“I just wanted you to know that,” she finally said.

She closed her eyes and listened to the hum of the air conditioners in the courtyard below mixing with passing cars on the street and Joe’s breathing. As sleep came for her, she whispered to Joe, in a voice so soft as to be as much thought as it was breath, “I love you.”

Chapter 8

Gavin knew that his plan held risks, unavoidable gaps that could be minimized but never eliminated. Getting the women into the Bronco in public was one of those gaps; and for Sadie Vauk, that part had gone without a hitch. The second unavoidable gap came when Gavin brought them out to the banks of the Mississippi River to say goodbye.

Gavin put a great deal of thought into how best to part ways with them. Fantasizing the perfect adieu had lulled him to sleep on so many nights. The problem, as he saw it, was that if he left them dead along the side of the road, they would be found, and the foul play of his deed would flash as if in bright neon red. The game, as Sherlock Holmes might say, would be afoot. So why invite that kind of trouble?

He considered hiding them, maybe digging a hole and burying them, but that brought with it a host of new problems, not the least of which was finding a suitable location, a place where he could spend time without being observed. He considered purchasing land out in the country, but then he would own the graves if they were ever discovered. That would not do. The best solution had to be one where no one would know what had happened to them.

That’s when Gavin discovered Nicollet Island.

Unlike those deserted islands of Huckleberry Finn, Nicollet Island was as much a part of Minneapolis as any other city block. It held houses, a school, a hotel, and on its lower tip, a pavilion for weddings.

That’s how Gavin first discovered it. He had photographed a wedding there as one of his earliest gigs. When he’d stepped outside to get some fresh air, he’d strolled along the walking path that followed the river, and where others might have seen the peaceful beauty of one of the world’s most storied rivers, Gavin saw the answer to a problem.

A couple hundred feet downstream from the pavilion lay the front edge of a hydroelectric dam built at the start of the twentieth century. The dam reached upstream in an upside-down V, water washing over a fourteen-foot spillway. But that was just the beginning of the ride. Below the dam churned St. Anthony Falls, a fifty-foot drop in the river where according to Dakota legend, an evil god named Oanktehi lived.

For Gavin, the river seemed an answer to a prayer. The medical examiner would determine that death came from drowning, but what kind of drowning? Suicide? Accident? Foul play? If they couldn’t say for certain that it was a murder, would anyone ever look for him? As an added bonus, the brutality of the falls would pummel the body, threshing away any speck of evidence that Gavin may have missed. Although he never missed a thing.