by Allen Eskens
If she made the connection between Kevin at the salon and Gavin the Picture Boy, detectives would be at his door soon, but when? That was the question that gnawed at Gavin’s thoughts. Would they wait for toxicology reports to come back? Doubtful. They might hold out until they got a search warrant, and that would take time. Pass on the warrant, and they could be at his door as early as noon. Gavin figured that he had at least until then to finish his cleanup.
He had pulled his laptop and the bottle of GHB from beneath the lazy Susan, wiping his prints from both and tossing the bottle into the bin. As for the laptop, he’d had one last project to run on it. He’d exported the new pictures of Sadie from his camera to the computer before destroying the camera’s memory chip with fire and a toilet flush.
This part of the plan—saving pictures of his crime—was absolutely foolish, and he knew it, but he had no choice. His keepsakes were like oxygen for him. He couldn’t live without them. Besides, what was the point of all that planning and effort if he couldn’t relive the thrill through his small mementos?
Once he had secured his trophy—the memory of Sadie locked away on the server hidden in his mother’s garage attic—he went to work destroying his laptop.
Of course, simply deleting the data would not do; that was the digital equivalence of hiding behind a curtain. Gavin first used his evidence-erasing software to wipe the hard drive clean. A lesser mind, at that point, would have been satisfied, but not Gavin. He opened the laptop, removed the hard drive, and drilled holes through the memory platter. In order to get data from the platter, it needed to spin like a record album. He rendered the disc useless and unreadable.
Redundancy.
Finally, he smashed it all with a hammer and put the scraps into a plastic shopping bag, which he placed in the front seat of the Bronco.
He removed the privacy screens from his license plates and put those in the bin, too. Despite having laid plastic sheathing on the floor of his downstairs bedroom, he vacuumed the carpets and put the vacuum bag in the bin. Then he loaded the vacuum itself into the Bronco, on the near impossible chance that its beater-bar held a strand of hair or a few skin cells. He would donate the vacuum to a thrift store on his way to buy tires.
Once everything had seemed ready, he’d paused to see what he might have missed.
His home computer had never accessed the hidden server, never held any of the incriminating pictures, and had never been used for research. If they examined it, they would find tedium. A search of his phone would show that it hadn’t left his house in the past twenty-four hours.
What was he missing? This was the point at which most people made mistakes. They got in a hurry. He would not hurry.
He had almost convinced himself that he had thought of everything when a mistake caught his attention. The router. A router can collect browsing histories. He had almost missed it. He went and unplugged his router. Back in the garage, he wiped it down with a baby wipe to remove his fingerprints and skin cells, then took a hammer to it, pulverizing it, before sweeping the bits into a second plastic grocery bag.
He then filled eight condoms with gasoline, tucking them around the edge of the bin—a trick he learned from a documentary on special effects in movies. They used condoms to create fiery explosions because gasoline wouldn’t eat through a condom as it would a regular balloon. He slipped a book of matches and a tiny cone of incense into his pocket for a detonation device.
His final act was to back both the Bronco and his Lexus out of the garage and sweep the floor clean, tossing the dirt and broom head into the bin. The detectives would find absolutely no evidence that Sadie had ever been in Gavin’s home.
* * *
Driving north on Interstate 94, Gavin pulled off on Broadway to go through a couple of twenty-four-hour fast-food restaurants, ordering a small meal from each drive-through. As he pulled out, he tossed the plastic grocery bags into their trash receptacles, leaving the remnants of the laptop at the first restaurant and the smashed router at the second.
Continuing north, he came to a stretch of land along the river where they once dredged sand. He had found that spot the first time he went through this ritual. It was a perfect place to set a small fire.
As was his habit, he drove past the sand pit twice to make sure it was deserted in those wee hours of the morning. Then he backed the Bronco down to the river’s edge and slid the plastic bin out of the back, dropping it to the ground. He lit the cone of incense and tucked it inside the book of matches, placing the makeshift timer where its flame would lap against one of the gas-filled condoms.
As he was about to leave, he had another thought and tossed his floor mats and cargo mat onto the pile. Crime labs had the technology to trace the dirt from a pair of shoes to a crime scene. He had been careful, but if any dirt from Nicollet Island had made it onto the floor mat, it made no sense to leave such a thing lying around.
In the Bronco again, he drove to a vantage point about a half mile away to watch.
It didn’t take long for the spark from the incense cone to touch off the book of matches, igniting the first condom full of gas. Things erupted quickly after that, and in a matter of seconds, the bin went up in a pyre visible for miles, the thick black smoke from the burning plastic and rubber lifting to the sky. There would be no trace evidence found there.
Gavin’s next task was to clean up his beloved Bronco.
He drove through two different car washes because seedpods and grass can sometimes tie a vehicle to a crime scene. But a car wash could not change the tread of his tires. That’s what brought him to the tire shop.
At first the guy acted like he didn’t want Gavin’s business.
“Your tires ain’t that bad. Ya got a good twenty thousand miles left on ’em.”
“They don’t ride well,” Gavin said, avoiding his lisp.
“But why do ya want used tires? What I got here in the shop ain’t as good as what ya got on there now.”
“I prefer older tread.”
“But that don’t make sense.”
“I could go to another company—”
“No, I’ll take care of ya, it’s just…Fine, if ya want used tires, I’ll get ya used tires.”
Chapter 12
A nurse led Niki Vang and Matty Lopez to a room in the Hennepin County Medical Center where a young woman lay sleeping in the lone bed. Her face was hollowed out by her ordeal, her hair tangled, having gone unbrushed after being wet. Next to her, a man in his late forties slept in a green chair, his head propped up by an elbow on the armrest. When the detectives entered the room, the man sat up and wiped the exhaustion from his eyes.
“This is her father,” the nurse whispered.
The man blinked as if confused.
“Mr. Vauk?” Niki said.
“Yes.”
“May we speak to you?” She pointed to the corridor.
The man looked at his daughter and nodded, standing to follow the detectives out of the room.
“I’m Detective Vang, and this is Detective Lopez. We need to talk to Sadie, but we’d like a word with you first, if that’s okay.”
“Did you find him—the one who did that to my little girl?”
“We’re just getting started, Mr. Vauk,” Niki said. “We need to learn everything we can—every detail. Do you know where your daughter was yesterday or last night?”
“I already had this conversation with you people.”
“We’re with a different unit, and we’d like to go over it again. Make sure nothing gets overlooked.”
“What unit?”
Niki handed a card to Mr. Vauk. “We’re with Homicide.”
“I don’t understand. Sadie’s alive.”
To avoid getting into the weeds about the three cold cases, Niki simply said, “Someone made an attempt on your daughter’s life. That’s why we’re here. What do you know about Sadie’s whereabouts yesterday?”
“Not much. She lives on her own. She came by Sunday to drop off he
r dog so I could watch him. She had a wedding to go to.”
“Whose wedding?” Matty asked.
“A friend of Sadie’s named Janelle Halloway. Sadie was supposed to come by after work yesterday to pick up the dog, but she never showed. I called her but got no answer. I kept calling until around eleven; that’s when I phoned you folks. I got a call around four-thirty this morning. Said Sadie was…” Mr. Vauk paused to let a quiver pass his lips. “She was here at the hospital.”
“I know this is difficult, Mr. Vauk,” Niki said. “Only a few more questions. Was Sadie dating anyone?”
“No one she told me about.”
Matty asked, “Did she have any enemies?”
“No.” The word came out sharp and strong, as if Mr. Vauk had been insulted.
“Anyone make her nervous lately? Call her too much?”
“Nothing like that. Everybody loves Sadie.”
Niki asked, “Has she said anything since the other detective left?”
“She’s been asleep.”
“We’re going to talk to her and ask her some questions, and we’d prefer it if you weren’t in the room,” Niki said.
“She’s my daughter.”
“Exactly,” Niki said. “Sometimes we ask questions that are…Well, they’re the kind of things a girl might not want to talk about in front of her father.”
“I’d rather be there.”
“We need to speak with her alone,” Niki said. “It’ll help the investigation. We want to catch this guy as much as you do, Mr. Vauk.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, ma’am. Ain’t no one on God’s green earth that wants to catch that son of a bitch more ’n me. I’m her father. I was supposed to protect her.”
“I understand,” Niki said. “We need to do our job now, so this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“You find out who did this and I’ll god damn guarantee you he never does it to anyone else. I got friends who’ll make sure of that, guys from the brotherhood if you get my drift.”
Matty, who stood all of five foot nine, calmly stepped forward and looked the six-foot-plus Mr. Vauk in the eye and said, “Mr. Vauk, I know you’re angry, but we’ll be the ones handling this case. And right now, we need to talk to her alone. Is that all right with you?”
Vauk seemed to wilt under Matty’s stare. He nodded. “I’m just saying…”
“We understand,” Niki said. “Why don’t you go grab a coffee or something. This won’t take long.”
Vauk nodded and hesitantly walked away.
Inside the room, Matty stayed near the door while Niki walked to the side of the bed, put her hand on Sadie’s arm, and gave it a light squeeze.
Sadie opened her eyes in confusion, as if she had no memory of where she was or how she’d gotten there. She looked almost unbearably young and scared. Her breath quickened when she saw the detectives and her eyes darted around the room searching for her father.
“Sadie, my name is Niki Vang. I’m a detective. I’d like to ask you a few questions about what happened. Would that be all right?”
Sadie calmed at the sound of Niki’s gentle voice.
“I know you already talked to some other detectives, but I want to have you go through it again in case we missed anything. Let’s work backwards. So do you remember the ambulance ride here?”
“A little.” Sadie’s voice cracked as she worked the sleep out of it. “I was so tired.”
“What do you remember before the ambulance?”
“I was in water, and I swam to some rocks. A man laid me in the grass. He put his jacket around me.”
“He was a security guard,” Niki said. “He’s the one who called the ambulance. What do you remember about being in the water?”
“Swimming. The water tasted like mud, and I couldn’t move my arms right, but I was swimming. There was a current. I tried to swim against it. Where was I?”
“You were in the Mississippi River.”
“I don’t understand.” Sadie looked at Niki as if something in the detective’s face might hold an answer that eluded her. “How’d I…get in the river?”
“Let your mind relax,” Niki said. “What happened before you were swimming? Were you with anyone? Do you remember anyone talking to you or holding on to you?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Take your time, Sadie. Just let your thoughts come to you.”
She closed her eyes. “I was in the water. I couldn’t see. It was dark, and I had water in my eyes. And it was loud. I could hear…I could hear the water.”
“What about before that?”
“I think I remember falling. The water was so cold.”
“Describe the fall. Do you remember what was around you?”
Sadie closed her eyes, pinching them tight at first, then relaxing them. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed brokenhearted. “I just remember the water. This is so confusing. How’d I get in the river?”
Niki shared a look with Matty, not seeking permission so much as letting him know that she would answer Sadie’s question.
“Sadie, when was the last time you had sexual relations?”
“What?”
“When was it?”
“My boyfriend and I broke up in April, so…not for four months.”
“The doctors found evidence of sexual trauma. We’re running tests to see if you had anything in your system—like a date-rape drug.”
“I was raped?” Sadie’s face paled with fear and anguish.
“We’re not sure at this point, but…I’m sorry.” Sadie’s eyes filled with tears and Niki rubbed her arm to try and soothe the blow. “What’s the last thing you remember before the water?”
“I was at the shop—my hair salon, Queen Bebe’s—and this guy came in for a haircut.”
“Was he a regular?”
“No. He wanted an appointment after hours. He offered me…” Something seemed to be shifting around in Sadie’s memory. “I don’t think he paid me. I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember him leaving?”
“No. I’m not sure that I even gave him a haircut. He wanted to look at some style catalogs. We were talking and then…I don’t know.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Kevin. I wrote it down in my appointment book. Kevin. I’m sure of that. And…” Sadie stared hard at the wall. “I think I’ve seen him before, like we’d met, but I can’t…”
“His name is Kevin, though? Do you remember what he looks like?”
“My age, I suppose. Kind of chunky in the middle, light-brown hair, and…he was wearing…I think he had on a sweatshirt…a hoodie. That’s all I can remember.”
“Do you remember what he drove to his appointment?”
“No.”
“You said he looked familiar. Think about the places you frequent—restaurants, night clubs, gyms—is it possible you know him from a place like that?”
Sadie closed her eyes, but then opened them again and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.” Niki patted Sadie’s arm. “Sometimes a memory can get blocked if you try too hard. Just take it nice and slow.”
Sadie closed her eyes again as if searching, but then opened them and said, “Nice.” She said the word slowly, as if she were saying it for the first time.
Niki waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, she asked, “Are you—?”
Sadie held up her hand to stop Niki from talking, her eyes burrowing deep into an empty space on the wall in front of her. Then Sadie whispered the word again to herself. “Nice.”
Sadie still had her hand raised, so Niki looked at Matty, who shrugged. Sadie’s face wore a look of intense concentration verging on fear. Then she said, “He said…‘nice.’”
“Who said ‘nice’?”
“The guy—Kevin. He said…” She closed her eyes again and fought to remember. “He was standing in front of me…I was sitting…in the grass…and he said, ‘All you had to do was be
nice.’”
Niki repeated the words. “All you had to do was be nice.”
“Yeah, but…he had a lisp.” Sadie slowly repeated the line, but muddled the letter S. “All you had to do wasch be nische.” Sadie’s eyes grew big and her breath caught. “I think…I know who Kevin is.”
Chapter 13
Gavin sat in his basement, in the very room where he had brought Sadie the night before, and pondered the myriad paths that might bring detectives to his door. There were so many variables, any one of which could change everything, and the prospect of accounting for each contingency filled Gavin with a sense of purpose. He tapped a nervous finger on the side of his temple as he shuffled through possibilities, narrowing them down to the most likely scenario.
Sadie would remember the man who came in for a last-minute haircut. She would give a detective the name Kevin, as it appeared in her appointment book. But would Sadie connect Kevin from the salon to Kevin the Picture Boy? Gavin had seen no sign of recognition as she’d prattled on about hair products and new styles. He’d managed to hide his lisp the entire time. Still, if detectives showed up at his door, he had to assume that Sadie had made the connection to the wedding.
They would want to know where he was last night. A forensic check of his phone would reveal that it never left his house, but a neighbor may have seen him leave or return in the Bronco. No need to get caught in a lie. So he would say nothing.
Would they do a lineup? Of course they would. But the question was whether it would be an in-person lineup or a photo. Should he agree to an in-person lineup if they asked? His first inclination was to refuse. Why make it easy for them. But on further study, he changed his mind.
If he refused the in-person lineup, they would show Sadie his driver’s license photo mixed with a group of similar-looking guys. She would likely have no problem picking him out of the bunch. The jury would then hear about how easily Sadie had identified Gavin.