We checked into the DeSoto House, the city’s oldest operating hotel, where $250 rented us a Parlor Suite with a sitting room and gas fireplace for the night. While we checked in, a young man bounded down the winding staircase as if he were in a dreadful hurry. When he reached the bottom, he looked up to see his girl descending slowly, dragging her hand along the banister.
“What are you doing?” he asked her. His voice dripped with impatience.
“General Grant touched this banister,” she said. “So did Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Stephen Douglas, who else?”
“Teddy Roosevelt,” the desk clerk said.
“Teddy Roosevelt, “the girl repeated.
“So what?” asked the boyfriend. “Do you think all that greatness will rub off on you? I bet they polished the banister since those guys touched it.”
“You’re such an idiot,” the girl said as she brushed past him and walked out the front door.
“He is an idiot,” Nina repeated after the boyfriend followed the girl outside.
It never occurred to me to argue with her.
After we claimed the room and unpacked our bags, Nina said, “What do we do first?”
“What do you mean, we?”
“You don’t really believe I drove all this way just to sit in a hotel room while you go out and enjoy yourself, do you? This is a nice suite, by the way.”
“Nina, you and I are not Nick and Nora Charles, okay?”
“Okay, but what do we do first?”
I sighed dramatically and called the Galena Police Department. That’s when I discovered that Chief Hasselback was out and wouldn’t return until Monday morning—why she hadn’t told me that when I spoke to her earlier I didn’t know. Still, it gave us plenty of time to explore the town and its many century-old buildings. I found a store called the Root Beer Revelry that sold nearly ninety different varieties of root beer. I bought two cases of assorted brands with names like Iron Horse, Gale’s, Jack Black’s Dead Red, Sea Dog, and Frostie with the idea that I would gather a group of trusted and discerning confidantes for a taste testing to determine the world’s greatest root beer. Nina told me to let her know how that worked out.
Meanwhile, she discovered Old Blacksmith Shop Mercantile, an 1894 blacksmith shop where, under the guidance of the resident smithy, she fashioned an ornate fireplace poker. I mentioned that neither she nor I had a fireplace. She told me that our new home would have one—it was a prerequisite. Again, who was I to argue?
We found a former movie theater where they filmed scenes for Field of Dreams that was now an antique store, and a former firehouse that was now a theater that was supposed to be haunted. And then there was the bar where I was told that the recipe for Red Stripe beer was actually developed in Galena and sold to an Englishman, who turned it into one of Jamaica’s better-known exports. I drank a bottle; suddenly it didn’t taste quite the same.
Eventually we ended up at the Perry Street Brasserie for dinner. Throughout the meal—hell, throughout the day—I had the distinct impression that we were being watched. It whispered at me like a buzzing mosquito that I was unable to swat. Yet I couldn’t identify the watchers.
Either you’re being unduly paranoid, my inner voice warned me, or these guys are very, very good.
* * *
Chief Lori Hasselback was lovely in the way you’d expect a former high school homecoming queen to be lovely, with soft blue eyes and shoulder-length blond hair that she twirled around her finger as she spoke. She didn’t look like a police officer. She looked like an actress pretending to be a police officer—think Emily Procter in CSI: Miami. That she had somehow managed to rise from beat cop to chief of the Galena PD in seven years impressed the hell out of me—until I learned the entire department consisted of herself, two lieutenants, one investigator, six officers and two meter maids that only worked from 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. The Jo Daviess County Sheriff’s Department answered calls after hours and on weekends and holidays. That’s why I had to wait until Monday to meet with her. I had never heard of a part-time police department before.
We met the chief Monday morning on the first floor of a gray brick building on Main Street that the cops shared with the other city departments. The only building in downtown that seemed to have been built in the past half century, it was located between Fritz and Frites, a German and French restaurant, and Little Tokyo, a restaurant serving Japanese cuisine. She suggested that we chat where it was more comfortable and led us across the street to Kaladi’s 925 Coffee Bar. After buying coffee, Nina and I sat on a black leather sofa beneath a colorful mural that I couldn’t describe if I wanted to. Hasselback sat in a matching chair to our left. She dragged a lock of hair across her mouth, then let it fall as she began speaking.
“I remember Collin Baird,” she said. “Didn’t need to review my notes, either. He was an asshole. Bully in a letterman’s jacket. You know the type. He had good grades, but I suspect that had more to do with his ability to throw a tight spiral than his study habits. Some women had accused him of peeping their windows, but we never caught him at it. The deputies did catch him the summer after he graduated from high school with a fourteen-year-old girl. They were drinking in the cemetery around midnight; the deputies came along before things went too far with the girl. Probably they should have busted ’em both for trespassing or at least given ’em minors, but it’s a small town and everybody knows everybody and the deputies didn’t want to ruin the girl’s rep, so they were let off with a warning.”
The way Hasselback spoke, especially the way she said “minor”—a citation for underage drinking that comes with a hundred-dollar fine and attaches to an eighteen-year-old’s permanent record—made me think she was more of a cop than I had given her credit for.
“I was a rookie when he went missing. Caught the case. Good riddance, some might say, good riddance to bad rubbish—you hear that a lot from the old folks around here. Only you can’t choose the vic, am I right? One of the first things you learn on the job. I worked the case with the county deputies. Interviewed the mother; the old man had taken off years earlier, and it was just her and the kid. She gave us diddly-squat. The college and the cops in St. Paul, they didn’t give us anything to work with, either. My first thought: like father, like son—the kid simply took off just like the old man had. The fact that we couldn’t get a handle on this David Maurell character was what made me think there was fuckery afoot.”
“Wait,” I said. “What did you say?”
Hasselback’s head jerked slightly as if she were surprised to be interrupted.
“I said … I apologize for my language,” she said.
“No, not at all. I had an old friend in St. Paul homicide named Anita who used to say that.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Was she pretty, too?” Nina asked.
Hasselback’s head jerked again, and she looked at Nina as if it were the oddest question she had ever heard. Nina pulled at the hem of her black skirt and the cuff of her blue shirt as if she were wishing she had worn something else.
“Anyway, we sent out bulletins,” the chief said. “I didn’t expect much; the boss told me not to expect much. Then we got a hit. Laredo, Texas. The PD there spotted Collin Baird’s car parked in a shopping mall lot near the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge that crosses the Rio Grande. Car was clean. Nothing to indicate”—the chief quoted the air—“foul play. Took a chance and contacted Mexican Customs, who are a helluva lot more cooperative than we give them credit for. Turns out they dinged Collin Baird’s passport a week earlier. That told us the little SOB went to Mexico.”
“What about Maurell?” I asked.
“Nothing on him—whoever he is. You say he’s the one who turned up in the Twin Cities?”
“He’s the one.”
“I’d like to speak to him.”
“You and me both, Chief.”
“What I don’t get—why park the car?” Nina asked. “McKenzie, you and I have driven acr
oss the border, why not him? Why not just drive across the bridge into—what’s the city on the other side of Laredo, Texas?”
“Nuevo Laredo,” Hasselback said. “Maybe he wanted the cops to find the car, wanted his mother to know he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“He could have done that by picking up a phone,” I said.
“Yeah, he coulda.”
“Maybe he did,” Nina said.
* * *
We agreed to visit Collin Baird’s mother together. Chief Hasselback warned that she didn’t expect anything would come of it.
“I’ve spoken to her on and off over the years, mostly about her son,” she said. “The woman’s a walking ten-ninety-six.”
“What’s that?” Nina asked.
“Mental case,” I told her.
The chief gave us directions to Mrs. Baird’s house and then told us to follow her. Nina and I were sitting in the Lexus waiting for her to pull out of her parking space when I decided I could no longer hold it in.
“What was that all about before?” I asked. “‘Is she pretty, too?’ Where the hell did that come from?”
“Chief Hasselback is an attractive woman,” Nina told me.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I was just wondering if you noticed.”
“Nina, she’s a cop.”
“I thought you’d like that about her.”
“I don’t believe it. Are you jealous? You need to tell me, because I’ve never seen you jealous and I’m not sure what it looks like.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“It kinda sounds like you are.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never been a sidekick before. I don’t know how to behave.”
“You’re not a sidekick. What do you think, that we’re Batman and Robin?”
“I was thinking more like Sam Spade and Effie Perine.”
“Sam didn’t sleep with Effie. She was his secretary.”
“We don’t know what they did after hours.”
“All right, all right, Rule Number Two—”
“Should I write this down?”
“You are forbidden to be jealous and we must never have a conversation like this again.”
“Is that two rules, or one rule with two parts?”
“This is why couples should never work together. What?”
Nina leaned across the seat and buzzed my cheek.
“I like that you said couple,” she said.
“Couple, not partners.”
“We’ll see.”
* * *
Mrs. Baird lived in a small two-story house in a heavily wooded area on top of the hill, not terribly far from Galena’s senior high school, home of the Pirates. She met us on her front stoop, and I immediately noticed her nervousness. I marked it down as a consequence of Chief Hasselback’s presence. When I was a cop, I used to make people nervous, too, especially when I appeared unannounced on their doorsteps.
Mrs. Baird demanded to know why we were there. The chief told her we wanted to talk about her son. She brought her hand to her throat and moved backward until she bumped into her closed screen door. The words came out in a rush.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I haven’t seen him. Why are you coming here now? I haven’t seen him, I tell you.”
Chief Hasselback set a hand on the woman’s shoulder. It was meant to be a gesture of comfort, yet Mrs. Baird flinched just the same.
“These are the investigators from Minnesota I told you about,” the chief said. Nina brightened at the word “investigators.” I was more interested in the phrase “I told you about.”
“They’re the ones who found David Maurell in Minneapolis,” Hasselback added. “They want to ask a few questions about him.”
Mrs. Baird stared at me with such intensity that I found myself cautiously reaching behind my right hip and patting the Beretta beneath my sports coat.
“You’re McKenzie,” she said.
“Yes.” I offered my hand. She refused to accept it. Her eyes had the obstinacy that comes from seeing too many changes in life and not being able to change with them.
“David,” she said. “Yes. We want to talk about David. Let’s go inside and talk about David.”
She turned her head and gazed through the screen door inside her house. After a moment, she stepped back and opened the door. “Please, come inside.”
I was last across the threshold. There was a wooden staircase to my left that led upstairs. What caught my eye and held it, though, was the pictures on the wall, all of them religious, and so many that I thought they must be her first line of defense against the world.
Mrs. Baird led us away from the staircase to the corner of her living room that she had reserved as a sitting area. There were books stacked on a coffee table and next to the chairs; books with titles like God Has a Dream, Fasting and Prayer, and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, as well as Mysterious Ways and Give Us This Day magazines. She sat facing the staircase. We fanned out on either side of her.
“Tell us about David,” she said.
Us? my inner voice asked.
I reached inside my pocket and produced the smartphone. I called up Navarre’s photo and showed it to her.
“Mrs. Baird,” I said, “is this the man you know as David Maurell?”
Her mouth formed a sneer and through it she said, “That’s him. That’s the man who…”
“Who what?
“Who ruined my son’s life.”
Chief Hasselback leaned back in her chair and made herself comfortable as if she expected a long story. Nina hunched forward, resting her forearms on her knees, as if she expected the same thing.
“How did he do that?” I asked.
“Ask him. David’s up in Minnesota, isn’t he? Do you know where?”
“He was in Minnesota. I don’t know where he is now.”
Mrs. Baird snorted. “Oh, he’s still there. We know that much.”
We?
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“We just do.”
“What do you know about Maurell?”
“When he came to visit that one time, he seemed very shy. Very polite. I remember that Collin kept teasing him because of a classmate they had at Macalester. A girl. David thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, only he was afraid to speak to her. I thought it might be because of David’s accent. Collin said it was because the girl’s family was extremely wealthy and David’s was poor.
“Perhaps not poor, exactly. David’s people had escaped from Cuba when Castro took over. They became American citizens and started a company that sold sugarcane, but they weren’t rich by any means—at least that’s what David said. He said his family’s dream was to return to their native land. David didn’t want to go to Cuba. He was born in America. Cuba was a foreign country to him. So he and his family were at odds. That’s why he came here with Collin on break instead of going home.”
Oh, he’s good, my inner voice told me.
“He and Collin were great friends,” Mrs. Baird said. “They met in college, you see. David would buy him gifts—and me, too. David seemed always to have plenty of money on hand. I said, put the money in a bank. Only Castro confiscated everything, all of their money and property, so his family didn’t trust banks. This was America; the banks can be trusted here, I told him. Then the financial crisis hit and we found out, no, we can’t trust our banks, either.”
Very, very good.
“But he was a liar,” Mrs. Baird said. “He lied about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
Mrs. Baird rose abruptly from her chair and crossed the room to what could only be described as a knickknack shelf. At the same time, I heard a creaking sound on the staircase. So did Nina. She rotated her head to see. She turned back when Mrs. Baird said, “Look.” Mrs. Baird found a photograph of a young man dressed in black high school graduation robes not unlike the ones Jax Aban
a had worn and carried it back to where I was sitting. She thrust it at me.
“Look,” she repeated. “Collin was a good boy. He never did anything to anybody. He never did anything wrong.” Mrs. Baird was looking at Chief Hasselback when she said that last part. “People said he did things, but that wasn’t true. He was a good boy. A good student and athlete. People were jealous of him.”
I took the photograph and stared at it for a moment. It might have been taken eight years earlier, yet I recognized the young man instantly.
Sonuvabitch.
“David, David was such a liar,” Mrs. Baird said. “He lied to Collin. He showed Collin money that he had, thousands of dollars, and he said he and Collin would go to Iraq and invest the money. He said that Iraq was the new land of opportunity because the people there needed so much help to rebuild after the war. He said that they could invest the money and Collin would help and they would become rich and split the money fifty-fifty.”
“Iraq?” Chief Hasselback said.
Sonuvabitch.
Chief Hasselback shifted her position in her chair so that she could look into Mrs. Baird’s eyes.
“How do you know this, Mrs. Baird?” she asked. “How did you know they went to Iraq? When I called Saturday, and all the times we talked before that, you thought Collin had gone to Mexico. We all did.”
There was another creak from the staircase.
“What is that noise?” Nina said. She stood and moved toward it.
“Where did this information come from, Mrs. Baird?” Hasselback asked.
“Nina, wait,” I said.
Nina cocked her head in an effort to see around the corner at the top of the staircase.
I stood, letting the photograph of the man who had assaulted Anne Rehmann, the man who had raped and murdered Mrs. Rogers, slip from my fingers. It bounced against a book on the coffee table and rattled to the floor.
That’s when I saw him.
On the staircase.
I reached for the Beretta. My hand closed around the butt and I yanked it from the holster.
Collin Baird gripped the banister with his left hand and leapt over it.
The Devil May Care Page 19
