Lot’s return to Sodom

by Sandra Brannan

  Jens padded over to the couch, his back to me as he, too, stared out onto the street. “Michelle and Char got into another argument. They did that a lot. Sunday night it was over a guy. Someone she was seeing who was way too old for her.”

  “How old is too old?” I asked, wondering if it would help me narrow in on the guy so I could see if he knew where Char was. “Sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Forty or fifty,” Jens said.

  I gasped. “Didn’t you say Char was only fourteen?”

  “Mm hmm. That’s why Michelle was so angry with Char and needed to talk to her. Char ignored her warnings and went out with him anyway. Michelle said the guy came and picked her up at the Freeburgs’, parking way down the block so the family wouldn’t see him. Michelle decided to follow them, and the guy drove up Dinosaur Hill and parked with Char. Michelle said she was so mad, she decided to confront the guy.” Jens looked down into his coffee cup for a long moment.

  I couldn’t ignore the tension that paralleled the haunting second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which hung softly in the warm summer air. Unaffected, Jens took a sip.

  “And did she?”

  He had been in a daze. “Hmm? Oh, yeah. She said the man and Char were about to make out in the front seat, and she was prepared to give him a piece of her mind, but then she realized she knew the guy. She panicked, grabbed Char, and made her come with her. Liv, I have never seen Michelle so agitated.”

  I would be, too, if my little sister was necking in a car with a fifty-year-old man. I thought about Clint White. He was at least forty-eight. Maybe older. Then I instantly dismissed the idea.

  “She didn’t tell you who it was?”

  “Refused. Said I knew him, probably everyone around here did, and that I would probably kill him with my bare hands if she told me,” Jens said, lifting his face and driving home his point by locking his gaze with me.

  “Roy Barker? After all, you threatened him earlier that night.”

  Jens shook his head. “I asked her the same thing for the same reason, thinking she said forty or fifty just to throw me off. See, Roy’s our age. She assured me it was not Roy Barker with Char. I believed her.”

  Doesn’t mean Roy wasn’t the one who murdered Michelle, I thought. My mind went to Michelle’s panic and I thought of Mully. He was probably forty or fifty, and that would really shake me up if my little sister were kissing and messing around with a biker from the Lucifer’s Lot. Speaking of panic, my eyes darted back to the windows.

  “Was it the guy from the grocery store? The biker who asked her out?” I asked. “Had he met Char in the parking lot that night or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jens said, furrowing his brow as he thought about it. “Did I mention that the bikers were with the Lucifer’s Lot motorcycle club?”

  My heart nearly stopped. This was all too coincidental. It couldn’t possibly be the same bikers, but I had to know. I stammered, “Any names ever mentioned?”

  “Who? The bikers?”

  I nodded, swallowing hard.

  “Michelle introduced one guy to me as Mully. But he walked away before I could shake his hand,” he said, rubbing his chin as he thought about it. “I don’t think I heard any other names.”

  I felt like an elephant had just decided to lounge on my chest. I could barely breathe. This was unbelievably bad luck.

  “Anyway, those guys were long gone by the time Michelle and I left Barker’s Market, and I think Michelle would have told me if it was one of those bikers. She did say I knew the guy, but I got the impression it was someone I knew from around town or had known all my life.”

  Shaking off the willies that crept along the back of my neck and down my spine, I stuttered, “Well, it would have helped to know who the old guy up at Dinosaur Hill was because it would have made my search for Char a little easier. But back to Michelle. Why did you and she get in a fight? There’s something you’re not telling me, Moose.”

  Jens’s shoulders sagged.

  “If you want me to help, you have to tell me what I need to know.” I had no idea what it was I needed to know, but I was counting on the fact that he did.

  “Michelle was …” he started to say. “Michelle and I …”

  I could see this was excruciating for Jens, but I was losing patience—and daylight. “Michelle and you what?”

  Lips pursed, he set his empty coffee cup on the table. “I overheard Roy tell Michelle that he’d been stalking her for years. Since high school.”

  “A creeper.”

  “But that’s not the worst part. He said he knew all about Michelle’s ‘dirty little secret’—his words, not mine.” Jens’s hands were clutching and unclutching as he struggled to get the story out. “So I pushed her to tell me what he meant, and she told me. Over a period of months in the eighth grade, she was repeatedly raped by one man—a grown man—and got pregnant by him. Then it stopped.”

  I hadn’t seen that coming; I wanted to throw up. Michelle’s whole life suddenly looked tragic, a bleak trail with a terrible ending. I threw my arms around Jens for the comfort of it, his and mine.

  “But you know, she got past it. She was tough,” he said, turning me loose. “She wasn’t going to let one awful year ruin her life. Look what she did, Liv. She got herself enough training to become a decently paid bookkeeper. She put herself through college and was going on to medical school this fall. She always looked good—a little conservative, I guess you’d call it, but good—and her eyes were on the future. The future that she never got.”

  “Jens, the guy should still be in jail. Didn’t she tell her parents?”

  Jens shook his head. “You’d have to know Arlene and Frank to know why telling them would have been useless. Brain dead, both of them. She was always the only grownup in the family, and that includes those idiot brothers of hers.”

  I thought that was a little hard on them, but then I’d never met them and he had. But I could see now why Michelle had felt the need to protect Char at close range, if she didn’t trust her parents to guide Char any better than they’d guided her.

  “I think she was lying to me,” Jens confessed. “She never lied to me.”

  “About the rape?”

  He shook his head.

  “About what?”

  He buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know for sure. She told me the guy left her alone once he found out she was pregnant and when I asked her what happened to the baby, she told me it was all a false alarm. But I think she was lying to me.”

  “Do you think she had the baby? At thirteen?” I couldn’t imagine it. “Oh, no. Not an abortion. Maybe she miscarried?”

  “Boots, I don’t know!” Jens barked, removing his hands from his face and glaring at me. His shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve run it back in my mind a hundred times, and I can’t pinpoint why I think Michelle was lying to me, but I do.”

  My mind raced. Someone knew something. A false alarm or miscarriage would be the only explanation for no one knowing anything. And according to Jens, Michelle indicated that Roy knew something about all the shit she was going through during high school. But if Michelle had had an abortion or went full term with the baby, a doctor would have been involved. Or someone.

  “All I know is that on Sunday night, Michelle lost it completely. Told Char a thing or two and dropped her off at home, warning her not to step one foot out of the house or she’d see to it she would never date again, or something like that. She drove over here to calm down, told me what had happened, and said she was going to fix this once and for all.”

  “Fix this? What did she mean by that?” I asked.

  Jens shrugged. “Michelle said she wouldn’t be surprised if Char ran off with the guy that same night and she could not let that happen. I told her she had already done the best she could and was bordering on meddling. I told her she was obsessed with Char and that she couldn’t keep torturing herself like this. That she had to live life.
Her life. Not Char’s. I suggested she needed to put some effort into fixing her own life rather than to continue to live vicariously through Char.”

  I couldn’t bear to see the torture that was etched on his face. “Jens, you didn’t cause this. You’re not to blame.”

  He looked at me with pleading eyes, needing to finish what he had to say. “We had argued up until then, Boots. Argued hard. But when I mentioned something about it being a parent’s job to handle issues like Char’s, noting how numb Arlene and Frank were to the world of parenting, the argumentativeness disappeared. An eerie peacefulness came over her, like a shroud. Like she was in a trance or something. It was so weird. It shook me up. I told Michelle I thought she should see a psychiatrist—to help her through the unaddressed emotions concerning the rape, her lost childhood. Michelle placed her hands on my cheeks and said she loved me. And she walked calmly out of here, vowing again to fix things once and for all, to make it right.”

  “Think back, Jens,” I said, a niggling feeling starting to form amidst all the facts I had gathered today. “What were her exact words? Her last words to you before she left?”

  I could see him thinking hard. He rubbed his chin and worked through the discussion in his head. He looked up at me and his facial features had softened. On the verge of tears, Jens answered, “She said, ‘I love you and have loved you long before I met you. But you’re right. I know what I have to do. I have to learn how to love me. I have to end this. Once and for all.’”

  AFTER SETTLING INTO THE safe house—rented for federal agents working the rally and looking for top tenners, a place with a view down Sturgis’s infamous Main Street—Bly and Streeter left in the bureau car for their first interview. They had scheduled their afternoon interviews carefully so they’d be back in time for the rally’s nighttime activities. After poring over both crime scenes, Streeter was convinced more than ever that the Crooked Man had killed Ernif Hanson but not Michelle Freeburg. They were two completely different cases. Because the Lucifer’s Lot would be leaving town after the rally and because of his desire to work the Crooked Man case, Streeter abandoned the idea of assigning one to Bly and working both cases simultaneously. Instead, he decided to focus on investigating Michelle Freeburg’s case first, then dedicating all his time to the Crooked Man’s latest murder. Of course, choosing the Freeburg case as the more urgent one to solve had nothing to do with the Bergens’ involvement.

  “You asked if there were any comments in the report about penetration, multiple partners, sexual abuse. I saw the look on your face,” Streeter said, looking over at Bly, who was weaving expertly along the winding roads through the Black Hills. “You don’t believe the Lucifer’s Lot murdered Michelle Freeburg, do you?”

  “Nope,” Bly said.

  “And it really bothered you when you heard she had probably been lying out there for at least eleven or twelve hours, maybe more, and died about the time she was found,” Streeter continued, never taking his eyes off Bly.

  “Yep.”

  After a long silence, Streeter said, “No biker from any outlaw gang, the Lucifer’s Lot or otherwise, killed Michelle Freeburg in your mind. Am I right?”

  Bly nodded and said, “And no, I’m not some biker-loving undercover agent gone bad who protects the one percenters at any cost. I cannot be bought, bribed, or blown.”

  Streeter grinned. “Didn’t think so. But you are smart. And let me guess; you’ve done enough work with these lowlifes to know they wouldn’t just kill a woman without having left some sign—mutilation, sperm, something on her dead naked body, particularly if it was some sheep they picked up at a bar, who would likely have drugs in her system or a whole lot of alcohol. Right so far?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And last but not least, they would not, under any circumstance, bash a woman in the back of the head and leave her for dead without making darn sure she was indeed dead,” Streeter guessed.

  “Exactly,” Bly said, a smile twitching near the corner of his lips. “Unless it was a prospect who seriously fucked up.”

  “Which would mean we would be dealing with four dead bodies, not three.”

  “Quick study. You’re good at this. And Shank said you couldn’t find your ass with your own two hands.” Bly reached behind the seat and whipped out a small bag of candy, opening it one-handed. “This is a setup, Streeter. Mully is getting framed. The location, the FTW pin. Someone wants him out of the picture.”

  “Another gang?”

  “Maybe,” Bly mumbled, “or someone within the Lucifer’s Lot.”

  The attention Bly was giving his snack annoyed Streeter. “Are you watching the road?”

  Bly popped another chunk of hard candy in his mouth before handing the open bag over to Streeter, “Want some?”

  “Peanut brittle?”

  “From Wheeler Farms,” Bly said, returning the bag to his lap and picking out two more pieces to munch. “Yeah, it’s that good.”

  Streeter shook his head. Bly grinned, crunching away at another piece.

  Streeter admitted, “I worked more rallies than I care to admit. Thousands of businessmen and doctors and lawyers and white-collar professionals come to the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally from all over the country to let their hair down for a week. Upright, model citizens in their communities the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Party one week out of the year. And no one will chastise or criticize them for their bad behavior. It’s Sturgis. It’s expected.”

  Bly nodded. “Only difference between them and me is I don’t dress up like a wannabe biker as if this is nothing more than a blue-collar Mardi Gras, a place to behave badly, to get polluted on tequila and whiskey, to whistle at naked women or get a twenty-dollar hand job. I dress up to become one of them for a short time each year so I can learn as much as I can about the sons-of-bitches from the outlaw motorcycle clubs and their covert operations, hoping someday to see their sorry faces behind bars. Talk about sophisticated networks.”

  Streeter saw anger flash in Bly’s eyes.

  “They murder, rape, burglarize, steal, assault, intimidate, victimize, you name it. They traffic narcotics, force their women into prostitution, commit any number of weapon offenses, launder money, and evade taxes.”

  “The bureau used to think the biker clubs were Public Enemy No. l.”

  “Not since 9/11, they don’t. International terrorism is a bigger perceived threat—not that the bikers’ tactics can’t be a form of terrorism. They’re pros with weapons and intelligence gathering, and that keeps the FBI kind of interested in them, you might say.”

  “What I remember is that the clubs actually appoint one of the members as an intelligence officer. He’s assigned duties of collecting and documenting intelligence, like pictures and information about rival clubs and their members in case a war erupts. Gang war.”

  “Exactly,” Bly affirmed with a quick nod. He eased the car left off Vanocker Canyon Road onto Nemo Road.

  “What starts the wars these days?” Streeter asked.

  “Same as when you were here. Mostly when one gang crosses another’s territory,” Bly answered, heaving one shoulder toward his ear. “Methamphetamine is the biggest money maker now for those that traffic drugs. The gangs control everything from manufacturing to distribution of meth in this country. Other motorcycle clubs traffic guns, women, murder for hire. It’s all about money and power. When one club starts infringing on another’s territory, wars erupt.”

  “Just like the Mafia,” Streeter said, glancing out the window from time to time.

  “Only damn near more organized. The clubs have structures, with presidents, vice presidents, secretary/treasurers, enforcers, sergeants at arms, at both the national level and the local-chapter level. Many of the members in the local chapters don’t hold what we would consider a steady job. Instead, they manage the business, like the drug trafficking, stripping down or reselling stolen bikes, trafficking of illegal weapons, and of course keeping tabs on the prostitution.”


  “What’s Mully?”

  “President of his chapter,” Bly answered. “And a hell of a businessman. Smart.”

  “How do they launder their money?”

  “The usual,” Bly said. “Ice cream parlors, bike repair shops, bars, hotels, campgrounds, apartment buildings. Some of the members run these businesses, but most of the time they hire nonmembers to run them so that they look legitimate.”

  “You think Eddie Schilling is one of these guys? A nonmember hired by the Lucifer’s Lot to launder money?”

  “I doubt it. Not enough income from that little piece of shit campground. I’m talking more like owning the beer tents at the Cattle Jump Campground, where tens of thousands of dollars are made each year.”

  “Is this part of their intelligence network?” Streeter ventured. “Keeping an ear to the ground and an eye on the community for changes, gossip, rumor, etc.?”

  “Sure.” Bly looked in his rearview mirror as he slowed through the tiny town of Nemo. “But their biggest source of intelligence is from the old ladies.”

  “The biker women who are like wives, the ones not passed around the club?”

  “Right. The ones who usually hold down regular jobs at the county courthouses, in the jails, at the police departments, in city offices. Wherever they could overhear what may be coming down the pike, whether it be a change in laws, regulations, procedures, an arrest, subpoenas, whatever. The motorcycle clubs are the first to know and are prepared before anything ever comes their way.”

  “Like the one Leonard mentioned to Shank who’s working at Pennington County in the titles department. The impact that probably has on policing such activities must be significant.”

  “They’re untouchable,” Bly said.

  “It’s how they’ve always gotten away with trafficking stolen vehicles and weapons. They get their old ladies to lift a few blank titles or licenses from the counties.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which makes it all appear very legitimate,” Streeter figured, “and nearly impossible to prove otherwise.”