She fussed with the hem of her blouse, then met my eyes and quietly asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking of asking if I can kiss you.” Although we never defined our relationship ten years ago, we had shared more than a few kisses, and I felt we had once mastered the art of kissing. I wanted to be close to her again.
Holding my gaze, Serena slowly leaned forward, then hesitated just before our lips met. I took that as a “yes,” and closed the distance. What began as a tentative kiss quickly intensified. As I leaned into her, Serena responded by reclining to her back on the floor. Our breathing deepened as our kissing became more passionate. After several minutes, I tenderly brushed her hair to the side of her face and gazed into her eyes. “God, I’ve missed you.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, softly kissed me, and then gently pushed some space between us. “I’m sorry, Jon. This is just too fast. I have so many questions.”
We worked our way back to a respectable arrangement, side-by-side, on the couch. She probably wasn’t a sex addict. I admonished myself, thinking, Why did I have to interrupt this wonderful kiss by talking? Like most guys, I didn’t want to talk about a relationship. I just wanted to have one. But I took a deep breath and prompted, “Ask away.”
With sadness in her eyes, she responded, “Why did you stop talking to me?”
I considered how to present this. “Have you ever slept with someone you shouldn’t have?”
Serena busied herself trying to smooth new wrinkles from her blouse, and without looking up, said, “I’m a Christian, but honestly, I haven’t been a great Christian. But I keep trying, and I hope there’s some redemption in that. Maybe I’m even the cliché of the hypocritical Catholic girl. So, have I slept with someone I shouldn’t have?” She looked up and shrugged. “Honestly, yes—and yes.” She slowly shook her head back and forth, as if settling an uncertainty, and then added, “And yes.”
I thought, Okay. Point made. I wasn’t sure if this meant everybody she had slept with, or just the people she shouldn’t have slept with. Regardless, I needed to surge forward.
Serena sat posture-perfect and turned to face me as I sat next to her, leaning forward. I was simply going to be honest with her and let it play out. “Okay. Mandy and I had sex on the first night we were together.”
Serena nodded. “I assumed that.”
“She said she was on birth control, but I don’t know that she was. I was worried she might get pregnant, so I stayed with her. I needed to be responsible for the choice I made.” If Serena would have slept with another guy at that time, I would have been devastated. But I was too immature and self-centered to have considered this back then. “When it was clear that Mandy wasn’t pregnant, I ended it . . . and she disappeared. After everybody started accusing me of murder, I didn’t want to burden you with my garbage. You’re just nice enough that you would have stood by me, and you didn’t deserve that.”
Serena studied me for a moment, and with genuine compassion, she sighed, “Psalm Thirty-One.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to pretend I knew what she was talking about.
“It reads, ‘My life is spent with grief. I am repulsive to my acquaintances. I am forgotten like a dead man. I am a broken vessel, for I hear the slander of many.’ It was all so unfair.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “You should read Psalm Thirty-Two.”
Okay, maybe she was still single because she was a religious freak. It’s interesting that we never refer to atheists as “freaks.” After all, isn’t it incredibly egocentric to only believe in what you can comprehend? I smiled sadly and said, “I have nothing against reading the Bible, but it’s not going to solve this for me. I didn’t kill Mandy Baker.”
“I know,” she sighed. “I’ve missed our long walks and conversations by the fire, huddled in a blanket.”
I agreed. “I should have confided in you. It seems so obvious, now, but at seventeen, everyone else’s life seems so far from your own.”
Serena softly conceded this. “Yeah.” She placed her hand on my knee. “I didn’t know you were going to leave, for good, the night after graduation.”
I looked over the scars on my arm I had earned from working construction as I replied, “I didn’t have you to talk to anymore, so there was no reason for me to stay. After the graduation ceremony, my family came home to the word ‘Killer’ painted on the side of our house. Dad said, ‘That’s enough. I’m getting you out of here before one of these judgmental zealots shoots you.’ The next day, I moved in with an uncle who lived two hours away, and worked in construction until I started college.”
With a sad acquiescence to opportunities lost, her shoulders sank in resignation. “Have you ever heard of Facebook?”
“Do you have any idea how tired my family is of mindless gossip about my involvement with Mandy Baker? I wouldn’t go on social media for their sake.”
I saw a painful sorrow in Serena’s eyes as she sadly said, “In the Hmong language, they’d say ‘Kuzee.’ It means a lost opportunity with someone you admired. It’s spelled k-h-a-u-rx-i-a-m. Not how I would have spelled it.”
I couldn’t stand seeing her so melancholy. I took her in my arms, held her close, and said, “I’m sorry.” For a moment, I wanted us to be who we used to be. I wanted to lie next to her and not think about anything other than how good it felt. Serena was neither married nor damaged. She was just a normal, beautiful, healthy, single woman. After a long embrace, I finally ended our silence, once again, by offering, “I think tonight, the best thing I can do for you is to make sure you’re safely secure here and head back to my hotel to get some sleep.”
Chapter
Five
JON FREDERICK
MONDAY, MARCH 31
AMERICINN, LITTLE FALLS
AT 7:00 A.M., TONY KNOCKED and entered my hotel room. He was comfortably dressed in faded jeans and hiking boots, ready to take on another day’s work. Tony announced, “Brittany began breathing independently last night. The lab results came back, and whoever abducted her injected her with some sort of animal tranquilizer to sedate her. It wasn’t a lethal dose, maybe just enough to put her out until her abductor decided what to do with her body.”
“Anyone who has worked on a farm could have taken syringes of the tranquilizer from a veterinarian,” I said. “The vets typically need help from the farmhands with holding the animals still during examinations, and they keep extra syringes in the kit.”
Tony agreed. “Yeah, I know. I’ve already contacted a veterinarian who serves the farmers in this area. He admitted that several doses were stolen months ago, but he was unable to confirm exactly when they went missing. He provides services to a lot of these small farms in Morrison County, so it basically confirms what we already believe, that it was someone local. The doctor thought Brittany may have only been submerged for twenty minutes. That means we,” Tony pointed a thumb to his chest, “us Morrison County guys, messed up, because we can’t account for Al or Jason Brennan during this time. It likely happened when you and I were standing on the dirt road, talking about fekking corn.”
I wondered out loud, “Why didn’t the neighbors find her when they searched?”
“She was about a quarter mile beyond where the search ended. They only searched between the Downing and Brennan farms. Brittany was north of the Brennan farm.” Frustrated, Tony ran a hand through his hair. “We don’t deal with a lot of homicides in Morrison County. We’re still trying to avoid heat from the last one.”
On Thanksgiving of 2012, Byron Smith had shot and killed two unarmed teenagers who broke into his home in Little Falls. He was currently on trial for murder, since he fired “kill shots” into the teens, after he had already wounded them and they were incapacitated. Attention had been brought to the Morrison County Sheriff’s Department over a report that Smith sent a memo to the department, one month before the shooting, requesting they check into break-ins on his property. None of this was related to our case, and employe
es of the sheriff’s department were not allowed to discuss it. With this in mind, I asked, “Where were Al and Jason twenty minutes before we found Brittany?”
“Al insisted they had to get some chores done, so they could help when the investigators arrived, and our local cops just let them go. Do farmers typically do chores alone?”
“Yes. Somebody gets silage and somebody throws hay down. And you fix and do some of the many things that need to be done. You’re never completely caught up. I doubt they started milking at that time. You can’t change the cows’ schedule.”
“Everything was done but the milking,” Tony confirmed. “Neither Al nor Jason can account for the other’s whereabouts, since they both had their own chores, but they did get all of the work done.”
I explained, “You get done with chores quicker if each person works independently. There is no time wasted in conversation. Maybe this is why farmers are notoriously quiet.”
“What exactly is silage?” Tony asked.
“Chopped up and fermented hay. It’s stored in silos to reduce its exposure to oxygen, to allow for fermentation and to maintain its nutrients. It’s poured out as needed, each time you feed the cattle.”
Tony scratched his head. “None of the Brennans tested positive for gun residue. We know it wasn’t Mary. She was with us.” Tony found some gum in his shirt pocket and, as he unwrapped it, said, “There were no decent prints on the jacket left on the road. Who leaves a leather jacket on the road when it’s freezing out?”
“Someone who wanted to leave the area quickly.”
“I interviewed Al Brennan last night,” Tony continued. “He’s an odd duck. The man eats northerns out of Green Lake.”
Green Lake, a small lake completely surrounded by farmland, just a couple miles south of the Brennan farm on 195th Avenue, wasn’t even labeled on a map. It had no rivers or creeks running into it, so the water was stagnant and infused with pesticides. If a person drilled a hole in the ice on Green Lake in the winter, green fluid would fizz out onto the ice. All the northerns out of this lake were skinny, “snakes,” and they were all particularly slimy. I tried to give Al the benefit of the doubt by responding, “Maybe he just catches them for the sport of it.”
Tony shrugged. “He claims they taste the same as any other fish. Al started college, but dropped out because he felt it was ‘all bullshit,’ which, of course, it mostly is. Then he got sixteen-year-old Mary pregnant, and she dropped out of school. They ended up taking over his parents’ farm. Al whined that we should have issued an Amber Alert. He didn’t quite understand that Amber Alerts only search for the victim, and we had the victim. Al also was upset that the reporter on the news pointed out that you were a farm boy. He told me, ‘We don’t need more farmers, we need investigators!’” Tony paced a few steps before he asked, “Are you in a relationship?”
“I’m not sure,” I responded carefully. Serena and I planned to talk again soon.
Tony smiled. “I’m not sure if I’m dating, either, but I do know a woman who’d be angry if she heard me say that. So, how do you know the reporter?”
“What makes you think I know her?”
“You gave an unknown reporter an exclusive. And she kind of gave you some cutesy eyes during the interview. She backed off when you were uncomfortable. That’s something a lover might do, but it’s an opposite instinct for a reporter. So, you have a history with Jada?”
I had to admit, Tony was good. I told him, “We used to date.” Tony grinned like the cat that swallowed the canary. “You’re trying to date someone else, then?”
I nodded. “I am.”
Tony said, “I thought so. You said you didn’t know if you were in a relationship. That translates to you wanting a relationship with a woman, but you’re not sure if she’s interested. If you didn’t want it, you would have just said you weren’t in a relationship.”
Going along, I simply said, “Okay.”
Tony looked a question at me. “You don’t see an issue with inviting an old lover to a small town where the investigators and the media are probably all going to be staying in the same hotel?”
I was embarrassed. “I guess I hadn’t considered that.”
Tony pointed at me. “Well, my vote goes to the beautiful black reporter.” He waited for a response but tired of the game when I didn’t offer one. He finally got down to business. “There was no DNA on Brittany Brennan because of her submersion, but it’s clear she’d been vaginally and anally penetrated. The problem is, we don’t know when, and she’s not talking.” Tony considered this for a beat, then continued. “Maurice wants Sean and Paula interviewing Al and Jason Brennan. Evidently, the family complained that I’m a little too harsh,” he said with a sneer. “I’m going to stop at all the farms along 210th Street, and the sheriff’s department is getting me a list of all of the registered sex offenders in the area. We’ll see what comes out of that.”
I was frustrated that being partnered with Tony cut me out of interviews with the prime suspects, so I offered to do some investigating alone. “I’ve given this some thought, and maybe it’d be best if I went to Brittany’s school to speak to her teachers,” I offered. “It would be interesting to know if Brittany exhibited any inappropriate boundaries around peers. Unless you want me to go with you.”
Tony’s short night was wearing on him. He stifled a yawn and waved me on. “No, go. When I’m done, I’ll check out Jason Brennan. You try to retrace Al’s steps from yesterday morning. As a farm boy, you’d know exactly how long it should have taken for him to do everything he did. I want to see if either Jason or Al had time to dispose of Brittany.”
AT LITTLE FALLS MIDDLE SCHOOL, I discovered Brittany had been written up in third grade for French kissing a boy in her class. There were no other reports of inappropriate behavior. Brittany didn’t share where she learned the behavior. The teacher felt it was something she may have seen on television. Sometimes, when a child is sexually abused, she exhibits poor boundaries in other environments. It’s referred to as “sexually reactive” behavior. The hardest part of any investigation is sorting out the relevant information from the distractions.
It bothered me that Brittany didn’t have any close friends, other than the younger neighbor girl. No friends from school came over to play at her home; nobody knew her. Every child should have a friend outside of her home. A stranger who is clever and appealing might seem pretty interesting when a child isn’t getting attention from anyone other than her mom—regardless of what she’s been told about strangers.
School records indicated that Jason was a C-student at Little Falls High School, where he did well in shop classes, but avoided the college preparation coursework. He had received after-school detention once, two years earlier, following a shoving match with a peer. The other student had apparently started it. Jason had no other disciplinary reports. He was described as quiet and sullen.
Mary Brennan had dropped out of school her junior year after she became pregnant with Jason, and never earned her GED.
I also learned that Al’s legal name was actually “Alban,” an old German name, common in medieval times but rarely seen today. Alban Brennan had been a B-student, and had been suspended twice for possession of chewing tobacco. None of the Brennans were ever involved in after-school activities.
As I finished going through the school records, I saw Al and Jason Brennan trudging into the office, so I sought them out to see what they were doing. They had stopped to see Brittany at the hospital and Al was making sure Jason wouldn’t be in trouble for checking into school late. Al had gaunt facial features, dark, thick, wavy hair, and set back, dark eyes. He seemed to have a little extra space between his teeth. In his thirties, he reminded me of a young Willem Dafoe. He was in good shape and stood about five feet, ten inches tall. Al was not particularly good or bad looking, just different. Jason had dark hair as well, which he wore long in the front and shaved in the back. His facial features were sharper than his father’s, and he look
ed like a typical gawky teenager. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact by hiding behind his hair.
When Al saw me, he said, “I guess I owe you thanks.” The comment seemed forced and not particularly genuine.
My thought was that Al was just one more local farmer of stoic German ancestry who lacked emotional congruence when he spoke. I could understand his frustration. His daughter had almost been killed, and only God knew if she would ever recover.
Al squinted and asked, “Do you think Brittany was hurt because someone was mad at me?”
“Is someone mad at you?”
Al looked away as he spoke. “It has me thinking. You make a lot of deals on a farm, buying and selling equipment and crops. Not everyone ends up happy. I sold Eldon Meyer some hay two years ago, and loaded it in a shed for him. It was green, and his shed burned up.”
The term “green hay” is used to refer to hay that’s still wet when it’s baled. The storage sheds can get to over one hundred degrees in the summer, and bales that are wet on the inside generate a lot of heat, sometimes catching fire. Every farmer knows you shouldn’t bale green hay.
Al continued. “Eldon and I haven’t spoke since. And now Brittany turns up on Eldon’s land, hidden in a culvert? It has me thinking.”
I told him, “We’ll check into it.”
Frustrated, Al said, “Checking isn’t enough. Do something about it!”
I’d be frustrated too, if I’d just learned that my daughter was left for dead, and my wife had subsequently been badgered by an investigator.
Al added, “There are lakes around here where you could leave a body, and no one would ever find it. Why leave her body in a culvert under a county road? It had to be convenient for him.”
Murder Book Page 5