Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  “Who knew about it?”

  Varma shook his head. “Nobody.”

  “Okay,” Kruse said, sounding impatient. “Show him.”

  Varma seemed a little nervous, almost embarrassed. “All right then.” He played a video recorded by a camera that must’ve been mounted right here in the office.

  It took Reed by surprise. “Wait a minute – I thought you had video of the truck lot. Outside the diner somewhere…”

  “No. This is hidden in here. I… it’s not that I don’t trust my workers, but I thought if there was ever a break-in… we do keep some cash in the safe, right here by your feet.”

  Reed looked around. “Where is the camera now?” He had a rough idea where it should be based on the angle of view that showed on the computer. But he didn’t see it.

  “I took it,” Kruse said. “It’s bagged and tagged in case we need it. You should just watch.”

  On-screen, the door to the office opened, but not all the way. A man stood in the doorway with a hand on the knob. Only his bare, muscled arm was visible for a few seconds, as if he was talking to another person outside, out of view. Then the arm disappeared as the man went back out.

  A bad feeling formed in Reed’s gut. He wanted to break the suspense right now and ask Kruse if they were about to witness something involving Daryl Snow and Kasey Stevens. Something with the two of them having sex. Because while Lloyd Cox and Aaron Mosier were suspects, Daryl was the one who’d worked here, lived with the teenager, and shot himself after she was murdered. That, and with the inclusion of Laurie Paine, this whole thing seemed to be headed in one direction: young girls disappearing. Raped, or at least involved in illegal sexual relationships beyond good sense or emotional maturity.

  Reed didn’t say anything, and the door swung open on-screen, and Daryl Snow came in, wearing a sleeveless Harley Davidson T-shirt, blue jeans, still talking to someone outside, just his back visible. When he at last came all the way into the room, he had a woman by the hand.

  Reed exhaled.

  Julia Hetfield was immediately recognizable. Even if she was dressed quite differently than the last time he’d seen her. But his sudden relief was immediately replaced with concern for her well-being.

  “When was this?” He hadn’t seen any date or time code.

  Kruse, behind him, said, “According to Mr. Varma, this is from a month ago. April 25. Two o’clock in the morning.”

  Reed managed to pull his eyes away to look at Varma, who was nervier still, eyes averted. Varma said, “I didn’t tell you about this because I didn’t think there was any reason to.”

  “Pause it.”

  Varma did, but still avoided Reed’s eyes.

  “Did you confront Mr. Snow about this?”

  Varma hesitated, then said, “No.”

  “He had no idea you knew about this? Obviously he didn’t know there was a camera in here…” Reed glanced up at Kruse. “Can I see the camera, please?”

  “I’ll get it, yeah.” Kruse hurried outside.

  Virginia stood against the wall, arms folded, studying Varma. Reed said to him, “You didn’t commit a crime, Mr. Varma. I’m just curious. We’ve got a lot of moving parts on this case. If Daryl Snow knew he was on camera with Hetfield – if anyone knew, including you – it could have driven him to do something. Or there could have been blackmail.”

  “We haven’t seen anything yet,” Virginia said. “We’re just assuming something happened.”

  “Good point.” To Varma: “Play it, please.”

  The video going again, the two of them stood in a kind of slow dance, face-to-face, Hetfield’s hand on Snow’s belt buckle. Then Julia Hetfield grabbed Snow with force and pulled him against her, kissed him hard.

  Okay, so, then, consensual.

  Maybe. Apparently.

  In real time, Kruse burst back into the room, panting with effort. He held out a plastic baggie with a small camera inside, the kind that came on a big clip for attaching it somewhere. His eyes riveted to the screen, like he didn’t want to miss anything.

  Reed took the bag and kept watching as Hetfield undid Snow’s belt and his pants. She was definitely different from the put-together woman at the school. Her hair was loose and wild, outfit kind of slinky, low cut blouse and tight-fitting jeans. Like they’d come from a bar. Come from a bar and were looking for a place to hook up. When Hetfield got his pants down, and Snow’s bare ass was in the camera, and she dropped to her knees, Reed said, “All right. Pause it.”

  “Hang on,” Kruse said. “There’s more.”

  “I’m sure there is.” Reed turned around. The office had shelves, the kind attached to the wall with brackets, and he saw where, on the first shelf behind him, the camera had likely been. “How well did you hide it?” he asked Varma.

  “Pretty well. I watched a YouTube video using a picture in a frame to conceal the camera. So that’s what I did – set it right over there so it would aim at the safe by our feet.”

  Satisfied, Reed said, “Okay. Keep going.”

  Varma hit the space bar on the computer, and they watched Julia Hetfield fellate Snow – at least, that was the implication; mostly they watched his naked rear end. “Can we forward past this?” He turned to Kruse. “You’ve seen it all the way through, you said – why don’t you just tell me what happens?”

  Kruse looked a little sweaty. “Ah…” He leaned down and took over the keyboard, putting the video in fast-forward. “Well, okay. But you gotta see where, ah…”

  Reed watched as Snow pulled Hetfield up and spun her around so she was facing the camera. He bent her over and they had intercourse, presumably, in that position. Hetfield’s face was close to the camera, quite close, and at one point, Kruse paused it and said, “There, right there.”

  Julia Hetfield appeared to be looking right into the camera, Snow behind her, in the throes of it.

  Oh boy.

  “She’s looking right at us,” Kruse said.

  “He just said it was a picture in a frame, camera aimed through it,” Virginia challenged.

  Varma got up, moved some things around. “Here, let me show you.” He got the apparatus together. The picture was an eight by ten, a wide shot of Betty Beaver’s, taken from the road. Varma and a woman, probably his wife, and several others stood smiling in front of the diner. The gas station was just visible to the left, the truck lot would’ve been off to the right.

  “I cut a hole right here,” he said, pointing to some trees in the picture’s background. Reed saw it. “And then in the frame backing,” Varma explained. “Then the camera lens went right in there.” He took the camera, still in the bag, and showed them roughly how it worked, the small lens peeking through. It was nearly impossible to notice unless you were really looking for it, expecting it.

  “Any reason Julia Hetfield would think there was a camera in here?” Reed asked.

  Varma looked unsure.

  “How about – has she ever been here before? Have you seen her on camera before this?”

  Varma shook his head, no.

  Reed looked at Virginia. “Is this exhibitionism? Does she know?”

  “Personally,” Virginia said after a moment, “it doesn’t seem like that to me. She’s looking in this direction, but not right into the lens. There’s no knowing expression on her face or look in her eyes that suggests she’s onto it.”

  Varma put everything down and sat in the chair again. They all looked at Julia Hetfield’s face on-screen, her color high, hair even wilder.

  “She’s married,” Reed said, and added, for no particular reason, “To a psychiatrist.”

  Kruse cleared his throat. “You should play it until the end.”

  Reed checked Kruse out, but decided the guy wasn’t just being a voyeur. There was something else in his eyes.

  “All right,” Reed said. And they watched.

  Back in the car, Virginia asked, “So do we talk to Julia Hetfield next? What are you thinking?”

  In truth? It w
as hard not to keep mentally replaying the Snow-Hetfield video. Not everything that happened between Daryl Snow and Julia Hetfield in that room was for him, not his style, but still – it had stirred up some imaginings. He was only human.

  Anyway.

  Julia Hetfield was married. Daryl Snow wasn’t, but he’d seemed pretty tight with Ida. Everyone Reed had talked to considered them a couple. But, legally speaking, the person who stood to lose out on an exposed affair was Hetfield, not Snow.

  “Reed?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How are we going to handle this?”

  “I want to find out who knew. That’s one thing. She was, ah… did it look to you like she instigated most of that stuff?”

  “Sure, yeah. She was aggressive,” Virginia said. “And not all women – probably most women, I don’t know – they don’t like rough sex. Or… alternative sex. But some do. Maybe those reasons are healthy for some, maybe not for others. But while we’re sitting here diagnosing Julia Hetfield’s sexual nature, what about him? What about Snow? What did his actions say to you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No – I’m saying, there’s two of us in this car. This is speculation. I understand why you’d ask me. Now, your turn – have at it.”

  Reed thought about it. “Daryl Snow seemed happy to be there.”

  A few seconds passed and Virginia broke into a wide grin and started laughing. She had a nice laugh, that hint of troublemaker in her throat. Finally, she said, “I can’t argue with that.”

  They settled, and then his phone rang.

  Britney Silas. She sounded exhausted, and why wouldn’t she – she’d been processing one crime scene after another. “At least there was no body at this one,” she said about Cox’s place. “We got the laptop. It’s definitely his website. He’s not hiding anything, either. There wasn’t even a password screen lock. I had Kim Yom go through it and it’s just a basic Wix site. He was logged in to everything; we could see it all. There’s nothing untoward.”

  “What about the rest of the house?”

  “Nothing. The guy doesn’t own much. We got through it pretty quick. None of the dogs found anything. No mushrooms. And no evidence Kasey Stevens was ever here.”

  “Okay,” he started to say, but she wasn’t finished.

  “I did find his address book. It’s like something an old lady would have. Purple, edged in lacy stuff. It’s in the chain of custody, and it’s about the only thing.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Silas.”

  “I’m going to go sleep for a day now. Talk to you later.”

  Reed hung up and sighed. After relaying Silas’s findings, or lack thereof, to Virginia, she asked, “You gonna let him go?”

  “Yeah. We’ll kick him loose.” He added, “I think we need to take a look at everything. Get in a room, spread it all out, and see.”

  “I think you’re exactly right. First thing tomorrow morning.”

  She was right. He glanced at the clock. Time was just flying. He’d begun the day under a dark cloud, sitting in the van while on the phone with Virginia. Now she was here. Her presence was both comforting and unnerving, for different reasons.

  They went back to the motel, to their own rooms and beds. He lay awake for a while trying to turn off the images in his head. Julia Hetfield in the throes of passion. Kasey Stevens’s body, partially hidden in the bright green ferns. Tyson Wheeler’s house engulfed in fire – Pyle, panicked and pale as a cloud, holding his wounded shoulder. The dark diner kitchen, Snow in the middle of it, head lolling back in the chair amidst the sour smell of gunfire.

  A little prayer helped push it all away. A bit of deep breathing. For a few moments, thinking about Virginia some more. Her hazel eyes, the way she laughed. And he went to sleep that way.

  21

  Day Four

  Back in the day

  Another gorgeous spring morning, the sky royal blue, no hint of rain. Unfortunately, they were holed up in a conference room in the barracks, half a mile up the road from Betty Beaver’s truck stop and diner.

  With the benefit of sleep, the video of Snow and Hetfield had shrunk to a proportion more comparable to the many other puzzle pieces. Still, they had to discuss it, and did so first.

  No one knew where it fit without having further information. Such as, whether Julia Hetfield was aware she’d been recorded. Or whether Daryl Snow had known and purposely filmed Hetfield performing explicit sex acts – truly triple-X toward the end – in order to blackmail her. Or how, if at all, it related to Kasey Stevens. Maybe Kasey had been the one to find out and tried to blackmail Julia Hetfield?

  It felt too wild, too desperate a conclusion, and waving the video in Julia’s face wasn’t the move. Not yet.

  And they had something else to dig into: Reed told Kruse about the missing girl from Orville.

  “Jesus, another one?”

  Reed also told him about the reporter, Marrs, and Kruse said grumpily, “Well, it’s going to be everywhere now.”

  “Don’t worry about Marrs,” Reed said. “I plan to talk to him. I just wasn’t ready yet.”

  “Okay,” Virginia said. She set down her coffee, rolled her shoulders, and cracked her knuckles. “We’ve got three cases over a fifty-year span.” Reading from her laptop, she said, “First, here’s what we know about Orville and Laurie Paine. The Paine family have ties to the area going back to the iron ore mines that give it its name. Orville Mines started production in 1864 and are what they call a ‘producer deposit site.’ The company that ran the mines was called Republic Steel. I can’t verify it – there’s no employee records – but one newspaper clipping I found stated Laurie Paine’s father worked the mines until they closed in 1971, and then he was largely absent from the family’s life. I mention this because in my research I kept seeing the effect of Republic Steel going down – how it affected families in the region. Paine, for instance, had four daughters and one son. We can assume they struggled after the mines closed. Okay, so, now to the disappearance. It was one of the daughters who went to the sheriff and reported her sister Laurie missing.”

  “Who?” Reed asked.

  “Lois Paine. So this is May 2, 1970. It’s unclear why the mother didn’t report it, but it could just be she was reticent, and the daughter beat her to it. Lois walked herself to the police station – they had no phone – and reported that early the morning before, she’d awakened to find her sister Laurie not in her bed. Lois had waited a full day before she went and made the report. Lois was sixteen, a year older.” She looked up. “That’s what I’ve got.”

  While she was talking, Reed had used a dry-erase marker on the three whiteboards hung from one wall. There was a six-inch gap between each, but he’d drawn a timeline and designated one whiteboard per case, starting with the 1970 Laurie Paine case on the left. He’d made notes there, including Orville Mines and sister Lois.

  He moved to the middle board. “Okay – Melanie Hollander, from 1998. Her father is Roy Hollander. What was the mother’s name?”

  Virginia moved the mouse, clicked, said, “Oh…” and looked up. “Lois,” she finished.

  He felt his pulse quicken. “Do we have a maiden name?”

  Virginia looked and shook her head. “I don’t. But I don’t have the entire file.”

  Reed moved to the large conference table. He opened his file on the Hollander case – copies he’d made – and flipped through it. “Lois Paine,” he said.

  Everybody was silent, just breathing.

  “So that’s a connection,” Kruse said. “A big one. Sister of a missing girl becomes the mother of a murdered one? That’s huge.”

  “Now it’s about linking the Hollanders to the Stevenses,” Virginia said. “Going to look at that right now.”

  The room had an electricity to it; Reed felt rigid with tension. Had he been distracted by being outside his usual region, by his son, by his own tortured mind? Had he screwed up? Why hadn’t he checked into cases of similar stature right away? Why had i
t taken a suspect, Aaron Mosier, to get him even thinking laterally toward other possible cases?

  He kept flipping through the Hollander file, his head buzzing.

  Kruse was griping, too. “I feel like we’re way behind the eight ball.”

  “Laurie Paine was a missing persons case,” Virginia said. “Looking for fifty-year-old disappearances isn’t the first move in a homicide investigation, is it?”

  Reed said, “But it is my fault we didn’t know about Melanie Hollander sooner…”

  “You had things popping up all over the place.”

  “You can’t look for links for things you don’t know about,” Kruse said, agreeing with the exculpation. “We’re talking about different counties and a deceased sheriff.”

  Reed was unconvinced. “Well, but Orville is in this county, which puts it in your state police jurisdiction. Meaning, I should have checked.” He shook his head, feeling heavy. “Tallman was right – it looks like the police have been harassing people and turning houses upside down, and it’s led to arson and suicides. That’s how it’s going to get played by someone like Jackson Marrs, who wants a juicy story.”

  Virginia looked between them, disapproval on her face. “All right – I think I’ve heard enough of the pity party. This is how these things go sometimes. And we don’t even understand the significance of the coincidences yet. But we’re working on it. Assessing blame or guilt has no part in that. Okay?”

  Reed and Kruse said it simultaneously: “Okay.”

  And Reed added, “You’re right – we can talk to Marrs, see what he knows. I’ll let you handle it.”

  That settled a few things. But still, it felt like they were still on the fringes. Working around the edges of a catastrophe.

  They ordered pizza for lunch and had it delivered to the barracks. Each of them drank Coke from cans as they pecked at laptops. Reed checked in twice with the courts handling the subpoenas from Kasey and Tyson’s cellphone carriers: texts and call logs were imminent.