Elisabeth Hennessy had drowned under suspicious circumstances, with whispers of suicide surrounding her death. Her daughter’s memory made me wonder if Marlinchen’s mother had been troubled throughout her young life, if a highly tuned nervous system had turned the excitement of Minnesota ’s summer thunderstorms into terrifying psychodramas.
“Is something wrong?” Marlinchen asked me.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask whether Elisabeth Hennessy had been fearful or neurotic, so I filed away the issue for another time.
“How old were you when your mother died?” Marlinchen asked me.
I hoped my surprise didn’t show on my face. She was something of a mind reader. Not spot-on, but close. “I was nine,” I said. “Almost ten.”
Marlinchen paused with her plastic spoon halfway to her mouth. “The other day, I thought you said you came to Minnesota when you were 13,” she remarked. “What happened in between?”
I’d told the story of my migration to Minnesota to a number of people, and none had asked that specific question. Until now.
“I told you my dad was a truck driver, right?” I said. “He was on the road a lot. But until I was 13, my older brother, Buddy, lived at home. Then he joined the army and moved away, so I would have been living alone. That was mostly why. But also…” I hesitated.
“What?”
“That summer, I think, a girl went missing. She was about my age, and in a small town, things like that cause a real panic.” A waterbird swept low over the river. “I haven’t thought about that for years.”
“Why not?”
“It was a long time ago. I was young.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that might have had an influence on my father’s feelings. Besides that, I was becoming a teenager. My father probably thought I needed a feminine influence.”
“I see,” Marlinchen said dryly. “So it was your aunt’s feminine influence that led you to break into airports and practice stunt driving?”
“Right,” I agreed. “Ginny was the mellowest aunt ever. She worked evenings and weekends at a bar and grill, and she mostly let me do my own thing. Want one of these?” I held out the onion rings, and she took one.
“Thanks. So is your aunt still up on the Range?” she asked.
“No, she died when I was 19, of a stroke. Not like your dad,” I added quickly, seeing Marlinchen’s little twitch of reaction. “Hers was down in the brain stem, where a lot of the body’s autonomic functions are. If there’s such a thing as a good location to have a stroke, that’s not it.”
After a few minutes, when Marlinchen had finished her ice cream, I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said, “let’s head out.”
We walked down to the car together in silence. This time, I got behind the wheel, and at the end of the dirt lane we’d followed to our vantage point, I turned north instead of south onto the road.
“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” Marlinchen said as we continued to accelerate.
“Yes,” I told her. Then I hauled up on the parking brake and turned the wheel hard. The Nova slewed in a 180, back wheels drifting briefly onto the shoulder, and then we were heading west, picking up speed again.
“See?” I said. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
17
Another gas-station mini-mart was hit; it was clearly the same two perpetrators. Welcome back, guys, I thought.
After taking initial witness reports, I reviewed security video from the first two stores, hoping that by watching tape from the day before the robberies, I might recognize these guys without their stocking masks, casing the place.
When I got off work, I was thinking that it might be a good night to go out to the lake in time for dinner. Marlinchen’s cooking was probably better than mine. I rode the elevator down to the parking garage.
“Detective Pribek!”
I turned to see Gray Diaz approaching along a lane of parked vehicles. He wasn’t alone. The man behind him was in his early fifties, tall, and slender, dressed in simple plainclothes: shirtsleeves and trousers, no tie. His eyes were gray behind wire-rim glasses. He too was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
“I’m glad we caught you before you left for the day,” Diaz said. He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. “You know Gil Hennig, correct?”
“Yes,” I said, recognition kicking in. Hennig was a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension technician. I’d seen him at crime scenes, brushing fingerprint dust onto doorways, making casts of footprints, never drawing attention to himself.
“What can I do for you guys?” I said, feeling the little flutter of anxiety in my stomach that Diaz caused.
“Gil came down with me to get your car,” Diaz said. He held up the piece of paper. It was a warrant. “You’re welcome to look this over.”
I took the warrant from his hand and scanned it. It allowed testing for hair, fiber, prints, and blood. The work would be done at the BCA’s crime lab. Hennepin County had its own laboratory, but this wasn’t a Hennepin County case, and the BCA did testing for smaller jurisdictions, like the one Diaz served.
“If there’s anything you need from the car, why don’t you get it now?” Diaz suggested. “The warrant covers contents of the car, but we’ll be flexible. Officer Hennig will just need to watch, and he’ll need to briefly inspect whatever you remove.”
“I don’t need anything,” I said. There were tire tools in the trunk, the first-aid kit, and a few other emergency items. Cassettes in the glove compartment, and two $50 bills for towing in case of breakdown. I had no doubt the money would still be there when the Nova was returned to me.
Hennig spoke. “I’ll need the key, then.”
My fingers were clumsy. After perhaps sixty seconds, a period that seemed much longer with the two men watching me, I scraped the Nova’s key between the tight double coils of the key ring and out to freedom.
Hennig walked over to my car, not needing me to point it out for him. In a moment, a tow truck had pulled in behind it, and they were hooking it up.
“I know this is an inconvenience,” Gray Diaz said. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Really,” Diaz said. “It’s no trouble.”
I shook my head. “I have a friend who’s just about to get off work,” I said. “I’ll get a ride from her.”
“Are you sure?” Diaz said as we started walking toward the elevators, the direction from which I’d come.
“Positive,” I said.
Back upstairs, I disappeared into the women’s room. I wasn’t sure exactly where Diaz had gone, but I didn’t want him to see me standing around, obviously without a friend I intended to hit up for a ride.
The restroom was unoccupied. I rested my haunches against the counter in silence.
Shorty had never been in my car, but of course Diaz couldn’t know that. He knew that Stewart had been at the Sportsman bar, where I’d spoken to him, and shortly thereafter had been dead in his burning house. For all Diaz knew, Shorty could have been in my car in the interim, either alive as a passenger, or dead in the trunk. I could have killed him elsewhere and transported the body back to his house to burn it in a weak cover-up attempt.
The problem was, while Shorty hadn’t been in my car, his blood had been. I’d been at the scene and even knelt beside him as he bled out, trying to persuade him to tell me a story that would otherwise have died with him. Stewart had told me what I needed to know, and all the while his warm blood had soaked into my clothes. Later, when Gen and I had gotten to her sister’s farmhouse, we’d washed our bloody clothes in the basement machine, and carefully gone over the porch and house, making sure no trace of Blue Earth had followed us there to implicate us. The next day, I’d gone to a carwash and given the Nova the most thorough cleaning, washing, and vacuuming it had ever suffered at my hands.