An Altar by the River

by Christine Husom

From that point on, I resolved to delete all search history, erase my “favorites,” change my passwords, uncheck the “remember my username” and “remember my password” boxes, and lock my computer so no one but me could log on in the first place. All things that had seemed unnecessary before. I lived alone. Sara stayed overnight on a rare occasion and used my Internet access from time to time, but she was the only one.

  “Sergeant, when I was in your office, I noticed your briefcase lying on the couch when I sat down. Did you check to see if everything was in order there?”

  I shook my head. “No, but it was locked. I got my PBT out of it, and I know it was locked.”

  “And you locked it after you got your PBT?”

  “Yeah, I do that out of habit.”

  Edberg lowered his jaw and drew his eyebrows together. “They may just keep an eye on you and what you’re up to or they may warn you to back off.”

  I wanted to know who they were.

  Smoke blew out a loud breath. “Corky tell you her car got keyed the night of the party?”

  Edberg shook his head, and his frown deepened. “No.” He looked from Smoke to me. “I’d say consider yourself warned.”

  It felt like little crawly things were walking around on my skin. I pulled at my shirt and the protective vest beneath it to ease the sensation.

  Edberg nodded a goodbye, climbed in his squad car, and drove away.

  Rex nudged my leg with his nose. I reached down, took the ball he was holding from his mouth, and tossed it toward the lake. “Smoke, what do think about all that?”

  “Another unsettling conversation with one of our own. Everything Edberg said lines up with Armstrong’s story pretty well.”

  “The way he said ‘consider yourself warned’ almost sounded like he was the one delivering the warning.”

  “I think he was just being emphatic because of what he’s been through himself. I doubt he’d tell us things like what he keeps on his computer if that was the case. The sheriff is going to have a heart attack before all this is over, I’m afraid.”

  Rex was back with the ball, panting in front of me. I threw it as far as I could.

  “I met with Nichole Jaspers today.”

  “Yeah, how’d that go?”

  I hit all the highlights, or lowlights, of the lives she and Collin had endured and shared. “Then after we walked through the squad room, she told me someone in there was ‘saturated with demonic influence.’”

  “Someone, or something, in the room?”

  “She said someone. Remember when we were talking to Doctor Fischer and she was telling us about that session with one of her clients who asked her if she could hear the angels of darkness screaming?”

  Smoke nodded. “Kinda hard to forget.”

  “Doctor Fischer said the woman was sensitive to the spirit world. She has spiritual discernment.”

  Smoke kept nodding.

  “When Nichole said that, I wondered if she was the client Doctor Fischer was talking about. The one with spiritual discernment. I mean, Nichole was truly upset, very convinced about what she was saying.”

  “Lots of things we don’t understand. So who was in the squad room?”

  “Edberg, Stauder, and Brooks.”

  Smoke bent over and picked up the ball Rex had dropped at his feet. “Brooks has been around over twenty years. Same with Edberg, of course.” He tossed the ball. I watched Rex make his mad dash to catch it.

  “Brooks is about the quietest deputy in the department. He comes to things and just kind of hangs around in the background. A real wallflower. I saw him with Zubinski at the party for a while, but that’s about it. I’m not even sure when he left that night.”

  Smoke turned to me. “You can learn a lot if you’re the one listening, not the one talking. Back to that warning Edberg talked about. If your car got keyed by the same guys who have had Armstrong and Edberg toeing their lines all these years, we need to take that seriously.”

  “I know, and I am very security-minded, Smoke.”

  “But that didn’t prevent you from being attacked and abducted last fall. Things happen, no matter how careful you are.”

  The smells, sounds, and terror of waking up in the trunk of a moving vehicle with a splitting headache rushed through my mind.

  “I’m much more cautious now. I carry my freeze-plus-three spray and my off-duty Smith and Wesson.”

  Smoke smiled. “That is a sweet little gun.”

  “I wear shorts or pants with a pocket for the spray. And a loose-fitting shirt to cover the holster.”

  “In a couple of weeks you’ll have your dog companion. She’ll help watch out for you.”

  I tapped my temple. “I have to remember to tell Rebecca about Queenie. She’ll be so excited. Maybe it’ll help distract her from thinking about her grandma’s death so much.”

  “You’re still planning a little memorial service?”

  “Yeah, I have to get back to Jean on that. It’ll probably be Sunday—my day off—so I don’t have to rush off to work after the service.”

  “You gonna tell Rebecca about her great-grandma before the service, or sometime down the road instead?”

  I shrugged. “Since there are only two sane people in the world who loved Alvie Eisner, it would be nice to have them both there.”

  “Not counting her brother Henry?”

  “I said sane. Jean says Henry’s off in his own world most of the time. But there might be some recognition of her name. I don’t know.”

  We played fetch with Rex, alternating who threw the ball, for a few more minutes.

  I rubbed my hands together, brushing off some dirt. “Back to the evil Nichole sensed in the squad room. We started talking about Brooks. What do you think?”

  “Still waters run deep? Like his name, with an S at the end?” Smoke lifted his shoulders and shook his head. “If you had told me two weeks ago we had some kind of a satanic infiltrator in our sheriff’s department, I would have said you’re crackers, and here we are. I’ll move Brooks to the top of my list to investigate. He was backgrounded a lot of years ago. Could have gone bad somewhere along the way since then.”

  “Winnebago County, Six oh eight.” Communications calling.

  “Go ahead.”

  “There is a Nine-twenty at Location One, Oak Lea.”

  It was the code for a silent alarm at the State Bank in downtown Oak Lea.

  “Copy and en route.”

  “Hope it’s a false trip,” Smoke called as I hopped in my squad car. I was on the main road less than a minute later, speeding toward town, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

  Robin called for a second deputy. Mandy Zubinski responded that she was a few blocks away. Closer than I was. I turned my sirens off a mile or so from the bank. When I got to the location, I pulled around to the side where there were no windows. Mandy was waiting.

  I depressed my radio button. “Six oh eight, Winnebago County?”

  “Go ahead, Six oh eight.”

  “Seven twenty-eight and Six oh eight at location and going in.”

  “Ten-four.”

  I signaled Mandy to get down as we crept to the front windows. She stayed on the west side, and I crawled to the east side and stood with my side against the building. Mandy stood and did the same. I leaned my head forward just enough to see inside. A middle-aged Asian man was pushing a vacuum across the carpet.

  “Six oh eight, Winnebago County.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Code Four. Accidental trip.”

  “Copy Code Four, at eighteen twenty-three.”

  I removed the flashlight from its holder on my belt and used it to rap on the window. After the third tap, the male cleaner stopped vacuuming and looked toward the sound. His eyebrows shot up and his body jerked in surprise. I pointed in the direction of the door. He nodded, shut off the vacuum, and headed to the entrance. Mandy and I met him there.

  He pushed open the door. “Hello?”

  “It appears you tr
ipped the alarm.”

  “Oh, man. Sorry, man. I guess I forgot to disarm it when I got here. Sorry to make you come here for that.” He walked to the alarm panel and punched in a series of numbers.

  “It happens,” I assured him.

  “Part of the job,” Mandy said. “We’re glad it wasn’t a break-in.”

  He gave his name, address, and date of birth for my log entry. I jotted the information on my memo pad.

  “We’ll do a routine walk-through and let you get back to work.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mandy and I checked the few offices and walked behind the tellers’ counter. The vault door was closed and locked. We called goodbye to the cleaning man, then headed out to our squad cars. “You haven’t gone on break yet. Want to grab some supper?” I asked.

  She hesitated a second too long. “Um, I was going to meet up with a couple of the guys at Perkins. You want to join us?”

  I looked at my watch while I thought of an excuse. “You know, thanks, but I got leftovers from the party I should eat up. I just thought if you didn’t have plans—”

  Her mouth puckered. “Now I feel bad.”

  “Don’t. Really. I’m just going to grab something quick. I have a few things to catch up on.” I reached for my door handle.

  “Corky, I wanted to tell you I had a lot of fun at the party the other night. Thanks.”

  “Sure. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “We don’t see each other much off-duty.”

  “Don’t forget, we have another opportunity at the team-building event on Saturday.”

  She groaned. “We’re all really looking forward to that.”

  Mandy left and I stayed to type the call information into my squad car’s laptop.

  I heard Mandy Zubinski, Fred Brooks, and Devin Stauder announce they were going on break at Perkins within minutes of each other. I drove by the restaurant on the way home and glanced at the three squad cars in the parking lot. According to office chit chat, none of the three had any real friends in the department, ones they socialized with outside of work.

  Mandy tried too hard to fit in and gossiped too much.

  Brooks was quiet, but not unfriendly. He rarely spoke unless he was spoken to.

  Stauder was a bit of a braggart. He had the latest and the greatest of whatever was in vogue. His wife had a good job, and it seemed he had plenty of money to spend. A lot of deputies were turned off by his frequent boasting and avoided him.

  They struck me as an odd trio to be friends. On the other hand, I hoped they were.

  30: The Coven

  Roman had a few minutes before his next scheduled patient. He scanned the chart to review the patient’s history. His mind wandered, and he glanced at the calendar. April nineteenth. In four days he’d have their victim secured for Saint Mark’s Eve. He had convinced himself, time and again over the years that it was for their own good. Dying was better than living as a hopeless, homeless drunk or addict on the streets. It wasn’t dignified. And it made the world a better place. That’s what they told him. That’s what he repeated to himself, over and over until he almost believed it.

  It was far better than the baby and children sacrifices. They were the most difficult. Administering drugs that forced young women to go into labor and delivering babies who were used in the ensuing rituals got harder with each passing year.

  Roman didn’t know what had happened to him. He was suffering doubts, serious doubts. He questioned the practices and rituals he’d been involved with all of his life. He had been coached from early on that he would pursue medicine as a profession. He owed his life, his intelligence, and his success to Satan.

  The coven was his family.

  He bent down on his knees, intent on calling to Satan for guidance. No words would come. That’s when he heard them screaming. They were not pleased. But he would appease the dark spirits when he found a sacrificial offering.

  31

  I woke up Monday morning less than thrilled with life in general. That often happened when I felt overwhelmed. Gregory Trippen’s frantic phone call ten days before had opened four separate investigations for the sheriff’s department. A search to find and save his brother, a cold case shooting death, uncovering the mole in the sheriff’s department responsible for stealing reports and delivering death threats, and working on charges against Dr. Royce Sparrow, and the others, for abusing the Trippen brothers.

  Four separate cases, all related to satanic-cult activities and the cover-up of a murder committed by its members.

  The good news: there was no statute of limitations on murder.

  The bad news: there was a statute of limitations on abuse.

  In Minnesota, victims had only six years to bring their claims of personal injury caused by sexual abuse before the court. If a claimant was victimized as a minor, he or she needed to file a suit before his or her twenty-fifth birthday. In cases of repressed memory, the Minnesota “disability extension” applied. With Dr. Fischer’s help, perhaps we could file a suit on Jeffrey Trippen’s behalf.

  Sheriff Twardy had sent Alden Armstrong and his family away. Would he do the same with Edberg when he learned Edberg had received similar threats?

  How would we find and flush out the bad cop? Nothing had turned up in the investigations to that point. We had to consider it might not be an officer. What other personnel had been with department for twenty years? I thought of two in the secretarial pool off the top of my head. There might be more.

  I was frustrated—more than frustrated. Jeffrey Trippen was out there somewhere, eluding every law enforcement department in the state of Minnesota. I searched for him when I drove the county roads, on-duty or off-duty. I waited for a phone or radio call announcing that he had been spotted. If he was biding his time until April thirtieth in a city like Minneapolis, he would blend in with others like him who wandered the city streets. I assured myself, time and again, that we would find him.

  Gregory Trippen had taken the week to manage his trucking business and planned to arrive back in Winnebago County on April twenty-sixth with reports and journal pages in hand. In addition to his internal investigation of Winnebago County deputies, Smoke had sunk his teeth into the Sparrow case, disregarding his growing backlog of criminal cases. He was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Sparrow’s journal and the shooting-death reports.

  I stared at the ceiling another minute, then climbed out of bed. My work cell rang. Local number, caller unavailable. I’d seen the number before, but couldn’t place it.

  “Sergeant Aleckson.”

  “Hi, it’s Marcella Fischer. Are you in the middle of something?”

  “No, not at all.” I plopped back down on my bed.

  “I’m touching base with you about Nichole Jaspers. I have to tell you how pleased I am about your meeting with her yesterday. Nichole told me about it and said it would be okay to call you. It is amazing progress, given her general distrust of police officers.”

  “She has quite the life story, which does not begin to describe it, of course.”

  “Yes, well, I hope it gave you a better idea of what these victims have been through.”

  “Oh, man. She’s been through similar trauma, some of the same things as the two brothers in the case I’m working on.”

  “I’ve treated people from all over, and their stories are eerily similar. You can’t make those things up.”

  “No. In my wildest imagination I’d never think of anything close to that. And what can we do to find these people who are committing these heinous acts? How can we stop them?”

  “Whatever we can, but we may have to wait for the final battle.”

  “The final battle?”

  “When Satan is bound for a thousand years, then cast down forever.”

  “Oh.” That final battle.

  “How are things going in your search for that young man?”

  I stood up and pulled my sheets and comforter over the bed. “I didn’t think it would take this lon
g to find him, but we think he’s planning the event for April thirtieth.”

  “Walpurgisnacht.”

  “I guess you’d know that.” I wandered to where my clothes were heaped in a pile and started picking them up.

  “Major night for rituals.”

  “And it happens to be Jeffrey’s birthday.”

  “Ah. I can see why he’d choose that. I understand one’s birthday is the most important date for rituals. It must be a bonus if it falls on one of the more important satanic holidays of the year. Jeffrey’s most likely convinced himself he will be freed of his suffering by pleasing Satan in that manner.”

  “That is so warped.” I tossed my clothes on the bed.

  “Yes it is. Have you given any consideration to talking to Pastor Daniel Trondholm? He’s had vast experience with victims of cults and covens. Spiritual warfare.”

  “I was thinking of giving him a call. I’ve done some research online, but I would like to hear it firsthand from someone else who has experience and expertise in that area.”

  “I’d recommend it.”

  “Thanks, Doctor Fischer.”

  “You’re welcome. And don’t forget to call me when you find Jeffrey. I’d be more than happy to help in any way I can.”

  “Will do. Thanks again.”

  Sheriff Twardy phoned an hour later. I was sitting in the living room staring out the window. “How are you coming with that list of party guests?”

  “I got it done. It’s in my briefcase, and I gave a copy to Holman for his supplemental, but I forgot to leave a copy in your box last night.”

  “Just drop it by when you report for work today. I’m turning that part of the investigation over to the chief deputy, so he’ll make the contacts and do the questioning. It’ll be a while yet before we have results on the fingerprints.”

  “I wish we knew if it’s related to the cases we’re working on. If it is, it’s important. If not, we could put it on hold.”

  “That’s true. Dawes said the two of you talked to Edberg. What he had to say was another shock. I’m going to meet with him this afternoon and decide what to do. I’d like to know what in the Sam Hill happened. I’ve been in charge of this department all these years, and not once did Armstrong or Edberg come to me. Doesn’t the sheriff deserve to know when there’s corruption in his own department?” His voice grew louder with each sentence.