by Julie Kramer
So while I definitely started getting the feeling someone was watching me, I guessed it was Mark. Figuring he’d seen my news coverage about his mother’s murder, he might have been interested in eye-balling me without a television screen separating us.
As a wanted man, he’d be easy to recognize. So many fugitives blend into the crowd, usually resulting in false sightings and tying up law enforcement teams in far-flung geographic areas on squat. That hadn’t happened in this case. Police received absolutely no tips reporting the missing groom/suspected murderer. They attributed this to his skill in lying low. After all, he’d vanished months ago without leaving a trail.
Madeline insisted he’d not been in touch with her. Best man Gabe Murray claimed the same.
But during the last twenty-four hours I felt certain he was out there, watching me, and since I didn’t have a bodyguard, I was glad for the row of news trucks parked conspicuously on my street and the company of a big dog with sharp teeth. But tomorrow, Shep would be reunited with Emily, so tonight we went for a last run together.
It had a parade quality.
A couple of times people recognized us and cheered.
When we passed Ursula’s Wine Bar, the owner chased us down and insisted we take a break on his patio. He poured me a glass of what he called his finest red and served Shep a slab of raw sirloin under the table. He asked if I’d mind if he put our visit in his monthly newsletter under “celebrity sighting.”
The sun was nearly gone, but I didn’t want the day to end. Also without Shep’s protection, starting tomorrow, I’d want to be home by nightfall. So we ran west into the end of the sun and the start of the moon.
A white full-size van pulled up alongside us as we raced and I waved to the driver, who I assumed was another fan. Then I saw a man in the passenger seat raise a gun. The illumination of a streetlight just then revealed that neither man was Mark.
“Shep!” I called and turned off the street, cut through a dark industrial park, over some railroad tracks. Soon I found myself in the Tamarack Nature Center parking lot. The vehicle followed us from the street and sped straight toward us, flying over speed bumps. I sprinted for the trees with Shep on my heels. A car door slammed. Then the sound of running feet.
I changed directions several times and heard a voice shout something like “Make sure you get the dog this time.”
That’s when I realized that instead of Shep protecting me, I needed to protect Shep.
And I wished my dog was named Nitro.
ON THE PRO side: I had a head start, was familiar with the park after my walk and talk with Madeline, and was highly motivated to stay alive.
On the con side: I was tired, had a dog to keep quiet, and my pursuers were armed, dangerous, and highly motivated to kill.
The prairie where the wedding didn’t happen was straight ahead. Hiding seemed my best option. I ducked under some bushes, pulling Shep with me, and we rolled and pulled until we were wedged deep in a briar patch. This seemed as good a place as any to make our last stand.
“Hush,” I whispered to my dog, wrapping my arms tight around him and closing my eyes. Then I listened, heard nothing except my beating heart. Or was it Shep’s? My cell phone was gone. I spread one hand across the ground, reaching and searching for something metallic, but felt nothing except damp leaves and soggy moss.
Shep struggled against my grip, so I loosened it, whispering for him to sit still. But he wanted to stretch. Then he wanted to sniff. Then he wanted to move.
I tried to coax him back in the direction we came, thinking by backtracking we might find my phone. He ignored me, heading the opposite way. I trailed behind, praying our opponents didn’t detect our movement. I recalled Madeline saying that Tamarack was more than three hundred acres, which seemed like plenty of space for all of us to get along. I couldn’t let our paths cross with the gunmen or Shep would attack and lose badly.
He stopped and started smelling the ground. Then pawing it in a now familiar manner. “Not now,” I whispered. “Lie down, boy. Please.”
But he continued, sniffing and pawing, like on a mission from a drug czar. Then he started digging.
Great, I thought, he’ll probably unearth ten kilos of heroin. And then those thugs will get rich wasting us. Why can’t you just chase cats like other dogs?
I pulled at what seemed to be a cloth bag wedged under the dirt, thinking the sooner we finished this, the sooner Shep would settle down. As the fabric tore, the hole deepened, and while I couldn’t see the contents, the smell told me we had not uncovered a secret stash of illegal drugs. The smell actually reminded me of the corpse flower, which couldn’t be all that rare if they also grew wild in the woods of Tamarack Nature Center.
Shep kept digging and I kept pulling and suddenly, we were not alone.
In the moonlight, a human face stared back from the hole in the ground.
y Jamie Lee Curtis scream started Shep barking. Movement seemed to come from different directions and I guessed the bad guys had split up looking for us. I wasn’t sure which way to go, then I heard repeated gunfire and turned the opposite way.
I tripped, landing in the dirt. I blamed my clumsiness on a tree root until I realized it had a handle and a blade. Piling dead, damp leaves over Shep and myself, I kept one hand on the shovel in case I needed a weapon. Then I flattened my body and tried not to breathe.
I prayed some nosy neighbor might have heard the gunshots and called the police to report poachers in the nature center. Minutes later, sirens.
“OVER HERE,” I called out when I could see uniforms behind flashlights.
The two officers were skeptical of my story until Shep led them through the brush and showed them the corpse at our feet—the fifth dead body I’d seen in just under six months.
By their reaction, I suspected it might have been their first.
One of them took my statement while the other called for the homicide team. The parking lot had been empty when the squad cars arrived to investigate the sound of “shots fired.” The cops decided to walk up to the park lodge to make sure the building was secure when they heard me hailing them down the path. The only detail I could provide was a vague description of a white full-size van.
“Sure they weren’t after you instead of the dog?” one of the cops asked.
“I’m very sure.”
“Usually thugs don’t go after women with dogs,” the other insisted.
“That’s the whole point,” I explained again, “they weren’t after me, they were after him.”
I explained that Shep wasn’t just any dog. Leaning against my legs, he seemed to nod.
Over the next hour, more questions. “Tell me again why the dog started digging.” That query came from Detective Leo Bradshaw, a homicide investigator with the White Bear Lake Police Department.
Even though there seemed little connection between the men chasing me and the corpse in the ground, he pressed for minutia. “Are you sure you didn’t get a look at either of them?”
Like most Minnesotans, they were Caucasian. But that’s all I could offer. Then I remembered how K9 dogs in Europe are used in scent lineups, and suggested Shep might be able to identify the men if they were captured. Detective Bradshaw shook his head.
By morning, state crime lab technicians would finish unearthing the body and begin forensics. In the meantime, additional investigators arrived to string crime-scene tape and sweep the nature center for evidence. That’s when they found a freshly dead drug dealer shot in the heart, apparently by his careless accomplice in the darkness.
That made six dead bodies I’d seen in just under six months.
——
WHEN WE GOT home, Shep slept in my bed with me. A squad car stayed parked in front of my house all night and escorted me to Emily Flying Cloud’s place the next morning where I returned her four-legged partner.
They delighted in seeing each other again. She looked much stronger than the last time I visited. We agreed, at the moment, th
at Shep was safer with her than with me. I shook the big dog’s face, traced the scar on his ear with my fingers, and told him goodbye. He barked, but didn’t try to follow me out the door.
I left lonely.
Sitting in my car outside her house, I switched through radio stations until a sad song from the seventies stopped me. I listened to Sylvia’s mother advising a caller that her daughter was too busy to come to the phone. Now I really felt lonely.
So I called Nick Garnett for an early lunch. We met at a Mexican restaurant in south Minneapolis where few of the help or customers seem to speak English—a good place to meet a source since no one can understand your conversation. That same reason also makes it a good place for a rendezvous, except it lacks romance.
I hadn’t decided where I wanted this encounter to lead. My latest brush with death made me want to cling to someone without fur and a wet nose. I wanted to touch and be touched. Intimately. Just to reassure myself I was still alive and could still be thrilled by passion.
But Nick didn’t seem to want me unless I wanted him. I could sort of understand his position. I had rejected him once—pretty convincingly. So I almost made the first move and reached across the table to squeeze his hand; instead I chickened out and reached for salsa and chips.
“If I hadn’t lost my cell phone,” I told Garnett, “I would have called you last night and said, ‘I see dead people.’”
“You would have been better off dialing 911 because I’d simply have answered, ‘Haley Joel Osment, The Sixth Sense, 1999,’ and hung up on you.”
We talked about how neither the police, the public, nor the media get too excited over drug dealers killing each other. Newsrooms shrug off drive-by shootings unless they result in the death of an innocent, like a kid doing homework who’s hit by a stray bullet through a window. That kind of murder will spark a neighborhood to protest the violence and energize activists to call for change.
But as innocents keep dying and nothing seems to change, so does the community fervor to try to do something about it.
LEST YOU THINK I buried the lead, it wasn’t until later in the day that authorities announced the buried body was the missing groom. The news didn’t exactly stun me—remember, I’d gotten a glimpse of the face.
He wasn’t badly decomposed, because the ground had frozen so early. Some insect larva had invaded his flesh, but crawly things don’t freak me out. I grew up studying entomology as a hobby and taking my insect collection to the county fair each year to compete for a blue ribbon. An unusual hobby, but I was a poor farm kid and bugs were free. So my level of squeamishness differs from that of most women; better that I found Mark’s body, than a young child exploring the nature center for buried treasure.
So in retrospect, Mark Lefevre had an acceptable reason for missing his wedding: he was dead.
He hadn’t run off with an old girlfriend.
He hadn’t killed his mother, either.
And the discovery of his body in a shallow grave was a development that the police, the public, and the media cared intensely about. Especially since he hadn’t died from the bullet in his chest. Certainly loss of blood was a contributing factor, but the medical examiner found traces of dirt down his trachea and in his lungs, concluding that Mark had technically suffocated—been buried alive.
The next night, after the crime lab had cleared the scene and the police tape came down, I went back with Malik to shoot a moonlight stand-up bridge for my story.
((RILEY/STAND-UP))
THIS IS WHERE I STUMBLED
UPON THE SHALLOW GRAVE
CONCEALING MARK
LEFEVRE’S BODY.
Noreen had assigned coverage of the police investigation to another reporter because I was in pretty deep. Finding the body of the missing groom took me well beyond my role as journalist and made me a witness. But my boss still wanted me to track a how-it-happened sidebar story as I walked viewers through the woods.
While I waited to lay my voice track in the truck and feed it back to the station, I practiced variations of my sign-off line: “This is Riley Spartz, Channel 3 News.”
I like my name. Some journalists, such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper, have two last names stuck together. Others, like NBC’s David Gregory, have two first names. Both work well for them. To me, Riley Spartz sounds strong and confident, and that counts for something in the news business.
“This is Channel 3’s Riley Spartz …” “From White Bear Lake, this is Riley Spartz reporting …” “Reporting from White Bear Lake, Riley Spartz, Channel 3 News …” I kept it up until my photographer called me annoying and asked me to please turn off my wireless mic.
A couple of crews from the other stations were already laying cable in the parking lot for their own live shots. Their biggest challenge was telling the story without mentioning my name or television station, otherwise viewers would switch channels mid-sentence from them to us. No reporter enjoys following a competitor’s big scoop. We try glossing over that detail with vague references to “News reports say…”
On an earlier evening I might have walked through these woods thinking, Isn’t the park beautiful at night? But now I all I could think was, Isn’t it creepy?
The killer must have been familiar with Tamarack to pick that place to bury Mark. Or have known Mark well because I considered it a real in-your-face move to bury him near the site of his own wedding. That seemed to rule out a random serial killer, carjacker, or robber.
Garnett, using his old police sources, had unearthed another reason, not yet made public, why robbery could be ruled out. He’d just called to tell me Mark died with a big wad of cash in his wallet: five one-hundred-dollar bills.
But money wasn’t the biggest clue in this case. Not even close. Forensics showed the same gun killed both Mark and his mother.
Investigators were having a hard time making sense of those test results, particularly because a different jurisdiction was handling each murder. But to me, it seemed fairly reasonable to conclude that if the same gun was behind each homicide, the same finger pulled the trigger both times.
The Wisconsin cops still believed the big stack of cash in the safe-deposit box suggested Mark was connected to something dark and dangerous—like drugs. The cash in his pocket also supported that theory. Whatever the Minnesota police made of the evidence, they were keeping it to themselves. And I hadn’t heard anything to suggest either team of investigators had made any headway recovering the boxes taken from Jean Lefevre’s garage.
I had seen the murder weapon. Briefly. Though I was distracted by Mrs. Lefevre’s body sprawled on a blood-soaked carpet. The gun used wasn’t a drug thug’s firearm of choice. Instead of a semiautomatic pistol, it was some kind of old revolver, likely retrieved from the top shelf of a dusty closet, where it had been hidden years ago.
To me, Mark’s slaying screamed crime of passion. And since he clearly hadn’t run off with his old girlfriend, I wondered again about Sigourney Nelson’s whereabouts—both now and in the hours leading up to the doomed wedding.
To be fair, I also vowed to press the Post family—mother, daughter, son—a little harder on their individual timelines following the rehearsal dinner. Problem was, they tended to corroborate one another’s stories. And they’d had months to get them straight.
If investigators hadn’t reclassified Mark’s mother’s death as homicide, Jean Lefevre would have been a tempting target for authorities to wrap up loose ends. The cops could have concocted a theory—she killed her son out of rage; killed herself out of guilt—blaming her for not wanting her only child to marry and start a new life. But they’d already played their cause-of-death flip-flop card and now had to stick by their homicide ruling or else look like idiots.
Minneapolis police closed their missing person file on Mark Lefevre. Didn’t matter that he’d been found dead. All that mattered was he’d been found. Their work was finished. They could mark another case solved.
I would have liked to read that file, but those
records remained sealed because they’d been folded into White Bear Lake’s homicide case and that department had a whole lot of work ahead before they could mark anything solved.
THE DARKNESS REMAINED macabre that night without Shep as I stared out the window of my home office. I no longer feared a missing groom lurking outside. But murderers and drug dealers remained fairly high on my worry radar.
I’d owned a gun, briefly—or rather, I inherited my late husband’s service Glock. Police confiscated it last fall as evidence in a suicide committed by a serial killer at close range to me. Once I, and the cop on the scene, were officially cleared in the shooting, authorities offered the gun back to me. I declined, perceiving the weapon as tainted. But tonight I wished I was armed and dangerous.
A friend once worked at a TV station in Laredo, Texas—market size 198, small by television standards. A firearm store couldn’t come up with the cash to cover its advertising bill, so the station was paid in guns. Every employee got a .22 Magnum as a Christmas bonus that year. But this is the Twin Cities—market size 14. And all we get at Christmas is a gift voucher for a sport watch, toaster oven, or some other civilized home-electronics gizmo.
I glanced around the room for a suitable weapon to keep close by. A shelf of journalism awards drew my interest and I reflected on past stories that had gone much better than my current batch.
I stroked a national Emmy, but the shiny gold figurine was too beautiful and delicate to swing at an intruder. I quickly dismissed the bronze Sigma Delta Chi medallion as better suited for a coaster than a weapon. The pointed corners of the Edward R. Murrow trophy might inflict some damage but lacked heft. The silver duPont-Columbia baton fit nicely in my hand but was too short to cause serious harm. I settled on an American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award. Nothing feminine about this statuette, except its name and curved shape. The four pounds of solid pewter could crack a skull as decisively as a metal baseball bat.