by Stephen Frey
My next call is to Bill Campbell’s office in St. Paul. I have at least two numbers in the Twin Cities for each estate so I can get in touch with somebody quickly if I need to. I get his secretary first. She tries to stonewall me—that’s her job and I understand what she’s trying to do—but I use an official voice and make what I have to say sound urgent.
“Hello,” Campbell says, coming on the line in his crusty, all-business voice. “Sheriff Summers?”
I always feel like I need to talk quickly when I’m speaking to Campbell, like I’m already taking up too much of his precious day by the time I’ve finished saying “hello” and he can’t wait to get me off the phone. Like even if I was calling to tell him he’d just won three billion bucks in the Powerball Lottery, he’d still be impatient and hang up on me the second he felt like I was dragging the call out. It’s the same way I felt whenever I called my father at his office in Los Angeles, before we fled to Bruner.
“Yes, Mr. Campbell, this is Sheriff Summers.”
“What’s the problem? Why are you calling me?”
Campbell’s got a reputation as a tungsten-tough businessman who isn’t afraid to use tactics that aren’t necessarily within the law. In his early days as an entrepreneur he was supposed to have employed a crew of guys who could have given Bear a run for his money. Campbell was supposed to have paid those guys a lot of cash to help him build his cable television empire. There were rumors that a few regulators in St. Paul and Washington got some unexpected, late-night visits from them, but nothing was ever proven. He built a national company in less than five years, though. I understand that’s pretty damn fast in the cable television industry.
“Damn it, Sheriff, are you there?”
“Yes, sir, sorry. I’ve got just one question. Were you up here in Bruner last week?” There’s a long pause at the other end of the phone. “Mr. Campbell?”
“Why?” he finally asks.
What I really want to do is ask him about that thing that happened with his wife and Lew Prescott, but I can’t. Even if I did, he wouldn’t tell me anything important and then I’d probably have another enemy on my hands. “I heard you were here.”
“So?”
I always deal with Campbell like I’d deal with the occasional porcupine I find in my barn—carefully and respectfully—but I want an answer. My deputies have hard and fast orders to immediately investigate anything unusual at the estates when we haven’t been alerted to the fact that someone from the family is coming to town. I don’t want to put my guys in any kind of danger I don’t have to, but at the same time I want them in those mansions right away if someone who shouldn’t be there is. If Campbell was here and he didn’t warn us, he needs a slap on the wrist.
“Sir, I don’t mean to be—”
“Okay, okay, I was there and I should have called you.”
“You usually do, Mr. Campbell. All of your folks are usually very good about calling us. That’s why I’m a little surprised.”
“Hey, I said I was sorry. I’ll remember next time. It won’t happen again. Is that all?”
“Yes, sir.”
The phone clicks in my ear and I’m left alone in the middle of the forest.
19
SHERIFF WILSON AND I end up meeting at a spot two miles north of Hayward instead of at his precinct where we’d originally agreed we would. At the entrance to a campground on 681 that one of the locals must have plowed, because I can’t imagine a state guy taking time to clear it. They just clear the main roads and that’s it. Wilson called me right after I hung up with Bill Campbell, but he wouldn’t tell why he wanted to switch meeting places. He acted kind of strange about it on the call, too, real tight-lipped, and he’s not usually like that. Despite what happened to him a few years ago, he’s still pretty laid-back and easy to deal with. A lot of cops aren’t.
Wilson’s in his midfifties and he’s been around Brower County for a while, though he’s not originally a local. He’s like me in that he moved here from the West with his family when he was a teenager, so we’ve always had that bond between us. He was a deputy for nearly two decades before he became the sheriff eleven years ago. The entire time he was a deputy and for the first six years he was sheriff he didn’t carry a gun. He kept his cool on his sleeve and his county-issue Beretta 9mm in his desk drawer and he was famous for it.
But one winter night Wilson got shot during a routine traffic stop out on Route 91 east of Hayward. It happened a year before I became sheriff of Dakota County and Wilson was lucky to survive. The guy who shot him was just passing through town, but he was hopped-up on crystal meth when Wilson pulled him over. Wilson just walked up to the car and asked for the guy’s license and registration after pulling him over for speeding and suddenly all hell broke loose. Apparently the guy had a lot of drugs in his car and he was worried Wilson would see how hopped-up he was and search the car. So he just started shooting.
Because of the drugs plowing through his system the guy couldn’t tell for sure if he’d finished Wilson off, but he figured he better get out of there when he didn’t hear any more shots coming from the clip. Fortunately, neither of the two bullets that found their mark hit any of Wilson’s major organs and the guy peeled away after the trigger just started clicking over and over. Then he ran off an embankment a mile down the road doing ninety-five and killed himself. It was good riddance, too. I don’t say that very often, but in this guy’s case, it was, and the cops in Chicago where he was from agreed.
Now Wilson carries a .44 Magnum with him at all times and walks with a distinct limp. He paid for the gun himself but at least the county bought the knee brace he’ll wear for the rest of his life.
He wears that cannon of a .44 on his hip at all times like a Vegas billboard so everybody sees it right away, so there’s no mistaking what you’ll be dealing with if you want a fight. I’ll give him credit, though. He went to the gun—something he swore he’d never do—but he was back on duty six weeks after his knee was blown apart. He wasn’t out patrolling, but he was back in his office protecting his county. A month later he was on patrol again. Now that’s a tough man.
Wilson’s waiting for me when I pull up to the campground. He’s leaning back against his black SUV with Brower County Police painted down the side in white block letters, smoking a cigarette. He never smoked until he got shot. I hear he smokes all the time now. Two to three packs a day.
“Hi, Roy,” I call as I step down onto packed snow. I notice right away that Peter Schmidt was spot-on with his weather report. Brower County didn’t get nearly as much snow as we did. “How are you?”
“Fine, Paul. How about you?”
“Good. Uh, why are we meeting out here?” I ask, getting straight to the point. There’s a guy sitting in the passenger seat of Wilson’s SUV and I want to know who he is. I get the feeling he has something to do with why we’re meeting outside at a snowy campground instead of inside a warm office. “And who’s that in your truck?”
Wilson takes one more puff off his cigarette, then flicks it into the snow and jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Justin Gates, and he’s got something I want you to hear. Something that sounds important,” he says ominously.
Christ, it seems like I’m getting hit with things out of left field all the time now.
“It has to do with Lew Prescott’s daughter,” Wilson continues, “and I thought it’d be better if you heard it where we can’t be bothered. If you get my drift,” Wilson adds under his breath. “We’ll talk about that girl up in the Gorges after we finish with Justin.”
Wilson seems kind of standoffish today, not his usual friendly self. “Okay.” And I definitely don’t get his drift.
Wilson raps on the driver’s side window with his thick, gold wedding band, then waves for Justin to get out. I recognize the guy as soon as he comes around the side of the SUV. He’s one of the men who was harassing Cindy that day out on SR 681, one of the men in Caleb Jenkins’s crew. He’s still got that gaunt, hungry l
ook about him.
“Go on, Justin,” Wilson orders without any introductions. “Tell him what you told me.”
Justin peers around a tree and checks 681 in both directions, like he’s scared, then he asks for a cigarette. He takes a long drag off the Camel as Wilson lights up another one, too. “The thing is,” he says in a gravelly voice advertising what’s clearly been a lengthy relationship with tobacco, “it wasn’t any chance meeting we had with that lady in the Beamer up north of here last week on SR 681.”
I don’t like Justin right away. He’s got a smugness about him that makes me want to smack the smirk off his skinny face with a quick right cross. “What are you talking about?”
“It was all a setup.”
“A setup?”
“Yeeup.” He takes a long drag from the cigarette. “That lady wanted to make damn sure you left your office to come see her that afternoon. So she got Caleb to round up me and some of the other guys to follow her past the county line into Dakota. Then she drove her car off into the snow on purpose. We met up with her right here, right in this very spot the day last week when she was coming up from Minneapolis. Then we followed her past the Brower line in Caleb’s van and we watched her go off the road and it wasn’t because she slipped on ice or we ran her off the road like she probably told you we did. She drove that car straight off the road. Yup, it was right here where we met her.” Justin points down at the snowy ground, then puts the same finger he just pointed with to his chin and looks up at the sky. “Thursday, I think it was,” he says after a long pause. “Yeah, that’s right, it was definitely Thursday because the next day was the day she was murdered and that was Friday. I remember seeing her picture in the papers and reading the articles on Sunday morning and thinking the whole thing was crazy. I saved the papers and I remember how it said Sunday on all the covers the day she was murdered and how in the articles it said she’d been killed Friday night but it had happened too late on Friday to get the story into the Saturday papers. How the police beat reporters didn’t find out till Saturday afternoon what happened.” His eyes get big. “That woman sure wanted to make it look like we were gonna do something terrible to her beside the road so you’d be sure to stay with her that night at her mansion.” Justin chuckles loudly, like he finds what he’s about to say really amusing. “I guess she liked you a whole, whole lot, Sheriff Summers.”
“I don’t believe you,” I snap, sneaking a quick glance in Wilson’s direction so I can try to gauge what he’s thinking about all of this. What worries me about what Justin said is that it sounds exactly like something Cindy would do. What also worries me about this is that Sheriff Wilson’s getting an inside look at my relationship with Cindy. He’s probably heard a lot of things second-and third-hand, but now he’s got a front-row seat. “Come on, how would she ever meet Caleb Jenkins?”
“She—”
“She met Jenkins at that bar on the south side of town a couple of weeks ago,” Wilson interrupts. Justin’s a slow talker and it was obviously bothering Wilson.
“You mean the Steelhead Saloon?” I ask.
Wilson nods. “Yeah, that’s it. Jenkins lives about a mile from there, back in the woods in an old shack.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me that.” I talked to him after I left the Prescott estate the day I went out 681 to help her. “Cindy would never go into a place like that.”
Wilson shrugs. “Well, one of the bartenders at the Steelhead is an old guy named Hank Brown and he’s pretty sure of what he saw. I showed him a picture of Cindy earlier today, that newspaper photo of her that was in Sunday’s papers, and he ID’d her right away. Said he knew Cindy obviously wasn’t a local the second he laid eyes on her a couple of weeks ago and it raised his antenna. Said she and Jenkins weren’t in the bar for more than a few minutes before they went outside to talk. Hank said he went to the window and saw them standing by Cindy’s Beamer for a while, too. Then he said it looked like she handed Jenkins some money and took off. Sounds to me like Cindy went into the Steelhead looking for recruits, Sheriff Summers. It sounds to me,” Wilson says confidently, “like she really did set the whole thing up. And I’ve known Hank a long time. He wouldn’t make all that up.”
“He didn’t make any of it up,” Justin says evenly. “She gave Caleb five hundred bucks to do it and he gave us each a hundred and kept two for himself. He claimed she wanted six of us out there when you came by, Sheriff Summers, but Caleb wouldn’t split the money that far.” Justin smiles widely and I get a close-up look at his crooked teeth. “Guess four of us worked out fine, though,” he says, pointing at me, “because you sure got heated up when you saw us crowding around her car.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You drew your gun,” Justin says loudly. “And I was a little worried there for a few seconds. I thought Caleb might have gotten us in over our heads. I thought you might actually start shooting at us and I hear you mostly hit what you aim at. I was ready to take off into the woods at one point.” He chuckles like he’s proud of himself. “I guess we did a pretty good acting job. Maybe I should think about a new career.”
I feel Wilson’s eyes drift to me after Justin says what he says in a snide and, even worse, accusatory tone. “Why are you telling us this?” I ask as I glance in Wilson’s direction and meet his stare. “What he’s saying isn’t going to do him any favors with Caleb Jenkins,” I point out. “I can’t understand why he’d make all this up other than to get his name in the newspapers.”
“I’m not making it up and that’s the last thing I’d—”
“Justin’s got a problem with me,” Wilson explains. “Last night he got drunk and one of my deputies pulled him over while he was trying but failing to find his way home.” The sheriff points at Justin and frowns. “He was twice the legal limit. When he woke up in his cell this morning he mumbled that he had something he wanted to tell me. He said he thought maybe it might help him cut a deal with me so he wouldn’t lose his license. After I heard what he said, I called you to change our meeting spot. I didn’t want him going through his story again where a lot of people could hear him. This is your case so I figured I’d give you a chance to hear it with just him and me around.” Wilson nods at him. “So, what do you think?”
“I think I want to talk to Caleb Jenkins,” I say quickly, still unnerved by what I’ve heard. “I think I want to hear what he has to say about all this.”
“Okay.” Wilson waves for Justin to get back into the SUV and warns him not to call anyone while he’s in there. As I turn to go back to my truck, Wilson grabs my arm. “Wait a second, Paul.”
Jesus. Is something else about to come screaming at me from out of left field? “Yeah?”
Wilson waits for Justin to go around the front of the cruiser and climb inside, then he walks me to my door. “You know a guy named Darrow Clements?”
I shut my eyes tightly and shake my head. “Jesus,” I mutter.
“I take it,” Wilson says sympathetically, “you do.”
“Yup.”
“I figured you knew him when you were with the state boys down in Madison, but I wasn’t sure.”
“I knew him all right.” Christ, Clements is calling everyone. He really is going to get me arrested for Cindy’s murder if he isn’t careful.
“He called me yesterday to tell me he’s working for Lewis Prescott on the case,” Wilson says in an even tone.
“I figured.”
“Said he’s calling all the sheriffs in the area to let them know he’s working for Prescott on the chance that they turn up anything related to the murder that could be of interest. He’s telling us to call him first, before you.”
“Jesus Christ!” I hiss under my breath.
“You could probably get him arrested for interfering with your investigation at this point,” Wilson says. “Of course, that might not look so good. It might be exactly what Lewis Prescott wants you to do.” Wilson takes a long, careful look around the woods, as though he actu
ally thinks someone might be out there listening to our conversation. “I’ve known Darrow Clements for a long time, Paul, even longer than you have. Which makes me dislike him even more than you do just for the simple reason that I’ve had more experience with him than you have. He’s such a jerk you can’t help but hate him more each time you deal with him. He’s one of those guys.” Wilson points a paternal finger at me. “And as much as I’ve always hated Clements, I’ve always liked you. I’ve heard about your itchy trigger finger and how you got drummed out of Minneapolis and Madison, but I always form my opinion of another law officer based on how that person treats me, not based on what other people say about him. And you’ve always treated me really well, Paul, I’ve got no complaints. You’re one of those guys I’d want going back to back with me if I ever got caught in a dark alley by a gang of thugs, you know? And a couple of little birds told me how you’ve been manipulated by the powers that be for things you shouldn’t have been manipulated for. They told me how you haven’t always put yourself in the best situations, but how down deep you’re a good cop and that Dakota County’s lucky to have you. And I agree.” His eyes narrow. “So listen when I tell you this and listen hard. It’s my opinion that Darrow Clements has been instructed to do anything he can to implicate you in Cindy Harrison’s murder. And I bet there’s a big fat bonus waiting for him if he does. That’s what I take from my conversation with him yesterday.” Wilson hesitates as he goes for his pack of Camels. “You got a lot of trouble on your hands, son. Watch out.”
• • •
As soon as we pull up in front of Caleb Jenkins’s place the bullets start to fly. They blaze from two broken front windows of the falling-down, one-story, middle-of-the-woods shack Caleb Jenkins apparently calls home. I hear the pop-pop-pops, see the fire flashes spit from the barrels, and half-hear, half-feel those eerie zings that bullets always make as they knife through the air around you.
