Big Sick Heart: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (24 page)

“Well, Ms. Skarzenski, we’ll let you go now. Your
program is probably about to start.”

“Will you do one thing, young man? I’m sorry, I no
remember name. If you find Timmy, you ask him to call me? If he has time? I
like to talk to him. See how he is.”

“I’ll be sure to do that, ma’am. I’ll certainly do
that.” We heard her phone go dead.

I was already on the Internet, getting the phone
number of the church in Milwaukee. “Good work, Ryan,” I said to him as I dialed
the number.

“Hello, Our Lady of Mercy.”

“Hello, my name is Detective Karen Seagate,
Rawlings Police Department, in Montana. Can you tell me who you are?”

“My name is Cynthia O’Neil. I’m a volunteer here.”

“Ms. O’Neil. I need to speak to, well, I don’t
know who specifically, the senior priest for your church. Is that person in?”

“That’s Father Hrbek. I saw him around earlier.
Let me see if I can find him for you.”

“Thanks very much.”

While we waited, Ryan said, “How’re you going to
go at him?”

I shook my head. “No idea.” I sat up straight in
my chair as I heard someone pick up the phone.

“This is Father Hrbek. Can I help you?”

“Father Hrbek, sorry to bother you out of the
blue. My name is Detective Karen Seagate. I’m the lead investigator in the
murder of Arlen Hagerty in Rawlings, Montana, last week. Can I speak with you a
minute?”

“Yes, I read about that. What a terrible tragedy.
How can I assist you?”

“We’re trying to locate a man named Timothy Sanders.
He was an associate of Mr. Hagerty’s. He used to be a parishioner of Our Lady
of Mercy, some years ago. I imagine that was before your time.”

“I’ve been here only two years, so, yes, that
would have been considerably before my time.”

“Father, we have some reason to think he might be
in Milwaukee. Have you seen Mr. Sanders recently? He’s about fifty years old,
blond hair, receding, a beard, about five eleven, one eighty?” There was
silence on the line. “Hello? Father Hrbek? Are you there?”

“Yes, Detective, I’m here.”

“I don’t know if we had a bad connection, or
something, but did you get my description of him, of Timothy Sanders?”

“Yes, Detective, I did.”

“Okay, good. Has he stopped by your church?”

“Detective, I don’t know where Timothy Sanders
is.”

Ryan was giving me the thumb-up sign. I nodded.
“Okay, well, thanks very much, Father Hrbek. Have a good day.”

“Yes, you too, Detective.” He hung up.

“Bingo,” Ryan said.

“You think the priest is gonna tell him we got
him?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”

“I don’t want to give him a lot of time to put two
and two together,” I said. “Let me try the Milwaukee police, see if they can
hold him.”

“Want to run that by the chief?”

“No, let’s see if we can get them to grab Sanders,
then we’ll ask permission to go interview him. Better to ask forgiveness than
permission.”

“Ancient wisdom,” he said as he looked up the
number for the Milwaukee Police Department. He wrote it down and passed it to
me.

“Thanks.” I dialed. I got the main number and
asked to be switched to the precinct where Our Lady was located. I asked the
receptionist to connect me with the precinct lieutenant, a Lieutenant Dayley. I
introduced myself.

“Lieutenant Dayley, I’m the lead on the Arlen
Hagerty murder, last week here in Rawlings, Montana. I need your help. We’ve
got a person of interest, a Timothy Sanders, who we think is in hiding in Our
Lady of Mercy.”

“In hiding?”

“Yeah, I’m not sure what you call it. He was a
parishioner there some years ago, and I think he’s kind of—I don’t know—seeking
sanctuary in the church. Like he’s having some kind of breakdown or something.”

“Did you contact the church?”

“Yeah, we did. The priest there, Father Hrbek,
didn’t exactly say so but didn’t deny it, either. More like he didn’t want to
admit Sanders was there, but we got a pretty strong impression he’s there.”

“What’re you asking for?”

“He’s a suspect in the Hagerty murder, and we
think he’s on the run. Could you go in and grab him, bring him down to your
precinct? We’d fly in, as soon as possible, just interview him and either ask
you to let him go or work on extraditing him to Montana.”

“Your CO authorize this?”

“He’s out sick today but he okayed it. I just
talked to him.”

“You say he’s a person of interest or a suspect?”

“I guess he’s a person of interest. We’re not
quite ready to charge him, but, like I said, we think he’s trying to run. So if
you could just hold him. We could get there maybe by tonight or tomorrow
morning at the latest.”

“I hate to get into a jam with Our Lady. They’re
good people …”

“I understand, Lieutenant, but this would look
real good for you if you help us with this guy. That murder has been all over
the national media. It would be quite a coup for the Fourth Precinct. What do
you say?”

“I want to talk it over with my Commissioner. Let
me get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Okay, great, I appreciate it, but like I say, I
think he wants to run.”

“I hear you. As soon as possible.”

I gave him my number. “Thanks, Lieutenant.” I hung
up. “Ryan, you stay here in case he calls back. I’m gonna go ask the chief for
authorization to fly there.” I rushed out of the bullpen and down to the
chief’s office. I brushed past his gatekeeper.

The chief looked up, annoyed. “What is it?”

“Chief, we like this guy Timothy Sanders in the
Hagerty case.”

“Which one’s that?”

“He’s the guy who founded Soul Savers. Then he had
a power struggle with Hagerty—and he lost. Then we found out he lied to us
about his whereabouts when Hagerty was killed. He was really here in town at
that time, and now he’s on the run.”

“Know where he is?”

“We’re pretty sure he’s hiding out in his old
church in Milwaukee. The police lieutenant there is working on grabbing him.
Ryan and I want to fly to Milwaukee to interview him.”

“Jesus, Seagate. What is that? A thousand bucks?
More?”

“Chief, this guy’s got a screw loose, and he’s the
only one of the whole bunch who’s on the run. If he flips out and commits
another crime, we don’t want to be in the position of not having grabbed him
when we could. The Milwaukee lieutenant said he’d pick him up from the church,
and it’s fine with him if we fly in and interview him. Grabbing him would look
real good for the department, Chief.”

“Go. But you better be right about him.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Chief.”

Back at my desk, I said to Ryan, “The lieutenant
call?”

“No, the Commissioner did.”

“Shit, what’d he say?”

“He said he’ll do it. He used the word
reluctantly
four or five times. They’ll hold Sanders till noon tomorrow at the latest.
And we better be right.”

“Yeah, that’s what the chief just told me. So,
Ryan, you better be right about this.”

“I better be right? How about ‘we’ better be
right?”

“No,” I said. “See how much you can learn from me?”

*  *  *

I got the call saying
Milwaukee PD had Sanders in custody. Ryan booked our flights. We spent about an
hour and forty-five minutes in the air, but the trip took more than five hours.
We were routed through Denver to Milwaukee, tracing a big triangle of wasted
taxpayer time.

On the cab ride into Milwaukee, I saw some of the
reasons I chose to live in Montana: the obstacle-course ancient highways with
potholes so deep they spit out hubcaps onto the trash-filled shoulders; the
abandoned factory hulks that nobody had the money to tear down; the
scary-looking unemployed guys, shoulders hunched, hands in their pockets,
gathered close around the bonfires in the rusted oil drums. I gazed at the past
that hadn’t finished dying, the future that would never be born.

When we got closer to downtown, it looked a little
better. There were people out on the streets, doing errands, headed home from
work, living their lives. It was a mixed neighborhood, with whites, blacks,
Asians, and people from the Middle East mingling, if not in harmony, at least
without apparent hostility. Some of the old row homes, built with care a century
ago, needed paint and had plywood windows, but most of the houses still had
their dignity.

Ryan said to the driver, “Do you know where Our
Lady of Mercy is?”

The driver, a dark skinned Asian man, nodded yes.
He said, “You want stop?”

Ryan said, “Yes, just for a minute.” A moment
later, we pulled up to the curb. The church was a blend of stone and brick,
built, according to the year on the cornerstone, sixty-three years ago. It was
bordered by a six-foot tall wrought-iron fence with sharp points that were
installed for decorative purposes when the church was built but had probably
become part of the security in recent years.

I looked at the heavy lock at the gate at the
entrance, remembering when churches were always open. Near the heavy wooden
doors at the main entrance was the glass-covered notice board announcing the
hours of services and masses and the names of the priests. The glass was
cracked diagonally, with a piece the size of a fist missing near the bottom.
The glass had not been repaired, the brown city air dirtying the white letters
on the black felt background.

Ryan and I got back in the cab and asked the
driver to bring us to the Fourth Precinct. He pulled up to an old red-brick
building, four stories, set back from the curb. There were ten parking spots
inside the high chain-link fence enclosing the front entrance to the building.
A wooden sign, hand-painted in a fancy script that looked like it dated from
the 1930’s, announced Milwaukee Police Department, Fourth Precinct.

We walked up the seven gum-blackened stone steps
and into the precinct house. Unlike our own building, which had a receptionist
at a desk and could have passed for the entryway at any of a hundred businesses
in Rawlings, the Fourth Precinct looked like an old precinct building. To the
left, a wooden counter stretched back some thirty feet. Behind it, two
uniformed sergeants stood guard, processing the drunks, the mugging victims,
and the petty thieves the uniforms brought in. A staircase on the right led up
to the detectives’ bullpen, the holding tanks, the interview rooms, and the
showers and bathrooms.

We walked up to the sergeant on duty at the
counter. He was a black man, about fifty, a little too heavy for street patrol.
He looked like he was in the last couple of years of his twenty. His badge said
Willey.

“Can I help you?” he said in a voice that signaled
it would be just fine with him if we turned right around and walked out and
never came back.

I took out my shield. “Hi, we’re Seagate and
Miner, from Rawlings, Montana.” Sergeant Willey just stood there, as if I would
have to do better than that if I wanted to motivate him to do anything.
“Lieutenant Dayley said he would be holding a Timothy Sanders for us to
interview.”

The sergeant looked down at his counter, in no
hurry, his eyes scanning papers, looking for anything that might help him
figure out what he needed to do. A long minute went by. Finally, Willey called
out to the other officer, a young woman who was talking with a man who looked
like a detective at the far end of the counter. “Hey, Barner.” She looked up,
annoyed at the interruption. “You know anything about the lieutenant holding
someone for two detectives from—where’d you say you’re from?”

“Rawlings, Montana,” I said.

“From Montana to interview?”

Barner said, “Yeah, I got it,” waving for Ryan and
me to come down to her. She looked down at a slip of paper. “Seagate and Miner,
right?” I nodded. “Let me call Detective Knox. You want to take a seat over
there on that bench? He’ll be right down.”

We sat down. “They look like they’re thrilled to
see us, huh?” I said.

“I guess their eight-hour shift is a lot longer
than ours,” Ryan said.

“Apparently.”

“Well, if they have Sanders and we can figure out
he’s our man, it’ll be worth it.”

“You’re always looking for the bright side, aren’t
you, Ryan?”

“You bet. I’ve got a good feeling we’re about a
half hour away from solving this case.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” I was tired of sitting
around, waiting. I saw a man come down the stairs. He was forty, a shaved head,
goatee, half-closed lids over tired eyes. This would be Knox. He walked over to
us.

“Johnny Knox,” the detective said. He looked at a
scrap of paper in his hand. “Karen Seagate,” he said, shaking my hand. “And
Ryan Miner. Good to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I said. “We want to thank you for
picking up Sanders for us.”

“Not a problem.”

“Hope that didn’t mess things up too bad with the
church.”

“No. It was okay,” Knox said, leading us up the
stairs. “The lieutenant put in a call to Father Hrbek. They work together on a
bunch of things. Hrbek’s had some experience counseling prisoners and parolees.
I think you just caught him off guard when you called him. The lieutenant
talked him through why he didn’t want to protect this guy. He told the Father
you wanted to talk to him, that’s all. Worked out okay.”

“Great. So you’ve got him?”

“Yeah, we put him in one of the interviews,” he
said, pointing down the hall we were walking. “We bought him dinner. He’s
okay.” We stopped outside the interview room, which had a deadbolt that locked
on the outside. “Okay, Detectives, have a good time talking to him,” Knox said
with a sad smile.

“Yeah, thanks, Johnny. We talked in Montana.”

We walked into the room. It looked like our own
interview rooms, but a couple hundred years older. The walls were yellow tiles,
many of them cracked and broken. The grout had turned a grey-brown. Sitting in
the middle of the room was an old black steel table, its scratches, gouges, and
dents testifying to some lively interviews. Four blue plastic stacking chairs
ringed the table.