As the Tylenol and hot water slowly worked on her throbbing head, Lori was able to think back over her night. She had twisted and rolled and turned until her bed covers had pulled loose. She had opened her eyes to watch the red digital clock change from one to two to three o’clock. She had drifted into a fretful sleep and would wake to sadness. Finally, when the sky started to turn pink, she had fallen into a sound sleep. When she woke, before she had moved, she remembered the essence of a dream, sadness and being all alone. She had moved and her head exploded in throbbing pain.
Lori took a bar of soap and slowly started to lather. As her hands traveled over her body, a face to the sadness appeared in her mind, James. It took Lori a while for her to realize her hands were doing more than washing her body as she soaked under the hot water. She left the shower more confused than when she entered.
Lori dressed, and made breakfast. She turned the Saturday morning cartoon shows on, anything to escape the sadness. Nothing worked. She thought about calling her father but didn’t. She thought about shopping or calling friends. Finally, she got into her car to drive to her father’s. Suddenly she realized, she had turned the wrong way on the road.
Lori knocked on James’ door. She turned to watch him appear around the corner of the trailer. She saw the sad loneliness in his eyes that had kept her from sleep last night.
Lost in their despondency she said, “We need to talk.”
She entered the trailer and saw the walls of the living room had been lined with old firebrick up to the height of about three feet. The unusual sight of broken brick lining the inside of a room gave an eerie desolation to the trailer. The stark bareness of the room with the mismatched furniture broke down her last restraint. She started to cry. Wrapped in the misery that engulfed her, she felt an arm go around her. Behind the tears she couldn’t stop, she felt herself being guided to the floor. Sitting there her back touching the cold bricks, she gave up trying to control her tears and buried her face into Jim’s shoulder.
Jim sat with her, holding her gently until her crying stopped. Her head was tucked under his chin and with every breath, he could inhale her fresh clean scent. She had fallen asleep! His hands gently stroked the side of her face. He tried to remember the last time he had touch the soft gentle curve of a face, but a mist of loss engulfed his mind and he slept.
Jim woke still holding her. The tears had dried on his shirt. He felt their crustiness contrasting with the soft warmth of Lori’s body. He slowly eased her sleeping form to the floor. He gently rocked her glasses off her face. The soft warmth radiating from her cheek seemed to burn his hand. His dreams over the last few days took control of his hand and he slowly traced the soft curves of her body. He tried to move and pain shot through his body.
His legs had fallen asleep.
Jim writhed on the floor in agony, careful not to wake Lori. After a few minutes, he was able to move. He crept into the bedroom to get a blanket.
Gently covering the sleeping woman with the blanket, he left the trailer to do a perimeter check of his property. Finding nothing, he sat in a chair and watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Lori’s chest as she slept curled up in a fetal position.
It was late evening and the setting sun was casting an eerie red glow though the room when she woke. She rolled from under the blanket and onto her back, stretching her cramped legs. In the red glow, Jim viewed the rounded curves of her lithe limbs as she moved.
Jim packed away the ache of desire he felt for Lori. “Good, you’re up.
I’ll make us something to eat. You can move around. Just stay away from the windows.” Jim lit an oil lamp, and in its dim light, started to make a meal.
He sensed Lori walk up to him. Turning to her, he saw her nose crinkle pulling her lips apart in one of the most erotic gestures he had ever seen.
“Do you know where my glasses are?”
Jim never found out how long he froze. His mouth hanging open, forgetting to breathe.
The lips moved again, “Do you know where my glasses are?”
Breathing, “Yes, here … I’ll get them.”
The rest of the night and most of Sunday was a blur to them. They talked. They ate. They napped. But neither touched the other. They knew what would happen if they touched. The fear of what was happening to them forced them to delay. Finally, Sunday afternoon came and Lori went to her car to leave. There by the open car door they kissed for the first time.
Their delay had done nothing to control their desires. Each tried to absorb the other in their embrace. They finally parted, trembling, neither knowing why nor what was happening. Jim called his children and talked for an hour. Lori stopped by her father’s home and talked till morning. Both ended the weekend more confused then when they started.
The hands reach slowly for the deck. They seem to know what the next card will be. The card is turned over.
A tower struck by lightning and on fire appears. A man and a woman tumble off the tower and past a rocky cliff. A yellow crown is blasted away from the dark tower by the lightning and fire.
A sigh can be heard from the figure behind the hands. The light is turned off and darkness shrouds the room.
––—
CHAPTER 11: The Tower
Every county in North Eastern and Central Minnesota has dozens of lumber mills. Some are small one-man or single-family operations. A few are large-scale productions run by the international lumber companies. But the most notable are a fascinating combination of high tech and low tech that is characteristic of a medium-size company. This particular mill was large enough to take full-size trees and cut them up into lumber. Anything left over would be fed into a couple of wood chippers and the resulting chips would be sent to a paper mill.
Trucks with full-length trees would drive into the mill and either a hydraulic crane or a front-end loader would unload the truck. The trees would be placed in a single layer on a table one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty feet wide. Running the length of the table were twelve chains with six inch long links. A cogged sixty-foot long shaft would move the chains in unison to a feeding table, which would bring a tree one at a time into the mill. The first saw the tree would get to was a ten-foot circular blade that would cut the tree into bolts. The bolts would then be fed into either a chipper or another table to be cut by a bank of saws. Throughout the mill in a haphazard manor would be troughs and chutes, each with its own huge chain moving chunks of wood to saws, chippers, or scrap piles. Men with shovels, forks, and pickaroons would clamber all over the troughs, cleaning out tangled or jammed splinters of wood. Every few months, a man would get a limb caught in one of the hundreds of moving chains and belts. Injuries would range from minor lacerations and amputations to the occasional death. The result was an agglomeration of emergency off switches scattered throughout the mill.
It was an hour into the seven o’clock shift when the emergency off switch for the feed chain off the scrap hopper under the tree chipper was pulled. Bells rang, lights flashed and the ten men who worked in that section of the mill came running to the location. The man assigned to keep the feed chain clear had already straightened out a problem on the bolt table and a clogged chute in a chip blower when he got to the hopper. The man had hit the emergency switch and thrown up at the same time when he saw the two severed legs dangling from the side of the feed chain trough. The man had then fainted when he had walked farther into the hopper room and saw the mass of red tissue and wood scraps piled under the two-foot steel cog driving the hundred-foot chain.
It would take investigators five more hours to collect the remains of the body and a court order to keep the mill owner from turning the equipment back on before all of the on-site forensic work was done. It was ten AM on Tuesday when enough teeth had been examined to positively identified the remains as Pike Borland.
There were twenty officers in the Monday afternoon meeting in the sheriff’s department’s largest room. The BCA lieutenant, Frank, led the meeting. Although there was no pos
itive identification yet, everyone assumed that the body found at Borgquist Lumber was Pike Borland’s. A deputy who knew Borgquist was given the task of summarizing to the group what was known of the mill’s operations.
The young man began, “During the week, the mill is currently running three crews on staggered shifts. The seven o’clock crew cuts and processes the lumber. They quit at four o’clock. They were the ones to find the body at about eight Monday morning. The eight o’clock crew packages and ships out the lumber. They quit at five o’clock. Because of the unusually heavy spring demand this year, Borgquist put on a four o’clock crew. They finish any remaining shipping for the day and clean up the mill for the next day’s running.
“No one on the four o’clock crew saw the body on Friday, although they did clean up the hopper area. On Saturday, there is a skeleton crew to unload any lumber trucks that arrive at the mill. They only work in the tree yard, the truck scales, and the garage where the two Caterpillar front-end loaders are kept. No one checks the hopper area during the weekends until Saturday night when the watchman does a walk-through of all the buildings. He does another walk-through on Sunday afternoon. Other than the two building walk-throughs, he mostly stays in a small guardhouse at the main truck entrance to the mill. There are five entrances to the mill area, none with gates. The two hundred-acre mill complex has a thirty-acre production area with a dozen buildings, truck and car parking with loading and unloading areas. The truck park usually starts to fill up around five in the morning with trucks waiting to get unloaded. The remaining one hundred and seventy acres are divided into five yards, near and far tree yards, near and far lumberyards, and waste yard. The whole complex has about twenty miles of roads. The night watchman does drive through the yards every one to two hours, but he is primarily there to keep kids from having keg parties in the yards and to prevent vandalism.”
Frank asked, “Why the large size of the yards?”
“This is not one of the really large mills. They don’t have the huge drying kilns of the major logging companies. They dry their lumber by letting it season a few months in the sunlight and that takes a lot of room. They had only about a hundred acres up to fifteen years ago until Borgquist bought old man Holgren’s farm when he retired. Borgquist had been crowded when he started his mill, so when he got the Holgren farm, he spread out his yards so he would have plenty of room.”
“Do we have a closer time to when the body could have been placed on the hopper chain, and could the watchman have been involved?”
“The closest time I could confirm was sometime after three o’clock Sunday afternoon. As you can imagine, the mill jobs are not that good. Most of Borgquist’s manual labor only stays for a few months to a couple of years. His current night watchman was given his job after working on the sorting crew for twenty years. I know he couldn’t get a job at a grocery store because he couldn’t read the labels on the cans. He wasn’t involved. He could never remember his lies for more than a few minutes.”
Frank continued talking to the gathering. “You all should have looked at the preliminary reports I handed out earlier. So we have a killer who likes to slowly kill his victims. That’s my interpretation of the coroner report on Jenny Rossetti’s body and the fact that Pike Borland had been missing for a few days. The man or men have to have a secure place to do their killing and an intimate knowledge of the area. He or they knew about the neighborhood dogs, how to get in the lumber mill, and where to place the body. He or they are using their knowledge of the area to destroy evidence but also to terrorize. He wants everyone to know what he did. He wants the fear and knowing that he is causing it.
“Now, something that you might not have realized. At least some of you, if not all of you, must know the killer or killers. I have worked serial murders before. The killer’s actions blend in with the neighborhood. Anything unusual about their actions is so minor that it is only discovered after the killer is caught. This killer has left us clues.
“He knows the school, the residential area of Deer Lake Falls, and Borgquist Lumber. My guess would be that he also had personal contact with the two victims before he killed them. I have no idea what the contact was, but they somehow caught the attention of the killer. Any questions or comments?”
A general shaking of heads ‘no’ followed.
“The ten men assigned to the homicide task force stay. The rest of you can leave. Those leaving, keep your eyes and ears open. You know what we’re looking for. Contact the task force with any information you discover.”
Frank waited until the noise and disturbance of those leaving quieted.
“You all know Henry?” Frank waited until the nods and murmurs of greetings settled down. “He’s my second in command. If you get anything and I am not around, you contact him immediately. Any questions? Good!”
“Al, you, Mike, and John are assigned to the school. You check out any information that comes in about the school. I want at least one of you around the school property while it is open. You will be able to request additional officers for surveillance during the loading and unloading of busses and for any public events, such as the baseball game on Friday.
“Chris, John Pietila, and Fred will take care of anything that involves Deer Lake Falls.
“Dave, Bill, and Vernon will take the mill. Vernon will also coordinate any information between the three groups.
“You will start by making lists of people in your areas whose names come up in the investigation. I want you to list all the names. You are not looking for just the killer or killers right now, but on any way those three sites could be connected.
“Vernon, you will keep an updated list of all the names divided into three categories, matching on all three, matches on two, and names that came up. I want all three groups to check on changes in the lists every two hours.
Everyone on the task forces will be working at least double shifts until further notice.
“Any questions? Good! Get to work!”
After the rest of the men left the room, Henry walked up to Frank. “I want to try to force something to happen. Maybe … get the killer to make a move he hasn’t planned.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“The county attorney contacted the sheriff’s department to investigate a blackmail and extortion complaint against the school district. The teachers’
union has filed civil charges against the superintendent, principal, and school board. The union’s lawyer notified the county attorney of the filing for possible criminal action. Remember that Jenny had filed a sexual-assault complaint against James Makinen and then the school immediately fired him with no investigation.
“I know there doesn’t seem to be a connection between the cases, but something about the whole thing bothers me. I want to shake up the whole school administration and see what falls out.”
Frank hesitated. Attacking a school administration and board could be political suicide. Not finding a killer was also a job destroyer. What if he cut Henry loose?
“Okay, Henry. You can put the pressure on, but be careful. If you step on anyone’s toes, you are on your own.”
Henry stared at Frank until he looked away. He had hoped that Frank had more backbone. With his backing, it would have been much easier to apply pressure. Maybe he could see if the county attorney knew someone in the Attorney General’s office. A State audit of the schoolbooks would really get everyone’s attention.
The old man relished the fear that penetrated the school after the news of a body found at the mill spread though the building during the noon lunch period. It didn’t have the same satisfaction as killing, but he could still feel the power of the fear that he controlled.
It was during the sixth-hour class time, while he was sweeping the hall by the ninth grade lockers, when he saw a girl with her head buried in her locker. The old man dumped the load of dirt and paper that he was pushing with his dust mop. Without the paper, the mop was absolutely silent as he pushed it across the fl
oor. The girl closed the locker door. Turning, she stifled a scream when she saw how close the old man was to her. She smiled at the awkward looking old man holding the broom and left for class.
The old man stood in the hall, his grip on the broom slowly turning his knuckles white. The janitor played through his mind the fluttering throbbing of the startled girl’s throat. The fast pulsing of the heart as seen though the smooth white skin of a young girl’s throat froze him there until the bell rang at the end of the hour.
After school, the old man was surprised when Amy, the dotty old fool of a secretary, asked him to walk her out to her car for protection. The janitor heard loud voices coming from the Superintendent’s office when he got back to the building. He pushed his cleaning cart next to Thelma’s desk. Picking up her wastebasket, he leaned against the door to the inner office. He heard Kawalski ranting about Makinen and Lori, and the worries of the blackmail investigation. A final angry oath came from Kawalski. He moved quickly away from the door. As it was, Kawalski pushed the old man into Thelma’s desk as he bulldozed his way to the doorway.
The janitor finished his cleaning in a dazed state as he planned his next moves. The same sappy lopsided grin that had lulled the high school girl into complacency was plastered on the old man’s face. Outside as the janitor left the building, Al Gallea saw the grin and dismissed the old man as feeble.
He never even noted the old man on his log of whom entered and left the school for that day or the way the old man stopped to stare at the cars in the parking lot.
James woke again from his night terror. After spending the night in fitful naps, he finally remembered the terror that woke him. He was looking down on Lori. She had been split open from chin to crotch. Each layer like an onion peeled back and pushed to the side. At first, all he could see was her white chalky face. The terror began when he looked below her face. The split blouse was peeled back first followed by the bra, the inside of its cup facing outward. The skin had been sectioned next. The pocket of skin making up the breast placed within the cup of the bra. Next, the muscles were peeled back and laid across what had been pulled back before. The ribs were wrenched apart. Inside the chest cavity, the heart was gone. Jim stood over her paralyzed. As he struggled to move, he fell in slow motion. The closer he got to Lori’s body the more detail he saw, the weave of the material making her blouse, the jagged edge of the cut flesh. The instant before he touched her, he woke.
S. A. Gorden Page 7