Lake Country (3 page)

“Yeah,” Toby said. “That’s part of the problem.” He was quiet, then added, “Thing is, Mike, I sent a guy to Chevalier this week already.”

“Oh.”

“Monday morning.”

Mike thought he was finally getting the picture. Considering the rubble of empties between them on the coffee table, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what must have happened. Only the night before, at the Elbow Room, a news reporter had to remind him that April was a week old already, and, compared to Darryl, Mike was organized. He said, “So mistakes were made.”

“You could say that,” Toby said. “If by mistakes you mean putting a gun up to my best customer’s eye and pretty much flat out robbing him, in broad daylight, in his own place, then, yeah. It sounds like definitely mistakes were made.”

Mike looked at him. “Say that again?”

“Eleven o’clock this morning, my customer calls and tells me Darryl comes to his place around daybreak, pulls out a hand cannon, and tells him he’ll shoot his face off if he doesn’t settle his sheet.” Toby’s voice rose as he talked. “And not just the weekly juice either, which, remember, he already paid. I mean the whole balance.”

Mike didn’t know if he’d ever heard quite this tone out of Toby. Hand cannon? Juice?

Even Toby seemed to hear how he sounded. He released a long breath. “Apparently my guy was in his office, batching up tickets,” he said. “Most of what
he would have owed me was stacked in cash on the desk, all ready to go to the bank. He said Darryl shoved a bag at him, like a gym bag, told him to stuff it all in, and just, you know. Walked out with it.”

“That’s what your guy told you?”

“He was pretty rattled,” Toby said. “Took him all morning to pull himself together, the way he tells it. Lucky thing he called me instead of the cops.”

“Did you talk to him in person or only on the phone?”

“Both,” Toby said. “Can’t see any reason not to believe him, Mike. He’s never lied to me before, as far as I know.”

Mike thought a minute. “There’s no way you and Darryl could have crossed wires?” he said. “He messed up the day, went in there with the wrong idea?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Thing is, Mike? Darryl doesn’t exactly work for me anymore.”

That definitely didn’t make sense. “Doesn’t exactly?”

“Doesn’t at all.” Toby seemed to be sizing him up. “I’m getting the impression you didn’t know that.”

“It’s new information,” Mike admitted. “Since when?”

“About a week ago,” Toby said.

“He quit?”

“Not so much quit.” Mike got the impression that Toby wished he didn’t have to be the one to explain. “Mike, you know I like the guy, but lately? I don’t
know, man. It kind of seems like he’s been coming unglued.”

“How do you mean?” Mike said, even though, being maybe the closest thing to a friend Darryl Potter had left on planet earth, he thought he knew well enough what Toby meant. Unglued was as good a way to put it as any.

“Getting rough on people, for one thing.”

“A bookie’s worried because one of his collectors is getting rough on people?”

Toby’s cheeks flushed. “More than need be.”

“How much more?”

“More enough,” Toby said. “Okay? My sheet, Mike, the regulars, they mostly always pay. I wouldn’t keep taking their action if they didn’t. Guns? Who am I, Tony Soprano? I’m a numbers guy.”

Mike tried to think. What came to him was a picture of Darryl in the passenger seat of the Buick twelve hours ago, sitting in the dome light with bloodshot eyes and a thousand-yard stare, and all Mike could think was,
What the hell have you started this time, you dumb grunt?

“And you know for a fact it was Darryl,” he said. “At the restaurant this morning. Not one of your other guys?”

“I’ve only got one other guy, and he’s answering his phone,” Toby said. “Besides, this customer’s seen Darryl a time or two. If he didn’t remember him before, he sure remembers him now.”

Bryce came back into the living room then, cracking his knuckles. “No wonder this genius took your money,” he said to Toby, scanning his surroundings. “This place is a shithole.”

At the mention of money, it occurred to Mike to ask, “How much was he into you? Your restaurant guy.”

Toby shrugged. “Ten grand or so.”

“Jesus.”

“His Final Four bracket didn’t work out.”

Mike sat and thought about ten thousand dollars.

Toby added, “He told me Darryl walked out with more like eleven.”

“Eleven?”

“Thousand, yeah.”

Mike thought about eleven thousand dollars.

“Look, Mike, I’m really sorry,” Toby said. “I know he’s your boy and all. I’m not exactly in my comfort zone here.”

By now Mike was only half listening again. A bad feeling had crawled into his stomach and curled up there.

“Anyway.” Toby stood. He produced a smartphone, looked at the screen a minute, tapped it a few times with his index finger, then put the phone back in the pocket of his windbreaker. “If you see him … I guess, you know. Could you tell him to call me?”

“Sure,” Mike said.

Toby seemed ready to say something else before deciding that there wasn’t much else to say. He rejoined the muscle he’d borrowed from his uncle and headed for the door.

As they let themselves out, Mike said, “Hey, Toby?”

Toby looked back.

“You haven’t heard from any of your other customers today, have you?”

“Not so far,” Toby said. “Believe me, we’ve been checking.”

“If you do,” Mike said, “would you let me know?”

“Sure thing, Mike. Thanks. And, you know. Sorry again about the door.”

Mike felt himself nod.

“See you around,” the bounty hunter said.

By the time her simple highway-safety story turned into breaking coverage of a felony kidnapping, Maya Lamb remained the only reporter in the state of Minnesota who’d spoken with Wade Benson’s daughter in the hours before she disappeared.

She encountered the girl first thing Wednesday at the sleek, modern house in Linden Hills, where Juliet Benson still lived with her folks and where Maya arrived, with a station photographer, for the in-home interview Benson had granted them.

It was half-past eight in the morning. Cheryl Benson had escorted Deon into the breakfast area to set up his gear for the piece; Wade Benson had excused himself briefly to take a phone call in his office down the hall. Maya, for the moment, had been standing alone at the wall of glass with the rain-streaked view over Lake Calhoun. The house was every bit the pad she might have conjured for the successful architect, if anyone had asked her to imagine one, and in five minutes she’d already composed the intro to her ten o’clock package in her head:

Once each year, on the anniversary of the roadway collision that ended Rebecca Morse’s life, Wade Benson
says goodbye to his family, hands his longtime business partner the reins to Benson Granger Architecture and Design, gathers together a small bag of personal toiletries, and goes to jail
.

“You know, I can’t help feeling like I owe you an apology,” a voice behind her said.

Maya hadn’t been aware she had company. She turned and smiled, wondering how long Juliet Benson had been standing there behind the Barcelona lounge. “An apology?” she said. “What on earth for?”

“For hating you.”

How to respond?

“Not just you.” Juliet came over and joined Maya at the window. She had intelligent brown eyes and pretty dark hair, cut a fashionable length. Skinny jeans, a light hooded top, a hint of fragrance. Everything tasteful. Even her tone was pleasant. “I hated all of you for a while.”

Good morning to you too
, Maya thought. She said, “All of us?”

“You and everybody else with a news camera.” Juliet folded her arms and took in the view as though she didn’t take time to notice it every day. “I was fifteen the first time we met. Do you remember?”

“I do,” Maya told her. “I remember very well, actually.” The mildly bug-eyed high schooler with braces on her teeth had grown into quite an arresting young woman in the time since. Maya knew from her research that Juliet Benson was now in her second year at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to her until just then, standing there at the glass together, that five years
made Juliet twenty years old. The same age Becky Morse had been when she died.

“I mean, I sort of admired you. I thought you were smart,” Juliet said. “Nicer than the others. But I still hated you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Maya said, and she meant it. Regarding Juliet Benson in profile, for the first time she began to consider this side of her highway-safety story from a different angle. “If it means anything, I think I understand how you could feel that way.”

“You guys used to set up camp out there.” Juliet nodded toward the world outside the window. “Every night that my dad showed up on the news, I’d walk through school the next day feeling everyone’s eyes. Even the teachers. Heck, the janitors. I wanted to climb into a locker and not come out.”

“Of course you did.”

“When I think of what Mrs. Morse and her family went through, I’m ashamed of myself for complaining, but back then? I just wanted you guys to go away.” Juliet turned from the window and faced Maya with such an utterly guile-free expression that Maya liked her instinctively. “Want to know what seems funny?”

“What seems funny?”

“Now I’m standing here thinking, Where is everybody?” She quirked her mouth. “I know. Pick a gripe, right?”

It hadn’t struck Maya as an unreasonable question. “Minneapolis architect avoids criminal charges, receives unusual sentence,” she offered. “If it was such big news in the beginning, why not at the end?”

“Something like that, I guess.”

Reporters move on to new markets, Maya could have told her. Assignment editors retire. New stories crowd out old ones—sometimes even stories as terrible as this one. All true statements. Were they answers?

“I saw your piece last night,” Juliet said. “I thought you were fair.”

“Thank you,” Maya said. “I try to be.”

“And Mom let you in the door. So I gather you must be okay there too.”

“I appreciate you saying that.” Maya took a chance and added, “Does that mean you don’t hate me anymore?”

Looking back, she’d remembered the way Juliet Benson had smiled at her. It was a nice smile. Genuine. Something in her eyes seemed older than twenty. “Let’s see how tonight goes,” she’d said.

“You feel sorry for the dude,” Deon told her later, in the van, as they followed Wade Benson’s silver Audi through the misty drizzle along Calhoun Parkway. “I can tell.”

Maya sipped cold coffee from a paper Go Shop cup and watched the lakeshore pass by her window. “Can you, now.”

“I can read people.”

“Who told you that?”

Deon chuckled, leaning over the wheel as he drove. “That ain’t a denial.”

“Yeah, well,” Maya said. “It’s not my job to feel sorry for him.”

“Never said it was your job. Just said you feel sorry for the dude.”

They’d gotten good sound around the Benson family breakfast table, a little more than fifty minutes to work with back at the station. Now they were accompanying Benson to his downtown office to shoot B-roll for the piece. This afternoon, by arrangement with jail officials—and against the flinty objections of Wade Benson’s attorney, who seemed exasperated with his client’s willingness to subject himself to renewed public scrutiny—they’d be meeting their subject again, this time at the Hennepin County Adult Corrections Facility in Plymouth, where they’d shoot him booking in for his final stay. It would make a good visual, Maya thought: the downtown architect, and the county inmate. Same guy, different clothes.

She considered the lone silhouette behind the wheel of the car ahead of them. It wasn’t her job to like Wade Benson either, though Wade Benson happened to be a likable man. He had the sort of understated, put-together quality she associated with people who designed things for a living, and she sensed in the way he carried himself a humility that had come at a dreadful price. Between the two of them—Benson and his wife, Cheryl, who worked in corporate relations for St. Jude Medical—it wasn’t difficult to see where Juliet had come by her general self-possession.

“Fine, I feel sorry for him,” she said. “Why, don’t you?”

“Where I come from?” Deon glanced at the image of Wade Benson’s graceful home receding in the rearview mirror. “Little hard to feel sorry for a guy with that guy’s view. Know what I’m saying?”

“Try looking at your daughter and seeing the kid you killed. How about that view?”

“I got four boys.”

Maya finally turned in her seat and appraised her photographer, with whom she’d worked maybe a dozen times since he started with the station in February. Deon wore a different Timberwolves jersey each day of the week, had already picked up three speeding tickets driving the news vans, smoked cigarettes in front of their call sign when out on stories, and could set up a live mast shot faster than any camera jockey Maya knew. He also seemed to get a kick out of trying to hook her for some reason.

“Tell you what, though,” he added. “A brother from Hawthorne killed that kid? Instead of some white dude from Linden Hills? They’d send him up more than two days a year.”

And if Grandma had balls she’d be Grandpa
, Maya thought, but it was a fair enough point. “Maybe so.”

“Anyhow. Mix in a Red Bull, that’s all I’m saying.”

“You never fell asleep driving, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Nodded off? Never once?”

“Guess I never been that tired.”

Maya rode along, listening to the clockwork thud of the windshield wipers, the whisper of mist on the roof over their heads. As they followed Benson off the parkway, turning right onto West Lake, she said, “We don’t know how to measure tired.”

“Say what, now?”

“That’s what a state patrol lieutenant told me at Benson’s trial,” she said. “He said you can pull a guy over and have him blow into a machine, and the machine
tells you if he’s had too much to drink according to the law.” She looked at Deon. “But how’s a trooper in the field supposed to write down a guy’s legal level of tired?”