The Deep Dark Descending

by Eskens,Allen

  I know what I’m doing.

  We have to deal with someone right away.

  Send a message?

  No. Extreme prejudice. Hit-and-run.

  Great. Another drop of blood and we do all the work.

  This is serious. It’s a cop’s wife.

  A what?

  You heard me. She stumbled onto something she shouldn’t have. If we don’t move fast, we’ll all be fucked. I don’t like this any more than you do.

  When?

  Today. 3:00.

  Where?

  Hennepin County Medical Center. There’s a parking garage on the corner of Eighth and Chicago. Meet me on the top floor. I’ll fill you in there. I’m not sure if they have cameras at the entrance, so cover your face when you drive in.

  The voices belonged to two men. The first to talk answered the phone with a thick “hello” and was likely the one who recorded the call because his voice, deep and throaty, came through more clearly than the other. He spoke with that kind of permanent slur that I’ve heard in men who spend their lives around bars, his words dragging like he’d just woken up.

  The boss said you’d be calling, he said. This man had a boss; he was an employee—a henchman. He understood that he was expected to follow orders—even if it meant killing a woman that he apparently didn’t know.

  It’s a cop’s wife.

  A what?

  I could hear an edge of surprise, maybe even concern in his voice. The Henchman didn’t know Jenni. He didn’t know the target.

  The second man’s voice was a little harder to hear, like he was talking through wax paper. Despite the bad connection, I could make out the professional tone, the steady calm of someone who handled stress well, someone who could plan a murder and not trip on his words. This man, the Planner came across more clipped and trimmed than the Henchman. Educated, I would say. Concise. No chitchat. There was something about his voice that struck me as familiar, not like an old friend or relative, but familiar as though maybe we had met once—chatted at some point in our lives. That was probably just wishful thinking.

  The Planner knew who I was. He knew that Jenni was a cop’s wife. When I heard those words the first time, my breath knotted up in my chest. It had been my fault, just as I believed. Jenni died because she was my wife. She died because of my actions, because of my sins. They were going to kill a cop’s wife to get even with the cop. I had suspected that for some time, and the Planner’s words now confirmed it . . . at least that’s what I thought.

  But then he continued. She stumbled onto something she shouldn’t have.

  I missed that line the first time that I listened to the recording. After he said they were going to kill a cop’s wife, the next words fell behind a thick hum of rage. It wasn’t until I played it a second time that I heard the reason for Jenni’s death, and it made no sense to me. Who would want to kill a hospital social worker? She did nothing but help people. I must have heard it wrong. I played it again, and I heard it again: She stumbled onto something she shouldn’t have.

  I stopped the CD and backed away from my laptop as though it had turned venomous. It had never occurred to me that Jenni died because of something she did or something she knew, no more than it would occur to me that the sun might, one day, set in the east. I was supposed to be the target. I was supposed to be the reason. I was a homicide detective. I was the one who had enemies. Not her.

  I couldn’t stop pacing. I couldn’t sit down. I went to the front door and opened it again, letting another wave of frigid air slap me in the face. I left the door open until my eyelashes began to frost over and stick together. When I closed the door, my head was quiet, and the world no longer spun backwards.

  I returned back to my laptop and played the CD again and again, writing down every word they said, listening for accents and sounds in the background. After playing the CD for the tenth time, the words held no sway over my blood pressure and I saw the CD for what it was—a gift. All these years, I’d been looking down when I should have been looking up. I discovered more about Jenni’s death in one hour, on that bone-chilling New Year’s Eve, than I had learned over four and a half years of digging.

  I closed my laptop and looked down at the pad of paper in front of me, my eyes focusing on one line: The boss said you’d be calling. I turned to a blank page and wrote three words: Boss, Planner, and Henchman.

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 3

  Our home in Logan Park was the kind of house you’d drive by every day and never notice. Blue siding. A modest front yard cut in half by a sidewalk. A fenced in back yard with a garage off the alley. Small by most measures, it had always been big enough for the two of us. After Jenni died, the house seemed to expand and contract depending on the strength of her memory, inhaling and exhaling, breathing deepest when I missed her the most.

  Jenni’s China figurines watched me from the fireplace mantle as I paced around the living room mumbling to myself, debating my next move. The file that Boady had stumbled upon, the stolen file that now lay on my coffee table, had to be the key. Boady didn’t know how important his single contribution might be. How could he. He didn’t know about the other puzzle pieces that I was hiding in my house.

  I went to a drawer in my bedroom and brought out my other file, a file I had secretly copied from the Archive Room at City Hall. I put it on the coffee table next to its new sister. As I stared at the two files, I became swept up in the hope that somewhere in those pages lurked the secret that would lead me to my wife’s killer, one file filling in the gaps left by the other, consonants and vowels finally joining together to give meaning to the noise.

  My thoughts settled as the path ahead of me became clear. The time had come to toss aside half-measures and shadow investigations. Like a base jumper committing to the leap, I would either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly. What I would no longer do—is waver.

  With our master bedroom on the main floor, we rarely went upstairs, which held two small bedrooms and a bathroom. We kept one of the upstairs bedrooms nice for company to stay in. That room was also going to be the nursery when—if—that time ever arrived. Even before the wedding, we talked about having children, a plan that fell behind careers and the daily pressures of life. Then one day, Jenni called me up to the guest room in the middle of a spring afternoon. When I walked in, I found her lying on her back, completely naked except for a bracelet on her left wrist. It was a piece of jewelry she had never worn before, her great-grandmother’s bracelet, an heirloom that carried over a hundred years of history.

  Jenni had shown me the bracelet back when we were still dating, a simple chain with six golden charms on it, each about the size and shape of a dime. On each charm had been inscribed a name. Three of the names were those of Jenni’s grandmother and her grandmother’s two brothers. Two more names belonged to Jenni’s mother, Alice, and Jenni’s Aunt Helen. The sixth charm carried Jenni’s name. Great Grandma Mary had started the tradition of inscribing the names of her children on the bracelet, adding a new charm with each new birth. Now the tradition had fallen to us.

  Jenni’s nakedness surprised me and was a happy interruption of my afternoon. When I had lain beside Jenni, she told me that she had made a decision. The time had come to have a child. We’d been risking the possibility for a while, but now, she said it was time to get serious. She wanted to make me a father, and she chose to begin that journey in the room that would become the nursery.

  I slipped the bracelet off of her wrist and hooked it on a nail above the headboard where a picture of ducks once hung. And there the bracelet would remain—for years, a symbol of what we lacked. We never made love in that room again, and over time, we both stopped visiting the guest room all together. I think neither of us could take the daily reminder that not all trees bore fruit.

  The second upstairs bedroom had been turned into a storage room, filled with everything from old textbooks and unused exercise equipment, to boxes of clothing. I don’t remember being in
side of either of those rooms since Jenni’s death, but now, that time had arrived. I needed a war room, a place where I could immerse myself in Jenni’s case with no distractions, a place where I could release my inner Mr. Hyde and indulge in my own form of masochism, like those penitents who flog themselves into religious ecstasy. In this room, this lair, I would purge all other thoughts from my head and focus on one task—hunting down the people responsible for my wife’s death.

  With that inspiration, I went to the guest room to begin my work.

  Before anything else, I wanted to remove the bracelet from the wall. I didn’t need the weight of that history distracting me. When I went to pull it from its nail, it was gone. I hadn’t noticed before. Jenni must have packed it away with all the other reminders of our broken dream. If I had looked for the bracelet, I probably would have found it in the storage room, in a pink sewing kit that also came to us as an heirloom, a box that held Jenni’s bronzed baby shoes and the hospital band they wrapped around her wrist the day she was born.

  I took a moment to let the memory pass and then went to work.

  First I took apart the bed in the guest room, hauling its slats and rails out to the garage and leaning the box spring and mattress against the wall at the top of the stairs. I dragged the dresser to the storage room and emptied the bookcase of its books, throwing them into the dusty bathtub of the upstairs bathroom. Within a couple hours, I had emptied the guest room of all of its contents other than the bare bookshelf, which I figured I could use.

  I would need lots of table space, which I didn’t have, so I popped the hinge pins off the doors of both bedrooms and the bathroom. They were cheap hollow-core doors with flat, smooth surfaces. Laying them on boxes I’d taken from the storage room, I created three tables, which I arranged into a horseshoe.

  Satisfied with my effort, I brought up my laptop, a dining-room chair, and the two files. As I began organizing my investigation, I heard the pop of firecrackers in the distance, their lonely clap offering proof that, even in sub-zero temperatures, people can’t resist bothering neighbors when it’s New Year’s Eve. I looked at my watch and saw that midnight had just passed.

  Thus began my fifth New Year’s Day without her.

  I opened the first file, the thicker of the two—the file that led to my reprimand last year. I swiped that file from the Archive Room at City Hall, an act that would not have garnered a second glance, much less a reprimand, had it not been my wife’s case. I made a copy of the file, kept the clone, and returned the original to its home. The case was originally assigned to Detective Louis Parnell, who was given instructions not to pass anything along to me. There were rules against such things. I was the victim’s husband. If Jenni’s death had been anything other than a hit-and-run, I would be the top suspect. Nothing personal; that’s just where most spousal murders ended up.

  I knew Louis well, and it didn’t take long for him to break his silence about the case. It also didn’t take him long to conclude that Jenni’s death was nothing more than what it appeared to be—a hit-and-run. Just as that man on the CD, the Planner, had intended.

  Parnell’s final report concluded that Jenni had been walking through the Hennepin County Medical Center parking ramp and had been hit by a yellow, Toyota Corolla. He knew the make, model, and color of the car because of paint transfer on Jenni’s clothing and part of a headlight that remained behind. I don’t think Parnell spent all that much time looking for the car, and I don’t believe he lost too much sleep over not finding it. I didn’t fault him for that. His efforts didn’t matter because I had been looking for that car. Nights and weekends. An obsession at first, but as months turned into years, it took on the pattern of a hobby—walking through junk yards and randomly stopping by body shops, leaving my card wherever I went.

  Then, four months ago, I found the car—or rather the car found me. An anonymous envelope with a cryptic note and storage room key sent me, once again, into the night in search of the yellow Corolla. And by-God, this time I found it—me—the husband. I was responsible for the break in the case. I was the one moving the game pieces forward. And still, I was the one who was once again frozen out of the investigation—reprimanded for sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.

  Like a dutiful Boy Scout following the rules, I turned my evidence over to my commander—well, maybe I didn’t follow all the rules. I had come too far to pay attention to needless roadblocks. So I kept the clone. I got my ass chewed when Commander Walker found out that I’d taken the file home; he had to do it, but he never asked if I’d made a copy. I always figured Walker didn’t want to know. He was a good man that way.

  The second file, the Kroll file, was another story all together. When he handed the file to me, Boady told me, flat out, that he had secreted it out of the office of a dead attorney named Ben Pruitt. Boady had been placed in charge of resolving the dead man’s cases and client funds. Sanden would lose a great deal if his deed ever came to light. Friend or not, that would be a line I’d never cross.

  I turned my attention first to the Ray Kroll file and read that he was a small-time criminal who graduated to the big leagues by bashing a guy’s head in with a brick. I had never heard of Ray Kroll, nor could I remember Jenni ever mentioning the guy’s name. Yet, Kroll’s file held the key to Jenni’s death. It was in Kroll’s file that Boady found the CD of the telephone conversation.

  I laid the contents of the two files out across the tables, separating stacks of police reports, witness transcripts, pictures. There were some pictures, however, that would remain tucked away in a sealed folder. When I took Jenni’s hit-and-run file to the copy center, I gave the clerk instructions to place all the photos of her body into a special folder and tape the edges shut. I had never looked at those pictures, and I never would, unless it became gun-to-the-head important. I had enough problems with nightmares without having to wrestle with those images.

  There were nights when I dreaded closing my eyes, knowing how my Freudian cup would runneth over. Usually, those dreams didn’t start off all that bad. In fact, they usually began in a world where Jenni and I had been happy, sitting on the porch playing gin rummy, or wading through the shallows up at the cabin. I liked that part of the dream, but that part never lasted. Soon the sky would grow black and the air cold and Jenni would be ripped away from me. The dream that came to me most often involved a pack of wolves, their eyes glowing, their teeth long, silver and dripping with appetite. In their snarls I could hear the whisper of Jenni’s name, and in their eyes I saw my condemnation for having failed her.

  But now I had Kroll’s file and the CD. I knew about the Planner, the Henchman and the Boss. The time had come to go on the hunt.

  I did an internet search for Raymond Kroll and Ray Kroll and R. Kroll. The man had done a pretty good job of living under the radar. I had his date of birth and address so I could weed through the Ray Krolls who had nothing to do with my investigation. I found his mug shot, but more than anything, I wanted to hear his voice, compare it to the voices on the CD. If only he had made a YouTube video or Vine. But I found nothing.

  I went back to the paper reports on my table, poring over them until my eyelids became heavy and my mind thick. I fought to keep sleep at bay, as though calling a halt to my work that night might make it all disappear, nothing more than a hallucination born of my desperation.

  When I finally went to bed, I found myself floating in an unfamiliar calm, a strange concoction of the equal parts, wariness and excitement. Yet one final thought kept me from nodding off. Everything I had in my possession, all of my evidence had been pilfered. None of it came through legal channels. None of it would be admissible in a trial—a small detail that would undoubtedly grow into one of those insurmountable problems.

  How would I explain the CD? I had the voices of the men who killed my wife, but no jury would ever hear them. I couldn’t say that a friend of mine stole a file from another attorney’s office. Boady would lose his license to practice law, and that
would only be the start. In the end, the evidence would get kicked out and the killers would walk away free. I may end up uncovering the truth about what happened to Jenni, but those men who plotted and carried out her murder would never be convicted in a court of law.

  I tried to put that minor wrinkle aside and get some sleep. I felt oddly hopeful as I meandered between wake and sleep, ready to take on those demons that prowled in the darkest fissures of my subconscious. Maybe tonight would be the night that I would stop the wolves. Then, as I was about to fall asleep, a new thought brought me back from the deep dark. This thought was not calming; it made my heart thump inside my chest. Fear? Excitement? I wasn’t sure to be honest.

  It was undeniable that this evidence would never be admissible at trial. But there would be no trial if the wolves were dead.

  Chapter 4: Up North

  Chapter 4

  Up North

  The man is stirring. He’s trying to speak, but the garbles that stumble from his mouth make no sense. I should tie him up while he’s still in this state of tranquil befuddlement. I take off my gloves and unbuckle my snow pants to get to the belt on my blue jeans. I’m on my knees, pushing through the snow, shuffling around him until I’m above his head. I lift his shoulders to sit him upright.

  He mutters something unintelligible.

  I pull his arms back and wrap my belt around his elbows, buckling it behind his back.

  “What are you . . .” His head flops on top of his neck as he speaks.

  I let him fall back into the snow, and I move to sit across his hips, yanking the draw string from the waist of my coat, three feet of cord a quarter inch thick. I tie one end around the man’s right wrist, cinching it tight enough that I don’t have to worry about him slipping free. He tries to pull his hand away, but with his mind in a fog, his efforts are meaningless. When I grab his left wrist, he yelps in pain. Through the coat sleeve, I can feel that his forearm is swollen from where my ax handle connected. I’m pretty sure it’s broken, and if it’s not, it won’t be of much use to him.