Spilled Blood

by Brian Freeman

  ‘She’s sixteen.’

  ‘I don’t care how old she is. I’m not the police. If a witness comes to me with information, I’m going to listen to her.’

  One of the flaps of Rollie’s yellow shirt had come untucked, and it dangled over the bulge of his stomach. He sat down behind his desk and grabbed an oversized cup that had a straw squeezed through the hole. He sucked up a mouthful of pop. When he was done, he slammed it down, and Coke spewed upward through the straw and onto his desk. He let it drip onto the floor.

  ‘You’re going to get her killed,’ Rollie told him. ‘I am trying to protect her.’

  ‘I’m just asking questions.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Chris. I know you’re doing everything you can to save your own daughter, but I thought you’d respect me when I told you to stay away from Tanya. Instead, you took advantage of her.’

  ‘You lied to me, Rollie,’ Chris snapped. ‘Don’t talk about respect unless you’re prepared to be honest with me first.’

  ‘Okay. Fine. I lied. You’d lie, too, if you were in my shoes.’

  Chris stood up. ‘I’m done here. You can talk to Michael Altman and the sheriff about all of this.’

  He yanked open Rollie’s door, but before he could leave, Rollie bounced off his chair and intercepted him. The younger attorney pushed the door closed again. ‘Don’t get them involved in this. Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t know who to trust.’

  Chris pointed at the empty chair. ‘Start over, Rollie.’

  Rollie’s chin, which looked perpetually unshaved, was especially dark. There were circles under his eyes, and the caffeine wasn’t helping to revive him. They both sat down again.

  ‘Tanya told me that Ashlynn offered to get inside information about Mondamin,’ Chris said. ‘Did you meet with her?’

  Rollie’s fists gripped the arms of his chair. ‘Sure, I did.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Sometime last fall. November, I think.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  Rollie shook his head. ‘Nothing we didn’t already know.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Ashlynn suspected that her father was involved in a cover-up, but she didn’t have any actual evidence.’

  ‘Did she mention Vernon Clay?’ Chris asked.

  Rollie’s eyebrows went up. ‘Yes, she did. How did you make that connection?’

  ‘A contact at Mondamin. Someone else that Ashlynn reached out to.’

  ‘Well, you know we were trying to find him. We thought he might be our smoking gun.’

  ‘What did Ashlynn know about him?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. She didn’t have any new information. She didn’t know where he was or how we could reach him. She didn’t have any details about what he might have done while he was at Mondamin. All she had was the same speculation that we had years ago. It was a dead end.’

  ‘So what was Ashlynn proposing?’ he asked.

  Rollie took another slug of Coke and wiped his face, which had a dew of sweat. ‘She told me she could hack into Florian’s computer at home and copy his paper files. She thought she could do it at his office, too, without him finding out.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  The younger attorney scowled. ‘What the hell do you think I told her? I said no. She was offering to violate civil and criminal statutes by stealing private company documents. If I’d encouraged her, I would have been disbarred, sued, and dumped in jail. I told her that if she had any specific information regarding a crime, which she didn’t, she should take it to Michael Altman, not me.’

  ‘How did Ashlynn react when you said no?’

  ‘She said she’d do it on her own. I tried to dissuade her. I told her not to go behind her father’s back or break the law by taking anything that didn’t belong to her. I also told her the truth, which is that we lost the litigation fair and square. A judge dismissed it. The scientific issues involving Mondamin and St. Croix – including Vernon Clay – were examined in detail by an outside expert who found no link between the cancer cluster and the actions of the company.’

  ‘Did you convince Ashlynn to stay out of it?’

  ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘Did she contact you again?’

  ‘Not until she called Tanya on Thursday night.’

  ‘What did she say when she called?’

  ‘You already know. Ashlynn claimed to have evidence against her father now. She didn’t say what it was.’

  ‘Did you talk to her yourself?’

  ‘No, Tanya did.’

  ‘Did she tell Tanya anything else?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what kind of proof she supposedly had.’

  Chris leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and stared into Rollie’s tired eyes. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell the police about this when Ashlynn’s body was found? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Rollie backed up in his chair, putting distance between them. He spread his hands. ‘I’m a lawyer, Chris, just like you. I share information on my terms. Not yours. Not Altman’s. Not the sheriff’s.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I already told you. My only concern is my daughter. Before I said anything that might put her in danger, I needed to know what was really going on. Ashlynn had already been murdered. For all I knew, Tanya was next.’

  ‘So you withheld critical information?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure the information was relevant at all. The evidence was overwhelming that Olivia killed Ashlynn. The police considered it an open-and-shut case.’

  ‘The police didn’t know about the phone call,’ Chris said. ‘Ashlynn told Tanya she had evidence against her father the day before she was killed. Do you really think that’s a coincidence?’

  Rollie shrugged. ‘I have no idea whether Ashlynn had proof of anything at all. She was a kid. Who knows whether she really found anything?’

  ‘If that’s true, then why are you so afraid Tanya is in danger? Did something change between that phone call on Thursday night and now?’

  Rollie’s face flushed again. He pounded the desk. ‘Of course, something changed! Kirk Watson tried to assault my daughter!’

  ‘What makes you think that had anything to do with Ashlynn’s phone call?’

  ‘I know Kirk. I know what the son of a bitch is capable of, and I know he’s mixed up with Florian.’

  ‘So talk to the police,’ Chris said. ‘Once the facts are out, no one’s going to touch her.’

  ‘You don’t know that. Besides, it’s not that simple anymore.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not just about Kirk.’

  Chris watched Rollie’s face and saw another side to his fear. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Someone else contacted me.’

  ‘Who?’

  Rollie closed his eyes and squeezed his fists against his forehead. He looked torn with doubt. Finally, exhaling loudly, he opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a single sheet of paper. Chris saw the block printing and recognized it. He’d seen it before.

  He thought about Michael Altman. We’ve found him.

  ‘This was in my mail box yesterday,’ Rollie said. He handed the paper across the desk.

  TO THE ATTENTION OF

  MR. ROLAND SWENSON

  SAY NOTHING

  SPEAK TO NO ONE

  SILENCE WILL KEEP YOUR DAUGHTER ALIVE

  SHE IS NOT PART OF MY PLAN

  DO NOT FORCE ME TO DO

  WHAT I WISH TO AVOID

  MY NAME IS

  AQUARIUS

  37

  The police cars surrounding the barn glistened in the driving rain. Their flashing lights made halos of red and blue. Rivers of brown water wound through the overlapping tire tracks toward the highway, and the swift-moving black clouds looked low enough to touch. The barn itself was weathered, with a rounded roof and patchy blue siding, and two winter ash trees waggled th
eir bare branches overhead. There was a farmhouse nearby, with frilly lace curtains in the windows. The deserted farm was surrounded by miles of fields. The gravel road north of 212 wasn’t far from the South Dakota border. Chris didn’t think Rand McNally had ever mapped it.

  He opened an umbrella as he got out of his car, but the wind bent the downpour into his clothes. He approached a young cop in a yellow slicker at the crime-scene tape and asked for Michael Altman. The kid used a wet microphone against his face to squawk out a request for the county attorney.

  Chris waited. He counted two dozen uniformed police and evidence technicians processing the scene at both buildings. They probably doubled the population in the ten square miles around the farm.

  Aquarius had chosen well. No one was likely to stumble onto his remote lair.

  The cop’s microphone came alive with a growl of static. ‘Altman’s in back,’ the kid told him. ‘Stay out of the barn.’

  Chris bent down under the crime-scene tape. Stretches of muddy tarpaulin had been laid out on the ground, leading toward the rear of the barn. Where the tarp didn’t cover, the earth was like quicksand. As he passed the open door, he peered inside and saw technicians examining empty metal shelves and a rubber-lined floor. The interior was shockingly bright against the dark day. Otherwise, the barn itself was vacant.

  When he followed the tarp behind the barn he found a brown Honda Civic hatchback parked out of sight of the road and an oversized metal garbage bin with its lid open. A makeshift tent had been staked out close to the edge of the fields, and he saw the county attorney talking to two police officers who were sifting through bags of cross-shredded paper on a long table.

  Altman gestured at him.

  ‘Aquarius is still a step ahead of us,’ the county attorney told Chris when he joined him under the tent. Rain hammered rat-tattat on the plastic. ‘He’s already gone, but he was here recently.’

  ‘Do you think he’s coming back?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The interior of the barn has been cleaned out. We’ve got spotters near the crossroads in case anyone heads this way, but I’m not counting on it. I don’t know if he smelled us on his tail or whether he’s getting ready for whatever the hell he’s planning.’

  ‘Have you found any clues about what he’s up to?’ Chris asked.

  ‘We’re just getting started. It took us two hours to get clearance to go inside. We needed to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped. Whatever he was doing, he set up a generator and a lot of interior lights. He had a vehicle inside, and based on the indentations in the rubber floor, it was heavy.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Altman said. ‘We’re beefing up security outside Mondamin. I don’t think this guy is faking. I think he’s the real deal.’

  ‘So how did you find him?’

  Altman took off his fedora and smoothed raindrops from it. He repositioned it carefully on his head and tugged on the knot of his trench coat. ‘I’d like to tell you we found this place through painstaking investigation, but in truth, we got lucky. So lucky that it can’t be an accident. Aquarius wants us to chase him.’

  ‘You think he deliberately led you here?’

  ‘I do. We lifted a fingerprint off one of the Aquarius notes and matched it to a graduate student in Ames who’s heavily involved in the fringe environmental movement. He’s been arrested at protests all over the Midwest during the last five years – including right here in Barron outside Mondamin. At that point, I figured we had him. He was Aquarius.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  The county attorney shook his head. ‘No, he’s been in jail for six weeks. An Iowa judge finally got tired of this guy being arrested for vandalism, B&E, harassment, whatever, and decided to teach him a lesson.’

  Chris shrugged. ‘So Aquarius must be one of his furry friends.’

  ‘Yes. We began looking at people in the environmental organizations he’s connected to, but the break in the case came from somewhere else. It turns out this activist has a night job at an Ames hotel. One of the things he does all the time is fix paper jams in the printer for guests who use their business center. Hence his fingerprint.’

  ‘How do you know the paper came from the hotel?’

  ‘The Iowa cops showed him one of the Aquarius notes. He said there was no way it came from a printer at any of the organizations he worked with. They only use paper with a higher recycling use of post-consumer waste. I guess that means you can still see flecks of fecal matter from the toilet paper they re-use. Anyway, he said it looked like the standard office supply stock they use at the hotel.’

  ‘So you think Aquarius stayed there?’

  Altman nodded. ‘That’s right. At first, I figured Aquarius might be setting up this kid as a fall guy. Anyone familiar with the environmental movement knows his name and knows his fingerprints would pop in the system. Then we ran a guest list at the hotel for the past six months, and one name leaped out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Vernon Clay.’

  ‘So that’s why it raised a red flag that Ashlynn was talking about him. You think Vernon is back?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Nobody at the hotel remembered him or recognized a description of him. If it’s not Vernon, it’s someone who knew we’d spot the name immediately. The address on the register led us right here to this farm. That’s not an accident. He wanted us to find the kid, find the hotel, find the guest list. He made it hard but not too hard. He wanted to get our attention.’

  Chris looked at the Honda Civic parked behind the barn. ‘What about the car?’

  ‘The Minnesota plates don’t match the VIN. We’re trying to trace it.’

  ‘If Vernon Clay really is Aquarius, has he been hiding out here?’

  ‘It doesn’t look that way. The house is largely untouched. He’s been doing his work in the barn. The property belongs to the family of a widow who passed away three years ago. None of the kids are local. The place has been vacant since she died, and they haven’t been able to sell it. Someone called them in December about renting it for a year and sent them a lump sum in cash. They didn’t ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘Did you talk to Florian?’

  ‘I did. He says there is no reason why Vernon Clay would bear a grudge against himself or Mondamin.’

  ‘What about Ashlynn? Did you tell him that she was asking questions about Vernon Clay?’

  Altman shoved his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. ‘I did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said her mind had obviously been poisoned by Glenn Magnus and his son.’

  ‘It was more than that,’ Chris said.

  ‘She knew something.’

  ‘Is that a guess, or do you know that for a fact?’

  Chris hesitated. He thought about Rollie and Tanya. ‘I’m not sure what I can say right now.’

  The county attorney didn’t hide his annoyance. ‘I’ve kept you in the loop, Mr. Hawk, because you made a connection between Ashlynn and Vernon Clay at the same time that Vernon’s name appeared in the context of our Aquarius investigation. However, the favor goes both ways. I expect you to share anything you know that might help me find this man. Whatever he’s planning, the threat is real.’

  Chris had to make a snap decision, and he chose to trust Michael Altman. ‘Ashlynn told Tanya Swenson that she had proof that Florian was involved in a cover-up connected to the deaths in St. Croix. This was the night before she was killed.’

  Altman’s lips wrinkled with distaste. ‘What kind of proof?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘So how exactly does that help me?’

  ‘Aquarius knew about it,’ Chris said.

  ‘He sent a note to Rollie Swenson warning him to keep quiet. He threatened Tanya’s life.’

  ‘Why didn’t Rollie tell me about any of this?’ Altman asked.

  ‘He’s scared for Tanya. He probably has reason to be. If Vernon Clay really is Aqua
rius, and if Ashlynn found him, then you have to admit it’s a possibility that he killed her to keep her quiet.’

  ‘Let’s wait to see how this plays out,’ Altman told him. ‘Right now, I just want to find Aquarius and stop him.’

  ‘Kirk Watson may know something,’ Chris said.

  ‘Kirk’s just a thug.’

  ‘Yes, but he works for Florian. Rollie thinks Kirk tried to assault Tanya to intimidate her into silence. There’s something else, too. Ashlynn went out with Kirk a few times last fall, but Johan said she wasn’t interested in him. It wasn’t romantic. Now I wonder if she was trolling for information about her father and Mondamin. And maybe Vernon Clay, too.’

  ‘Kirk’s not going to tell us anything. Not if it involves Florian.’

  ‘You may be too late anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Johan Magnus told Tanya he was trying to find a gun. She thinks he’s going after Kirk.’

  Altman closed his eyes and let out a slow breath in frustration. ‘It’s Pandora’s box in this town. Bad things are happening, Mr. Hawk, and I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to stop it before we all get swept away.’

  ‘I’d like to know what Ashlynn found out about her father,’ Chris said.

  The county attorney frowned, as if he were again debating how much to share. He walked away from Chris and spoke to the police who were sifting through fragments of shredded paper. When he returned, he had a sealed plastic bag in his hand. ‘Did you say that Ashlynn told Tanya Swenson that she’d found proof connecting Mondamin to the deaths in St. Croix?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  Altman held up the plastic bag. There was a single sheet of paper inside. ‘Aquarius left us another bread crumb.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Chris asked.

  ‘We found bags of shredded paper in the garbage. It will take us weeks to figure out what it all is. However, there was one page in the middle of the pile that wasn’t destroyed. This page. He obviously meant for us to find it.’

  Chris leaned closer to study the paper. The plastic was speckled with rain. He didn’t recognize the document inside, but he could see that it wasn’t a note from Aquarius. ‘What is it?’