Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

'It's mostly who shot JFK,' Kasey said. 'Bruce is like a cousin of a cousin of a cousin of a cousin. He takes it personally.'

'Do you have kids?' Maggie asked.

Kasey nodded and held up one finger. 'Jack.'

'Jack Kennedy?'

'It was Bruce's idea.'

'Well, good for you. You've got a family. Don't let what happened here tonight get in the way.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, let it go. You stumbled into the middle of something horrible, and you did your best to stop it. Go back to your life, and let us take it the rest of the way.'

'I really want to help,' Kasey insisted. 'Whatever it is, even if it's gopher shit, I want to be part of the investigation.'

Maggie stood up and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. A cough rattled in her throat. 'Look, I've got to meet with Troy Grange tomorrow. He's the husband of the second victim, and he's a friend of mine. I need to talk to him about what happened here. Why don't you come with me?'

'Really? Yes, absolutely. Thank you.'

'It won't be easy, Kasey. Before tonight, we didn't know what this son of a bitch was up to, but now we have a body. No matter what we tell him, Troy Grange is going to realize that his wife is probably dead. There's nothing harder than that.'

'I understand. I really appreciate it.'

Maggie patted Kasey's knee. 'Go home, go to sleep.'

'I will.'

'One last question.'

'What is it?' Kasey asked.

'How do you get your hair that color? What do you use?'

'It's natural.'

'I'll be damned,' Maggie said.

Serena Dial walked down Chisholm Trail from the highway toward the Glenn estate on Friday afternoon. The street was unnaturally dark. Light didn't easily penetrate the wooded lots of the lake homes, and the fall sky was a bed of charcoal. She smelled snow in the cold air and heard the honking of geese overhead flying southward. The dead street around her spoke to the waning season. Carved jack-o-lanterns grew moldy and soft on porch railings. The trees were mostly bare.

She imagined the same street at midnight the previous day. In the fog. In the dark. Stride was right; someone could have come and gone easily without being noticed and without leaving a trail.

Assuming someone had been there at all.

So far, there was no conclusive evidence to prove or disprove that an intruder had entered the Glenn house. The forensics team from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St Paul had arrived at five in the morning and spent seven hours at the scene, without much to show for their efforts. It would be weeks before they sifted through the fingerprints on the doors and windows. They had bagged traces of wet soil on the upstairs carpet, but those could be ascribed to the boots of the policemen who had responded to the 911 call. The front and backyards were similarly a mess of footprints from the first wave of searchers at the scene.

Callie's disappearance had broken on the morning news shows, competing with reports of the latest murder in the farmlands north of Duluth. Serena and Stride had spoken live to a gaggle of reporters. By now, most people in Minnesota had seen the photograph of the missing baby girl with blonde curls and a toothy smile. Stride had spent most of the morning mobilizing the statewide alert system, and Serena had overseen the network of interviews with neighbors on the roads surrounding Marcus Glenn's home and along the fifty miles of populated shoreline on Pokegama Lake. The result of all that effort was little or nothing to help their investigation. No witnesses. No credible sightings. No reports of vehicles coming or going that could focus their search.

Callie Glenn was there, and then she wasn't. The magician had waved his black sheet and made her vanish. As the clock ticked, each hour increased the risk that they would never find her.

Serena knew what Denise Sheridan believed. Marcus Glenn had killed his own child, either accidentally or deliberately, and then hidden the body to cover up his actions. There was no evidence to suggest that he had done so, but there was also no evidence to suggest he hadn't, and in these cases that omission was damning. The finger of suspicion always pointed first at the parents when a child vanished. Serena knew the rumor of guilt had begun to spread around town like a virus. She could hear it in the questions of the reporters, asking about Marcus Glenn, quizzing her about his background and personality, hinting about his capacity for murder. The cold, aloof surgeon was a perfect target.

Serena didn't discount the possibility that Glenn was guilty, but she found herself doubting Denise's instincts about him. For one thing, she had already pegged Denise Sheridan as hopelessly biased by her own relationship with her sister and her husband. She might be a good cop, but she despised Marcus Glenn so much that she would believe anything bad about him. For Serena, Glenn's frigid demeanor actually made him seem innocent. She had dealt with parents guilty of heinous crimes during her time in Las Vegas, and they were always the best actors, the ones who pleaded on television for the return of their children and wept in the arms of their spouses. Glenn wasn't exaggerating his grief or putting on a show for them. If anything, he had invited their scrutiny by showing his true colors.

And yet. And yet. The intruder theory didn't make sense either. There were too many holes in this case.

Serena made her way down the curving driveway that led to the

Glenn front door. Several members of the Grand Rapids Police were on hand to guard the scene and keep reporters and spectators away from the house. They nodded politely at her, but she could sense their uneasiness. She understood. As of this morning, she was a detective on the payroll, but she was still a stranger, an outsider. They all knew Stride because of his years in northern Minnesota, and the police here didn't have any problem accepting his authority. But not Serena. It didn't matter that she had dealt with street crime and violence for a decade in Las Vegas on a level that no one here would see in their lifetimes. She was different, and that made her suspect.

It was easier for her in Duluth. Duluth was a larger city, and there was something about its icy remoteness that made people welcome strangers who had the courage to live there. Out here in Grand Rapids, she was in a small town. If you lived here, you were a known quantity, regardless of whether you were a saint or a sinner. If you didn't, you had to prove yourself.

Serena studied the country-style house. It was low and wide, with three gables over the second-story rooms and white, freshly painted wood siding. A triple garage was on her left, and she saw the windows of an upstairs apartment above the garage doors. The chambered windows of the first-floor dining room faced the yard, but most of the house was built to take advantage of the lake view in the rear. Marcus Glenn, in the master bedroom, wouldn't have seen what was happening in front of his house at night.

If the kidnapping was the work of an intruder, Serena was convinced that he came from the street, by car. Arriving by boat was too risky, with too many variables: launching a boat at night, navigating the waters without lights, keeping a baby quiet in an area where sound would travel easily across the lake, and landing without a dock. There were too many ways a plan could go wrong. No, the straightforward strategy was to park in the driveway under the cover of trees and go into the house from there.

But how to get into the house without a key? The locks on all of the doors looked unmolested. The windows were solid and tight.

Serena let herself in the front door and stood under the glamorous crystal of the chandelier in the glossy oak foyer. After the chill outside, the house was warm. The ivory carpet on the stairs directly in front of her led to the second floor of the house. She followed the stairs to the second story and looked up and down the long hallway at the series of closed white doors. There were at least eight of them, leading to different rooms. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a walk-in closet, and an upstairs laundry. None of the doors gave any clue to its contents. How would an outsider have found the nursery? And how would a kidnapper know whether Callie Glenn still slept in the master bedroom with her parents? That was a big risk.