Gone to Dust

by Matt Goldman

“Who told you that?”

  “Beth. She said it with admiration, not like you were trespassing on her turf.”

  “Yeah, Maggie was funny about her lawn. She loved to tell everyone how she did it herself. It was some sort of statement of being self-sufficient.”

  “But she didn’t do it herself?”

  “She kind of did, but she was in over her head. Sometimes her kids would help but they were so fucking over-scheduled. Sports and guitar lessons and church youth groups and mountains of homework. So she’d try to do it all herself, and she would for the first couple waves of leaves. But those red oaks drop their leaves so late, weeks after the other leaves have fallen. So she had to rake all over again. It went right up to when the snow fell. So Perry and Beth would help. Even her ex-husband helped sometimes.”

  “Yeah, they appear to have had a pretty friendly divorce.”

  “Seemed to me like they did. From what I could tell, they split up because they grew apart. Other than their kids, they were interested in different things. I was in the garage once when Robert stopped by to pick something up for the kids. I didn’t meet him, but Maggie was out front raking, and I overheard him say she should hire someone. She said she wouldn’t. He said she was being stubborn and out of touch with reality and the whole family had the calluses to prove it. That was December a year ago, and she had a garage full of bagged leaves because they stop picking up around November first. But those damn red oaks drop long after that. So the leaves were just sitting there waiting until they started picking up in the spring again.”

  “Thanks for sharing all this with me, Stevey. Especially during such a terrible time.” I stood. “I have to get going. When is Andrew’s funeral?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. The chapel and cemetery on Xerxes.”

  “I’ll see you there. And tell your mom and sister not to pay any attention to the news about Andrew being a suspect in Maggie’s murder. That’ll be all cleared up before Andrew’s in the ground.”

  “Thanks, Nils. I appreciate it.”

  I put on my jacket and walked over to the front door and slipped into my Sorels. “Are these condos or apartments?”

  “Condos. Are you interested? There’s a few for sale in the building.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am interested. I’ll check it out.”

  33

  I got back to the car and called Ellegaard. When he answered the phone he said, “We got a match.”

  “Exact?”

  “Exact. The carpet is a hundred percent wool so it takes the dye differently every time. Anything on your end?”

  I said, “A lot.”

  “Does it fit?”

  “Oh, yeah. It fits. All of it. We’ll need McGinnis’s help—he’ll have to be a real cop again. At least for a day. I’ll meet you at the station in fifteen.”

  On the drive to the Edina police station, I called Lauren. She’d heard about Andrew Fine and assumed I’d cancel our date. I told her I was going on three hours of sleep and had a few more hours of work but hoped to make it. It might end early but, if she were still up for it, I’d love to meet her for dinner. She was and gave me her address. I said I’d pick her up at 8:00 unless she heard otherwise.

  At 5:30, Ellegaard and I knocked on Beth Lindquist’s door. Perry answered. He wore canary-colored wide-wale cords and a kelly green sweater.

  “Mr. Shapiro. Twice in one day. I’m honored.”

  “Well, thank you. Perry, this is Detective Ellegaard from the Edina police department.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Perry, “I remember Detective Ellegaard. Please come in.”

  “Is Beth home?”

  “No, sorry. She’s out for her run. I told her to go before the snow started but she’s a creature of habit.”

  “Do you mind if we wait until she gets back?” said Ellegaard.

  “Not at all. Come on into the living room and have a seat. She went out for a twenty but that was some time ago. She shouldn’t be long.” I sat on the couch. Ellegaard sat in the chair closest to the foyer. “I just got dressed for the big Edina game tonight. We’re going up against Eden Prairie at Braemar. They’re ranked one and we’re ranked two. One of their wings and their center have already committed to play at the U. Should be a heck of a game. Make yourself comfortable, gentlemen. I was just about to help myself to a pre-game beer. Who’d like to join me?”

  “No, thank you,” said Ellegaard.

  “I’m good but thanks, Perry.”

  He smiled. “Suit yourself. Be right back.”

  Perry went into the kitchen. Ellegaard adjusted the wire under his shirt. I heard Perry pry the top off his bottle of beer and then, “You sure I can’t get you one?”

  “Positive,” I said. “The detective here doesn’t drink, and I’m operating on a few hours sleep. But thanks again.” I heard the cabinet door open and a glass being set down on the counter. A minute later, Perry joined us holding a glass of pilsner in one hand and a tobacco pipe in the other. He sat in the chair next to Ellegaard’s.

  “I’m not going to smoke the pipe. I smoke it in the duck blind and just like having it in my hand sometimes. Although I’ll tell you, Beth does not care for it. When the door opens, don’t think badly of me if I hide it before she walks in.”

  “We’re all still boys at heart,” I said.

  Perry smiled. “That’s true. Say, I hope you’re here to tell us you tied up your loose ends and confirmed that Andrew Fine killed Maggie.”

  “I wish we were, Perry. But it hasn’t worked out that way.”

  “Eh, that’s too bad. My bride’s been through an awful lot this week. Finding Maggie’s killer would give her some relief.”

  “I know,” said Ellegaard. “It’d be nice for Maggie’s kids and family, too.”

  “Sorry,” said Perry. “I was a bit selfish and insensitive.” He looked at his watch. “She really should be back any minute.”

  The room was quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the dining room. Then Ellegaard said, “Nils mentioned you work at DBC Systems.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We were out there last night. Your alarm went off.”

  “Really? I didn’t hear anything about it.”

  “Apparently, the cleaning crew set it off. So not a big deal. But whenever an alarm goes off at one of the defense contractors in town, Edina PD takes it seriously.”

  “Well, I appreciate it, Detective. I really do.”

  I said, “Did you know that Andrew Fine owned the Hyland Lakes Office Park on Highway 100 and 494?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “His brother Stevey, the guy you know as Slim, manages it.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It is. Because the carpet throughout all five buildings of that office park matches the carpet fibers we found scattered in the vacuum cleaner dirt in Maggie’s house.”

  “Are you saying Slim killed Maggie?”

  “It’s hard to overlook the coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “It is. Have you questioned Slim? I suppose it’s kind of tough right after his brother was killed.”

  “I’ve talked to him, but the police haven’t. The thing that bugs me is that whoever killed Maggie did such a brilliant job of covering their tracks. I mean, I don’t want to glorify such a horrible deed, but it was almost a perfect murder—eliminating any possibility of finding DNA evidence or footprints or fingerprints.… There wasn’t even a forced entry that could give us clues. So it seems kind of simpleminded of the killer to use vacuum cleaner bags collected from his or her own building.”

  “In my line of work,” said Perry, “everyone makes a mistake. They think they’ve taken all the precautions to wipe information off their laptops, but it lives in the recesses of their hard drives or in a server in some godforsaken place on this earth. It’s almost impossible to hide information nowadays.”

  I looked at my phone. “Should we be worried about Beth? It must be slick out there.”


  “She hasn’t had a fall yet,” said Perry. “But if she’s not back soon, I’ll go look for her. I asked her to take her phone, but she doesn’t like to.”

  “The strange thing is,” said Ellegaard, “when that alarm went off at your company today, and we drove out to make sure everything was okay, I noticed that your building has the exact same carpet as Andrew Fine’s office park.”

  Perry’s genteel smile stayed put. “I’m not sure what you’re implying, Detective.”

  “I can clear that up for you,” I said. “Detective Ellegaard is implying—well, we’re implying—you killed Maggie Somerville.”

  34

  “Gentlemen,” said Perry, “I don’t know what went wrong with your investigation, but you’ve made an egregious mistake. Why would I kill Maggie?”

  “You know, Perry,” I said, “that’s what’s been so difficult in this case. Why would anyone kill Maggie? By all accounts she was a lovely, easygoing person. She wasn’t sexually assaulted. Nothing was stolen from her. It wasn’t a serial killer. Someone just wanted her dead. And when that happens, it’s almost always the husband or boyfriend. So we looked hard at Robert Somerville and Andrew Fine. But Robert, that guy won’t even kill the bacteria in his armpits—there’s no way he’d kill Maggie. And Andrew, man, we had Andrew pegged for it. But what you couldn’t have known is Andrew’s an acquaintance of mine, so when he became a suspect, he consulted me about the investigation. I spent some time with him, got to know him better, and he opened up to me about his life. And the more I learned about Andrew Fine the more I realized he neither had the motive nor the capability of plotting and executing the crime. The guy was a great salesman, but he didn’t have the attention span to pull off the logistics.”

  “That very well may be,” said Perry, “but it doesn’t mean I had anything to do with Maggie’s death.”

  Ellegaard said, “We know Andrew Fine’s inability to pull off such a well-planned murder doesn’t prove you did it. That’s the tough part because you planned it so well. It must have taken a long time, if for no other reason than to accumulate that much vacuum cleaner dirt.”

  Perry shifted his weight in his chair. His amiable expression shifted to neutral and disengaged, as if he were watching a bad TV show. He checked his watch.

  “You were so close to getting away with it, Perry. When I realized Andrew Fine didn’t kill Maggie, I thought we had to start all over again. Maybe that Slim character wrote the letters and he’s our killer. Then I had a hunch who Slim was so I came over here this morning. Beth confirmed my suspicion. Slim is Stevey Fine. Then she said Slim and Maggie could have been so happy together and that Maggie deserved happiness and love more than any person she knows. That rang a bell for me. It took me a few minutes to put it together—I’ve only had three hours of sleep—but while driving away this morning I realized Beth’s words about Maggie deserving happiness more than any person she knows, that was in the love letters. Almost verbatim. So I wondered if Beth could have written those letters. And Stevey Fine confirmed that she did.

  “I can see from your expression, Perry, that you know what letters I’m talking about.” Perry put the pipe in his mouth but didn’t let go of the bowl.

  “Maggie figured out early on who wrote those letters. Your problem, Perry, is not that Beth wrote them. It’s that you discovered them and you didn’t factor in the possibility of Maggie saving them. And why would you, the way Maggie rejected Beth? But that’s the kind of person Maggie was. She thought the letters were sweet. Even though they were from her best friend. And so she saved them. And their existence unraveled everything for you.

  “Because until we knew who wrote those letters, they implied that a secret admirer was out there. Someone we didn’t know about. And that unknown person became a suspect. We never would have guessed they were written by Beth if she hadn’t quoted one to me.”

  “Your delusion,” said Perry, “is starting to become worrisome. How could I discover the letters if Maggie had them?”

  “Excellent question. I wondered the same thing. Beth obviously didn’t tell you. She mailed them from all over the city. Then I remembered. Your field is cyber forensics. All it would have taken from you was a little suspicion.

  “It must have been sad, Perry. Beth could no longer love you the way she used to. She didn’t have the capacity, or maybe ‘availability’ is a better word, because she was in love with Maggie. And when you love someone so dearly, to the point that they’re your reason for existence, it hurts like a mother when they don’t love you back. I mean, it’s a debilitating pain. And that empty hole created by Beth no longer being in love with you, well, that awful feeling was your seed of suspicion that maybe Beth loved someone else.

  “You’re an old-fashioned couple. You haven’t added on to your house. You don’t live above your means. You have one computer. You share one computer. That Dell on that desk right there. And that’s how you knew about Beth’s love letters to Maggie. You found them on the hard drive, even if she deleted them. Because you know how to do that, Perry. That’s your expertise. Even if Beth never saved the letters, you installed a program that captured every keystroke typed on that keyboard. You did something. And I know for a fact it happened at that computer.”

  Perry sat still and quiet. He swallowed and said, “And how do you know that?”

  “Because there was this crazy coincidence that happened when Maggie got killed. See, she has a daughter no one else knows about. Her name is Ansley Bell, and Maggie had her when she was fifteen. Do you want me to stop because you know all this?”

  “I don’t know any of it,” said Perry.

  “Maggie gave Ansley up for adoption, and Ansley grew up in California. But she didn’t get along with her adoptive parents so well, and when she was still in high school, she met a guy who saved her from them by marrying her. But she’d made a mistake, so she ran away and hid in Minnesota after discovering her birth mother lived here. Maggie and Ansley made up for their years apart by becoming dear friends. Maggie offered to help Ansley obtain a divorce. She wrote a letter to a lawyer and, goddamnit, Perry, she wrote it on that computer, probably so she could get away from her kids for a few minutes to think clearly. And you found that letter when you found the others. It included the contact information for Ansley’s ex-husband and the fact that she’d been hiding from him for eight years. So to get back at Maggie for stealing the love of your life, you tipped off Ansley’s ex-husband and told him where he could find his long-lost wife.”

  “I didn’t make that connection,” said Ellegaard. “Interesting.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said. “That crazy coincidence of Ansley’s mother dying and her ex-husband showing up wasn’t a coincidence at all. Both incidents were born in that computer. The only coincidence was the snowstorm giving you the opportunity to kill Maggie shortly after you wrote to Ansley’s husband telling him where she was.”

  Perry removed the pipe from his mouth and took a big gulp of beer.

  “The stupid thing on our part is we back-burnered the letters when Andrew Fine looked like our killer. But this morning, after we realized Andrew Fine didn’t kill Maggie, we came back to the letters. Maybe they were important, after all. Especially because the day I received the letters from Robert Somerville, someone broke into my house. I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t know what they were looking for. I know, it makes me look kind of stupid. But I didn’t think whoever broke in would be after the letters, that the burglar wanted to intercept them on their way to Edina PD. I didn’t consider that possibility because the letters weren’t written by a killer. The sender genuinely loved Maggie in the most unselfish way. I don’t know if you read any of those letters, Perry, but trust me, they are beautiful.”

  Perry slouched forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees.

  “I hate to sound defensive, but maybe another reason I didn’t connect the letters to the break-in is I didn’t have them. I went home after seeing Robert Somerv
ille then I took them to Detective Ellegaard.”

  “I have the letters,” said Ellegaard.

  “I wonder where Beth is,” said Perry. “She really should be home by now.”

  “Then I wondered if you knew those letters still existed, so I called Robert Somerville. He told me he was going through Maggie’s stuff after she died, and he ran into you outside the house. He told you he found a collection of love letters written to Maggie by a secret admirer. He said that—what were his words?—‘They just added some weirdness to tragedy.’

  “I don’t know if you wanted the letters because you were afraid they could incriminate you or because you wanted to protect Beth. Either way, you planned to take them from Robert Somerville’s house. My guess is you were casing the place when I walked out carrying the letters in the same decorative box that Robert had carried out of Maggie’s house when he told you about them. Then you followed me to my house and waited for me to leave. I’m pretty good at spotting a tail, Perry, but you were trained in spec ops. I’m guessing you’re better at that game than I am.”

  “This is sounding quite fanciful, Mr. Shapiro.” His voice was dry and hoarse. The beer couldn’t fix it.

  “But when you broke into my place to look for the letters, you made a mistake. You took your cell phone with you. And you should have known better. Because my neighbors across the street, Karyn and Alice, they refuse to protect their Wi-Fi network with a password. They invite neighbors to use it for free because they hate the cable company and it’s their way of getting back at them. So your phone jumped onto their network. And I’m sure you know how easy it is to see what devices have used a network and for how long. That log puts your phone within a hundred feet of my house for twenty minutes during the time frame it was broken into.”

  Perry rubbed his chin. “If that were true, that would, at best, make me guilty of breaking and entering, not murder. I didn’t kill Maggie Somerville. You have no evidence that proves otherwise. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m genuinely concerned about my wife. She’s been gone over three hours.”