“Did she get a look at him?”

Maggie shook her head. “She thought he was tall and skinny, but that’s it. It was dark.”

“That’s nine incidents in the last month,” Stride said.

“It’s summer. Time for the perverts to come out.”

The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn’t be dark until after nine o’clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma’s Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.

Plus a peeping tom with a fetish for blond high school girls.

Stride had overseen the city’s Detective Bureau, which handled major crimes in Duluth, for more than a decade, and he had steeled himself to human behavior that defied all rational explanation. Sexual abuse. Meth labs. Suicide. Homicide. The peeper had shown no inclination to violence, but Stride didn’t minimize the danger of someone who liked to watch young girls undress in their bedrooms. It was a short trip through the looking glass to molestation and rape.

“He’s been stalking the south side, right?” Stride asked.

Maggie grunted affirmatively and pushed her black bangs out of her eyes. She was a diminutive Chinese cop who had worked side by side with Stride since he took over the major crimes unit.

“Yeah, all the reports have been south of Riverside,” Maggie said. “He’s crossed the bridge into Superior a couple times, too.”

The great lake that loomed over Stride’s shoulder narrowed into the jagged bays and harbors of the St. Louis River as it wound southward between the cities of Duluth and Superior. On the scenic drive along the river, Duluth broke up into small towns like Riverside, Morgan Park, Gary, and Fond du Lac. None of the towns was large enough to afford its own police force, so the Duluth police stretched its enforcement coverage all the way along the river’s twisty shore.

“You know what it’s like down in the river towns,” Maggie said. “People leave their shades up and their windows open. For a peeper, it’s like a cat with a goldfish bowl. Lots to look at.”

“Do we have any leads on an ID?” Stride asked.

“Nothing yet. We have no description and no idea how old he is. We’re working our way through the sex offender list, but no one looks like an obvious suspect.”

“How about a car?”

“We’ve had reports of a small SUV—something like a CRV or a RAV4—near three of the peeping locations. Maybe silver, maybe gray or sand. No one in the area would claim it. That’s as close as I’ve got to a lead.”