“Awaiting his court hearing,” Ryan said. “Unless you’re his lawyer, you’ll have to wait until then to see him.”
“But my dad doesn’t know anything about this!” Landon insisted. “You’ve got to let him go.”
“The gun found in Kennedy Petersik’s car belonged to him,” Ryan revealed.
“I know,” Landon breathed. “I’m the one who gave Kennedy the gun.”
“What for?” Ryan demanded.
I jumped in before Landon could supply an answer. “Let’s not do this out here, guys. There’s gotta be an available interview room somewhere.”
I looked warily at the several sets of prying eyes regarding us, uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives. This was not the place for any kind of conversation.
The interrogation room was grey and sterile. A metal table was fused to the ground. On either side of the table were two wooden chairs. A mirror monopolized one of the walls, but it was a façade. No police officers stood on the other side to listen and observe our interview.
“You’re gonna release my dad, right?” Landon fidgeted in his chair. The legs of the chair were slightly uneven and he rocked back and forth on the linoleum floor. “Cause his heart’s not so good.”
“That all depends on what you have to tell us,” Ryan said. He pressed the record button on a small video camera that sat atop a tripod.
“Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer present?” I interjected.
“Can’t afford one,” Landon mumbled, dropping his eyes to the table. “Besides, I’ve got nothing to hide.”
I thought about Chase Trask and his overly-protective mom. I thought about the high-priced lawyer in his high-priced suit that people like Landon Tauer would never be able to afford. I wanted to tell him about public defenders, about people like my girlfriend, whose job it was to protect him from incriminating himself in a situation like this, but Jason Ryan was too eager to start the interview.
“Let’s try this again,” Ryan started. “How did your dad’s gun end up in Kennedy Petersik’s car?”
“Kennedy called me up when she was in town on her fall break,” Landon said. “She asked if she could borrow my dad’s gun. She said she needed it for protection.”
“A gun. Not pepper spray?” I wondered aloud. It felt like an overreaction unless there was something we were missing, like a stalker situation. I really needed to see her journals.
“She didn’t really explain,” Landon admitted. “She only said she needed it.”
“You know this doesn’t look good for you, right?” Ryan noted.
Ryan was trying to intimidate Landon into some kind of confession, but I had more questions. I hadn’t been allowed to interview Steven Tauer, but as far as I was concerned, Landon Taurer was my witness.
“How did she know your dad had a gun?” I asked.
Landon’s eyes shifted in his skull. “I, uh, I brought it to a party once.”
Ryan jumped on the question before I could. He was practically salivating. “As in the graduation party where Michael Bloom was shot and killed?”
“Uhm, yeah,” Landon mumbled. “That’s the one.”
I heard Ryan’s excited hiss, but I tried to ignore it. My heart pounded in my head. “Landon—I want you to be very sure and very careful about what you say next,” I prefaced. “Are you admitting to shooting Michael Bloom?”
Landon’s eyes widened. “Hell, no. I didn’t do that! I didn’t even know the kid!”
“The bullets retrieved from Kennedy Petersik and Michael Bloom’s bodies are a match,” Ryan practically gloated. “We know they came from the same firearm. The one registered to your dad.”
Landon quietly swore under his breath. He took off his baseball cap and ran both of his hands over his buzzed brown hair.
“I never should have brought that gun,” he muttered with regret.
“Why did you bring a gun to a party?” I questioned.
It wasn’t as though the Twin Cities suburbs were dangerous. And a bullet from a handgun like the one found in Kennedy Petersik’s car would have felt like a bee-sting to a 500 lb. bear.
“I was a dumb kid,” he said. “I didn’t know how to impress girls.”
Ryan scoffed. “And you thought bringing a gun to a party would do the job?”
It was clear he didn’t believe Landon’s explanation. I wondered what else he might not believe.
“Like I said,” Landon shrugged. “I was dumb.”
We were tip-toeing around the important details—namely who had killed Michael Bloom. “What happened that night at the party, Landon?”
He stared at the grey metal table, chewing on his lower lip. I could only imagine how his heart and his thoughts must have been racing. Finally, he looked up and spoke:
“I decided to crash Pius’s graduation party. Everybody knows they have a rager at the end of the school year, but it’s by invite only. I’d just signed my contract with Junior-A hockey, and I was feeling pretty cocky. I never made it inside the house though because I saw Kennedy sitting outside by herself.”
As he recounted his memories from that night, he picked at an aggravated cuticle on one of his fingers.
“I could tell she was depressed, upset about something, and I wanted to cheer her up. I mentioned I had the gun and offered to let her shoot it at some beer cans.” His gaze dropped to his hands and his voice came out like a rough whisper. “I thought we were alone. I don’t know what that kid was doing in that field. Taking a piss maybe because the bathroom lines were too long.”
I swallowed hard. “So Kennedy shot Michael Bloom?”
Landon lifted his head. His eyes seemed wobbly and unsteady. “It was an accident. We were just messing around. The last thing either of us wanted was for someone to get hurt, let alone die.”
“I’ve looked over witness depositions from that night.” Ryan leaned forward in his chair. “No one at the party reported hearing gunshots. How do you account for that if you two were popping off rounds at beer cans like you say?”
“It was a party. The music was loud,” Landon shrugged. “You couldn’t hear yourself think inside. That’s part of the reason Kennedy came outside in the first place.”
“And the other part?” I asked.
“She and Chase were fighting,” Landon said.
I shared a quick look with Detective Ryan. Maybe we had another reason to drag the Trask boy and his mother back to the police station.
“What did they fight about?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.” Landon shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to find out; I just wanted to cheer her up.”
I exhaled, trying to process all of this new information. “If it was an accident, why not tell the police what had happened?”
Landon’s features grew sharp. “Oh yeah—tell the police and ruin my life? Ruin my parents’ lives, too. R-ruin K-Kennedy’s life,” he stuttered. “I was getting out of this town and so was she. I couldn’t mess that up for us.”
“So you ran away,” Ryan accused.
“I was protecting Kennedy.” Landon’s temper continued to flare. “And yeah, I was saving my own ass, too. I took the gun with me, and told Kennedy to call 911 from a landline inside the house.”
“So it couldn’t be traced back to her phone,” I observed. “Pretty smart thinking for something that happened so fast.”
Landon flashed me a wild look. “We didn’t leave him there to die. We got help, but we didn’t want to get in trouble, too.”
“What did you do with the gun afterwards?” Ryan asked.
“I put it back in the lockbox by my dad’s bedside table. No one knew I’d been at the party—I wasn’t supposed to be there. The gun was better hidden in my dad’s bedside table than me tossing it into a lake.”
I had another question that I didn’t want to ask, but my job required it of me: “Landon, where were you the day Kennedy died?”
“At the hockey rink.”
“Can anyon
e vouch for that?” Ryan questioned.
“I’m there every Tuesday.”
“But did anyone see you on that specific Tuesday?” Ryan emphasized.
“Oh. Uh, n-no, I don’t think so,” he verbally stumbled. “I’m usually the only one there during the day.”
“Do you have to sign in and out at the high school office?” I probed.
Landon shook his head. “No. Since they know me, they let me come and go as I please.” He blinked a few times. “Shit. Does this mean I don’t have an alibi?”
I shut the soundproof door to the interrogation room with Landon Tauer still inside. Detective Ryan and I conferenced in the hallway just outside.
I leaned against a wall and crossed my arms. “We’ve got to release Steven Tauer.” I kept my voice low to make sure none of the swarming cops overheard us. “There’s no reason to keep holding him.”
Ryan nodded in agreement. I knew how much he wanted to erase that number 35 from the board, but I was glad he wasn’t so fanatical about it as to charge an innocent man.
“Kennedy Petersik killed Michael Bloom,” he said wistfully. “Do you buy it?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “We’ll need to go over the Cold Case files again with this new information. Look for extra bullet casings collected from the scene. Beer cans with bullet holes, maybe. Something to corroborate Landon’s story.”
“What do we do with him?” Ryan tugged his thumb in the direction of the interrogation room.
“Is it a crime to be a dumb, love-struck kid?” I posed.
Ryan arched an eyebrow. “You think he was in love with her?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t my job to head-shrink the kid, but it seemed like he’d gone through a lot to protect a girl he didn’t at least care for.
“We’ve got him for tampering with evidence, at least,” Ryan noted.
I pursed my lips in thought. “That’s peanuts. The D.A.’s office is going to want something bigger. I say let him walk for now. Tell him to stay close—not to leave the area. Maybe the Inspector will give us a badge to tail him. I want to know what he does once he leaves this place.”
Ryan’s mouth curved in a peculiar way. He didn’t say anything about my idea, but he stood with an idiotic grin on his idiotic face.
“What?” I demanded.
“I never thought I’d say this, Miller, but I think you might actually be a cop.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
My heavy leather boots crunched through dead flowers and overgrown grass. The wind swirled around me, kicking up loose, fallen leaves like a miniature tornado. I popped the collar of my leather jacket to shield myself from the worst of it. Detective Ryan, Stanley, and I had taken an impromptu field trip out to the property where the Pius High School graduation party had occurred. The house had been removed as a rental property following Michael Bloom’s death. Inappropriate as it was, I wondered what kind of zero-star reviews the property owners had received in the aftermath.
I kicked at the damp ground, not really sure what we might find, three years later, that the original police investigation had overlooked. Ryan had rented a metal detector and busied himself at the edge of the property to search for brass bullet casings. An abundance of them in a central position might suggest that Landon had been telling us the truth—that Michael Bloom’s death had been an accident, the victim of a stray shooting range bullet.
The physical evidence related to Michael Bloom’s death was scant. With so many reluctant witnesses, police at the time hadn’t known what objects to collect from the scene. There were no shell casings to suggest an impromptu target practice and no beer cans with bullet holes. Michael Bloom’s clothing had been separated into several evidence bags. The original DNA testing hadn’t produced any interesting results, but that could have been predicted since forensics had already determined that Bloom had been shot at a distance.
I thought it was notable that Landon had known that detail. It was unlikely that news coverage of the death had been specific about the kind of gunshot wound the boy had suffered. Ryan ordered a second round of DNA tests on Michael Bloom’s clothing now that we had both Landon and Kennedy’s profiles to compare against, but I didn’t believe the crime lab would find anything.
A number of other details from that night that only the persons involved would have known about were starting to pile up. The biggest detail was that the 911 call had come from the landline connected to the rental property. Every single high schooler at that graduation party would have had a cell phone on them. Why, then, had the call been made from a landline? And how else would Landon have known that detail if he hadn’t been the one to instruct Kennedy to make the emergency call?
Stanley held up one of the oversized photographs that the original forensics team had taken of the crime scene. He spun on his heels, trying to decipher where on the property Michael Bloom had been shot. The task was made more difficult because the Bloom boy hadn’t died on the property. He’d still been alive when the first responders had arrived, and he’d died overnight at the hospital.
“What do you think?” he asked me. “Does that tree look like it’s three years older than the one in the picture?”
I took a cursory look, but shook my head after a moment. “I have no idea.”
The property surrounding the home was largely flat and monolithic, with no distinguishing features beyond the floating pier and docked pontoon on the lake.
Stanley continued to trod through the tall grass, periodically comparing a new photograph to his surroundings. The landscape hadn’t completely changed in three years, but the lawn had become overgrown and unkempt.
“Hey!” I waved down Ryan, who continued to scan the perimeter of the property with the rented metal detector. “Find anything?”
“Not yet!” he called back.
Beside me, Stanley pulled a large ball of yarn from the pocket of his trench coat with some difficulty.
“What are you doing, Stanley?” I wondered what else he kept in those jacket pockets.
“If we can figure out the epicenter—the place where Michael was standing when he got shot—we can use this yarn to draw a radius around the center to figure out the likelihood that he was killed by a stray bullet.”
I hadn’t known how Stanley might react to Landon Tauer’s claim that Kennedy Petersik had killed Michael Bloom, even if it had been an accident. I knew he felt a responsibility to the girl as her former mentor at Pius High School, but first and foremost his duty was to the Cold Case division. In his position, I might not have been so gung-ho about proving Landon’s story to be true.
Another brisk wind rustled through the long grass. Tiny ripples skated across the surface of the nearby lake. A thick cloud cover had hidden the sun for the majority of the day, making our task even more difficult. I wished I’d worn a thick sweater or had thought to bring a hat and gloves. Julia would have made sure I’d been properly bundled up. I was so lost without her.
I didn’t have a specific assigned job, so I rambled along the property and stared at the ground, looking for anything that seemed out of place. Every other step had me sinking into the soft turf. The level of the lake must have been on the rise because the land was uneven and soggy.
“I think I’ve got something!” Ryan’s voice carried from across the yard. “Disregard,” he said almost immediately. “It’s just a coffee can!”
I stopped my fruitless search by a dilapidated fence. Doubt about our errand began to creep into my bones the longer we worked without discovery. I kicked at the fence posts to dislodge some of the mud that had collected on the bottom of my work boots. The wood creaked in response, but I heard another sound: something metal and crinkling.
I bent down and wedged my fingers into an empty fence hole where one of the posts had fallen off or had rotted away. My fingers closed around a cylinder-shaped object. I thought it might be another coffee can—an impromptu ash can or bait bucket—until the soft metal bent in under the pressure of my grip.
The ground made a sucking sound as I wrenched the object out of the mud. I wiped away at the wet dirt that coated the half of the canister that had been partially submerged. The grey clouds seemed to part at that moment. The sun was warm against my back. I twisted the dirty beer can in my hand. Sunshine pierced through a bullet-sized hole.
+ + +
I hold my hand up like a visor and squint into the sun. I hear a motor, an engine of some kind, but I can’t be sure if it’s friend or foe, real or imagined. A commercial airplane, too high to ever see us, streaks through the periwinkle blue sky, leaving a white, puffy trail behind it.
“Chemtrails,” Pensacola grits out. Speaking in full sentences has become increasingly difficult for him. “My mama always told me that’s what those were.”
“You mean the water condensation?” I question.
I’ve heard all about this conspiracy theory before, but I egg on my friend, hoping that talking will distract him from the severity of his injuries.
He uses his arms—the only part of him that escaped the dirty bomb—to prop himself up. I reach to help, but he waves me off. My back in on fire though, so I don’t know how much help I’d actually be.
“Government’s trying to kill us: EPA, NOAA, FAA,” he lists off. “They’re trying to control our minds.” He taps a dusty finger against his blood-caked temple. The dried blood crumbles off his dark skin.
“What’d she say when you told her you were going to be a Marine?” I ask.
His cracked lips purse. “Said I was gonna die.” An even drier tongue tries to wet his lips, but it’s useless. There is no water. There hasn’t been for some time. “Guess she was right about something.”
I want to tell him we’re going to be alright. I want to say we’re going to survive—that help is on the way. But I can’t force the lies to my lips. I need to conserve my energy to prove Pensacola’s mom wrong.
I flinch and duck down a little lower when I hear the bombs. I can tell from the sound that the explosions are far away, but that doesn’t make them less alarming. Sometimes I’m thankful for the noise, however. It’s the only reminder that Pense and I aren’t the only ones left in the world.
One Little Secret Page 14