Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  “Lucy!” Sheridan said, looking to her mother for help.

  “I’m not calling,” Lucy said, opening the phone, finding the text thread in an instance, and writing a message so quickly—a blur of practiced thumbs—that she pressed SEND before Sheridan or Marybeth could wrest the phone away. Then she handed the phone back to her sister and gave one last spiteful deadeye to all of them in turn before grabbing her backpack on the way out the door.

  There were a few beats of silence.

  “Wow,” Joe said.

  “This will take some work,” Marybeth said. “She’s got a point. We’ve got to consider the fact she’s growing up. She’s not that little girl anymore.” She looked blankly at the kitchen window. “Lucy’s growing up whether we want her to or not.”

  Sheridan snorted as she read aloud the message Lucy sent:

  april come back. still scared of closet. we need revenge. love, luce.

  LUCY’S BLOW-UP seemed to hang within the walls of the house like a scorching odor long after she left for school. While Sheridan slumped down the hall to take a shower and get dressed—a process that would rarely take less than an hour, Joe knew—Marybeth listlessly cleared the dishes, something on her mind.

  When the sound of the shower coursed through the wall, she turned to Joe and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He nodded. By her tone and her choice of words, he knew where they were going.

  They took her van to the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery, ten minutes away, in complete silence. The cemetery was on the east bank of the river, overlooking a bluff and a shallow bend. During the flash flood three years ago, the river had swollen as if suddenly hungry and had eaten into the soft dirt wall like a beast. The horrified citizens of Saddlestring formed a sandbag brigade that diverted the wall of water before it ate too deeply into the bluff and devoured the coffins. The sandbags were still there, scattered and broken and sunken into the embankment, six feet above the current benign level of the river. Looking at the river, Joe saw violence in remission, a sleeping brute capable of rearing up whenever it wanted if for no other reason than to remind them who was in control.

  April’s grave was one of those nearest the bluff above the river. The headstone was small and thin, a wafer of granite, all they could afford at the time. It used to be shaded by river cottonwoods, but the trees had washed away in the flood and so had the shade, and the high-altitude sun burned the grass and whitened the stone itself, aging it well past its six years. All it said was:

  APRIL KEELEY

  WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

  And her birth and death dates.

  “We used to come here every month,” Marybeth said. “Remember? Then it turned into every few months.”

  “Yup.”

  “Joe, we haven’t been here for over a year. I feel really guilty about that.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Did we forget about her?”

  “No,” he said. “Life went on, I guess. Let’s not beat ourselves up.”

  They stood in silence. The only sound was a whisper of breeze high in the remaining treetops that sounded more like the river than the river itself.

  She said it: “Is it possible there is someone else in the grave, Joe?”

  “I was thinking about that.”

  “An unknown child? It’s too painful to even consider.”

  Joe said, “I didn’t see any other children in that trailer, Marybeth. Only April.”

  “But we know the Sovereigns had other children with them. We don’t know what happened to them after the fire.”

  Joe remembered the week after the raid when the county coroner and the team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation dug through the charred trailers in the campground. The snow had finally stopped, but in its place an incredible blanket of cold—day after day of twenty, thirty below zero—had descended on the mountains as if to punish them for what had taken place. He had purposely looked away when the investigators cleared blackened sheet metal from the site of Brockius’s trailer, when the coroner shouted out that he’d located three bodies—two adults and a child. Joe had no doubt at the time who they were: Jeannie Keeley, April’s birth mother; Wade Brockius, the leader of the camp; and April. Joe never looked at the bodies, didn’t need to. All he saw were the body bags—one stuffed full like a sausage (Brockius), one stiff and thin ( Jeannie), and one with a body so small it seemed empty. The body bags were carried by investigators to an ambulance and taken away. The autopsies of Jeannie and April were cursory—neither had dental records to match up, and the state chose not to run a DNA confirmation because at the time the process was slow and expensive and no one doubted who the bodies were. The decision was made in no small part because of Joe’s own eyewitness testimony.

  “We could have the body exhumed,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to go about it, but I can find out.”

  Joe shook his head. “It could take months. We’d need a court order. To get the order we’d need to go to a judge and explain what this is all about. We’d need to try and convince the judge that April might be out there somewhere. We’ll need more than those text messages, Marybeth. Even I can’t completely convince myself she’s alive. We need more.”

  “We need her to text again,” Marybeth said.

  “At the very least.”

  “Joe, there’s something else.”

  He knew there was. She’d alluded to it the night before, when she said she’d been doing an Internet search using the place names from the text thread.

  “I DID AN ADVANCED Google search,” Marybeth said, seated at her desk in her office. She wore her reading glasses that made her look serious and thoughtful, Joe thought. She tapped the monitor of her computer with an index finger. “I did several combinations of the words Chicago, Madison, Cheyenne, Mount Rushmore and words like crime, murder, killing, police. I got thousands of hits, of course. Then I narrowed down the search to the last two weeks, because April said she’d been on the road for two weeks, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So since she said she used to live in Chicago, I assumed the two weeks in the car started there. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but that’s what I’m guessing. So I narrowed it down to the second week of August. Guess how many murders took place that week?”

  Joe shrugged.

  “Eight. It’s a big place. Of the eight, four were ‘gang-related,’ but I guess we can’t rule them out until we get more information from April. The others run the gamut, from the murder of a doctor—wife arrested—to a truck driver in a suspected road-rage incident. And a brothel owner got shot in the head but nobody saw anything. So who knows?”

  Joe agreed. “All we’re going on is that one line she wrote—some people died. We just don’t know enough. We need to get her to tell us more.”

  “Right,” she said, doing another Google search. “But let me see if I can find what I found last night. Madison is smaller than Chicago, of course, and there was an unexplained murder there eleven days ago.”

  Joe’s antennae went up because of the way she said it.

  “Here,” she said jabbing the screen. “From the Capitol Times. I’ll print it out, but here’s the headline: CONTROVERSIAL BLOGGER SLAIN.”

  It meant nothing to Joe, and he shrugged.

  The printer purred, and she snatched out the sheet that slid out and handed it to Joe.

  By Rob Thomas, Staff Writer

  MADISON—Madison Police are looking for suspects in the alleged slaying of controversial anti-environmentalist blogger Aaron Reif, 38, author of “PlanetStupido.com.” According to MPD Spokesman Jim Weller, Reif’s body was found Tuesday night in his studio apartment at 2701 University Avenue slumped over his computer. According to Weller, Reif had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon at point-blank range. Because there were no signs of forced entry, the police assume the alleged assailant may have been an acquaintance of Reif, according to police sources who asked to remain unnamed.

  PlanetStu
pido.com attracted national and international notoriety last year when Reif publicly accused the proprietors of several international carbon-offset brokers of fraud and corporate malfeasance. Police sources refuse to speculate whether the alleged murder was connected with the website or Reif’s high-profile activities.

  Weller stated in a hastily called press conference at police headquarters that Reif’s body was discovered at 9:47 P.M. by a pizza de liveryman who arrived at the apartment to deliver a pizza that Reif allegedly ordered, leading the police to believe that Reif was killed between 9:20 P.M. when the order was received and the time of delivery. The Madison Police Department urges citizens who may have been in the vicinity of 2701 University Avenue between 9:15 and 10:00 P.M. to report any suspicious persons, vehicles, or activities . . .

  “Interesting,” Joe said. “I’ve never heard of this website, have you?”

  “No, but when we get done here, I’m going to spend some time on it,” she said. “But first I’ve got to show you something else.”

  She found no major crimes in Cheyenne or at Mount Rushmore, she said. But when she looked at the road atlas for South Dakota, she noted how many small communities there were around the monument. Hill City, Custer, Keystone, and Rapid City, the only city of any size.

  “Keystone,” Joe said, sitting up. “Wasn’t that where—”

  “Yes,” she said, leaping in. “That’s where that old couple from Iowa were found murdered a week ago in that RV park. Remember that they thought those poor old people had died because their motor home caught fire while they were sleeping, but they later found they’d been shot first?”

  “With a small-caliber weapon,” Joe finished for her.

  He sat back, his head swimming.

  “This proves nothing, I know,” Marybeth said, spinning in her chair to face Joe, whipping her glasses off. “But you’re right—we need to ask April more questions.”

  As they looked at each other they both came up with the same thought.

  Marybeth returned to the keyboard and the Google home page, typed ASPEN + MURDER, and directed the search within the last twenty-four hours.

  Joe observed her as she read the screen. Suddenly, she gasped, sat back in her chair, and covered her mouth with her hand.

  He stood up and leaned across the desk. There were only four hits.

  The first one, from the Aspen Times said:

  MURDER IN ASPEN: COUPLE SLAIN ON EVE

  OF WEDDING WEEKEND

  9

  Chicago, Two Weeks Before

  STENKO HAD SAVED HER. SHE OWED HIM; SHE WAS LOYAL. Her journey from that frozen campground on fire in Wyoming to Chicago had been cruel and difficult, consisting of movement with no destination in mind. Until Stenko.

  As Stenko and Robert argued back and forth in the front seat of the SUV as they drove north toward Wyoming again, she reviewed how she got to this place at this time and let their voices become nothing more than a discordant background soundtrack.

  After the fire, after the raggedy soldiers of the Sovereigns had thrown her across the back of a snowmobile and raced away from that campsite under cover of smoke, confusion, and automatic weapons fire, she’d been bounced around the Midwest to family after family. Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, finally Illinois. All were Sovereign sympathizers, but that didn’t mean they were necessarily sympathetic to her. She’d learned to expect nothing from anyone and to have no aspirations. She became what each family expected of her, which was a nonentity attached to a monthly check issued by the social services people. She’d had twenty or more “brothers” and “sisters” along the way. She matured early and was taller, softer featured, and more voluptuous than her mother had been, although when she looked into the mirror and squinted or made an angry face she saw the hard, flinty, cold-eyed face of her mother looking back, as if Mama were inside her trying to break out.

  She’d smoked her first joint at age eleven and had sex for the first time at age twelve with foster brother Blake in Minnesota, who’d also taught her how to shoplift from Wal-Mart. The act took place in her basement bedroom while Blake’s friends watched through the window well and hooted. It hurt, she hated it, and afterward she found out quick that most boys despised what they said they wanted most, and that was an important thing to learn. When her foster parents found out what happened they blamed her, called her names, shipped her out of there to the next family.

  That’s how she wound up with the Voricek family on the South Side of Chicago. The Voriceks supplemented their income by taking in foster children. She was one of ten. Ed Voricek, her foster father, was a pig-like man with a slight mustache and a comb-over, and he smelled of cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon. He held a series of jobs in the short time she was there, which turned out to be his pattern. He had so many jobs that if anyone at school asked her what her father did, she had to stop and think for a moment what uniform shirt he’d been wearing last. Midas? Grease Monkey? Jiffy Lube? He was chronically in and out of work. His wife Mary Ann was as stout as Ed but meaner, and the children lived in absolute fear of her. Any transgression—not making their beds, not eating every bit of food on their plates, talking back to her, sulking—was greeted with a threat to send them back to the agency. So she learned to do what she had to do, not talk, and live in her own head. Her only companion was a foster sister the same age who had come from the same place, and they used to sneak into each other’s rooms and whisper about running away together. Her foster sister had stuck by her when she screwed up and protected her when a drunk Ed Voricek hovered outside their bedroom door one night when there was no good reason for him to be there. Not that Ed suggested anything or made any moves, but the fact that he was there, leaning against the wall next to their door, said enough in itself. She could still recall the stand her sister took when she opened the door, stared the man down, said, “Why don’t you get the hell to bed?” Ed slunk away.

  Ed Voricek was a gambler. She didn’t understand very much about it at the time, but she and all the other children heard the furious arguments between Ed and Mary Ann about his losses. Mary Ann would scream at Ed, beat him with her fists, threaten to leave him if he ruined them, if the social workers found out that he’d lied about his employment status and took the children away.

  She was surprised the evening Ed knocked on her bedroom door and told her to get dressed. “Wear something nice,” he said. “Something cute.”

  So in her best second- or third-hand dress and sandals, she followed him out to his car. Although he’d told her not to pack a bag or bring anything along, she took a small leather pocketbook with a few papers and one-dollar bills—her savings. She knew Mary Ann was out for the evening—Thursday was her bingo night—and when she reached for the handle of the back door, Ed had said, “What’re you doing? You can sit up front with me.”

  She thought she knew what would come next. She was wrong. But it turned out to be worse.

  They drove through downtown Chicago and out the other side in Ed’s rattletrap station wagon. They crossed the river to the west side, and she saw a battered street sign that read DIVISION and she thought about that. She turned around in her seat and watched out the back window as the sun dropped and the buildings downtown burst with color, the glass and steel towers lighting up fire orange and magenta. The vibrancy of the colors reminded her of sunset in the mountain west and how long it had been since she’d seen one like that. Then, as suddenly as it started, the light and colors doused as if a curtain had been pulled and the buildings became buildings again. Dark, metal, and cold.

  Ed was saying, “This is all for the best, all for the best.”

  “Are you taking me back to the agency?”

  “Something like that,” Ed said.

  She was scared but resigned to whatever would happen next. She wished her foster sister were with her. But, as always, she was alone.

  He parked on a street of old buildings. There were women in revealing clothes on the corners and knots of young bla
ck and Hispanic men on stoops and playing basketball on a cracked court with chain nets that sang when a ball passed through them. When she and Ed got out of the car, a couple of the boys saw her, stopped playing, and hooted like those friends of her “brother” outside the window well.

  “Follow me,” Ed said, taking her hand.

  They went through a heavy door and up narrow stairs. At the top of the landing was a single bare bulb. She detected a new smell on Ed to go along with the cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon: whiskey. He held her hand too tightly, and she tried to jerk away.

  He turned on her, his eyes blazing. “Follow me,” he said.

  “You hurt me.”

  “Don’t try to run,” he said.

  “Where would I run?”

  “And cheer up. Try to look cute, like I told you. Wet your lips.”

  She licked her lips.

  “Okay,” he said.

  At the top of the stairs Ed rapped out a series of taps on a door that could only have been some kind of code. She heard locks being thrown and the door opened.

  “I’m Eddie V,” Ed said. “I’ve got her with me.”

  A tall man in a suit with shallow, badly pockmarked cheeks ignored Ed and peered around him to look at her. But he didn’t so much look at as size her up, the way a man looks at a car he might buy. His eyes narrowed and he nodded to himself, humming. Then, “Come in.”

  The tall man shut the door behind them. The room was nothing like what the building and the hallway suggested it might be like. There were soft lights and empty chairs and couches upholstered in buttery leather. There was a desk with a green shade. Music played in the background from invisible speakers. A bar in the corner had dozens of bottles on it and the liquid in them looked warm and delicious.

  The tall man continued to look her over. He walked around her, appraising.