No Coming Back (13 page)

Krauss is a quick study, always was. While I am mashing up thumbs, she hits the nail on the head with the first blow.

“I think it’s a possibility we can’t ignore. I’ve exhausted every other avenue. If Ruby’s story holds true it changes everything. Jenna was a schoolgirl. These were married men with good reputations to protect. It’s like putting a spark in a powder keg.”

Krauss nods. “It’s motive, all right, that’s for sure. Even so, they would have known the risks beforehand. They must have really trusted her, Jake. Known she wouldn’t talk, no matter what. So why kill her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe something happened to change her mind. Maybe she got cold feet and came to the realization she was in too deep and wanted out.”

I’m taking shots in the dark, but Krauss is still nodding.

“I guess I can run with that. Jenna could be feisty at times. I can imagine her getting too hot to handle and somebody not wanting to get burned. Her speaking out would have wrecked marriages for sure, and sent people to prison. It’s plenty of reason to get her killed. And now your coming back is threatening to expose that dirty little secret all over again. I know if I were the person who killed Jenna I’d make it my mission to silence anyone who could point the finger of blame at me. Wouldn’t you?”

“If I’m the crazy type, yeah. It also means Ben would still be alive if I hadn’t come back.” It’s a sobering thought.

Krauss reaches through the bars and turns my face to hers. “Jake, it’s not your fault. By the sounds of things, Ben was involved in some pretty immoral stuff. Sooner or later that kind of thing is going to come back and bite you on the ass.”

“He didn’t deserve to die.”

“And you didn’t deserve to lose eighteen years of your life for a murder you didn’t commit.”

Krauss has always been able to pan the gold from my muddy waters.

“Kim, if we’re right about this and somebody is out to keep people from talking—especially to me—then we need to warn the remaining members.”

“We?”

“Okay. You.”

A wry smile pinches at her lips. “Well, that could prove easier said than done. The founder, Lyle Cody, was found swinging from a tree the same year you left town. As far as I know, the club disbanded shortly after.”

“Lyle hanged himself?”

“I know what you’re thinking: did Lyle Cody kill Jenna and then, overwhelmed with guilt, did he take his own life? It’s one theory. My guess is no one made the connection at the time because you’d already been convicted of the crime. What it doesn’t account for is the fact somebody is cleaning up today.”

“That’s if we’re right.”

“What do you think?”

“I think the only other thing I can come up with to explain Ben’s murder is that somebody is trying to get me sent back to Stillwater.”

“You mean to frame you? So far, it’s working.”

I smile, shakily.

“But I think your gut feeling is right. I think the killer knows you’re back in town and asking awkward questions. I think they’re out to cover their tracks at any cost.”

“Okay, so who else was in the club?”

“Aside from Ben and my dad, barbershop Chuck is the only other person I know who was a member from the start.”

“Ryan Hendry’s dad?”

“You remember Chuck Hendry?”

“I remember Ryan, the son. He was seriously screwed up in the head. Got in trouble for skinning a cat, then later confessed to cutting wings off birds while they were still alive. When he wasn’t doing community service he used to hang out with Jenna’s brother and Meeks. The three stooges. He was one angry kid, with the IQ of a log.”

My remark brings Krauss’s smile back. “Barbershop Chuck and my dad were drinking buddies. They used to see how many shots they could stomach before passing out. Liver cancer took Chuck a few years back.”

“So that rules him out and leaves us with two remaining
members
. Any ideas who?”

Krauss shrugs.
“
If the theory’s right, it makes one of them the last victim and one of them the suspect.”

“Last man standing is the killer.”

Kim winks. “We should let them duke it out. Do my job for me.”

I let her see my disapproval.

She lets out a sigh. “Okay, so, those four men Ruby saw that night—did she identify anyone else other than Ben?”

“No. According to her they were all wearing weird animal masks, even the girls. Don’t ask. She only knew it was Ben because she recognized the wolf tattoo on his forearm. And that’s why I went to the bait shop, to speak with him.”

A police officer comes down the steps and gives Krauss a nod before going into the restroom.

“I need to get to work on getting you out of here,” she breathes.

She goes to pull away, but I keep my fingers on hers, preventing her from leaving. “Kim, please, be careful. If Ruby’s right and Jenna was killed to stop someone’s sordid little secret from getting out, and that same someone has now killed Ben, there’s no way he’ll take your snooping lightly.”

Krauss smiles at my concern. “Jake, don’t worry about me. I’m a big girl now; I can take care of myself. Plus, I’m a cop and that comes with a gun and the full arm of the law. I’ll be okay. If anyone tries anything, they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

“One last thing,” I say before she leaves. “There was somebody else in the bait shop, in the back office, out of sight. I heard Ben talking to them as I entered. Ben has a security camera over the counter. It might be worth a look.”

“Okay, I’ll do that. I’m also going to speak with Ruby, take her a strong coffee and see if she remembers anything with a little more meat on the bones. Maybe she’ll undergo an acid flashback and come up with an identity for the other girl. But first I need to clear you of Ben’s murder, so hold tight; I’ll be back just as soon as I can. In the meantime, for Pete’s sake, don’t do anything to
antagonize Meeks.”

I’m not sure I can hold my breath that long.

Chapter Fifteen

W
hen Tolstoy thought of himself it never came with the label
contract killer—
even though he had killed at the behest of others, and in return for financial remuneration. He preferred to think of himself as a Good Samaritan: a trusted friend with helping hands—albeit ones able to punch through cinderblocks—whose services were enlisted when dirty work needed handling.

Over the years, he’d worked his magic for many employers, both here in Harper and in the neighboring towns. Debt collection
agencies
, landlords, loan sharks. Tolstoy prided himself on his discretion, his loyalty, and his commitment to the cause. His hit rate was first class. In fact, his record of achievement was flawless, perfect. In any other industry he’d have awards and promotions coming out of his ears. Not so, when you operated on the edge of the law.

For five decades now he’d been cleaning up other people’s messes, in which time he had rubbed shoulders with those he did label
contract killers
. Thankfully, he’d found he was nothing like them. Most were paid mercenaries with little regard for either the craft of coercion or for human life, and certainly with no respect for the etiquette of negotiation. More often than not their idea of
brokering
a settlement came through brute force and lilies at a funeral. No appreciation for the art of positive persuasion.

In his opinion, incentivized people made for better payers.

Give them the right motivation and they would sell their souls.

It was all about leverage and weakness. Find a person’s Achilles heel, apply pressure, and then watch them cooperate. You didn’t always need to resort to chopping out a man’s tongue to get him to cough up.

But sometimes killing was the only option.

Tolstoy thought about the Olson kid as he watched Sergeant Kimberly Krauss of the Harper PD leave the police station and drive away into the deepening dusk.

Chapter Sixteen

T
he truth is all we have. It shapes us, defines us.

Lars’s words take me back to Stillwater, where uncovering the truth behind Jenna’s disappearance ate away at me for years. It was a hunger that refocused, a mechanism that kept me centered, on target, distracted from an otherwise mundane existence.

Each night, as I stared at the featureless ceiling of my cell, I went over the same plan in my head, going through it step by step until I had it all worked out in meticulous detail: where I would go once I got out of prison; how I would hunt down Jenna’s real killer; what I would do to put things right when I found him.

But nothing ever turns out how we think it will.

As the years passed, I lost the youthful energy that compels us to straighten the world’s axis. When my release finally arrived, the
passion
for revenge had conceded to age and to wisdom.
Retribution
was no longer my driving force. Answers were.

Somebody had killed Jenna.

I had no idea if that somebody still lived in Harper, or if the person responsible for her death was even still alive.

Frustratingly, my release came with restraints. A conditional freedom that chained me to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for the next twelve months. Parole wasn’t a pardon. It was the sum of good behavior and penitence added to time served and then subtracted from the original sentencing. In other words, it was a hall pass.

“Want some advice?” a lipless clerk in the Probation Unit asked on the first day of my supervised freedom, as I sat filling out one form after another, hand aching. “You see any signs of trouble, anything at all, you turn yourself around and you run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. You got a boat load of baggage now.
Dragging
it behind you like a ball and a chain. People notice something like that, and they don’t take kindly to it; they see you for what you are, which in their eyes is nothing short of trouble. You thought life was hard on the inside. It’s ten times harder out here. In the real world you’re as good as dead meat. Worthless. I’m not kidding with you. It’s tough. You need to put in ten times the effort. Anything less and you won’t make it. The world will eat you up and spit you out.”

The cheery clerk found me employment in the form of cleaning tables at the Maplewood Mall food court. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the world, but it was a steady income and a stepping stone. I got to sweep up the mess made by impolite teenagers. I knew there should have been an element of irony in that, but it escaped me. The clerk assigned me lodgings in the shape of a bunk at a hostel in Whittier, close by the College of Art and Design in St. Paul. No privacy, but then I wasn’t used to precious me-time anyway. I got to share with a guy who worried about me suffocating him with a pillow when the lights went out.

For the next year, my life would consist of reporting directly to Denis Flannigan, my parole officer, on a regular basis.

“Don’t you be thinking of giving me any shit now, Olson,” he warned me, the very first time we met. He drew my attention to a wall chart. It contained a graph, depicting successful reintegrated parolees versus reoffenders. The imbalance in favor of failure was staggering. “If you so much as sneeze out of place I’ll ship you straight back to Stillwater. It’s there in black and white. Happens all the time. So don’t get your hopes up. Way I see it you got yourself two options:
First is, you get your act together, you get yourself cleaned up, you keep your nose out of any trouble, you get a chance of making it, I sign you off, and you start a new life. Easy, right? Wrong. Most likely you’ll go with option two: where you play the victim, you get knocked back, your head goes down, you fall in with the wrong crowd, you go back to your old ways, and before you can say
you’re shitting me
you’re back in the block, serving out the rest of your sentence and then some.

“This isn’t personal, Olson. I see it with my own eyes. Every damn day of the week. Doesn’t make a bit of difference to me which option you choose; I get paid no matter what you decide. I will say this, though: you only get out of this what you’re
willing
to put in. Do this the wrong way and I guarantee you’ll go back to prison; do this the right way and you get a chance to live a decent life again. Who doesn’t want that, right? It’s more than can be said for the fucking girl you killed.”

Flannigan was a bucketful of joy and hope.

At first, the thought of being pinned down to the Twin Cities, while my home and Jenna’s killer were over two hundred miles away in Harper, was a setback. I’d waited eighteen years to uncover the truth, only to find myself held back and on a short leash.

But my hands weren’t completely tied.

The Internet had come of age while I was hibernating.
Everything
I needed to know was now online: births, deaths,
marriages
, phone numbers, addresses, employment records, newspaper
articles
, police reports, court archives. I used the public computers in the St. Paul Library to navigate a sea of data. My research was done remotely, through ninety-minute time slots. I was under no illusions. Finding someone who had a motive to do Jenna harm might prove
impossible
.

I kept telling myself: Jenna was popular. As such, she had an abundance of friends, followers, admirers. Within that broad disk of light there existed nothing but warmth and good wishes. But on the darker periphery the jealous ones orbited. They scratched and they gnawed away at the edges, trying to take a bite and hopefully taste a little of what they desired.

That’s what happened when you were popular: you attracted hate.

My goal was to find the hater. The one person who had despised Jenna so badly that they’d wanted her dead. Long ago, I had ruled out accidental death by man or by animal. Harper had its fair share of predators, both human and beast, but predators prey, habitually. No one had gone missing in Harper either before or after Jenna’s disappearance, which ruled out some crazy local abducting young women and having his wicked way with them before disposing of the evidence. Of course, it had occurred to me that some anonymous visitor to the town could have killed Jenna at random, but my gut had always told me otherwise.

Jenna’s murder was deliberate. I could feel it.

Somebody knew something.

Eighteen years was a generation. It might as well have been a century. People drifted, relocated, died. Memories faded, changed, vanished altogether. I knew that finding more than a handful of people who knew Jenna personally, remembered the events leading up to her disappearance, and still lived in Harper, wasn’t just hopeful, it was wishful.

Once out of Stillwater and six months in, and for all my digging, I’d turned up no dirt. I needed to be home. I needed to be in the reality and not merely dreaming about it. Then the telephone call came, informing me about my father and his critical condition, and suddenly I was on my way home to Harper. Just like that.

It was like divine intervention.

“By any flaming means,” Flannigan warned me in his thick Irish accent as I prepared to ship out and thumb a ride home, “don’t you get to thinking this is a Get Out of Jail Free card. The conditions of your parole still apply, regardless of where you pitch your tent.” He handed me a card with a number on it. I recognized it as belonging to the Harper Police Department. “Now, I’ve spoken with the chief up there. He’s not happy about the arrangement, but he’s agreed to monitor your release restrictions and report back to me in a timely manner. You be sure about checking in with him the minute you get there, you hear? This is your big chance, Olson. You have something to prove, and especially back in your home community. Don’t fuck it up.”

Flannigan’s final words are still resonating in my head when Meeks comes barreling down the steps into the basement, followed by another officer brandishing a pump-action shotgun. The shotgun keeps Meeks covered as he rattles keys into the lock on my cage and swings back the gate.

“Move it, Olson. The show’s over; it’s time to go.”

I stay seated on the aluminum bench, fingers hooked around the handcuff loops. “Where?”

Krauss has been gone less than a couple of hours, and I trust Meeks just about as much as he trusts me.

“We’re handing you over. Let’s move it.”

“Kim said the U.S. Marshals would be here in the morning.”

“Yeah, well, Sergeant Krauss doesn’t make the decisions around here. Now move it, Olson, before I get Fickes to shoot you in the foot for resisting a police officer.”

To demonstrate his eagerness to carry out the threat, Officer Fickes smiles cockily and aims the weapon at my feet. He’s just a kid, with one of those thin faces that makes his eyes look too big for their sockets. Still wet behind the ears and willing to go the whole nine yards to make a good impression. He motions with the weapon:
get up, move out, no trouble; I know how to use this baby
.

“I didn’t kill Ben,” I tell Meeks as I pull on my coat.

“Wrists,” he says.

I thrust out my hands. He clasps them in cuffs.

“Kim’s out there, right now, clearing my name.”

Meeks pushes me out of the cage. He isn’t getting into it with me. To him, I’m vermin and conversation isn’t an option. With Fickes holding the rear, he escorts me up the steps and through the police station. It’s early evening, Saturday, and the place is empty.

“I’ll take it from here,” he tells Fickes as we reach the main entrance.

Fickes doesn’t hide his disappointment, but he knows better than to voice it to his superior. Dutifully, he stands aside, keeping the shotgun aimed as we leave the building.

It’s dark out, bitterly cold. Street lights illuminating snow. Large breaks in the cloud cover, showing stars. Meeks’s police cruiser is parked out front with the engine running and the lights on. He opens up the back door and gives me the nod to climb inside.

I hesitate. “We’re not meeting up with the US Marshalls, ar
e we?”

“Don’t be paranoid. Just get in.”

I grab the edge of the car door with my manacled hands. “I know my rights. You owe me a phone call.”

“I owe you squat, Olson. Besides, you have nothing but
enemies
here. Who on earth would you call?”

“Grossinger.”

Meeks balks. Lars might be a frail old man, but he still pulls most of the bigger punches in town. I stand my ground. Meeks bars his teeth and puts a hand on his gun. Stalemate. I’m too big for him to physically manhandle into the back of the Mustang all by himself. Forcing the issue will cause a scene. And bullies don’t like audiences.

“Where were you when Ben was killed?” I ask.

Meeks stares at me like I’m speaking in a foreign language.

“You were Chief Krauss’s sidekick, back in the day. One of your best buddies was Ryan Hendry. His dad was in Six Pack. Were you in Six Pack, too?”

Meeks goes to say something, then bites down on it as a silver Prius slides to a stop next to us and Krauss jumps out.

“What’s going on here? Where are you two going? And why wasn’t I invited?”

“Stay out of this, Sergeant,” Meeks warns, still trying to force me into the cruiser with his stare alone. “This is no longer your concern.”

Krauss pushes herself between us and squares up to her boss. “Let’s call a truce here. Before you go jumping the gun and making a complete fool of yourself, just hear me out. You’re making a big mistake. Jake didn’t kill Ben.”

Meeks sighs through clenched teeth. “It’s getting old, Sergeant.”

“I have evidence proving his innocence.”

“So tell it to the judge.” He tries to step around her.

But Krauss blocks his way. “Shane, listen to me. I’m not making any of this up. And I don’t want you to do something you’ll later regret. I have a video proving Jake didn’t kill Ben.”

Meeks’s venomous stare moves from me to her.

“There’s a webcam outside of Merrill’s,” she explains. “They installed it a few years ago as an online tourist attraction. The last twenty-four hours is backed up to a hard drive, on a loop.
Indirectly
, it faces the bait shop.” She gets out her smart phone, taps the screen and holds it so that we can all see the picture. “Here’s what it recorded this afternoon.”

The video shows a dusky view of the main street, on an angle, so that the frame captures most of the antique and specialty
boutiques
across from the diner, including the barbershop, all lit up against the approaching night. Cars parked on the diagonal, including my father’s Bronco. People wrapped up against the cold, walking along the sidewalk or going in and out of stores. Everything
normal
. It could be a scene from any small town in any
northern
state,
wintertime
. In the top left-hand corner is Varney’s Bait & Tackle, with its neon signage glowing brightly behind the plate glass.
Nothing
out of the ordinary.

A rumble grows in Meeks’s throat. “Sergeant, you’re wasting my time. This doesn’t prove a thing.”