Ceremony

by Paul Austin Ardoin

He looked up at Dunn. “Two weeks ago, Douglas Rheinstaller bought a hundred pounds of TFM from Wildlife Specialties up in Fond du Lac.”

  “TFM? The fish poison?” Bernadette asked.

  “Used to control the lamprey population,” Kep said. “It’s particularly poisonous to their ammocoetes.”

  “Their what?” Maura asked.

  “Their larvae.” Dunn nodded. “I had to do a report on TFM in seventh-grade science. We used to have a real problem in the 1950s with sea lampreys killing the fish in Lake Michigan.”

  Kep looked down at his laptop screen. “3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol. Considered a toxic respiratory irritant.”

  “But doesn’t kill trout or salmon,” Dunn said. “Only the lampreys.”

  “So it’s the perfect substance to have on hand,” she continued, “if one were planning to poison an aquarium full of them.”

  “Right,” Dunn said. “You usually see those types of orders from the Department of Fish and Game. They apply the TFM to the tributaries where the larvae are most common. Fishermen who are out on the lake wouldn’t use it—Rheinstaller wouldn’t have any need for it.”

  “But Rheinstaller was the president of the Piscary Association,” Bernadette pointed out. “He wasn’t a regular fisherman. Maybe he had a reason to purchase the TFM.”

  “With the spring thaw coming,” Dunn said thoughtfully, “there’s a possibility that he didn’t think Fish and Game was moving fast enough. Something else to ask him.”

  “Any word on Cecilia Carter?”

  Curtis nodded. “I put in a request with her wireless provider. We’ll see where she is soon enough.”

  Bernadette thought for a moment. “Detective, with what’s happened to Thompson and Taysatch, do you think there’s any merit in putting a protective detail on Jude Lightman?”

  Dunn nodded. “Probably. We should station an officer at the Freshie too. The bosses will hate the overtime, but they’ll approve it. I can get that started.”

  “Call Lightman first. See if he’ll even agree to it.” Bernadette scrunched up her face in thought.

  “What is it?” Maura asked.

  “Annika Nakrivo,” Bernadette said. “She’s made an accusation about Reverend Roundhouse, who’s one of our main suspects. If Kymer Thompson told his girlfriend about his research, maybe Annika needs protection, too. Especially if the cameras at her dorm can’t be relied on.”

  “I’m headed over there next,” Curtis said. “I might be able to salvage some footage—or at least figure out how they deleted the recordings. It might give us a clue on who did it.”

  “Annika seems to think it was drug dealers,” Kep said.

  “Or campus security not wanting to do their job,” Bernadette interjected.

  Maura shook her head. “She’s taking wild guesses. Curtis, you get over there, and if Annika’s in her dorm room, tell her we’ll be adding her to our protective detail.” She turned to Dunn. “How long will it take to get protection in place for them?”

  “The request has to go through channels. It’ll take an hour, maybe two—more if there’s any delay about approving overtime.”

  “Okay, Curtis,” Maura said, “stay with Annika until the uniform gets there. I don’t know if the reverend will show up, but this has the potential of turning messy pretty fast.”

  “What about the camera footage?” Curtis said.

  “It can wait until after you’ve confirmed she’s safe.”

  He typed a short message on his laptop, hit the enter key with a flourish, then turned to Bernadette. “I got the wireless carrier information for Cecilia Carter, and I forwarded it to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Curtis grabbed his leather jacket off the back of the chair and turned to Maura. “Can I take your SUV?”

  Maura nodded. “You call us the moment you see she’s safe,” she said. “If we have another incident on our hands, we need to know as soon as possible.”

  Curtis gave the team a thumbs-up as he left the office.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bernadette opened the email forwarded from Curtis. Ten spreadsheets. She double-clicked the first one and was greeted with tiny text in dozens of columns and what appeared to be hundreds of rows.

  “You okay?” Dunn asked.

  “I need an Excel-to-English translator.”

  Dunn smiled, then got up. “I’m going to stretch my legs. See what Lesley’s uncovered.”

  “Lesley?”

  “Lesley Gill. Our forensic accountant, remember?”

  “Right, right.”

  “We’ll be here a while. I’ll order some dinner. You have anything in mind?”

  “Definitely no Wisconsin Old Fashioneds for me. Other than that, I don’t know. Something good.”

  Dunn smiled and turned to Kep to ask him about dinner.

  Bernadette focused her attention on the laptop screen and began to dig into the cell phone records. The whole month was in the report, not just the last few days. There was an insane amount of detail—the second spreadsheet contained all the SSIDs of the Wi-Fi networks she’d connected to; the third, triangulation coordinates. She discovered she could enter the coordinates into her Maps program, and it would give her a reasonable two- or three-block radius of the location of her phone. A single set of coordinates took almost five minutes to complete on the map. She scrolled down—there were thousands of coordinate entries. Bernadette shook her head; Curtis loved the whirrs and clicks and beeps of stuff like this.

  She clicked the tab for the day of the Kymer Thompson murder and scrolled down to the late evening. After a few coordinate searches, Bernadette zeroed in on an apartment building downtown, not too far from Veterans Memorial Park on Lake Michigan. That must be where Cecilia Carter was staying. Rental? Lease? Maybe an apartment paid for by Justice for Oceans?

  She sent an email to Curtis asking him to look at the lease agreements for the building. Maybe a name would pop out.

  Then she clicked back on the SSID spreadsheet. Maybe Carter had connected to a router in her apartment that day—and maybe the internet service provider would be able to link to it.

  So much information—the dates started three weeks previously. Bernadette began to scroll.

  Hold on.

  She stopped and clicked back one screen.

  Wildlife-FdL.

  Hadn’t Rheinstaller purchased TFM from Wildlife Specialties in Fond du Lac two weeks before?

  She went back to her email, and a message from Dunn was there with a copy of the receipt.

  Yes. Douglas Rheinstaller. Wildlife Specialties, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Timestamped 4:17 p.m. Wow—almost five thousand dollars for a hundred pounds of TFM. That would leave a mark on his credit card bill.

  Bernadette clicked back on Cecilia Carter’s SSID spreadsheet. Wildlife-FdL. Connection made 16:06; connection dropped 16:18.

  Douglas Rheinstaller and Cecilia Carter were there at the same time. While he was buying TFM—and her Wi-Fi connection dropped a minute after his transaction was complete.

  “It’s a big coincidence, and I don’t like it,” Maura said. “But it’s not a smoking gun. It’s not illegal to buy TFM, and it’s not illegal for them to be together when he purchased it.”

  “Maybe not,” Bernadette conceded, “but we can ask him about it, can’t we?”

  “For what purpose?” Maura said. “Thompson wasn’t poisoned with TFM. Eddie Taysatch wasn’t shot with TFM. So the guy has a hundred pounds of the stuff in his garage—where’s the crime?”

  “Politics make strange bedfellows,” Bernadette said. “Normally, the two of them would be at each other’s throats. But they have a common enemy.” She took a deep breath. “What if their plan is to kill all the lampreys, but they had to get Thompson and Taysatch out of the way first?”

  Maura shook her head. “Pure speculation at this point. Not saying you’re wrong, but you’ve got to get more than innuendo and a Wi-Fi report. There are plenty of reasons they could be together that don
’t involve conspiracy for murder. And with Cecilia Carter’s lawyers? You better be sure that you’re accusing her of something real.”

  “You’re saying no fishing expeditions.” A lilt in Bernadette’s voice.

  Maura closed her eyes, a smile touching the corner of her mouth.

  “Sorry.”

  Chuckling, Maura sat back in her chair before clearing her throat and putting a serious look on her face. “Also, the forensic accountant sent the reports back. She couldn’t find unusual activity on Nick LaSalle’s accounts.”

  Something pinged in Bernadette’s gut. “Really? Can I see that?”

  “I’ll print it out if you want, but you really think you can catch something that the forensic accountant didn’t?”

  “Uh—I don’t know. I guess I need to see it for myself.”

  “Fair enough.” Maura tapped the computer, and the printer roared to life.

  Bernadette stood up. She’d been sitting too long. She needed to get her blood pumping. Maybe a weight session at the hotel gym, or a run in the cold weather.

  She walked over to the printer. The transactions started six months prior—no one could accuse the forensic accountant of not being thorough. She looked through the list: paychecks every other Friday. A rash of payments on the first of the month: rent, utilities, insurance, college loan. A small car payment.

  The next month, it was the same: rent, utilities, insurance. LaSalle ate out a lot, at mostly fast food or cheap restaurants. There was the Bratwurst House. Groceries. Car payment, college loan. Then the next month: mechanic. Oof, over two thousand dollars—and the car wasn’t even paid off yet. This was Christmas, and there were a few big purchases: mostly from online stores and from the shopping center next to the Freshie. Rent, utilities, insurance, car, college loan. Fewer restaurants, though. Christmas was pricey for somebody at their first job out of college.

  January. A nice restaurant. Maybe he’d gotten a gift card—oh, wait, no, this was the debit card. She looked back. Yes, a cash deposit of a few hundred dollars. Maybe from grandparents for Christmas. Rent, utilities, groceries. Insurance and a car payment.

  February. Rent, utilities, groceries, insurance, car payment.

  Bernadette blinked.

  She looked at January and February again.

  Nick LaSalle had gotten his bachelor’s in computer science at Kilbourn Tech. It was an expensive school. He’d had to get college loans and he’d been out of school—what? Three or four years, tops. He’d paid his college loans in October, November, and December.

  So why did he stop paying them in January?

  “Lieu,” she said, hurrying over to her boss, “I found something. LaSalle stopped paying his college loans.”

  Maura knitted her brow. “He stopped paying his loans? Maybe he had a rich uncle die.”

  “If he had,” Bernadette said, “we’d see a big lump-sum payment.”

  “Maybe his mom had a rich uncle die.”

  “Maybe,” Bernadette said. “But we should look into this.”

  Maura took the statement from Bernadette’s hand and opened another window on her machine. “This might take a minute.” She frowned. “You know, Curtis would be able to do this faster.”

  “When did he get to Annika’s dorm?”

  Maura took her phone out of her purse. “I must have missed his call.” She tapped her phone app and scrolled. “Uh—no. Nothing from Curtis yet.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t there, and he went looking for her.”

  “Don’t you think he would have called if he’d done that?”

  Bernadette ran her hands through her hair and scratched her scalp, grimacing. “I’ll try to track him down. Maybe something happened when he arrived, and he got distracted.” She dropped her hands, then tapped the statement on the desk next to Maura’s laptop. “Let’s figure out what happened to this loan.”

  Bernadette walked into the small windowless office where she’d looked at DMV photos and took her phone out, tapping Curtis Janek in her phone.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  Curtis’s voice. “Curtis Janek.” Then a computerized female voice. “Is not available. To leave—”

  Bernadette hung up and called again.

  Still no answer.

  Maybe he has his phone on vibrate. A brief, flitting thought: Maybe something had happened to Curtis—and maybe something had happened to Annika too.

  Curtis struck Bernadette as responsible and level-headed. He wasn’t the type to go rogue. She tried to think of a reasonable explanation for his disappearance, but she kept coming back to a car accident or a medical emergency.

  Bernadette called a third time. No answer.

  The nagging voice in her head grew louder: something had happened. Someone tried to hurt Annika, and Curtis had gotten in the way. He could be in the hospital—or worse.

  She dropped her hand to her side, still holding the phone.

  Kep looked up. “What is it?”

  “Curtis isn’t answering his phone.”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s not answering.”

  “Well.” Kep leaned forward and rested his chin in his hand. “Perhaps his battery is dead, or maybe he left his phone in the car and thought it was more important to protect Miss Nakrivo than go back and get his phone.”

  “Or he’s hurt. Car accident or…” Bernadette trailed off.

  Maura looked up. “I’ll ask for a patrol to be sent to the dorm right away.” She stood and began walking toward the front desk.

  “Should we go too?” Bernadette asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” Maura turned the corner.

  Bernadette glanced up at Kep from across the table. “So,” she said, “now what do we do?”

  “This would be an excellent time to find a restaurant and eat dinner. I don’t want to wait for Detective Dunn.”

  “How can you think about food?”

  “I think there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for his disappearance.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “As I said, it’s much more probable that he has a dead cell phone battery than anything else.”

  “He would find a land line or borrow a cell phone. He’s responsible.”

  “He’s twenty-five. Young people don’t always think things through.”

  Of course Kep would say that. He vanishes for hours at a time and ignores his phone. I bet he thinks that it’s no big deal—and maybe I’m overreacting because I’m worried about Sophie. She looked at the clock on her phone—she still had an hour or so to call Sophie and say good night. Bernadette looked at Kep out of the corner of her eye. “So you don’t think we have anything to worry about?”

  “I don’t. So why don’t you try to get something done before Lieutenant Stevenson returns?”

  She stared at Kep for a moment. “Yeah. Keep my mind off all the horrible unrealistic scenarios swimming around in my head.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Maybe I’ll work on the questions I can ask Douglas Rheinstaller.”

  “I already told you he isn’t our murderer.”

  Bernadette chuckled. “Yeah, I know you didn’t smell lampreys, but I discovered that he and Carter were possibly together when he bought the TFM. Maybe he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger or pushed the plunger, but I bet he knows something that’s relevant.” She typed his name into the county’s system and waited for the data to appear. “So—are you working on Annika Nakrivo?”

  “Correct.” Kep tapped his keyboard. “Lesley emailed us an address for Miss Nakrivo in Miami, and her appearance is quite different. According to her rental agreement, she vacated her apartment on October 31.”

  “And we know she arrived in Milwaukee in early January,” Bernadette said thoughtfully.

  He tapped again. “Lesley hasn’t discovered Miss Nakrivo’s whereabouts for November or December.”

  “Maybe she went to spend the holidays with family. Or if she knew she’d be in Milwauk
ee in January, she could have couch-surfed for two months. There are a lot of possible explanations.”

  Kep took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Yes, probably. I wish I could find definitively where she had been. She has a certain appearance in Miami in October, and then reappears ten weeks later with a slightly altered face and a beauty mark, three thousand kilometers away. It’s odd.”

  “But she might not have left a trail.”

  “I find it hard to believe that she would be able to cover her digital footprint completely,” Kep said. “She’d find it difficult to delete records of credit card receipts, airplane tickets, storage unit agreements—”

  “Storage unit agreements,” Bernadette interjected, glancing back at her screen.

  “What is it?”

  She pointed to the laptop monitor. “Three days ago, Rheinstaller reported that his backyard storage shed had been broken into.”

  “He did?”

  Bernadette nodded. “Patrol went out to investigate. Shed’s lock was broken, and the shed was empty. But Rheinstaller wouldn’t say what had been taken. He refused to make a report to the police.”

  Kep frowned. “He refused?”

  “Right.”

  “Are you suggesting,” Kep said, “that someone stole the forty-five kilograms of TFM from his shed?”

  “Maura would tell me I’m speculating.” Bernadette paused. “But I can’t think of another explanation for why he wouldn’t tell the police what was stolen.”

  “I can think of several: illicit drugs, pornography, or perhaps defalcation.”

  “You’re saying he could’ve been skimming from the Lake Shore Piscary Association?”

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

  “Speaking of the Piscary Association...” Bernadette clicked her keyboard and pointed to the screen. “Okay—the Association has their meeting minutes online.” She paused as she read.

  After a moment, Kep leaned forward. “Do you see anything of note?”

  “Not yet. Unless you care that the trout population is slated to be down this year.”

  Bernadette continued to read, then clicked to the previous month. “Oh.”

  “What?”