by Steven James
He hadn’t seen anyone with her build arrive last night, and that intrigued him. Either she’d been here already or had managed to enter this morning.
Maybe she was really the one in charge rather than Becker. It’s how he would have played it.
Becker had looked toward that corner of the room before he agreed to proceed with the meeting.
Had this all been a ruse? A ploy?
Is that why these four were careless last night, allowing their faces to be illuminated by the Inn’s entrance lights?
Evaluate, adapt, and respond.
Alexei arrived at the door. From now on he would be careful not to underestimate this group.
As he left, out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman step back as the darkness swallowed her.
Silent.
And whole.
And thirty seconds later, had he remained near the door, he would have heard the brief sound of a strangled cry coming from inside the room as the man who’d been on the business end of the bone gun fought uselessly to draw in a breath, and then dropped into a heavy, motionless mound on the floor.
24
The line at the pump took forever.
“Everyone’s getting ready for the storm,” Sean said, one eye on the cloud-blanketed sky. Flakes swirled around us.
Finally, after we paid for the gas, I asked Sean if he minded if I drove the sled.
“You still remember how to handle one of these things?”
“Let’s find out.”
As I took my seat I reviewed where everything on the snowmobile was located: the choke, the kill switch, the brake, the throttle.
Dad’s instructions from my childhood came to me, words still clear after all these years: When you’re going down a hill, just let the sled do all the work . . . Stay right in traffic like you would on your bike and watch for warning signs for bridges, road crossings, driveways . . . Remember, you can’t back up on a sled and they have a wide turning radius, so don’t miss your turn or you’re gonna have to get off, grab the back end, and swing it around. It’s a pain and it’s a telltale sign you’re new at this.
Amber’s helmet was a little small and held her fragrance so I was glad it wasn’t a long ride to the sawmill. Sean took a seat behind me. I slipped on the gloves I’d worn last night on my short walk beneath the stars, pulled the choke, revved the engine, and took off.
Sean had an older model Yamaha whose speedometer only went to 90 mph, but I anticipated that he’d pushed it up a lot higher. On this ride I had no intention of running it out all the way, but it might be fun to take it to the limit later if I had some free time.
Regardless of the snow whipping around me, rainbowed splinters of light shone in the plexiglass shield of the helmet, and it made the day seem bright and hopeful. For a moment I forgot why I was here in northern Wisconsin, why I was on this snowmobile in the first place.
But then I remembered.
Death.
Encountering the real.
25 mph.
Even at this moderate speed I could feel the wind rushing in the edges of the faceplate and through the small adjustable slits designed to let air in by the rider’s mouth. I squeezed the throttle.
As we passed 35, there wasn’t much of a difference in the feel of the machine, but as I accelerated to 40 a tight vibration began riding through the sled, especially as I swung around the curves on the trail.
45 mph.
Speed called to me.
Edging past 50, the ride remained pretty much the same, but then the trail straightened out, and once I hit 60 I could tell we were really starting to move. The sled’s tracks skidded to the side whenever we hit a patch of packed snow, and the sled felt like it was ready to whip out from under me if I tried to make the slightest turn.
70 mph.
We raced past a field populated with half a dozen white tail deer, and in the moment that they caught my attention, the snowmobile began to fishtail; I let up on the throttle, took us down to 50, and as we neared a sharp descent, dropped us to 35.
With the noise of the engine, even though Sean was sitting right behind me, it was impossible to talk to each other, so now he patted my arm and pointed to the right. I took us across Highway K and then cruised to a stop at the entrance to the Pine Shadow Sawmill.
25
In his car, Alexei tracked the movement of the bag of money as the Eco-Tech activists left the Schoenberg Inn and headed along a country road that led to the west entrance of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
The most direct route for him to follow was along Highway K just north of town.
He guided his car toward it.
We left the snowmobile by the other sleds and pickup trucks on the edge of the property and headed for the admin building.
Logs stood piled in pyramids nearly five meters high on each side of us. Parked throughout the yard, half a dozen backhoes, log loaders, and lumber haulers waited to roll, lift, reposition, or pile the logs. A cabbed snowmobile trail groomer with enormous treads for getting through deep snowbanks sat idle near the office building.
Even now, here in the yard, three men were driving specially outfitted forklifts, maneuvering around the stacks, hoisting and removing logs.
I could only imagine how muddy this place would be in the spring, but this winter the ground was frozen in deep, looping tire ruts and covered by a layer of dirty, hard-packed snow.
The sawmill’s main building sat about fifty meters to my right, near a towering stack of massive white pine logs. The facility still had a sheet-metal roof and faded red barn boards on the side facing me. Evidently it had been a barn at one time before being called into commission as a sawmill. A thick log, two feet in diameter, lay on a conveyor belt and was riding into the mill where the blades waited.
Despite the weather, four men stood clustered outside the east entrance: two of them smoking, the other two digging through paper bags, apparently finishing late lunches before getting back to work.
“I know those guys,” Sean said. “Come on.”
He introduced me around. Though the men didn’t seem antagonistic, they greeted me with a visible air of suspicion.
Sean explained that I was a member of the investigative team looking into Donnie’s disappearance and the shootings at his house.
“Ardis and Lizzie,” one of them said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“You a cop?” he asked me.
It struck me that, just as I hadn’t told Margaret about my brother, Sean hadn’t told his buddies about me. “I’m with the FBI,” I said.
The two men who were pecking through their lunches stopped. Stared at me.
I went through the standard questions: Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt Donnie or his family? Did he have any enemies? Had he indicated to any of you that he was upset with his wife or daughter?
The answers came quick and blunt: no, of course nobody wanted to hurt him; he didn’t have any enemies; he loved his family. In fact, he and Ardis had tried for years to have kids and finally adopted Lizzie.
“How long has he worked here?”
“I don’t know. Seven, eight years.”
The door opened, and a looming, broad-shouldered Native American introduced himself to me as the foreman. He told me his nearly indecipherable Ojibwa name, then added that I could just call him Windwalker. “What do you need? We’ve already talked to Deputy Ellory.”
I gestured toward the sawmill building. “I’d like a quick tour, then a look at Donnie’s personnel files.”
Windwalker didn’t seem thrilled by the idea, but he agreed and led me into the sawmill while Sean stayed behind to catch up with his friends.
As we entered, Windwalker handed me a pair of industrial-grade headphone-style hearing protectors. “You’ll need these.”
Both of us slipped on a pair, and I took in the room.
Sawdust lay everywhere, and the smell of freshly cut pine was sweet and damp and almost overwhe
lming.
The white pine log I’d seen earlier on the conveyor belt was halfway in the building. The belt carried it forward until its end nudged up against a wickedly edged saw blade nearly two meters in diameter.
One of the workers pressed a button on a control panel to my left, and a 200-horsepower diesel engine growled to life. The shrill whine of the now-spinning blade filled the air. Then the saw blade slid to the side, the conveyor belt carried the log forward, and then the blade swung back into place, biting into the wood.
For a moment it reminded me of one of the Edgar Allan Poe stories Tessa had convinced me to read—The Pit and the Pendulum.
A blade swinging.
Slicing toward a victim tied to a table.
He escaped just in time.
I watched the saw blade chew through the log, then I surveyed the rest of the mill, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Unfortunately, my unfamiliarity with the site made that challenging, so, rather than try to pick up specific clues, I tried to get a sense of the place, a spatial understanding of the sawmill where Donnie Pickron, the main suspect in a double homicide, had worked until two hours before his family was slaughtered and he disappeared.
Different workstations were positioned throughout the mill. Five men and two women sorted boards into piles, graded lumber, or removed warped and knotted timber, then sent the unusable pieces to the far end of the mill on a second conveyor belt to be ground into pulp for easier transport to the paper mills.
The wood shredder for grinding the logs into pulp was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The reticulated gears spun at an astonishing speed, powering through the boards and logs in seconds.
Hardly anything was left after the logs were shredded.
Hardly anything was left.
Donnie disappeared.
Unlikely, but not impossible, not out of—
A hand on my arm caught my attention, and Windwalker motioned toward the door. I took one more look around the sawmill and then we dropped off our hearing protectors by the door and he led me toward the admin building.
A rush of snowflakes slanted around us.
“Can you tell me about Donnie’s job?” I asked.
“Transported the logs. Piled ’em here in the yard, sometimes drove ’em to Hayward.”
“Was he hourly or on salary?”
“Hourly.”
“And yesterday?”
“He was on a run. Left at noon. That’s all I know.”
“I need to see his time cards and a record of his arrival times.”
“Time cards are just inside.” His voice was curt. It was clear he was not enthusiastic about helping me here today.
We entered the building and found a receptionist’s office. He mentioned briefly that he had “let the girl go” recently, and I could see that he’d taken over the office himself.
The room was arranged haphazardly with used, mismatched furniture, two old filing cabinets, a desk strewn with invoices and a decade-old computer. A small bookcase filled with three-ring maintenance and construction binders sat in the corner. A photo of Windwalker standing beside a waterfall with a man I had not yet met was propped on the corner of the desk. The window on the south wall overlooked the yard.
My phone vibrated and I took a call from Jake. He informed me that the Lab’s handwriting analysts had confirmed “with a high degree of certainty” that Donnie Pickron had written the name on the helmet. Also, an unidentifiable set of prints were found on Ardis Pickron’s cell. “They’re not hers. Nothing came up in AFIS.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“Press conference went well,” he said, reiterating what I’d gathered from our earlier conversation.
“I’m sure it did.”
“I’m still hoping to make it by 2:30.”
“All right.”
End call.
As it turned out, the time punch cards weren’t in the office but down the hall in a makeshift employee break room.
When Windwalker and I entered, I was surprised to see a set of old gym lockers rather than the open-faced shelves I’d expected. It explained why most of the guys had left their helmets on their snowmobiles outside even though it was snowing—there wouldn’t have been room for them in the narrow lockers. Just beyond the last one, a stairway led down to a basement.
Each locker was labeled with a strip of white tape containing the handwritten name of an employee.
Donnie Pickron’s locker sat on the far right and had a padlock hanging from it.
“I have no idea what the combo is,” Windwalker told me.
Even though I had my lock pick set with me, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good with a combination lock. “Could you dig up a hacksaw or some bolt cutters for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said grudgingly.
“I’ll wait here.”
The tracking signal in the bag that Alexei had left with the Eco-Tech activists disappeared.
He was driving on Highway K when it happened, and he slowed to a stop by the side of the road to check his equipment for a malfunction.
Moments later he’d assured himself that there was nothing wrong with his GPS tracking device.
Someone must have found the transmitter and disabled it, but with the thread-sized wires and a nearly untraceable signal it seemed remarkable that any of the amateurs he had met would have located it.
But maybe they were not all amateurs.
Alexei pulled out his phone.
Now that he’d delivered the money and the access codes, a status call to Valkyrie would be in order. A few strategic questions could give him the answers he needed, but as Alexei was tapping in this assignment’s alphanumeric pass code for Valkyrie—Queen 27:21:9—he noticed movement in his rearview mirror.
A state trooper’s cruiser had turned onto the road and flipped on its blue lights.
Alexei stopped his call.
There were any number of reasons for the lights, but he had a feeling he knew what the real reason was.
Someone who was not an amateur.
You left the knife there, left your prints with them.
But had enough time passed for that to make a difference?
Well, whether it was the prints or not, something was up.
They turned you in.
Maybe.
Probably.
The car rolled up behind him, kept its overheads on. Parked.
Alexei set down his cell. He would call Valkyrie after he’d taken care of this situation.
In his rearview mirror he watched the officer talking into his radio. Alexei gauged what he would need to do but then had another thought. He pulled up a GPS lock on his car and searched for any nearby businesses or parking lots where he could acquire a different vehicle.
Using the bolt cutters Windwalker had retrieved, I managed to cut through the combination lock and clicked open Donnie Pickron’s locker.
Inside, I found a change of clothes, photos of Donnie’s wife and daughter, an extra pair of brown leather gloves, a pair of the same type of headphone-style hearing protectors I’d used to protect my hearing from the grind of the motors and saw blades. All to be expected.
I was feeling the pockets of his Carhartt work pants when I found what I did not expect: a federally issued biometric ID card.
Windwalker was lurking behind me. I held up the card. “Any idea what this might open?”
He shook his head.
“Could you bring me Donnie’s personnel file?”
A slight pause. “Yeah, sure.”
I searched the locker more thoroughly but didn’t come up with anything else.
I studied the ID card.
It’d been issued by the Navy. Above top secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access. I saw that he was a commissioned officer, a lieutenant commander. And he was most certainly not retired.
I had no idea what the card might have given him access to. As far as I knew there were no military bases nearby.
&nb
sp; Windwalker returned with Donnie’s personnel files. I collected the time punch cards I’d come in the room to retrieve. “Is there a place I could look these over?”
He gestured down the hall. “You can use the office. Long as you don’t disturb anything.”
The trooper still had not left the vehicle.
Alexei figured that if he’d stopped simply to help a stranded motorist he would have certainly gotten out by now to see if the person was okay.
In lieu of that, Alexei ran down what he knew about American law enforcement felony stops. The trooper would give instructions through his cruiser’s PA system but wait until he had backup, a cover officer, before exiting his vehicle.
The language might vary, but the standard operating procedures were similar for law enforcement agencies throughout the United States: single commands to ensure that the driver’s hands were visible and that he was not going for a weapon: “Driver, put both hands on the ceiling . . . With your right hand remove the keys to your car . . . Place your right hand on the ceiling . . . Open the window of your door with your left hand . . . Place your left hand on the ceiling . . . Throw the keys out the window . . . With your left hand open the door . . . Exit the vehicle . . . Face away from me . . .”
Then he would tell him to interlock his hands behind his head and walk backward toward his voice until he told him to stop.
Then kneel and cross his ankles.
Now, as Alexei expected, the trooper’s voice came through his vehicle’s PA, but what he said was surprising. “Step out of the vehicle with your hands away from your body.”
Not protocol.
Either this state trooper was a rookie or he knew that backup wasn’t going to be arriving anytime soon. And either of those scenarios played in Alexei’s favor.
The order came again: “Driver, step out of the vehicle.”
Even before Alexei opened the door he had decided what he was going to do.
26
Alexei stood with his hands up, facing the officer, the bone gun slipped down into his right sleeve.