Tradition of Deceit (10 page)

Twelve

Chloe finished her
kuchen
,
still thinking about flour. During her career she'd helped tell the beginning of that story (planting, growing, and harvesting grain) and the end of that story (creating baked goods from scratch) at historic farms from Wisconsin to Switzerland. She'd never had opportunity to consider the middle phase, though—turning grain into flour. The mill's interpretive possibilities really were exciting.

She read the research reports, scribbling ideas as they came. An hour later she reluctantly acknowledged that she should be going. She made sure the fire was out, bundled up, and fetched her skis from the front porch. The cast iron skillet she'd baked the
kuchen
in, which now needed cleaning, was a heavy addition to her pack.

But it was worth it, Chloe thought, as she kicked off. My love life might be falling apart, but I do enjoy my work.

Her optimism carried her back to the Education House. She'd endured her assigned workspace in a dilapidated trailer through the fall, but once the weather turned cold, she humbly begged Byron for corner space in the cottage he shared with the curator of research. She'd found an old wooden desk in a storage shed, scrubbed away all evidence of mice, and bribed a maintenance guy to help her haul it to her new digs. She had no privacy at Ed House. Byron was on the phone a whole lot, potential interpreters came for interviews on a daily basis, and she now was expected to help answer the museum's main phone line if it rang more than twice. Still, the move had been good.

Byron's car was the only one in the Ed House lot. “I come bearing
kuchen
,” she called as she walked into the main room.

“Good,” Byron said. “Say, somebody's been trying to reach you.”

Roelke, maybe? Chloe's heart rose, making her
I'm an independent woman
psyche nervous. But Byron added, “A friend from Minnesota.” He handed her several little
While You Were Out
slips.

“Ariel,” Chloe said automatically. Then she frowned. The
From
line on each slip was blank, and the number listed below was unfamiliar
.

Chloe went to her own desk and placed the call. A man answered after one ring. “Hello?”

“This is Chloe Ellefson.”

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “This is Toby, Ariel's brother. I need your help.”

Chloe felt every muscle go taut. “What's the matter?”

“It's Ariel,” Toby said. “She's been arrested.”

Fortified by his
pierogi
, Roelke drove to his old district building. He sat in his truck until shortly before second shift started. Inside, he gave the desk guy a friendly wave—
Hey, it's just me
—as he walked by. Sergeants would be busy with roll call—inspecting uniforms, checking weapons, handing out lists of stolen cars' license plates, sharing whatever the beat guys needed to know.

He reached the communications room as Olivette was shrugging into her coat, which was an astonishing orange number. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn't speak until joining him in the corridor. “You want another favor.”

“You did offer,” Roelke reminded her.

She sighed. “I did. What do you need?” She began walking. Her old-fashioned boots, the kind that came to mid-shin and fastened on the side with button-and-loop closures, made rubbery whispers.

Roelke fell into step beside her. “I need the list of specific call boxes Rick used for his mark calls during his last shift.” A cop couldn't make a mark from the same box twice in a row, and a record was kept to prove he was covering his beat. “I know what Rick's habitual pattern was. Maybe comparing his mark locations with the call list you gave me will present something new.”

“That's out of my jurisdiction, hon. Did you ask the clerks?”

“I'm trying to be low-key here, Olivette.”

“Right.” She mulled that over. “Okay. I'll see what I can do.”

“Thanks. What's the mood in the building?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “You know about the gun?”

“Yeah. Anything new come to light?”

“Nothing that's been announced. The mood around here?” She shook her head. “It's ugly.”

“Ariel's been arrested?” Chloe repeated.

Toby sounded frantic. “I've never heard her so hysterical before.”

“But why on earth was Ariel arrested? What can the cops possibly think she's done?”

“I don't
know
! She said she'd been arrested, and then she hung up.”

“Did you try calling back?”

“Of
course
I tried calling back!” Toby said. “The cop I talked to said she had terminated the call herself, and wouldn't provide any further information. I'm desperate to get down there, but my wife's sick and can't really take care of the baby, and—”

“Let me see what I can do,” Chloe said. “I'll call you back.”

She dialed Ralph Petty to request time off. Maybe I shouldn't have been
quite
so helpful at the staff meeting this morning, she thought. The site director had never liked her. Baiting him and
then
asking for a favor was not a good strategy.

When he picked up, she plunged in. “My colleague in Minneapolis needs help. She's trying to finish that interpretive plan proposal in time to meet a grant deadline on Friday—”

“Go ahead. We'll consider it a professional favor to a sister in-
stitution.”

“—and I'd like to …” Chloe realized belatedly what Petty had said. “Um … Okay. Thanks.”

She hung up and looked at Byron. “Petty only agrees to my ideas if they involve me leaving town. Coincidence?”

“I think not. But I'd just go with it.”

Chloe waited until she got home to her rented farmhouse to make personal calls. Her friend Dellyn said she was happy to kitty-sit Olympia again. “Sorry,” she murmured to Olympia, who clearly understood that Chloe was going to leave
again
, and was clearly aggrieved. “Lots of lap time when I get home, I promise.”

Then Chloe dug out Toby's phone number and used a pencil to dial. “Hey, it's me. I told my boss that I have a wonderful opportunity to consult with the Minnesota Historical Society on the mill project, and I got permission to take a few days off. I'll leave for Minneapolis first thing in the morning and call you when I know what's going on.”

Her last call was to Roelke's cousin Libby. “I wanted to be sure that you'd heard about Rick's death.”

“I saw it on the news,” Libby said grimly. “This is straight out of my worst nightmare.”

“Have you talked to Roelke?”

“I haven't been able to reach him. How's he holding up?”

“I'd have a better idea,” Chloe said, “if he would actually talk to me. He's in Milwaukee. My company is not wanted.”

“Oh.”

“That being the case, I'm going to Minneapolis for a few days. A friend of mine is having a hard time. Here's the number, in case you need to reach me.” She dictated the digits.

“Got it.”

Chloe nibbled her lower lip. “Will you … I don't know … could you keep trying to get in touch with Roelke? Maybe he'll talk to you.”

“Probably not.” Libby paused. Chloe pictured her in her kitchen, thinking. Finally Libby said, “Time with the kids would do him good. Their dad just let Justin down for the zillionth time, and that will give me an opening. I'll see what I can do.”

“Thanks. I'm worried about him.”

“Yeah,” Libby said. “I'm worried about him, too.”

After leaving Olivette, Roelke drove downtown. While the MPD district stations operated with a large degree of independence, the Police Administration Building served as a clearing house and repository for all records. The central property guys circled through the districts every couple of days, picking up firearms, knives, baseball bats, croquet mallets, pot, cocaine, and everything else that cops had seized from bad guys and stored temporarily in their own inventory room. Even dinky stuff got moved here. A gun that had killed a cop? That would be locked down tight.

Roelke made his way to the clerical division, an enormous room filled largely with files designed to hold five-by-seven-inch cards. One of the police aides looked up from a typewriter. “Can I help you?”

This guy can't be more than seventeen, Roelke thought. The aides were kids who wanted to be cops, high school graduates waiting to turn twenty-one so they could apply to the academy. Roelke fought the urge to grab this kid's shoulders and say
Are you sure you want to be a cop? Really sure?
Instead he said, “I'd like to see Fritz Klinefelter.”

“Here I am.” A heavyset man with a Santa Claus beard wheeled himself from a passageway between banks of files. “Hey, McKenna.”

Fritz Klinefelter had once been a field training officer. Tough but fair, his rookies said, which was the best a guy could hope for. His FTO career ended when a drunk driver plowed into his squad car. Now Klinefelter used a wheelchair and ruled the clerical division.

When the older man rolled around the desk, Roelke pulled one of the visitors' chairs over and extended a hand. “It's good to see you.”

“You, too. You remind me of good times in the bad old days. Remember the car wars?”

Roelke laughed—actually laughed out loud. Milwaukee cops, if they were assigned a car at all, were lucky to get one with four wheels. Still, there was nothing worse than coming out of a tavern and discovering an empty spot where the car used to be. “I figured I was off probation when you moved my car around the corner.”

Klinefelter's grin faded. He looked over his shoulder. “Hey, guys? Take ten.”

The baby-faced kid looked up from his typewriter. “But I haven't finished—”

“Take ten.” He didn't raise his voice, but all three aides filed silently from the room. Klinefelter turned back to Roelke. “First of all, I'm sorry about Almirez.”

Roelke was looking forward to the day when every conversation did not begin with expressions of sympathy. “Yeah.”

“You know the gun came from district Evidence?”

“I do.” Roelke's knee began to piston. “Somebody inside that building broke into Evidence, snatched the gun, and shot Rick in the head.”

“It seems so.”

“Rick got along with everybody. You ever hear otherwise?”

“No.”

“I've talked with Banik and Bliss, and neither of them can think of anyone who had a beef with Rick. He'd just gotten engaged to a wonderful girl, so I guarantee you he wasn't sleeping with somebody's wife. But something's going on. Maybe somebody got sucked into drug stuff, and Rick saw something.”

“Did he report anything like that?”

Roelke made a frustrated gesture. “If so, nobody would tell me. I talked to Sergeant Malloy but didn't get very far.”

“Try talking to one of the detectives?”

Yeah, right, Roelke thought. “There's nobody I know personally. Besides, I'm trying to work back channels.”

“So you came to me?”

“I did,” Roelke said, hoping Klinefelter would understand that he meant it as a compliment. To be sure he added, “I don't know who to trust right now. I thought you might let me check through Rick's FI cards.” Field investigation cards, he meant. An information-gathering form printed on rectangles of yellow cardstock. Active cops turned in a lot of FI cards, and they ended up here for long-term storage. “I don't know what I'm looking for, but maybe he recorded an incident that might give me something to go on.”

“Could be,” Klinefelter said. “But somebody beat you to it.”

“Well, I figured that might happen,” Roelke admitted. “It's been two days already. Standard procedure for the detectives, I guess.”

Klinefelter leaned forward in his chair. “But here's what's not standard procedure. I was home when I heard about what happened. I came in Saturday morning to pull all of Almirez's cards for the detectives. It's what I could do, you know? When I got here, all of those cards were gone. Somebody had pulled every damn card with Rick's name on it, going back six months.”

Roelke did not like what he was hearing. “Did you check in with the detectives working the case?”

“Straight off. The guy I talked to thanked
me
for pulling the cards and leaving them on his desk. I have no idea who put them there, or what cards might have been removed from the stack first.”

Roelke felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. “What does that mean?” he asked, although he knew.

Klinefelter's eyes flashed with anger. “It means that while some beat man may have pulled the trigger, somebody higher up is involved. Somebody with access to a key to our records.”

Roelke pressed a knuckle against his forehead. What the hell was going on inside the MPD?

“Now, I got something to say to you. I don't like it, but facts are facts.” Klinefelter worked his jaw. “I've got a twenty-nine-year old daughter with Down Syndrome. She's going to need expensive care after me and my wife are gone. A lot of cops work security when they retire, but once the MPD puts me out to pasture, I'm not going to have a lot of job offers come my way. You understand what I'm telling you?”

A warning throbbed in the back of Roelke's skull. “I'm a Lone Ranger here.”

“I'm sorry, McKenna.” Klinefelter looked torn up. “You deserve better, and so does Almirez. But that's the way it is.”

“It's okay, really.” Roelke tried to focus. “Just a couple of things before I go. Do you have any idea what might have been in the records that made somebody so nervous?”