The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  “He says what he bought was for his own use. An experiment. There wasn’t enough to sell, and he’s underage, first time offense. Plus, we want him to talk so we can finally get the Gruders for distribution. He’ll need a lawyer, but chances are, he can get off without jail time, and eventually he can get his record expunged.”

  “I’m going over there later. Ellen asked me to spend the evening with her. I’ll make sure they get a good lawyer who can work everything out.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Where are the Gruders? Have you found them?”

  “Yes, they were over in Stanton. The police picked them up and are bringing them back here.”

  “I hope they know something useful about Jeremiah.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to Agent Reed.” Violet walked away, but then she hesitated and retraced her steps. She was taller and thinner than me, and she was dressed in style. “It’s not personal, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My disagreement with Sheriff Ginn.”

  “He’s my father. That makes it personal to me.”

  “I understand, but you have to face reality. Tom has done great work for this county for decades, but he’s not fit for the demands of the job anymore.”

  “I disagree. And that’s up to the voters, not you.”

  “It’s up to the county board if we think there’s a problem.”

  “He’s fine,” I said sharply.

  Violet put a hand on my shoulder, which I shrugged off impatiently. “No, Shelby,” she told me with more caring and concern than I would have expected. “He’s not fine. He’s getting worse. Sooner or later, you’ll see that for yourself.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Will and Vince Gruder sat like greasy bookends on either end of the bleachers in the gym. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs. As usual, I didn’t know which was which. Both of them wore tie-dye tank tops from an El Paso bar with a logo of a drunk parrot on the front. I was sure they knew why they’d been brought in, but they made a point of looking unimpressed with the FBI men in their suits.

  “So which one are you?” Agent Reed asked the first of the brothers.

  “Vince.”

  “Okay, Vince. Let’s not waste time. You’re in trouble. So’s your brother. Judges are tired of meth wreaking havoc in their towns. Making and selling it will get you ten years, maybe more.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vince replied.

  “Adrian Sloan says you do. He says you sold him drugs.”

  “Adrian Sloan can say whatever he wants, but he’s lying. The Stanton police didn’t find anything on us. Go ahead and search our place in Witch Tree, man. It’s clean. You can play tough guy all you want, but you’ve got nothing.”

  I was standing next to Reed, and I reacted hotly and jumped into the middle of the interrogation. “We know you’ve got a lab in the woods, Vince. You were blasting music out there half the night.”

  “Wasn’t us. We were sleeping like babies.”

  Reed bent forward and leaned his foot on the bleacher. “Look, Vince, you’re not stupid. You know what this is all about. We’re more interested in finding Jeremiah Sloan than we are in you. If you tell us what happened with Jeremiah and Adrian yesterday afternoon, we’ll talk to a judge about going easy on the drug charges. This is a one-time-only daily deal. Grab it before it’s gone.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I’m not buying what you’re selling.”

  Reed straightened up and casually jerked a thumb at one of his colleagues. “Okay, forget it. Get this one out of here. I’ll talk to his brother. Nobody says the deal has to be for both of them. One’s all I need.”

  “My brother’s got nothing to say!” Vince retorted loudly. As he was yanked to his feet, he repeated in a voice that Will could hear on the other end of the bleachers. “You got that? Will’s not saying nothing to any of you!”

  Reed waited until Vince was dragged out of the gym. Then he shoved his hands in his suit pockets and wandered down to the far side of the bleachers, where Will Gruder danced uncomfortably on his butt cheeks as he waited for us. Reed took his time before talking. He sat down next to Will, too close for comfort, and casually stretched out his arms on the bench behind him. Will tried to mimic his brother’s tough-guy pose, but it didn’t work.

  “You must be Will,” Reed said after a while.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Your brother tells me he’s not interested in a deal. Are you smarter than he is?”

  “We don’t need a deal. We haven’t done anything.”

  “Sure. I believe you. Trouble is, I’m not the one you need to convince. Who’s a judge going to like better, Will? A dropout like you who’s been in trouble since he was fourteen or some nice small-town football player like Adrian Sloan? A kid whose little brother is missing. That wins a lot of sympathy points with people. In fact, what’s a jury going to think when they hear that you and Vince were out there in the national forest with Adrian when Jeremiah disappeared? They’re going to assume you two had something to do with that.”

  “We didn’t!” Will burst out. He nodded his head at me. “She saw us! Her and that other cop, Twilley. We were here at the school playing basketball yesterday. Then we went to the bar in Witch Tree, and we were there until after midnight. No way we had anything to do with that kid going missing.”

  “But you were out there, right? The two of you met Adrian in the campground, and you sold him meth. He already told us you did.” Reed squeezed in until he was practically breathing in Will’s ear. “Come on, kid. We’re talking about a missing ten-year-old boy. Help us out. If you give us a clue and we find him, hell, you’ll be a hero. A judge is going to like that.”

  Will glanced at the far end of the bleachers to make sure that Vince wasn’t in the gym anymore. His nose was running, and with his hands cuffed, he couldn’t do anything about it, so he bent over to wipe his face on his knee. “I’m not talking about drugs. You can’t ask me about that. Got it? I’m not saying anything about what went down with Adrian.”

  Reed cocked his head at me. He shot me a look that said: This is your town. What do you want to do?

  “All right, no drugs,” I interjected. “But we better like what you have to say, Will.”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with that kid going missing. No way. We didn’t even know about it until you and Twilley told us.”

  “But you were there.”

  Will’s knee bounced nervously. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, we were there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing! Nothing happened, that’s what I’m saying! Vince and me, we set up a meeting with Adrian in the campground. We were supposed to meet him like one o’clock or so.”

  “To do what?”

  “To do whatever. I told you, no questions about that. Got it?”

  “Okay, no questions. Go on. When did you and Vince get there?”

  “Like one fifteen or so. Adrian was there, but so was his little brother. Vince wasn’t happy about that. And the kid was being annoying, getting in our faces and asking all sorts of questions. What were we doing, what were we talking about. Vince figured the kid was going to blab to his parents about seeing us. So he told Adrian, either the kid goes or the meeting’s off.”

  “What happened?”

  “Adrian told his brother to beat it. Said he should take his bike and start heading back to the ranger’s office. He said he’d catch up with him in a little bit.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. One thirty maybe.”

  “Did Jeremiah go?”

  “He argued for a while, but Adrian gave him ten bucks. That did it. The boy got on his bike and took off.”

  “Which way?”

  “South.�
��

  “You’re sure? Away from the lake?”

  “Yeah. Back toward the ranger station.”

  “What did you and Vince do?”

  “We wrapped up our business with Adrian. Then the three of us smoked for a while and hung out. Around two o’clock or so, Vince figured we better blow, so we got in the Bronco and left. Adrian said he was going to have another cigarette, so he stayed behind.”

  I was practically holding my breath. “Did you see Jeremiah?”

  “We saw his bike.”

  “Where?”

  “Tipped over on the side of the road like a mile south of the campground.”

  “Did you see the boy?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stop?”

  “No. We figured the kid was in the woods taking a leak or something. No big deal. We didn’t think anything was wrong.”

  “So Jeremiah left at one thirty, and you left half an hour later. Is that right?”

  “About that, yeah.”

  “When you were in the campground, did any vehicles pass by on the road? Or did you see any people?”

  “Nah, it was quiet.”

  I shook my head in frustration. I couldn’t believe we could get this far and come away with nothing. We knew approximately when the boy had disappeared, but beyond that, we were no closer to finding him.

  Agent Reed was unhappy, too. “Okay, Deputy, let’s get this piece of crap out of here.”

  “You’re letting me go?” Will asked.

  “Hell, no, nobody’s letting you go. You’re dealing meth. The county cops are going to lock you up, and then twelve nice people of Mittel County are going to send you away for a long time. You and your brother.”

  I took Will by the shoulder and began to push him toward the other end of the gym, but he broke away from me and spun around, nearly falling down. “Wait, wait, wait, I’ve got more. We can talk. We can do a deal. Vince and me, we saw something.”

  Agent Reed stood up from the bleachers. His dark eyes shot through Will like lasers. “What did you see?”

  “First a deal. No charges. You forget about what Adrian Sloan told you.”

  “We’re not making any promises until we hear what you have to say.”

  Will looked back and forth between my face and Agent Reed’s. His nose was running again, and he was in full panic mode, watching the next ten years of his life tick by behind the bars of a cell.

  “A truck,” he sputtered.

  Reed’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “As we were driving north toward the campground, we passed a truck. It was maybe two, three miles before we got there. Thing was on the side of the road. Parked, engine running. Local plates, but I don’t remember the license. There was somebody inside, but we couldn’t see who it was.”

  “One person or more than one?” I asked.

  “I only saw one.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

  “What kind of truck?”

  “White,” Will replied. “A big pickup, an F-150. Look, I don’t know who was in it, but they were just hanging out there on the road. When we headed back south later, the truck was gone. So was the kid.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A white F-150.

  You couldn’t pick a more popular truck around these parts, but on the day Jeremiah disappeared, a white F-150 had been reported stolen in the lakeside town of Martin’s Point, which was fifty miles south of us. That didn’t sound like a coincidence. When I checked with Monica, she told me that the truck hadn’t been found yet, which was unusual for stolen vehicles around here. Most joyriders abandoned them within a couple of hours.

  Agent Reed and I made the drive to Martin’s Point. Fifty miles probably sounds like a long way, but to us, it’s a trip to the dentist. Shopping for a new coat. Lunch with a friend. When you live out here, you get used to driving an hour to do just about anything.

  “There’s a whole lot of nothing in this place,” Reed commented after we’d driven ten miles on the highway without seeing another soul. “Living here would drive me crazy.”

  “Time moves a little slower in the country,” I agreed.

  “It does that when you’re dead, too.”

  “Let me guess. You’re a city man, Agent Reed.”

  “I am.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Minneapolis.”

  “Well, you weren’t all that far from the north woods living there, right? A couple of hours?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t get much farther than Uptown when I was a kid. I like having people around. Trees, not so much. I know small-town people probably hate cities, but give me a downtown neighborhood any day. This might as well be the dark side of the moon.”

  I’d heard that sentiment from visitors many times before. “I don’t have anything against cities. I love going to the city. Most of us around here do. But then we’re happy to head home and leave you with the traffic and the noise and the pollution.”

  “Well, you’re right about the traffic,” Reed said. Then he changed to an entirely new subject and took me by surprise. “Tell me about the murder here last fall.”

  I knew what he was talking about, but I froze and said stupidly, “Murder?”

  “Was there more than one?” he asked slyly.

  “No.”

  “Okay then. Violet tells me that a woman was shot and killed here last November. Her husband was a suspect, but the sheriff didn’t have enough evidence to make a case against him.”

  “That’s right. The victim’s name was Colleen Whalen. Her husband is Keith.”

  “So give me the details.”

  “Do you think the murder has something to do with Jeremiah’s disappearance?”

  “Probably not, but murder isn’t a common occurrence around here. Neither is child abduction. When two unusual events happen in the same area, my first instinct is to wonder whether they might be connected. Plus, Violet says that the victim’s house isn’t far from the Sloan house. They were neighbors, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, you tell me. Could there be a connection?”

  “I don’t see how. Colleen’s murder was months ago. November fourteenth.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “All right.”

  I blinked as I drove, thinking about that day. I was shocked at how quickly Keith had been proven right. The FBI had only been in town for a few hours, and already he was on their radar screen. I was also focused on the sky ahead of us. Over the trees, I could see dark clouds pushing our way, blotting out the sun. A summer storm was getting closer.

  “Deputy?” Reed asked.

  “Sorry. Looks like severe weather coming in. I was thinking about Jeremiah. A kid in a storm, you know? I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Anyway, November fourteenth was a Saturday,” I went on, rattling off the details we’d unearthed in the investigation. “Colleen Whalen spent most of the day shopping in Stanton. She had dinner by herself at an Applebee’s restaurant and paid the check at seven forty-five p.m. There was nothing on her credit card after that and no calls on her cell phone. If she went straight home, it would have taken her about an hour to make the drive. That puts her back in town around nine p.m.”

  “And her husband?”

  “Keith Whalen says he was out hiking all day at Shelby Lake.”

  Reed looked at me curiously.

  “Yes, that’s how I got my name. Long story. Keith said he had a sandwich in his car in a parking area near the lake. He fell asleep. When he woke up, it was late in the evening. He headed home but says he didn’t get back until almost midnight. He found his wife dead in the grass outside their house, with the front door open. She’d been shot in t
he head. He called 911, and I responded to the call along with Deputy Twilley. There was no gun found at the crime scene. When we searched the house, we saw that a jewelry box in the master bedroom had been rifled. Keith said that an expensive watch had been taken from his nightstand, too. And Colleen’s wedding ring wasn’t on her finger.”

  “So the idea is that his wife came home and interrupted a burglar, who killed her and escaped.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a common thing around here, armed robbery?”

  “No.”

  “Were there any witnesses who could confirm that Whalen was at Shelby Lake like he said? Or what time he got home?”

  “No.”

  “Did Whalen own a gun?”

  “Yes, he told us that he owned a Taurus Centerfire revolver but that it was missing. The caliber of the bullet we recovered from Colleen Whalen was consistent with a gun like that, but of course, without the gun itself, we couldn’t test it.”

  “And what did Mr. Whalen say about the state of his marriage?” Reed asked.

  I gripped the wheel tightly. “He said it was fine.”

  “Did his neighbors agree? I hear it’s tough to keep a secret in a small town.”

  “Keith has a troubled past,” I said carefully. “He lost a leg in Afghanistan. He suffers from depression and probably PTSD. It’s safe to say his marriage showed the strains of that. Colleen worked with Ellen Sloan at the mini-mart, and Ellen told us that Colleen wasn’t happy.”

  “So the murder victim knew Jeremiah’s mother?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Everyone knows everyone else around here.”

  Reed pursed his lips. “Keith Whalen was never charged in the murder?”

  “No. Honestly, the sheriff didn’t believe Keith’s story, but there was no way to prove that a burglar didn’t do it. He talked it over with the county attorney, and they concluded there was too much reasonable doubt to get it past a jury.”

  “Probably true,” Reed agreed. Then he added, “Do you know what kind of vehicle Keith Whalen drives?”

  “A Toyota Highlander, I think.”

  “So not a white Ford F-150?”