In the Drink (15 page)

“Perhaps, but I find it odd that she wouldn't tell her best friend that she liked her brother,” I persisted.

Marie shrugged again. “Maybe she did and Anna just never wrote about it. I know that she and Erik used to fight a lot back then, and I heard her accuse him once of snooping in her diary. So maybe she didn't write it down because she didn't want to let Lori's secret out of the bag. Or maybe she intentionally wrote down falsehoods to try to goad Erik since she knew he read her diary.”

Knowing how unstable the emotions in teenaged girls can be, I imagined anything could have been possible, so I decided to let the matter go.

Mal said, “Just to clarify, can you remember exactly what time it was that you and Erik were out riding around that day?”

“Like it was yesterday,” Marie said, gazing off into space. “It's one of those events that's forever stamped in your mind, like where you were and what you were doing when 9-11 happened. It was the last Friday of Christmas break, right before New Year's Day, and everyone was getting geared up for going back to school the following Monday. The weather was strange that year, with unusually warm temps, kind of like what we had yesterday.” She refocused on us for a moment. “Seems like we get one of those every few years, doesn't it? Only, that year we had several days of it. All the snow melted and there were even some crocuses trying to come up.”

I smiled and nodded, eager for her to continue. She did so, once again taking on that faraway expression.

“Anyway, on the day the girls went missing, I went jogging early in the morning and when I was finished with my run I went home to shower. My mom was just leaving for work. She's a nurse at the hospital and there was no extended holiday for her—she's lucky if she gets the actual days off. My dad always went in to work early so he was gone already. I told my mom I was going over to my friend Tina's house later that day, but that was a lie.” Again she focused on us, flashing a sheepish smile. “Tina and I used to cover for one another all the time and the real plan was for Erik to come by around eleven o'clock to show me his new car.”

“How long were you and Erik together that day?” I asked.

Marie frowned. “I'm not sure exactly. I know it was after three when I got home. I had to be back before my mom got home from work at four.”

“Where did you go exactly?” I asked, thinking that the driving time might help narrow down the itinerary.

“I don't know, somewhere north of here. I really wasn't paying attention to anything but Erik at the time, you know? He would know.”

“How and when did you learn that the girls were missing?” Mal asked.

“It was that same day, in the evening. Both Lori's and Anna's moms were calling around trying to find them. Someone called my mom and she told me about it to see if I knew anything, which I didn't of course. I really didn't think anything of it at first because I assumed Lori and Anna were like me and my friends, sneaking out to do things, forgetting about curfews, that kind of stuff. I figured they'd be in trouble when they got home but I never figured they wouldn't ever come home, or that they'd end up dead.”

A silence fell as Marie once again stared, this time at the floor.

Mal broke the quiet. “It would really help if Erik would talk to us,” he said. “We aren't looking to point the finger at anyone, we're just trying to assemble as many facts and details as we can.”

Marie nodded but she looked grim. “I'll talk to him and see if I can turn him around for you. But I'm not making any promises. He can be very stubborn when he wants to be, and to be honest, this whole thing has haunted him ever since it happened. He's constantly trying to put it behind him so I don't know how easy it will be to talk him into facing it again.”

“Anything you can do will be helpful,” Mal said. Then he looked over at me. “Do you have anything else you want to say or ask?”

I shook my head.

“Then we'll be off,” he said.

After giving Marie my cell phone number in case she had any additional information to share or Erik wanted to talk with us, she walked us to the door, wished us luck, and asked us to keep her posted. “Even if Erik doesn't want to know, I do, particularly if you are finally able to clear his name once and for all. Living under this cloud of suspicion for the past twelve years has been really hard on him.”

We thanked her for her time, got back in Mal's car, and headed for the bar.

“What did you think?” I asked him once we were under way.

He shook his head. “Hard to know. The wife seemed sincere enough but Erik's reluctance to speak to us bothers me. I would think he'd be eager to have someone looking into this again if it might exonerate him, no matter how painful the memories might be.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I have to admit that the idea of resurrecting my father's death investigation gave me pause, even though I was desperate to know who had killed him. Those memories can be brutal.”

“What was your take on Erik? What does your superpower tell you?”

I laughed. “It's hardly a superpower,” I said, recalling how I had thought in those terms myself when we were talking with Marie. “And I didn't have enough time with him to get a sense for how honest he is. Had we been able to ask him some questions about the girls' disappearance, I might have been able to pick up on whether or not he was lying, but we never had the chance. There was something about him though . . .” I trailed off, trying to recall the feeling I had when he had presented at the door. “Something is off with him, but I can't be any more specific than that. Though I did think I smelled alcohol on his breath. I wasn't sure if it was real or one of my responses.”

“It was real,” Mal said. “I smelled it, too.”

“So it seems Erik has lost himself in the drink. I wonder why.”

“Who knows? Maybe we'll get another chance at him if his wife comes through, although if what she told us is true, it doesn't seem likely that Erik is high on the list of suspects. Did you get any sense of her level of sincerity or honesty?”

“Funny you should ask because Marie Hermann is a bit of an enigma to me. Nearly everyone's voice triggers some type of synesthetic reaction in me, and even though I'm constantly trying to tune them out, I'm still aware of them on some subconscious level. And if I focus, I'm very aware of them. But with Marie, I had nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not with regard to her voice. I had reactions to the color of her hair, and some fragrance she had, but her voice gave me nothing at all.”

“Has that happened before?”

“It has,” I admitted. “It's rare but there have been a few people I've come across in my life whose voice didn't trigger anything.”

“Interesting.”

“I guess,” I said with a shrug. “Anyway, Erik Hermann doesn't seem to offer much promise at the moment, so let's hope we'll have better luck with our next interview.”

“Don't get your hopes up too high,” Mal cautioned. “Based on my past experience, prisoners don't like to talk much unless you have something to offer them. If they think you're coming after them for something, they won't utter a peep.”

We got back to the bar just after eleven and since the place was closed, we had it to ourselves. I offered to make Mal some lunch but he wasn't hungry enough for an entire meal. So instead I suggested an appetizer and slipped into the kitchen to fire up the deep fryer and make us a batch of fried cheese curds.

“I never had these until I came here,” Mal said a short time later as we sat at the bar munching on our curds.

“They're a Wisconsin specialty,” I said. “Do you know how to tell if they're fresh?”

Mal shook his head, his mouth full of cheese curd.

“They squeak,” I told him. “When you bite into a fresh cheese curd, it should squeak when the curd hits your teeth. It's an interesting experience for me because I can taste both the cheese curd and the squeak. For a long time I thought the squeak was my own unique experience, a synesthetic response to the taste. But then I heard others describe it and realized it's a genuine phenomenon.”

Mal looked at me suspiciously. I think he thought I was trying to put one over on him so I told him to sit tight and went into the kitchen to get a fresh, unfried cheese curd. “Go ahead, try it,” I said handing it to him on a napkin. “I'll be quiet while you bite into it and listen.”

Still looking skeptical, he took the curd, eyed it as if he thought I might be feeding him something rancid, and then slowly took a bite. I heard the squeak, and from the way Mal's eyebrows arched, I knew he had, too.

“See?” I said with a self-satisfied, righteous smile. “Told ya.”

“Can you hear my squeak, or is the sound in one's head?”

I took the remainder of the curd from him, leaned in close, and said, “Listen.” Then I bit down into the curd, creating an audible squeak.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Mal said. “Who knew?”

“Most Wisconsinites,” I said. “If you want to stay here for any length of time, you're going to have to learn your cheese stuff. It's Wisconsin state law.”

He smiled at that. “As long as I'm not required to wear one of those foam cheese wedges on my head, I'm fine with learning more about cheeses.”

“There's a fabulous deli not far from here that has an amazing array of local cheeses. We should go there some day and do a sampling.”

“I'd like that.”

Once again we found ourselves sharing a moment that felt comfortable and fun one second and awkward the next. This time we were saved by a knock at the front door, though it was more of a pounding actually. We both turned to look and I saw Tyrese peeking in and waving at us through the window in the door. I waved back to let him know we saw him, and then Mal and I grabbed our coats and went outside to greet him.

Tyrese owned a Toyota Highlander, which was double parked in front of the bar. Mal sat up front with Tyrese, giving me the backseat all to myself. As Tyrese pulled out, we gave him a summary of our visit to Erik Hermann's house.

When we were done, Tyrese picked up a folder he had beside him and handed it to Mal saying, “I did a little research on Lonnie Carlisle. Take a look if you like.”

Mal opened the folder, scanned the first sheet, and then handed it back to me. It was a rap sheet that showed Lonnie Carlisle's conviction for statutory rape and a couple of DUIs. There were some other offenses as well but they were minor: loitering, trespassing, panhandling . . . typical convictions for someone who was homeless.

“Are you going to get into trouble for showing us this stuff?” I asked Tyrese.

“The arrest records are a matter of public record. You could dig it up on your own if you wanted to. You might find some additional info in there, however, and I'd appreciate you not sharing it with anyone else or saying where you saw it.”

“My lips are sealed,” I said.

Tyrese nodded and looked over at Mal, who was busy reading whatever was next in the folder.

“Mal won't say anything, either. Will you, Mal?” I said.

He looked up, said, “Of course not,” and then went back to reading.

After another minute or two, Mal handed me the second section from the folder. It was several pages stapled together, slightly faded, and dated nearly twenty years ago. It was a narrative summary, typed up by the arresting officer, of the statutory rape charge against Lonnie Carlisle. It stated that Lonnie, who was eighteen at the time, had had sex with a minor girl and that the girl's parents had filed a complaint. The report was written in an objective and unemotional manner until the very end. Then the arresting officer went into an explanation about how upset the victim was over the charges her parents had brought against Lonnie, arguing that the sex had been consensual and the two of them were in love. I got a sense from the wording that the officer had sided with Lonnie on some level and felt the charges were unfair, though there was nothing in the report that explicitly said that.

On the next page there was an addendum to the report written some months later. It noted that the victim had committed suicide by overdosing on a handful of sleeping pills and narcotics, prescriptions the girl's mother had for her severe, crippling arthritis.

Mal handed me another collection of stapled pages that highlighted Lonnie's attempted murder and sexual assault charges from an incident that happened in the summer following Lori's and Anna's murders. The names of the girls who were involved in this incident had been blacked out in the report, and when I mentioned that, Tyrese offered up an explanation.

“Sometimes with minors, the names are excluded, obliterated, or a fake name might be used to protect their identity. The press can get ahold of some of these reports and while some reporters are good about not naming minors, others have no such qualms. Plus one of the girls in this case was the daughter of a prominent local judge at the time.”

I read through the report, which included the statement of the girl who had escaped more or less unscathed, the results of the physical examinations of both girls and Lonnie, and a description of some evidence found at the scene. The unscathed girl's physical exam was negative other than some bruises on her arms and some scratches on her legs that were determined to be from running through brush when she escaped. The other girl's exam showed similar leg scratches but it also revealed a huge depression fracture of her skull with bleeding in the brain as a result.

Lonnie had multiple bruises on his body—on his legs, his arms, his head, and his back—most of which he said were incurred when the girls kicked and threw rocks at him.

The statement from the girl who escaped said that Lonnie had jumped out of the woods and scared the girls when they were riding their bikes along a path in the park where the incident occurred. It forced them to stop, and then Lonnie reportedly lunged for the girl who ended up with the brain injury, stating that he wanted to “feel her boobies” and have her “stick your hand in my pants.” There was a struggle, and the girl making the statement said she tried to help her friend get away, but after Lonnie shoved the first girl to the ground, smashing her head on a rock, he then grabbed the second girl and started “feeling me up.” When the cop asked the girl what that meant, she stated that Lonnie stuck his hand up her shirt and tried to undo her pants.

The unscathed girl said she managed to escape and get back on her bike to go for help. By the time the cops arrived on the scene, Lonnie was gone. They found the wounded girl still lying where she'd been when her friend went for help, and a rock nearby that had her blood and hair on it.

There was no actual evidence of sexual assault on either of the girls, although the shirt of the one who had escaped was torn, and the snap and zipper on the shorts of the girl who had been wounded had been undone. Also noted was the fact that this event took place in the same general area near the Little Menomonee River and the Oak Leaf Trail where Anna's and Lori's bodies had been found.

Lonnie was apprehended a few hours later and his statement was the polar opposite of the girl's. He claimed that the two girls found him sitting on the ground dozing at the base of a tree. The next thing he knew, he was getting kicked. He tried to defend himself, and finally managed to get to his feet and start backing away. He begged the girls to stop, but they started throwing rocks at him so he turned and ran. He claimed he never touched either girl except perhaps in an attempt to ward off their kicks, and that both girls were fine when he left. When asked how the one girl came to be so gravely injured, he claimed not to know.

It wasn't hard to see why Lonnie had been convicted, particularly if one of the girls had been, as Tyrese said, the daughter of a prominent judge. Clearly, Lonnie was a disturbed man and a prime candidate for the murder of the other two girls.

I said as much to the two men in the car. “What I don't understand is why they didn't try to pin Anna's and Lori's murders on him,” I concluded.

“Lack of evidence,” both men said at the same time, and I saw Tyrese shoot Mal a curious look.

Mal held up the last of the papers from the folder and said, “At least that's what this report says.”

This seemed to satisfy Tyrese, who nodded and turned his attention back to the drive.

Mal didn't hand me the next group of papers; he summarized them for me instead. They were reports from the examinations of Lori's and Anna's bodies.

“Both girls' bodies had been in the water, trapped under the frozen ice for a little over two months. Their bikes were found in the river, too, though the one Anna rode actually belonged to her brother. Hers had a flat tire and was still at the house so she apparently borrowed her brother's. The water washed away a lot of potential evidence, but the fact that the water was so cold did preserve the bodies. There were no hairs or body fluids found on either girl, and only Lori showed evidence of sexual assault in that she was naked from the waist down and there was bruising and tearing in and around her vagina. There was also bruising on both girls' necks indicating they were strangled, and the clothesline that was used to do this was still around their necks and tied around heavy stones. While the weight of the bikes and the stones might have kept the bodies under the water for a while, there was enough early . . .” Here Mal paused, bit his lip, and thought for a moment. Then he looked at me. “Basically the bodies would have eventually surfaced due to gas formation,” he said with a wince.

I nodded both my understanding of what he meant and his reluctance to relay the grim information, so he went on.

“The rope was eventually traced to a clothesline in the backyard of a house in a neighborhood several blocks away that bordered the park area where the bike trail and the bodies were located. It appeared to have been cut with some sort of sharp object.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Were they able to tell?”

Tyrese glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Darn good question, Mack. You really are starting to think like a cop.”

Mal said, “It says the ends of the clothesline were frayed and the person writing the report felt that it had been cut, or gnawed at, with a pair of ordinary household or office scissors.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but before I could get a word out, Mal said, “And to answer your next question, no, there were no scissors found at the scene or anywhere nearby.”

“Did the cops find scissors like the ones described in any of the suspects' houses?” I asked.

Tyrese smiled at me again and Mal looked to him for an answer to this one. Apparently, that information wasn't in the papers he still held.

“They did,” Tyrese said. “Scissors were taken into evidence from Lonnie's house, William Schneider's house, Tim Johnson's house, and the Gruber home. None of them produced any usable evidence and they couldn't be connected to the crime, nor could they be ruled out. However, no scissors of any kind were found in the Hermann house even though Mrs. Hermann swore she had a pair on her office desk. She wasn't able to explain why she couldn't find them.”

“Wow,” I said arching my eyebrows in surprise. “That doesn't look good for Erik, does it?”

“No, it doesn't,” Tyrese agreed.

“We really should try to talk to him again,” I said. “I hope his wife can convince him.”

Tyrese and Mal both nodded their agreement.

That was the end of the papers in the folder and a short time later we arrived at the prison. We checked in at the outer gate and once we were inside the compound, we parked and then Tyrese led the way to the front entrance, where we had to pass through another guarded gate before we were allowed inside the main building. The place had the smell of institution all over it—at least for me—and faded, chipped concrete walls that were painted avocado green. We checked in at yet another gated station, where we all had to offer ID to a guard sitting behind a glass enclosure that sat alongside a barred, floor-to-ceiling wall with a gate. There were two guards inside the enclosure, and the one sitting up front near the check-in spot sported a name pin that said
R. DINKLE
. Behind him was a series of monitors that showed various areas in and around the prison, and these were being watched by the second guard, who had his back to us. I wondered if the glass of the enclosure was bulletproof. Something about it was different from ordinary glass because when I looked through it, I got a whiff of an acrid chemical scent that faded as soon as I looked away.

Dinkle asked Tyrese who Mal and I were, and why we were along for the ride.

“They're involved with the case I'm investigating,” Tyrese said vaguely.

Dinkle frowned, clearly not liking this answer, but he didn't pursue the matter. Instead he slid a clipboard toward us through a slot in the glass and told us to sign in after asking to see our IDs yet again.