Finn’s body, the bound man awakened and began to struggle, clawing at the mud for traction with his fingers. He spat out grass and dirt from his mouth and screamed. Clark ignored his cries, which were drowned out by the ferocious wailing of the wind and the beating of lake waves against the shore.

The beach was a long, lonely strip of sand and trees. The sky belched out rain and blinded him with a near-continuous chain of lightning flashes. Somewhere, he could smell wood burning, where electricity had blasted through bark and roots. The thunder was so near and loud that he felt the earth tremble under his feet. If he had believed in God, Clark would have believed that God was angry, but he had given up his faith long ago. He had stopped believing on that day when Mary first went into the water and came out a ghost of who she had once been.