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Central High School with him. When he found a drowned child in the Lester River, he usually knew the parents. It made the job harder and the wounds more personal. He couldn’t see the people as strangers. They were neighbors and friends.
    Other towns tore down the past and built on top of it. Not Duluth. The terraced streets that rose off the shore of Lake Superior still boasted Victorian homes that dated to the early part of the previous century, when shipping and mining had made the city a glamour town. The wealth of that era was long gone but the houses remained, decaying like sorrowful echoes. The same was true of the Canal Park factories near the water, even after they’d been shuttered and converted into shops and restaurants for the tourists. You could still see old industrial names etched into the building stone, like Dewitt-Seitz and Paulucci.
    When something did get torn down in Duluth, people complained. Where Stride lived, out on the sliver of land known as the Point that divided the harbor from the wild waters of Superior, the shabby old lake homes were slowly disappearing, replaced by condos and hotels and new mansions. No one liked it. The house where he’d lived with his first wife for twenty years was gone. Every time hecrossed the lift bridge over the shipping canal, he remembered the homes and the faces of the people who weren’t there anymore.
    He’d spent his whole life here. It was an extreme place, like a frontier outpost on the border of the Canadian wilderness. Tourists flooded the town for the brief, warm summers, but the endless winters defined the city and gave it its fierce beauty. For months the waves of the great lake made ice sculptures on the beach and the smaller lakes simply froze into roads for fishermen. Blizzards buried the empty highways, and Alberta winds swept snowdrifts up to the roof lines. Living here was harsh, but Stride couldn’t live anywhere else. When he’d tried, he always came back. This was his home.
    Locals boasted that Duluth toughened anyone who survived the winters, but Stride knew that it also made you old before your time. You couldn’t fight the elements and not feel the damage to your body. You couldn’t weather the storms and not get broken. There were other, less visible scars, too. The more time he spent in Duluth, the more he learned about keeping things inside. You hung on to the pain and locked it away. You stayed closed off to the world. After a while, it became a way of life.
    Serena had complained that he kept every death harbored in his soul, and she wasn’t wrong. He never forgot the people he’d left behind. To Stride, loss was like the parade of giant ore boats coming and going through the city’s ship canal. Every boat arrived weighted down with black cargo, and every boat had a name.
    Like the one in his mind dedicated to Michaela Mateo.
    *
    ‘Private party,’ the guard told Stride, holding up a beefy hand to stop him as he boarded the
Charles Frederick
.
    Stride peeled back the flap of his black leather jacket, revealing his badge pinned to the inside pocket. ‘I have an invitation.’
    The guard swore under his breath. He looked like a tackle on the UMD football team, with a blond crew cut, no neck, and ahuge torso bulked with muscle, not fat. He was young, probably not even twenty years old. He wore red nylon shorts despite the cold morning, holey sneakers, and a gray sweatshirt with a logo advertising Lowball Lenny’s used cars.
    ‘What’s your name?’ Stride asked.
    ‘Marcus,’ the kid told him.
    ‘You been here all night, Marcus?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Tell me about the party.’
    ‘I don’t know anything about that. They hired me to make sure nobody crashed. I stayed down here. All the fun was upstairs.’
    ‘Who hired you?’ Stride asked.
    Marcus pointed to his sweatshirt. ‘Lowball Lenny. You know, Leonard Keck. The car guy. This was some big celebration for his top salesmen. He brought them in from around the