by Steven James
“Nope. You’re going to have to wait. But I have a feeling you’re really going to like it.”
Okay, now my curiosity was getting piqued.
“Really, Pat”—urgency in her voice again—“I need to go. Ashton and I need to finish some things up. I’m glad you called, though.”
“Yeah.” I wanted to mention Amber, tell Lien-hua the story of what had happened five years ago, explain that Amber wasn’t a threat, but all that came out was, “I’ll look forward to that surprise, then.”
“Good. Call me tomorrow.”
“I love you,” I said.
“You too.”
After we hung up I was still thinking of Amber, of the incidents from my past that I hadn’t shared with Lien-hua. The phone felt heavy and awkward in my hand, and I nearly missed slipping it into my pocket.
“Pat?” Jake’s voice. He was standing in the doorway. I wondered how long he’d been there.
“What?” Even to me, my tone sounded somewhat sharp, but I figured if he’d been listening in on my conversation he deserved it.
“We should probably find a motel before it gets too late.”
I heard Linnaman’s voice from the living room: “You staying in Woodborough, then?”
“If possible,” Jake said.
We joined Linnaman by the couch.
“Only one there is the Moonbeam Motel. The Schoenberg’s in Elk Ridge, but the Moonbeam’s a lot closer.”
“That’s it, then.” Jake looked at me expectantly.
“All right.” I tossed him the keys. “I’ll be right out.”
I did one final walk-through, trying to do what Margaret said I was good at—noticing what needs to be noticed—but didn’t feel very successful at all.
At last I returned to the night and left with Jake for the Moonbeam Motel.
In her dorm room at U of M, Tessa listened to Patrick’s voicemail from earlier in the day—holding the phone to her right ear because of the hearing loss she’d suffered in her left ear last summer, when it all happened.
When the message ended, she set her phone on the dresser. The mirror above the sink caught her reflection, and she whisked away a strand of black hair from her eyes so she could see to wipe off her mascara.
Over the past couple years she’d flirted with the Goth look, wearing black lipstick, fingernail polish, and mascara for most of her sophomore and junior years. However, this year she’d eased up on all that, moving into more of a neo-Bohemian thing. But the dark mascara had stayed. As her friend Cherise sometimes said, “Fashion trends may come and go, but black is always sick.”
As she was washing up, she brushed her fingers across the line of thin, straight scars on her right forearm, emblems of her cutting stage in the wake of her mom’s death. They marked her search for release, narrow red lines that each brought a thread of pain while also letting a different kind of pain out.
But these days, despite being totally into screamer bands like House of Blood, Trevor Asylum, and Death by Suzie—and being pretty much addicted to gothic horror stories—she wanted nothing to do with blood or dead bodies in real life.
Nothing at all.
She’d had enough of that.
Instead, lately, she let her pain weep out onto the pages of her notebooks, filling one every week or so as she passed through the quotidian rhythm of life.
But still, the notebook wasn’t quite enough.
She took the bottle out of her overnight bag.
Stared at it for a long time.
Slipped two pills out.
She caught herself glancing at the phone as she swallowed them and decided to return Patrick’s call in the morning rather than tonight. She shed her clothes, pulled on her pajama pants and one of the old T-shirts Patrick had given her, an XL Simon Fraser University tee from the days he’d done his postgrad work in Vancouver.
Leaving the dorm room’s bathroom light on, she swung the door only partly shut, then climbed into bed and grabbed the teddy bear she’d brought with her. Occasionally over the past year Patrick had given her a hard time about sleeping with Francesca, but she had the feeling that beneath it all he was glad she hadn’t grown up completely yet; that at least in a few small ways she was still a little girl.
And he was probably relieved she was sharing her bed with a stuffed animal and not some guy.
Even if the pills did help, Tessa didn’t expect to sleep much tonight, since she barely slept at all these days, and when she did, her dreams were harsh and scraped raw with images of her being chased by a man with a cold face and barren eyes and a wide unnerving grin that still gave her chills whenever she thought of it.
She’d been a part of something last summer that she could not forget and would never forgive herself for, something she tried not to think about every night when she lay down to go to sleep.
And every day when she awoke.
But the memory of that gun beside her ear, of squeezing the trigger, of the sound of the man who was about to kill her dropping to the floor, of seeing—out of the corner of her eye—all that blood splattered across the wall . . .
It had all happened so fast, so—
It was way too much.
She slid the memory to the side. Buried it.
Refused to let it crawl to the surface.
A distraction.
That’s what she needed.
She flicked on the light beside her bed, pulled out one of her notebooks, propped herself up, and picked up a pen, “as carefully as if she were pulling out a scalpel to do surgery,” the words whispered through her mind, seemed to hover in the air before her, “against the black insidious tendrils of shame tentacling through her heart.”
Okay, that was too much. Too melodramatic. Definitely in need of editing, but something else would come.
She placed the tip of the pen against the virgin page, but hesitated. When she opened herself up like this on paper, she could be certain it would bring everything to the surface again, paradoxically making her feel worse and better at the same time.
Just like the razor blades.
But leaving different kinds of scars.
However, when she didn’t write, when she kept everything inside, the dreams only got worse. She began with a few disjointed thoughts, then wrote,
my soul is famished,
yet feeds on phantoms.
my stomach grumbles
at me, starving for
something real.
i lift another forkful
of vapors to my mouth.
when my diet is made up of so much
illusion and mirage,
the more moments i devour,
the emptier i become.
She tinkered with the words a little, then wrote for half an hour, poems stained with the past, but the harder she tried to forget, the clearer she seemed to remember.
At last, clicking off the bedside lamp, she put the notebook aside, drew Francesca close, and stared at the light easing from the bathroom doorway. “She knew it was important that she rest,” she thought, visualizing the words again, almost as if they were scribbled on a page, “but Tessa Bernice Ellis did not close her eyes, lest the sleep she needed, the dreams she dreaded, would find her once again.”
15
After picking up our room keys at the motel’s front desk, Jake and I agreed to meet tomorrow morning in the lobby at 8:00, when it would finally be light enough to view Tomahawk Lake. Natasha, who would also be staying at the motel, told us that she was returning to the Pickron house in the morning but would meet up with us later in the day.
In my room, I stowed my suitcase in the closet and gave Torres, the SWAT Team Leader, a call. He told me they hadn’t found Reiser. “Don’t worry, Pat. We’re on this. We found blood on two of his knives. We checked the DNA. Matched that of two missing persons—one in Milwaukee, one in DC. The DC victim was female, but the one from Milwaukee was male. Doesn’t fit the pattern. And no prints on the knife. He must have wiped it clean.�
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DC? He brought the knife in the knife block back here from DC?
“I’ll be back down there as soon as I can,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied. “What are you thinking about the case up there? Double domestic homicide? The husband the shooter?”
“It’s too early to tell,” I said honestly.
After hanging up, I realized that I was becoming more and more concerned about the approaching snowstorm. I tried Tessa’s number again but only reached her voicemail.
Not a fan of texting, I left another vm for her to call me first thing in the morning: “It’s supposed to start snowing in the early afternoon so I need you to leave the winter session early, by 8:30 or so. Either that or I’ll reserve a room for you at a hotel there . . . Okay, so talk to you in the morning.” Out of habit I found myself calling her by the nickname I’d given her a year ago, a small way of acknowledging her independent spirit and her insatiable interest in Edgar Allan Poe: “I love you, Raven.”
I said nothing about hoping she would sleep well.
It was a topic best left untouched.
Ever since the day last summer when her father had been accidentally killed and I shot a man who was threatening Tessa’s life—was in fact about to shoot her—she understandably hadn’t been able to sleep well, rarely making it through the night.
I’d suggested a counselor, but that didn’t go over so well. She’d scoffed at the relaxation exercises I looked up online and tried yoga once but hated it.
Being a vegan and not wanting to use any drugs that had ever been tested on animals, she’d tried all the natural and homeopathic cures she could find. Then practical, commonsense things: no caffeine or food within four hours of bedtime, calming music, different ambient lighting combinations in her bedroom, candles and incense, getting up and doing something else rather than lying there dwelling on the fact that she couldn’t fall asleep. Nothing had really helped, at least not in the long-term.
Obviously, it’s not healthy for a high school senior to be unable to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, and her GPA had taken a dive. In just one semester her cumulative 4.0 slipped to 3.65—pretty traumatic for a girl who’d never gotten a B on a report card in her life.
Her resultant testiness had also eroded her budding relationship with a new guy friend. He stuck with her for a while, but as she became more and more moody he finally broke things off just before Thanksgiving, which only made matters worse.
It seemed like the more I tried to find something to help her sleep, or the more I asked her how she’d slept, the more upset she became, so last month I stopped bringing it up. As long as she wouldn’t take medication or see a therapist, I wasn’t sure what else I could do for her.
Now, I set down the phone, but I left the ringer on just in case she called back.
After cranking up my room’s heater, I sent Cybercrime the emails and web history I’d downloaded from Donnie Pickron’s computer, searched through our online files for other instances of three shots through a window at a crime scene to see if that was the signature of any known criminal, but came up blank. Then I took some time to familiarize myself with the online maps of the miles and miles of snowmobile trails that intersect Tomahawk Lake and weave through the surrounding forests.
I found out that nearly all of the national forest service staff are seasonal and the ranger’s office closes down most of the roads once winter hits. It didn’t take me long to realize that, based on the location of the sawmill in relation to the Pickron residence and the long, looping county roads that wound around the marsh, it would have saved Donnie time and money if he rode his snowmobile to work through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest rather than driving his car.
I committed the trails to memory.
Finally, emotionally drained from the events of the day, especially from seeing the four-year-old girl Lizzie’s body, I put my laptop away and headed to bed, unsure, with all of this on my mind, if I would be able to sleep any better than my stepdaughter.
16
Friday, January 9
6:05 a.m.
I awoke later than I’d expected, a black slit of night still hanging between the curtains.
The motel didn’t have an exercise room, but I threw myself into an old-school workout of push-ups and crunches and ended with pull-ups on the door frame to the bathroom—a way to keep my grip in shape for the climbing trip in Patagonia I was planning this summer. Ever since my days as a wilderness guide, I’ve slipped out to go rock climbing whenever I got the chance, and this summer was going to be my first trip to Patagonia in more than a decade. I needed to crank up my finger strength or I’d never be able to pull down the 5.12 routes I was eyeing.
After a shower, I saw that it was 7:08 a.m., less than an hour before my trip to Tomahawk Lake with Jake.
I flipped on the TV to catch the weather, and a life insurance commercial popped on.
Life insurance: an oxymoron. After all, life is the one thing that cannot be insured, a fact that’s all too obvious to someone in my business.
“Planning for the unthinkable, made simple and secure,” the announcer said.
I barely held back a head shake. A culture that calls the inevitable “unthinkable” is simply a culture in denial. However, when he assured me that I would “never have to face the future alone,” his words brought to mind something a little less disheartening: a conversation a few months ago with Tessa, the talk that had led to my decision to take things with Lien-hua to the next level.
My wife Christie died of breast cancer almost two years ago. At the time I didn’t know who Tessa’s biological father was, and neither did she, so, as her guardian, I began caring for her as if she were my own daughter. From the start, things had been rocky, but eventually we’d grown as close as a real father and his daughter might be, and I wouldn’t trade the time with her—even the rough spots—for anything.
Tessa liked Lien-hua a lot and wanted me to get together with her, but Lien-hua had been drifting from me, and when Tessa asked me how things were going I’d been honest and told her, “She seems a little aloof lately.”
“What are you doing about it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m wondering if she’s not that interested in me after all.”
“Patrick, women want to be pursued. They want to play hard to get, but the last thing they want is to succeed in getting away.”
I stared at her. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s ’cause you’re not a girl.”
“Why don’t they just—”
“How old are you again?” An arched eyebrow. I was having a conversation with Mr. Spock. “Thirty-seven? And you still have no clue about women?”
“Do you know a guy of any age who does?”
She considered that. “Good point. But when a girl distances herself from a guy it’s a test to see how serious the guy is.”
“So, let me get this straight. Women pretend they don’t want guys to pursue them so that they will, and they act like they’re not interested in them when they are.”
“Exactly.”
“And the more ambivalent they act about making things work, the more they want to get got?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“You’re a teenage girl. How do you know all this?”
“I’m a teenage girl.”
So, I’d pursued Lien-hua as Tessa suggested and found that her counterintuitive observations about women were correct. Consequently, things with Lien-hua had progressed, and this coming week I was planning to propose.
If I could only work up enough nerve to actually pop the question.
I surfed through the channels until I came to some cable news weather. The cohosts chatted for a minute about the balmy weather in San Diego while the scrolling news at the bottom of the screen announced that Secretary of State Nielson had arrived in Tehran for “groundbreaking bilateral talks about sanctions and Iran’s controversial nucl
ear research program.”
That’s what the media was reporting, but I’d heard through my friends higher up in the government that his trip was really precipitated by Israel’s recent statement, “Any nuclear aggression by Iran will be met with immediate and unequivocal force.” Israel has never officially acknowledged that they have nuclear weapons, but to everyone in the know, it’s a given. The story caught my attention only because Nielson is a friend of Margaret’s and his name comes up now and again. According to her, she helped him get started in politics years ago. I had the sense that she liked having friends in high places who owed her.
The ticker scrolled: the stock market was down forty-four points, the Celtics beat the Lakers, and then finally, the meteorologist addressed the national weather scene. He started by encouraging everyone in the upper Midwest to fill up on gas and groceries before the storm arrived. And to stay off the roads if at all possible.
I only needed to watch a few moments to realize that it’d be best if Tessa left by nine or not come up at all.
After clicking off the television I decided to call her during the drive to Tomahawk Lake to sort things out.
Whenever possible I like to visit the scene of a crime at the same time of day as when the crimes occurred in order to gain a temporal understanding of that location. If that isn’t practical, as in this case, I could at least orient myself spatially in reference to the snowmobile tracks, open water, and the sawmill Donnie worked at across the lake.
At the scene, I try to consider what the killer and the victim saw, smelled, or heard. What would I be responding to if I’d been there? If I’m the victim, am I resisting? How does the environment affect that—either facilitating or hampering my efforts to get away?
Timing and location.
And frankly, the crime scene at the Pickron house didn’t make sense, especially if Donnie were the shooter. After all, surely he would’ve known that he’d be a suspect, whether or not he bothered to remove the spent casings. Why take the cartridge casings if you’re simply going to commit suicide?
While it’s true that people often don’t think clearly during and immediately following their involvement in violent behavior, removing evidence is a form of staging, and you only do that if you’re trying to cover something up, derail an investigation, or shift suspicion onto someone else, which—if Donnie had been planning to kill himself—didn’t seem likely.