Taking the ring and the paperwork with her, Bernadette left the shop. Garcia told her he’d track down Strandelunder so she could question the boy by the end of the day. Meantime, she shopped Lydia’s photo around town, starting with her own motel.
“Never seen her before,” said the clerk, still popping cherry lozenges in between coughs.
He stood on the opposite side of the counter while Bernadette flipped through the grimy registration book. There were few visitors in December, and none offered a name that resembled Lydia’s real or fake one. Bernadette held the pawnshop papers next to the guest signatures from early in the month and found identical handwriting beside one name. She looked up at him and said through her teeth, “You don’t remember her, huh?”
The guy shifted his feet nervously. “Well… we get a lot of people through here.”
“This is a murder investigation,” she told him for the third time.
He glanced down at the photo of the girl and back at Bernadette. Wiped his nose with a ball of tissue. “You know, maybe she does look a tad familiar.”
Bernadette ran through the same questions that she’d posed to the woman at the secondhand store. Got the same answers.
She took the photo to the gas stations and sporting-goods dealer. None of the employees recognized the girl. A waitress at the restaurant remembered her but hadn’t had any sort of conversation with her.
Bernadette checked her watch as she left the restaurant. It was already two in the afternoon, and it would be a three-hour drive or so to the Twin Cities. She’d established that Lydia had been in Brule. No one who saw the girl seemed to know why she was in the tiny town, but Bernadette had a theory. The boyfriend might be able to confirm it. Because what he told her could send her running elsewhere, she wanted to get to the kid before it got too late in the day.
As Bernadette drove, she checked in with Garcia. The first thing he asked was whether she’d had any more trouble, and she assured him that she hadn’t. At the same time, she was keeping a close watch in her rearview mirror.
“You call even if you don’t like the looks of the grandma in the station wagon behind you,” he said.
“I will,” she promised.
Noticing the time on the dashboard clock, she asked about his meeting with Dunton. It had been postponed—again. They discussed whether to tell the senator that his daughter had been spotted in Brule and decided to hold off until they could ascertain why she’d been in the town.
Garcia: “If she was chasing after that old murder case and that’s what got her killed …”
“We have to know
why
she went after it,” finished Bernadette. She wasn’t ready to share her theory with him. She wanted to talk to the boyfriend first.
Garcia told her the agents checking the other women’s clinics in the Walker area had come up with nothing. The ME hadn’t yet gotten back with a report.
“Did B.K. come up with anything juicy on Ashe or Graham?”
“Nothing much.” Both women were from the states they’d claimed. Graham’s record was spotless. From her days in California, Ashe had two misdemeanors on her record—both for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.
“That isn’t exactly a shocker,” said Bernadette.
They were refusing to talk any further, and Garcia asked how far Bernadette wanted to push the two women.
“Let me see what I come up with on this boyfriend,” said Bernadette.
Garcia gave her some background on David Strandelunder. The kid was two years older than Lydia. He’d dropped out of school after finishing his junior year. Shortly after that, his mother had kicked him out of the house for doing drugs. He was living on his own and working at his uncle’s foundry in St. Paul.
“Guess we know what the big attraction was,” said Bernadette.
“Bad boys do get the girls,” said Garcia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
T
he bad boy’s uncle was a tall, thin man with slate hair clipped close to his head. His stiff gray work pants and shirt matched, and nearly blended into his taut gray skin. His cheeks were sunken and deep lines formed a parenthesis around his thin-lipped mouth. The gray brows over his gray eyes were knit in what appeared to be a permanent expression of worry. The brows knitted even tighter when she flashed her identification.
“What’d he do? Rob a bank?” Russell Hague asked, sounding as if he were only half joking.
“He may have knowledge of a crime.”
“What kind of crime?”
“Murder.”
“Crap,” he said, and stopped asking questions. He started leading her down the long, narrow hallway that would take them to the foundry. Along the way, Hague put on a pair of safety glasses and handed her a set. “These are for your baby blues. Uh, I mean …”
She slipped the specs over her eyes. “Thanks.”
“Actually your eyes are kind of neat,” said the nervous Hague, struggling to make conversation. “I had a hunting dog with one blue eye and one brown. He could spot a tick on the back of a field mouse.”
One side of her mouth turned up. “That’s neat.”
“Sure you don’t want to wait for him in the office?”
Bernadette feared that Hague would let the nephew out the back door while she was waiting up front. “That’s okay,” she said pleasantly. “Never set foot in a foundry before. Kind of curious.”
“We’ve got a partial crew on Saturdays, but it’s still crazy busy.” Hague opened the door to the shop. “Stay close. Don’t want any accidents.”
Steam and smoke. Men wearing silver suits and face shields pouring molten metal into buckets. A space-age version of Dante’s Inferno. She’d had a college-lit professor who insisted that his students memorize the circles of hell, and she put this scene right around the sixth. The one with the heretics trapped in flaming tombs. “When you
do
have an accident, I imagine it’s pretty horrific.”
“Never had anything serious, thank the Lord. A foundry across the river had a bad one a few years back. There was a spill. Poor bastard melted like a candle.” They stopped in the middle of the shop floor and Hague yelled to a trio of men standing together. “Hey, shithead!”
The middle man raised his face shield. “Yeah.”
“Somebody wants to talk to you.”
Bernadette started to interview Strandelunder in the foundry, but it was too hard to talk above the racket of the equipment. They walked back to the office.
The boy was tall and lean and gray-skinned like his uncle. He wore his long black hair tied into a ponytail and had a gold loop in his left ear. Though he was only eighteen, a five o’clock shadow darkened the hollows of his cheeks and colored his high cheek-bones. He slouched in a metal folding chair while she sat behind the uncle’s desk in the small, hot office. Hague stood off to the side, leaning his back against shelves filled with foundry books and binders.
OSHA Reference Manual. Welding Data. Filtering Info. Foundry Seminar. Government Specs. Mold-Pour Log
. While they talked, it became obvious to Bernadette that she’d misjudged the uncle. Hague was perfectly willing to throw his nephew to the federal wolves.
“Jesus H. Christ, Davy! You’re as stupid as they come. Just answer the goddamn question.”
“I’ll say it again; I didn’t do nothing,” said Strandelunder.
The young man refused to acknowledge Lydia or her pregnancy, and showed no reaction when Bernadette told him how his girlfriend had died. His answer to every question was a denial.
Bernadette reached into her pocket and held out Strandelunder’s class ring. “Recognize this?”
He sat up straighter but didn’t say anything.
“Evidence,” said Bernadette, examining the inside of the band.
Eyes locked on the ring, Strandelunder squirmed in his seat. “Evidence of what?”
“Know where we found this?” asked Bernadette, letting the boy’s imagination run wild.
“Didn’t kill her,” said Strandelunder. “Didn’t kill no baby.”
The uncle looked at Bernadette. “He
has
been working here steady since the fall. Now, whether he took off over a weekend and drove up north—”
“Thanks a whole fucking lot, Uncle Russ!” The boy bent in half and dropped his face in his folded arms. Started crying.
“Davy!” barked Hague. “Be a man!”
“Lyd!” the boy sobbed.
Bernadette didn’t believe the boy did it. “When did you see her last, David?”
“She came in here Thanksgiving week,” volunteered the uncle. He tipped his head toward his nephew. “She waltzed onto the floor while shithead was in the middle of a pour. Bawling her eyes out. Major scene.”
“Did she have a fight with her parents?” Bernadette asked the figure hunched in the folding chair.
Strandelunder sat up and dragged a sleeve across his nose. “That mother of hers was an old bitch. She found out Lyd was pregnant, and she wanted her to go get an abortion. An abortion! Lyd told her to go fuck herself, and the old bitch threw her out.”
Bernadette’s mouth hardened. The Duntons had lied; they knew about the pregnancy. “What did Lydia do?”
“You know why that old bitch wanted to kill it?” Strandelunder poked a finger into his chest. “Because it was my baby! Mine! Old bitch hated my guts! I wasn’t good enough!”
“David, what did Lydia do after they kicked her out?”
The boy wrapped his arms around his gut and started rocking. “My baby! Mine.”
“David,” said Bernadette. “What did Lydia do? Where did she go?”
He sniffed. “She came over to my place. I got a duplex with some guys. South Minneapolis.”
“Scary pigsty,” editorialized Hague.
“After the old bitch and her husband left for the weekend, Lyd broke in to … uh, got back into the house to get some … stuff,” said Strandelunder. “Clothes and whatever.”
“This is over Thanksgiving?” asked Bernadette.
“That weekend,” the boy said. “Saturday.”
“Keep going,” said Bernadette.
“While Lyd was digging around, she found something.”
Bernadette leaned forward. Now it was getting juicy. “What? What did she find?”
“Letters or something. She found them in the …” He cut himself off and looked down at his hands.
Bernadette: “I don’t really care where Lydia was digging.”
“She found them tied together in the safe.”
“Did you read them?”
The boy shook his head. “Told her to mess with them later because we had to get the hell out of—” He stopped short again and looked from Bernadette to his uncle.
Strandelunder had just admitted to busting into the Dunton house with Lydia. “Keep going,” said Bernadette.
Hague nodded, and Strandelunder continued. “She … we left, and while I was driving she was reading the stuff—the letters, or whatever they were. Lyd started freaking out in the car.”
“What did she say?” asked Bernadette.
“She was, like, screaming, Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I can’t believe this shit!’ And I’m, like, ‘What shit? What is it?’ She wouldn’t tell me. She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! This is fucking unreal!’ I tried to look, and she shoved the stuff in her backpack. She told me it was none of my damn business.” He shook his head. “I’m her kid’s father, and it’s none of my damn business. How do you like that?”
“Then what happened?” asked Bernadette.
“We got back to the duplex and she’s so freaked out, I’m afraid she’s gonna pop the kid out then and there. She’s walking back and forth and yelling, ‘Those fuckers! Those fuckers! I can’t believe it!’ I told her to tell me, and she says it again. ‘It’s none of your damn business.’ Nice, huh?” He looked from one of his listeners to the other. “Tell you the problem: That old bitch mother of hers was always working on Lyd, telling her I’m a loser. Telling her I’m too stupid. Lyd started to buy into that shit.”
“Couldn’t have been too hard of a sell,” said Hague.
“Uncle Russ! Jesus! You’re supposed to be on my side!” The boy put his hand to his forehead. “Nobody’s on my side.”
“I’m on your side,” said Bernadette.
“Right,” the boy said. “Fucking FBI’s on my side. Have to be real stupid to swallow that one, lady.”
“David, I know you didn’t do it,” said Bernadette.
His body relaxed a little. “You know?”
“I know,” she said. “Now, what happened next?”
“I went to the liquor store.”
The uncle: “Your pregnant woman is having conniptions and you left to go get a six-pack?”
“Can you think of a better time to make a beer run?”
The uncle: “Boy might be smarter than he looks.”
“I got back and she was gone. No note, no nothing. Gone. Took her backpack and her share of the … her stuff that she got from the house.”
“Share?” snapped the uncle. “Did you goddamn steal from the home of a United States senator, son?”
The boy looked over at him with a sneer. “I ain’t your son.”
“Did she call while she was on the road?” asked Bernadette.
“Twice,” the boy said.
According to the St. Paul police files, the Duntons claimed their daughter had no cell. Was that another lie from the parents? “Did she have a phone on her?” asked Bernadette.
He shook his head. “Called from pay phones.”
“When?”
“First time was, I don’t know, a week or so after she left. She wanted to know if it was okay to sell my class ring. She wanted to wait on selling the other stuff because it would attract attention. I told her to go ahead and sell the ring. I never liked high school.”
“Did she say where she was calling from?” asked Bernadette.
“Somewhere in Wisconsin. Rule? Something like that.”
Close enough, Bernadette figured. “What else did she say?”
“She told me she tried talking to her mother, but the old bitch hung up on her.”
They had indeed had contact with their daughter after she left home. More information left out by the Duntons, thought Bernadette. “So Lydia’s mother didn’t ask her to come back or ask her where—”
“Old bitch didn’t do nothing but tell Lyd she was stupid for going to Wisconsin.” He wiped his nose with his shirtsleeve. “Lyd said after talking to her mother she felt like a fugitive.”
Bernadette wondered if the boy was getting his words mixed up. “You sure she said
fugitive
?”
“Something like that. Maybe it was
refugee
, like that Tom Petty song.” Under his breath, he sang a few words. “Yeah. Could have been
refugee.”
This boy was not smart enough to carry out a murder, thought Bernadette. She was surprised that he could successfully execute a trip to the liquor store. “When did she call again?”
He looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Four days before Christmas. We talked about that, how it was four days away.”
“Where did she call from then?”
“She was back in Minnesota.”
“Why did she call?”
He smiled. “To tell me the baby had just kicked her a good one.”
“What else did she say?” asked Bernadette. “Did she say where she was or who she was with?”
“She said she was up north, looking for somebody.”
“Who? Who was she looking for?”
“Don’t you remember, lady? It’s none of my motherfucking business.”
“Davy,” Hague said sternly.
“She didn’t say, okay? She wouldn’t tell me. All she said was shewas looking for someone, and she felt like a fugitive. A refugee.
Whatever.”
“David, is there anything else she said? A name or—”
“Did somebody really cut her open and take my baby and killit?” The boy’s eyes started to well up. “Did that really happen, lady?
Is my little baby dead?”
Bernadette hesitated. “Afraid it’s true. I’m sorry.”
“You know who did it?” he yelled through his tears. “That oldbitch mother of hers, that’s who! She didn’t want that baby around! She did her own fucking abortion on Lyd!”
Another hour of questioning didn’t get much more from David Strandelunder. Bernadette would have his cell records checked, but she believed him when he said Lydia had called only twice. Getting phone records out of the Duntons would be another matter. It would require some diplomacy. Up Garcia’s alley, not hers. Why had they lied or omitted information? Embarrassment? Michelle Dunton’s behavior wasn’t going to earn her the Mother of the Year award.
Bernadette had the police pick up Strandelunder for burglarizing the Duntons. Until the case was cleared, she wanted someone sitting on him. She might have more questions for him later. Bernadette and Hague stood watching on the sidewalk while Strandelunder was loaded into a squad, his eyes red from bawling over his lost infant.
“Better call that loser sister of mine,” said the uncle, heading back to the foundry.
Bernadette vowed to herself that she’d watch Strandelunder’s case and help the kid out. He really did need someone on his side.
Before she pulled out of the foundry parking lot, she phoned Garcia to give him an update.
He wasn’t ready to give credence to Strandelunder’s version of events. “Has it occurred to you that the boy genius has a faulty memory, especially since he despises the Duntons? For all you know, Michelle Dunton begged Lydia to come back. Hell, maybe the girl never called home at all.”
“What about the Duntons’ phone records?”
“I’ll work on it. This is … delicate.”
“That’s why
you’re
doing it,” she said.
Garcia did admit that he was intrigued by the mysterious documents Lydia found at her parents’ home. “Boyfriend didn’t sound sharp enough to make that up.”
“Whatever she found, it had to have something to do with the earlier murder,” said Bernadette.
“Maybe not. Maybe the papers just had to do with Brule.”
“I don’t follow.”
Garcia theorized that the letters could have taken Lydia to Brule for reasons completely unrelated to the earlier murder. While she was in the small town, she got the attention of the Brule resident who’d killed the pregnant woman years ago. Very pregnant and all alone, she would have been tempting. He followed Lydia to Walker—perhaps even picked her up while she was thumbing it—and killed her and dumped her in Paul Bunyan. “He goes back to Brule. Sees you poking around there. Knows the FBI is on Lydia’s case. Tries to scare you off.”