Dearly Departed (33 page)

“Do you really expect an arrest within twenty-four hours?” Ingrid asked.

I flashed on Jimmy Johannson. “It’s possible,” I said.

“Who?” Lonnie asked.

“I really shouldn’t say,” I told him. “But I doubt anyone will be surprised.”

“Not King?” Ingrid asked.

“No, not King.”

We were halfway to Saginau. The county road dipped and turned and suddenly we were motoring past The Harbor.

“I still feel awfully guilty about all this,” Ingrid said.

“Guilty about what?” I asked.

“The Harbor.”

“What about it?”

Ingrid didn’t answer. Instead, she turned her head and looked at Lonnie. Her eyes weren’t visible behind the sunglasses. Lonnie shrugged.

“You think?” Ingrid asked.

Lonnie shrugged again.

“What?” I asked, intrigued by this silent passing of information.

Ingrid’s chest rose and fell with a sigh that I couldn’t hear over the wind.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

“What?” I leaned in close so I could hear better.

“I’m the one who told Michael about The Harbor,” Ingrid confessed. “I’m the one who told her the Ojibwa were buying the civic center across the highway.”

“You?”

Ingrid nodded.

“How did you find out?”

“I told her,” Lonnie said.

“Are you privy to the tribe’s business dealings?” I asked him.

“Carroll Stonetree is my uncle,” he told me.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“My mother’s brother.”

“He told you that the Ojibwa are building a new casino?”

“Not exactly,” Lonnie answered.

“We kept that part from Michael,” Ingrid added.

“What part?”

Ingrid’s chest rose and fell again. “Michael was talking about how she wanted to become an
important
part of the community,” Ingrid explained. “But the way she said it, it reminded me of King. She didn’t want to become a part so much as she wanted to
own
a part, to run a part. And it annoyed me. I realize now that I was just being petty. I see myself as a big fish in a small pond, and I didn’t want any other big fish coming around.

“So one night we were talking and I mentioned that The Harbor would make a good investment, the kind of community investment she was looking for. I told her the Ojibwa were negotiating in secret with the Board of County. Commissioners to buy the civic center across the highway and turn it into a casino. I told her I would buy The Harbor in a heartbeat myself, only I didn’t have the money. So she bought it.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“The Ojibwa are not going to build a new casino,” Lonnie told me. “The tribe has no intentions of expanding its gaming operations.”

“Why then—”

“The tribe is starting a company to build recreational boats,” Lonnie explained. “The civic center would make an ideal factory for it.”

“And you knew that?” I asked Ingrid.

“Lonnie told me,” she said.

“But why keep it a secret?” I wanted to know.

“Because the company will be in direct competition to King Boats, Koehn’s bread-and-butter company,” Lonnie said. “The tribe wanted to secure the civic center location before King had a chance to use his political ties to squash the deal. And the county commissioners wanted to keep it a secret because they knew if King did scuttle the deal, they’d be stuck with the civic center for all time.”

In his own obfuscated way, Chief Stonetree had told me all this the night before—but I was being too obfuscated myself to see it.

“The entire county is up in arms thinking you’re building a casino,” I reminded Lonnie.

“Think how happy the people will be when they discover that we’re not,” he said, smiling. “When people discover that we’re actually bringing honest manufacturing jobs to the region, I expect we’ll become quite popular.”

“With everyone except King Koehn,” I suggested.

“I doubt he’ll appreciate the competition,” Lonnie agreed.

“That’s why you’ve been content to allow all this casino nonsense to go on,” I figured out loud. “To keep King in the dark as long as possible.”

Lonnie nodded.

“Shrewd,” I told him.

“That’s what they’d call it if a white company made it happen. I’m real curious to hear what adjective they’ll apply to us.”

So was I.

“Then Charlie Otterness was telling the truth,” I said. “He didn’t pass insider information.”

“No,” Ingrid agreed. She added, “I feel really, really guilty about that. But everyone will know he told the truth when the Board of County Commissioners meets in formal session and the Ojibwa make their bid.”

“And Michael?”

“If she works at it, I bet she could make The Harbor go,” Ingrid predicted. “With a boat factory across the way, she’ll have a good lunch crowd if nothing else. Probably a good happy hour, too.”

“But she won’t have the business a casino would bring in,” I noted.

“I won’t, either,” Ingrid said in her defense.

I leaned back in my seat and watched the back of Ingrid’s head as she guided the Sebring into Saginau. Suddenly I didn’t like her as much as I had before. Or Lonnie. Or the chief. Suddenly I didn’t like anybody because of what they had done to Alison.

They had stolen her dream.

At least that’s how I saw it.

“Drop me at the county court building,” I instructed Ingrid. And she did.

W
e were all surprised when we pulled into the parking lot. It was filled with deputies donning Kevlar vests and checking weapons.

Ingrid and Lonnie were curious but not enough to ask questions. They drove off, leaving me standing next to my car. I was curious and not shy about it.

“What’s going on?” I asked no one in particular. Gary Loushine heard me and answered as Sheriff Bobby Orman stood behind him and listened to every word.

“We searched Chip Thilgen’s house,” the deputy told me. “We found financial records that indicate that Thilgen wrote five checks to James Johannson for five hundred dollars each and a sixth for twenty-five hundred. Each of the five-hundred-dollar checks were written the same day as a reported farm break-in or animal liberation that Thilgen had been accused of but not charged with. The sixth check—the twenty-five-hundred-dollar check—was written the day before Michael Bettich was shot.”

I nodded, pretending I didn’t already know this.

“Jimmy Johannson is well known to us,” Loushine added. “He has a significant record. So we checked his fingerprints against a set of latents we lifted off the Buick, including an index finger we found on one of the shell casings. We examined them on the optical comparator. There’s no mistake.”

“The perpetrator is James Johannson,” Sheriff Orman announced, reminding me of Jack Lord in
Hawaii Five-O.

“James Johannson,” Loushine agreed.

They were both smiling.

“So what do you expect from me?” I asked. “Applause?”

twenty-seven

S
heriff Drman was acting like Joe Professional now—perhaps he thought he had something to prove.

“We have an hour of daylight left,” he estimated, glancing at his watch.

“Yes, sir,” said Loushine.

“I want everybody here. Now.”

“They’re here,” Loushine said.

Sheriff Orman nodded.

“This is going to get ugly,” I muttered to myself.

I was impressed by how grim and unsure the deputies appeared as they awaited their instructions—so unlike my former colleagues in the St. Paul Homicide Unit. This was not something they wanted to do, and not wanting to do it put them at risk. Loushine moved among them, grinning, even cracking a joke or two. He managed to illicit a few chuckles, a few smiles that faded fast. But the overall mood didn’t change, and I could see that he was as concerned as I was.

I didn’t know any of these men, these strangers. I didn’t know if they were properly trained for this kind of action. I didn’t know how they would react. I knew only that they were scared. And that was reason enough for me to adjourn to the beer joint down the street. Besides, it wasn’t my job. I was a civilian. I shouldn’t have even been invited to the party. But then the sheriff asked, “You coming, Taylor?” in a voice loud enough to be heard by all of his deputies.

The men stopped checking their weapons, stopped donning their body armor, and waited for my reply. And suddenly I felt responsible for them, for all of them, as if my refusal to join the posse would make them more afraid than they were, and that extra load of fear would be too much for them to carry.

Loushine whispered something to the sheriff, and Orman replied, “No, it’ll be all right.”

“You’re the boss,” Loushine said and joined the others who waited for my answer.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, smiling just as big and brightly as I could.

And we tell our children not to succumb to peer pressure.

T
hirty minutes later I sat on the hood of the sheriff’s cruiser about a mile from the Johannson homestead while he deployed his men. I could hear the low rumble of his voice but not what he was saying. By my estimate, we had thirty minutes of daylight left.

“I’ll tell you what we used to do,” I announced. “When we could, we would take our suspects at dawn. Hit ’em hard and fast when they were still too groggy from sleep to put up a fight. It was standard procedure.”

No one was listening.

“I was out there yesterday,” I recalled. “Johannson’s father and his young nephew were in the house. Have you considered them?”

No one was listening.

“Hey, I know! We have the barn. We have the costumes. Let’s put on a show.”

“Quiet down, Taylor,” Loushine warned.

“Deputy, this is small-town amateur night,” I countered.

He looked at me like he knew I was right but said nothing. A moment later, the sheriff joined us. His deputies had scattered, some in cars, to encircle the house down the road. He looked at his watch. “The teams will be in position in ten minutes. Then we move.”

“Move? What do you mean, move?” I knew what he meant, I just wanted to hear him say it.

“We’re going to knock on the front door.”

“Sheriff, the man has an UZI semiautomatic carbine. He can fire twenty-five rounds before you can say, ‘Bless me father for I have sinned.’”

“You’re not frightened, are you, Taylor?” Loushine interrupted.

I studied him for a moment. He was busy checking the load in his service revolver. It wasn’t necessary. I had seen him check it twice before. But it gave his hands something to do, and it was an excuse not to look me in the eye.

“I’ll be standing right behind you, Deputy,” I told him.

Sheriff Orman slapped a gun into my hand. A Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special, Model No. 64: three-inch barrel, thirty and a half ounces fully loaded, serrated-ramp front sight, square-notch rear sight, square butt, satin finish, six shots—as efficient a close-encounter killing machine as you’ll ever find and a stunning improvement over the Walther PPK in my pocket. Yet I looked at it like I had never seen one before in my life.

The minutes dragged on, giving me plenty of time to think, plenty of time to contemplate what I was expected to do with the .38. I was expected to point it at a man and squeeze the trigger. Simple, right? Yeah, sure. That’s why I have nightmares, because it’s so simple.

It is not as easy to kill a man as TV and the movies would suggest. Living with it later is even harder. You don’t brush it off and go out for Chinese like the actors in the cop shows: “Hi, honey, I killed a couple of guys today; what’s for supper?” I know. I’ve killed men. Four of them. I’ve replayed my encounters with them a hundred times in my head, carefully editing each tape until any alternative action was clearly impossible. I memorized their rap sheets until I convinced myself that their deaths were an almost preordained consequence of their lives and my involvement a kind of destiny. Yeah, I know it’s self-deluding bullshit. But a man has to sleep.