The Deep Dark Descending

by Eskens,Allen

  “You don’t know who I am,” I say. I’m angry and at the same time a little unnerved.

  I know you, Max.

  “You left twenty years ago,” I say to the air around me. “Hell, I was just a kid when you knew me.” I find another rock, another ten-pounder, and toss it to my small pile.

  I didn’t feel like I was a kid when Nancy left, but looking back now, twenty-years-old seems so young. She moved out the week after Alexander graduated from high school. She’d fulfilled her unspoken promise to take care of me and my brother. With Alexander old enough to set his own course, she kissed us both goodbye and headed for warmer climes. Our father didn’t show up to see her off. By that time, he was absent even when he sat in the same room as we did.

  I find my fourth rock and it is larger than the other three. I contemplate whether to take it. I question if it might cause a jam when I slip it through the hole. I decide that it will work, and I kick at it with my heel.

  You can’t kill him. You know that.

  “I know no such thing,” I say. I try to dismiss the memory. She knew me as a boy, not as a man. She’s from that part of my past where I lived in truths of black and white. Now I know that we live in a world of gray. We are the ones in charge of the balancing. We are the reckoners. The only question to be answered is: can one live with the aftermath. The men who killed Jenni had to understand that. They knew the rules. What this man had coming is nothing more than what he should have expected.

  And that gives you the right to take his life from him?

  I sit down to put my foot against the stubborn rock and push. It lifts out of its home, flat on the bottom which will make it easier to fit through the hole in the ice. I pick it up in my arms. “Yes,” I say. “That gives me the right to take his life from him. It gives me all the right I need.”

  Would Jenni think so?

  I stumble in the snow, falling head-first to the ground, the rock sliding down the embankment, coming to rest on the edge of the lake. I don’t want to hear those words, so I fill my head with the task of adding weights. “Twenty pounds,” I say. I’m out of breath and I start to cough as I roll onto my butt. “At least twenty pounds.” I speak out loud as I add the weights together, hoping to shush the echo of that last question. “That was eighteen and ten . . . twenty-eight . . . and . . .” It’s all a muddle. I can’t keep track of the numbers. I haven’t eaten since . . . when was it? Yesterday. And I need sleep. It’s been too long.

  I see the rock below my feet and I slide down and pick it up. “Twenty pounds. That’s right. Plus . . . um . . . what was it. Yeah, twenty-eight. That’s about fifty pounds so far. About a third of the way.”

  I drop the rock with the others.

  Would Jenni think you have the right to kill this man?

  “Jenni’s not here,” I say.

  I start a new path up the embankment and quickly find an outcropping of stones just the right size. “Ten pounds. Twelve pounds. Fifteen. That’s what . . . thirty-seven . . . let’s call it thirty five. Here’s another fifteen. Now that’s fifty, plus the fifty from before. One hundred.”

  Max, you know that’s not an answer.

  I don’t want to think about it because I know the answer. Despite my effort to keep the memory away, it pries its way past the numbers. We were watching a documentary on politics that day—Jenni loved to follow politics. In this documentary they played the famous 1988 debate where Michael Dukakis was asked if he would support the death penalty if his own wife had been raped and murdered. A longtime opponent of the death penalty, Dukakis said that it would make no difference in his position. I made an off-handed remark that Dukakis answered the question wrong.

  “How’s that wrong if it’s the principle he lives by?” Jenni asked.

  I hadn’t meant to stumble into a political debate, especially given her strong leanings on most issues, but I felt I was on good footing here. “I’m not saying he should give up his principles. But there are two parts to that answer and he left out the most important part.”

  “Two parts?”

  Jenni turned on the couch to face me, as if readying herself for a contest.

  I took a breath and continued. “He should have said that as a governor or president, the death penalty is wrong because jurors are human and humans make mistakes. But at the same time, as a man, as a husband, if someone killed my wife, I’d have no qualms about sending that bastard to hell.”

  I expected Jenni to be impressed with my political savvy, coming up with an answer for Dukakis that would have both preserved his principles and give a voice to the primal need for revenge, a trait that, like it or not, lives in all of us. Instead of being impressed, she furrowed her eyebrows a little and asked, “Would you really?”

  “Would I really what?”

  “Would you really send the man to hell? Do you think you could end someone’s life like that?”

  “If someone killed you, yeah, I’d have no problem pulling the switch or plunging the needle into him.”

  I remember the sad look on her face when I said those words. I got the sense that I’d missed some important point, something so fundamental that it caused Jenni to rethink how she saw me. Then she shook her head and put a hand to my cheek and said, “Don’t you see? It’s not about the murderer. He’s defined himself by what he’s done. The question is: how do you define who you are? Vengeance is not justice. It’s that simple. I would never want you to kill someone for me. I’d never want you to become someone . . . bad because of me. You’re a good man, Max Rupert. Don’t ever lose that because of me.”

  She looked so disappointed. I shrugged and nodded my agreement, but made the mental note to myself to never bring the subject up again.

  I lose count of my rocks, picking up two more, each a little over ten pounds, and I walk them to the pile. I add up a rough total in my head and figure I’m around one hundred and twenty pounds of weight now. How much weight do I need? One-twenty seems like a lot, especially when I think about the burden of dragging those stones a quarter mile over the snow-covered ice. I decide I have enough rocks.

  The snowmobile cover has a bowl where the canvass fits over the wind screen. It also has nylon straps to keep the cover secure when it’s on a trailer. I put the rocks into the bowl and tie it off with the straps, making a tight bundle.

  The toes on my left foot have grown numb from the moisture and cold that has seeped through the broken stitching. I get down on one knee and heave my bundle of stones onto my back, lifting it up as close to my shoulder as I can. It’s heavy. When I stand up, my legs shake with exhaustion. But I know that it’s not just exhaustion that saps my strength—it’s the memory of Jenni.

  I came to this frozen lake certain to the very core of my being that I would kill the man who killed my wife. Now, as I walk back to him, carrying these rocks, I also carry the weight of Jenni’s words to me: You’re a good man, Max Rupert. Don’t ever lose that because of me.

  That memory presses me down and threatens to buckle my knees more than any bundle of rocks ever could.

  Chapter 26: Minneapolis—Yesterday

  Chapter 26

  Minneapolis—Yesterday

  The gape on Niki’s face, as I walked back to our cubicle, told me that she had heard the yelling coming from Briggs’s office, but didn’t know who had won the argument. I smiled to let her know.

  “What the hell happened in there?” she said.

  I plopped into my chair and ran my hands through my hair, lacing my fingers behind my head. “Briggs resigned.”

  “He . . . he what?”

  “He’s out. You don’t have to worry about him ever again.”

  “What did you do? How?”

  I shook my head. “It’s best you not know. There could be repercussions coming down the pike, and you need to stand clear of it all.”

  “Still keeping me out.”

  “Protecting you. It’s not the same thing.”

  “What did you do in there?”

/>   “I had a little come-to-Jesus. Briggs saw the light and decided that his time with us has come to its natural end.”

  “Why does this strike me as anything but natural? Did you make a deal with that devil?”

  “Nothing I can’t live with.” I put my curser back to the CD-play button and steadied myself. “You ready to hear this?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I clicked play and heard the judge speaking.

  “Your name is Raymond Alan Kroll?”

  “Yes.”

  The voice sounded right, but one word wasn’t enough.

  “You’ve been charged on a five count complaint with assault in the first degree, assault in the second degree, assault in the third degree and two counts of assault in the fifth degree. The maximum penalty for the top count is up to twenty years in prison and a fine of up to thirty thousand dollars. Do you understand the charges against you or would you like to have the charges read aloud in open court today?”

  “I understand. I don’t want no charges read.”

  It was the same slow rusty voice from the phone call; I was sure of it. I pressed play on my digital recorder and listened to the old telephone recording of the Henchman.

  Hello?

  Yeah, it’s me.

  The boss said you’d be calling. What’s up?

  We have a job. I need you to lift a car. Keep it clean. No fingerprints. No DNA. Wear gloves.

  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.

  “It’s him,” I said, turning to Niki. “No doubt it’s him. It’s . . .”

  Niki’s eyes showed horror, not excitement. Her mouth hung open on its hinge, and the rose of her cheeks had fallen pale.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I know that voice,” she said in a cold whisper.

  “I know. It’s Raymond Kroll.”

  “Not him—the other man. I know his voice.”

  “The Planner? Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “So do you.”

  “I do?”

  “Reece Whitton.”

  I couldn’t move. I stopped breathing. Words and thoughts flung around my head like leaves in a twister. Reece Whitton? That wasn’t possible. It made no sense.

  “It’s Reece,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

  I remembered, the first time I heard the recording. Something in the Planner’s voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I spoke to him just yesterday, but it didn’t hit me. Why would it? It never occurred to me to look within my own circle for the men responsible. But now I heard it. I played the recording again and listened as Reece Whitton planned my wife’s murder.

  My world took on a spectral shift once I connected Reece’s voice to the recording, as though I could now see wavelengths of light that had been hidden to my eyes. Things started to come together in a crush.

  “Whitton was the investigator at the hospital,” I said. “He would have gotten the call about the girl at HCMC.”

  “That’s why there was no supplemental report in the file.”

  “And the photos taken by the responding officer . . .”

  “Whitton has access to the Cappers system,” Niki said. “He’s the one who deleted the pictures. He wanted to erase any evidence that Zoya went to the hospital that day.”

  “But why? Who was Zoya to Whitton? And why kill Jenni?” My thoughts hummed and pinged with such ferocity that it made me dizzy. Whitton, Kroll, Jenni, Farrah, Zoya—where was the connection? A cop, a thug, a social worker, an interpreter and . . . Zoya.

  “Slow down,” Niki said. “Let’s walk through this.”

  I took a deep breath. “There’s at least three of them: a Boss, a Planner, and a Henchman. That’s what I’ve been calling them. The two guys on the recording are the Planner and the Henchman.”

  “Whitton and Kroll.”

  I nod my head, still disbelieving that Whitton could have been involved, even though I heard it with my own ears. “The third guy is the Boss. On the recording, Kroll says ‘The boss said you’d be calling.’ That means there’s a third person.”

  “So Whitton went to HCMC on the morning of Jenni’s death,” Niki said, her eyes fixed on something far away as she worked it through. “He didn’t send a detective, he went himself.”

  “He must have known about Zoya being thrown through the window before he got the call?”

  “Makes sense, but how?”

  “And when he gets there, Zoya sees him and shuts down—what did Farrah say?”

  “She clammed up when the investigator walked in.”

  “Zoya recognized Whitton,” Niki said.

  “But Jenni called Ms. McKinney back. She wanted to set up another meeting for that afternoon.”

  “She would have called Whitton too,” Niki said in a soft, sad voice, almost to herself. “Whitton would have known that Zoya was talking again.”

  “That’s when he put this plan together.”

  My fingers tapped lightly on the desk, my outward appearance as calm as the ripples in a brook. In my head, however, I fought to see and hear. A scalding red rage drowned out my vision, and in my ears, I couldn’t hear past my own thoughts: I’m going to kill him. I will beat the life out of Reece Whitton. I will track him down and rip him apart with my bare hands and stomp the scraps of his skin and bones into the snow.

  “Max?” I felt Niki’s hand on my arm.

  “Huh?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “What?”

  “I said ‘what are you going to do now?’”

  “You know where Whitton lives?”

  “Max, that’s not—”

  I hit my words harder the second time. “I said, ‘do you know where Whitton lives?’”

  “In Kenwood.”

  “Give me the address.” I started stacking the files together, Zoya’s, Jane Doe’s, everything. There’d be no trace of any of this left behind.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No Niki, you’re not. Your part ends here.” I shove the files into my briefcase, papers stacked helter-skelter, sticking out through the mouth of the case. “If anyone ever asks you, you don’t know where I went. You don’t know anything. You can’t go where I need to go.”

  “But—”

  “Niki!”

  I barked like a man yelling at a beloved dog to stop it from running into traffic. It hurt me to do it. “I’m going alone.”

  Niki sat back in her chair, the hurt of my words apparent on her face. It was time for our trail to split into diverging paths. She had to know that I couldn’t involve her in what would happen next.

  I stood up as a million wishes and regrets swirled in my head. She was my only friend, the last to leave my side. And the time had come to push her away as well.

  I turned to leave, feeling certain that I would never see Niki again.

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 27

  Whitton lived in Kenwood, a neighborhood on the southern edge of Minneapolis, where the houses ran on the more expensive side. His two-story Tudor stood on a fine corner lot overlooking Lake of the Isles. Not the kind of place one might afford on a civil servant’s pay. My guess was that Reece came into some side money along the way.

  It was just past five o’clock in the evening whe
n I got to his house and parked down the block. Darkness had settled over the City of Minneapolis, and lights were blooming in the windows of the houses around me, random buds of white and yellow, vivid against the dark. In Whitton’s house, a light flicked on, filling the square of a picture window, another, dimmer, light bled from a room deeper in the guts. I didn’t see his car, but it made sense that he’d have parked in the garage.

  I pulled my Glock from its holster and chambered a round. He won’t be expecting me. He doesn’t know that I know. I slid the gun back into the holster. I wasn’t sure what I would do when he answered the door. I trusted that something in his reaction, in his answers to my questions, would tell me what to do.

  I walked down a sidewalk across the street from his house, the frozen Lake of the Isles over my shoulder, the crunch of ice under my shoes. Pausing across the street from his house, I stood in the shadow of a street light and pictured his face when he’d see me, eyes wide with confusion, then squinting thin as he tried to figure out why I was there. I would pull my gun and be inside before he could put the pieces together.

  I looked both ways before crossing the street, even though I knew I was alone in the darkness. Careful not to make a sound, I made my way up to his porch, pressing the door bell and then resting my hand on the grip of my gun. I heard the muffled padding of someone approaching the door. The porchlight came on. I turned slightly to block the peephole view of my gun and waited.

  A click of a lock. The door opened.

  A woman stood on the threshold looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and hesitation. She was stunningly attractive with long dark hair falling loose past luminous blue eyes that seemed to hold light. I tried to place her in Whitton’s world. She appeared too old, and far too beautiful to be genetically entwined with that pig, so daughter was out. Wife? Girlfriend? Lover? Again, she was far too attractive to be any of those either.

  “Yes?” she said as a question.

  “I, um . . . is Reece home?”

  “Reece is not here.”

  She spoke in a heavy accent, Russian or something in that neighborhood. Why did that not surprise me?

  “Do you expect him soon?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.