Lot’s return to Sodom

by Sandra Brannan

  “Sure do. There’s nobody here to help. I’m constantly jumping on the loader for the trucks. Could you cover for me there while I finish this report for the agents Tommy and I talked with yesterday?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Come on and wait inside the trailer until the next truck arrives. I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”

  “Thanks, but I picked up a big one on the way over. That’s why I’m so late.” I turned my wrist to check the time and noticed it was later than I’d hoped. Nearly 8:40 a.m.

  “Late? I’m just glad you’re here.”

  “How long do you need me?”

  “An hour or two should do. Sure you don’t want to come inside to wait?”

  “I’d prefer to play Gladys Kravitz and scope out the activities next door.”

  He chuckled as he retreated to his office, and I once again donned all the necessary personal protective equipment. This time, though, the hat, gloves, and so forth, which belonged to Jens, were also stored behind the seat of his truck. I retrieved my supersized Styrofoam coffee cup and meandered over to the corner of the property and leaned casually against a fence post as I eavesdropped on the busy team, who barely noticed me. I pulled my hard hat low on my forehead and adjusted my shaded safety glasses.

  Although the line of vehicles parked along Nemo Road had drastically diminished since yesterday, the media types who remained were diehards, craning and finagling to get a telescopic photo or even a glimpse of the crime scene—most of which was blocked by the fabric-covered buildings—from two hundred yards away. Most were likely quite envious of my position; the newsman I’d chased off was probably wishing he had run me over when he had the chance.

  For what must have been three hours, I slouched against the fence post near the clustered birch, watching the criminalists working the banks along the creek and the surrounding meadow. Now and again I had to pry myself away and load a truck, but I was back in a flash, glued with fascination and genuine interest in the process. My perch, slightly uphill from the creek, offered me a unique bird’s-eye view of the activities.

  The criminalists were all clustered within twenty or thirty yards of me, but they never once acknowledged my voyeuristic presence. As I dashed to and from the loader, my breathing sounded like a bellowing seal with its tail caught in a whale’s teeth, yet they still took no notice of me. How long it takes to get into shape and how quickly we get out of it. Physical therapy wasn’t working fast enough for me.

  As I watched the busy bees below, I wondered what percentage of the aches, pains, and strains were the result of being hospitalized for four weeks or from leaning against a post for the past three hours, standing in one position. Without a doubt, my weakness was the result of the entire cocktail, regardless of the proportions.

  My mind drifted, and the movements of the criminalists took on a familiar rhythm. I found myself comparing them to those who had worked in my home after my friend Lisa was killed there, and I toyed with the idea of taking seriously her comment about me joining the FBI. I had a knack for being inquisitive, I loved investigating (more like poking my nose into other people’s business, really), and I was talented at solving problems in creative manners. But it still didn’t feel like the right fit to me, somehow. Glancing over my shoulder at the purplish-red iron ore highwall, a quarry we’d been mining for nearly half a century, I sighed. The FBI would be too distant from this, too far from my love for mining. Despite my fascination with the crime solvers’ dedication, brilliance, and industriousness, I couldn’t imagine leaving this world behind.

  No crime in being an interested third party and student of the criminalists, though, so I got back to my studies. The yellow crime-scene tape to cordon off the area was primarily strung across the Broken Peaks entrance road, about ten degrees to my left and half a mile away. The entrance road paralleled our haul road, which lay directly in front of me and saw steady truck traffic. To my right ahead of me was the office trailer, and to my immediate left in front of me was the big rock, the crime scene. The Benders’ lodge on Broken Peaks was about a quarter of a mile to my far left, down the creek.

  From time to time it was so quiet that I could even hear a bit of chatter from the people parked along Nemo Road when I strained to listen. I was most afraid of someone using the telescopic lens of an expensive camera to zoom in on my face, the photo appearing on tomorrow’s front page below the headline: “Suspected Killer Had Sister Stand Guard” or something damaging like that. As long as I limited my movements and kept my hard hat pulled low across my eyes, I should remain anonymous.

  I hoped.

  The noonday sun was approaching, and I felt its rays beating down on me. Sweat dripped down my back. I decided to find a place to sit down and let my achy muscles rest. This grassy knoll midway up the slope with its stand of birch trees is perfect habitat for bighorn sheep and mountain goats, so I sat perfectly still, half expecting one to nuzzle my ear at any moment. This, of course, would cause me to scream or wet my pants or both, an embarrassing scene any way you looked at it. So periodically I glanced back over my shoulder, just to make sure, and prayed my sweaty self would scare them away before they ever made it too close.

  I had been watching the team gather whatever evidence they could from the area, crime scene photographers snapping a constant stream of photos, but I never saw any major pieces of evidence like clothes or weapons being bagged and tagged. I did see two technicians bag a few rocks from above the banks, and although I couldn’t hear their exact words, I could hear them mumbling to one another about a fine spray of blood, high velocity or something. Another technician, a slim woman with blond hair, combed the meadow floor on that same bank’s edge through the tall grass, using what looked like magnifying goggles and tweezers to find and pluck small items, bagging each piece carefully. Her voice was so soft I couldn’t distinguish a word she said, but I did hear “flashlight lens” spoken by one of the young men nearby. A technician who was working the creek bank had a loud and distinct voice, and I heard him declare, “Probably the kind the gangs carry when they can’t carry weapons. You know, those heavy-duty flashlights with the long handles?”

  The mumbling continued, as did the tedious and meticulous work. I watched and learned. Michelle’s body had been found right here. A few miles from where Jens had been earlier that same morning. No wonder he was a suspect. My stomach lurched at the thought of how Jens must have felt when he first learned where Michelle’s body had been discovered. It must be eating away at him that he was so close, yet couldn’t help her one bit.

  I wiped my brow and checked my watch. It was nearly noon. About an hour earlier, when I had gone inside the trailer to retrieve a Diet Coke, Clint apologized for needing me longer and said he hoped to be done in an hour, so I would likely be going back to Rapid City soon. Clint told me two agents, Blysdorf and a new guy, had been by half an hour prior to pick up his statement and to peruse the crime scene. I had been loading a steady stream of trucks about that time, but I never saw either man cross the fence or walk among the criminalists.

  As I studied the movements in the valley, I eased up to my feet to stretch my legs and realized that my fear of making things worse for Jens had cooled a bit in the warmth of the summer day. I slowly sank back down to my knees in the grass.

  Suddenly, I heard someone shout, “Hey!”

  I didn’t dare move, thinking I’d been spotted. I held my breath and froze, squeezing my eyes shut and hoping the man, if he’d seen something move in this little grove of trees, would take me for a rabbit, or at least not Jens’s sister. The air was still and hot and unforgiving. The muffled voices nearby, the chatter that began to grow, and the scuffling of shoes on rocks and pine needles surely meant they were headed my way. I kept my eyes closed and forced myself to hold my breath a little longer, kneeling in the tall grass amid the thin shadows of the birch trees.

  “Look!” the same man shouted.

  More muted voices, m
ore movement. But this time the movement sounded slightly different: it was not closer, as I expected, and it was not the sound of rocks sliding beneath hurried footsteps on the gentle slope in front of me; rather, it was farther to my far left, and steadier.

  As slowly as my lungs could stand, I released my breath and inched my head sideways in their direction, raising my eyelids and expecting to see the criminalists standing in front of me, hands on hips awaiting an explanation. I drew in a deep breath of relief when I saw a small group huddled on my side of the creek, but much further down the tree line to my left and well east of where they all had been working. I caught their murmurs and nods, and I saw them pointing at something in the woods to my left. My eye scanned where they were pointing and I could barely make out off in the distance down the road toward Rapid City the tops of what looked like a row of tents and the bodies of campers moving about in the trees and the clearings. It was the campground between Broken Peaks and Pulman’s place.

  I rocked to my feet and walked the fence line, scuttling between the trees until I closed the distance between where I had perched all day and where the criminalists had moved into the tree line. I stopped behind a large pine tree when I came within earshot and strained to hear them.

  “Boot prints,” one of the younger men said. “Leading along the tree line on the Broken Peaks side of the fence.”

  The man with the loud voice took charge. “Those are hiking boot treads or something similar. Not the same print as the tennis shoes our vic was wearing. Cast the prints before we lose them completely.”

  Another voice said, “I’ve got two sets of prints by the creek bank; one set heads back down this fence line. Toward the Broken Peaks place.”

  “We searched that place yesterday. Higher-ups say the Benders confirmed they hadn’t been anywhere near the place since last October, and the dust that had gathered suggested no one had been hiding out or staying at the place.”

  “Then where is this person headed?”

  The loud man answered, “Let’s follow the tracks. My guess is they will lead us to where the killer took off in a vehicle or something.”

  “See this? Two sets of tracks coming this way, one set returning. The killer made our vic walk in on her own volition. She was alive until he hit her over the head.”

  “Like I said, based on the shards of plastic that McMillan found, I would guess they were from the lens of an industrial flashlight.”

  Then I thought I heard, “Lucifer’s Lot. Those treads are probably from biker boots, not hiking boots. Hope they all burn in hell.”

  “The boyfriend’s with the Lucifer’s Lot?”

  “No. Shank said the suspect is some guy named Mully.”

  At the name, my breath caught in my throat.

  I heard two of the techs fall away from where I stood, following the tracks along the tree line downstream. I heard the other retreat back across Boxelder Creek, sloshing through the shallow water, and call out to someone to help with a cast.

  I darted quickly back from tree to tree until I was near the loader. I crawled into Jens’s pickup, hoping I wouldn’t hurl all over his seat. I cranked the engine and turned the fan to high on the coldest setting in an attempt to stave off the nausea.

  Lucifer’s Lot. Mully.

  The same bunch that I had seen the day before with that poor girl at Sturgis on the deserted street near our concrete plant. The one the EMTs were trying to revive and whisked away in the ambulance before I ever got a chance to find courage enough to crawl out of Jens’s pickup and tell them what I saw. Why hadn’t I told someone yesterday about this? What happened to the girl? That certainly wasn’t Michelle, although it did look a little like her, only younger. I worried now if the girl had died. I assumed she’d lived because I waited for Jens for at least forty-five minutes after the ambulance left and no policemen or FBI agents ever returned. If I had witnessed a crime, they would have returned to the scene on Sherman Street to canvass the neighborhood, surely. I was prepared to say something, tell them my story if they had, but they never came back. So I assumed she’d lived. What if she was dead, too? And how did Michelle fit in to all this?

  I had to talk to Jens. Now.

  I took a deep breath and stepped down out of Jens’s idling truck. Making my way to the trailer, I poked my head in the door and called out to Clint that I had to go in for an appointment in town. He thanked me for my help and I hurried off to the pickup, dropped the stick into drive, and spat gravel with my tires as the pickup jumped forward out of the lot.

  I told myself to calm down and not draw attention to myself. I drove the long stretch of road exiting our quarry, opened the gate enough for me to squeeze the truck through, then swung the chain back around the gate and locked it tight. Jumping back in behind the wheel, I noticed the clock read 12:10 pm. I hooked a left onto Nemo Road and craned my neck to locate the two criminalists who had decided to follow the boot prints. I spotted the two young men emerging beyond the Broken Peaks lodge on the far end of the property and cutting across the meadow toward the campground. I drove slowly, hugging the shoulder to find out where they ended up. The pair followed the boot prints to the tents and campers sandwiched between the open spaces of Broken Peaks acreage and Pulman’s land.

  As I followed their progress, I saw the campground on the left and slowed. About to round the bend to my right away from the campground, I crept along the curve in the road, stealing a glimpse over my shoulder at the criminalists nearing the lot.

  Just as I was about to signal a left to turn into the campground, I saw the line of motorcycles pulling around the rear of the lone building and toward the parking lot exit. There were indeed several tents pitched in the campground, as well as one camper and two vans. The Lazy S Campground sign above the door caught my eye, as did the man who exited the front door, waving at the line of motorcyclists. I had nearly slowed the pickup truck to a complete stop on the shoulder so I could get a better look at the familiar-looking man.

  It was Mr. Schilling, the PE teacher from my junior high school. Though obviously older, he still looked very much the same, still wearing a tank top and shorts and sporting a tan. His attention was on the gang of bikers leaving his place, as though he wanted to make sure they were gone. I was about to pull in and ask him if he knew anything about what was going on over at Broken Peaks, or if he knew anything about Michelle Freeburg, when I noticed the two criminalists approach Mr. Schilling. I also noticed that the motorcycles had rumbled to a stop at the campground’s entrance, waiting to turn onto Nemo Road.

  My eyes darted from Schilling to the bikers and suddenly I realized that they were the Lucifer’s Lot members. I scanned the group, skipping from face to face and finding some familiar ones. My eyes landed on the biker in the lead. Sure enough, there was Mully. And he was staring back at me. Grinning.

  I hoped the spray of gravel from the truck tires didn’t shower any biker because I’d heard how important bikes are to them, and they were already mad enough at me for witnessing something I shouldn’t have. I just hoped they would choose to turn right and head to Sturgis through Nemo rather than fall in behind me.

  In my rearview mirror, I saw Mully pull out. Turning left. Going my way.

  “SHANK, I TOLD YOU yesterday that I was washing my hands of this thing,” Sheriff Leonard insisted. “So why don’t you boys get on with your business and leave me out of it.”

  The name tag pinned to his uniform above his badge read Sheriff Leonard L. Leonard. Streeter couldn’t help wondering if Leonard’s parents had been cruel enough to give their baby boy the middle name of Leonard as well. Wasn’t their sense of humor warped enough, to name a boy Leonard Leonard?

  Shank leaned across his desk, beefy elbows spread wide, and said, “You handed this off to me like a hot potato because the trail leads directly to Mully, and you guys don’t want to have to be the ones to break the news to him that he’s a suspect.”

  “Right,” the sheriff affirmed simply.

  Bl
y murmured, “Can’t say as I blame them, boss.”

  “Shut up, Blysdorf.”

  “Where can we find Mully now?” Streeter asked, cutting across Shank.

  Sheriff Leonard shrugged. “Can’t say. But he’ll show up at their campground tonight sometime. More like in the early morning, around three, four. To sleep for a couple of hours, just like he always does. His boys set up camp at the Lazy S every year and they stay about a week or two.”

  “The Lazy S?”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said with a tobacco-stained grin. “It’s Schilling’s idea of a joke. You know, like lazy ass?”

  Streeter smiled. “I suppose the S in Lazy S has something to do with the man named Schilling?”

  “Yep, he’s the owner. Name’s Eddie Schilling. He bought that land and opens it up for camping during the tourist season. Memorial Day through Labor Day. But I think he makes his steadiest money during the rally. He reserves the entire place for the Lucifer’s Lot every year. Won’t let anyone else camp there. So they have privacy.”

  “And so the owner doesn’t have to keep peace among other campers,” Bly added.

  “The Lazy S is just down the road a stretch from Nemo, adjacent to Broken Peaks,” Sheriff Leonard explained. “It has some areas where people with tents or campers can pull in, build a campfire, and share the bathrooms and shower facilities in the common area. But nothing too fancy. Primitive, you might say.”

  “You know him?” Streeter asked Shank.

  “Mully?”

  “No, Schilling,” Streeter asked, noting Shank’s evasiveness.

  “I suppose everyone in this area knows him or knows of him. He’s a coach at a Rapid City high school.”

  Streeter turned back toward Sheriff Leonard. “And you’re convinced Mully killed Michelle Freeburg?”