Dear Crossing (31 page)

“Wait,” she said. “Blue and white.”

“What?”

“The paint. I remember now. Mrs. Davis set the paint cans on the counter while she waited for her prescription. There was a gallon of white and one of blue.”

“I’d have bet on that,” he said.

Ray hurried from the drugstore and radioed the station. “Irene, patch me through to Cooper.”

48

After comparing notes, Ray and Frank Cooper parked their squad cars nose to tail in Greg Speltz’s unpaved driveway along Euclid Road. From the second step of wobbly black, metal stairs, Ray knocked on the flimsy hollow-core door of the old, green and white mobile home. Cars traveling the gravel road had coated the trailer with layers of dust, which spring showers had turned into grimy streaks. Ray knocked more forcibly a second time, a third, then a fourth. Cooper stood on the grit-covered grass, waiting for a response.

The door finally opened, and Greg Speltz peered out. “Whatd’ya want?”

“We want to talk with you,” Ray said.

“I’m busy.” The door started to swing shut.

Ray stopped it with the palm of his hand. “Hold it. Where’s your girlfriend? We’d like to talk to
both
of you.”

Speltz brushed a batch of unruly hair out of his eyes. “Well, you’re shit out of luck ’cause I don’t have time to talk, and Katie’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

Speltz shrugged. His gesture could be interpreted several ways: he didn’t know, didn’t care, or wasn’t about to say.

“Hey,” Cooper said, looking up from his spot at the bottom of the steps, “if you’re not going to ask us in, how about coming down here? I’m getting a crick in my neck.”

Clumping down the steps, Speltz jerked the door shut behind him. The two-day-old stubble looked out of place on his boyish twenty-year-old face.

Ray asked, “When’s Katie going to be back?”

“She won’t.” Speltz shoved both hands into the pockets of his threadbare jeans. “She took off.”

“Where?”

Speltz gave them another noncommittal shrug, refusing to meet their eyes.

“You’re saying she left for good?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah.”

“Lover’s quarrel?”

“Whatever. She’s gone.”

“That’s too bad,” Ray said.

“It’s no big deal.”

Ray stuck with it, hoping to get at least a shred of useful information. “Why’d she leave?”

“Said she was sick of living in this piece of shit and just took off one night. Left half her crap behind, too. If she wants it, she’ll have to dig it out of the Dumpster in back.”

“
When
did she leave?”

Suddenly wary, Speltz started walking toward the garage. “I’m in the middle of something. I don’t have time for this.”

“We’re in the middle of something, too,” Ray told him. “Maybe you’d better come with us.”

Speltz stopped and turned. “The station again? C’mon, man, you gotta be kiddin’ me.”

“We need a statement from you.”

“About what? I told you I did the number on Kramer’s barn. What more do you want?”

Cooper crooked a finger at Speltz, summoning him to the rear seat of his squad car. “C’mon, son. Hop in.”

The kid got in back. “Shit. I’ve got a job to finish.”

“Us, too.” Cooper closed the door and climbed behind the wheel. “Meet you at the station,” he called to Ray.

Speltz alternately sulked and grumbled on the way into town. At the station, seated in an interview room, his annoyance gave way to nervous tension.

Ray wanted him at ease. “We don’t want to hold you up, Greg. Cooperate and we can be done here in no time.”

“I got a deadline. I can’t afford to louse it up.”

“A detailing job?” Coop asked.

“Yeah. Can we just get on with this?”

“All right, let’s get to it.” Ray leaned against a wall, casual, almost indifferent. “You said Katie left. When?”

“A while back.”

“Can you narrow it down?” Ray asked.

“A couple weeks ago,” the kid said. “Maybe a little longer.” He screwed up his face, trying to remember. “The last time you had me in here—it was that night.”

Ray remembered the occasion. “The day you confessed to vandalizing Hank Kramer’s barn.” He made it sound like idle chit-chat. “Katie must’ve been really pissed off about that.”

Speltz laughed. “Are you kidding me? She didn’t give a damn about that, only that I admitted doing it. Katie hated Kramer’s guts, his son’s, too. There was nothing wrong with the logos I painted on that old bastard’s truck. They had no business stiffing me.”

“Where’d she go, Greg?”

“Beats me.”

“She must’ve left a phone number or address for you. Something,” he insisted.

“Hey, she didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask. We met in rehab. A couple months after I got out, she showed up looking for a place to stay. Roommates with benefits, you know?”

“Nothing more?” Ray asked.

“Nah.” The kid’s knee bounced under the table with increasing speed. “Hey, why don’t you just let her be? What happened was an accident.”

Something unexpected was coming their way; Ray felt it like an electrical shock coursing through his body. Cooper started to open his mouth—probably to ask the same thing going through his own mind:
What
was an accident?

He stopped Cooper by jumping in ahead of him with a purposely ambiguous question. “Is that what she told you—that it was an accident?”

Speltz looked up at him. “My dad told you, right?”

Whoa. What?
“What difference does it make who told us? Katie’s not here. If you want us to hear her side of it, you’re going to have to fill us in.” He prayed the kid would take the bait.

“Okay, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. I swear. Hell, I didn’t even know about it until the night she left.” He wiped his face with a sleeve of his sweatshirt.

The wait felt endless. “We’re listening,” Ray said.

“Katie didn’t mean to hurt anyone; she just wanted to even the score.”

Questions whirled through Ray’s mind. What could Valerie Davis have done that called for retaliation? In the short time Katie Springfield stayed in Widmer, had she offended the girl in somehow? He kept up the pretense that they knew what he was talking about. “You think what she did was justified?”

“I wouldn’t have taken it that far, but Katie lost it. We needed that money bad. Her especially. Hell, I had that money coming to me.”

Shit. This isn’t about Valerie Davis. He’s talking about Hank Kramer.
Unsure where it was leading, Ray said, “Okay. Give us Katie’s version.”

Greg sat there, silent and brooding.

“C’mon, Greg,” Ray said. “We need to hear it.”

With both hands, Speltz hung onto the ankle he’d crossed over his knee. “Katie said she was on her way home when she saw Hank Kramer driving into town that day. Just seeing him pissed her off all over again. She knew nobody would be there to see her, so she drove to Kramer’s farm and got one of the tools I borrowed from my dad out of the trunk of the car.”

“The wrench.”

“Yeah.”

Finally.
Ray felt a weight lift off his shoulders.

“She figured she’d mess with the old man’s milking equipment. Payback, you know? When she saw the bull penned up in the barn, she changed her mind.”

Ray got the picture. “So instead, she decided to do a number on his bull.”

Speltz nodded. “Kramer wasn’t supposed to get hurt.”

“He was more than hurt, Greg. Hank Kramer was killed.”

“Not by her,” the kid argued. “It was an accident. While she was taking a few swings at that bull, her jacket got caught on the gate bolt. It slid out when she tried to get her jacket loose. Before she could slide it back in place, the bull knocked the gate open. Katie had to run like hell. She barely got the door to the barn latched in time to keep from getting trampled.”

“Like Kramer,” Ray pointed out.

“Well…yeah.”

“So, when Kramer got back,” Cooper said, “he must’ve gone into the barn thinking the bull was still penned up.”

“That was his mistake,” Greg said, “not hers.”

Cooper shook his head, muttering something unintelligible under his breath.

“And your father knew about this?” Ray asked.

The kid’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No.”

“Then why’d you ask if he’s the one who told us?”

“He kept at me all the time about how I was gonna wind up on drugs again because of her. He couldn’t stand her. I figured he said something trying to get her in trouble.”

“If he didn’t know about it,” Ray asked, “why’d he take the wrench out of Officer Lloyd’s car?”

“It was his wrench,” the kid said. “He wanted it back.”

“Give me a break, Greg. Your father lied about having it. At his suggestion, I went on a wild goose chase looking for it at the accident site.”

“Okay, yeah, not cool. But he didn’t actually
know
anything. He figured if his wrench was sitting in a police car, I’d gotten into some kind of trouble. Typical. I didn’t have to be a genius to catch his drift and play along when you came nosing around and he told you I never had it.” Greg dragged a sleeve under his nose. “Once you hauled me down here, though, he started climbing all over me again wanting to know what I did. Hell. I didn’t do a damn thing. It pissed me off. That’s when I got on Katie’s case about the wrench and found out what happened. ’Til then, I didn’t know, and if I didn’t know, he sure didn’t. He still doesn’t.”

“I want you to be straight with me, Greg.” Ray asked. “Have you started using again?”

He shook his head.

“But Katie’s actively using, right?” Cooper asked.

The kid clammed up.

“At Rittman’s Pharmacy she had access to customer records,” Ray told him. “Filled prescription slips, too. She could find out who took what.” He leaned in closer. “Did she pass the information on to you? Was it you who broke into the Davises’ place? The Sumners?”

The kid’s jaw dropped.

“Did Katie have you steal the drugs for her, or the money to buy them?”

“What are you talking about?” Speltz shoved his chair back, ready to bolt.

Cooper put a hand on his shoulder. “Steady, son.”

The kid twisted his shoulder out of Cooper’s grip. “Are you guys crazy?”

Ray leaned closer, palms on the table. “We’re going to check that Dumpster behind your place, Greg. We can get a search warrant for the trailer if necessary. Want to tell us what we’re going to find?”

“Nothing.”

“No drug paraphernalia? No discarded prescription bottles?” Ray was only inches from Speltz’s face. “Think about it, Greg. You said Katie left things behind—things you got rid of. Your prints will be on everything you touched.”

“Yeah, I threw her stuff out, but I didn’t see any of that crap. If she was involved in something, she was doing it herself. I had nothing to do with it.”

“How do you think that’ll fly in court?” Cooper said.

“You’re in a world of hurt,” Ray told him. The time was right. “Tell us about the paint.”

“The paint? The stuff I used on Kramer’s barn? Holy shit. I told you guys I did it. I’ll find a way to pay a fine if that’s what this is about. What more do you want from me?”

“We want to know where you got the paint.”

“What the fuck? What does that have to do with—”

“The paint,” Ray insisted. “How’d you wind up with it?”

Speltz shrugged again. “Katie must’ve bought it, I guess.”

“The two of you were barely scraping by. Why would she spend what little you had on that?” Ray saw the blank look on Speltz’s face. “When do you first remember seeing it at your place?”

“I don’t know. End of March. Beginning of April maybe. Why?”

Ray and Cooper exchanged knowing looks. It fit with the time of Valerie Davis’s murder.

“That paint…” Cooper said, “it came from the Davises’ house.”

Speltz stared at them, his eyes wide, his lips parted as he tried to suck in some air.

“Valerie Davis went into town that Saturday—the last Saturday of her life,” Ray told him. “She picked up two gallons of paint from Sheehan’s Interiors. One blue, one white, Greg. When she stopped at Rittman’s to get Vicodin, she had it with her. The next morning when her body was discovered, both the paint and the Vicodin had disappeared.”

“Katie wouldn’t—”

“We’re talking about a drug user, Greg,” Ray reminded him. “You know what lengths an addict will go to for their fix.”

The kid chewed on his lower lip.

Cooper took a turn. “Michael Sumner’s prescription drugs went missing during a break-in at his place, too. He kept a change jar on his dresser—a large, apple-shaped jar with a gold, tin lid. Probably had over five hundred dollars worth of change inside. Gone.”

Speltz’s face paled. His chest rose and fell faster.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” Ray said. “Greg, where is she?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I swear—”

“I’m not buying it. Roommates with benefits, my ass. She meant something to you. I can see it in your eyes every time you mention her name. And if she’s nothing more to you than a good lay, why are you trying to defend her?” Ray sat down beside him. “I understand, Greg. I do. But think about this. She had good reason to run. You said it yourself. Katie didn’t give a damn about you vandalizing Kramer’s barn. What freaked her out was that you admitted doing it. Why? Because if we traced that paint to you, it could lead back to her and Valerie Davis.”

“But the Davis woman…Katie couldn’t do something like that.”

“I don’t know how it happened,” Ray said, “I only know it did. Katie’s out of control. You’ve started to make a new life for yourself. Don’t be stupid. Don’t let her take you down with her.”

The kid laid his head down on his forearms and wept.

49

The new lead in Valerie Davis’s murder lifted Ray’s spirits, but the death of innocent suspects in the wake of the investigation plagued him. The details involving Hank Kramer’s death eased his mind, but gave him no peace. And despite being cleared in the death of Mark Haney, there were still those few who remained convinced of his guilt. He’d expected as much.

Following their search through the Dumpster behind Greg Speltz’s trailer, Frank Cooper had made the necessary contacts with other law enforcement departments. The Speltz kid hadn’t been able to give an exact address for Katie Springfield, only a general idea of her whereabouts. Based on the mention of having friends located in the area, they were focusing on the Anoka, Minnesota region. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was their best bet. Now it was a matter of waiting, and patience wasn’t one of Ray’s greatest virtues.