Gone to Dust

by Matt Goldman

  “Well, good job then. And to answer your question, no, I didn’t grow up in Edina. I grew up in New Hope, a misnamed town if there ever was one.”

  “Then how do you know Andrew Fine?”

  “I said I know his brother, Stevey. I only kind of know Andrew. And I kind of know him because all Minneapolis Jews know each other. It’s mandatory. We have to take a test and everything.”

  McGinnis looked disappointed. I wondered what he’d expected to hear. Or perhaps it was a general disappointment in the private detective he’d just hired.

  Ellegaard said, “Two uniforms found Fine at home at his Indian Hills estate. When they told him Maggie had been murdered, he didn’t seem too upset. Just said it was a shame.”

  “Well, we have a clear place to start,” I said.

  McGinnis dumped a packet of sugar into his latte and stirred without taking his eyes off me. “And where is that?”

  “Whoever killed Maggie had a key or at least left the house with one. No dead bolts had been left unlocked. And he—and I am going to assume it’s a he for now—knew Maggie well, if not intimately.”

  “Why do you think that?” said Ellegaard.

  “For starters, there was no sign of a struggle.”

  “We won’t know that until we dust her off,” said McGinnis.

  “Everything was in place. The body was on top of a perfectly made bed. My guess is Maggie was comfortable with the killer until it was too late.” McGinnis stirred his latte as if he was trying to dissolve rocks. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the killer rode straight into the garage in the victim’s car.”

  Ellegaard sipped his chamomile tea. He didn’t drink caffeine either. I don’t know how he survived. Or why, for that matter. “You think Maggie Somerville drove her own killer into her garage?”

  “It’s possible. If she went out last night. We should have CSU examine her car for hair and fibers.” McGinnis looked dubious. “And Chief McGinnis is right—the killer planned the murder well in advance. That dust has to be from a vacuum cleaner bag—nothing else looks like that. But not just one bag. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. It takes time to amass that many vacuum cleaner bags full of dirt.”

  “Unless he went fishing in a hotel garbage bin,” said Ellegaard.

  “That’s true,” I said. “But Dumpster diving outside a hotel is risky. I tailed an unfaithful husband, who frequented hotels, and I had to dig through the Dumpsters to prove what he’d been up to. I avoided video surveillance and hotel dicks who’d been looking for an excuse to kick someone’s ass. And even if all that dirt did come from vacuum cleaner bags in a hotel Dumpster—that takes some planning, too.”

  “And what about getting all that dust in the house,” said Ellegaard. “How did the killer do that without anyone noticing?”

  “I don’t know, but it all points to one thing: the killer was close to Maggie Somerville. So close he gave her a peaceful death—he even shut her eyes. He knew he’d be a suspect. That’s why he filled the crime scene with the DNA and fibers of thousands of people. We could test that house for decades and never isolate forensic evidence that pointed to one suspect. And if the killer is worried about DNA, then chances are his DNA is in the system.”

  McGinnis stopped stirring. I had his attention.

  “And then there’s the weather.”

  “What about it?” said Ellegaard.

  “The killer waited for a weather event like last night. The ground was frozen solid. He left on that. No footprints. No indentations. No anything. And he took extra precaution by leaving at the beginning of a heavily forecasted snowstorm. No way in hell can we track his exit out of that house.”

  McGinnis and Ellegaard looked at each other and communicated telepathically the way cops can after working together for fifteen years. The androgynous barista swooped by and dropped a napkin on the table in front of me. It said EXMAGICIAN.

  “Here’s how we’re going to do this,” said McGinnis. “Ellegaard, you question Robert Somerville and Andrew Fine. See if either of them have a key to Maggie Somerville’s house. And that neighbor lady…”

  Ellegaard consulted his notes. “Beth Lindquist.”

  “Find out everything she knows about Maggie Somerville’s personal life. How much she played. Where she hung out. If her child-custody schedule was strict so we can check local spots on her nights without the kids. Follow up with every name you hear about. Family. Friends. And I want a list of all Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, and whatever other connections she has. Get the names and run ’em. See if anything turns up. If Mr. Shapiro here is right, we got to pay attention to anyone whose DNA is in the system.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ellegaard, just like he did at the academy when some leatherneck told him how to jump over a fence or put on his armor. He was damn close to making lieutenant and he wouldn’t stop playing the good boy, and I kind of loved him for it.

  “And you might as well hit some hotels,” said McGinnis. “See if anyone’s noticed full vacuum cleaner bags disappearing from garbage bins or wherever the hell else they’d disappear from. And bring a sample of our dust. See if it looks more like the dust of one hotel over another. Might as well start learning what we can about the stuff.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That sounded like an awful lot of work I wouldn’t be doing. But I knew Ellegaard was getting the easy road.

  “Nils,” said McGinnis, “you’re going to attack from another angle. When it comes to our persons of interest, blend in. Observe. Tail. Make acquaintances if you can with the ex, Robert Somerville, and the boyfriend, Andrew Fine, and any other names we get from Detective Ellegaard. Edina PD will apply the heat and draw focus. You slip into their lives when their guard is down. And use those boyish looks of yours to meet Maggie Somerville’s single friends.” He looked like he was about to take back that idea. He thought a moment, peering down at his stirred-to-death latte then looked back up. “Are you married?”

  Ellegaard’s cell rang. He answered it.

  “I was married,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, as if we had something in common. “Marriage. It’s complicated, isn’t it?”

  “My marriage was simple. My divorce is complicated.”

  He considered asking more but thought better of it. “None of this is S.O.P.,” he said, “but we’re going to have a frightened little suburb on our hands and I want to put this to bed as soon as possible. If anyone asks who you are, tell the truth. You’re a private detective investigating the murder of Maggie Somerville. Just don’t reveal who you’re working for.”

  “I never do.”

  “And another thing, Shapiro. Don’t get too wrapped up in your theories an hour after we left the crime scene. Keep your ears and eyes open. Follow the trail that presents itself.”

  I nodded as Ellegaard hung up the phone. “That was CSU,” he said. “Maggie Somerville’s car is full of gray dust.”

  3

  Ellegaard dropped me at the shitbox around lunchtime then headed out to interview Robert Somerville and Andrew Fine. We planned to meet after dinner so he could fill me in. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it in front of the Bengals/Colts play-off game. I wanted to care about the game but didn’t. I’d lost interest in sports, which I chalked up to the general anesthesia I’d mainlined to survive Micaela. Couldn’t stick with a game, couldn’t get through a book, couldn’t give a damn about beautiful women. I’d pissed off more than a few, which was preferable to the others who I had straight-out hurt. At thirty-eight years old, and for the first time in my life, I’d turned into one of those guys.

  My anesthetic wasn’t booze or drugs or ego or even sex, not that I didn’t partake in a few of those. It was a concoction mixed of equal parts perseverance and stubborn-headedness and garnished with a big old sprig of fuck everything. The humane thing would have been for me to withdraw from everyone female, but that would have infused my concoction with a lethal dose of despair. Because every damn one of them, at least for a litt
le while, gave me hope. Albeit hope at their expense.

  I trudged out to the garage, grabbed a shovel, and faced the driveway. It wasn’t big but it lay under a foot and a half of heart-attack snow. A plow had pushed through the alley, and now a three-foot-tall wall of dirty ice bordered the driveway. I checked my weather app to see if Mother Nature would give me an excuse to procrastinate. She would not. The temperature had started to drop—every white and gray crystal on my driveway would soon freeze into cement.

  I stepped back into the shitbox a couple hours later and tossed my sweat-soaked clothing down the laundry chute. I showered and got dressed and saw I’d missed two calls, one from Ellie and one from Micaela.

  Micaela’s message said, “Hey, Nils. Wondering if you want to see a movie later. Something art house with powdered wigs, perhaps. Call me.”

  Then I listened to Ellegaard’s message. “I just finished with the husband. You’ll want to crash Maggie Somerville’s funeral. So get your suit cleaned or, knowing you, get a suit. Meet you at 8:00. Somewhere the good citizens of Edina don’t go.”

  I called Micaela and told her I couldn’t see a movie with her because I’d started on a new case.

  “It’s good you’re working,” she said. I knew she meant it. I also knew she meant a couple other things.

  “Yeah, well. It’s been known to happen.”

  I looked out my front window. Karyn and Alice across the street were shoveling their sidewalk. Together. Why couldn’t I find love like that? Their two shovels hung next to each other in the garage. I’d gone to their wedding—a golden retriever bore their rings. A fucking golden retriever named Belvedere. They picked up his shit every day with their bagged hands and still bestowed upon Belvedere the honor of running to the wedding party with a pair of platinum bands tied to his collar. That was a good wedding. They lived a good love.

  The only woman I’d had anything like that with was Micaela, who became my wife and then my ex-wife and then lingered like a chronic sinus infection. She’d flare up every once in awhile and ask me to see a movie followed by a few whiskeys at Bradstreet then an hour or so of naked tomfoolery in her big bedroom that looked out on Lake Harriet. Then we’d go our separate ways, but the fever would knock me down for weeks.

  “I hope they’re paying you what you’re worth,” said Micaela.

  “No need to insult me.”

  She laughed and we talked about catching that movie another time, though I wondered if there would be another time.

  I met Ellegaard at Liquor Lyle’s on Hennepin. The walls were covered in sheet paneling, big TVs, neon beer signs, and vinyl wall hangings advertising drink specials during Monday Night Football even though Monday Night Football was over for the season. A dozen tap handles jailed the bartender, including one for Fireball and another for Jägermeister, potions which in some countries were probably sold as cold and flu medicine. We found a booth in the corner. Ellegaard had changed into something from REI made of zippers and recycled soda bottles.

  Sturdy-framed young women who flocked in threes and fours glanced our way. I’d forgotten how it went with Ellegaard and me in a bar. The tall, handsome Nordic guy who attracted most of them and the shorter, Irish-looking guy who attracted one or two of them and didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in him unless you counted Jameson.

  The sturdy frames probably graduated from high school in Osseo or Fridley and then went to work as cashiers or in low-level office jobs. They dyed their hair at home, took their daily exercise chewing hamburgers, set their DVRs to record UFC, and bought slinky underwear at Target. Most of their friends had married before turning twenty-one. But these women had not, so here they were. I wondered what it would be like to go home with one of them. I didn’t expect I would but I ordered a whiskey, neat, to give it a fighting chance.

  Ellegaard ordered a soda with bitters. When I pointed out that bitters was alcohol he reminded me that he wasn’t a teetotaler—he’d never had a drinking problem. He didn’t abstain for moral reasons, he simply didn’t enjoy alcohol so he didn’t consume it. But soda and bitters calmed his stomach, and his stomach needed calming.

  “We ran Robert Somerville and Andrew Fine,” he started. “Both are in the system.”

  “That’s a little weird,” I said.

  “Somerville wrote a not-so-nice letter to George W. Bush. We don’t have access to it, but it made enough of an impression that the FBI paid him a visit, swabbed his cheek, and started a file on him.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  “He said he was upset about Bush destabilizing the Middle East by going into Iraq. That hundreds of thousands of innocent people would die while creating a more fertile environment for terrorists and eventually terrorist states.”

  “He should have been a futurist.”

  “Yeah. Well, Somerville also said something along the lines of if Bush ever came to Minnesota, he’d regret it. That’s what triggered the FBI’s visit. Somerville told me he’d heard a rumor that Bush was going to throw out the first pitch for the Twins’ home opener, and all he meant by the comment was Minnesota fans would boo him off the mound. But the FBI didn’t see it that way.

  “Other than that, Robert Somerville seems more hippie than anything else. He owns a company that raises sheep on a big spread down in Zumbrota. The sheep run wild and eat organic grass. Somerville’s employees milk them to make cheese, sheer them to make wool products, and when they die of natural causes they make their hides into boots.”

  “A whole vertical sheep operation,” I said. “Use every part of the buffalo, right?”

  “It’s strange you say that because now he’s doing the same thing with bison. No one wants bison milk, of course, but he’s started a renewable fuel plant that runs on bison manure. When the bison die, again of natural causes, he’ll make the hides into a new line of winter coats and sell the meat for dog food.”

  “And he makes a lot of money with the sheep and bison?”

  “The bison venture is new. Somerville dropped a ton of cash on land for them to roam. But he does make money on the sheep. Mostly on the boots. A decade or so ago some kids in Manhattan started wearing them and the boots took off. Kids all over the world want those boots.”

  “Bet he’s got those sheep driving without seat belts to keep up with demand.”

  “He can’t meet the demand. That’s what makes the business work. He keeps raising prices—people keep buying. Inventory’s gone every year before Thanksgiving.”

  “So Robert Somerville is in the system because he threatened George W., but other than that, he seems clean.”

  “Yep.”

  “Alibi?”

  “That’s not so clean. Said he was home asleep with his kids, who were also asleep. Said he woke up around 8:00 this morning, was making pancakes like on any other Sunday, and got the news when a uniform knocked on his door.”

  The waitress brought our drinks and asked if we wanted to pay or keep the tab open. I said keep it open and told Ellegaard to give her a card. He shot me a look, and I reminded him this was Edina PD business. He gave her the card, and she left.

  “And when I talked to Somerville,” said Ellegaard, “he was a mess.”

  “That could be for a few reasons.”

  Ellegaard stirred his bitters and soda making it a bubbly, uniform reddish orange. “I agree. But he doesn’t seem like the type.”

  “Well, whoever killed Maggie Somerville isn’t the type. That’s why he went through all the trouble to cover his tracks. Did you run a search on ‘vacuum cleaner–bag murder’?”

  “Yeah. Nothing. It’s a first. I think Chief McGinnis was disappointed.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’d hoped we were looking at a serial killer to take the heat off Edina. Like it was going to happen no matter what and it was just bad luck it happened in the bubble.”

  Half a dozen twentysomethings took their time getting through the front door. A wave of cold rippled to the f
ar end of the bar.

  I crossed my arms and said, “And how’s Andrew Fine doing?”

  “By a lot of people’s standards, he’s doing well.”

  “He was a son-of-a-bitch when we were kids.”

  “He’s made the bulk of his fortune in call centers. When the business started going to India, he cut costs. Hires a lot of Somalis and Hmong. Schedules them in a way that doesn’t conflict with cultural and religious obligations.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. I suppose he’s got his Jewish mother working on Christmas.”

  “When he was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a coed accused him of rape. A medical exam of the coed couldn’t find any physical evidence of forced penetration. Fine’s lawyer argued that Fine and the alleged victim had consensual sex, but because of the victim’s strict religious upbringing, she claimed she was raped.”

  “Does that make sense?”

  “Fine told me the girl was Persian. And when a Persian woman gets married, the couple consummates during the wedding party. Then the old aunts run in to make sure there’s blood on the sheets.”

  “If I ever get invited to a Persian wedding, guess I’m giving them new sheets.”

  “The jury agreed that the woman hoped to explain the loss of her virginity by claiming she was raped.”

  “Really. Why would she put herself through a trial instead of sneaking a vile of blood into her wedding bed. It could be any kind of blood—it’s not like her aunts were going to test it.”

  “You think Fine raped her?”

  “The Andrew Fine I used to know was a bad dude.” I took my first sip of Jameson. They didn’t sell the good stuff in a place like Liquor Lyle’s, but the cheap stuff could be good, sometimes. That’s the thing with Jameson. Some bottles are smooth. Some bottles burn like hell. You don’t know which until it’s open. I’d caught a bad one and told myself it’d get better with each sip. “Social media makes me tired, but I sure hope to hell people use it to share and find common stories like that one. Get those guys’ names out there. That’ll be a far better punishment for those assholes than the courts are giving them. And a far better warning to other women.”