I groaned softly.
“—but us. You. I started having doubts about you. But then my mom helped me see the other side.”
“Your mom,” I repeated stupidly.
“Yeah, she was there, you know, at Aunt Kjersti’s bedside. It was kind of hard not to talk to her.”
“And your mom said you should give me another chance?” I tried to picture Marget arguing on my behalf, and couldn’t make it work.
“Oh God, no.” Katie laughed. “Just the opposite. She says you’re a loser, and that you’ve told me all these lies about how my dad died, and I can do so much better, and how she always liked Dwight, he’s got a real job, you know, not stealing cars but a decent career with a pension and benefits.” As she spoke, Katie’s voice took on the vaguely Minnesotan lilt of her mother’s accent.
“Sounds like I’m growing on her.”
Katie grinned at me. “I guess I’ve just never thought much of my mother’s advice on matters of the heart. Or anything else. If she disapproves of you, that’s the best endorsement a man can get.”
“I’ll try to continue to earn her distrust.”
Katie’s eyes searched my face. “But I do love you, Ruddy. There’s so much stuff with my mom, and I hardly see any of my girlfriends, but I know, no matter what, I love you. Being away from you, missing you, taught me that. Now that I have my own place—I’ve never lived alone before; I had roommates, and having a trailer on my mom’s property didn’t count. But now that I have my own place, I feel like for once in my life I’ve got freedom of choice. So: I choose you.”
“I choose you, too, Katie.”
“So we’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah. We’ll … date. Go to the movies. I’ll ask you to prom.”
She laughed.
Katie slept in my bed that whole night. Jake spent a lot of it hunting around for a place to lie down—he liked having her back but didn’t believe it meant she could reclaim her pillow.
I was awake for much of the time, watching Katie sleep in the glow of the moon. I could understand just how close I’d come to blowing it. She was right; we hardly knew each other when we moved in together, and because it was my house, she adapted to my ways, while all I did was grumble about the number of her items in the bathroom. I silently vowed to myself that from that moment on I would always put my goddamn socks in the hamper.
I didn’t hear her get up, but the sound of the shower running dragged me into consciousness. I felt the sore spot on the back of my neck and gingerly rotated my head, wincing. When I stood up, Jake turned in circles and sprawled across the blankets, relieved to have the bed all to himself.
I went in to make coffee. Katie smelled it and came in for a cup, wearing only a towel, and I expressed my enthusiasm for this convenient outfit by reaching hungrily for her. She laughed. “Okay, now I have to get ready for work.”
I volunteered to cook breakfast. This time, at Jake’s insistence, I made bacon, too. Katie ate and I watched her and she smiled at me watching her. “Might be fun to do this again tonight,” I finally ventured.
Her gaze was frank, and I steeled myself against what she had to say while she considered her words. “I have a six-month lease on the place in East Jordan,” she finally said. “With the roads iced up, it’s going to take me more than an hour this morning. When I walk, it’s eight minutes.”
“Okay, then.”
A small smile crept onto her lips. “Maybe some nights you could sleep over there.”
“I would really like that.”
She went back to finish getting ready, and I stealthily set the plates on the floor for Jake to lick. It’s just easier than scrubbing them at the sink, and the dishwasher would sterilize them anyway. When Katie emerged, wearing her work clothes, her face carefully made up, she was so pretty, I felt a pleasant hollow sensation in my chest. She came to me and kissed me good-bye. “I’m getting lipstick on you,” she breathed.
“It’s okay.”
She motioned to Jake to say good-bye. Watching her lean over my dog, stroking his ears, I did something I wouldn’t have expected: I reached out to Alan, and I invited him back in. I felt his presence inside me like an increase of internal air pressure, just the slightest change of my sense of being.
“Hey, Katie,” I said as she turned to go. She stopped, her hand on the front doorknob, raising her eyebrows.
“I know that if your father were here, he would tell you how proud he is. How much it means to him that you’re following in his footsteps in the real estate business. That he knows that part of what you’re doing is an homage to him, honoring his memory. He’s watching you, Katie, and I promise you he is so, so happy right now.”
She tightly pressed her lips together, her eyes shining. Inside, I heard Alan weeping. I went to Alan’s daughter and pulled her into a long, hard hug, an embrace all for him.
* * *
I didn’t tell Alan what I had discovered—that he was a completely fictional presence in my head—because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. What would be the point? I was a repo man with a voice in his head. It didn’t mean I needed to be on antipsychotic medication.
I didn’t tell Schaumburg, either. “Your urine test was positive,” he advised me on the phone.
“Good. I was up all night, cramming.”
He grunted, which is maybe what psychiatrists do instead of laughing. “Are you experiencing any side effects?”
“Yeah, I feel like crap.”
“There’s usually a period of adjustment. You’ll probably feel better soon.”
I didn’t feel like advising him that the main adjustment was that I’d thrown the medication in the trash at the Burger King and actually was feeling better, thank you. We made an appointment for the next urine festival, me wondering what I was going to do about that. “How is Sheryl doing?” I asked hopefully.
“Dr. Johnston is recovering but is not expected to return to work until the fall.”
“Ah.”
“So you’re stuck with me, Ruddy.”
“I did get that that was what you were telling me.”
“I don’t like him,” Alan remarked when I rang off.
“Yeah, well, he wants to see you gone from my head forever. Not the greatest basis for a long-lasting friendship.”
“Not that. It’s his manner. He’s very dictatorial.”
“He’s got the power to send me to jail just by writing a letter. I think that might turn anyone into a dictator.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant by dictatorial.”
“If we’re going to start parsing vocabulary words, I’m going to turn you over to Kermit.”
After dropping Jake off at the office, I went out to the junkyard where Tigg Bloom’s Suburban wound up after he went tree smashing with it. He was refusing to accept his insurance company’s offer, and the bank needed it off their books as a huge delinquency, so they wanted me to take it, and then the settlement conversation would be with them. No one noticed when I put dollies under the rear wheels and towed it away—people were dragging vehicles in and out of the place all the time.
With that taken care of, I stopped by the Ferry Bar. Phil, the mayor of Shantytown, had been in, but not recently, and no one could remember the last time he had been there.
“Some friends. They can’t even remember if it was yesterday or this week?” Alan asked indignantly.
I knew from working at the Black Bear that friends in the bar are a different category from friends anywhere else. Being a supportive fiancé, I handed out Katie’s business cards to everyone there. One guy said he already had a real estate agent, but I gave him a hard stare, and he took one.
“She’s hot,” Rogan the bald-headed bartender told me, leering.
“She’s my fiancée,” I corrected him.
“That’s what I meant.”
“Hey, Wade. Let me ask you something. Have you told anyone about what I talked to you about? You know, how I’m looking into the missing wom
en, the ones who drowned, and Lisa Marie Walker?”
“Yeah, I told Phil that’s why you wanted to talk to him.”
“Huh. Does Phil have a bald spot?”
“A what?”
“You know. Like on the top of his head, is he missing some hair?”
“He’s missing a lot of hair.” Rogan rubbed his own skull and grinned. “Maybe it’s the air in here.”
“Okay. And hey, I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell anyone else about my investigation.” I felt embarrassed saying the word investigation but didn’t know what else to call it.
Rogan made a zipping-the-lip gesture and winked at me.
* * *
I slid in behind the wheel. “You know, I like the vibe of that place,” I told Alan as I steered toward Boyne City.
“Yeah, nice serial killer hangout.”
I cocked my head. “Are you making a joke? You? Alan Lottner?”
“No, I’m just pointing out that our mayor seems to have vanished the moment he found out you wanted to talk to him about Nina Otis. And by vanished, I mean ran off.”
“Okay, because for a minute there I thought I detected some humorlike content in your statement. I was just saying, the Ferry Bar is a nice place. That’s all. I like the guy who runs it.”
“Maybe you should take Katie there. Be an entirely different experience than a night at the Black Bear Bar.”
“Now you’re pissing me off.” I didn’t tell him that yeah, that’s actually what I had been thinking, that Katie might like the place.
“And I’m glad you’re buddies with Rogan. One of our suspects.”
“No, our suspect is the medical examiner Dennis Kane. I’m thinking I should go back there and ask him.”
“Ask him? As in, ‘Hey, did you murder Lisa Marie Walker?’”
“Why are you in such a pissy mood? Aren’t you getting enough sleep? Maybe you should take a nap.”
“The inside of this truck is filthy.”
“Yeah, because it’s winter, Alan. My boots get coated with snow and mud. You want me to go to the car wash? Spray the truck with frozen water?”
“You could mop it out.”
“Repo men do not mop.”
“We’re going to Boyne City,” he noticed. “To visit Shantytown, talk to the mayor?”
“No, we’re going to meet Barry Strickland and the state police. I set up the appointment while you were sleeping, which is what I wish you were doing now.”
Strickland had agreed to come out of his cave and meet at Café Sante, a restaurant owned by the same people who run my favorite Mexican place, the Red Mesa. The café has a beautiful outdoor terrace and sits right on the shore of Lake Charlevoix, not too far from where Lisa Marie’s body was pulled from the water. Today the lake was a sheet of ice, and the wind howling straight out of the north had driven the wind chill to negative ten, so I didn’t imagine there would be many people sitting on the patio.
Strickland was already in a booth and waved me over. “I just got a call. They’re both running late.”
“Both?”
“Darrell Hughes is joining us.”
Darrell Hughes was the prosecutor who insisted I had to be guilty of something even though I didn’t commit any crimes, back when I, as Blanchard mischaracterized it, “solved Becky’s problem with extreme prejudice.” My probation with Sheryl, and now Dr. Schaumburg, was D.A. Darrell’s brilliant idea. Strickland correctly read my expression. “He’s not my favorite person either,” he stated apologetically.
I ordered a cup of coffee. Through the window I could see the tiny ice shanties of Shantytown. The wind was blowing crystalized snow against the glass like a sandblaster, and the small buildings out there were barely visible. The idea of going there in search of the mayor, trooping around from shanty to shanty, some of them a hundred yards apart, was very unappealing. One of them had what looked to be a thirty-year-old Pontiac station wagon parked next to it.
“I can’t believe people drive their cars on the ice,” I told Strickland.
He shrugged. “It’s thick enough. I’d probably drive. I don’t have any interest in ice fishing, though.”
“You know anyone who does? Someone who could introduce me around?”
“Not really. Why, you looking for a vehicle to repo out there? Most people drive clunkers to get to their shanties.”
“Something like that,” I replied evasively.
“Uh-huh. The other thing, then,” Strickland concluded shrewdly. “Lisa Marie Walker.”
I took a noncommittal sip of coffee.
He nodded, making up his mind about something. His normally hard demeanor changed somehow, and I gave him my full attention. “So…,” he began. “About that. I got my hands on the autopsy for her. Absolutely no surprises in the M.E.’s report. High blood-alcohol content. Some facial bruising, but she’d been in a car accident. No other injuries. Water in the lungs. Died of drowning.”
I absorbed all this, disappointed. I didn’t know what I had expected.
“What’s he not saying?” Alan asked.
I glanced up at Strickland and saw him gazing back intently. If anything, his expression had become even more un-Strickland-like. Uncomfortable, maybe. “All completely normal,” he told me. “And then I saw the photographs.”
22
This Is Huge
The expression on Strickland’s face was one I’d never seen on him before: uncertainty. He seemed almost hesitant to continue.
“What about the photographs?” I prompted tensely.
“Ruddy, I want to clear the air with you on this. When you came to me with the story of this girl and what she claimed to have seen that night, I did not for a moment believe she was telling you the truth. I didn’t know why she would lie, but her story seemed improbable. No, impossible. I really didn’t think there was anything to it. So I dismissed it out of hand, though in all my years as a lawman I thought I had learned by now not to discount anything, to treat everything as evidence. I’m sorry for that.”
I nodded at him, swallowing.
“I told you the medical examiner was incompetent,” he continued.
“Yes, you said that.”
He shook his head in disgust. “There’s no way Lisa Marie Walker spent five days in the water. Even really cold water. I’ve seen bodies pulled from the lake, and they look pretty rough. She was pristine.” Strickland sighed. “So I went back through and read the autopsy again, and saw some things that were missed. For one thing, she was floating.”
“But bodies float; that’s how we find people who drown. The decomposition gasses make them float,” Alan argued.
Strickland nodded as if he’d heard the voice in my head. “I know, you expect them to float. But there’s an order to it. A corpse floats at first, then it sinks. Then, as it decomposes, it comes back to the surface. In the postmortem, the lack of decomposition is noted by Dr. Kane and explained away as due to the cold water temperature. But five days? Also, she was nude. And I’ve seen that, too. I can’t explain why, but when I was a cop in Muskegon, there was a body that had been in the water for a couple of months, and the clothes had come off somehow. Washed away or something. Rotted, maybe. But five days?”
“You’re saying she wasn’t in the water very long.”
He grunted. “My opinion, she probably went in the night before she was found.”
“So she wasn’t in the car when I drove into the lake.”
“I do not believe she was.”
I sat back, waiting to feel it: elation. Vindication. Or even a sense of time wasted, of a life ruined over a lie. And I felt … nothing.
“My God, my God, this is huge,” Alan breathed. At least he was feeling something. Maybe that’s why I invented him, to process things I apparently could not.
“So now what? Can you get your hands on the other autopsy reports?” I pressed.
“The other … So you really believe that list you gave me is all murder victims?”
“Have
you checked them out?”
“No. Tell you the truth, the list is still sitting on the kitchen counter.” He held up a hand. “I only saw the autopsy photographs yesterday, Ruddy. Up until that point, I was just going along with you to help you work this out in your head, to get past what I thought was a sick joke. I didn’t expect to find anything in the file. Those photographs hit me like a punch in the gut.”
“But now you do believe me.”
“I do believe that something happened to Lisa Marie Walker that wound up with her dead body being pulled from the lake.”
“There’s more.” I told Strickland about the semen.
He looked thunderstruck. “Dr. Kane withheld that?”
“It’s what he told me.”
“That’s a criminal offense.”
“I imagine so.”
Strickland incredulously shook his head. “I don’t suppose he kept it.”
“No, he said then he would have had to put it in his report, and that would have caused agony to the family.”
“The man is an embarrassment. I don’t need to tell you.…” Strickland stopped, fixing me with his steely eyes. “Would it have been your semen, Ruddy?”
“No, sir. I never so much as kissed her. In fact, once she climbed in the backseat, I never saw her.”
“I don’t think I can get into the other files, not without a reason,” Strickland told me, addressing my question.
“Why did someone let you have the file on Lisa Marie?”
He looked sheepish. “I explained that you and I are working for Kramer, and I wanted to check into your past.” He looked past me, over my shoulder. “Here they are,” he told me.
* * *
State Police Captain Cutty Wells had an iron grip, a disciplined posture, and a no-nonsense gaze. She also wore lipstick and a uniform that completely failed to camouflage her feminine curves. Her curly hair was styled in a blunt, fashionable cut. Her nails were sculpted and painted pink. I found myself a little tongue-tied as we were introduced, sorting through my reactions to this tough woman with her military bearing and stylish tastes. She looked to be a few years younger than Strickland—fifty, maybe—but was clearly very fit.