by Allen Eskens
The only stumbling block was getting them into the river without being seen.
West Island Avenue followed the contour of the Mississippi but curved sharply away from the river when it arrived at the entrance to the wedding pavilion. With a sleeping Sadie Vauk in the back, Gavin drove down the avenue twice, looping past the pavilion to see if anyone might be walking the paths or loitering in the parking lot of the nearby inn. At three o’clock in the morning, everything seemed quiet.
On his third pass he stopped, looked around one last time, and then backed his Bronco onto a walking path. Only thirty feet off the avenue, Gavin found a spot at the edge of the river beyond the reach of the nearby streetlights. He knew that spot; he had been there before.
As Gavin slid her out of the back of the Bronco, she acted lethargic and drowsy, more conscious than Gavin would have liked. He thought he heard her say the word “No,” her voice thick with sleep. None of the others had been able to speak. Had he used enough of the drug? If she’d ever imbibed liquid ecstasy, say at a club, she could have built up a tolerance. He had no way to account for that.
“Right over here,” Gavin whispered as he walked her to the edge of the river. He set her in the grass atop the six-foot embankment and slipped over the edge, finding his balance on the slippery rocks.
Sadie was trying to open her eyes. That hadn’t happened the other times. And Sadie’s legs seemed less wobbly. He had to drag the others to the river’s edge, but Sadie had managed to put one foot in front of the other, leaning on him to remain upright. Would she put up a fight when he pushed her face under the water?
Gavin took ahold of Sadie’s left wrist and she tried to pull away, a feeble effort. When he tightened his grip, she opened her eyes enough to look at him, but then she closed them again, pinching them tight as if trying to solve the riddle of how she had come to be in this place, with this man. Gavin felt a spark of charity—knowing that she would soon be dead—and in that moment of benevolence, he answered the question that he thought she was pondering. “All you had to do was be nice, Sadie.” He hadn’t prepared his words, so they dripped thick with his lisp. Then he grabbed her other wrist and yanked her over the edge of the bank.
Right away he understood his miscalculation. He had expected her to be heavy and inert, a bag of rocks like the others, but Sadie stumbled into him, sending them both tumbling toward the river.
Gavin spun backward, letting go of Sadie and grabbing a branch to keep from falling. Sadie sailed past him, crashing down the steep embankment, twisting on the rocks, and plunging into the water, crying out in pain just before the river swallowed her.
Gavin tried to regain his footing but tripped in the darkness and fell back into the scrub.
When Sadie came up for air, Gavin heard splashing, but no scream. That was good—or was it? When he finally managed to get back to his feet, he saw Sadie twelve feet out, struggling to right herself.
He wanted to leap in and finish the job, but he froze. Was she awake enough to fight? How deep was the water? Would the current pull him toward the falls? That synaptic flurry of doubt lasted a mere second or two, but it was enough to keep him on the shore until his window of opportunity had disappeared.
Sadie sloshed and flailed and fought to stay alive. He waited for a scream or maybe a yell for help, but none came as the current pulled her away from him and toward the dam. St. Anthony Falls would have her soon, and no one could survive its crushing power.
But then, Gavin saw something that confused him. At first he thought that the darkness was playing a trick, but it wasn’t. The splashing, which had once been erratic and wild, had taken on rhythm, like the strokes of…a swimmer. She was swimming away from the falls!
Goddammit!
The hydroelectric dam powered a station on Hennepin Island only a hundred yards downstream from where Gavin stood. He watched Sadie flutter and fight to stay alive, her clumsy strokes pulling her toward the jagged riprap on the upstream point of the power station. Lights from the plant illuminated the river enough that Gavin could see her head bobbing in the water—loose on her shoulders, but moving in rhythm with the strokes.
No! No! No!
Gavin climbed the bank and ran to the Bronco. He stomped on the gas, causing the old truck to bounce over the curb so hard that he hit his head against the roof. He willed himself to slow down. Keep your wits. Panic is the enemy. This is where a lesser man would screw things up. You’re no lesser man.
Once again in control, he drove calmly off the island and down the lane that followed the river, toward the gate of the power plant. A surveillance camera on the building’s roof forced him to circle the block and park where the camera couldn’t see him.
Sadie lay on the rocks, her body limp, like a shipwreck survivor washed upon a hostile shore.
Options: He could pull the hoodie over his head and climb the fence, drag her back into the water, and drown her. She would put up a fight. Plus, the power plant had cameras and a security staff. He would never make it back off the island before he was spotted—but would they be able to identify him?
Before Gavin could come up with a better alternative, a man appeared in the doorway of the power plant, stood for a moment as if confused, and then walked toward Sadie. As he neared her, he must have realized what lay on the rocks, because he ran the last few yards to pull her to safety.
Gavin should have been apoplectic at the sight of Sadie being rescued, but somehow he wasn’t. Instead of visions of prison and recrimination, Gavin saw a challenge like no other. A strange energy washed over him.
Finally they would know about him. Sadie would tell of the man who came to her salon, the man named Kevin. And with that, the game would be on.
They would come for him like hunters in search of prey, chasing him over a terrain of his choosing, his skill matched against theirs. He had been preparing for this test his whole life, and now that it had arrived, it excited him to his core.
The time had come to test his long game, march out onto a new and vastly more complex battlefield. He had imagined this moment a thousand times, prepared for it. Now he would face off against a true adversary, a detective, someone worthy of his prowess. And if he remained calm and executed his moves with intelligence, his victory would be as sweet as heaven’s own honey.
The first move in this new game would be to dismantle what little remained of his evening with Sadie Vauk. Gavin Spencer had a long night ahead of him.
Chapter 9
It was Detective Niki Vang’s turn to get the coffee that morning, which she bought at the Park Café, a cafeteria in the bowels of the Hennepin County Government Center—this even though her partner, Matty, wrinkled his nose at anything that wasn’t Starbucks or Caribou. As she waited for her order, she spotted a familiar face, smiled, and gestured for the man to join her in line.
“You coming or going?” Niki asked.
George Devlemnick rubbed his eyes, heavy with exhaustion, and cleared his throat with a light cough before he spoke, a habit she remembered from the days when she worked with him in the Sex Crimes unit. “Just finishing up a long night,” he said. “Worked a prostitution sting.”
“All night? Must have been a big haul.”
“Nothing more than usual, although we did snag a man of the cloth. Said he was only there to spread the gospel of repentance. You know, ‘Go forth and sin no more.’”
“I take it that didn’t fly?”
“He brought his own condom.”
Niki stepped up to the counter and placed her order. “If it was just a sting, why’re you still here? That should have wrapped up hours ago.”
“We had a curveball thrown at us.”
The woman behind the counter brought two coffees. Niki thanked her and waited with George as he ordered.
“Actually,” George said, “it was nearly a case for you guys. A security guard over at Hennepin Island fished a girl out of the river. Found her washed up on the rocks.”
“Alive?”
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“Barely.”
A cog clicked somewhere in the back of Niki’s mind. “Tell me more.”
“Woman. Early twenties. Groggy as hell. We tried to get a statement, but she couldn’t focus. We’re having the dayshift go back to give it another try this morning.”
“Drugged?”
“That’s our bet. We took blood and urine.”
“Sexual assault?”
“Doc said she saw evidence of recent sexual activity, but the girl was out of it, so we couldn’t ask about consent.”
This all sounded strangely familiar to Niki. She pointed to a table and the two of them moved to take seats. There had been other women in the river. She worked the memories out of the dust.
“Fully clothed?” she asked.
George tipped his head, curious. “Yeah.”
“No ligature marks?”
“None.”
Niki took a moment to think, to remember them all. The most recent one had been two years ago. It hadn’t been her case, but she remembered how cavalier Lieutenant Briggs had been when he assigned it to the other detective. “I’ll bet fifty bucks that she just broke up with her boyfriend,” he’d said.
Curious, and disliking his assumption, Niki had done some digging and found a similar death two years before that and another two years before that. When she mentioned this to Briggs, he said, “We have enough murder cases to keep us busy; we don’t need to burn time on people who jump off bridges. These are low-priority cases. Focus on the ones we know were murdered.” She was a rookie in Homicide back then and didn’t challenge Briggs, but his offhanded dismissal stuck with her.
Niki leaned in toward George and lowered her voice. “Just after I came to Homicide, they pulled the body of a young woman from the river down near Ford Parkway. She was fully clothed, her body a mess: postmortem bruises, broken bones. Best we could figure, she went in upstream from the falls. Two years before that, another one washed ashore in Gorge Park. We couldn’t really say it was a murder versus an accident or a suicide.”
“Two victims?”
“Maybe three. St. Paul pulled a woman out of the river six years ago. Same MO: fully clothed, no ligature marks, no defensive wounds. They all had signs of recent sexual activity and GHB in their systems.”
“Okay, but GHB can show up naturally in a dead body.”
“A few years back, they came out with a new test using brain tissue. GHB doesn’t get into the brain unless it’s ingested. They did that test on the girl from two years ago, so we know she definitely ingested it. Whether it was voluntarily or slipped to her, we can’t say. What can you tell me about the one from last night?”
“Her name’s Sadie Vauk. We think she went into the river off Nicollet Island.”
“Find anything on the island?”
“Some tire tracks. They ran along one of the walking paths. Stopped near a gap in the trees. We made a cast of the tread print. No surveillance cameras in that spot, but we have requests in at some of the businesses around the area. Maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of something. We know what time the security guard found her, so we have a pretty tight window.”
“I think you have an attempted murder,” Niki said. “If we could link this girl from last night to any of the others, we might have modus operandi for three cases.”
“It’s thin,” George said.
Thin, Niki thought. Low priority. How could men so easily dismiss three dead women? “It’s a start, George. That’s what it is.”
“You want the file?”
“I do.”
Chapter 10
Lila sat quietly in the office of Andi Fitch as her new boss read the first criminal complaint that she had prepared. Lila had stacked the files in order of her own confidence, the top file being spot on, in Lila’s opinion. Yet Fitch picked up a pen and started crossing out words. “It’s not the defendant; it’s simply Defendant. ‘Defendant ran into his house. Officers followed Defendant in hot pursuit.’” Andi slid the file back to Lila. “Otherwise…it’ll do.”
Andi added similar changes to the next three files, cosmetic adjustments, but nothing that caused Andi to throw the file back to her the way Ryan had described it. The fifth file, a child pornography case, would be a problem and Lila knew it. She mentally steeled herself as Fitch opened the file to find no complaint awaiting her scrutiny. This one she did toss at Lila. “I wanted this done this morning,” she said. “Get it back to me by lunch.”
“I don’t think you should charge him,” Lila said.
Fitch looked at Lila as though the younger woman had just thrown feces at her. “That’s not your call. If you can’t do what I ask, I’ll be happy to transfer you to Child Support Collections.”
Lila, her hands clasped tightly together on her lap, waited for Fitch to finish. And when she spoke, she stumbled at first. “It’s not…This isn’t about…” She took a breath. “If you charge him, he’ll walk.”
Andi leaned back in her chair and crossed one leg over the other, a move she executed with the ease of a scorpion drawing back its stinger. “Go on.”
Lila cleared a lump of doubt from her throat and began. “So this guy, Woggum, gets arrested because he made a child porn video and shared it with his buddy. But we only know about Woggum because we arrested the buddy—gave him a deal so we could get the guy who made the video.”
Lila paused to see if Andi might offer some acknowledgment, but the woman simply stared at her.
“But when they searched Woggum’s house, they found nothing. He had wiped his hard drive, so, no possession of child pornography.”
Fitch rolled her eyes. “Tell me you didn’t decline to charge because of that. Good lord!”
“I’m not finished.” Lila spoke in a tone she meant to sound firm, but it was lacking the intended punch. “The informant said that he was there two years ago when Woggum made the video. That implicates Woggum, but it’s the word of a co-accomplice.”
“We also have Woggum’s voice on the video,” Andi said. “We know he made the video because you can hear him, for God’s sake. That’s not enough for you?”
“My concern…” Lila paused before taking her next step through the minefield. “Is not who made the video, but when it was made.”
Andi’s expression moved from exacerbation to curiosity, a wolf losing its snarl. She tipped her head to listen, a gesture that inflated Lila’s confidence.
She continued. “The video proves that it was Woggum’s apartment, and detectives took a bunch of pictures when they made the arrest. In the video Woggum made, you can see that the bathroom is being remodeled—the sink is on the floor and there’re pipes and stuff lying around—but in the arrest pictures, the remodel is finished.”
“Okay.”
“I thought…Well, maybe we could look up the building permit to get a fix on the date of the construction. That way—”
“Didn’t the detectives look into that?” Andi picked up the file and began paging through the police reports.
“No.”
“You did?”
Lila could see that Andi had finally synced with Lila’s train of thought. Now bring it home. “The permit was issued three and a half years ago. I called the landlord, and he said he finished the work just over three years ago.”
“Beyond the statute of limitations.”
Lila held her grin in check. “For Minnesota, yes, but the feds have a five-year window. You can refer it out.”
A long silence filled the space between them, and Lila had to fight to keep from squirming with excitement. Andi finally spoke. “I read your résumé. You did some defense work with Boady Sanden.”
“As a second-year, I worked a case with him, yes.”
“I can tell. You think like a defense attorney.”
“I don’t—”
Andi held up her hand to stop Lila. “That’s a compliment. You worked through the case, anticipated the defenses—that’s good.”
“I didn’t like the weak timeline,
that’s all.” In truth, she had obsessed over that small detail for hours, but false modesty seemed to be a better response.
“Tell me the truth, Lila. Were you the one who told Ryan to charge out the false imprisonment on the Gray case?”
Lila didn’t answer.
Fitch nodded. “Ryan’s a smart kid, but has no mind for strategy.” Andi handed the file back to Lila. “Please do a referral letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
Lila took the file.
“And they’re bringing Mr. Gray in for his first appearance this morning. I want you to handle the hearing. You have done a first appearance, haven’t you?”
“Mr. Hernandez preferred that I not.”
“Good lord.” Andi closed her eyes and mumbled something under her breath. The only word Lila made out was Oscar’s name. When she opened her eyes again, she looked at Lila and said, “Well, you’re doing one today.”
Chapter 11
By nine o’clock that morning, Gavin Spencer had taken care of most of the tasks on his list, and now he sat in the waiting area of a tire shop, giving thought to what he may have overlooked.
After seeing Sadie get rescued at the power station, he drove the Bronco home and got to work. First, he placed the large storage bin—the one he purchased the day before at Walmart—on the floor of his garage and began filling it with the evidence, starting with the plastic sheathing that he had laid out in the back of the Bronco and on the floor of the bedroom. He added Sadie’s water bottle and his clothing, latex gloves, and wipes. Anything that either of them had touched went into the bin.
How much time did he have? Sadie would have been groggy when they found her, most of her recent memory lost to a comatose haze. The name in her appointment book at the salon listed him as Kevin. If she didn’t connect him to the wedding, the police might never find him, but part of Gavin hoped they would. Chalk it up to hubris, or maybe boredom, but now that the worst had happened, he wanted a taste of the big leagues.