Spilled Blood

by Brian Freeman

  I responded to a referral from a 911 emergency operator that a teenage girl, identified as Ashlynn Steele, seventeen years old, of Barron, was potentially stranded in the ruins of the unincorporated town of Bell Valley. I arrived in the town at 5:43 am and discovered an orange Mustang convertible, license plates 489 BAW. The vehicle was unoccupied, and the driver’s side rear tire was flat. Registration of the vehicle was to Florian Steele of Barron. I made several verbal announcements of my presence in an attempt to locate the missing girl. When I received no response, I began a search of the area, including the unoccupied buildings. Seven minutes later, I observed the body of a woman in a park approximately one hundred yards from the vehicle. I determined that the woman was deceased and noted a gunshot entry wound in the center of her forehead. Her face matched the driver’s license photograph of Ashlynn Steele. I saw no sign of a weapon at the scene of the crime. At that time, I reported the incident and remained on-site to secure the scene pending the arrival of investigative and medical personnel.

  That was all it took to mark the end of a young life and begin the ripples that threatened to destroy many more.

  Chris removed the police material page by page and organized the documents into piles on the table in the hospital lounge. Olivia was talking with the counselor Hannah had hired, and Chris passed the time by reviewing the chain of events that had led from Rollie Swenson’s 911 call after Tanya awakened her father on Saturday morning, to the arrest of Olivia two days later.

  He laid out witness statements and interview reports. Diagrams and crime-scene photos. Early test results. Warrants. Records pulled from Ashlynn’s life. Records pulled from Olivia’s life. Reading between the lines, he could see an overarching theme emerging from the first minutes of the investigation.

  This was an open-and-shut case.

  The police knew who did it. They had Tanya’s statement about Olivia and Ashlynn. If you already had a theory of the crime, you looked for evidence to support your theory, and you tended to play down evidence that pointed in other directions. Rather than widen the search, the police focused on making sure that the evidence gathered against Olivia would hold up in court. No screw-ups in the chain of custody. No procedural errors. No technicalities. Not with the daughter of Florian Steele as a victim.

  Chris looked at the evidence from a different perspective. A perspective where Olivia was innocent, not presumed guilty. A perspective in which Ashlynn was alive when Olivia left her in the ghost town.

  In the early hours of the police investigation, there was no suspicion that Ashlynn’s personal life was a contributing factor in her death. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a St. Croix girl who was obsessed with the blood feud against Mondamin. The initial interviews with Florian and Julia revealed nothing about Ashlynn’s relationships or her pregnancy. Either her parents didn’t know or they didn’t divulge it. No one mentioned Johan.

  That changed after the autopsy. The follow-up interview with Julia reflected shock and horror that Ashlynn had been pregnant and that her daughter had made the decision to terminate the fetus. According to the interview notes, Ashlynn’s mother had flatly refused to believe the coroner’s findings. She told police that her daughter would never make such a godless choice, no matter what the physical evidence showed about her body. However, faced with the reality of Ashlynn’s pregnancy, Julia did confess a secret not shared by her husband – that Ashlynn had secretly been dating Johan Magnus for months. After that revelation, it didn’t take long for the dominoes to fall. The police discovered that Olivia had dated Johan, too, and that he had dumped her to be with Ashlynn.

  Olivia knew about their affair. She had a whole new motive for murder.

  Chris wasn’t surprised that the physical and personal evidence had cemented suspicions among the police and the county attorney about Olivia’s guilt. If he’d been in their shoes, he would have believed it, too. Even so, there were holes in the case. Johan had covered up his own visit to the ghost town when the police questioned him. There was nothing about Mondamin and the company’s struggles with environmental activists. No one had asked about threats against Florian’s family. No one mentioned Aquarius.

  When he checked the inventory of Ashlynn’s personal effects compiled from her wallet, her Mustang, and her bedroom at Florian’s home in Barron, he also discovered a surprising omission. Something that should have been there wasn’t on the list, and he checked it three times to be sure he hadn’t missed it. It was possible that the police had failed to note it in their catalog, but that seemed unlikely. Ashlynn had packed a small suitcase for her trip, and the police had found the case in the trunk of the Mustang. It included the usual personal items, such as clothes and toiletries, but nothing else. No books. No homework.

  No laptop.

  There was no computer in her car. There was no computer in her bedroom, either, according to the inventory and photographs. To Chris, that was inconceivable. The daughter of Florian Steele owned a laptop. Where was it?

  It was missing. Why?

  He dug in the box for the girl’s cell-phone records and found a copy of an online statement showing activity for the preceding month. If the police had already done the legwork of tracing each number, they had opted not to make it easy for Chris by writing the results down on the copy they had given him. Instead, as he reviewed the list of calls that Ashlynn had made and received, he booted up his own laptop and went to a reverse directory web site to identify the numbers.

  He was surprised at how few calls he found to other teenagers in Barron, and he remembered Maxine Valma mentioning that Ashlynn had withdrawn from that circle because of the feud. Based on her phone records, she hadn’t replaced the Barron clique with a different group of friends. Her life looked lonely.

  He saw numerous calls from the same phone number early in the month, and he tracked the number to Johan Magnus. Most of the calls were no more than a minute in length. Ashlynn had ended their relationship a month before her death, and in the days following the split he had obviously tried repeatedly to get in touch with her. Either she had let the calls go to voice mail, or she had hung up after answering. Eventually, he’d quit trying to change her mind. There had been no calls between them for two weeks.

  Instead, he saw calls back and forth between Ashlynn and the very clinic in which he was sitting. The Barron hospital. He wondered: Was that when she discovered she was pregnant? He’d assumed that her pregnancy had prompted the break-up with Johan, but maybe he was wrong. Regardless of the timing, the day after the last call she received from the clinic, she’d dialed a new phone number. He recognized the number without having to feed it to the reverse directory. It was the number for the Grohman Women’s Resource Center.

  Ashlynn had made her choice.

  There was an ominous silence in her phone records in the succeeding days, as if she were wrestling with her demons alone. She made no calls for nearly a week. None. To anyone. She received no calls either. Then he saw an out-of-state number on an outgoing call, and he traced it to the switchboard at Stanford University. He remembered Florian’s comment that Ashlynn was looking at her options for college applications. Shortly after the call to Stanford, he spotted another local call, this time to Maxine Valma, and he wondered if Ashlynn was asking the principal to write a college reference letter. Maybe she’d begun to make peace with her decision about the baby and had started to turn her eyes back to her future. Or maybe she was just trying to think about anything other than the reality she faced.

  Days later, she left for Nebraska.

  During that awful period, he saw one call to her home number. It made him wonder whether Julia Steele had lied about knowing what her daughter was doing in those days away from home. Or maybe Ashlynn had lied to her mother and covered up her pain and grief and told her that everything was fine. The church project is great, Mom. Don’t worry, I’ll be home on Friday.

  There was another call, too. He noted one outgoing call from Ashlynn
’s phone, lasting five minutes, on the day before she made the long drive back to Barron. The day before her death. She must have been in Nebraska at the time, recovering from the abortion procedure. Chris ran the number through the reverse directory, and when he did, he rocked back in his chair in surprise. It was about the last thing he expected to see on the girl’s phone records.

  There she was, alone, miles from home, experiencing the worst event of her young life. She made only one call that night, like a prisoner calling for help, and it was the last call she ever made.

  Ashlynn called Tanya Swenson.

  22

  Hannah buzzed Chris through the street door into the Women’s Resource Center. He waited until the door closed behind him with a solid click before he went upstairs. The steps were old and steep, worn low in the middle by decades of foot traffic, and the narrow hallway was claustrophobic. He smelled pizza from the ovens of the Italian restaurant next door. At the top of the steps, he opened another door and found himself in the small lobby of the Center. It was gloomy, lit by a few table lamps. The aluminum mini-blinds on the windows were down. There was no receptionist, just a handful of chairs on the beige shag carpet, a water dispenser with packets to make tea or coffee, and a brochure rack sitting on a square oak table. The room was warm.

  He wasn’t alone. A woman in her twenties sat in a straight-backed chair, with a copy of Redbook in her lap. She had strawberry-blond hair, and her closed eyes snapped open at the sound of the door. Her eyes were a pretty shade of pale blue, but they were alert and fearful. Her entire body flinched when she saw him, like a cat alarmed by the smallest sound. He was reminded of where he was, in a place that was often the last stop on a brutal road, where it took courage even to walk through the door.

  He took a seat as far away from her as he could, near the window overlooking the street. He separated two of the blinds to peer outside and noticed a round hole in the glass, large enough to poke his finger through. When he eyed the opposite wall of the lobby, he spotted a matching hole near the ceiling, where the bullet fired from the street had buried itself in the plaster.

  Abortion protester. Enraged husband. Barron boy. Take your pick.

  The door to the inner office opened. It was Hannah. Seeing her, the young woman in the lobby bounded to her feet and threw her arms around Hannah’s neck. Her nervous face blossomed with relief, as if she’d found a life preserver in a big ocean. Hannah hugged her back, then whispered in the woman’s ear. The visitor nodded shyly and disappeared into the open office with a final, furtive look at Chris.

  Hannah gave him a smile that was unusually warm. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Take your time.’

  She closed the door, leaving him alone. He found himself daydreaming about the past, remembering Hannah. The woman in the doorway was the same woman he had met in college. Time didn’t matter; she was still the girl in the tie-dye shirt and sweat pants, who nursed abused dogs at the Humane Society, who screamed at politicians at the state fair, who drove four hours to swing sand bags at the Red River, who made love until sweat covered their bodies. He was the one who had changed, not her. In the early years, he’d been an idealist, like her. Young. Naïve. The crappy apartment in Uptown was fine. Mac and cheese was the best dinner on earth. They both worked in a South Minneapolis urban center, the lawyer and the psychologist, out to rescue their corner of the world. They laughed, they fought, they made up. They were happy.

  Olivia changed everything. He held that fragile baby in his arms, and he got scared. He grew up; he got older. Barely getting by wasn’t enough anymore. Other people, other causes, didn’t matter; only that little girl mattered to him. He made a bargain with Hannah, and neither of them realized at the time that it was a devil’s bargain. She stayed home with their daughter, and he went to work. Real work. Lawyer’s work. He made money and played the game. He moved them out of Uptown and west to the exclusive lakeshore suburbs. In the early years, he thought he was building a fortress, but it was really a maze. Eventually, he lost Hannah in it.

  The door opened again. She stood there, waiting for him. Behind her, the office was empty. There was a rear entrance that she used to make it easier for women to come and go in secret, and the woman in the lobby had slipped away. It was just the two of them. Hannah stared at him in silence, and he stared back. It felt to Chris as if she could read his mind and see that he had been reliving their years together, the highs and the lows. Her face had a sweet sadness. He stood up, and she came to him and quietly put her arms around his chest.

  ‘Thank you, Chris,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being here. For saving her. I married a good man.’

  He said nothing. It felt like the first scar over an old wound, and he didn’t want to risk breaking it open by saying the wrong thing.

  They stayed in the lobby in the dim, dusty light. She sat down next to him and played nervously with the shade of an old lamp. Her hand trembled with little involuntary spasms. He saw weakness and fatigue in her pale face. Even Hannah had her limits. Fighting Mondamin. Fighting cancer. Fighting the violence that had swept Olivia up in its currents. There was a point at which you simply wanted to throw yourself into the wave and get carried away.

  ‘I never wanted to kill anyone before last night,’ she said. ‘If I’d had a gun, I would have shot every one of those bastards.’

  He thought: I have a gun. In a few hours, it would be dark, and he would have to make a choice.

  ‘We’ll get them,’ he said.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asked. ‘We can’t unring the bell for Olivia.’

  ‘No, but we can get justice.’

  Hannah grimaced and sucked in her breath. Her eyes closed. Chris put a hand on her shoulder and leaned closer. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘There are good days and bad days. This is a bad day.’

  ‘I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can—’

  Hannah stopped him with a finger on his lips. The smallest touch of her skin was sensual. ‘Please don’t. Don’t say it. You’re already worried about Olivia. You don’t have to worry about me, too.’

  ‘I do anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you here to take care of me.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I can’t,’ he said.

  Hannah offered a small smile of surrender. ‘I know. Thank you.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you something? You don’t have to tell me, but I’m curious.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Glenn Magnus told me he was interested in you, and you turned him down. Why?’

  ‘Glenn shouldn’t have told you that,’ she replied, frowning.

  ‘Maybe not, but why? You obviously care for him.’

  ‘I wasn’t ready.’

  Chris was surprised to see her look away and cover her face. In trying to be tender, he felt as if he had said the most hurtful thing imaginable. His temptation was to reach for her, but he resisted it. Instead, he got up and took a box of tissues from the coffee table and handed it to her.

  ‘I guess we should avoid certain topics,’ he said.

  Hannah sniffled and nodded. ‘I guess.’

  ‘You heard about Johan and Ashlynn?’ he asked.

  She nodded again.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ he asked. ‘Olivia never told you?’

  ‘She tells me very little.’

  ‘He was in the ghost town the night of the murder. He may have killed her.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘I know the boy, Chris. I don’t believe he would do something like that.’

  ‘I can’t look the other way, even though he’s Glenn’s son. There are certain realities of defending a murder charge, Hannah. Evidence pointing to someone else helps Olivia.’

  She opened her mouth as if to protest, but she closed it without saying anything. She squared her shoulders, reclaiming her strength. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I need to know more about Ashlyn
n,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Ashlynn called Tanya Swenson from Nebraska the day before she was killed. Do you have any idea why she would do that?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Were they friends?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  He frowned, wondering if she was hiding things again.

  ‘Chris, it’s true,’ Hannah went on. ‘You have to understand, I barely knew Ashlynn. She called me two weeks ago. She was in trouble, and I helped her as best I could. That’s the only communication I had with her.’

  ‘There are too many missing pieces about this girl,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the abortion.’

  ‘Christopher, put yourself in her shoes. She was scared and alone.’

  ‘I realize that, but everyone tells me she was close to her mother. Why didn’t she go to Julia?’

  ‘Even good girls are afraid to admit their mistakes. Particularly when they face the awful choice that Ashlynn did.’

  ‘She was a teenager, Hannah.’

  ‘Do you think she did this lightly? Do you think having a baby was a trifling inconvenience to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tell me.’

  ‘I saw her, Chris. That girl was in despair. She was inconsolable. The idea of terminating her pregnancy was horrifying to her. It went against every spiritual value she held.’

  ‘Then why do it? You said you didn’t think she’d been raped.’

  ‘I don’t believe she was.’

  ‘Did she tell you who the father was?’

  ‘I told you, no. I assume now it was Johan, but she didn’t say.’

  ‘Maybe she was seeing someone else. Johan said she broke up with him a month ago, but her phone records show that she exchanged calls with the clinic shortly before she called you. That was only a couple of weeks ago. If she just found out she was pregnant—’

  Hannah held up your hands. ‘Chris, no, you’re wrong.’