by Steven James
Just like the razor blades.
But leaving different kinds of scars.
However, when she didn’t write, when she kept everything inside, the dreams only got worse. She began with a few disjointed thoughts, then wrote, my soul is famished, yet feeds on phantoms. my stomach grumbles at me, starving for something real. i lift another forkful of vapors to my mouth. when my diet is made up of so much illusion and mirage, the more moments i devour, the emptier i become.
She tinkered with the words a little, then wrote for half an hour, poems stained with the past, but the harder she tried to forget, the clearer she seemed to remember.
At last, clicking off the bedside lamp, she put the notebook aside, drew Francesca close, and stared at the light easing from the bathroom doorway. “She knew it was important that she rest,” she thought, visualizing the words again, almost as if they were scribbled on a page, “but Tessa Bernice Ellis did not close her eyes, lest the sleep she needed, the dreams she dreaded, would find her once again.”
15
After picking up our room keys at the motel’s front desk, Jake and I agreed to meet tomorrow morning in the lobby at 8:00, when it would finally be light enough to view Tomahawk Lake. Natasha, who would also be staying at the motel, told us that she was returning to the Pickron house in the morning but would meet up with us later in the day.
In my room, I stowed my suitcase in the closet and gave Torres, the SWAT Team Leader, a call. He told me they hadn’t found Reiser. “Don’t worry, Pat. We’re on this. We found blood on two of his knives. We checked the DNA. Matched that of two missing persons-one in Milwaukee, one in DC. The DC victim was female, but the one from Milwaukee was male. Doesn’t fit the pattern. And no prints on the knife. He must have wiped it clean.”
DC? He brought the knife in the knife block back here from DC?
“I’ll be back down there as soon as I can,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied. “What are you thinking about the case up there? Double domestic homicide? The husband the shooter?”
“It’s too early to tell,” I said honestly.
After hanging up, I realized that I was becoming more and more concerned about the approaching snowstorm. I tried Tessa’s number again but only reached her voicemail.
Not a fan of texting, I left another vm for her to call me first thing in the morning: “It’s supposed to start snowing in the early afternoon so I need you to leave the winter session early, by 8:30 or so. Either that or I’ll reserve a room for you at a hotel there… Okay, so talk to you in the morning.” Out of habit I found myself calling her by the nickname I’d given her a year ago, a small way of acknowledging her independent spirit and her insatiable interest in Edgar Allan Poe: “I love you, Raven.”
I said nothing about hoping she would sleep well.
It was a topic best left untouched.
Ever since the day last summer when her father had been accidentally killed and I shot a man who was threatening Tessa’s life-was in fact about to shoot her-she understandably hadn’t been able to sleep well, rarely making it through the night.
I’d suggested a counselor, but that didn’t go over so well. She’d scoffed at the relaxation exercises I looked up online and tried yoga once but hated it.
Being a vegan and not wanting to use any drugs that had ever been tested on animals, she’d tried all the natural and homeopathic cures she could find. Then practical, commonsense things: no caffeine or food within four hours of bedtime, calming music, different ambient lighting combinations in her bedroom, candles and incense, getting up and doing something else rather than lying there dwelling on the fact that she couldn’t fall asleep. Nothing had really helped, at least not in the long-term.
Obviously, it’s not healthy for a high school senior to be unable to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, and her GPA had taken a dive. In just one semester her cumulative 4.0 slipped to 3.65-pretty traumatic for a girl who’d never gotten a B on a report card in her life.
Her resultant testiness had also eroded her budding relationship with a new guy friend. He stuck with her for a while, but as she became more and more moody he finally broke things off just before Thanksgiving, which only made matters worse.
It seemed like the more I tried to find something to help her sleep, or the more I asked her how she’d slept, the more upset she became, so last month I stopped bringing it up. As long as she wouldn’t take medication or see a therapist, I wasn’t sure what else I could do for her.
Now, I set down the phone, but I left the ringer on just in case she called back.
After cranking up my room’s heater, I sent Cybercrime the emails and web history I’d downloaded from Donnie Pickron’s computer, searched through our online files for other instances of three shots through a window at a crime scene to see if that was the signature of any known criminal, but came up blank. Then I took some time to familiarize myself with the online maps of the miles and miles of snowmobile trails that intersect Tomahawk Lake and weave through the surrounding forests.
I found out that nearly all of the national forest service staff are seasonal and the ranger’s office closes down most of the roads once winter hits. It didn’t take me long to realize that, based on the location of the sawmill in relation to the Pickron residence and the long, looping county roads that wound around the marsh, it would have saved Donnie time and money if he rode his snowmobile to work through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest rather than driving his car.
I committed the trails to memory.
Finally, emotionally drained from the events of the day, especially from seeing the four-year-old girl Lizzie’s body, I put my laptop away and headed to bed, unsure, with all of this on my mind, if I would be able to sleep any better than my stepdaughter.
16
Friday, January 9
6:05 a.m.
I awoke later than I’d expected, a black slit of night still hanging between the curtains.
The motel didn’t have an exercise room, but I threw myself into an old-school workout of push-ups and crunches and ended with pull-ups on the door frame to the bathroom-a way to keep my grip in shape for the climbing trip in Patagonia I was planning this summer. Ever since my days as a wilderness guide, I’ve slipped out to go rock climbing whenever I got the chance, and this summer was going to be my first trip to Patagonia in more than a decade. I needed to crank up my finger strength or I’d never be able to pull down the 5.12 routes I was eyeing.
After a shower, I saw that it was 7:08 a.m., less than an hour before my trip to Tomahawk Lake with Jake.
I flipped on the TV to catch the weather, and a life insurance commercial popped on.
Life insurance: an oxymoron. After all, life is the one thing that cannot be insured, a fact that’s all too obvious to someone in my business.
“Planning for the unthinkable, made simple and secure,” the announcer said.
I barely held back a head shake. A culture that calls the inevitable “unthinkable” is simply a culture in denial. However, when he assured me that I would “never have to face the future alone,” his words brought to mind something a little less disheartening: a conversation a few months ago with Tessa, the talk that had led to my decision to take things with Lien-hua to the next level.
My wife Christie died of breast cancer almost two years ago. At the time I didn’t know who Tessa’s biological father was, and neither did she, so, as her guardian, I began caring for her as if she were my own daughter. From the start, things had been rocky, but eventually we’d grown as close as a real father and his daughter might be, and I wouldn’t trade the time with her-even the rough spots-for anything.
Tessa liked Lien-hua a lot and wanted me to get together with her, but Lien-hua had been drifting from me, and when Tessa asked me how things were going I’d been honest and told her, “She seems a little aloof lately.”
“What are you doing about it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m w
ondering if she’s not that interested in me after all.”
“Patrick, women want to be pursued. They want to play hard to get, but the last thing they want is to succeed in getting away.”
I stared at her. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s ’cause you’re not a girl.”
“Why don’t they just-”
“How old are you again?” An arched eyebrow. I was having a conversation with Mr. Spock. “Thirty-seven? And you still have no clue about women?”
“Do you know a guy of any age who does?”
She considered that. “Good point. But when a girl distances herself from a guy it’s a test to see how serious the guy is.”
“So, let me get this straight. Women pretend they don’t want guys to pursue them so that they will, and they act like they’re not interested in them when they are.”
“Exactly.”
“And the more ambivalent they act about making things work, the more they want to get got?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“You’re a teenage girl. How do you know all this?”
“I’m a teenage girl.”
So, I’d pursued Lien-hua as Tessa suggested and found that her counterintuitive observations about women were correct. Consequently, things with Lien-hua had progressed, and this coming week I was planning to propose.
If I could only work up enough nerve to actually pop the question.
I surfed through the channels until I came to some cable news weather. The cohosts chatted for a minute about the balmy weather in San Diego while the scrolling news at the bottom of the screen announced that Secretary of State Nielson had arrived in Tehran for “groundbreaking bilateral talks about sanctions and Iran’s controversial nuclear research program.”
That’s what the media was reporting, but I’d heard through my friends higher up in the government that his trip was really precipitated by Israel’s recent statement, “Any nuclear aggression by Iran will be met with immediate and unequivocal force.” Israel has never officially acknowledged that they have nuclear weapons, but to everyone in the know, it’s a given. The story caught my attention only because Nielson is a friend of Margaret’s and his name comes up now and again. According to her, she helped him get started in politics years ago. I had the sense that she liked having friends in high places who owed her.
The ticker scrolled: the stock market was down forty-four points, the Celtics beat the Lakers, and then finally, the meteorologist addressed the national weather scene. He started by encouraging everyone in the upper Midwest to fill up on gas and groceries before the storm arrived. And to stay off the roads if at all possible.
I only needed to watch a few moments to realize that it’d be best if Tessa left by nine or not come up at all.
After clicking off the television I decided to call her during the drive to Tomahawk Lake to sort things out.
Whenever possible I like to visit the scene of a crime at the same time of day as when the crimes occurred in order to gain a temporal understanding of that location. If that isn’t practical, as in this case, I could at least orient myself spatially in reference to the snowmobile tracks, open water, and the sawmill Donnie worked at across the lake.
At the scene, I try to consider what the killer and the victim saw, smelled, or heard. What would I be responding to if I’d been there? If I’m the victim, am I resisting? How does the environment affect that-either facilitating or hampering my efforts to get away?
Timing and location.
And frankly, the crime scene at the Pickron house didn’t make sense, especially if Donnie were the shooter. After all, surely he would’ve known that he’d be a suspect, whether or not he bothered to remove the spent casings. Why take the cartridge casings if you’re simply going to commit suicide?
While it’s true that people often don’t think clearly during and immediately following their involvement in violent behavior, removing evidence is a form of staging, and you only do that if you’re trying to cover something up, derail an investigation, or shift suspicion onto someone else, which-if Donnie had been planning to kill himself-didn’t seem likely.
I pulled up the emails I’d downloaded from the Pickrons’ computer, checked the times they were last opened, and found that almost all of Donnie’s emails on Mondays and Fridays were last accessed before 6:00 a.m. In some of them he’d written that he was “on his way out the door” so it seemed reasonable to move forward with the working hypothesis that he checked his email and left for work soon afterward.
I made a note to find out when he was expected to arrive at the sawmill on those days, then reviewed my notes, specifically what we knew about the murder weapon.
Apparently, Donnie had a gun cabinet in his basement. An empty rack and. 30–06 cartridges told me that Deputy Ellory’s guess about the type of gun used was probably correct. Two handguns were still in the cabinet.
Why take the rifle with you on the snowmobile? If you wanted to either kill yourself or protect yourself, why not just take one of the handguns along?
I couldn’t help but think that a hunter like Donnie would have chosen a shotgun or maybe a handgun for the crimes. Rifles are better for long distances. Why use a rifle in the close quarters of a house? Did the shooter fear that Ardis or Lizzie would flee and want to be able to pick them off before they got away?
And where was Donnie now? At the bottom of Tomahawk Lake? And if not, who drove that snowmobile off the ice?
That last one was the key question to address this morning.
At last, at 7:55, with all of this cycling through my mind, I laced on my boots, gathered my coat, gloves, and cap, and headed for the lobby.
The continental breakfast offered at the Moonbeam Motel consisted of sludgy, cold coffee and a box of day-old donuts. Instead, I opted for two large glasses of orange juice, telling myself that it was the equivalent to a plateful of fruit. As I was finishing the second glass, my phone rang.
Tessa’s ringtone.
“Hey, Raven, how are you?”
“Good.”
“How was the winter session yesterday?”
“Lame. I bailed so I could check out the places Mom wrote about in her diary when she went here. So that’s been cool.”
I wasn’t excited about her skipping the class, but knowing Tessa, her reply didn’t surprise me. “Has the food gotten any better?”
“They have, like, no vegetarian dishes. Just hamburgers or steak, or whatever, every day. It’s troubling.” I would’ve expected that the university would offer vegetarian alternatives, but I took Tessa’s word for it.
As a big fan of cheeseburgers myself, I’d been trying for months to come up with good reasons to get her to expand her culinary interests to include animals. I had a zinger. “Tessa, if God didn’t want us to eat cows he wouldn’t have covered ’em with meat.”
“He covered you with meat.”
Okay, that was not a bad comeback.
“Um.” I had to take a second to regroup. “So you got my messages then? About leaving early? Are you on your way up?”
“You said it’s like a four-hour drive?”
“Maybe a little longer to get to Woodborough.”
A pause. “There’re still some places here I want to visit. I’m not sure when I’ll be back in the Twin Cities. I’d like to see ’em before I leave.”
I flipped open my laptop and checked the weather one more time. “I can understand that, but if you’re going to come”-NOAA was now calling for up to eighteen inches-“you should probably leave right now.”
A small, tight silence. “The Walker Art Center doesn’t open until 9:30. Mom used to go there all the time.”
“Then I guess it makes the most sense for you to stay there in the Cities. I can try to catch up with you later this weekend before you fly back home.” Actually, because of the storm, I was a lot more thrilled about this scenario. The last thing I wanted was for Tessa to get stuck somewhere on a back road in Wiscon
sin in a blizzard.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ll just swing by the center, then get going. I shouldn’t have any problem.”
“Just stay in-”
“Patrick. We live in Denver. I can deal with a little snow. Besides, I’ve never met Amber and I haven’t seen Sean in like forever.”
As a girl who often seemed four years younger emotionally than her real age and yet four years older intellectually, Tessa had always been an enigma to me, and now I couldn’t tell if she was excited about driving over or not. “All right,” I said, “here’s how we’ll play this. For now, as long as you leave by 10:00 I’m good with you driving over. But if the storm moves in faster and I give you the word, you need to stay there in the city.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“And on the way you’ll stop at a hotel if the roads get too bad.”
“Yes, Dad.”
Dad-lately that word had been coming out more and more often and sounding more and more natural and welcome to me each time.
“So,” she said, “we’re staying at a hotel there, right? I mean, instead of at Sean and Amber’s?”
She knew a little about my history with my brother and his wife, but we’d never talked specifics. And now she was displaying a little more intuition than I liked. “A motel. Yes. It’ll give us all some privacy.”
“Privacy.”
“Yes.”
“They invited us to stay with ’em, didn’t they?”
I tapped my finger against my leg. “It’s better if we don’t.” I tried not to be too stern but to also make it clear by my tone that we were done discussing the topic. “Text me when you leave and call me if anything comes up.”
“I will.”
I reserved a room for her, and as I was slipping the keycard into my pocket, Jake emerged from the doorway. After a quick “Good morning,” he filled up a coffee cup, grabbed two donuts, and we headed for the car.
It had to be close to zero outside, and the windchill made the air feel like a wire brush scraping across my face.
