Lake Country (6 page)

“Three fifty-seven this afternoon, according to the time stamp.”

Maya took another look at the image. It was difficult to absorb the details; her mind kept straining to run ahead of her.
I just talked to you
, she thought.

As if reading her mind, Barnhill said, “I understand that you also may have video images of Miss Benson
from earlier today. Her general appearance, what she was wearing, et cetera. Is that correct?”

Maya felt herself nodding. She couldn’t stop looking at the PDA screen. In the photo, Juliet Benson’s pretty dark hair clung to the grimy carpet of the trunk floor beneath her head in wet, matted tendrils. Her mouth had been stuffed with some kind of rag and tied with what appeared to be the belt of her own raincoat. Above the gag, her eyes swam with fear.

“Around her wrists,” Maya said, squinting. “Are those flex cuffs?”

“Possibly,” Barnhill said. He didn’t elaborate. Maya finally noticed him standing patiently, palm out.

She pulled herself together, shook her head, handed the BlackBerry back to him. “And that’s all there is?”

“That’s all.”

“No note? Anything?”

“Just what I’ve showed you,” Barnhill said. “Our office is preparing a press release to the other outlets now. But you’re here, and I’m new to this county, and I believe it’s time I made a friend in the TV business.”

“I feel like we’re old pals already,” Maya said. “What do you know that won’t be in the press release?”

“I haven’t seen a draft yet, so I’d say that determination is ongoing,” Barnhill said. “What we know so far is that Juliet Benson has a two-o’clock class on Wednesdays and that she attended class today. We know that she missed a study date at a coffee shop off campus at four o’clock. I have deputies on campus now, and Minneapolis PD is supporting us there. Personnel from that group have determined that the girl’s car is not currently located in the student parking lot
she normally uses. According to Mr. Benson, it could be her car in the photo, but there’s not enough for him to make a positive ID. Either way, the Bolo call on that vehicle went out over police channels twenty minutes ago.”

Listening to all of this, Maya couldn’t help extrapolating time frames in her head. A two-o’clock class, a four-o’clock study date. It was entirely possible, she realized, that at the very time she and Rose Ann had been sitting around at the station, chatting about happy endings, Juliet Benson was being forced into the trunk of her own car.

Detective Barnhill went back to the desk, replaced the phones, and picked up the file folder. From inside the folder he took a sheet of paper with another photograph—a good old-fashioned print this time—paper-clipped to the corner.

“This is part of what’s going out to everybody,” he said, handing the page to Maya. “Juliet Benson’s full description, our hotline info, so forth. This photograph came from her mother’s purse and I’m told it’s recent, though certainly not as recent as whatever footage you’ve obtained. You’ve done the rest before, I assume.”

“Police are seeking the public’s assistance in locating a Minneapolis woman,” Maya said, appraising the new photo: Cheryl Benson and her daughter in tennis dresses, arm in arm. Juliet had her dad’s eyes and her mother’s smile. Maya looked at Detective Barnhill. “Surely we’re using the word missing?”

“Missing and endangered,” Barnhill said. “We’ll want to name the campus as her last known location,
mark the time at three p.m. this afternoon. Everything else …”

“Authorities have yet to disclose further details,” Maya said.

At last, Benson’s attorney spoke up from his spot in the corner. “Detective, about the reward.”

Maya looked at Clay. Looked at Barnhill. Detective Barnhill took what seemed like a measured breath, then nodded toward the page in Maya’s hand. “Mr. Clay’s firm wishes to secure a private cash reward for any information leading to Miss Benson’s safe return. That information is also included on the sheet you have there.”

Maya looked back at Morton Clay. He seemed unsatisfied but remained silent. She slipped the photograph free of its clip. “Do you have a soft copy of this?”

“Our public-information office does. Give me an email address and I’ll tell them where to send it.”

Maya was already eyeballing the multifunction office printer on Terry Spilker’s desk. “That has a scanner, right?”

Spilker nodded. “If you know how to run the thing. I don’t.”

“May I?”

“By all means.”

Five minutes later, from behind Terry Spilker’s computer monitor, Maya used the superintendent’s office phone to call Miles Oltman at the station.

“Ticktock,” her assignment editor said. “How we doing?”

“I sent you something,” Maya told him. “Check your mail, you should be—”

“It just popped up. Hang on.” A pause. She heard Miles tapping away on his laptop in the background. In a moment he came back on the line. “Okay, what am I looking at?”

“Tonight’s top story, I’d think,” Maya said.

By five o’clock Mike felt more or less human. He took three Vicodins for his leg and stayed a long time in the shower, then shaved, brushed his teeth, and got dressed. By the time he was finished, he’d organized a rough order of business in his head. First item on the list: Eat something.

The cupboards were bare, so Mike grabbed his jacket, locked up the house, and walked over to Hal’s place. The Elbow Room wasn’t licensed to serve food, but each day Hal made up a couple dozen ham sandwiches with mayo and mustard, wrapped them in plastic, and loaded them into the cooler under the bar. Hal didn’t advertise the sandwiches, but if you knew to ask, he’d sell you one on a napkin with a beer or whatever you were drinking for a buck or two extra. What he didn’t sell by last call he took the next morning to the soup kitchen over by Como Park Lutheran. Mike had gotten to like those sandwiches.

The rain had quit, and the air smelled like early morning instead of late afternoon. Mike breathed it in through the nose as he walked, let it freshen up the inside of his head. It was still cool for April, but they’d finally turned the corner on winter; he could hear the
ground sucking and popping beneath the humpbacked lawns along Front Avenue, thirsty after an early thaw and a cold, sunless March. The robins were out in numbers, hopping about in the wet grass, hunting for earthworms. Mealtime for everybody.

By the time he made it to the Elbow, Mike’s stomach was rumbling. He pulled open the door to the clack of pool balls,
Jeopardy!
on the television over the bar, and the scattered voices of a few other early birds getting a head start on happy hour.

“That was a quick trip,” Hal said as Mike took a stool. “Fish weren’t biting, huh?”

Mike felt like he’d walked in on somebody else’s conversation. “Fish?”

Hal brought up a sandwich, pulled a beer to go with it. “I guess you stayed home.”

“You lost me at
trip
, Hal. Thanks for the grub.” He put a fiver on the bar, which Hal ignored. Mike left the money anyway. He slid the sandwich toward him by the napkin, began undoing the plastic wrap. “What are we talking about?”

Hal chuckled. “Potter came by first thing this morning, asked if he could borrow my place a couple days. Said he needed to dry out, thought he’d see what the walleye were up to. Hell, I didn’t have the heart to tell him walleye season don’t open ’til May.”

Hal owned a little place up in the lake country, a ramshackle cabin on a pretty piece of water he’d inherited from his grandfather twenty years ago. Rockhaven, the older man had named the spot, planting the sign at the end of the long narrow lane that stood today. Mike had used the place himself on occasion,
at Hal’s invitation, and he’d hauled Darryl along up there one weekend last August, after Darryl got off probation, thinking the peace and quiet could be good medicine for both of them. They’d run out of booze, and then cigarettes, and Darryl had spent the last day sweating, slapping bugs, and crawling out of his skin.

Mike evaluated this news with mixed feelings. On one hand, his chore for the day had gotten easier. On the other hand, Darryl didn’t fish.

“That’s funny,” he told Hal. “I was about to ask if you’d seen him around here today.”

“Uh huh.” Hal smirked and wiped down the bar. “You ain’t the first either.”

Shit. Mike took a bite of his sandwich. It tasted better than eleven thousand dollars. “I guess Toby Lunden’s been by.”

“That’s his name? Milky-lookin’ kid, glasses like Coke bottles?”

“That’s his name,” Mike said.

“So that’s Mr. Big, huh?” Hal shook his head slowly. “Jesus, I must be older than I thought.”

Mike said, “I suppose he probably had a friend with him.”

“Shoulder holster. Face like he got in a fistfight with some guy who had hatchets for hands.”

“That’d be Bryce. We only just met.”

“Yeah, well, they both met the end of my foot kickin’ their asses outta here.”

Mike couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah?”

“You don’t bring a gun into my place. Not unless you’re a cop. And that asshole wasn’t a cop.”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

“So,” Hal said, ignoring the guy down the bar trying to flag him for another beer. “Who is he? Besides the reason Potter figured he ought to get the hell out of town.”

Mike thought about how to answer. He felt bad that any of this horseshit had gotten tracked into Hal’s place of business. “I gather there was a miscommunication at the day job,” he said.

“I guess there must have been.” Hal flopped his towel over a shoulder. “What’s he gotten himself into this time?”

“No clue,” Mike lied. “You know Darryl.”

“Not as well as I know you,” Hal said. He went to pull a refill for the guy down the bar, leaving Mike to wonder what that was supposed to mean.

While Hal tended the paying customers, Mike sat on his stool and finished his sandwich and tried to figure out what the hell Darryl thought he was doing up in vacation land with Mike’s car and Toby Lunden’s money.

But there was just no damn telling. The Skylark might be a piece of crap, but it was the only piece of crap Mike owned, and while on a given day Darryl Potter could have been liable to uncork all sorts of havoc you wouldn’t have seen coming, he’d never left Mike stranded before. And that was saying something.

“Hey, look at that,” Hal said, wandering back Mike’s way. He grabbed the remote from the bar and punched up the volume on the Magnavox. “Speaking of Babe Winkelman Junior. Ain’t that his new favorite reporter?”

Mike looked.
Jeopardy!
had given way to the six o’clock news. Hal was right: On-screen was the same reporter they’d all been watching the night before. Maya something—an animal name. Mike couldn’t remember. Lamb.

The way she looked, Mike figured she was probably lots of guys’ favorite reporter around this time of day. He washed down the last of his sandwich with a gulp of beer, licked mustard off his thumb, and waited to hear what sunny piece of good cheer she had for them today.

Deon got them from Plymouth, through downtown rush-hour traffic, and to the MCAD campus on Stevens Avenue by 5:45. They set up in front of the student parking areas off Third Avenue and 25th, squad cars and yellow cordon tape in the background. At 5:52, Maya held a blank notebook page in front of Deon’s lens so he could white-balance the camera. At 5:54, she popped in her earpiece and tested the audio link with her producer at the station.

Fifteen seconds before Rick Gavigan made the toss to her live shot, her producer came back over the link. “Give me an ask to lead you out.”

Maya scrambled. Ten seconds. Into the mike, she said, “After I give the hotline number, have Carmen ask me if the police have any further instructions. I’ll mention the reward again.”

Lame. Whatever. Five seconds.

Her producer’s voice came back in her ear: “Instructions, reward, got it. Go.”

“Rick, Carmen, thanks,” Maya said. Behind the
camera, Deon gave her a thumbs-up. She had the same moment of throat-clenching panic she always felt at the top of a live remote, no matter how many she’d delivered: mind a sudden blank, notes forgotten, wondering how the words would come out of her mouth. Then she took a breath and said, “I’m standing in front of the student parking facilities at the campus of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design,” and they were off and running.

Three minutes later, they were out. Deon said, “Way to go, pro.”

Maya heard him in one ear, while in the other her producer said, “Stand by. If you get more, we’ll break in after sports.”

But she was already walking out of the shot.

Deon turned as she passed him. “Um … where ya going, Maya Lamb?”

Maya handed him the mike and stripped out the IFB, letting the earpiece hang over her shoulder by the cord. She kept walking toward Third Avenue. She waited for a break in traffic, then hustled across, picking up the tree-lined sidwalk on the opposite side of the street.

Behind her, Deon called, “You know the news is on now, right?”

She ignored him and kept walking, past the ivy-covered apartment buildings facing the college, scanning the cars parked along the east side of the avenue. Something had caught her eye on the way in, though she’d had her mind on more-immediate matters at the time.

But while Deon had set up the gear, she’d found herself looking back the way they’d come. Then, right
in the middle of her stand-up, a disturbing thought had popped into her head.

Just beyond the Children’s Theatre, she finally found the car she was looking for, still sitting where she’d noticed it the first time: a dented-up, rust-punched Buick Skylark with a cracked windshield and Minnesota plates, burgundy paint job baked dull by the sun.

Maya stood and looked at it. She walked all the way around and returned to the sidewalk.

Nah
, she thought, then flashed to the view from Benson’s house in Linden Hills. She saw herself standing alone at the wall of glass, looking out over Lake Calhoun, just before Juliet Benson announced herself in the room. Looking out over the lake, and the skyline beyond. And the street below.

She took one last long look at the beat-to-shit Skylark at the curb.