Cold Land: A Mystery Thriller

by John Oakes

  “I can do the first request. But the rest? We don’t have any of that.” She cut a hand through the air. “I should say, we don’t have most of it. Nelson’s computer has access to the database, but it can’t access the latest features. Something to do with old software.” Melinda led him to the side door and put out her cigarette. “If you think we ought to have all those tools up and running, well, I am more than with you. It’s my entire purpose.” She led him up the stairs, and down the hall of portraits again, but this time took a right toward a well-lit office. A man in his sixties sat in a plush office chair, hands folded over his flat stomach, looking out his windows over the neighborhood.

  “Jerry, dear.” Melinda knocked on the door.

  Jerry spun in his chair using his feet, keeping his hands folded. He had a grey mustache and thin grey hair over a round head. He looked gentle, handsome and grandfatherly, as if he were about to start talking into a camera about term life insurance for a TV commercial.

  “Melinda?”

  “Jerry, this is a new addition to the team.”

  Jerry looked up at Jake behind her and couldn’t help a sour reaction. “Is that so?”

  “Don’t worry. He’s from Texas. A possible transfer.”

  Jerry seemed to brighten at that. “Well, that’s something new.” He stood and shook Jake’s hand.

  “Jake Adler, sir. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Texas, huh.” Jerry looked at Jake with a grin on one half of his face, eyes somewhat vacant.

  Jake didn’t know how to respond, but with a “Yep,” and an awkward smile.

  “Huh,” Jerry said, half amused.

  Melinda said, “Jerry, I’m hoping to get Jake here to lay claim to a case that rightfully ought to be ours. But he doesn’t have a badge and such yet.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Would you be so kind as to go with him to the scene and vouch?”

  Jerry’s brows lifted, considering the request as if Melinda had asked him to personally give Jake a circumcision. “Well, I have a few things here.” Jerry gestured to the desk which was empty except for a short stack of files and a newspaper open to the crossword. “But I suppose it can wait. Sure.”

  Jerry grabbed a canvas hunting jacket with lots of pockets, too many pockets one could argue, and led Jake to his cruiser. He got in the driver’s side and cleaned the passenger seat of paper sacks and straw rappers, so Jake could sit. “You mind if I stop for a diet soda on the way? I always like to get some caffeine in me before I take a look at evidence.” Jerry bunched his mustache and furled a hand. “Invigorates the analytical apparatus.”

  Jake put his seatbelt on. “Fine by me. You know a place with diet soda and coffee?”

  “Oh, you betcha.”

  Jerry drove them to the nearby McDonalds and joined the drive thru line. “Now some people turn their noses up at McDonalds coffee, but after forty years in law enforcement, I don’t trust coffee that tastes real good. All that froofy whipped cream and caramel and what have you. McDonalds coffee is good cop coffee.”

  “Good enough for me. I try and make a habit of being easy going. Harder to be disappointed that way.”

  Jerry looked at him and smiled in approval, his cheeks growing rosy and crinkling his eyes.

  “So if you like cop coffee, why drink a diet soda?” Jake asked. “Isn’t coffee better for you?”

  “Well, the funniest thing happened,” Jerry said. “A few years back, I was in a wreck chasing a suspect.”

  “Working for the Bureau?”

  “No.” Jerry pulled forward in the line and paid.

  “Hi, Jerry,” the cashier said. “How you doing today?”

  “Hi Janelle,” he said, handing her his card. “The sun could be shining more for my taste, but I won’t complain.” He pulled forward to the next window. “I was with the State Police, Special Crimes Unit at the time. So, I took a hit to my noggin in this crash. It didn’t even total our cruiser, but wouldn’t ya know, I couldn’t remember what day of the week it was or the name of the president.”

  “Jeez. You seem okay now.”

  “Pretty quick I figured out how to tell what day of the week it was, and I practically shouted the president’s name when he came on the TV a few weeks later.” Jerry guffawed at the recollection. “I remembered all my kids and grandkids’ names, and I walk and talk as well as I did before.”

  “That’s miraculous.”

  “It really is,” Jerry said with a waggle of his head. “But you know, some things changed for permanent.” Jerry accepted their drinks through the window.

  “Hey Jerry, what’s happening?” the worker in the window said.

  “Not much, Ramon, just breathing the good air.”

  “Amen brother. You have a blessed day.”

  Jerry rolled up the window and handed Jake his coffee. “For instance, I completely lost a taste for coffee.” He cut a hand flatly through the air. “It tastes like garbage, no matter what I do to it!”

  “That’s a damn shame.”

  “Nah, it’s nothing in the grand scheme. But you enjoy that a little extra for me, even so.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I don’t miss the coffee, Jake.” Jerry looked off, gripping the wheel, still blocking the drive thru. “But it makes you wonder. Makes you wonder what else changed for good that you didn’t notice. Makes you wonder if you’re still you. And would you know either way?” After a silence, a horn chirped behind them. Jerry sniffed and waggled his mustache, then pulled out of the drive thru and toward the exit. “So where’s this murder?”

  They stepped out of the cruiser in Northeast Minneapolis and cut through the number of cops and other figures at the crime scene. As they approached the house, the coroner techs brought the body out the front door on a gurney. A man in a blue police windbreaker with a badge and lanyard around his neck and a clipboard in his hand followed behind it. “Jerry? Is that Jerry Unger?”

  “Hey, Wodz.”

  “What are you doing here, you old son of a gun?” The man called Wodz was middle-aged but rope thin and high energy. He clamped a hand over Jerry’s, and they shook like merry old friends.

  “Wodz, this is Jake Adler. He’s up from Texas helping us out. You mind if he and I take a look-see?”

  Wodz put a fist on his hip. “Well, can I ask what for, Jer?”

  “Sure. We, uhh.” Jerry looked to Jake.

  “The Bureau was looking into a matter of fraud,” Jake said. “Agent Nelson was. David Young was principal to the investigation. His death complicates the picture.”

  Jerry lifted his chin in thanks. “Right. It sure does.”

  “I see.” Wodz fidgeted with his pen, drumming it on his clipboard. “Well, we did find some pretty sketchy looking stuff upstairs. It’s all taped off. Were you hoping to take evidence?”

  “We’ll certainly take any of the printing equipment you find superfluous to your murder investigation,” Jerry said.

  Wodz scratched his head, then waved a hand. “No problem, fellas. Tell ya what. Whatever we leave behind is all yours.”

  Jake had already seen the murder scene. He let Jerry take it in, while he looked elsewhere for clues. The front door wasn’t harmed. That plus the lack of defensive wounds on David Young meant it’d probably been a sharp surprise from someone he knew and trusted to some extent, someone he shouldn’t have trusted in hind sight. In this sort of thing, Jake noted to himself, one of his criminal associates was most likely the culprit. Usually something to do with greed.

  The living room didn’t have the look of a bachelor pad nor a woman’s recent touch. It was decorated to suit older feminine tastes. There were two sitting chairs by a small table, their upholstery bleached by the sun. A couch had a floral pattern on it from the 70s. The walls were decorated with family photos. On a buffet style table with deep cabinets, he found a mother’s shrine to her children. Two little boys smiled from the pictures with missing baby teeth and mullet haircuts. Jake smirked
as he remembered having a decent mullet himself in his elementary school years. He didn’t call it that at the time. It was just the style. Flat top, sides shaved close, let it flow in the back.

  Other pictures captured David and his brother’s growth year by year, getting bigger and a little easier to tell apart but not by much. There were a notable number of pictures of David and his brother with boys roughly their same age: Twins with curly mops of reddish hair.

  Jerry emerged from the rear bedroom where David had been killed. “Not a whole heap to go on there.”

  “No.” Jake’s gaze lingered on the walls, the tables, the TV remotes. He picked one up and turned on the TV. A sports channel broadcasted a motocross race, motorbikes whipping around corners and speeding over berms that sent them flying through the air. Jake turned it off.

  “Big family.” Jerry stuck his hands in his pockets, looking over the pictures.

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s just a lot of pictures.”

  Jerry hummed to himself.

  Jake stepped into the kitchen, where earlier that day he’d burst in through the back door. A phone hung on the wall next to a message pad that looked stiff and long since used. A wicker basket on the counter below it held some old bills, keys, batteries, rubber bands and loose change. Jake picked up a matchbook that read “5-5-5 Club” and beneath in italics, “The Triple Nickel.”

  He set it back in the basket and looked in the refrigerator. Beer, milk, a bulk-buy thirty-six pack of greek yogurt and an unopened fifteen pound bag of raw bratwurst, three segments of five pounds each. “That’s a lot of brats.”

  “Shame if those went to waste,” Jerry said. “Some knife collection. Bet those could fetch a pretty penny. Must be hundreds of those suckers. None of them touched, save the murder weapon.”

  “Nothing stolen,” Jake said. “Quite the opposite. Looks to me like some of that printing paraphernalia was left upstairs in haste. Maybe to incriminate David.” Jake closed the fridge and brushed his hands together. Through the living room window, Jake caught sight of on older woman with white hair and a purple overcoat standing on her enclosed porch. “I’m gonna talk to the neighbor lady. Pardon.”

  Jake stalked out of the house and across the street. He waved at the woman and slowed a touch so as not to frighten her. “Ma’am.”

  She raised one of her crossed arms.

  “Could I have a word?”

  “Is it bad?” she asked in a quavering voice. She pushed a screen door open for him and he entered up a set of steps.

  “Afraid so. A young man was killed.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible. One of the Young boys?” Then the shock ebbed away. “I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and why not?”

  “Well, that Russell Young killed my Snickers.”

  “Your what now?”

  “Those Young boys were always causing trouble. They say ‘boys will be boys’, but Marie just didn’t even try to rein them in. I raised one of my own, so I know where the line is. They’d be out throwing rocks and sticks and always yelling so much. And that Russell, he killed my cat, Snickers. Was it him who got killed?”

  Jake thought he heard hopefulness in the question. “No, it was David.”

  “He’s the younger, but not by much.”

  “They have a father around?”

  “Russell senior worked up in Alaska on fishing boats sometimes.”

  “Ah, I see. Dangerous work.”

  “Sure. But he got drunk and fell in a snowbank. They didn’t find him ’til spring.”

  Jake’s brows lifted.

  “Marie was a good woman. She just never was much of a disciplinarian. She was a smoker, but she didn’t want anyone to know. I knew though. I’d see her trying to hide it in her car or her back yard. Poor thing tried dating a couple times after Russell Senior passed, but by then the boys were teenagers and holy terrors, God help her. I guess she died about two years ago.”

  The eagerness with which the old neighbor dished on the Youngs felt a little gossipy, but Jake nodded along anyhow. Fact wise, the story squared with what he’d seen in the home.

  “And your name, ma’am?”

  “Edith Holbach. And I’m eighty-six years old. Would you like to come in for some coffee?”

  Jake smiled. “That’s mighty kind, ma’am, but I really ought to be after the killer.”

  “Oh okay, then. If you say so.”

  “Before I go, do you have any idea where I could find Russell Junior?”

  “Oh, gosh. I couldn’t say. Haven’t seen him around. But there’s been folks over. A couple of men and a woman. Slender thing. She’s swollen like the snake that ate the pig.” Mrs. Holbach held her hands out before her stomach.

  Jake took down Mrs. Holbach’s number and wrote down his own in case she remembered anything or heard anything from the neighbors.

  Jerry had seen enough of the house and met him by the cruiser. “Don’t suppose we have much to go on,” he said. “You think Nelson will want that fraudulent paraphernalia?”

  “I’ll leave that for him to decide.” Jake said. “Might give him something to do.”

  “And those yogurts and brats.” Jerry gestured over his shoulder. “It’s really upsettin’ me to think of them all going to waste.”

  “You suggesting we steal from a crime scene, Jerry?”

  “Oh, well, if you’re gonna phrase it like that.” He got in the driver’s seat a little testily.

  Jake laughed to himself harder than he had in some time, maybe weeks. Once he got a handle on himself, he got in and hit Jerry in the arm. “You know what, Mister Jerry. You did just give me an idea.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. But first, you ever heard of The Triple Nickel?”

  FIVE

  Questions and Answers

  Jake stepped into the 5-5-5 Club, the so-called “Triple Nickel” which had repeated itself so many times in Jake’s head it sounded like “Trickle Nipple.” He entered the establishment unsure of what to expect. He was greeted by a lone bartender, a round young woman with short hair dyed black and a single silver earring. “Hi there. We’re not really open this early.”

  He spied a small stage, booths along the walls and tables in the center. Looked like people could make room to dance if they wanted to, but it wasn’t a “club” in that sense of the word.

  “Oh, hey… That’s okay. Could I just ask you about something?”

  The bartender took a chair off a table and set it underneath. Now that the table was clear of chairs she wiped it with a moist cloth. “I like your hat.”

  Jake gave a nervous laugh. “Thanks.” He took off his hat and put his other hand inside it. “I’m looking into a criminal matter.”

  The bartender stood straight.

  “Nothing to do with this place. Something totally separate.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “My name is Jake Adler. Can I ask yours?”

  “Hanna Trukler.”

  “Hanna. Nice name. Can I lean on your bar here?” Jake took a place at the bar along one side of the room.

  Perhaps by second nature, she stepped behind it. “Can I get you anything?”

  Jake rubbed his face, thinking of the blur the last couple of weeks had become. “Man alive, I could do with that bottle of Jameson, but I’ll probably be better off with a seltzer water.”

  “You want a lime?”

  “Hit me.”

  Hanna smiled as she poured him the drink.

  He set his hat down on the seat next to him, then accepted the plastic cup of fizzy water.

  “You sure you don’t want a little something?” She reached for the bottle of Jameson behind the bar and poured a shot. He waved her off, and she downed it alone.

  “Your boss gonna get mad?”

  “I dunno. Mitch! I’m drinking your booze! You gonna fire me?”

  No response came.

  “Guess not.” Hanna poured herself a second shot. “Sure you don’t
want one. It’s free, apparently.”

  “I will take a rain check. Promise you that.”

  “What kind of cop are you? I hate to state the obvious, but you’re not from around here.”

  “No. Think of me as a cop version of an exchange student.”

  Hanna held up the shot and threw it back. She winced and drew her wrist across her mouth. “That’s how to start the day. Whew.” She coughed. “What kind of case are you working on?”

  Jake sat back and took in a breath. “Well, it’s a murder. Might be someone you know. A patron.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit, indeed. David Young was his name.”

  “Oh, him?” Hanna relaxed. “Yeah I know him. He’s dead?”

  “I’m looking for his associates, namely his brother or his twin friends, maybe even his girlfriend.”

  “Yeah… That guy definitely came in here with more than one girl. But the twins, I think I remember. You know to be honest, they didn’t really fit in here. They just drank here because it was so close they could walk home hammered.” Hanna worked the bar-top with her wash rag. “This is a spot for hipsters and thirty-somethings out with their friends from the grocery co-op. Know what I mean? Open mics, bingo on Tuesdays. Hey, we do cheap Lone Stars on bingo night.”

  “No kidding? Here?”

  “I think one of our previous bartenders was born in Texas and started it as a laugh. Those things are dirt cheap. No offense.”

  “Hell yeah they are.” Jake’s weary face bent up in a smile again. “That’s the point.”

  “So you’ll come back.” Her eyes glinted with excitement.

  “One thing at a time, Miss Hanna. Now, how often have these gentlemen been coming in lately?”

  “Pretty often. I’ll see them here at least three out of my five shifts per week. And I get off at nine, so who knows if they’re showing up after that, too.”

  “Do you happen to know the last name of the twins? Is it Young? Relatives or…”

  “Sorry.”

  “I can figure it out, I’m sure.” Jake sipped his seltzer. “What about the brother? David has an older brother, Russell. About the same age, same look. He ever come in?”