Lake Country

by Sean Doolittle

  It would have been predictable to find him here eventually, Maya thought. A missing girl, an active search, lots of news cameras—it was all right there in the front window of Buck Morningside’s favorite candy store. But this was moving quickly even for him.

  Maya walked up to a young guy with artsy black-framed eyeglasses and a North Face fleece. He was standing a few feet behind the camera operator, holding a clipboard.

  “Hey,” she said quietly. “Who are you with, anyway?”

  The guy flipped her a cursory glance. Then he took a second look, brightened a little, and said, “Oh, hey. Maya Lamb, right? News7?”

  She touched the insignia on Carter’s coat. “That’s me.”

  He smiled, tucked his clipboard, held out his hand. “Eliott Martin,” he said, automatically matching her volume; nearby sound gear picked up the sibilance of a whisper more easily than it did low, quiet voices. “Twin Cities Public Television. I watch you all the time.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Maya said, thinking, TPT? Seriously? She nodded toward the proceedings, where Buck Morningside stood bright in the light, spouting some horseshit or other. “Just curious—what are you shooting here?”

  “New series we’re doing in the summer,” Eliott Martin said. He angled his clipboard so that Maya could see. “Pilot episode airs in June.”

  Maya squinted, found the show title in a log heading at the top of the page: American Manhunter: Northstar Justice. She had to read the words twice before she was convinced she’d read them correctly.

  “You absolutely have got to be shitting me,” she said.

  One of the sound guys looked their way. Close behind him came a glare from an unshaven thirty-something fellow standing near the boom mike. Thirty-something wore a peacoat, Chuck Taylors, a denim military cap. Maya took him to be the director.

  Which made Eliott Martin a producer of some kind. Martin cringed a little, gave a thumbs-up, made a cranking motion with his index finger: Sorry, gang, keep rolling.

  When everybody turned back to business, Maya said, “American Manhunter?”

  “I know, right?” Eliott used his clipboard as a shield. “I totally thought the same thing.”

  “When did TPT start slumming?”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” the young producer murmured, as though they were conspirators. “You don’t even want to see our pledge-drive numbers for last year.”

  “Come on,” Maya said. “Buck Morningside?”

  “Oh, he’s an onion. Believe me. We haven’t even started peeling the layers on that guy.”

  It’s official, Maya thought. The world has gone to hell.

  “You know, we should put our heads together,” Eliott Martin said. “Who knows? Maybe we could help each other.”

  Words failed her. Maya tuned in to the monologue in progress.

  “… triazolam,” Morningside was saying to the camera. In what context, Maya couldn’t immediately guess. “Docs used to give it for trouble sleeping, anxiety, what have you. Nowadays you don’t see it prescribed quite so much as you used to, but regular folks might remember the brand name Halcion. Which, ’course we know now, is the same stuff Jeffrey Dahmer used to slip his victims.”

  Holy Jesus, what an idiot, Maya thought. Morningside was surrounded by the TPT crew and miscellaneous onlookers. Reporters from a couple of her competing affiliates had, like Maya, wandered over to check out the fuss. If Buck Morningside sensed her private derision emanating from anywhere in the audience, it didn’t slow him down.

  “Now, triazolam,” he said. “You mix this stuff with a little alcohol, and what you’ve basically got is a batch of homemade knockout drops.”

  Murmurs from the crowd.

  “ ’Course, we can’t know that’s what’s happened here,” Morningside said. The voice of cautious reason. “All we know is, a police search found an empty prescription bottle for triazolam in this old boy’s medicine chest. But right now we just can’t know. That’s why we’re out here.”

  Maya honestly couldn’t believe the fool crap she heard coming out of the guy’s mouth, and she’d heard her share over the years. Jeffrey Dahmer was involved now? Whose medicine chest?

  But the director seemed mighty pleased with his star. Eliott Martin rolled his eyes for Maya’s benefit, though she could see plainly on his face that he’d given himself over to the dark side. Desperate times call for desperate measures, he’d said. She didn’t even want to see last year’s pledge-drive numbers.

  When the camera and the lightbank went dark and the production crew set about their gear, Buck Morningside cut a handshaking path through the cluster of people, ignoring the other reporters in attendance, and made a line directly toward Maya. Apparently he’d noticed her after all. She must have been special.

  “ ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats but little lambs eat ivy,’ ” he said, closing the distance between them. His mustache lifted up at the corners as he touched the brim of his Stetson. “Didn’t even recognize you under that big old coat. What’s the news, darlin’?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you’ll have to tell me.”

  “How’s that?”

  Maya caught a glimpse of Eliott Martin under the picnic canopy, talking to the director. She looked for Carter and saw him thirty feet away, talking with a photog from KARE 11. For the moment, it was just her and and the one-and-only Buck Morningside.

  “Come on, Hubert.”

  “Buck to my friends, darlin’.”

  I’m not your darling, Maya thought, surprised at her sudden anger. “Where’d you come up with that Halcion routine, anyway? Top of your head?”

  “Now, Miss Maya,” he said. “You know I got my sources.”

  “What sources could those be?”

  Morningside chuckled. “You know, these cops, I just naturally expect to come down here and do their jobs for ’em. Don’t break my heart and tell me I got to do yours now too.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you’re here.” It occurred to Maya that she was taking this personally. “To do the cops’ jobs for them?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Hey, I don’t know if anybody told you.” She pointed over Morningside’s shoulder, toward the search party spreading out through the timber in the background. “But everybody’s over there.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, I got some boys of mine in the mix.” He cocked his head thoughtfully. “Then again, when you’re right, you’re right. Guess I’d better quit jawing and get to work, hadn’t I?”

  This morning, Maya kept thinking, she’d talked to a bright young woman with her future ahead of her. Tonight they were searching for her body. And here was this clown.

  “Don’t forget your cameras,” she said.

  He touched the brim of his hat again. “Same to you.”

  Maya said nothing.

  “Always a pleasure, darlin’.”

  As she watched him go, a breadth of dun-colored sheepskin moving away through the gloom, Maya stabbed at her mobile with her thumb, texting a single word to Roger Barnhill:

  Triazolam?

  In moments, her phone buzzed in reply.

  Who gave you that information?

  Her head was starting to ache. She was grinding her molars. She forced herself to relax her jaw.

  Maya looked up from the phone screen and let her eyes drift across the tableau before her. She observed the loose scrum of newspeople milling about in the picnic area, waiting for something to happen.

  She watched the crew from Twin Cities Public Television mounting up and preparing to move. She watched the scruffy director in the peacoat and denim cap, now speaking to Buck Morningside in sweeping hand gestures, perhaps blocking out their next scene in the air between them. She looked around and thought, as if it had only just occurred to her: I’m part of this.

  All at once a crushing fatigue swamped her. She saw another group of people working beneath yet another picnic shelter. A short line had fo
rmed there, and Maya recognized at once what she was seeing: members of the neighborhood association Carter had heard about, doling cups of coffee to cold and weary volunteers.

  A memory came to her. A favorite professor, a particular afternoon lecture: Ethics in Journalism 452. On the day of this memory, the professor had projected a famous image for the class to consider and discuss.

  Their subject had been an AP photograph from the Vietnam War: a young village girl running naked toward the camera, face contorted in fear and pain, her flesh burning all over with napalm. It was a haunting image that brought the horror and chaos of wartime straight into your belly from someplace far away. The question for the class:

  If you’re the photographer, do you take time to snap the picture?

  The photograph in question won a Pulitzer prize, and it had been credited with changing public perception of the war; moments after capturing it, the photographer had delivered the girl personally to a Saigon hospital, where, against all odds, she’d survived. And Maya—that day in class, and every day since—had always answered the question the same way:

  Of course you take the picture.

  You take the picture because that’s why you’re there. You take the picture because it’s your job.

  But something happened just then, watching the coffee line in the distance. For the first time in her career—standing there by the picnic shelter, feeling like a little girl in Carter’s oversize coat—Maya felt her answer changing.

  Thinking of Juliet Benson standing at her father’s window—remembering the sight of the girl’s haggard parents huddled together like refugees near the state patrol post back at the Camden Center mall—she could almost feel the moment her perspective shifted. Like a twig snapping underfoot. A galvanizing surge of adrenaline followed; her surroundings seemed to shimmer with new clarity. She thought of Buck Morningside’s face as he tipped his hat goodbye. Then she thought, What the hell are you waiting for?

  Maya started walking. She squirmed out of Carter’s jacket on the way. When she reached him, she draped the jacket over his shoulder and said, “Thanks.”

  Carter took one look at her and said, “You okay?”

  “Never better,” Maya told him, and kept walking.

  There was a twenty-four-hour drugstore at the Camden Center shopping strip, the parking lot of which now served as the cross-agency command hub for the Juliet Benson search effort. Maya took the footpath up the grassy slope, crossed Webber Parkway at the corner, and strode across the lot, through the lights and commotion.

  She walked directly to Webber Drug and pulled open the front door. She went in past a cluster of employees, all crowded around the front windows in their smocks and name tags. She grabbed a red basket from the stack in the entryway. Then she struck out for supplies.

  In aisle 9, she found wool socks. She grabbed two pair and tossed them in the basket, then moved on to the rack she spotted at the end of the aisle: heavy hooded sweatshirts in plain solid colors, on sale for nine dollars each. She found the last size small on the rack, in navy blue. Into the basket it went. In the adjacent rack she found matching sweatpants. Only extra-large left in navy, nothing in black, only double-extra-large in gray. Her choices appeared to be fire engine red or canary yellow.

  Yellow, she thought.

  Into the basket.

  Maya clacked along from aisle to aisle in her kitten-heel pumps, hoping to run across a bin of cheap sneakers or even a pair of basic buckle overshoes. Everybody sold overshoes in Minnesota.

  Everybody except the Webber Drug at Camden Center, apparently. She coursed up and back, heels clipping and clopping. At last, at the very end of the outdoor aisle, she struck pay dirt: a rack of lime-green Crocs-brand rubber sandals. She grabbed a pair in her size, thought again, and exchanged them for the next size larger. She’d need to double up on the socks.

  She grabbed three energy bars from the rack in the checkout aisle and tossed them into the basket with the rest of her goods. She lifted the basket into the check stand and then, as an afterthought, reached back and added one last item: a white plastic Bic cigarette lighter.

  Maya had to clear her throat loudly before an irritated-looking woman with ruddy cheeks pulled herself away from the view out the window, slouched over without a greeting, and began ringing her through. Phyllis, according to her name tag. At one point she glanced up, and her eyes flickered, and she said, “Oh, hi there. Don’t I know who you are?”

  “I don’t know,” Maya said.

  As Maya swiped her credit card, Phyllis snapped her fingers and said, “I knew it. You’re Maya Lamb, aren’t you? From the news? You must be with them out there.”

  Maya smiled politely and said, “Do you have a public restroom?”

  Phyllis smiled back and escorted Maya personally to the women’s room in the back corner of the store, near the pharmacy. At the door she said, “Do you really think they’ll find that girl’s body down there in the park?”

  “Let’s hope for a happy ending,” Maya said, thanked the woman for her help, and pushed her way into the ladies’.

  Five minutes later, she emerged, dressed in her new hot-green sandals, both pairs of socks just in case, and the mismatched sweatpants/hoodie combo.

  The whole ensemble had cost her forty-one dollars and felt comfortable as hell. She carried her six-hundred-dollar suit and heels in the crinkly plastic Webber Drug sack. A few employees gawked at her as she left the store, and Maya caught a glimpse of herself in the glass of the window front outside. She looked like a circus clown. And she felt better than she’d felt all day long.

  Deon must have departed in whatever station vehicle Carter had driven here, because the live truck remained where she and Deon had left it after the ten o’clock: around the corner of the Joy Luck Restaurant at the end of the mall.

  Maya detoured quickly past the truck, flung her things in the back, then made a beeline toward the command post. She stopped the first person she encountered who looked like he knew what he was doing, a stocky sheriff’s deputy just coming off his radio.

  “Deputy,” she said, and when he didn’t respond, she called out, “Deputy!”

  He was trying his best to be on his way somewhere, but he stopped and said, “Help you, miss?”

  “I’m here to join the volunteers,” Maya said.

  The deputy looked her up and down, seeming puzzled by something. Maya waited impatiently for the inevitable: Aren’t you Maya Lamb? Then she remembered what she was wearing and understood that he wasn’t trying to place her at all. He was merely amused by her appearance.

  “We’re grateful for any assistance from the public,” the deputy said. “Follow me.”

  17

  Rockhaven might not have had any phones or a cell tower within range, but as of two winters ago the place did have a twenty-seven-inch RCA flat-screen television with three hundred satellite channels, including HBO. The TV had been a Christmas present to Hal from Regina, who had won the set selling mail-order jewelry. Every time Mike saw it, the thought of the crappy Magnavox Hal still kept over the bar at the Elbow Room amused him.

  The muffled yammer of the television was the first thing he heard as he approached the cabin. It wasn’t quite so amusing tonight.

  He thought about trying to get a look through the east windows to see if he could get the lay of the land in there, but he didn’t care to break an ankle crawling around the piled, jagged rock apron in the dark. So he climbed the steps up to the porch, walked heavily across the pine boards, and announced himself in a loud, clear voice on his way through the front door: It’s Mike, I’m coming in, don’t shoot my ass.

  The way it turned out, he didn’t have to worry.

  Mike found Minnesota Public Enemy #1 passed out on the old leather couch by the fireplace, snoring loudly over the cackle of an after-hours infomercial. He stopped with his hand on the latch and scanned the rest of the room. You could see the better part of the place from the entryway, the main room going maybe twen
ty by thirty feet corner to corner, opening up to the rail-lined half-story landing.

  Every lamp was burning. Above the fireplace, a trophy walleye hung shellacked and gleaming in the yellow light, posed over an old cane fishing pole in a frozen mimic of its former glory. Most of the furniture sat around a large rag rug in the middle of the floor. There was a rough sideboard, some handmade shelves, a few other trophies mounted here and there on the walls. An old steamer trunk sat in one corner, an antique rocker in another.

  No sign of the girl who belonged to the car outside. Only Darryl, sawing logs in the middle of it all.

  Mike went over. Darryl was slouched half upright amid a scatter of empty beer cans and a spilled bag of Doritos, legs splayed in front of him, one hand resting on the .45 at his side. His unwashed hair stood up from his head in matted clumps. His mouth hung open. His stomach rose and fell. He sounded like a dump truck climbing a hill.

  On the coffee table, Mike saw yet another fifth of Old Crow, this one already worn down to a couple inches in the bottom of the bottle. The bottle sat next to a yellowed stack of last season’s newspapers: The Lake Country Herald—Voice of Brainerd/Baxter Vacation Land.

  On the floor beneath the coffee table sat Darryl’s rucksack, alongside a zipped gym bag. The gym bag Mike couldn’t remember seeing before, but he didn’t need to look to know that he’d find Toby Lunden’s cash inside.

  Jesus. Mike stepped forward. He leaned down into Darryl’s atmosphere, a noxious cloud of body odor and ethyl fumes, and slipped the gun from beneath his limp fingers.

  There came an immediate hitch in Darryl’s snore. He closed his mouth, shifted position, and was silent a moment. Mike stood like stone and waited.

  Slowly, Darryl’s mouth fell open again, and the snoring resumed.

  For the first time all day, Mike felt relieved. He’d seen Darryl sleep like the dead for twenty-four hours after a bender, and by his rough calculations—thinking back over the past two or three days—this one would go down as a bender for the books.

  Maybe all of this would go easier than he’d expected. He checked his watch. An hour and change before he had to call Hal.