by Steven James
They have some sort of history together.
Tessa let her eyes linger on the note.
She picked it up.
Gazed at it.
At last, she dropped it in the trash can and went for the door.
But as she was about to leave the room, her curiosity got the best of her. She returned, snatched up the note, flattened it out on her hand. And read what it said.
64
Tessa stared incredulously at the words.
No way.
Amber was leaving Sean? And she came over to tell Patrick first? To ask a guy who barely knew his brother the best way to break the news to him?
Yeah, right.
Obviously, based on what Amber had written, something had happened between her and Patrick last night that might hurt Patrick’s relationship with Lien-hua.
That was unbelievable, that was seriously—
Is Patrick cheating on Lien-hua with Amber?
No, that didn’t work. Not at all.
From what the note said, Amber was the one apologizing, and whatever had happened seemed to have been her fault.
Besides, Tessa refused to believe that Patrick would mess around with his brother’s wife. Not only was he in a serious relationship already, she couldn’t imagine him treating his brother—or any guy—like that.
But there was something between Patrick and Amber, wasn’t there? Back in the past, before Amber and Sean got married?
And now she was leaving Sean?
Tessa flumped onto the bed.
This was for Patrick’s eyes only. You were never supposed to see this.
She debated what to do. If she said anything to anyone—Sean, Amber, Patrick—it would probably only make things worse.
If you bring it up with Amber, she’ll totally assume Patrick told you—which would not be cool.
And anyway, this wasn’t really any of her business; whatever issues Sean and Amber were having, they needed to work them out on their own.
However, this also had to do with her dad, and, if she was reading things right about him and Lien-hua, her potential stepmom.
She stared at the note.
But you could at least feel things out, right? Amber brought it up to Patrick. Who’s to say she won’t bring it up to you too?
Yeah, that might work. Just feel things out.
But be subtle.
Tessa scrunched up the note.
Subtle. She could do subtle.
She tossed it into the trash can.
Then left to go find Amber.
For a little girl time.
I was in the cruiser en route to the motel.
The day was growing pale, slipping into night.
Both the sheriff’s department and state patrol had their hands full with the electrical outages from the storm and stranded civilians who hadn’t stayed off the roads, not to mention the search for Kayla and Donnie and the added security for Alexei. We could definitely use some more eyes up here.
I punched in SWAT Team Leader Antón Torres’s number, and he picked up.
“Pat, good to hear your voice.”
“Are you guys still in Merrill?”
“Yeah.” He sounded irritated. “We’re not making a lot of progress down here, though. Did you get word about the news footage? The press clippings?”
“Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to review them yet.”
“Yeah, well, the Evidence Response Team found some videos hidden in the trailer. We’ve got three DVDs recording the murders from the last six months, and get this: six VHS cassettes’ worth of footage of the crimes fourteen years ago. The ERT’s digitizing them now. I’ll have ’em send you the files as soon as they’re done.”
“So, only videos of the crimes with Basque?”
“Yeah. Looks like it.”
I thought again of the theory that Lien-hua and I had been probing that someone other than Reiser was the killer and had dabbled with the DNA evidence to make it look like Reiser was our man. The tapes and DVDs could have easily been planted in his trailer before we arrived.
Who had access to Basque’s case files? Me. Jake. Ralph, who originally helped me track him down. Torres, who’d needed to prep his men for the mission in the trailer park. A number of lawyers, detectives, and agents over the year. Lien-hua—
“What are you thinking?” Antón asked me.
“I’m wondering if Reiser was set up, if he wasn’t really Basque’s partner at all. You arrived in Wisconsin before I did. Did your team have any other clues that might have led to someone other than Reiser?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Listen, Antón, if you and your team aren’t needed down there, I’ve got a job for you up here.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve got two missing persons: Donnie Pickron—”
“The guy whose family was killed?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t look like he’s the shooter. We also have a missing woman named Kayla Tatum. Alexei Chekov is in custody.”
“Chekov?”
“A cleaner. A freelancer. Local law enforcement is stretched thin, and between you and me, I don’t trust them to contain Chekov.”
“I should be able to come, but I’ll have to clear it with the director.”
“Call her. Put it into play and let me know.”
“The roads are a mess, though. It might take us awhile to get there. Everything’s closed down tight around here, and the snow’s still coming down.”
“Do what you can. I could really use your help.”
A small pause. “So, did you ask her yet?”
“Who?”
“Lien-hua. I heard she’s up there.”
If nothing else, he was persistent. “Antón, the timing hasn’t been quite right for popping a question like that.”
“I’m telling you, Pat, the future’s uncertain. You never know what might happen. You need to seize the day.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“I’ll be there. Bro.”
While we’d been speaking, the day had continued to die. Now as I hung up, I realized that in their search for anything suspicious at the old ELF site, Lien-hua, Sean, and their driver no longer had daylight on their side.
65
Amber was gazing in the mirror above the sink, lightly touching up her lipstick. For the past few minutes, Tessa had done her best with the small-talk-understated-probing-question thing but hadn’t really found out anything. She was anxious to get to the point, so finally she said, “So you and Patrick first met, when?”
“Back when Sean and I were engaged. A little over five years ago.”
Feel her out, Tessa. Don’t, like, accuse her of anything, just try to see what might have been going on. Subtle, remember?
“And you, what? You hit it off?”
Amber paused. Looked into the mirror not at herself but at the reflection of Tessa sitting on the bed behind her. “I guess you could put it like that.”
“How would you put it?”
“How would I put it?”
“Yeah. You struck up a friendship? Had a lot in common? There was a good vibe going on?”
So, okay, screw subtle.
Amber seemed to be debating whether or not to reply. Finally, she turned and faced her. “What would you like to know, Tessa?” The words sounded flat and steely. A tone Amber had not used with her before.
“Are you leaving your husband to be with my dad?”
Almost instantly, Amber flushed, as if she’d just been caught red-handed shoplifting or lying to a friend. “You read the note.”
Tessa nodded. “Well?”
“Patrick has nothing to do with why I’m leaving Sean.”
Tessa wasn’t sure she believed her. “Whatever happened between you and Patrick? Did you guys . . . well . . . you know?”
She half-expected Amber to evade the question or tell her in no uncertain terms that it really wasn’t any of her business, but instead she said, “It’s not what you think. It was .
. . Mostly we just talked.” Amber slowly put her makeup back in her purse. “There’s nothing going on between us. Between me and Pat. You need to know that.”
“What about when my mom was alive?”
“No,” Amber said unequivocally. “Nothing. I swear. Pat and I didn’t even speak for almost three years.”
“Is this why you didn’t come to the wedding?”
“I was in the hospital.”
Oh yeah, now she remembered, Patrick had told her. “Food poisoning.”
A long, unbalanced silence. “It wasn’t food poisoning, Tessa. It wasn’t that kind of hospital.”
The depression meds?
“Oh.”
“I was ashamed, so Sean and I never told Pat. Believe me, there’s nothing going on between me and your father.”
Tessa wanted to believe her, in a sense did believe her, but felt like she needed to hear Patrick’s side of the story before she made up her mind about any of this.
“Okay.” Tessa stood. “I think I’m gonna go wait for him in the lobby.”
As Tessa passed her, Amber touched her arm gently. “I’m telling you the truth.” Tessa could hear a tiny tremble of pain in Amber’s voice, an unsettling fragility.
She’s been dealing with this for a long time. It’s not just seeing Patrick again.
“Okay.” Tessa managed a half smile.
“Don’t say anything to anyone, Tessa. Please. Especially to Sean. I’m the one who has to tell him.”
Yes, you are.
“Okay.”
Solstice watched the trail groomer’s headlights disappear into the tenebrous, snowy night, turning north along the trail.
Since she and her team had arrived in the field, the trail groomer had systematically covered each of the main trails surrounding the old ELF site. Agent Jiang had stepped out a few times to look around, but that was all. Eventually, as the day grew dim and then gave way to night, they must have decided there was nothing here to see.
Now the forest was nearly pitch black.
After the trail groomer left, Solstice waited a few minutes to make sure they weren’t coming back, then, with everyone using headlamps to find their way through the storm, she led her people to the maintenance building.
They buried their skis and poles in the snow, she picked the lock, everyone entered, and she snapped on the lights. Three lines of high fluorescents illuminated the vast, windowless building. She heard the sheet metal roof crinkle uncomfortably above her in the wind.
The air was thick with the smell of motor oil, grease, and dust.
A few chainsaws hung on the wall beside her, a cluttered tool bench lay just past them. Three forest service signs in need of repair leaned languidly against the wall in the southwest corner of the room.
The maintenance building had a concrete, oil-stained floor checkered with thick seams in large, neat rectangles, sectioned off almost like sidewalk partitions. An old John Deere tractor sat at the far end of the building. Beside it, a brown rusted Toyota sedan rested on cement blocks.
All in all, the building looked like someone’s vision of how a maintenance building was supposed to look.
A caricature of the real thing.
It’s a set.
Solstice studied the uniform grid of cracks in the concrete, each rectangular section about four feet wide and six feet long.
Typhoon and Eclipse grabbed their slings and cable cutters and headed outside. Solstice didn’t expect that it would take them more than a few minutes to ascend the telephone pole and take out the power lines stretching to the building, but she ordered Tempest to cover them. “In case the Feds decide to come back and have another look around.”
He swung his AR-15 assault rifle into his hands. “Absolutely.”
As far as the rest of the crew, Cane stood guard beside Donnie, whom they’d forced to ski over here but now stood handcuffed near the disabled sedan. Cyclone and Gale were bent over the radio jamming device, checking the settings. Squall and Cirrus were carefully removing their backpacks that contained the triacetone triperoxide canisters and were placing the packs gently on the concrete. Equator, the rotund hacker, was looking vacantly around the room, awaiting further instructions.
“Everyone get ready,” Solstice said into her headset mic so that the three people outside would hear her as well. “We move in five minutes.”
66
I arrived at the Moonbeam Motel.
Just a few minutes ago Torres had called to let me know that Margaret was on board with the SWAT team coming up to help out. He and his men were just finishing packing and would be on their way shortly.
When I entered the lobby I saw Tessa waiting for me, half scoping out the guy behind the desk, half watching the front door. When she saw me, she made her way toward me, but the lobby was packed with ten people I hadn’t seen before, not even when we searched the motel room by room. Two men were pleading with the clerk, trying to finagle a room. A cluster of young children clung to the pant legs of their mothers or moped around the lobby looking as exhausted and beleaguered as the adults did.
Tessa circumnavigated the crowd. “What’s up?” she said.
“How are you?”
“Hungry.”
One of the men at the counter pulled out his wallet. “We can all share one room,” he offered. “And we’ll pay you for two.” But the dark-haired guy who’d caught Tessa’s eye just shook his head apologetically. “There’s nothing available. I’m sorry.”
I nodded toward them. “What’s the story here?”
“They were stranded in the storm, I guess. Agent Jiang said she wanted to talk to you about that. She just got back a little bit ago.” Tessa looked at me expectantly. “Mostly I’ve been hanging out with Amber.”
“So you two got a chance to get to know each other?”
“We seemed to hit it off. We talked for a while.”
I sensed she was hinting at something. “And what did you talk about?”
“Movies. God. Drugs. Guys.”
“You talked about drugs?”
“She’s a pharmacist,” Tessa explained, then added suggestively, “It was mostly guys. Relationships.”
If this had anything to do with my past with Amber, it was not something I wanted to chat about. “Fair enough.” I gazed around the lobby. “So where’s Lien-hua?”
“Follow me.”
Squall was staring at the building’s cement floor. “You’re sure they’ll still have electricity down there?” he asked Solstice.
She could hardly believe she was hearing this. “Everything is run by the generators on the command level.” She said into her mic, “Cyclone, Typhoon, Eclipse, on my mark.”
“Roger that,” came back the replies.
The people inside the building turned on their headlamps.
“Five,” she began. “Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One—”
The overhead lights cut off.
“Outgoing and incoming radio signals are jammed,” Cyclone said beside her. “Once we’re down the shaft, I’ll take care of the unit-to-unit comm inside the base.”
A moment later Tempest’s voice came through Solstice’s headset. “It’s done.” But since the interior of the building was already dark, it wasn’t exactly a noteworthy announcement.
“Good,” Solstice told him. “Come back inside and let’s get ready to go down.”
With the electricity out, the maintenance building was now illuminated only by the streaks of light shining from her team’s headlamps.
Solstice aimed hers at the sedan.
Their means of getting into the base.
I stepped into Natasha and Lien-hua’s room while Tessa waited for me in mine. Lien-hua was there, Natasha was gone.
“I had no idea that Jake was going to do that,” Lien-hua said apologetically, “to follow you. When he left he just told us he needed to check on something.”
“Honestly, I don’t really blame him. If I was in his place, I probably would
’ve done the same thing. I’m just glad Alexei’s behind bars, but I hope it didn’t harm our chances of finding Kayla.”
For a moment neither of us spoke; it seemed to be a way of honoring Kayla’s plight. Then I told Lien-hua about Torres and the SWAT guys, we exchanged cell phones so that we each had our own once again, and I returned her Glock to her. “What else do we know?” I asked.
She ticked off the items one by one on her fingers. “Natasha’s with Linnaman at the morgue. Jake’s in his room making some calls. I didn’t see anything unusual out there by the ELF site.” She sighed. “Doesn’t surprise me, though. If there is anything there, it’s not going to be sitting out in the open.”
“True,” I acknowledged, “but we needed to have a look.”
“It’s possible that the ELF connection is just a red herring.”
Yes, it was possible, but the farther we moved into this case, the less likely that seemed. “I’d like to visit the area myself in the morning.”
A nod. “Listen, some state troopers found two families of stranded tourists out on the highway. They brought ’em here to the motel.”
“I saw them in the lobby. No rooms available.”
“Right. So here’s what I’m thinking. Tessa’s things are all back at your brother’s house; everyone’s been cooped up here all day. Amber’s been acting a little, I don’t know . . . something’s on her mind. I told her I wasn’t upset about last night, that I really wasn’t, but she seems rattled being here. I was anticipating that you’d want to go out to the ELF site tomorrow and . . . well, from here it’s a haul but—”
“From Sean’s house it’s a lot closer.”
“Yes. You and I could head out first thing in the morning. I talked to Sean, and he has cross-country skis we could borrow—if that would work with your ankle. Maybe if we taped it really well?”
Last night I’d downplayed to her how badly my ankle was bothering me. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine cross-country skiing on it, but I buried that thought for the moment. Lien-hua was right about one thing: the location of the Moonbeam really was working against us. It hadn’t been a bad choice when we were investigating the Pickron residence and the site of the snowmobile’s disappearance on Tomahawk Lake, but now the focus of the investigation was shifting toward the ELF site and the area surrounding Elk Ridge and the Schoenberg Inn.