The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

  “We didn’t lose more than a couple thousand dollars’ worth of stuff anyway,” he said. “The boss didn’t even file the insurance claims. It’s tough enough to get a rehab insured. Why file some petty claim for stuff we can afford to replace?”

  “Did you suspect any of your clients?”

  “We kind of had to suspect all of them, past and present, but we never solved it. We upped the security system, added some cameras outside, and started having someone stay here nights. We haven’t had any problems since.”

  Possibly because they had corralled their thief on their own premises and put cameras on him around the clock, Kovac thought. He would want to get a look at the security footage for the night the Chamberlains were killed to see if Krauss had been there or had gone out.

  “Do you have paperwork on Mr. Krauss?” he asked. “Driver’s license? Social Security number?”

  “I don’t have anything on file for him. I don’t even know if he has a driver’s license,” Rucker said. “He doesn’t have a car. When he works for Dan Franken, he just goes along in one of Franken’s trucks.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t have anything on this guy?” Kovac said. “That’s hard to believe, Mr. Rucker. I have to give two forms of ID and promise my firstborn kid to cash a freaking check. How do you have nothing on a guy you let live on the premises?”

  Rucker spread his hands. “Gordon isn’t a county patient, so we don’t have county paperwork. He’s considered a private client, and since the boss foots the bill, and he’s not a paid employee, what do we need from him?”

  “Does he collect veteran’s benefits? His mail must come here, right?”

  “No, it doesn’t. If he gets mail, he’s got a box somewhere. It’s none of our business.”

  Kovac rubbed his hands over his face and muttered, “Wow. We live in the age of information, and you have no information. This guy could be a mass murderer for all you know.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rucker said.

  “You don’t think so.”

  “He’s quiet, reliable, keeps to himself. He’s never caused any trouble here.”

  Here, where he had a free bed to sleep in and nobody asked any questions.

  There was no point in pursuing the conversation further. Kovac would try to get a search warrant for Krauss’s room, but he didn’t like his odds tonight. What did he have for probable cause? He couldn’t even say for certain their running man was Krauss at all. The guy had cleaned the rain gutters on the murdered couple’s house. So what? Chamberlain’s public beef had been with Dan Franken. There had been no mention of Krauss specifically in his complaint. They would run Krauss’s name through the system for wants and warrants. Maybe something would turn up—or maybe not.

  This night was getting longer by the minute.

  “Do you have a photograph of this guy?” he asked. “Or is he invisible, too?”

  “That I can help you with,” Rucker said, turning toward his computer.

  He pulled an image up on screen—himself and a lean, athletic guy in his forties with a thousand-yard stare, a head full of wavy brown hair, and a bushy beard. Rucker was smiling, looking happy. Krauss looked like someone you wouldn’t want your mother to sit next to on a city bus.

  Rucker printed a copy of the photograph for Kovac to take.

  “Can you please e-mail that to me as well?” Kovac asked, handing Rucker his business card. “If you see him, call me immediately.”

  * * *

  THE SEARCH CONTINUED FOR another hour among the rows of U-Store-It buildings, and the adjacent lot with the RVs and covered boats. Half a dozen uniformed officers and a K-9, and they never caught so much as a glimpse of their mystery man. He had vanished.

  Kovac finally pulled the plug. He would issue a BOLO for Gordon Krauss, and try to squeeze Dan Franken for some answers. If Franken felt enough loyalty to Krauss to tip him off, maybe their connection went deeper than one former addict helping out another.

  Wet and tired, he slid behind the wheel of the car. Taylor fell into the passenger’s seat like a sulky teenager, swore, and banged a fist on the dashboard.

  “I had hold of him! I had him! I let him get away!”

  He banged on the dash a few more times, cursing with each punch, then fell back in his seat, clasped his hands around the back of his head, and groaned.

  “Don’t sweat it, kid,” Kovac said. “He wanted to get away a whole hell of a lot worse than you wanted to hang on to him. Never underestimate the power of a desperate individual.”

  “What if he’s our guy?”

  “What if he’s not even Krauss?” Kovac countered. “He could be some poor homeless schmuck who crawled out of a doorway to take a leak, and suddenly people are screaming at him and jumping on him. That was some kick he gave you.”

  “That was a kick?” Taylor asked. “I thought he hit me in the head with an iron pipe.”

  “That was like something out of a kung fu movie,” Kovac said. “I wonder if he knows anything about samurai swords.”

  “I should keep looking,” Taylor muttered.

  “Every cop in Northeast is looking for him now. Don’t be a freaking martyr,” Kovac said, putting the car in gear. “You need your head examined.”

  “I’m crazy for wanting to find this guy?”

  “No. I’m taking you to the ER so they can shine a light in your eyes and ask you how many fingers you see.”

  Taylor didn’t protest, which said enough.

  “I hate to go home empty-handed,” the kid complained as they headed south.

  “We’re not,” Kovac said. “We’ve got one thing we didn’t have when we came here.”

  “A concussion?”

  “A suspect.”

  15

  Evi sat down for what seemed like the first time all day. She was tired, but in a wonderful way. They had slept in because of the ice, then Eric had cooked them his famous firehouse breakfast, with eggs and pancakes, bacon and hash browns. At Mia’s insistence they decorated their pancakes with faces, using banana slices and blueberries and strawberries and whipped cream out of a can. They had played with their daughter, then gently made love while Mia had her nap.

  A perfect day, Evi thought as she curled up on the sofa. Eric had convinced her to stay home all day. The center called to cancel the meeting she had worried about missing, making for a guilt-free afternoon. She soaked in the pleasure and joy of it all the more because she would now be without Eric for a day and a half. He had left late in the day to fill in at an ambulance service for a paramedic buddy whose wife was having a baby. His regular twenty-four-hour shift at the firehouse would begin at eight the next morning.

  She missed him already, which seemed kind of silly. They weren’t lovesick teenagers. They had been married for six years and had dated for two years before that. They should have been slightly bored with each other by now. But she still loved him so much it hurt when he was apart from her. She had never dreamed she could have a love like that. For most of her life she believed she didn’t deserve it, and for part of her life she didn’t deserve it. But she had learned that life is all about growth and change, rebirth and resurrection. And she deserved a chance at happiness as much as anyone.

  Having gone through her own metamorphosis with the help of the caring staff at Chrysalis, she had taken her second chance and had returned to the center to give back. She found her job as a social worker for at-risk girls and young women completely rewarding. She didn’t think she could ever give back to Chrysalis as much as the center had given her, but she loved trying.

  One of her current cases was a sixteen-year-old runaway named Hope Anders, who had been rescued from a sex trafficking ring. She had escaped life with her family in a strict fundamentalist cult, where she had been abused by her older brother, only to be snatched off the street by a pimp; raped, beaten, and tortured for days; and then added to his string of underage prostitutes. Hope had been through a hell Evi knew too well. The staff at Chrysalis
would help her make it to the other side of that trauma, offering health care, psychological therapy, social services, and legal aid.

  The meeting that had been canceled that afternoon regarded Hope testifying against her brother for molesting her. The girl was terrified at the prospect of her parents’ wrath. Even though they had abused her psychologically as surely as her brother had physically, there were still threads left from the ties that bind a child to the people who brought her into the world. As terrible as they were, the Anderses were the only family she had, and there was a part of her that didn’t want to let go. If she went forward with testifying against her brother, she would likely never see any of them again, except across a courtroom.

  Evi knew firsthand what a terrible thing it was to be that young and feel utterly alone in the world, knowing the people who were supposed to care about you most cared the least.

  Hope Anders was terrified. She was afraid of her parents, afraid of the religious cult, afraid of her brother, and she still had every reason to be afraid of the man who had imprisoned and profited off her on the streets.

  The pimp, known as Drago, had escaped capture. Rumors were that he could still be in the Twin Cities area. Hope would be a key witness against him when he was finally caught and brought to trial. Her continued existence was not in his best interest.

  Evi looked over her notes for the meeting, which had been rescheduled for the following afternoon, while the television kept her company. Mia, worn out from their big family play day, was tucked in bed, sound asleep. Evi planned to follow suit soon. She was already in her pajamas.

  Setting her notes aside, she turned up the volume on the TV to catch the day’s news, expecting the morning’s weather to be the biggest story of the day. Instead, the news crawl splashed across the screen with the station logo read: BRUTAL SLAYING HOME INVASION ROBBERY.

  A history professor from the University of Minnesota and his wife had been killed in their home. Evi listened to the details with shock and horror at the sheer brutality of the attack, making a mental note to triple-check the locks tonight. The neighborhood where the crime had taken place, considered a very safe and desirable area to live, wasn’t that far away.

  Evi found herself instantly wishing Eric hadn’t volunteered to work for his friend. Their cozy little house in their quiet neighborhood suddenly felt like a fishbowl. She realized anyone could be outside, staring in through the windows.

  What was the world coming to when someone would do something like this: beating and slashing a middle-aged couple to death in their own home? For what? For whatever the perpetrator could carry away? A few hundred or a few thousand dollars’ worth of stuff?

  Evi got up before the story was over and went around the house, checking the locks on every door and window, flinching at every shadow as she went. When she came back to the living room, she changed the channel to a cooking show and sat down to sort through the mail, thinking the mundane task would calm her.

  Sale flyer, sale flyer, coupon, coupon. NEED A PLUMBER? CALL PETE! Bill, bill, bill. A small envelope addressed to her in block print: EVANGELINE BURKE.

  It looked the size of an invitation or a thank-you note. She tried to think if she had been expecting either. There was no return address. No one she knew called her by her full name. She didn’t use it. She never had. She didn’t use it professionally. She didn’t even use it on her checks. She had only kept the shortest version of it possible to save the expense of legally changing it. Who would send an envelope hand-lettered to someone she had never really been?

  She opened the envelope slowly, a strange sense of apprehension filling her chest as she extracted the note. She stared at it, a terrible chill spreading through her.

  An otherwise blank piece of ivory paper with two lines in black ink.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

  I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

  Evi’s hands began to tremble. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  Why would anyone send her such a thing? She was no one special, just a social worker, a wife, a mom living a normal life.

  The chill went through her again like a shard of ice. She was a social worker for Hope Anders, who had been threatened by a cult and by her own family. Hope Anders, who was potentially the target of a vicious criminal being hunted by law enforcement.

  Evi had never equated her job with danger to herself. While the girls and young women she helped may have come out of dangerous circumstances, her job was simply helping them navigate the social services system. She was no threat to anyone. She didn’t even know where Hope Anders was staying. The addresses of the safe houses used by Chrysalis were known to only a few people. Evi was not one of them.

  She worked at the Chrysalis offices downtown, in a nondescript building just a few blocks from the Hennepin County Government Center, where the courts were located. Her name wasn’t on the letterhead. It wasn’t on the door. Grace Underhill, the founder of Chrysalis, was the public face of the nonprofit, along with Kate Quinn, who served as an advocate and liaison between the young women and the prosecutor’s office and law enforcement.

  But Evi had been quoted in the article the Star Tribune ran on the center. She had been included in one of the photographs.

  Still, why would anyone seek her out?

  She turned the envelope over again, as if she thought a return address might magically appear to answer her questions. Stupid. Then it occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t be handling the envelope or the note at all.

  She popped up from the sofa and went to the kitchen, her skin crawling at the feeling that someone might be watching her as she passed through the house, catching glimpses of her through the blinds in the dining room as she hurried to get to the kitchen. She pulled open a drawer and yanked out a Ziploc bag, then hurried back to the living room and maneuvered the note and envelope into it, trying not to touch the paper any more than she absolutely had to.

  She left the bagged note on the side table and stood back with her hands on her hips, staring at it as if it might morph into something. Maybe if she stared at it long enough, it would become an invitation to a holiday party or a thank-you for the baby monitor she had given her friend Kim at her baby shower.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

  I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

  What should she do? Should she call Eric at work? And tell him what? A strange thing came in the mail . . . ?

  She didn’t want to make a fuss. She didn’t want to inconvenience him. She shouldn’t disturb him at work.

  Old rules with hard consequences came back to her so easily. It didn’t matter how long ago they had been instilled, or how long since they had been enforced. She called herself stupid before that terrible voice in her memory could do it.

  Why should she bother Eric with her nerves over nothing? The note wasn’t even a threat. Would she call the police over it? No. They would laugh at her, roll their eyes, mock her when they got back into their car and drove away. She knew it happened. She’d seen it happen . . . and she knew what happened after they went . . . Not here, not now, not in this life, but the memory of it was so strong she could taste the copper of blood in her mouth.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

  That was no secret.

  I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

  Obviously so. She didn’t like that idea, but anyone could look up Eric’s name in the phone directory. If the mysterious “I” knew who she was, then he or she knew she was married to Eric. They weren’t living under witness protection.

  Her husband was not the only Eric Burke in the Twin Cities, she remembered with the sudden hope that the note had been delivered by mistake. There was another Eric Burke! Eric’s second cousin—

  But she was the only Evangeline Burke.

  No one called her by that name. She didn’t use it. She never had.

  She hugged herself and paced the small room, chewing on a thumbnail. She shouldn’t have looked at the mail. If she hadn’t opened the envelope, she would have been in bed asleep
by now, blissfully ignorant, dreaming of her perfect day and her perfect life.

  Her heart was racing. She was breathing hard. Angry with herself, she went to the front door and checked the locks again. She went to the kitchen and checked the patio slider. She went to the back door and unlocked and relocked the deadbolt.

  Enough, she told herself. God, how disheartening it was to have those old thoughts and old patterns of self-loathing rise to the surface like they’d never left her—because they had never left her. No matter how she weighed them down with common sense and cognitive therapy, they could always slip loose and rise.

  No. No, she wouldn’t allow it. She had worked too hard to be stronger. She had tattooed the word on her chest above her heart. STRONGER.

  Nothing had happened, really, she told herself. Nothing could happen. She and Mia were safe inside their home. She was going to go upstairs to bed, and she was going to sleep. In the morning, she would take the note to work with her and show it to Grace and to Kate, just so they would know, just in case they got one, too. If this was something tied to Hope Anders, or to the article in the paper, all the directors at Chrysalis had probably gotten one just to shake them up. Kate would know what to do with it or about it. That would be that.

  Hanging on tight to her false bravado, Evi turned off the television, left the lamp on, and went upstairs. She checked on her sleeping daughter, not allowing herself to go into the softly lit room. She didn’t want Mia to wake and sense her mother’s tension. Her daughter deserved better than to have her innocence tainted by her mother’s bad memories—no matter how badly Evi ached to go in and kneel down beside her bed and kiss her cheek and feel her daughter’s soft breath.

  She went to her own room and pretended to be normal, brushing her teeth and washing her face. She climbed into bed with just the nightlight on and burrowed into the pillows. She pulled Eric’s pillow close and breathed in his scent, trying to calm herself. She went through the exercises she had been taught: breathe slowly, breathe deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth.