The Cold Nowhere (31 page)

‘I lost him, I lost him –
oh, shit!
’

Through the fog at the end of her headlights, she saw a dark shadow. It could have been a deer; it could have been a child. Instinctively, her foot slammed to the brake, and like a dancer, the Avalanche swirled on the sheet of snow. It spun in a tilt-a-whirl circle, once, twice, three times, and then the right-side wheels of the truck skidded onto the shoulder and spilled into the shallow gully. The truck toppled onto its side, and kept toppling, over and over, rattling Maggie’s body with the shudder of each impact. Windows broke; glass flew across her skin; snow and dirt spat through the interior of the truck. She felt the world spin, and by the time it stopped spinning, it was black.

She was upside down.

When Maggie opened her eyes, she saw a face as round as Charlie Brown’s staring in through the broken window. It was Sergeant Max Guppo, squatting beside the overturned Avalanche. He yanked open the driver’s door, which groaned as he fought against bent metal.

‘I thought you were dead,’ he said.

‘If you’re an angel, heaven has a lot of work to do,’ she mumbled in reply.

Before he could say anything, Maggie unhooked her safety belt and dropped six inches to the roof beneath her. ‘Ouch.’

‘You shouldn’t move,’ he said. ‘You could be hurt.’

‘Oh, I’m fine. This thing’s a tank. Help me out of here.’

Guppo slid his beefy forearms under her shoulders and slid her out of the truck. Her legs wobbled as she stood, but she propped herself on his shoulder and waited for the dizziness to pass. With a huge breath, Guppo pushed himself up beside her. He didn’t squat easily, and he had an even harder time un-squatting. She heard an unmistakable sound behind him, and a foul aroma overwhelmed the cold night air.

‘Oh, hell, Guppo, what is that? Are you kidding me?’

‘Sorry. Chili cheese fries. You sure you’re okay?’

‘Quit babying me.’

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, pointing at her face.

‘So get me a frickin’ Band-Aid. Come on, we have to find this guy.’

‘You should go to a hospital. Stride will kill me if he finds out I didn’t get you an ambulance.’

Maggie grabbed a fistful of Guppo’s shirt and pulled him closer. ‘Now listen to me very carefully. Fuck Lieutenant Jonathan Stride!’

‘I think you have a concussion.’

‘I don’t. Let’s go.’

‘Yeah, except where do we go? He’s gone.’

‘He was on this road for a reason. Maybe he’s hiding out near here. We start checking houses one by one, and we get as many cars out here as we can to do the same thing. We wake people up, we don’t take any shit about how late it is. Okay?’

‘You’re pretty crabby.’

‘Yeah. I’m pretty crabby. My truck is totaled, and I feel like somebody’s been using me as a punching bag.’

Maggie turned too quickly and felt dizzy again. Guppo grabbed her before she fell. She shook him off and scrambled up the embankment to his patrol car, which was parked on the shoulder. Looking down, she saw her Avalanche, wheels in the air, its frame twisted. Her insurance guy was not going to be happy with her. Again.

She bandaged the cut on her face, and the two of them headed east. It was a lonely road, with few houses. Where they stopped, no one was happy to see them, but they crossed houses off their list one by one. Some they skipped, where the driveways were empty of tire tracks. Three other patrol cars joined them, and they hopscotched their way past Gnesen Road and then to Vermillion Road. The snow had stopped, but the desolate land was black under the clouds and they had to go slowly to find properties bordering the road. By the time it was two in the morning, she was almost ready to quit for the night and go to the hospital.

He’d beaten her, and she didn’t like it.

‘We done?’ Guppo asked.

‘Let’s do a couple more,’ she told him. ‘By the way, I never thanked you for blabbing to the whole fucking world about me and Ken.’

‘I told Serena, that’s all. She sent me snickerdoodles.’

‘You sold me out for cookies?’

‘Well, they’re really good. You know, cinnamon and all.’

She knew there was no point in being angry. Guppo was Guppo.

They crawled along the highway. Where Martin Road curved southeast, Maggie spotted a narrow dirt driveway almost invisible between the trees. The snow was beaten down with tire tracks coming and going. When they turned their search light toward the woods, they saw an old rambler set back from the road. The house was dark.

‘Those tracks look fresh to you?’ Maggie asked.

‘They do.’

‘Pretty late to be out and about.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s check it out.’

Guppo parked on the opposite side of the road. Maggie opened the passenger door. Inside the warm car, she felt fine, but when she climbed outside, her muscles tensed in agony. As she crossed the street, her face twitched with the spasms in her neck. Guppo studied her with concern, but she waved him off.

‘Call in the other cars,’ she said. ‘I want backup on this one.’

He hailed the other cops on his radio, and she bent down to examine the tire tracks with a flashlight. ‘Definitely fresh. The snow has hardly covered them up. I’d say no more than half an hour old.’

‘There are two sets of tracks,’ Guppo said, bending slightly at his massive waist.

Maggie doused the light. They stayed on the shoulder of the driveway as they approached the house. The trees around them were thick. At the end of the driveway, they saw a detached twocar garage, its door closed. Tracks came and went on both sides. Twenty yards from the garage, a single-story house, with painted red siding, was carved into a clearing in the trees. A snow-covered
cord of wood sat propped against one wall. The walkway from the garage to the front door showed no footsteps.

‘Looks deserted,’ Guppo said.

Maggie hiked through the virgin snow to the front door. A picture window faced the woods and she peered inside, using her flashlight to illuminate the interior. The living room was furnished with an old-fashioned sofa with a faded rose pattern, a rocker, a straight-backed Shaker chair, and a big-box television from the 1980s. It was an old person’s house.

‘This place look familiar to you?’ Maggie asked. She searched her memory, which didn’t take long. ‘This is the Linnerooth place. Wally and Ruth. Remember?’

‘Oh, sure, the lefse people.’

Every year, the Linnerooths baked lefse at their winter home in Arizona and sent a big box to the Duluth Police as a Christmas thank you gift for their service to the city. In return, cops always stopped in to see Wally and Ruth during the warmer months to help with household chores and play Scrabble.

‘It doesn’t look like they’re home yet,’ Guppo said.

‘No, it doesn’t. So who’s using the garage?’

Maggie slid her gun into her hand. So did Guppo. They retraced their steps to the detached garage. On the far side of the dirt driveway, two other officers joined them. They closed in on the garage door from both sides.

She pointed at the metal handle on the door and gestured one of the younger cops toward it. He positioned himself and bent down, ready to throw it open. She lifted three fingers and counted them off – one, two, three – and the cop yanked the garage door open on its metal tracks. They pointed their weapons at the interior, but the garage was dark and quiet.

A single vehicle was parked in the left-side stall.

It was a black Charger, still wet with mud and snow.

Maggie approached the car on the driver’s side. Her head throbbed, as if someone were beating on it with a hammer. Her legs felt weak. She steadied herself against the cold metal of the chassis. Guppo took the other side of the car and they simultaneously shot beams of light inside the Charger. It was empty. No one was inside the vehicle.

When she studied the leather on the front seat, however, she saw dark, dried stains. Blood. Kim Dehne’s blood. He’d carried it on his clothes as he escaped that night.

‘Think he’s still here?’ Guppo asked.

‘No, he left the Charger and made a getaway in a vehicle we wouldn’t recognize. Smart.’

‘He had to leave quickly. Maybe he left evidence behind.’

‘Maybe,’ Maggie said, but she wasn’t expecting this man to give them any lucky breaks. It was his safe house, and she assumed that he kept it safe. He had to know that any time he left, he might not be able to come back.

‘Turn on the light,’ she told Guppo. ‘Careful for prints.’

Guppo found a switch near the rear door of the garage and turned it on with a pencil. The bright light made her squint and sent ripples of pain behind her eyes. The nerves in her neck stabbed her when she moved. Her ribs ached where the safety belt had locked against her chest in the accident. Her stomach had begun to churn, and she thought she might throw up.

‘You’re not looking good,’ Guppo said.

‘Really? Because I feel terrific.’

‘I’ll call that ambulance now.’

‘Great idea.’

She studied the garage. It was impeccably organized, a handyman’s garage, with steel shelves lining the walls and supplies neatly stacked together. Gloves. Bird seed. Gasoline. Oil. Antifreeze. Boxes labeled for Halloween and the Fourth of July. She saw a riding mower, a white overflow freezer, and a rusted snow plough attachment
for a pick-up truck. Near the side door, she saw a peg board carefully arranged with an elaborate set of tools, saws and drill bits. Wally Linnerooth was an old-fashioned Norwegian who had a place for everything and kept everything in its place.

Except for the food. The food wasn’t right.

‘Oh, shit,’ Maggie said.

Guppo looked at her. ‘What is it?’

She pointed at the set of metal shelves beside the freezer. The top shelf, at arm level, was stacked with Tupperware containers, boxes of Banquet chicken, Lean Cuisine meals, and links stuffed with homemade sausage.

‘Oh, shit,’ Guppo echoed.

They both made a beeline for the freezer. It was a chest freezer, five feet wide and three feet deep. Maggie used the tip of her glove on the corner to force the lid open. A cloud of frost leached from inside.

Ice crystals clung to a fully clothed body squeezed into the tight space like a side of beef.

The body was face up, its skin bone white. Eyes closed. Frozen blood traced the woman’s cheeks from a wound near her temple, and a large plastic bag had been taped around her neck, suffocating her after she’d been assaulted. She was heavy, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. Her hair was cut short, mannish and flat.

It was Margot Huizenfelt.

The medical team had extracted Margot’s body from the freezer, but the corpse was still frozen solid, her bent limbs jutting into the air in a pose that was unnatural and obscene. The thawing was slow, but under the heat of the crime scene lights, melting ice had begun to soak her skin and clothes like sweat.

Stride and Serena watched the activity through the open garage door. He understood the depth of loss and anger he saw in Serena’s face. The longer a missing person stays missing, the more you know that he or she is never likely to be found alive. Even so, when you finally stare at that person’s body, you can’t escape the sense of defeat.

‘Time of death will be almost impossible to determine,’ he said.

Serena’s eyes were fixed on Margot. ‘The clothes match what she was wearing when she was last seen in Grand Rapids on that Sunday. If she was alive after she disappeared, it wasn’t for long.’

‘Dan and his team will be working the scene for hours, but so far, he says it’s clean. We’re not going to get much here.’

‘The house?’ she asked.

‘It doesn’t look like he even went inside. No trash, no food. The water’s not turned on. He was careful.’

She frowned. ‘Why take the body here?’

Stride kicked at the earth with his heel. ‘Ground’s still frozen. So are the lakes. He couldn’t bury it or dump it.’

Serena turned away from the bright lights of the garage. They pushed through the snow of the front yard. Red and blue lights from the emergency vehicles flashed on the highway, and the
evidence technicians streamed back and forth to their white crime scene van. Although the snow had stopped, the air was bitter cold. No one liked winter bodies.

‘Margot was in Duluth on that Saturday looking for Cat,’ Serena said, rehashing what they knew about her movements that final weekend. ‘She talked to Bill Green. She talked to Dory. Maybe others, we don’t know yet. As of midnight, she was down in the graffiti graveyard, still trying to find her.’

‘She never did,’ Stride said.

‘Do we know where Cat really was that night?’ Serena asked.

‘Yes, she bumped into a girl she knew from Denfeld up at Miller Hill Mall. The girl let her crash at her parents’ house. Maggie confirmed it.’

‘So at some point, Margot gave up for the night and went home to Grand Rapids. Early Sunday morning, she had breakfast at a local diner. The waitress said Margot was scribbling notes in a legal pad and made some comment about looking for someone to help her break a big story. No details about who or what. Margot left, and a day later we found her brand-spanking new Lowball Lenny Ford Explorer parked near the Swan River. No legal pads, no notes, no computer in her house, nothing. The only real clue I ever found is that she got a call that morning from a pay phone at a rest stop in Floodwood.’

‘The killer setting up a meeting with her?’

‘That’s been my theory all along. She had to be meeting someone at the river. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave prints on the phone or the coins.’

‘So he meets Margot,’ Stride went on, ‘kills her, cleans out evidence of what she was working on, and comes here to dump the body. He’s already got the stolen Charger, so we assume that’s what he’s driving. And then he starts doing exactly what Margot was doing.’

‘Looking for Cat,’ Serena said. ‘Why?’

‘Maybe Margot mentioned Cat when they met, or maybe she was listed in her notes.’

‘Or maybe one of the people that Margot talked to on Saturday tipped off the killer,’ Serena suggested. ‘Remember, we can’t be sure that this guy is working alone. This place is pretty remote, so how did he get here? The buses don’t come up this far. There were two cars in the garage. He couldn’t drive them both.’