“How so?”

“I think the connection between Ray and Randall Stanhope started back then,” he told her. “That’s when Ray got corrupted.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No? After we interviewed Peter, Randall asked Ray to stay behind. Then Ray came out a while later, and the two of us went after Dada. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what must have happened.”

“You think Ray and Randall did a deal,” Maggie concluded.

Stride nodded. “Exactly. Ray didn’t go there with me to catch Dada. He went there to kill him.”

It was twilight. Ray drove onto the gravel shoulder within sight of the Arrowhead Bridge. The twin spans of highway jutted like wings at the arch, leaving the passage open for one of the rust red ore boats arriving from the Soo. The water was black and windswept. The two of them got out of Ray’s Camaro and leaned against the hood near the front bumper. Cool drops of rain burst on the windshield. Ashen clouds massed overhead, inching from the high hills toward the lake.

Ray slapped his pack of cigarettes and offered one to Stride, who took it. He coughed when the smoke hit his lungs. Ray smiled at him. The breeze rustled his red hair.

“So this is the area where you saw Dada?”

“Yeah.”

“Rough area for a kid to be walking around. You should think twice about coming down here by yourself, you know?”

“I’m all right.”

Ray gestured down the railroad tracks. “You know those guys?”

About a hundred yards away, Stride saw two twenty-something men in jeans, with no shirts, swigging beer and strolling across the muddy ground, kicking at stalks of wild wheat. Pyramids of taconite and stripped tree trunks rose around the tracks like mountains. One of the men finished his bottle of beer and laid it sideways on the track. When the next train came, it would shear the bottle in two. Stride had come across bottle halves all over this area. Some of the men used the bottoms as soup bowls.

“No, I’ve never seen them.”

Ray stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. “I’m going to talk to them.”

“Let me come with you,” Stride said.

“I’m sorry, Jon. If things get ugly, I can’t have a teenager in the midst of it.”

“Except I know the area.”

“I know you do. Right now, though, I need you to let me handle this myself. Okay?”

Stride shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I’ll hang out here.”

“Good.”

Ray hitched up his pants and set out along the dirt road toward the tracks. Stride climbed onto the hood of the car and watched him go. Ray got within fifty yards of the two men before one of them looked back and spotted him. They both took off. Ray cursed loudly and chased them, but with his limp, he couldn’t run fast or far. The two men cleared a shallow hill and disappeared from sight. It was five minutes before Ray crested the same hill and was gone.