by Stephen Frey
“Sure he is,” Prescott snaps, raising an eyebrow. “Okay, that was your morning trip. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. But why’d you go back in the afternoon? Did Cindy call you then, too? What was the emergency the second time?”
Prescott must see that he’s caught me off guard, and, to make matters worse, that I’m struggling with what to say. “She was upset. She and Jack argued after I left and I was afraid he’d hit her.” How could Prescott know I went back out there? “She needed me. I wasn’t there for very long.”
“Long enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he mutters.
I don’t want to get off point here. I want to make certain he knows what a bad guy his son-in-law is. “Did you hear what I said about Jack?”
“What?”
“About him beating Cindy.”
Prescott stares at me for several seconds, then looks down and rubs his eyes. “I loved my daughter very much,” he says sadly, “but she was prone to making up stories. And that’s putting it mildly.”
I saw those bruises on Cindy’s side when I followed her back to the estate after rescuing her from Caleb Jenkins and his crew. The thought of telling Prescott about them flashes through my mind and it’s very tempting, but I hold my tongue. I saw the bruises but there’s no way for me to prove that Jack’s the one who made them. And Prescott might draw some unintended conclusions from my admission that I saw such an intimate thing on such an intimate area of his daughter’s body.
Prescott nods at my cell phone. “Can you show me her calling you and asking you to come out a second time in the afternoon? Can you get me a record of that call, too?”
The problem is I can’t. I went the second time on my own, without a frantic plea from her—even though she told me not to. I was really worried about what Jack might have done to her. “What are you saying?” I ask. All I can do is hit this head-on.
“Who’s leading this investigation?” Prescott asks, delaying the confrontation.
“I am.”
He rolls his eyes. “Christ.”
“I can handle it, Mr. Prescott,” I say angrily. For some reason I still call him “Mister.” Like I’m still that sixteen-year-old kid praying he’ll accept the fact that Cindy and I want to be together. “I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s not that. It’s—”
“I learned a lot before you had me run out of Minneapolis.” It took a lot for me to say that, though I’ve wanted to for a long time. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know I knew he had me kicked off the Minneapolis police force, but I’ve got to give him credit. He barely flinched when I dropped the bomb. He’s got a hell of a poker face. “I learned a lot in Madison, too. I can handle this thing.”
Prescott takes off his reading glasses, folds them up, and slides them back in his shirt pocket. “I know you’ve had a thing for Cindy ever since you were a teenager, Paul, ever since you met her that day on the river. I know you’ve carried a torch for her even though you knew nothing could ever come of it.” He holds up a hand when I try to say something. “And I understand why. Cindy was a wonderful woman in many ways.” He tilts his head forward. “There’s so much more to her than that stripper you ended up with.”
He says the words so snobbishly, like he’s so much better than Vivian and me. Like his life is so much more important than mine. What a prick. He always has been and he always will be.
“I don’t want you running this investigation,” he continues. He’s all business now. The red-rimmed eyes have cleared. “You’re conflicted.”
“Why?”
“You went out to my estate yesterday morning begging Cindy to be with you, telling her you’d do anything for her. That’s what happened. Things got ugly when she said it would never happen. When she told you to leave you got rough with her. You started to—”
“You’re crazy! Jack’s feeding you lies so—”
“That’s when you got physical with her!” he shouts. “But Jack drove up in the nick of time and you had to back off. You were mad at her, but there was nothing you could do, so you went back to the estate in the afternoon, after Jack left.”
I slam my fist on the desk and shoot up out of the chair. Two half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups flip over, spilling mocha slag everywhere. “What the hell are you saying?” I can feel that vein in my neck, the one that bulges when I’m really pissed off.
“I’m saying that at the very least a part of you is glad she’s dead,” he snaps, “and no one who feels that way should be running this investigation.”
I feel like I’m going to lose control in a second. “You’re wrong!” My voice shakes with rage. “I cared about Cindy very much. I would never be glad that—”
“And, at worst you … well, you might have …” He looks away. “We don’t want to go there. Not yet, anyway, not without the proof.”
The blood’s pounding in my head so hard his face is blurring in front of me with each beat. “Get out,” I order, pointing at the door. “Get the hell out of my office!”
8
“THE BASTARD,” I mutter. “The God damned bastard.”
“Calm down, Professor.”
“I’ll kill him.”
Bear’s eyes flash around the place. “Easy, easy, let’s not get crazy here. Just calm down and tell me what happened.”
Bear and I sit across from each other in a booth at the back of the Bruner Saloon. It’s ten after two and the lunch crowd’s almost gone. Just a few grizzled old-timers are still hanging around chewing yesterday’s fat along with the last of their burgers. No one seems to know about Cindy’s murder yet. If they did the place would be swarmed with people and everybody would be speculating wildly about what happened.
Mrs. Erickson found out about Cindy’s murder a few minutes ago, right before I kicked Lew Prescott out of my office. I tried to keep it from her, but apparently Davy Johnson was talking to one of the other deputies about it and she overheard him. She probably overheard me yelling at Prescott, too. It wouldn’t have been hard. I cringe. I can feel those gossip waves racing out in concentric circles over the territory even as I sit here. The Saloon’s going to be packed again in an hour or two and so will the Kro-Bar. Everyone will rush out to hear what happened and then the rumor mill will explode.
“Prescott basically accused me of being involved in Cindy’s murder,” I mutter, my voice still boiling with emotion.
Bear was about to gulp down a huge mouthful of Sara’s specialty of the day, Chili del Fuego. But the spoon stops an inch from his lips. “What?”
He’s interrupted his cheeseburger diet today because I wanted to meet here at the Saloon and Sara’s cheeseburgers aren’t very good. The Saloon’s closer to the precinct but the burgers aren’t fat and juicy like the Kro-Bar’s. Ike and Sara are in it to make money while the Kro-Bar’s changed hands three times in the last five years.
“Are you serious?” The steaming spoonful of chili remains poised before his lips.
“He didn’t actually say those words,” I answer carefully, taking a sip of some much-needed coffee, “but he implied them. Jack swore I was roughing Cindy up when he got there, too. He’s such a liar.”
“Is that where you went yesterday morning after she called you out on Silver Wolf Trail?” he asks, finally slipping the spoon into his mouth. “To the Prescott estate?”
“Yup.”
“And Jack Harrison showed up while you were there?”
I hadn’t told Bear all that. “Yup.”
Bear dumps a small mountain of pepper on his chili, then stirs it in. It’s like throwing jet fuel on a raging fire, but he’s always had an iron stomach. “Well that explains it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Prescott hates you. He has ever since he found out his daughter liked bad boys from Bruner, not blue-bloods from the Twin Cities. That’s why he framed you for stealing drugs from the evidence room in Minneapolis. You know that. We all
do.” Bear devours another steaming spoonful of chili. “Jack Harrison was never real fond of you, either, Professor. He knows Cindy loved you.”
It makes me feel good to know that my best friend understands exactly what’s really going on and doesn’t question anything at all. “Prescott told me I shouldn’t be running the investigation. He says he’s going to get somebody from Madison to take over, some ex–state cop.”
“He can’t do that,” Bear says confidently. “Not even with all his money. It’s your jurisdiction.”
“I don’t know,” I answer hesitantly. “Seems like Lew Prescott can do just about anything he wants.”
I spot Ike Mitchell talking on the wall phone at the end of the bar. Around six feet tall, he has blond hair that’s cut page-boy style so it frames his round face on three sides. Like most men up here he’s got a paunch that always seems bigger in the winter months. He hangs up the phone and heads purposefully toward the booth Bear and I are sitting in.
“Hi, Sheriff,” he says, smacking his gum. He chews a lot of it. He says it keeps him off the two-pack-a-day Camel habit he supposedly quit a year ago.
“Hello, Ike.”
Ike glances at Bear. “Hi, Bear.”
Bear grunts but doesn’t look up. He just keeps methodically spooning chili into his mouth like his arm and the spoon are integral parts of a well-oiled machine. Bear doesn’t care much for Ike, which is the other reason he prefers the Kro-Bar. Before Karen left Bear on Christmas Eve the rumor around Bruner was that she and Ike were having an affair. Ike denied it up and down, he still does, but everyone around town more or less assumes it was true. Not because Ike’s a lady’s man. He’s not, far from it. More because people figured Karen was so tired of getting no attention from Bear that she was willing to hang out with just about anyone who would give her some. They figured she needed a distraction or she might have killed him, and there weren’t any rumors about her messing around with anyone else.
“What’s up, Ike?” I ask him.
Ike’s the talkative one of the couple. Sara never says much. In fact, she rarely socializes at all. She mostly hangs out in the kitchen during the day concocting her recipes and prefers to come out at night when everyone else has gone to bed. She’s attractive, though, I’ll give her that. In her midthirties, she’s the prettiest local around.
One thing that doesn’t jive with the rumors about Ike’s affair with Karen is that Sara never did anything to Ike for being unfaithful to her, she never took it out on him. She tends to take revenge into her own hands, and when she does, it’s swift and brutal.
When I first became sheriff of Dakota County four years ago, Sara was living with a guy named Toby Sims in an old place in the woods out east of town on Route 7, a few miles from the lumberyard. The story goes that Toby started running around with a woman down in Hayward. He spent a lot of his time in the Kro-Bar, but in the beginning of June that year the regulars noticed he wasn’t coming in anymore and nobody ever saw him after that. Bear and I went to talk to Sara one day, but she said she hadn’t seen him since the beginning of June, either. Then, in the middle of August, some fisherman from Michigan discovered a skeleton in some reeds near the mouth of the Boulder, down at the Big Lake. The state boys in Superior identified the skeleton as Toby’s. I’m sure Sara killed him, sure as I can be. She probably threw him in the river off the Route 7 bridge late one night after beating him unconscious, but there wasn’t any proof. The state boys and I combed the place they lived in and Sara’s pickup truck for clues, but we couldn’t find anything. So there was nothing we could do.
Sara beat the hell out of Ike two weeks after they moved in together. She beat him with a tire iron when he tried to have sex with her one night and she didn’t want to. At least, that was the rumor Mrs. Erickson picked up off her web. Ike had a black eye and a swollen nose, but he never pressed charges. He never even admitted it was Sara who did it to him. Sara’s face was scratched up pretty good, too, and nobody else in town had bruises or scratches on them. I know what happened, but it isn’t about what I know, it’s about what I can prove.
But Sara never touched Ike for the rumor about Bear’s wife and him. Not that I know of anyway, and I don’t miss things like that. Even though I’m not a true local, I’m still tied in, I still have a damn good information network of my own—much to Mrs. Erickson’s chagrin. What’s strange is that Ike doesn’t lie very well, and the few times I’ve mentioned Karen having an affair with someone to him, he sure looks guilty.
You’ve got to watch out for Sara, you’ve got to deal with her cautiously no matter who you are. She’s like something out of Greek mythology. She’s like one of those sirens who lured sailors in so they dashed their ship on the rocks. She’s beautiful and feminine, but she’ll take you down in a heartbeat if she even suspects you’ve done her wrong. I wonder if she knows anything about a devil worship cult in Dakota County. It seems like she might.
Ike sits down next to me so I’m forced to slide over, and a heavy whiff of cigarette smoke drifts to my nostrils despite the spearmint-flavored gum he’s chomping on. “I just heard about Cindy Harrison,” he says in a hushed voice, glancing around.
Bear and I look up in unison. Mrs. Erickson’s web must be hard at work, because Ike isn’t one of her direct reports. He’s separated from the center of her web by at least one degree, probably two. The concentric waves must be moving out at tsunami speed.
“What the hell happened?” he demands, like it’s his right to know.
I can’t tell him anything but I want to see what he knows. “What did you hear?” I ask, like I really intend to tell him what happened after I hear his side.
Ike folds his hands on the table, takes a deep breath, and shakes his head. “It was that devil cult,” he says. “They killed her out at the mansion. They crucified her. She was hanging from the wall like Jesus on the cross when Davy found her. She had knives stuck in her all over.” He gazes straight ahead with a horrified expression, as if he’s picturing her hanging on the wall across from the booth we’re sitting in. “People are scared, Sheriff, really scared. They think the cult’s gotten tired of animal killings and now they’re going after people.”
“It was nothing like that,” I say firmly. “It wasn’t a cult. There’s nothing to all that stuff.” I can feel Bear’s eyes boring into me. As soon as he saw Cindy’s body he said the same thing. That the cult must have gotten tired of sacrificing animals, that they must have gotten thirsty for human blood. “She wasn’t hanging from the wall, she didn’t have knives in her, she didn’t have five pentagrams carved in her body. You can’t listen to the crap Mrs. Erickson puts out, Ike, you know that. We’ve talked about it before. There’s no damn cult here in Dakota County.”
“Sure there isn’t,” a female voice says sarcastically.
I glance up past Ike, right into Sara’s big burning brown eyes. She’s standing there, staring down at me hard. She’s heard every word I said and it seems like she isn’t buying any of it. I wonder why.
After a few moments she breaks into a grin. Then she turns and walks away. Her long black pigtail sways sexily from side to side across her back as she goes.
9
AROUND SIX O’CLOCK I go back out to the Prescott estate because Peter Schmidt, the man who’s leading the crime scene investigation team, called me. One of his guys found footprints in the hedge maze and Schmidt wanted to talk to me about it, like it was some big discovery that was going to break the case wide open. He said he didn’t want to get into specifics because he was on his cell phone and he couldn’t take the chance of someone picking up our conversation over the airwaves, so he wanted me to go out there. I was short with him, because driving all the way back out there was about the last thing I wanted to do, and I felt bad about it after I hung up, but it’s been a terrible twenty hours. Plus, I’m still pissed off at Lew Prescott.
It turns out that Schmidt’s all up in arms about the footprints in the maze because he’s positive one set
was made by boots he found in the mansion. Cindy’s boots. He figures the other set might be the killer’s. The enthusiasm drains from his face when I tell him that the other set is mine. What I don’t tell him about are those strange-looking footprints I found when I pulled up to the estate last night. But he and his team would have a tough time determining that they were of any significance at this point anyway because so many people have been in and out of the mansion in the last eighteen hours that those prints have been all but obliterated. I don’t tell him about the Bruner Washette ticket I found near Cindy’s body, either. Or the knife I found out on the trail to the Silver Wolf Rapids in the ashes of the fire. This is my investigation and I’ve got to be careful about the flow of information with Lew Prescott breathing down my neck.
I’ve known Schmidt for years, from my days in Madison, and he’s basically a good guy. He’s in his late fifties and he’s usually much more concerned about his pension than he is about who gets credit for solving a case. But this is different. The Prescott family is a high-profile name in the entire Midwest, not just in the Twin Cities and Bruner. So Schmidt wants to be the man who figures out what happened, because it’ll be one of the most publicized cases of the year and he’ll want to see his name in lights. No matter how old people get, they still enjoy that fifteen minutes of fame. It’s one of those irrefutable laws of nature.
I tell Schmidt how I came out to the mansion yesterday morning because Cindy called me for help, and I promise to get him the damn phone records so he can confirm it. I could have told him that over the phone, but I wanted to see the look in his eyes when I said it. I don’t tell him about my second visit, and I feel guilty, but it isn’t the right time to tell him about that.
With a frustrated wave, Schmidt says he won’t need the records. At least someone believes me.
The team packs up at nine o’clock and I’m left alone in the mansion. It’s eerie in here as I stare at the dried blood pool on the floor where Cindy’s body was. I glance across the room at an antique table beside a Chippendale chair. On it is a beautiful headshot of Cindy inside a tasteful gold frame. She was only twenty years old when the picture was taken, and it’s my favorite one of her. I move across the floor, carefully avoiding the blood as I stare down at her, at that beautiful face I’ll never see alive again. Finally, I grab the picture and head for the door. I have to have something to remember her by.