Missing Mark (10 page)

“We all have stuff we hold back.” He was punchy because I was making him drive while I made notes about our meeting.

“You too, Malik? You holding back on me?” My cameraman had seemed a little distant the past couple of days.

He didn’t answer as we passed the
WELCOME TO MINNESOTA
sign on the freeway. I didn’t say anything, either, because over the years I’ve learned that sometimes the best way to get a person to talk is to keep my own mouth shut.

We were approaching downtown St. Paul when he told me that he was disappointed I was suddenly so gung ho on the missing groom and didn’t seem to care much anymore about investigating meth.

“Meth?” I said. “I care plenty. It’s Noreen who put the kibosh on that project.”

“But if
you
really cared, Riley you wouldn’t care what she thought. You’d do it anyway. Like with the wedding dress.”

“I guess I didn’t know you cared so much about the meth problem, Malik.” He started paying extra-close attention to the traffic just then. “Do you want to tell me why?”

He didn’t look like he wanted to, but finally, while keeping his eyes straight ahead on the car in front of us, he started to speak softly.

“My sister was an addict.”

“Your sister? Which one?” I recalled him having three. No brothers, though.

“Hafsa. The youngest. She put our parents through hell.”

I didn’t have to ask for details. I’d covered addicts and their families enough to know what he meant. Crystal meth is the most addictive, most accessible drug on the planet and can turn good kids into trash. “You said she
was
an addict. Is she recovered now?”

“She’s dead.”

Now I was the quiet one. Fatal meth overdoses are rare. But addiction can lead into a dangerous world of violence, prostitution, suicide.

“She crashed her car while high,” he said.

“I’m so sorry.”

Sometimes “sorry” is all I can say. I was surprised that Malik had kept his pain to himself. The reporter-photographer dynamic can be the closest of all TV news relationships. We spend so much time together in a van, we see the best and the worst in each other and develop an us versus them alliance. One reporter I know calls her photographer the Husband She Doesn’t Sleep With.

“I’m so sorry.” I repeated my regret because saying it once didn’t seem enough. Twice didn’t do the job either. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Happened a year ago,” Malik said. “I didn’t feel like talking. But lately, when you made noise about doing a meth investigation, I began thinking maybe that would help me get some perspective.”

“It would,” I agreed. “I’ll put it on my Stories Noreen Doesn’t Know About list and keep plugging away. We’ll find something to hang it on, Malik. I promise.”

For the first time since we began this conversation he took his eyes off the road, looked at me, and nodded. Once again, we had an us versus them alliance.

Then he went back to concentrating on the drive and I went back to making notes about our meeting with Mark’s mom. One detail I circled was the discrepancy over who proposed to who. I didn’t have enough information to confront Madeline. Yet. And if I pushed too hard, too soon, I might push her away.

Remarkably, that didn’t happen with Jean Lefevre, even though I bullied her to tears during the interview. I stopped writing and thought back to an hour earlier, on the other side of the river, while we were packing up the gear in the back of the van and she came outside.

I’d thanked her again and assured her I’d keep her posted on anything we might find about her missing son. I expected she had followed us to ask that we not air her tape or that we never set foot on her property again. Instead, she was apparently one of those people who feel freed by a good cry, and asked if we’d like to return another day and see any of Mark’s things.

Malik and I looked at each other. “What kind of things?” I asked.

She explained that Mark had one month left on his lease when he disappeared. The apartment came furnished. When the rent went unpaid, the landlord packed everything in boxes and put them in storage. She’d paid a considerable fee to retrieve the items. Now everything her son owned was stored in her garage. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sort through the boxes.

All she could imagine were the memories; all I could imagine were the clues.

Mrs. Lefevre led us to the garage where she opened a squeaky door, fumbling for the light. Malik and I took a quick peak inside. She showed us a wall of boxes stacked neatly against one end. I opened the closest one labeled “Desk” and struck gold in the form of a laptop computer.

“Have you looked at this?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Do you mind if I try?”

I didn’t mean personally. Until recently I didn’t have even the cyber savvy to know how to put that sideways smiley face on the end of my e-mails like everyone else does. I hoped to hand off Mark’s laptop to Xiong and see what computer secrets he could mine.

“I never even turned it on.” She explained that it seemed too much like snooping.

“We’re past snooping,” I said. “If your son cared about his computer, he’d have taken it with him.”

So Mark’s mother let me take the laptop. I wanted to comb through more boxes then, but she had a church meeting so we made plans to come back another day. And despite how we’d ended her interview, she actually did seem to be looking forward to seeing us again.

“But we have to schedule it around the
Amorphophallus titanum,”
she said.

“The what?” I asked.

“The corpse flower, it’s on the verge of blooming.”

I wondered if her son got his sense of humor from his mom, but she picked up on my confusion.

“It’s a rare jungle plant that smells like rotting flesh when it blooms. It’s expected to unfold sometime this week.”

She explained that flower aficionados were awaiting the botanical wonder at the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in St. Paul’s Como Park. Apparently, only 122 such pungent events have been documented worldwide since the plant was first discovered in the Indonesian rain forests in the 1870s.

“Minnesota will have a place in floral history.” She clasped her hands together and smiled in anticipation.

T
HAT AN OFFICIAL
missing person report had been filed by his mother gave me a reason to hound the cops about Mark Lefevre the next day.

“We got nothing,” said Captain Walt Shuda as he opened Mark’s file. He wouldn’t let me read the reports because the case was still classified as an open investigation, even though months had apparently passed since anyone in law enforcement had peeked inside.

“Why does TV care?” He seemed more curious about that development than about Mark’s fate.

“A bit odd is all,” I answered. “He had a lot to walk away from. And he’s been gone a long time.”

“You’d be surprised,” Captain Shuda said. “Sometimes the longer they’re gone, the harder it is for them to come back.”

Because Captain Shuda was head of the Minneapolis Missing Persons Unit, I had to put some stock in what he was saying. Even though Mark was last seen in White Bear Lake, and even though the person making the report, his mother, lived in Wisconsin, Minneapolis police actually had jurisdiction. Unless foul play is suspected, like with missing spring-break coed Natalee Holloway in Aruba, law enforcement where the missing person lives typically has charge of the case.

“I got a stack of missing person cases I can’t get the media interested in.” The captain gestured to a pile of files stacked in the back of his office. The top one looked dusty. “Think it’s because they’re not young, blond, or pretty?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I responded.

But actually it wasn’t. I knew it. And Captain Shuda knew it. TV gloms on to a few high-profile cases, usually involving attractive women, and the rest are left to sort themselves out. Or not. Without foul play or Mark being a vulnerable adult, his missing person file would sit with the pile unless I stirred something loose.

But I couldn’t be that candid with Captain Shuda. Instead I expressed regret we couldn’t cover all the missing person cases out there. “Not even John Walsh is that good.”

It comes down to practicality, I explained. Space is limited in a newscast. So is staff. I stayed away from the specifics of how news-worthiness is determined. Down that path, in debate with non-newsies, lies madness.

Then the captain reminded me about the time I followed the police chief on a law enforcement conference to Florida and filmed him playing golf while a session on “Keeping Your City Safe from Terrorism” was under way. “You found time to put that in your news.”

It’s no secret that the chief and I have issues. But that particular incident happened nearly four years ago. And the chief survived the political fallout nicely by explaining that his golfing foursome included a high-ranking official from the Department of Homeland Security who was giving them private tutoring on terror avoidance because so many Fortune 500 companies are located in Minnesota.

I suspected the real reason Captain Shuda sought a philosophical discussion on media coverage was to avoid a similar discourse on police handling of missing person cases. He knew victims without vocal families also get less attention from law enforcement.

“By the time we even got the report,” he said, “there was a foot of snow on the ground.”

I’d already checked the weather that October weekend with Channel 3’s meteorologist and confirmed an abrupt climate change. A cold front moved in from Canada and the mercury plunged more than 40 degrees in two days. With the sudden drop came twelve inches of snow. So even if police had received a timely missing person call and had mounted an immediate search, Mark’s trail was cold right from the start.

“So what have you learned in the Mark Lefevre case?” I phrased my question in a nonconfrontational manner because I wanted the information straight and because I might need him to go on camera later.

“We got no leads.”

Captain Shuda explained that Mark’s car hadn’t been stopped by any law enforcement officer since his disappearance. He hadn’t been arrested anywhere in the United States. No activity on his bank account, either. Without leads, the cops didn’t have much to investigate. Which left me another day closer to deadline, and still no story.

S
IGOURNEY
N
ELSON ALSO
proved a dead end. She’d disconnected her phone. Moved from her apartment. Hadn’t updated her driver’s license address. Owned no property, not even a car. Didn’t appear to have been born in Minnesota. And didn’t have a hunting, fishing, or snowmobiling license, either.

“That is all the databases we have to check,” Xiong said. “I will work on the laptop now.” Mark’s accounts were password protected, but Xiong thought he might find a way past them.

Besides having Xiong run a computer background check, I’d door-knocked on Sigourney’s former neighbors who were clueless as to where she’d gone. As for tracking relatives, the name Nelson made that path unpromising. The Minneapolis phone book alone had thirteen pages of Nelsons and I gave up calling after a dozen strikeouts.

Sigourney had vanished as completely as her old boyfriend.

n the past months, Nick Garnett must have picked up some technology tips from his teenage son because a text message from him popped on my phone, reading “Somthin fshy re mal atack.”

“Go jmp lak,” I texted back. I figured he was hoping to get some more crime-stopper tips on the fish frenzy, but truthfully, unless they had an arrest, it was bordering on old news.

“Whpper fsh tale,” he sent back.

“Anglng fr pblcty?” I countered.

“U dont tke bait, yr cmpetiton wil.”

I couldn’t chance that, and since it would take forever for him to pony up the details texting, I drove over to the Mall of America to tell him—in person, in a nice way—to knock it off.

There I learned, unofficially not for attribution, that one of the fish from Underwater Adventures was missing.

A very famous fish: Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Minnesota record largemouth bass.

“What do you mean Big Mouth Billy is gone?” I asked.