The Deep Dark Descending

by Eskens,Allen

  “What’s with the bat cave bit,” she said as she turned on the lights. With the low morning sun rolling through the windows, I hadn’t noticed that I left the lights off. I slipped the reports into my pocket as Niki made her way over to the cubicle that we shared.

  “I’m just getting ready to take a search warrant over to the Government Center,” I said. “Fireball’s still unconscious, so I couldn’t get a statement.”

  “Who’s Raymond Kroll?” Niki had an eye on my computer screen as she laid her coat over the back of her chair.

  “Ray Kroll? He’s . . . um . . . he’s a guy.”

  Niki looked at me with the narrowed eyes of a parent trying to discern a child’s shenanigans. “You printing something?” she asked.

  “The search warrant.”

  “This search warrant?” she said, holding up the already completed application I had laid on my desk.

  I walked to my computer, blocking her view as I closed the screen with Ray Kroll’s reports on it. I typed the name Dennis Orton into an internet search.

  “Are you okay, Max?” You seem a bit—”

  “I’m fine. Just . . . there was a lot of noise in the neighborhood last night. Fireworks and stuff. I didn’t get much sleep. What did you find out at the scene?”

  “Well, the ME says that the woman in the backseat of the van is dead.”

  “Impressive. I was on the fence about that one.”

  “Preliminary exam suggests strangulation. Her hyoid bone and larynx both appeared disfigured. Autopsy will be back after lunch.”

  “Was she dead before the fire?”

  “Probably. The ME saw no signs of burning in the throat.” Niki pulled up a DL photo of Pippi Stafford. She was pretty, blonde, blue eyes, thirty-one with a big smile and dimples. Niki compared the DL photo to a shot she took at the scene. “Could be her,” she said. “Is Fireball who we think he is?”

  I found a picture of Dennis Orton with a young, pretty blonde on his arm—Pippa Stafford. They were at some political function, and Orton had his sleeve rolled up enough to expose the compass tattoo. I turned the screen toward Niki. “Here’s our boy.” I pointed at his wrist. “I saw that tattoo on Fireball.”

  “And that’s probably our victim standing by her man?”

  “Happier times, I guess. Did Crime-Scene find anything of value?”

  “Not yet. They hauled the van to the impound warehouse. It was too damned cold to do much at the scene. Did you run a history on Orton?”

  “I was just about to.”

  “What about Ms. Stafford?”

  “Been busy.”

  She glanced at my thin warrant application, a document that could have been typed in ten minutes. “Looking up Ray Kroll?”

  I stood up. “I have to get this search warrant signed before the judge leaves.” The look on Niki’s face told me that she saw through my bullshit. She always could.

  “Max, what’s going on? Why are you acting so—”

  “I gotta run.”

  I didn’t wait for a response. Rushing out of the office, I was happy to get a door between us. She saw past my subterfuge—my ink, as she would say. It was one of her favorite expressions. It referred to the cuttlefish and how it could spray a cloud of ink into the water to distract and confuse a predator.

  I left Homicide, disappearing behind my cloud of ink, but she knew I was up to something. It was like working with a psychic. I would need to come up with a plan to keep her out of my way, at least where it concerned Jenni’s case.

  Chapter 7: Up North

  Chapter 7

  Up North

  I get about halfway across the frozen lake, retracing my steps back to the cabin where the chase began, when I pause to catch my breath. My lungs feel heavy, thick. I can hear my breath wheeze as I exhale. I am less than a quarter mile away from the man, still a good mile and a half to go to get back to the cabin. I can no longer see or hear him, but I assume he’s still yelling his head off, hoping that his cry finds some wandering hiker. I’d be yelling if I were in his place.

  I start walking again, letting my mind float through the rough outline of my plan. It’s not really a plan, I suppose, more of an idea with a firm beginning, a fuzzy middle, and no clear ending. My drifting thoughts stay away from what that ending might be. I don’t want to go there. Instead, I swat at pesky criticisms and chew on uncooked details. I recall a quote by Sun Tzu about the folly of entering a war without a plan for how to end it, something like: tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. I shoo those thoughts away, but I feel like a man who has just jumped into a river, the current pulling me toward a bend. Around that bend there could be a tranquil pool or a plunging waterfall. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. It’s out of my control—at least that’s what I tell myself.

  Trudging through knee-deep snow seems to alter the planet’s gravitational pull. It’s like walking with a cinder block strapped to each thigh. I remember a day when I was a kid, and I was walking in deep snow like this. My little brother Alexander was following behind me. He was small enough that the only way he could move at all was to step in my tacks. I began taking bigger and bigger steps until his little legs couldn’t reach and he fell in the snow crying. I thought it was funny until I saw Nancy watching me from the house, a look of disapproval on her face. Then I felt bad.

  You’re going to kill him . . .

  I stop.

  It’s Nancy’s voice again—faint, struggling to find a foothold among the rest of my muddled thoughts. I can’t quite tell if she’s asking me a question or making a statement. Either way I know she will not approve of what I’m doing. I resume my march.

  My mother died when Alexander was born. I don’t remember her; I was too young. But I remember her pictures watching me from almost every room in the house. Even after my dad started dating again, the pictures remained on the walls.

  I was five the day I first laid eyes on Nancy. My grandma—my dad’s mother—had been babysitting Alexander and me the night before, which meant that we played in our rooms while she watched television. The next morning, Alexander woke me up because he wanted to go downstairs. He was only three-years-old and the steps in that old house were terribly steep. He needed someone to go down ahead of him to catch him if he fell, which he never did.

  As I descended the stairs, I could smell something warm and delicious coming from below. That was, in itself, unusual because my dad switched between instant oatmeal and dry cereal for our breakfasts. This was definitely neither of those.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped to catch Alexander who came down on his butt, plopping from one step to the next. As I waited, I peeked around the corner and saw a woman in the kitchen with her back to me, humming quietly as she poured pancake batter onto a griddle. I had never seen this woman before. I looked around for my dad or grandma or someone to explain why this stranger was in my kitchen.

  Alexander was getting closer to the bottom of the stairs and he had added sound effects to his plopping, saying “wump, wump, wump” as he hit each step.

  I put my finger to my lips to shush him, and instead of shushing, he said, “what?”

  I exaggerated my movement, hitting my finger to my lips in the hopes that his child’s mind could understand my obvious signal. He again said “what?” This time he said it loud enough to be heard in the kitchen. I peeked back around the corner and the woman was looking over her shoulder at me. She smiled and went back to humming and making pancakes.

  When Alexander saw her he froze behind me, holding onto the shirttail of my pajamas. We proceeded forward in a slow shuffle and were almost to the mouth of the kitchen when the woman turned around to look at us. She had a kind smile and soft eyes that made me want to like her.

  “You must be Max,” she said pointing at me. Then she bent down to make herself smaller for Alexander’s benefit and said, “And you must be the famous Alexander. I’ve heard so much about you two.”

  Right then, our dad came
out of his bedroom and walked into the kitchen. He was smiling, which set me off-balance almost as much as finding a stranger in our kitchen. He walked up to the woman and kissed her on the cheek and said, “I see you’ve met Nancy.”

  He sat down at the head of the table, to await his breakfast without another word of explanation. It took me years to gain enough understanding about adult relationships to piece together that they had been dating for a while and keeping it a secret from us boys. Then Dad figured the time had come for Nancy to move in and brought her home for a trial run.

  Those memories give me warmth as I trek across the frozen lake heading to the American shore, the smell of her cookies and roasted chicken, the way she used to sway and hum when she played her old blues albums, the gentle glances she would give my dad when she thought he was treating Alexander or me too harshly. The last time I saw her was the day Alexander graduated from high school. The next day, she left.

  As I enter the woods, those memories give way to the work ahead. The first hill, just off the lake is the steepest. During the chase, we both slid down its slope more than we ran. The climb back up is a slippery affair. I try to walk in the foot holes we made earlier, but they’re too far apart. I pull myself up grabbing onto tree branches and scrub. Beyond that hill is a valley thick with woods. I can see the portage path cutting through the forest like a scar in a hairline. I follow our tracks back across the valley and to the top of the second hill.

  It’s been less than an hour since I left the Canadian shore, but it seems like I’ve been walking for an entire morning.

  I crest the second hill, stumbling through the snow, and see the snowmobile. The man had turned a corner too fast and one of the skis caught a sprig of aspen, tossing the rider off the sled. I can see where he landed in the snow and rolled, and I can see his footprints coming back, tromping around the ski that had caught the tree. I bend down to brush away the snow. The ski is not broken, but it’s jammed tightly between two shoots of the tree. He must have briefly tried to dislodge it before taking off on his run north.

  I look around the sled and don’t see any obvious damage. I pop the hood. The engine is untouched. It’s a new machine in pristine condition other than being stuck.

  I climb up the crux of the aspen and lower myself between the two shoots. With one foot on the thicker of the two trees and my back pressed against the other, I push. The tree bends. I place my second foot against the tree and push with all I have until I hear a crack. The smaller shoot gives way, freeing the ski.

  A thin blanket of snow has covered the snowmobile. I brush it away from the dashboard, find the choke and the starter, and give it a go. After a few wheezes, it starts. I let it warm up as I turn it around on the narrow trail, lifting the ass end a few inches at a time until it faced in the direction of the cabin.

  As I make my way back down the path, now with the power of one hundred and fifty horses under my butt, my thoughts again turn to Nancy and the day she could have left us but didn’t.

  I was in sixth grade and knew enough about relationships to know that my dad’s and Nancy’s was falling apart. I would hear them having heated conversations, their angry words smudged by the thin walls that separated their bedroom from the living room. I knew they were fighting; I think Alexander knew too. And when they emerged, they barely spoke, and what few words they exchanged were as thin as eggshells. Yet Nancy never stopped talking to us boys, her words light and cheery, her smile genuine. It was her way of plastering over the fissure that was splitting our little family apart, probably hoping that my brother and I might not notice what was happening.

  But we noticed.

  I never let it show, especially to Alexander, but the thought of her leaving filled me with a dread more powerful than any emotion I had ever known. Alexander couldn’t remember a time before Nancy. He was so young when she appeared that it seemed to him as though she had always been there. But I remembered. I remembered feeling alone in our house even though my father sat in the next room drinking his after-work beers. I remembered the hole in my life, a sense of missing something. Although as a five-year-old I had no way of understanding that feeling, I remembered what it was like before Nancy came to us, and the thought of losing her scared me.

  Then one day, we came home from school and everything had changed.

  Our house had three bedrooms upstairs, so Alexander and I each had our own room. The third we used for storage. That day, Alexander and I came home from school to discover that Nancy had cleaned out the storage room and had moved upstairs with us. She never again shared a bed with my dad.

  At the time, she told us that she had moved upstairs because my dad snored too much. We accepted that explanation without question. But over the years, as I watched my dad sink deeper into his own solitude, I came to understand something much more profound. Nancy had left my father. To use the vernacular of my teen years, she broke up with him. They were boyfriend and girlfriend for six years, and then she ended that relationship. But she didn’t end her relationship with me or with my brother. Nancy moved upstairs to be with us, to raise us. She had no obligation to do that. She and my dad had never married. She hadn’t adopted us. She chose to stay because she knew that we needed her. That was all there was to it.

  When I pull up to the cabin where the chase began, I figure it’s close to mid-morning, the dim glow of the sun barely breaking though the low cloud cover. In the west, I can see a sliver of blue where the edge of the clouds gives way to an open sky. I can expect a drop in temperature once the sky clears. Hopefully, I’ll be finished with my task by then.

  I stop the snowmobile near a shed about fifty feet from the cabin. I had peeked into that shed earlier, back when I was hunting—before the chase began. I remember seeing implements and tools, the standard fair that you might find at a cabin in the middle of a forest. None of those implements meant a thing to me at the time. I only cared that the shed was empty of any human threat. But as I sat in the snow, trying to decide what to do with the man, I remembered the shed and the tools and the ice auger that hung on a nail.

  Just inside the door, I find a length of nylon rope, about forty feet long, and the tarpaulin cover for the snowmobile. I roll the tarp into a small bundle and wrap the rope around it, tossing the package onto the seat of the snowmobile. Then I return to the shed where I locate the centerpiece of my plan, an old-fashioned ice auger, a steel rod with a hand crank on one end and a small shovel—six inches wide—on the other. I look at the auger and imagine boring down through at least three feet of ice, punching through to the lake. I examine the blade and wonder, how many holes in the ice I’ll have to drill to create a mouth big enough to swallow a man?

  Chapter 8: Minneapolis—Two Days Ago

  Chapter 8

  Minneapolis—Two Days Ago

  I arrived back at Hennepin County Medical Center just before 11:00 a.m. to find Officer Fuller still diligently working on the pretty woman in scrubs at the nurse’s station. He again stood at attention as I approached.

  “Did our guy escape yet?” I asked.

  “Um . . . no, Detective. He’s still unconscious, I think.”

  I handed a copy of the signed search warrant to the nurse. “This is a court order saying that I can take possession of the personal items of the man they brought in this morning. Would you be so kind as to go and get those for me?” I smiled my politest smile.

  “I’d be happy to,” she said.

  “And could you give that copy of the warrant to him when he wakes up?”

  She glanced at the warrant, nodded and left.

  “Is Orton still intubated?” I asked Fuller.

  “Yes, Sir . . . I mean, Max.”

  The nurse returned with a large paper bag, folded shut at the top, and handed it to me. I asked her for a pair of latex gloves, which I snapped on before opening the bag and pouring the contents onto the countertop. Fireball’s pants had large patches where they had burned through. His shirt and coat were mere remnants of
their former state. Only his socks, shoes and tighty-whiteys came through the ordeal in one piece. I didn’t need to get my nose close to smell the scent of gasoline coming off the clothes.

  Folded into his pants, I found the cellphone that he used to call 911. I laid the phone to the side and emptied the pockets of the pants: a set of keys to a BMW, not the minivan, and a wallet. I opened the wallet: a debit card, a driver’s license, fifty-eight bucks, unused tickets to a Toby Keith concert, and a convenience-store receipt time stamped earlier that morning.

  “He can’t be that stupid,” I said half to myself.

  “What?” Fuller asked.

  I showed him the receipt. “He kept a receipt showing he bought gas at the Holiday station on Sixth Avenue. They have cameras all over that place. Unless I miss my guess, we’ll have video of Mr. Orton driving the van that he set on fire.” I shook my head. “Some people are just creatures of habit. Wants to make sure he never gets accused of stealing gas.”

  A sharp smile crossed the nurse’s face and she said, “Your man doesn’t sound like much of a mastermind.”

  That made me grin because Judge Krehbiel had the same reaction when I went to get the search warrant signed. The judge, working on her day off, didn’t seem particularly cheerful when I first entered her chambers. But I watched her eyes brighten as she read down the probable cause statement. Soon she stopped reading and looked at me.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Your guy kills a woman, puts her in the back seat of a minivan, drives the van out to a secluded area to destroy the evidence . . .” She paused to connect the remainder of the dots. “Then, he sets fire to the van, catching himself on fire in the process . . . and calls the police.”

  “That’s our working theory,” I said.

  “A real criminal mastermind you have here,” she said as she signed the warrant.

  I called Niki as I put Orton’s clothing back into the paper bag.

  “Did you know that Toby Keith was playing at Mystic Lake Casino last night?” I ask.