by Steven James
Only after I’d finished my sentence did I realize I’d been calling her by her first name this whole conversation. Over the last eighteen months as she’d moved up the career ladder it’d taken me a long time to get used to referring to her by her title rather than her first name, and I still wasn’t used to calling her Director Wellington. Probably never would be.
“Donnie was ex-military, and the Navy is pressuring us to have someone investigate it. They want to know if this was a murder/suicide, or if his death was accidental.”
“So his death was confirmed?”
A pause. “No. Not yet.”
“So he might still be alive?”
“We don’t know much of anything at this point.” She dodged my question. “That’s why I want you to look into this.”
I imagined that the pressure from the Navy had a lot to do with her decision to make this a Bureau matter, but still, I couldn’t figure out why she’d mentioned the snowmobile accident first, considering it was much less serious than a double homicide. Things just weren’t adding up here. “I want you to go up there,” she went on, “have a look around. I’m sending Jake with you. He’s good at what he does.”
It went unstated, but I guessed she’d added that last comment because she was aware of my history with Jake Vanderveld, how reticent I was to work with him. I left the topic untouched.
“I can’t leave the Reiser case right now, Margaret,” I said. “We’re closing in. He’s in the area.”
“Torres and his team will find him. I need you in Woodborough.”
“I work serial offenses, Margaret, not-”
“You’re the most experienced agent anywhere in the area,” she told me bluntly. “You notice what needs to be noticed.” Coming from her, the words were a sudden, unexpected compliment.
I rubbed my head. “A sheriff’s deputy who’s investigating what appears to be an accidental drowning contacts the FBI Lab-and within forty minutes of identifying a missing man’s deceased wife and daughter, the Navy brass is pressuring the Bureau to look into the case? What’s really going on here, Margaret? There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“You know everything I know,” she said tersely. “Woodborough is eighty-five miles north of you. Go up there, have a look around, and clear this up. There’s a storm moving into your area. Interstate 94 is already shut down east of Fargo, and you’re going to get hit hard.” She paused for a moment as if to process what she’d just said. “I’ll send up one of the ERT agents from the Reiser investigation later tonight to process the scene of the Pickron homicides, but I want you to head up the investigation.”
“Margaret, this is all-”
“Patrick, I’m very busy. I’m not pulling you from the Reiser case. Just go to Woodborough. Figure this out. I’ll talk with you in the morning. I’ve told the sheriff’s department to hold the scene and wait for your arrival.”
I looked around the trailer, exasperated. “What about Reiser?”
“If SWAT finds him I’ll have Torres watch him until you and Jake can drive back down. Beyond that, it’ll take the ERT a couple of days to go through the contents of his trailer. Until then, look into the double homicide.”
“Or triple.”
“Triple?”
“If Donnie was murdered too. We don’t know yet. Not until we find his body.”
“Of course. I’ll call Jake. Inform him of what’s going on.” Without saying good-bye she hung up.
Frustrated, I jammed my cell into my pocket. Torres had pulled the shades open to get more light into the trailer, and now, outside the window, I saw Jake answer his phone.
A glance at my watch.
4:46 p.m. I could hardly believe it was just over twenty minutes since we’d moved on the trailer.
From my infrequent visits to my brother’s house, I knew that from here most of the drive to Woodborough would be on county roads rather than interstate, so depending on how icy the roads were, we might not get up there until 8:00. And only then would I be able to start looking over the scene.
This was going to be a long night.
But then there was the matter of Sean.
I’d only be fifteen miles from his house.
Yesterday when I met up with Jake in Madison and drove over here, I’d convinced myself that Merrill was far enough away to justify not getting together with Sean. But now that I’d be just minutes away, I couldn’t come up with a way to politely avoid at least inviting him out for coffee. And I imagined that Amber, his wife, would also want to see me.
And seeing her would be even harder than meeting up with my brother.
4
I took one more look around the trailer, then stepped outside.
The sun had dipped below a silo nestled on the horizon, and the Wisconsin countryside was draped in one long winter shadow. In the day’s fading light I could see the SWAT guys moving methodically through the trailer park, stopping at one door after another.
Until I had a chance to assess the situation in Woodborough, I wouldn’t know how much time I’d actually have available to see Sean, so I decided to put off calling him for the time being. However, since I’d been planning to meet my stepdaughter, Tessa Ellis, here in Merrill tomorrow afternoon so I could show her around some of the areas I’d lived in as a child, I figured I’d give her a shout right away to tell her about my change of plans.
This week she was visiting the University of Minnesota for a special weeklong three-credit winter session for academically gifted seniors considering attending in the fall. After seeing her SAT scores, the U of M was so bent on recruiting her that they’d sent an admissions officer to meet with her at our home in Denver in October, before her dramatic grade point slide this last semester.
With her academic record, I doubted she needed a class on research methodology, but since her parents had attended U of M, I wasn’t surprised she’d agreed to sign up for the class, at least to check out the campus.
Of course, maybe now that both her mother and father were gone, it could have simply been a way for her to honor their memory.
Four members of the Bureau’s Evidence Response Team entered the trailer, and I walked toward the driveway to get some privacy for the call. Last weekend I’d decided my investigation took precedence over chauffeuring Tessa around the Midwest, so I’d arranged for a rental car for her, and though someone her age wasn’t officially supposed to drive one, the Bureau has an arrangement with rental car companies at every major airport. With my credentials I was able to swing it.
She didn’t answer, so I left her a voicemail explaining what was going on. “If this storm hits early, I may need you to stay in the Cities for another day or two. Talk to you soon.”
Then I returned the body armor to the SWAT guys, and by the time I arrived at the car, Jake was waiting for me.
“Well,” he said, “I guess this is another case we’ll be working together.”
“Yes.”
Being over six feet tall I had to stoop to get into the rental car. I slid into the driver’s seat, Jake climbed in the other side. “Director Wellington says you have a brother in the area.”
“Does she?” I started the engine.
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Yes.” I turned the car around and headed for the highway. “I have a brother.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sean-but if you don’t mind I’d rather stick to the case right now than talk about-”
“Right. Of course.” He overdramatized the words. “Didn’t mean to pry.”
A moment passed. “It’s all right. Did Margaret mention which ERT agent she was sending up to process the scene?”
“Natasha Farraday. She had a few things to wrap up here; should get to Woodborough around 8:30.”
What Natasha lacked in experience, she made up for in persistence. A good choice.
Jake positioned his iPad 2 on his lap. “Director Wellington had the deputy who sent in the photos o
f the snowmobile tracks to the Lab, guy named Bryan Ellory, send us the crime scene photos of the house.”
“So, preliminary police reports?”
He tapped the screen. “Looks it, yeah.”
“Read me what we have.”
Jake opened the files, I found the highway and headed north as the glow along the western horizon drained slowly into night.
Alexei collected his baggage from carousel 6 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and headed to the Avis reservation desk. He was traveling under the name of Neil Kreger and had a midsized sedan waiting for him.
Neil Kreger.
He mentally reviewed this identity’s family history, work experience, previous residential addresses, habits, interests. The sum of a life never lived.
It was just over a four-hour drive to Elk Ridge, Wisconsin. He’d hoped to arrive earlier, but as it turned out, the day’s work schedule had not allowed for that.
It’d been a busy morning, first chatting with Rear Admiral Colberg and then setting everything up for his regrettable fatal car accident near Cedarville State Forest in Brandywine, Maryland, not far from his home.
Before boarding his plane to the Twin Cities, Alexei heard that, unfortunately, Dashiell Collet had not survived the night. Erin had, however-awakening just as Valkyrie predicted she would-only to learn of her father’s death. Situations like that were one of the painful downsides of Alexei’s line of work, and though he tried not to dwell on them, he could not help but feel sympathetic toward the girl’s plight.
Ideally, arriving tonight would give Alexei enough time to look into the background of the three Eco-Tech members before his 1:00 meeting with them tomorrow afternoon at the Schoenberg Inn, famous as one of the northwoods locations gangsters used back in the early 1900s when they traveled up from Chicago to northern Wisconsin to elude the law.
With the hidden prohibition-era poker rooms and underground escape routes into the neighboring national forest, the Schoenberg had served John Dillinger and his men well. As far as Alexei knew, Valkyrie had arranged to use it for the meeting, no doubt paying the manager more than enough to obtain full access to the parts of the hotel no longer open to the public.
Alexei’s GRU contact still had no leads on Valkyrie. Nikolai was well connected and even had ways of getting into the US government’s federal agency databases, but so far had come up empty.
That surprised Alexei.
And intrigued him.
He arrived at the Avis desk. “Neil Kreger,” he said with a smile. He handed his license to the frizzy-haired, baggy-eyed woman behind the counter. “I’ll be the only driver.”
5
As we passed the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest on the way to Woodborough, Jake gave me his thoughts about the information contained in the police reports.
“Looks like we have a single EAMD,” he said, referring to the four locations every murder includes-the site of the initial encounter between the killer and the victim, the attack (which might include abduction), the murder itself, and the dump site.
When all four occur in a single location, it makes it harder to develop a geoprofile since you have only one site to work with. On the other hand, when a body is found in a home like this, evidence is preserved, making the site an ideal crime scene from a forensic standpoint.
Jake spoke for a few more minutes about the reasons why husbands shoot their families. Textbook, fill-in-the-blanks profiling that might or might not be pertinent to this case. I did my best to give him my attention, keeping my points of contention to myself.
“From my experience,” he said, “with a crime like this he won’t have spent too much time with the bodies.”
Jake had been in the Bureau eight years, a second career after working as a forensic psychologist in the Midwest: Rockford, Madison, a short stay in Cincinnati. With a master’s in abnormal psychology from Cornell, experience consulting with law enforcement, counseling rape victims, and an impressive curriculum vitae, the Bureau was glad to have him. Now he was based out of Quantico, Virginia, at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. But he was a man who tended to jump to conclusions too soon based on gut instincts and “experience” rather than relying solely on the evidence, and I avoided working with him whenever I could-but he’d requested the Reiser case, Ralph had approved it, and here we were in Wisconsin together.
In the conversational lull following Jake’s words, I called Deputy Ellory, the officer who’d contacted the FBI Lab to see if they could identify the snowmobile tracks. The whole situation struck me as incongruous. Multiple homicides in a rural area and a possible suicide, and a deputy rather than the sheriff was taking the lead on this? It didn’t make sense.
Ellory picked up. A quick greeting, then I asked, “What made you think to call the Bureau?”
“I figured they’d have the fastest ways to look up the model of the sled. You know, like when they have tire track databases or something.” He sounded young enough to still be in high school. “How they do all that stuff on CSI.”
Honestly, it was a good idea. Most agents I’ve worked with wouldn’t even have thought of it. “Okay. Tell me about the house.”
“Well, actually, I wasn’t there too long. Your director told us to leave. Lizzie, we found upstairs. Mrs. Pickron-Ardis-she was on the steps. She was shot in the back. Probably with a. 30–06.”
There was no mention in the police reports about the murder weapon being found. “Did you find cartridge casings?”
“No. That’s just what it looked like.”
“What it looked like?”
“The bullet hole, the entry wound. I hunt. You get to know gunshot wounds pretty good.”
He would have to know GSWs incredibly well to distinguish between calibers on an entry wound-I wasn’t even sure it was possible. Exit wounds yes, but Jake waved a couple fingers to get my attention. “Ask him about Donnie.”
I said to Ellory, “Have you found Donnie Pickron or recovered his body?”
“No.”
If the stretch of water was wide enough, we might have a chance at getting divers in to find him. “Any divers up there who can search the area?”
“Far as I know there’s just one guy around here who dives-Denny Jacobson. But he’s down in Florida this month. Visiting relatives, I think. Parents moved there last year, you know. But Donnie’s body is obviously down in that lake somewhere.”
We didn’t have nearly enough facts yet to know what was obvious and what was not, but I decided that pointing that out might not get us off on the right foot. “I was told there were no boot or shoe impressions, just the Ski-Doo tracks.”
“That’s right.”
“Has it snowed recently? Is there any chance footprints might have been covered or obscured?”
“No.”
“Are you a snowmobiler?”
“Everyone around here is.”
Growing up in Wisconsin I’d ridden my share of snowmobiles, but I hadn’t been on a sled in over fifteen years. Putting the question of the sled’s weight and the thickness of the ice aside for the moment, I said, “I understand this will depend on the speed, but how far do you think a Ski-Doo 800 XL would go without someone squeezing the throttle?”
“Let’s see… the trail along the lakeshore is pretty steep. I’d say he couldn’t have been going more than thirty miles per hour. Forty tops. That would mean…” He paused, obviously evaluating how that would relate to my question. “I guess it would cruise twenty, thirty yards maybe. But it went under a hundred yards from shore.”
Tonight when we arrived it would be too dark to get a good look at the lake, at least not with respect to its orientation to the surrounding terrain. We could check it out in the morning.
“We’ll be at the house in about twenty-five minutes. Does it work for you to meet us at the Pickrons’?”
“You betcha.”
End call.
The full moon, the first of the year, had risen, and fr
om where it hung low in the sky it looked impossibly round and bright, like an unblinking orange eye staring at us from the heavens. Its light reflected boldly off the snow, lending a surreal feeling to the evening, a spectral glow whispering across the fields.
Jake broke the brief silence. “So, they haven’t found him yet?”
“Not yet. No.”
He typed a few notes into his iPad. I hopped off Highway 77 and began winding down the county roads that led to the Pickron residence just outside of Woodborough.
6
We’d missed supper, but Jake and I swung through a gas station and grabbed some snacks to tide us over. Now, I crumpled up my Snickers bar wrapper, set it between the seats, and turned onto the long winding driveway that led to the Pickron house.
A frozen marsh bordered the house on the north and west sides, and in the headlights I could see vast clumps of dead marsh grass cutting through the crust of snow. From the maps Jake had pulled up, I knew a forest lay south of the house.
The closest residence I’d seen on the way here was about half a mile down the road.
The house lay at the top of a rise that would have given the family a beautiful wide-open view to the north. We parked beside one of the cruisers out front, I grabbed my laptop bag, and as we walked up the snow-packed path toward the porch, I took a moment to note the snowmobile tracks on the side of the house closest to the woods. In the brisk moonlight I noticed that two pairs of boot prints led to them from the side door.
Deputy Ellory, a baby-faced twentysomething guy with sandy-colored hair and slightly vacant eyes, was waiting for us by the front door.
Two state troopers flanked him, and I asked them to wait outside. They nodded without saying a word, but the hard look on their faces told me how deeply the murders had affected them. How committed they would be to catching the killer.
Good.