by P. J. Tracy
Magozzi let out a weary breath, then reached into his briefcase and placed an eight-by-ten photo on McLaren’s desk. Charlotte Wells in a sundress, smiling on a white sand beach somewhere, proudly pointing at her baby bump while turquoise-blue surf foamed in the background. Surf and life frozen in time. Timothy Wells had printed it out for them before he and Gino had left him to deal with his two motherless baby girls and his ruined life, and every time Magozzi looked at it, he was physically sickened because he couldn’t stop his darkest fears from transposing Grace’s face onto that pregnant body.
“Charlotte Wells. Pretty young brunette, just like Megan Lynn. Devoted wife and mother of two six-month-old twin girls, working her way up the corporate ladder at General Mills. Went jogging early this morning before work in the Minnehaha dog park, like she does a few days a week to get rid of her baby fat, according to her husband, Tim.”
Magozzi paused to let that sink in; he wanted McLaren to know a little of who she’d been when she’d still been breathing, because he got it. He would remember her, and not just as a nameless victim represented by random numbers on a case file that would hopefully get solved one day.
He pulled out another photo of Charlotte Wells in situ at the crime scene and placed it next to the beach shot. “Exact same MO as Megan Lynn,” he continued. “Strangulation, postmortem cutting on the torso with some kind of serrated knife, according to the ME. No sexual assault. Personal effects all intact. But the big kicker is she had a four of spades in her shirt.”
McLaren dragged his hands through his clown-colored hair. “It’s the same son of a bitch, it’s gotta be. The playing-card angle never saw the light of day, so it can’t be a copycat. Jesus. He’s marking his victims. He’s keeping track.”
“We’re thinking this is definitely a serial.”
“Fuck. Yes,” McLaren muttered. “And if he’s going in order, then there are two victims out there somewhere with the two and three of spades on them—we just haven’t found them yet.”
“Been there, we already plugged it into ViCAP. No matches on the national database for our MO or the playing cards. If he was operating anywhere else in the country during the year he took off between murders here, it’s not in the system.”
McLaren frowned. “So maybe he’s not going in order and there aren’t two additional victims.”
Magozzi reanimated after draining a half-liter bottle of water, per Gloria’s advice. “That crossed our minds, and it makes sense. Megan Lynn and Charlotte Wells were left in public parks near trails where they were sure to be found. He’s showing off his handiwork, and putting a cherry on top by marking his victims with cards. The sick bastard is signing his work, showboating. This kind of killer isn’t going to deviate and hide some bodies and not others. But we don’t know that for sure. We can’t get into the mind of a crazy, who knows what his twisted fantasy is.”
McLaren leaned back in his chair and started drumming a paradiddle on his desk with his fingers. “I’m thinking about the year time lag. Not out of the norm for a serial, but still, there’s a chance our perp could have taken an involuntary vacation that interrupted his killing jag. It’s a long shot, but worth a look.”
Magozzi nodded. “We’ll have Tommy Espinoza work his computers for prison records, see if there’s a violent offender who got put on ice after Megan Lynn’s murder and released before Charlotte Wells’s murder.”
“Did you get anything from the husband?”
“An absolute nightmare of a notification, and that’s about it,” Gino said, unwrapping a flattened turkey sandwich he’d pulled out of his briefcase and assessing it for food safety after it had spent a few hours in a boiling hot car. Hunger eventually won out over good judgment.
“How about associates?” McLaren asked.
Magozzi shook his head. “According to everybody we interviewed, including the husband, Charlotte Wells was social, gregarious, loved by all. She had no grievances with any coworkers, no sketchy characters in her past or present, no enemies. We’ve got a couple more friends to talk to and we’ll go through her cell phone records, but that’s probably going to be a dead end.” He cringed. There were too many goddamned idioms in the English language with the word “dead” in them. Dead end. Dead ringer. Dead reckoning. Dead to the world. Dead on your feet. Dead to rights . . .
McLaren jiggled his mouse and woke up his sleeping computer. “I’ll pull all the files I’ve got on Megan Lynn and forward them to you. Maybe there’s some kind of dovetail between her and Charlotte Wells, like they went to the same coffee shop or the same gym or whatever. What about surveillance footage?”
Gino tossed the crusts of his sandwich into the garbage can by his desk. “No cameras in the dog park, just a traffic cam that semi-covers the main entrance. Nothing jumped out at us. But there are a million ways to sneak in without using the main entrance, according to the park police, which is what I would have done if I wanted to stake out a sweet hiding spot.”
“Let me take a look at it. I’ve got all the Powderhorn Park surveillance from last year, plus the traffic cams from the immediate area. I’ve looked at the films about a thousand times, so something from the dog park might hit a nerve with me.”
“Thanks, Johnny.”
“No thanks necessary, let’s just string this bastard up by his nuts and send him down the river for life times two.”
“Amen.”
McLaren refocused on his computer, but that never stopped his mind or his mouth. “Hey, Leo, what’s the news on Junior?”
Magozzi suddenly felt an astonishing, cleansing emptiness as serial killer butchers and dead women completely evacuated his mind, replaced by joyful visions of what his near future might be like. “He’s kicking like a maniac.”
“It’s a boy?”
“We don’t know. But I think so.”
“Fantastic. Did you sell your place in town yet?”
“Hell, no,” Gino interjected. “His yard looks like White Sands after a bomb test—it’s never going to sell, I keep telling him but he doesn’t listen.”
“Why, are you interested, Johnny?” Magozzi asked.
“Maybe. A man needs a house if he’s going to start a family.”
“What?”
“Gloria and I. We’re going to start a family, she just doesn’t know it yet.”
ELEVEN
Buttonwillow, Minnesota, was indeed a one-horse town, minus the horse and minus the town. Aside from a feed mill, a gas station, and a Dairy Queen at the freeway turnoff, it was just an empty, unrelieved landscape of rolling hills, farm fields, and woods, speckled with electric fences, cows, and an occasional farmhouse.
Five miles off the freeway, Harley turned his Hummer onto a washboard dirt road and rattled their teeth for ten minutes before easing into a driveway with potholes slightly smaller than the Grand Canyon. Even Charlie, seated in the backseat between Grace and Annie, grunted at the impacts, then went rigid with attention, ears pricked forward, when the Hummer braked to a stop.
“I think Charlie’s scared,” Annie said.
Harley looked at the dog through the rearview mirror as he slid the gear into park and turned off the motor. “Bullshit. He’s eyeballing all those trees in the yard. It’s been a long ride.”
But when Grace opened her door, Charlie followed her out with doggie restraint, not running for the trees, not tearing up the grass as dogs sometimes do. He just stepped out of the car slowly, almost respectfully, then sat down promptly, his eyes and ears focused on the house.
The house was a big two-story box, probably built at the turn of the last century in classic rural Midwestern style, which meant a roof, four walls, and enough space for a brood of sons who would start working the land the minute they could walk. It sagged a bit on one side, as if it were about to tip over from sheer exhaustion, but Annie saw a Southern touch in a big wraparound porch with rocking chair
s and a railing that had once been white. Whoever built this house had been wealthy by the day’s standards, because wraparound porches were not common in the history of the Midwest. Settlers had had neither the energy nor the wherewithal to waste good lumber and labor on a porch made for sitting—in those days, houses were for sleeping and little else. Daylight took you out to the fields, dark took you to a bed, and that was life.
There were overgrown flowerbeds and a scraggly lawn; and behind it all, a fading red barn surrounded by rusting, discarded pieces of unidentifiable equipment.
The front door of the house opened and a man emerged. Somewhere in the back of her mind Grace had imagined that all old farmers would look the same: stooped from a life of hard labor, seamed faces ravaged by the sun, rawboned wrists hanging from too-short sleeves. But this man put a lie to the image. Tall, erect, with a full head of snow-white hair and wiry arm muscles showing themselves beneath the short sleeves of a denim shirt, defying the seventy-plus years that Harley had estimated. She saw Malcherson—chief of Minneapolis Police and Swedish to the core—in the man’s stature and coloring, but there was a subtle difference in his bearing as he drew closer. There was wicked stress in his shoulders, pulling them forward as if he were carrying the weight of an incomprehensible world pushing him down, threatening to drill him into the earth.
“Everybody, this is Walt,” Harley said.
“Morning,” the old man said to Annie and Roadrunner when Harley introduced them, but there was no smile, and now, Grace saw, no joy in that face.
“And this is Grace,” Harley finished, and Walt looked right into her eyes for a long time before giving her a nod that seemed meaningful in some way she didn’t understand. Grace thought the most extraordinary part of the exchange was that Walt’s gaze never wavered down to her conspicuous stomach, which was almost unavoidable at this stage in pregnancy.
He held his left hand away from his side, palm down, and Charlie walked right into it. “Nice-looking dog.”
Grace raised a brow to see Charlie’s sudden and immediate acceptance of a total stranger.
Walt finally took a step backward, signaling the end of niceties, and gave the Hummer a baleful glance. “What the hell is that contraption?”
Harley looked like he was about to beat his chest. “That, my friend, is a Hummer, upscale off-shoot of a military vehicle, and it can handle any terrain you’ve got.”
Walt grunted. “So will my old pickup. Paid fifteen hundred dollars for it used ten years ago. What did that thing cost?”
Harley blinked at that one. “Uh, well, around seventy, eighty grand.”
Walt looked at him, and for the first time, he smiled a little. “You got robbed, son. Well, pile back on in there, I got something you need to see.”
“Like what?”
“When we get there, you’ll see it, and then I won’t have to waste my breath telling you.”
Annie folded her arms across her breasts, a sure sign to anyone who knew her that what she was about to say was the way it was going to be. “I do believe I’ll wait for you all here, if you don’t mind.”
Walt looked straight at her without a trace of expression on his face. “But I do.”
“You do what?”
“I do mind.” He walked right up next to her and offered his arm, and there was absolutely nothing Annie could do. It had been a long time and a long road, but there was enough South left in her that made it impossible to refuse a man’s arm when it was offered. Especially when it was offered by an irascible old Minnesota farmer. She’d seen a lot of them on television news shows and documentaries, but never expected to see this kind of civility north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
It took them fifteen minutes to negotiate the hillocks and deep holes tractor tires had dug into the farm road during the early spring snowmelt. Every few minutes along the way Walt said something incomprehensible to Harley in the front, while Annie suffered greatly in the back, jostled by Grace on one side and Roadrunner on the other. “Only got eighty bushels an acre off this forty last year.”
Annie rolled her eyes. Eighty bushels of what? And who cared?
“One-ten off this parcel, and that’s after that nincompoop from the co-op double-sprayed the ammonia. Goddamn idiot.”
She didn’t ask what he was talking about, for fear that he would tell her; besides, she was too busy trying to keep her breasts in her bra and her butt on the seat during this god-awful carnival ride.
She just didn’t get it. Cornstalks rose in perfectly measured rows on either side, each plant exactly the same distance from its neighbors, the earth beneath them as flat and smooth as an ironed sheet. Seemed to her that if they could make the field that level they could have done the same with this stupid road that kept throwing her around like a hot kernel in a popper.
Worse than that, this place was ugly. Corn, sky, road—that’s all there was, and she wouldn’t have given a plug nickel for one inch of the space.
The road improved a bit as it turned away from the cornfields and plunged into a woods, but here there were only trees crowding the Hummer, barely a scrap of sky visible above them, and that only reminded her of the time she’d been hunted like an animal in a place in Wisconsin called Four Corners. “Honey, I want you to know I do dearly hate this place,” she whispered to Grace, softly enough so the sound wouldn’t reach the hearing of the old man in the front seat.
“Nothin’ wrong with my ears,” Walt said without turning around. “So why do you hate this place? You haven’t even met it yet.”
Embarrassment and Annie had always been strangers, so it didn’t really bother her that he’d overheard. Besides, she didn’t know the man, and always kept ninety percent of any truth under wraps when she was talking to people she’d never see again. “It’s in the country, that’s why.”
“Well, now. That sort of sets me back on my heels. Figured you for a lady who fits just right on one of those porches with the big white columns, just sitting there sipping on a tall drink with ice in it, looking out over a big lawn.”
He’d recognized her as a lady, which she liked, but he’d also pulled the most distant piece of Annie’s past, or at least what Annie’s past should have been, right out of his head as if he knew all about her, and she didn’t like that one bit. “Well, sir, it would seem you figured wrong.”
“Maybe.” Walt shrugged just as the Hummer poked its front end through a hole in the woods and pulled into the open. “But I’d face that porch right here, was I to build one for that kind of lady. Isn’t much of a lawn the way it is, but I can see the way it ought to be.”
And so could Harley. He stopped the car, draped his big wrists over the wheel and sighed while the rest of them followed his gaze out the windshield.
The trees thinned as the land rolled down to a lake, but there were a few giants shading the trip down. The grass was long and seed-heavy at the top, waving in the breeze with a synchronicity that looked choreographed. Beyond that, the earth hollowed out and cupped the lake that showed them all the sky.
Surrounded by the strangeness of farmland, the sight still evoked that same Zen quality of peace Roadrunner felt and appreciated at Magozzi’s new lake house. “Pretty,” Roadrunner murmured. He wasn’t much fonder of the countryside than Annie, unless there was a paved bicycle path cutting through it, but there were some slices of this world that just took your breath away whether you wanted to be in them or not.
“So that’s the farm,” Walt said. “Two hundred acres, more or less, including the lake and all the land around it. Plus the three cabins on the other side of the lake, right by the apple orchard, or where the orchard was before the drought of ’97. Used to be a migrant camp, but the cabins are all plumbed and wired, so no reason you couldn’t rent them out to fishermen if you had a mind to. There’s a muskie in that water that goes thirty, forty pounds.”
“Migrant camp?” Harley a
sked.
“Seasonal workers, they call them nowadays. They’d come up from south of the border to help us out during the harvests. Hard workers, they were. So there it is. Had three banks appraise the property last week, got the papers at the house. Bottom is over a million, top is over two. Is that enough to pay for your time? Enough to find out if my daughter is dead?”
TWELVE
Sheriff Jacob Emmet, six years into his service for one of the largest, emptiest counties in Minnesota and four years from his fortieth birthday, was beginning to think that every good reason he’d run for this office was fading fast.
The first two years had been dandy. He’d found any number of lost kids who’d wandered off into the countryside and lost their way, reuniting a lot of happy families; he’d shut down the first flush of urban transfers who thought rural areas were God’s gift to meth labs; he’d cleaned up after a lot of traffic accidents and put away his share of drunk drivers. That’s what a rural sheriff was supposed to do—get rid of the chaff and protect his meager populace, mediate silly arguments between neighbors, smooth feathers, and help make his slab of Minnesota farmland a place where kids felt safe and people always lent a hand to neighbors. He liked the state, he liked the jittery, fickle weather, but mostly he liked the people linked to the land through generations.
And then everything started to change. Small family farms sold out to agricultural conglomerates when times got rough, and now strangers with no tether to the community worked the fields for anonymous corporate overseers. Cottonwood County’s farms had always employed seasonal laborers—mostly Mexicans—to help during the abundant harvests, but before the sell-off to big ag, the farmers and the hired help lived and worked side by side, and the same workers came back year after year to the same farm. Their families knew one another, their children played together, and there had never been a lick of trouble. But things were different now.