Preying in Two Harbors

by Dennis Herschbach

  “Where?” he asked excitedly. Deidre pointed to the spot where she had stuck a small twig in the ground. “Make sure you don’t touch it with your bare hands. We’ll have it tested for blood, and if it is, then we’ll run a DNA test on it.” Deidre excused his telling her how to do her job. He was excited.

  With the pair of forceps, Deidre lifted the glass from the ground. It was the bottom of a soda bottle that may have been broken by a mower when the grass had been cut. The jagged edge was wicked, and she took care as she dropped it into a collection bag. She labeled the bag, noted the date and time of exchange, and turned it and the bag containing the shell casing to T.J. “Take good care of these,” she instructed.

  Deidre collected all of her paraphernalia and stored it in the trunk of her car. She checked the clock. Still plenty of time to visit the biker’s clubhouse. On the way up Five Mile Hill she mulled over the difference between being a PI for an attorney and being an officer. Her job now was to find any wiggle room for T.J.’s client, anything he could use to place a fragment of doubt in one juror’s mind. Before, as law enforcement, her job had been to erase any fragment of doubt. Before she could reconcile the difference, she arrived at her destination.

  As she walked up to the front of the building, the first thing she noticed was the black-and-white sign, No Fags Allowed. Strike one against Jimmy. She poked around back, but all she found was a garbage bag of empty beer cans. They don’t look like recyclers, but who knows? she thought.

  A rusted-out, twenty-passenger school bus sat beside the building, its district logo obliterated by a swipe of black paint. So far she had found nothing significant but the sign. Deidre decided to go up on the porch and look through the front window. She had just cupped her hands around her eyes and bent forward to peer in when the door burst open.

  “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?” Deidre was so surprised she stumbled backward, caught herself by the porch railing, and stared at her accuser. A muscular woman with black-dyed hair, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, and a broom in her hand glared at Deidre.

  “I’m so sorry,” she blurted out. “I didn’t think anyone was here.”

  “Well, yeah. I figured that much out for myself. You didn’t answer my question. Who are you and what do you want?”

  “I’m investigating a case involving one of your members. That’s why I was poking around. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have a search warrant? Because if you don’t, get your ass out of here.”

  Deidre knew she was in the wrong. “No I don’t. In fact, I can’t get one.” The woman stepped closer.

  “Whaddya mean you can’t get one?”

  “I’m not an officer. I work for T.J. Compton, the attorney representing James O’Brian.” Before she could say another word, the woman butted in.

  “Hammer. That dumb shit got himself in a real jam this time. What’s his chances of getting out of this one?”

  Deidre sensed a little thaw in the woman’s brusque manner, but she couldn’t be sure. “I don’t know, all I’m doing is gathering evidence for T.J. If Jimmy gets off, that will be up to him.” She thought she’d take a chance. “Look, can we talk for a few minutes?”

  “You sure you ain’t the law?” The woman squinted at Deidre. “I’m Blackie.” She thrust out her hand, and Deidre noticed her grime-packed fingernails. “Come on in.” Blackie held the door open and Deidre entered the clubhouse. Blackie signaled for Deidre to have a chair and sat across from her at the table.

  “He didn’t do it,” Blackie snapped.

  Deidre hadn’t gotten a chance to say a word. “How can you be so sure?”

  “He’s all bluff. Hammer’s just a big guy who’s always on the go. Sure, he drinks too much, but don’t we all? I’m just saying, Hammer’s not a mean person who picks on people.”

  The conversation was not going where Deidre wanted it to. “What I came for is concrete information. What you say might be true, but it’s your opinion. T.J. needs to build a case that puts doubt in the jurors’ minds. He doesn’t have to prove Jimmy didn’t commit the crime, just foster doubt. That’s why I’m here today, to find out about your group, the people he’s close to.”

  Blackie thrummed her fingers on the table for a few seconds. “I know we look tough, but all of us have jobs, pay taxes, work hard. On weekends and days off, we come here to forget our troubles and play like we’re bad dudes. The most any of us has ever had against us was a DWI. That’s been Hammer’s problem.”

  “Look, I don’t even know your name—”

  “Blackie,” the woman interrupted.

  “Right now we need to get away from the nicknames,” Deidre said. “What message are you sending if you continue to call Jimmy “Hammer”? And you, what if your name, Blackie, appears in the paper as a friend of his? What does that mean to people? See what I’m saying? From now on, use your given names if anyone approaches you. If you will, I’d like you to answer some questions. What’s your name?”

  “Caroline Reynolds.”

  “How long have you known Jimmy O’Brian?”

  “I suppose about six years. No, seven. It was the year after I graduated from business school.”

  Deidre began to think she had made her point. “Where were you last Saturday?” Caroline looked at her through narrowed eyes, and Deidre could see her answer would be guarded. “Look, Caroline, I’m not law enforcement, and you are not a suspect. I just need to be very certain of my timeline. Will you answer my question, please?”

  Caroline relaxed a bit. “I was here most of the day. Came up from Duluth around ten in the morning. It was the first nice day we had to ride. I got here first, so I opened up, got the heat going, and made sure the refrigerator was making ice.”

  Deidre nodded and smiled. She knew Caroline was thawing somewhat. “When did Jimmy arrive?”

  Caroline’s face screwed up as she tried to remember. “Scy, I mean Eddy, got here next . . . then it was Jimmy. I suppose that was about eleven o’clock.”

  “So, what did you do for the rest of the day, go riding?”

  “No, Jimmy and one of the other guys went into town to get some beer and other shit. The rest of us waited for them. It’s only a ten-minute trip.”

  “They took bikes?”

  “No, they fired up the bus you saw back there.” Caroline tilted her head in its direction and sort of laughed. “Sometimes we use that when we go out and plan on partying hard. Whoever draws the short straw is the designated driver. Saves us a lot of tickets. Anyway, Jimmy and Eddy were back in an hour with a couple cases of beer. We spent the rest of the day drinking.”

  “Use anything else?” Deidre asked, smiling while she waited. Caroline squirmed.

  “A little weed—but not much, you know?” She looked at her feet.

  “What time did Jimmy leave?”

  “He was the first one to go. I think it was about four. Anyway, the sun was still up pretty high. He was angry, because he wanted to plan a trip and nobody would listen to him. He cleaned up a little and then said he was heading to town. Rode his bike.”

  Deidre took her time writing down what had been said. “Did Jimmy have it in for people who were gay?” She waited for an answer.

  Caroline measured her words. “You know, we’re all straight, and we might say some things that aren’t,” she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers, “‘politically correct.’ But we never go looking for them. We sure as heck have never hassled anybody over it, and I know Jimmy wouldn’t hurt anybody because they were gay. Oh, that sign out front,” she said in explanation. “Eddy picked that up at another bike rally and brought it here as a joke. Nailed it to the wall.”

  Deidre wanted to ask how she could be so sure about Jimmy but held her thought. “Thanks, Caroline,” she said and started to lea
ve, then thought of one last question. “Was Jimmy pretty wasted when he left? Would you say he was drunk?”

  “No more than the rest of us,” Caroline answered, and Deidre wondered what she meant by that.

  *****

  It was two thirty when Deidre left the biker’s clubhouse and headed back to town. She stopped at the intersection of the Gun Club Road and Highway 2 and pulled out her cell phone.

  “Hi,” she said when someone at the high school answered the phone. “Is it possible for me to make an appointment to meet with Judith Eliason and her son, Nick, after school today?” The office person asked for information before she could respond.

  “My name is Deidre Johnson. I’m helping to investigate the murder of Justin Peters.” Again, she didn’t divulge whose side she was on, and the receptionist assumed she was with law enforcement. She asked if Deidre could hold while she made a call to one of the classrooms. Deidre had made a quick check on Nick Eliason and knew his mother taught psychology in the school he attended.

  The receptionist came back on the line and informed Deidre that school would be out in fifteen minutes. Mrs. Eliason would have a few minutes free at that time. It was less than a ten-minute ride down Five Mile Hill to the school, and Deidre parked in the visitor’s lot, checked in at the office, and was waiting outside Eliason’s classroom when the bell sounded and students poured out into the hallway. In minutes they had cleared the building, rushing to escape its confines. Deidre waited patiently for Judith to appear.

  “Can I help you with something?” the teacher asked as she approached Deidre in the hall. Deidre extended her hand.

  “I’m Deidre Johnson, and I was hoping I could speak with your son, Nick. I thought since you work in this building the three of us could meet.” She tried to accompany her request with a sincere smile.

  A frown crept over Judith Eliason’s face. “Who are you, and why do you want to speak to Nick?”

  “I’m helping to investigate the death of Justin Peters, which occurred over the weekend, and I’d like to talk to Nick about any contact he may have had with Justin.”

  “And what makes you think Nick would know anything about that?” Deidre could see she had lit a fuse, and the woman was about to explode. “My Nicky would never hurt anyone! I suppose you’ve talked to his mother, and she told you those lies about my son being a bully. Well, they’re not true.” She stepped closer to Deidre and continued her rant.

  “I’m tired of everyone saying that Nicky is a bully. He’s not. And now you come here accusing him of murder. Back off, lady. You’re standing in my personal space.” Deidre could tell Mrs. Eliason was trying to intimidate her by backing her against the wall, but she held her ground.

  “Mrs. Eliason, I wish you would calm down. No one is accusing your son of murder. I’m only trying to gather information that might give me a clue as to why Justin would have been so badly mistreated.”

  Judith thrust her jaw out. “From what I hear, you already have his killer in jail. Whatever happened, my guess is that Justin did something to this O’Brian guy to make him commit the crime. You know those people. They have a way of throwing their lifestyle in our faces. Not everybody appreciates that.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘their lifestyle’? Are you trying to tell me something, Mrs. Eliason?” Deidre looked the woman square in her eyes and waited for an answer.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” she shot back.

  “I think I do,” Deidre replied, her disdain for how the conversation was transpiring evident in her voice. “I presume you are not going to help me speak with Nick.”

  “I certainly am not!”

  “And there is absolutely no truth to the allegations that your son was bullying Justin?” Deidre pressured.

  “Absolutely none!”

  “Then why, after the school and Nick were threatened with legal action, did the nonexistent bullying stop?” Deidre held her ground, and Judith Eliason went speechless for a moment.

  “It’s all a lie,” she said and retreated to her classroom, slamming the door to make it clear that Deidre was not welcome to follow.

  Deidre made a few notes in her book and checked her watch. It was nearly four, time to become a mother and wife again. Heeding T.J.’s advice to not check in with every detail, she didn’t drive through town but took the back roads. On the drive home, she began to see the law from the other side of the fence. What had once seemed to be black and white was becoming more gray all the time. By the time she pulled into their driveway, she was nearly convinced the only thing James O’Brian was guilty of was making some very self-destructive decisions.

  Chapter Nine

  The ore docks in the harbor stand at least ten stories above the water. Railroad gondola cars lined up on tracks running atop the structure are filled with a partially refined product of the Iron Range made from low iron content taconite, and are emptied into waiting ships bound for eastern steel mills. A secluded bait shop sat near the tracks not far from where they curve onto the docks, and customers had to wend their way through a maze of gravel roads to find it.

  It was Monday of the third week of April when its proprietor, Mel, unlocked the door to the shop. He wasn’t in a hurry to open, because the lakes were covered with rotten ice, the kind that wasn’t safe to walk on. There was still no open water for anglers to float a boat. Business would be nonexistent. He planned to spend the day organizing the shop, unpacking inventory, and preparing for ­walleye season, which was set to open in May. In the distance Mel heard the sound of an approaching ore train coming down the incline to the docks. He was so accustomed to their passing the sound hardly registered. He had just cut open a carton of lures when everything in the shop began to rattle and shake.

  Mel grabbed a shelf to steady himself, but it broke loose from the wall, and he fell backwards onto the floor. He could hear screeching and the sound of metal being crumpled, and it felt like an earthquake, but that made no sense at all in Two Harbors. When it seemed as though the noise and quaking was never going to stop, it did, followed by an eerie silence.

  The shopkeeper picked himself up off the floor and looked out the window, but he couldn’t see anything. A wall of black dust was rolling toward him, and he knew in a second or two his shop would be enveloped by the cloud. He tried to orient himself, but his mind wasn’t cooperating.

  As Mel stood in the middle of the chaos inside his bait store, he became aware of sirens wailing. By the sound of them, they were getting closer. In seconds the first fire truck pulled in, followed by two police cars, a state highway trooper, and another fire truck. Just when he thought there would be no more emergency vehicles, two ambulances braked to a stop, sending up mini-clouds of dust that mixed with the particulates already suspended in the air.

  By that time, the firemen in the first truck had their hoses hooked up, and Mel saw a stream of water shooting toward the track. In minutes, the water began to pound the dust down, revealing a heap of twisted steel. The wheel assemblies of gondola cars were piled helter-skelter, some buried in the wreckage, some sitting atop a three-story-tall pile. Everywhere he looked, Mel saw wreckage. He knew somewhere under the pile of steel the locomotive was probably buried. He hoped the engineer and brakeman had jumped before the wreck occurred. All he could do was sit on a bench outside his store and watch as he regained his senses.

  In his bewilderment, he watched one of the firemen run to a nearby steel fabricating business and gesture wildly to workers who had run out of the building. One of them climbed onto a mobile hoist. Mel saw black smoke escape from its exhaust stack when its diesel engine started. The driver moved the slow-moving machine toward the wreckage, its engines whining because of the RPMs. It seemed to take forever for the driver to reach the spot to where he was being directed.

  Workers who had arrived from the docks began to hoo
k chains to something, and Mel watched as the hoist lifted what was left of a gondola car, swung it out of the way, and lowered it to the ground. Time after time the procedure was repeated, first a car, then an axle with a set of wheels attached, another gondola car body, more wheels, until the junk was piled high beside the roadbed. All motion stopped, or seemed to.

  The hoist operator inched the powerful machine forward, and Mel realized he had uncovered the engine. Workers on the ground attached chains to the locomotive, and the hoist groaned as its winch was activated. The massive tires of the hoist squatted from the load, and the diesel belched exhaust, but nothing moved. The operator tried again, and Mel saw him shake his head as he eased off on the power.

  After a five-minute wait, another hoist, a bigger one, roared up from the railroad shops. The two hoists were parked side by side, and together they were able to roll the engine a few feet up from its side. Mel watched in amazement as a worker risked his life by stooping and crawling under it. He pulled something out and went back under. Just as he dragged another something out from under the deadly trap and got out of the way himself, a chain either slipped or broke, and the engine crashed to the ground.

  Mel had regained his senses, or at least he was cognizant of what was happening, and as he watched the EMTs carry two draped stretchers to the waiting ambulances, he knew there hadn’t been time for the engineer and brakeman to jump. He locked the door to his shop and left for downtown. In The Pub, he ordered a brandy on the rocks. His hand was shaking as he lifted the glass to his lips and took a gulp. In one motion, he set the glass down and motioned for the bartender to pour another drink. Then he sat and stared at the glass of brandy and ice. Other than him and the bartender, the place was empty. Everyone downtown had heard the crash and had rushed to look at what happened.