“What’s ‘up the food chain’ from a pimp, you think? You think we have time to play by the rules here?”
She kept her arm up—I will find you—felt it shaking as she pointed at Dale Hill. “He knows her name. He knows who he sold her to.” She kept pointing through the pain. “You want to worry about your charges? You think you can’t pick him up tomorrow for the same shit? What’s he going to do, Chief, outsmart you? We do this job to protect people, and there’s a girl in danger right now.”
Johannsen winced again. He glanced at Yttri and ran his hand across the top of his head. By the time his palm had cleared his haircut twice, he was faintly nodding.
* * *
“Pepper,” Dale Hill told them a few minutes later. “All I know. Can I go now?”
“Nickname or real name?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
He was acting jaunty now that he thought he was about to walk away. He was shoving up the sleeves of his blazer, crossing his arms to show his prison tats.
“Last name?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“What were you doing with her in my library? And remember, I have two witnesses. First lie you tell, the deal’s off. You’re coming with me for battery. Homicide if you get unlucky.”
“Settling a bet.”
“What bet?”
“Little bitch said her brother hit six home runs in a baseball game up there. I mean, I know baseball, I played. But it turns out that really happened. Her brother really hit six home runs. Too bad the librarian helped her, so she cheated.”
The sheriff felt her hands jitter as she scrolled through the photo gallery on her phone, looking for the box score. No, it was on the phone that went into the river. But maybe she could recall it. Come on, the guy who hit six home runs. She had said his name to Harley.
“Greengrass,” she blurted to Johannsen. “Her name is Pepper Greengrass.”
Johannsen said, “That’s a Ho-Chunk name. There’s an extended Greengrass family around here. Some of them are tribal leaders, good folks. There are a few others that law enforcement knows pretty well. I’ll get an officer on it right away.”
The sheriff said to Dale Hill, “You sold her to someone. His name.”
He recrossed his arms and stonewalled.
“Nah, man. Like I said, she just asked me for a ride. I was going to this party so she went along. I never held no gun to her head. She went home with some other dude.”
She leaned in so close she could smell his body odor, his breath. Fucking dead inside.
“My mistake, Mr. Hill. You never sold her. She left with someone else. You see that?” Behind her, Johannsen had opened the door. “Describe the dude she went with.”
* * *
Back at the Bad Axe County Public Safety Building, she used the toilet. She splashed her face with cold water. Yttri had taken an accident call. Denise was just arriving. She demanded the keys to Denise’s old flatbed truck.
The man Dale Hill had described?
He was the same man who last week came to the grade school in a white van to shoot Ophelia’s class picture.
Hans Kling.
43
In Denise’s truck she sped through the dense warm rain out County Highway C to Kling Kountry Kamera. She smashed through the flooded ditch at Hans Kling’s turnoff. She turned out the truck’s lights and drove the long length of his driveway toward his dark studio. She exited Old Alimony with her fingers on the snap of her holster, her heart pumping.
But no one came to Kling’s door. She looked in the garage. A sad-sack Chevy sedan, but not Kling’s white business van, his mobile studio. The white van was gone. She put the butt of her flashlight through a glass pane in his back door, opened it, and went in. The converted farmhouse was so small, so achingly familiar, so easy for a coulee girl to search.
Pepper Greengrass wasn’t there.
* * *
“Nightshift crew meeting in five, Heidi.”
“I’m back,” she told Denise. “I’m just turning off the highway.”
“Police and Fire Commission just gaveled in for the hearing on your accident at the river. I said they’d have to wait for you to get your crew out.”
“Actually, tell them to pull up a stool and wait for the cows to give chocolate milk. What’s a Crawford County cruiser doing in our parking lot?”
“Sheriff Skog just showed up. He plans to ask Police and Fire what you think you’re doing down on his turf. Last week, did you try to talk his county clerk into pulling some old files for you? And then threaten to sue?”
“I was out of uniform, driving a minivan, a member of the public, and I got a little upset. That’s all.”
“I think the DA down there is on your side. She came to see you yesterday, remember? But Skog wants to bust your lady balls. You probably need to show up and tell Police and Fire what you just told me.”
“Tell Police and Fire to tell Skog that after the cows give chocolate milk, they can all settle back and wait for strawberry.”
“Heidi.”
“What.”
“Sooner or later, you need a better story about why you left Walt Beavers last night and ended up in the river.”
“I don’t have time for this, Denise. We don’t. Pepper Greengrass doesn’t.”
* * *
“This’ll do it for the Dairy Queen,” Deputy Eleffson was suggesting as the sheriff entered the squad room with her phone to her ear. The call rang on the other end, she was asked to choose a language, then it rang some more. “She can’t file for election now, while she’s under investigation. Anybody know if she filed yet?”
“She’s filed her nails, that’s it so far. I’m just kidding.”
Yttri’s voice broke in. “Shut the hell up, Schwem.” He was back from his accident call, blood on his pants. “You’re not kidding and you’re not funny.”
Sick with urgency, the sheriff cut right through their noise to the window, hoping to connect the call before her meeting started. Did she know the extension of the party she would like to reach? She heard Eleffson ask the question she was wondering about. “So where’s our former acting interim sheriff?”
Denise hustled in. “Boog Lund just called in dick.”
“What?” Eleffson’s eyes widened. “Did you just say dick?”
“I said dick.”
“Hey,” Schwem protested, “isn’t that sexual harassment?”
“You wish,” Denise corrected him.
“I feel threatened.”
“Shut the hell up, Schwem,” Yttri growled again.
“Heidi,” Denise said quietly into her ear, “Harley just called me. He said you’re not answering his texts. He said someone called the house and threatened you.”
A third prerecording booted the sheriff down another phone tree. Rain pounded the window. The field beyond the ambulance had filled with water that reflected the parking lot lights. Denise whispered, “Threatened you in nozzle pressure, Harley said, pounds per square inch. Really weird, he said.”
Vaguely the sheriff nodded and waved her away.
“Called in dick is when you can’t come to work because you’re a dick,” Denise explained on her way out.
“I don’t feel safe in my workplace,” Eleffson said.
“Shut the hell up.”
“Wait,” Schwem said. “Did I forget my thermos?”
They continued to bicker and banter around Sheriff Kick while she climbed her way down the phone tree at the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, the number that Dave from the National Insurance Crime Bureau had given her. The center was in Washington, DC. In the end, at the root of the tree, it was after hours, the center was closed, and she was asked to leave a message. She backed out and dialed the hotline number linked to something called the Polaris Project. It was for victims, survivors, families, service providers—not law enforcement. But she had touched all those bases already, triggered the Amber Alert. She was putting the name Pe
pper Greengrass out into the broader web of NGOs. At last a person answered and began to ask the sheriff questions.
“We don’t know yet,” she told the operator. “Pepper may or may not be her legal name. The local police are working that end for us, trying to locate her family. I’ll update when I can.”
“Age?”
“We don’t know yet. Her pimp says eighteen.”
“Of course he did.” The woman had a strong Southern accent. “Whatever the man says, subtract two. Last seen, where, and with whom?”
“Last night, Bad Axe County, Wisconsin, with a local man named Hans Kling.”
“Height, weight, distinguishing features?”
The sheriff shared what Gabby Grimes had observed about Pepper Greengrass in the library, before Dale Hill had punched Harold Snustead and put everything in motion. “About five six, a hundred pounds, long dark hair and brown skin. She’s at least part Ho-Chunk.”
“I’m sorry, What-Chunk?”
“It’s a tribe. Ho-Chunk. Winnebago is another name. We believe her family resides in or near a place called Wisconsin Dells.”
“Missing since?”
“Nobody’s reported her missing.”
The woman went silent, except for fingernails on a keyboard. The silence became so sustained that the sheriff worried she had just disqualified Pepper Greengrass from the database. It gutted her that nobody close to Pepper Greengrass had reported her missing.
Finally the woman from Polaris spoke again. “But you have this girl confirmed in the presence of an adult male not related? And evidence of sex trade?”
Relief. “Actually, two men. A pimp, Dale Hill, and I’m betting that our local guy, Hans Kling, is a pornographer. So, evidence of sex trade, yes.”
“And anyone with information should contact?”
“Tips should come to us. The Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department.”
She ended the call and looked at her deputies. All the chitchat had stopped when she had laid down her wager that Hans Kling was a pornographer. The idea hung out there in silence until Denise rushed back in.
“Mudslide. That bluff above the Turkey Hill Trailer Park collapsed on one of the mobile homes. Somebody might be in there, they can’t tell.”
Caught in the middle of a shift change, she considered her options.
“Deputy Schwem, that’s you, please. Hopefully everybody is accounted for. On the way back, check all taverns on the route for Hans Kling. Detain if found.”
He left right away.
“Now, you guys heard me. That’s our ten fifty-seven, a girl named Pepper Greengrass, missing and endangered. Deputies heading off duty, I want at least five taverns each before you get home, work it out amongst yourselves. Talk to the barflies. Detain Kling if you find him.”
“I’m staying on,” Yttri clarified for her. “Interim chief deputy to the reinstated interim sheriff. I won’t file overtime.”
The sheriff kept moving. “Deputy Eleffson?”
“Yo.”
“Kling’s mobile studio van was gone. Maybe he’s on location somewhere. Maybe there’s an event tonight, a reception, a game, a rodeo, whatever. Get to his website if he has one and find out who his big clients are.”
When the rest of the deputies had gone, Yttri trailed her into her office. She slumped into her desk chair, her mouth and eyes dry. Yttri studied her. “You heard me, right? I’m filling in for Lund tonight. I know there’s no money. And if I get hurt I won’t file a claim.”
“You should go home, get some rest.”
“Not until you do.”
She sighed. A few long seconds slipped by. She tweaked her computer mouse. Brock Pabst’s blow to her upper arm had evolved into a deep ache that pounded through the rest of her soreness. She minimized screens to see her desktop background: bright light, bright colors, big smiles, her photo of Harley and the kids canoeing on the Kickapoo River last summer, shot by her from the stern, the Kick family in love with one another, and in love with this place.
She glanced up. Yttri was knitting his big hands together as he leaned back in a chair, his chest stretching open and his eyelids fluttering as if he were viewing something inside his head. He winced. The sheriff looked away, refreshed her screen on the Polaris Project to see if Pepper Greengrass had registered on the missing/endangered clearinghouse website. Of course not, not yet. Urgency and inertia had crashed together—law enforcement work in a nutshell.
She tried to change her channel, fill some time. “You never played baseball?”
Yttri’s eyes came open, a startled soft gray. “Me? Nah.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Not a jock.”
She looked at him: that size, that grace. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“What makes you not a jock?”
“Loyalty to my mom. My Pee Wee League football coach called us girls all the time—ladies, ballerinas, Girl Scouts, beauty queens, princesses. Little League, the coach called us pussies and twats. I finally asked my mom why. She said, ‘Because women are disgusting, aren’t they? They’re meat? Isn’t that part of sports?’ And she was right. Not to every guy. Maybe even most guys in sports are not actually like that. But it’s kind of a groupthink thing, and on every team there were always just enough guys on that same page that I’d rather hunt and fish.”
All of thirty seconds had passed. The sheriff refreshed the screen. Not yet. She began to scroll through the database, composed almost entirely of missing girls and women, a few boys.
“Where’d you grow up again?”
“North of Green Bay. Lived around there until I got this job eight years ago.”
“So you never went wild with the boys at some secret strip party in a barn?”
“Worst thing I did was read a stolen Playboy up in my tree stand.” His lean toward her pulled her eyes from the screen. “Heidi . . . are you OK?”
“Why?”
“It looks like this is getting to you, that’s all. Back there in the Dells . . .”
She raised a hand to stop him. “Let’s just do the job.”
She was looking into the face of a missing girl from Idaho, realizing she could sort by region, where a girl was from and/or where she was last seen. She filtered for Wisconsin-Iowa-Illinois-Minnesota and scrolled through the postings, transfixed by the roster of tragedies.
Missing/Endangered . . .
Missing/Runaway . . .
Missing/Abducted . . .
Her eyes blurred with tears at the snapshots of missing girls, all of them between eleven and seventeen, and their age-progressed photos.
Age-progressed . . .
The computer projections broke her heart, how the technology gave these girls futures, tracked them into lives they had never lived. The software seemed so sensitive and accurate that even personality traits revealed in the original picture evolved with digital precision. A real girl looked at the camera with a cold hint of suspicion at age fourteen. Ten years later, the bloated rage beneath her defeat seemed stirringly real.
Age now: 35.
Age now: 41.
Age now: 25.
These girls were dead. That was the unspoken truth. Their lives were over. It was their bodies that were missing. Their families . . . the grief they must feel . . . the fear . . . the incapacitating anger . . . knowing a killer is out there.
She stopped suddenly. She bit her bottom lip and leaned in, squinting into the screen, feeling her breath catch. In this lost girl’s shiny blond hair . . . was she looking at a pair of blue butterfly barrettes, just like the one she had seen on Walt Beavers’s shelf? She brought up the photo Yttri had retaken. It was the same barrette, or one exactly like it.
“What’s up?” He had noticed her heightened distress. “Is our girl on the board yet?”
“No. Open that.”
She pointed to the red-bound volume of Bad Axe Broadcasters at the edge of her desk. “Where I’ve got the marker.”
&
nbsp; Her screen said Missing/Runaway. This girl was plain and pale, with a shy smile and shiny blond hair that was swept back from her temples and pinned with a blue butterfly on each side. A thin gold necklace, worn on the outside of a white turtleneck, disappeared across her shallow bust at the bottom of the photograph. This was a high school portrait, for sure.
She glanced up. Yttri was flipping the large, brittle pages of old newspapers. She looked back to her screen. Age-progressed, the girl looked heavier, bustier, plainer, her paleness seeming light deprived, her eyes distant inside deep, bruiselike circles. She read down:
AGE NOW: 20
DOB: 8/15/1996
GENDER: Female
RACE: Unknown
HAIR COLOR: Blond
EYE COLOR: Blue
HEIGHT: 5'2"
WEIGHT: 110
MISSING FROM: Waukon, Iowa
MISSING SINCE: August 3, 2012
LAST SEEN: Farmstead, WI, August 12, 2012 (unconfirmed)
CONTACT: Allamakee County Sheriff’s Department, (563) 468-4900
She scrolled up to see the name: Sophie Ringensetter. She reached into her breast pocket, touched the photograph of Harley and the girl, felt past it to find the necklace beneath. She laid the necklace on her desk. Sophie. Her fingers clumsily nudged the broken chain, spreading it as if to make room for the girl’s neck. Sophie Ringensetter had been sixteen.
Her hand felt damp and clumsy as she reached back into her pocket for the photograph of her husband with the girl at the Ease Inn. She touched it, stalled. She pulled it up and glanced. Age, hair color, eye color—and the date—all the same. Oh, God. Karen, Harley had told her, was the name of the girl he claimed he tried to help. Should she check with the La Crosse County Sheriff’s Department, check their records, to see if his story was true? Why did trust keep slipping away? Pages riffled. Yttri said, “What am I looking for here?”
“Story about a missing girl. It won’t be on the sports page, but that same issue.” Her own voice sounded alien. “I’m going to guess it wasn’t just the game that Walt Beavers closed the book on.”
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