Spilled Blood (3 page)

The motel was a U-shaped, single-story building with two dozen rooms. The white paint had begun to peel away in chips, and the gutters sagged from the shingled black roof. The doors were cherry-red. After parking and retrieving his bag, he ducked through the rain and opened the screen door of the motel office. The interior was humid, and a fan swiveled on the desk, which was unusual for March. On the left wall he saw an ice machine and two vending machines selling snacks and pop. He approached the check-in counter.

‘I’m Chris Hawk,’ he told the man seated behind the counter. ‘I called this morning about a room.’

The motel owner nodded pleasantly. ‘Welcome to Barron, Mr. Hawk.’

Chris guessed that the man was in his early fifties. He had an olive Italian cast to his skin. His hair was black-and-gray, buzzed into a wiry crew cut. He had a jet-black mustache, a mole on his upper cheek, and a silver chain nestled in the matted fringe of his chest hair. He slid out a reservation form, which he handed to Chris with a pen.

‘I’m looking for the county courthouse,’ Chris mentioned as he filled in his personal details.

‘Yes, of course. Well, you can’t miss it. It’s downtown, beautiful old building, red stone.’

Chris stopped writing and looked up. ‘Why “of course”?’

‘Oh, everyone knows who you are, Mr. Hawk, and why you’re here.’

‘Already?’

The motel owner shrugged. He was short and squat, with bulging forearms. His T-shirt, which fit snugly, advertised Dreamland Barbeque. ‘This is a small town. If you fart in your bedroom, your neighbors start gossiping about what you had for dinner.’

Chris laughed. ‘That’s good to know.’

The man extended his hand. His handshake was a vise. ‘My name is Marco Piva.’

‘Since you know why I’m here, Marco, can you tell me what people are saying about what happened on Friday night?’

The motel owner snuffled loudly. He wiped his bulbous nose above his mustache. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear that.’

‘They think my daughter murdered Ashlynn Steele.’

‘Oh, yes, everyone says she did. No one thinks it was an accident or a game. I’m very sorry. I have to tell you, I knew something like this would happen. Violence begets violence, and someone dies. It’s a shame two young girls were involved.’

Chris handed the registration form back to Marco and turned as the screen door banged behind him. A teenage boy, the kind of fresh-faced Scandinavian Lutheran that Chris expected to find in this part of the state, stood in the doorway. He had wavy blond hair that was plastered on his head from the rain and the sturdy physique of a football player. His eyes were sky-blue. He wore a form-fitting white T-shirt that emphasized his muscles, crisp jeans, and cowboy boots. Chris figured he was seventeen or eighteen years old.

‘Johan,’ Marco called. ‘This is Mr. Hawk.’

The boy didn’t look surprised. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Johan lives in St. Croix,’ Marco added.

‘Oh, really?’ Chris said. ‘So you know my daughter.’

‘She lives across the street.’

Chris found it odd that his teenage daughter lived so close to a boy who looked like a Norwegian god, and she had never mentioned
him. Not once. He thought about Hannah’s warning:
You see the girl she wants you to see.

‘Marco says a lot of people think Olivia is guilty, Johan. What do you think?’

The boy looked pained. ‘I guess nobody really knows what happened,’ he replied, but his face said something else.
We all know what happened.

‘I’m here to help her,’ Chris told him. ‘Maybe you can help me.’

‘How?’

‘By telling me about the bad blood between the kids in Barron and St. Croix.’

Johan frowned. ‘I try to stay out of it. It’s like a poison.’

‘That’s smart.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I told Olivia, but she didn’t listen.’

‘No?’

‘No, she’s stubborn. She couldn’t let go.’

Marco interrupted them, as if he didn’t want the feud carried inside his walls. ‘Is Mr. Hawk’s room ready, Johan?’

The boy nodded.

‘Put his suitcase inside, all right?’

Johan grabbed the suitcase, swinging it as if it were practically weightless. He nodded at Chris as he left the office, and his sculpted face was pure Minnesotan: polite, handsome, but yielding no secrets.

‘Johan is a good boy,’ Marco said when he was gone. ‘He cares for your daughter.’

‘He looked at me like I was from another planet,’ Chris said.

‘Ah, but you are, Mr. Hawk. You’re an outsider.’

‘Is that a crime around here?’

‘Oh, no,’ Marco chuckled. ‘It’s worse. Most people here would happily choose a local criminal over an honest outsider.’

Chris smiled at the man’s jowly Italian face. ‘You look like an outsider yourself.’

‘Yes, you’re right about that. I bought this place in December.
What a shock, all that snow and cold! I hate winter, but I needed to get out of San Jose. My wife passed away last year, and all I had was my city pension and a house full of memories. I asked a realtor to scout motels for me, and this place looked like a nice business in a beautiful area. I figured, that’s for me.’

‘Have the locals accepted you?’ Chris asked.

‘No, I could be here twenty years, and I’d still be a newcomer. The people are perfectly nice, but that’s as far as it goes. I don’t mind. I didn’t come here to make friends, just to get a little peace. It will be worse for you, Mr. Hawk.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because a man who tries to stop a dog fight usually gets bitten for his trouble.’

‘I’m just here for Olivia,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t care what’s going on between Barron and St. Croix.’

‘It doesn’t matter whether you pick sides. You will not be trusted. People will not tell you things you need to know. They will want to see you gone. Be careful, okay?’

‘I appreciate the advice,’ Chris said.

Marco shrugged. ‘No charge for that. It’s free from one outsider to another.’ He added, ‘If you want to know more, talk to Johan’s father. Glenn Magnus is the minister at the church in St. Croix. They were among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Mondamin Research.’

Chris felt a heaviness in his heart. He knew what that meant. Death.

‘Who did they lose?’ he asked.

‘Johan’s sister,’ Marco said, shaking his head. ‘Her name was Kimberly. Johan has shown me pictures. A lovely girl. Grief leads to some dark places, Mr. Hawk. When you get a cancer cluster in a place like St. Croix, especially among young people, it can’t help but cut out the heart of the town. It makes people crazy. It makes people want revenge.’

The main street of Barron looked like Hollywood’s idea of a small town. Chris drove by nostalgic storefronts, like the pharmacy with an oversized mortar and pestle stamped on its sign, the hardware store advertising lawnmower repair, and the Swedish bakery displaying racks of fresh kringle cookies. The brick walls were bright and clean; the paint on the stores was fresh. He saw none of the economic decay he expected. In a time when rural areas were bleeding young people into the cities, the streets of Barron bustled. The smell of money was everywhere, and most rural towns hadn’t known that smell in a long time.

It was easy to see why, to the people of Barron, the ten-year-old biotechnology company on their borders felt like a godsend. Their prosperity had a name: Mondamin Research.

Ten miles south along the highway, in the neighboring town of St. Croix, families had a darker view of Mondamin. They blamed the company’s pesticides for the deaths of their children. They’d sued to prove it, but the litigation had been thrown out of court, and in the year that followed, a wave of violence and vandalism had spread into the streets. Teenagers in St. Croix attacked the town of Barron. Teenagers in Barron struck back. The two towns, which were near enough that most people who lived in St. Croix worked or went to school in the larger town of Barron, became enemies.

Now it was worse, because a line had been crossed. Blood had been spilled.

Even among the primped store windows and flower baskets hanging from the street lights, Chris saw evidence of the feud. A concrete
statue of a founding pioneer in the street’s roundabout had been beheaded. The doorway of a clothing shop showed the black scars of a recent fire. He saw tiny starbursts popped through the glass of second-floor windows. Bullet holes.

The bullets had targeted one building in particular. The white lettering stenciled on the pockmarked windows above the street advertised the Grohman Women’s Resource Center. The Center was housed in Barron, but the woman who ran the organization lived in St. Croix, where her parents had lived, where her grandparents had lived, where her great-grandparents had settled after emigrating from Uppsala. Chris knew her. She had a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Minnesota. She had a freckle in the swell of her left breast that he had kissed a thousand times.

Hannah, Hannah, what are you doing here?

Chris understood. Hannah was where she always wanted to be. In the center of the storm.

He drove two more blocks to the end of Barron’s main street and found the county courthouse. Like a cathedral out of the Middle Ages, it looked oddly elaborate for its rural surroundings. It was a majestic three-story building with brick gables and a massive central clock tower. He parked and climbed terraced steps leading up from the street. Outside the oak doors, he turned to overlook the town from above. The river flowed immediately behind the downtown shops, and he saw a pedestrian bridge stretching across the water to a swath of forested parkland on the far shore. Away from the main street, he saw a neatly organized grid of houses built between the water and the rocky bluff that bordered the river valley.

From up here, Barron looked peaceful. Not violent at all.

Chris went inside the courthouse, which glistened with lacquered oak. He checked the directory. The sheriff’s office and the facilities for the county jail were buried in the basement. He headed downstairs, where the surroundings were institutional, not
ornamental. Security was modest. It wasn’t a place that housed hardened criminals.

He told the uniformed officer at the desk: ‘I’d like to see Olivia Hawk. I’m her lawyer.’

Her father. Her lawyer. It didn’t matter which hat he was wearing. The policeman, like everyone else in town, knew who he was.

Chris gave up his driver’s license; he had his picture taken; he walked through a metal detector. The officer led him through a steel door and into a conference room that wasn’t much bigger than a phone booth. Chris sat down on one side of a narrow conference table, and the policeman left him alone. The door lock clicked as the officer left. He waited.

Two minutes later, the door opened again.

Chris told himself he was prepared, but he wasn’t. He’d steeled himself for this moment, but his heart raced, and his stomach climbed into his throat, and his eyes stung with tears. Olivia walked in, her long brown hair dirty and tangled, her wrists bound in handcuffs as if she were praying. She wasn’t in prison gear; she wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and worn jeans. He’d seen her at Thanksgiving, but even in that time, she’d changed. She was growing into her adolescent features. She was more graceful. She was taller. She’d always joked about getting her looks from him, not Hannah, and if anything, she looked more like him than she ever had before. His sharp nose and high cheekbones. His mouth. His expressions.

For all that, he was afraid of what he saw in her face. Her brown eyes were as deep and unrevealing as a black hole, and he thought he could search in them for days without finding her. The daughter he knew, the girl he remembered, could never fire a gun at another human being, but this was someone else. A woman. A stranger.

The policeman undid the handcuffs, and Olivia rubbed her chapped wrists and shook out her fingers. The officer left, and the lock clicked on the door, and it was just the two of them. Father and daughter.
Silently, he pushed his chair back and came around the table to embrace her. She hugged him back fiercely, and he clung to her, stroking her hair. When he helped her into a chair, she stole a look at him and then hooded her eyes, her hair tumbling across her face. The shame in her beet-red cheeks was like a ten-year-old who’d broken a figurine she wasn’t supposed to touch. That was the Olivia he knew.

‘Guess I really screwed up,’ she said.

He sat next to her and stroked her face with the back of his hand. ‘First things first. Are you okay?’

Olivia squirmed in the chair. ‘I’ve had the Hershey’s for two days. Yuck.’

Chris smiled. ‘I’ll make sure they give you something.’

‘Other than that, I guess I’m okay.’

‘Good.’

‘Jail sucks.’

‘Yeah, it does.’

His daughter pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘So how was Matt’s?’

‘What?’

‘We texted on Saturday, remember? Didn’t you go to Matt’s Bar that night?’

‘I did.’

‘I could really go for a Juicy Lucy,’ she said.

He didn’t say anything. Olivia was in jail, and she was talking about cheeseburgers like she needed a new Facebook status. He wondered if she didn’t realize the gravity of her situation or if she was simply stalling. He also thought:
She texted me on Saturday.
That was the day after the murder.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You texted me on Saturday to ask what I was doing that night. Ashlynn was dead. You’d just been through one of the worst nights of your life, and you didn’t say a word about it, Olivia. Why not?’

Her lower lip quivered. ‘I don’t know, Dad. I couldn’t believe it was real, you know?’

‘Your mother says you wouldn’t tell her what happened.’

‘I couldn’t. I can’t deal with Mom right now. It’s easier to talk to you.’

Or maybe it was easier to lie to him. He put that thought out of his mind.

‘Okay,’ he told her softly. ‘Here I am. Let’s talk.’

Olivia sat frozen. Words didn’t pour out of her.

‘I don’t know what to say, Dad,’ she told him finally. ‘I don’t know what happened.’