Lake Country (4 page)

“How do I know?”

“Exactly,” Maya said.

The county grand jury hadn’t been able to answer that question either. Nor had they found, in Wade Benson’s case, the gross negligence required for a charge of criminal motor-vehicle homicide under Minnesota law. For his role in Becky Morse’s death, Benson had been convicted of misdemeanor reckless driving and sentenced to five years’ probation. In a final twist—which had made for splashy coverage at the time—the judge in the case had expressed her own opinion by imposing the following condition:

Each year for the duration of his probation term, on the anniversary of the accident, Wade Benson was bound to report to Hennepin County ACF, where he would spend the ensuing forty-eight hours incarcerated—a period of time roughly corresponding to Becky Morse’s hours in critical care before she’d expired.

Deon shook his head slowly. “Don’t know how to measure tired, huh?”

“That’s what I was told.”

He cracked his window, tossed out his ragged toothpick, and popped in a fresh one. “They know how to measure dead, though.”

Maya sighed. “That they do.”

They drove on in silence. The windshield wipers thumped along. On the north side of Loring Park,
Deon cocked his head and said, “Something buggin’ you over there, Maya Lamb?”

Something was bugging her, in fact, though Maya couldn’t seem to put her finger on it. Just then she’d been replaying her conversation with Juliet Benson, but the truth was, something had been bugging her ever since she’d started working on this story—this bookend to the past half decade of Wade Benson’s life. Of Lily Morse’s. Of her own. Something she’d seen in Juliet Benson’s eyes seemed to boil it all down somehow, though Maya couldn’t decide how or down to what.

She gave Deon a disappointed look and said, “I thought you said you could read people?”

It wasn’t hard to follow the bounty hunter’s tracks through the house. Bryce hadn’t exactly tidied up after himself.

The first thing Mike noticed about Darryl’s room as he passed it—after the open closet, and the bureau drawers emptied all over the floor—was the blank square in the dust next to the little TV on the dresser. Wherever Darryl had gone, apparently he’d taken his Xbox with him.

Then Mike did something he’d never done before. He went into Darryl’s room and looked around himself. Also missing: Darryl’s rucksack, the .45 he normally kept between the mattress and the box spring, and the last of Mike’s optimism.

Back in his own room, he found more or less the same state of disarray. The cheap leather jewelry case he kept in the bottom drawer of the night table lay on
the floor a couple of feet away, opened and upside down. The case was smaller than a shoe box, obviously not big enough to hold eleven grand in cash, and the message there seemed clear enough:
Here’s what I think of you, fella
.

Mike went around policing up the scattered contents of the box. He found his combat ribbon in a pile of socks, Purple Heart against the baseboard under the window. Bronze Star caught in the heating vent. He found his dog tags under the bed.

There were half a dozen curled photos he hadn’t looked at in a while. The last one he picked up showed two guys he barely recognized in BDUs and brain buckets, smoking cigarettes on the hood of a Humvee. Their faces were streaked with sweat and covered in grime. Light wisps of smoke from their cigarettes trailed off to one side of the snapshot, mimicking the heavy ropes of smoke still trailing from the empty window of the shell-pocked building in the background.

Ten minutes before that photo had been taken, inside the same building, Mike Barlowe had killed two people. He sat on the edge of the bed with the box on his lap and looked at the photo. Five years, he kept thinking; that was all that stood between the Marine he saw in the picture and the sad sack he saw looking back at him from the dresser mirror on the other side of the room.

Mike confronted his own reflection: a blotchy, stubbled wreck, sitting on the edge of an unmade bed with a photograph in his hand.
That’s you
, he thought.

He almost didn’t believe himself. His face looked too hard, his eyes too hollow. In a month and a half
he’d be twenty-seven years old, and he was already starting to resemble one of the middle-aged burnouts who held down the the bar at Hal’s place every night of their slump-shouldered lives.
If it’s not me
, he thought,
then who the hell is it?

A guy who had better things to do than sitting around looking in the mirror, that was who. Things like tracking down the other grunt on the Humvee in the photograph, for example. Preferably before somebody wound up getting hurt.

It seemed like enough to figure out for one day. Mike dropped the photos into the box, closed the lid, and put it all back in the bottom drawer where it belonged. The clock on the night table read a quarter of four in the afternoon. He’d be asked to remember that later.

Mike started with the obvious: Darryl’s mobile phone. No answer. He tried twice more, but Darryl still wasn’t biting. He stood around thinking for a minute, then tried the number on the side of the fridge. Three rings, four, then five; as he was preparing to hang up, Tanya Ellerbe finally answered.

“Hello?” She sounded out of breath. Mike could hear something whirring and thumping in the background. He guessed laundry.

“Hey, Tanya. You sound busy.”

“Oh, hi, Mike. Nah. Just on the treadmill. How’s it going?”

“Well, I’m not on a treadmill,” he said. “So I guess that part’s going okay.”

She panted a laugh. “What’s up? I haven’t talked to you in forever.”

It hadn’t been forever, but Mike guessed it had been a while. He thought of Tanya as a friend, or at least as a friendly, although primarily she was their landlady. She’d gotten the house in her divorce—a two-bedroom North End cracker box with sagging gutters and a leaky basement—but she hadn’t wanted to live there anymore, alone or otherwise; instead of selling,
she’d moved to a studio apartment near Marydale Park and listed the place in the City Pages.

In the year or so he and Darryl had been Tanya’s tenants, Mike had taken to looking after what needed attention on the house, and Darryl had taken to looking after what needed attention on Tanya, and Tanya cut them breaks on the rent when they needed it. Between Mike’s VA benefits, work when he had it, and what Darryl earned running collections for Toby, they didn’t need it often. But then, April wasn’t shaping up all that well so far.

“I’m looking for Darryl,” he said.

“Oh.” The treadmill hummed along, Tanya’s footfalls keeping time. “He wander off his leash again?”

“Something like that. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

“Seen him?”

She gave the word
seen
a little extra inflection, and Mike felt sudden heat in his face. He couldn’t see himself but knew he was blushing. This was stupid. “He hasn’t been by your place, then.”

“Not today,” Tanya said.

“Any chance you’ve talked to him?”

“Not recently.”

“Oh. Okay.” It was nice to hear Tanya’s voice, but he wished he hadn’t called. “Look, sorry to bug you.”

“Cut it out. You’re not bugging anybody.”

“Okay. Go back to your workout.”

“I’m done, so there.” The mechanical hum shut down in the background, and Tanya’s breathing lightened up. Pretty soon Mike heard the crinkle of plastic and the sound of gulping over the line. Listening, it was easy to imagine Tanya on her end of the call:
damp with sweat, flushed from exertion, towel on her shoulder, tipping back a water bottle. She looked healthy.

“So you can’t find Darryl,” she said.

“Well, I just started looking.”

Gulp. “He’s in some kind of trouble, isn’t he?”

“Trouble?” Mike didn’t want to get into it. “Not that I know about.”

“You’ve never called here looking for him before.”

“Actually, I need the car,” Mike told her. “Deakins laid off some guys a couple weeks back, so I don’t have the truck anymore, and I thought he’d be back a while ago. Darryl.”

“That’s who I figured we were still talking about.” Tanya’s tone sounded skeptical, but she didn’t press. “Mike, the truth is, I haven’t seen Darryl in a while. Or, you know. Talked to him.”

“No?”

“Not in a while.”

“Can I be nosy?”

“You’re not being nosy.”

“How long’s a while?”

“About a month?” Tanya said. “He didn’t mention it, obviously.”

“No,” Mike said, feeling more awkward as this conversation went on. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’ve always known what it was and what it wasn’t. Darryl and me. We’re all grown-ups.”

“Sure,” Mike said.

“Frankly, I liked things fine the way they were. But
lately, with his moods …” She trailed off. Drank some more water. “Listen, if I wanted a sullen asshole and angry sex, I could have stayed married. You know?”

He was out of his depth. “Makes sense to me.”

“Anyway, besides that, I sort of met somebody.” Tanya’s voice softened a bit. “He’s nice. Lives in the building.”

“No kidding?”

“I know. Sounds like a sitcom, right?”

“People like a good sitcom,” Mike said. “How long has this been going on?”

“Who keeps track?” Tanya said. He could almost hear her smiling. “About a month.”

A month. Mike put that with what Toby had told him about cutting Darryl loose. About a week ago, Toby had said. If there was a pattern to this timeline, Mike didn’t love the look of it.

“I mean, who knows,” she said. “But so far it’s been … refreshing.”

“Tanya, that’s great,” he told her, and he meant it. “You deserve it.”

“Hell, I don’t know what I deserve, Mike. But I’ll take what I can get. You know?”

He knew. Or he thought he knew. Anyway, good for Tanya.

“As far as Darryl,” she said, “I don’t know what’s going on there.”

Mike rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. His headache felt like it was getting worse instead of better. “Yeah.”

The line went quiet for a bit, but Mike was so lost
in thought that he didn’t notice the silence until Tanya said, “Hey, Mike?”

“Still here.”

“Did you really lose your job?”

“Yeah.” The truth. “But I’ve got a couple things lined up.” A lie.

“That sucks,” Tanya said. “Listen, don’t sweat this month, okay? Maybe go down and look at the sump pump if you get a chance. Or whatever.”

The sump pump. He’d fixed it when the snow thawed, but the mention of it reminded him that the rent was a week late already. If he’d felt awkward before, now he just felt shitty. “Thanks, Tanya. But everything’s fine. I forgot to mail the check, that’s all. I’ll get it to you.”

“Whenever,” she said. “Listen, I need to clean up, and then I have to go run around a little. You need a ride somewhere? I can come by and pick you up.”

“Nah. But thanks. Hit the showers.”

Tanya seemed hesitant. More silence. This time he noticed it.

“I feel like I want to say something,” she finally announced. “It isn’t my place, but maybe I’ll go ahead and say it anyway.”

“I live in your place, Tanya. Say whatever you want.”

“Then here I go.” She paused. “Look, I know Darryl’s your friend. You’ve been through a lot together, and I can’t imagine what any of it must have been like, but I know you feel like you owe him.”

Only because I owe him
, Mike thought, automatically annoyed by the commentary. But Tanya meant
no ill. And he’d been the one who invited her to speak her mind. So he said, “We go back a bit.”

“Well, I feel like your friend too,” Tanya said. “Maybe that’s dumb, we haven’t known each other that long, but it’s where this is coming from. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a nice guy, Mike.” She started to add something more to that, then sighed, backed up, and took a different tack. “Remember when you said you weren’t on a treadmill?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m just saying.” He heard plastic crinkling as Tanya drank her water. “You sure about that?”

Half an hour before Maya packed up her things for the trip out to Plymouth, a shadow fell across the doorway to the editing bay where she sat reviewing old tape. She looked over her shoulder to find Rose Ann Carmody watching her.

“Well, look at that.” Rose Ann lifted her chin toward the video monitor. “Who’s the little girl with the microphone up there?”

Maya glanced back at the frozen warp of her own image on the screen. The tape was one of the masters she’d pulled from the newsroom morgue, most of her original reporting on the Morse/Benson story. She barely remembered the outfit she was wearing in the piece. She remembered the haircut, though she couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking when she’d paid for it.

“Dunno,” she said. “I hardly recognize her.”

Rose Ann examined the Maya on-screen, seemingly
bemused. “How’d the interview at Benson Manor go?”

“Fine,” Maya said. “I asked him to describe the hardest part about going to jail. Want to hear what he told me?”

“What did he say?”

“He said it was so easy any fool could do it.”

“Did he.” Rose Ann considered that. “I like it. Where are we?”

“Ninety percent in the can. Except for what they’ll let us shoot at county in an hour.” Maya checked her watch. “Hour and change. I had Deon cut what we’ve got to fit the last bits in.”

“Good. Plan a live shot at the jail for the six if nothing breaks late. I’ll tell Miles.” Rose Ann removed her reading glasses and gestured with them. “You look like hell, by the way.”

“Gee, thanks. You look like a spring daisy.”

“Don’t be sensitive. Trouble sleeping?”

“Not particularly,” Maya said. “Why?”

“Because you look dog tired, that’s why.”

“I’m hungover, Rose Ann. You drank me under the table at your birthday party.”

A smirk. “Is that how you remember it?”

“It’s fuzzy, thanks.”

Rose Ann crossed her arms and observed Maya clinically, one stem of her glasses notched in her teeth. After a moment, she stepped in and slid the soundproof glass door closed behind her. “Frankly, my dear,” she said, “you’ve looked dog tired since January. Care to comment?”