The Burying Place

by Brian Freeman

  Stride wasn't surprised. Denise's body language had been eloquent since she showed up at the cabin. He had simply been waiting for her to say it out loud: this wasn't a kidnapping.

  'I can't prove it,' she went on. 'I know that instincts are crap compared to evidence, but this is what my gut tells me.'

  'Instincts count for a lot with me,' Stride said. 'Fill me in.'

  Denise crouched down and dipped her hand in the lake and rubbed her wet fingers together. She got up and wiped her hand on her sleeve. 'He's arrogant, and I know being arrogant isn't a crime. But it's not just that.'

  'Then what?'

  'I know him,' Denise said. 'Valerie and Marcus have been married for eight years. She figured out pretty quickly that winning the prize isn't as exciting as going after it.'

  'Meaning what?'

  'Meaning Marcus is exactly what you see. A cold prick. He doesn’t love anything or anyone except himself.'

  'He's a bad husband,' Stride said. 'That's still not a crime.'

  'Maybe so, but Marcus never wanted kids. He was clear about that with Valerie before they got married. No kids. He wanted money, work, travel, all the perks, and nothing to tie him down.'

  'Why did Valerie agree to marry him if that's not what she wanted?'

  'Oh, please. Valerie wanted Marcus Glenn, and that's all she was thinking about. She convinced herself she didn't want kids. She figured having Marcus was enough. She sobered up real fast about that.'

  'So what changed?'

  Denise's face darkened. 'About five years ago, Valerie swallowed down half a bottle of aspirin. It was a close call. We nearly lost her.'

  'What prompted it?' Stride asked.

  'If you ask me, she was so lonely she couldn't handle it anymore. That's when she told Marcus she wanted a baby.'

  'What did he say?'

  'Your wife's in the hospital promising to kill herself if she doesn’t get a child? He said yes.'

  'So maybe Marcus changed his mind about kids,' Stride said.

  'No, nothing changed. Valerie didn't get pregnant for almost three years. I was worried she was going to go over the edge again. But Marcus? He didn't care. He could barely contain his annoyance when Valerie finally got pregnant. After Callie was born, he hardly touched that girl. It was like she was an unwanted house guest who was messing up his perfect life.'

  'He could have divorced Valerie.'

  'Yeah, and how much of his fortune would that cost him?'

  Stride shook his head. 'You're not giving me anything, Denise. This is all smoke and no fire.'

  'I know. All I'm saying is that you need to take a cold, hard look at Marcus Glenn. I'm a cop and a mother, and I'm telling you, there was something not right about his relationship with his daughter. It chilled me whenever I saw them together, because there was nothing. No love. No interest. No passion. Valerie closed her eyes to it. Now here we are.'

  'Do you honestly think Glenn could have harmed his own child?' Stride asked. 'Is that what you're saying?'

  'I think he's capable of anything. I think this whole thing doesn’t add up. Someone breaks into the house without leaving a trace, takes the baby, and then vanishes? Come on. It makes no sense.'

  'Children get abducted all the time,' he told her.

  'Of course they do. But they get grabbed off the street, not whisked out of their lakeside mansions in the middle of the night. Look, I can't prove it, and it's not my case anyway. I'm just telling you what I think in my heart of hearts. OK?'

  'I understand.'

  'There's one other thing,' Denise added. 'Marcus said he was alone tonight, right? Just him and Callie?'

  'That's right.'

  'Well, if that's true, it would be the first time ever. Valerie took care of her. The babysitter took care of her. Not Marcus. No way. Don't you find it a little odd that Marcus is alone with the baby for one night, and she disappears?'

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  Maggie Bei parked her yellow Avalanche on the outskirts of the crime scene near the Lester River. She could see the abandoned cinder block dairy illuminated under the light poles erected by her team, and she watched her evidence technicians pawing through the grass surrounding the building and in the woods on the other side of the rapids. The crew from the medical examiner's office had a more gruesome task. Two of them, in white scrubs, attended to the dead body in the field.

  The fourth victim.

  Maggie steeled herself to join them. For years, she had built up an immunity to the grisly discoveries of her job, but the assaults in the previous month, one after another, had tested her objectivity. She knew she could have been any one of these women. It was too easy to imagine herself on the ground, lifeless and humiliated.

  Fingernails tapped on the passenger window of her truck, interrupting her thoughts. Maggie saw the round, cherubic face of Max Guppo, who waved at her and pulled open the door. She held up her hand, stopping him in his tracks.

  'Freeze! What did you have for dinner?'

  Guppo thought back. 'Chili con carne.'

  'Shit, what are you trying to do to me? Don't you dare get in this truck.'

  'I take Beano now,' Guppo protested. 'The commercials all say, "Take Beano before, there'll be no gas."'

  'Beano never met your digestive tract,' Maggie told him. 'Stay where you are, I'm getting out.'

  Maggie hopped down from her truck. She cursed as her square- heeled boots landed in the wet dirt and splashed mud on to her jeans. She slammed the door and bent over with her hands on her knees and sneezed. She sniffled, yanked a tissue from her pocket, and blew her nose loudly.

  'You got a cold?' Guppo asked, coming around the front of the Avalanche.

  'Yeah. Just what I need. I'm hopped up on vitamin C.'

  Guppo pointed at the tiny diamond stud in Maggie's nose. 'Doesn't that hurt when you sneeze?'

  'I shot it halfway across the room once.'

  'So why not take it out?'

  'Because I like how it looks.' Maggie whiffed the air as Guppo came closer. 'Did you think I wouldn't smell that?'

  'Sorry.'

  'Chili con came,' Maggie told him. 'Unbelievable.'

  The two of them headed across the Strand Avenue bridge over the river. They were an odd couple. Max Guppo was in his mid-fifties and had led crime scene investigations for the Detective Bureau for as long as Maggie could remember. He was only four inches taller than Maggie, who barely made it to five feet tall in her boots, and he waddled through life with cannon-sized thighs and an oversized snow tire permanently anchored around his waist. He had worn the same three suits - brown, brown, and blue - on any given day for the past decade. Maggie, by contrast, was a diminutive Chinese cop who snagged Hollister fashions off the racks for teenage girls. The closer she got to forty years old, the more she dressed as if she were twenty-five.

  As they neared the dirt road that led to the white dairy building, Maggie pointed her thumb and forefinger like a pistol at Kasey Kennedy, who sat in the rear of a patrol car twenty yards away. 'How's the kid?' she asked Guppo.

  'She's shaken up.'

  Maggie nodded. Kasey had the door of the squad car open and sat with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She wore a baggy blue sweatshirt and ripped jeans. She stared into space with eyes that were nervous and shell-shocked.

  'Wow, check out that red hair,' Maggie said. 'Is that natural?'

  'Beats me,' Guppo replied, smoothing down the strands of his comb- over.

  'No way that's natural,' she continued. 'Did Kasey give you a statement?'

  'Yeah. She thinks you're going to fire her.'

  'I'll calm her down,' Maggie said. 'Have you pieced together how this all happened?'

  Guppo nodded. He led Maggie along the shore by the river. The water tumbled frantically over the rocks in the narrows and then calmed as the valley widened below the highway bridge. Maggie tested the ground with her boot. It was soft.

  'The three of them came across the river here,' Guppo
said, pointing to the spot where the current was fastest. Twenty feet separated them from the opposite bank that led sharply uphill to the dead woman's farmhouse. 'The victim, the perp, and then our girl Kasey.'

  'They came down that hill?' Maggie asked.

  'Yeah. Kasey took a header.' He dug in his pocket. 'Here's her badge. We found it in the weeds on the other side.'

  'Then what?'

  Guppo led Maggie up a shallow slope under the evergreen trees, around the rear wall of the cinder block dairy, and into the small grassy field behind it. Twenty feet away, the medical examiner's team was zipping the woman's body into a black vinyl bag.

  'Hold on a minute, guys,' Maggie called. She turned back to Guppo. 'Kasey confronted them here?'

  'Right. The perp held the vic with a garrote around her neck. Kasey took a shot. Pretty ballsy move, if you ask me. It was foggy, and she didn't have a good angle on the killer.'

  'She missed?' Maggie asked.

  'Yeah, but the perp got the message, dropped the vic, and ran. Kasey says she took one more shot and missed again. He sprinted toward the highway and disappeared. We're still trying to figure out where he parked his car, in case he left anything behind. Kasey tried to revive the victim, but she was already gone. Two minutes earlier, and she would have been the big hero.'

  Maggie shoved her hands in her pockets and marched over to the dead woman in the wet grass. 'What's her name?'

  'Susan Krauss.'

  'Married?'

  'Divorced. She's got a teenage son in Florida with his dad.'

  'What did she do for a living?'

  'She was a personal trainer at the Y.'

  'Have we found anything that ties her to the other victims?'

  'Not yet.'

  Maggie pushed her black bangs out of her eyes and stared at the body of Susan Krauss. She looked violated, the way murder victims do, probed by the technicians in white, stripped of dignity by the men who hunted through the grass around her as if she weren't even there. Her skin leached of color. Her hair wet and messy. Her clothes ripped, exposing most of her private parts. Her neck, slashed open and practically severed by the wire that had killed her.

  'OK,' Maggie said quietly, nodding to the medical techs. 'You can take her.'

  ''Susan Krauss. Number four.

  The first was Elisa Reed in mid-October. Single, never married, twenty-three years old, a first-year teacher. She'd lived with her parents on a farm three miles north of here. Elisa vanished on a Tuesday night while her parents were vacationing in San Francisco. They'd called her that night, but she didn't answer, and when they hadn't reached her by Thursday, they decided to call the police. There was no evidence of Elisa in her bedroom, other than traces of blood on the sheets and a smashed alarm clock on the floor.

  Two weeks later, on Halloween night, Trisha Grange disappeared, becoming the second victim. Thirty-five years old, married seven years, mother of two. Her husband Troy had taken their oldest daughter to a Halloween party, leaving Trisha at home with the baby. When he returned at ten o'clock, the baby was sleeping, but Trisha was gone. They'd found no blood this time, but they found Trisha's shoe in the field behind their farmhouse and strands of her blonde hair caught in the screen door that led outside. She'd lived seven miles northeast of Susan Krauss.

  The third victim had disappeared only six days ago. Another farm, barely a mile away. Barbara Berquist was a widow in her early fifties who didn't show up to her job at the Duluth Library. That was enough to trigger suspicion, given the two earlier disappearances, and Maggie and her team had checked out the farm without waiting forty-eight hours to see if Barbara showed up somewhere else, alive and well. They'd found blood again. Lots of it. But no body.

  'What did you find inside the house?' Maggie asked.

  'We think the perp came in through a basement window with a broken lock. It looks like Susan Krauss was awake and in her bathroom when this guy made his move. That's probably what bought her a few more minutes. There's blood and evidence of a struggle near the doorway. Looks like she got away from him and bolted outside.'

  'OK, keep at it. Inside and out. This guy's plan got screwed up this time, so maybe he made a mistake during the chase.' She added, 'I better go talk to the redhead.'

  'Hang on,' Guppo replied.

  He peered over her shoulder at the whitewashed stone wall of the dairy. He crouched down with a heavy breath, studying the ground where Susan Krauss now lay in her body bag, and then his eyes traveled up to a high section of the dairy wall.

  'Anyone got a step stool?' he called.

  One of the evidence technicians produced a stool from the trunk of his car, and Guppo opened it next to the wall. He climbed up the two steps, and Maggie winced, hearing the metal joints groan under Guppo's weight.

  'Shine a light up here, OK?'

  Maggie obliged, illuminating a peeling section of white paint in front of his face. Guppo slid a magnifying glass out from his pants pocket and squinted through it. When he climbed down, his face was flushed, and he was smiling.

  'Spatter,' he said.

  'From the victim?' Maggie asked.

  'Based on the angle and location? I don't think so. I think Kasey winged a piece of our killer after all.'

  Kasey Kennedy looked young, which was a reminder to Maggie that she wasn't so young herself anymore. Kasey was twenty-six and had served on the force for three years. Maggie recalled seeing her in City Hall, but that was only because Kasey and her neon-red hair were hard to miss. They had never met. Kasey's features were plain, but she had fresh, freckled skin and a body that was skinny and toned, and the overall result was attractive. She was an odd combination of girlish and intense. Her blue eyes looked lost. Her left knee bounced up and down nervously, and her fingernails were cotton-candy pink. She looked like a naive kid in need of rescue, and yet this kid had nearly chased down a killer on her own in the middle of the fog. Maggie couldn't accuse her of lacking courage.

  'Here,' she said, handing Kasey the badge that Guppo's team had found near the river.

  'Oh, you found it. Thanks.'

  'How are you doing, Kasey?' Maggie asked.

  The young cop hung her head and squeezed her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. 'I'm sorry, Sergeant. I screwed everything up.'

  'Call me Maggie. And you didn't screw up.'

  Maggie told her about the blood trace that Guppo had found on the dairy wall. 'The best case is, we get a hit in the DNA database and we ID this guy. Even if he's not in the database, we can tie him directly to the murder scene when we do nail him. Thanks to you.'

  'Except the real best case would have been for me to kill the bastard, right?' Kasey said. 'I let him get away.' Her voice had a lilting pitch that could have come from the mouth of a teenager. It sounded strange to hear her talking about killing someone. She should have been gossiping about boys and sharing make-up advice.

  'Don't second-guess yourself,' Maggie told her. 'It took guts to do what you did. You could have been the one to wind up dead here. You know that, right? You took a hell of a risk.'

  'I know.'

  'Why didn't you call for backup?'

  Kasey rolled her eyes. 'No cell phone.'

  'Now that was stupid.'

  'Yeah, I was charging the battery in my bathroom, and I forgot to grab it before I left. I had to drive home to call nine one one, and then I came right back here.'

  'Do you live nearby?'

  Kasey nodded. 'I'm just a couple miles away, but I could have been on the moon tonight. I had no idea where I was.'

  Maggie leaned on the open door of the squad car. 'So how'd you wind up in the middle of this mess?'

  'I got lost,' Kasey told her. 'I drove up to Hibbing after work to hang out with a girlfriend, and I got a late start coming home. I ran smack into the fog and made a wrong turn.'

  'What can you tell me about the killer? You're the only one who's seen him.'

  'I wish I could tell you more. I never saw his face. He was tall.'
r />   'Tall as in how tall?'

  'Over six feet, definitely. Not heavy. He was in good shape. He had dark eyes, too. Deep brown, almost black.'

  'Caucasian?'

  'Yes.'

  'What about the mask?' Maggie pointed two fingers at her eyes. 'One eyehole across both eyes or two separate holes?'

  'Just one hole for both eyes. There was no hole for the mouth.'

  'So you could see the bridge of his nose, too?'

  'I guess so.'

  'Did you notice any other distinguishing features? Moles, freckles, scars, that sort of thing? Did you see any hair coming down from his forehead?'

  'I'm sorry, it happened too fast. I didn't notice anything.'

  'Would you recognize him without the mask if you saw him again?'

  Kasey shook her head. 'I don't think so.'

  'What else?' Maggie asked.

  'That's all I saw.'

  'What was he like?'

  'I don't understand.'

  'How did he behave? Was he scared? We need to get inside this guy's head.'

  Kasey scrunched her pale lips together. Her chest swelled as she took a deep breath. 'He wasn't scared,' she said.

  'No?'

  'No, he was aggressive. Confident. When I looked at him through the car window, it was like he was smiling at me. Then later, by the dairy, he laughed. He didn't think I would shoot. He was sure of himself.'

  'He spoke to you?' Maggie asked.

  'Yeah, he did.'

  'What did he say?'

  'He said he would let the woman go if I dropped the gun. And he taunted me, you know, that I wouldn't shoot because I might hit her.'

  'Describe his voice,' Maggie said.

  'Uh, it was cocky. Arrogant.'

  'Did he have any kind of accent? Was there anything distinguishing about his speech pattern?'

  'No. Nothing like that.'

  'Would you recognize his voice if you heard it again?'

  'I might,' Kasey told her. 'Yeah, I think I probably would.'

  'That's excellent.' Maggie squeezed the young cop's shoulder. She could see Kasey's eyes blinking shut. 'Listen, why don't you go home now? Get some sleep.'

  Maggie turned away, but Kasey grabbed her forearm. 'Sergeant? There's something else. I want to get in on this case.'