Ceremony

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “Fine,” Bernadette said. “Go and smell her.”

  Kep raised his eyebrows.

  “If,” Bernadette continued, “you can smell TFM or ibogaine or anything else that makes you suspect she had a role in the murders, we’ll take her to the station and book her.”

  “On what charge?”

  “We’ll figure something out. Go and smell her first.”

  He slowly shook his head, then walked across the bullpen and into the conference room, closing the door behind him.

  The seconds dragged by, and after what seemed like far too long, the door opened again, and Kep came out.

  “No,” he said. “Cecilia Carter wasn’t in the aquarium room today. No TFM. No ibogaine. She’s nervous about something—I could smell the cortisol pouring off her—but it’s not murder.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll let them go. Dunn can take their statements.”

  Kep nodded. “And you know who we need to find?”

  She nodded. “Annika Nakrivo.”

  “That’s correct,” Kep said. “If she isn’t answering her door, she could be in danger. I hope she isn’t floating dead in one of the other tanks.”

  “Are we still thinking the reverend is a suspect?”

  “Yes—although…” Kep trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Would she be able to lift Curtis into the lamprey tank?”

  “Curtis wasn’t a linebacker or anything. I’m not even sure he weighed as much as his jacket. I could lift Curtis and dump him in the tank. With that aquarium ladder, I could do it with one arm.”

  Kep blinked slowly. “Yes,” he said, “but you work out frequently. You lift weights.”

  “We don’t know that the reverend doesn’t. And besides, adrenaline does strange things to people’s physical capabilities.”

  “The reverend is nowhere near as strong as you.”

  “All I mean is, don’t count her out. She could be the wiry, strong type. Maybe Curtis was on a ladder looking at all the dead larvae, and he fell in when he was killed.”

  “I understand your point,” Kep said. “You should get to work.”

  Bernadette cocked her head. “Me? What about you?”

  “You have to track down Annika Nakrivo.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  Kep shook his head. “I can accomplish more here by identifying smells and working with the CSI team. In fact, I should return to the aquarium rooms immediately.”

  Bernadette put her hands on her hips. “I think you’re planning to disappear on me again.”

  Kep blinked quickly, then pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “I promise you,” he said, his steely gaze boring into Bernadette, “my nose at a murder scene is the most valuable asset we have.” His voice cracked on the last word. “But someone needs to find Annika.”

  “Yeah.” Bernadette cleared her throat. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  And she turned and walked toward the elevators.

  Chapter Twenty

  Bernadette stood next to the student floor supervisor in the hallway in front of Annika Nakrivo’s dorm room. The woman, a tall blonde with glasses, shoulder-length hair, and a Kilbourn Tech sweatshirt, shifted her weight nervously and cast furtive glances up and down the hall.

  Bernadette knocked for the third time.

  Still no answer.

  “You okay?” Bernadette said to the woman next to her.

  “Fine.”

  “Am I making you nervous?”

  “You woke me up in the middle of the night to do a wellness check on the weird transfer student. Wouldn’t you be nervous too?”

  “Look, you just have to give me the key. You don’t have to look in the room if you don’t want to.” The weight of the gun in the holster under her jacket comforted her.

  “What? Oh no—what do you think happened? Did someone attack her?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bernadette said. “You’re way ahead of me. She’s not answering her phone or the door. That’s it.”

  The floor supervisor thrust the key into Bernadette’s hand and hurried twenty feet down the hall.

  Bernadette turned the key in the lock, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  The room looked like it had been ransacked. The mattress was on the floor and all the drawers were open, clothes scattered everywhere. A smear of red on the wall next to the door. Was that blood?

  Bernadette stepped inside. No more blood appeared in the rest of the room. The television was on its face but didn’t seem broken. She stepped around the room carefully, not touching anything. No shattered glass. A huge mess, though.

  She squinted. What were the ransackers looking for? A communication device for the alarm system? A USB stick with proof of who had infected Kymer Thompson’s machine? A piece of information on who had stolen the TFM?

  Bernadette thought about the notebook on Annika Nakrivo’s desk at work. Nothing spectacular about that. Maybe she took work home with her—a USB drive, maybe like the one Thompson took home that infected his home computer.

  She crouched down and stared at the mess surrounding her. Everything had been pulled out of the drawers, and the furniture was turned over. Papers scattered all over—receipts, take-out menus, even a few Justice for Oceans brochures. No mattresses cut open; no broken picture frames. Maybe the intruders found what they were looking for.

  Or maybe they took Annika.

  Annika might have surprised them when she got to her dorm room. She thought back to Parr Medical’s attempts to woo Eddie Taysatch away from the Freshie. Then the van that barely missed her, the bullet whizzing by her ear—

  She chewed her lip. Nick LaSalle. He was the prime suspect for the installation of the keyloggers on Thompson’s computers. If he hadn’t found what Parr Medical needed, maybe he’d found it on Nakrivo’s PC. Had LaSalle kidnapped her?

  LaSalle also would be big enough and strong enough to empty a hundred pounds of TFM into the aquarium tanks—and still have enough strength left to kill Curtis Janek and dump him in the tank, too, even without the help of a ladder.

  She took out her phone and called Detective Dunn.

  The detective answered on the first ring. “Dunn.”

  “We’ll need another CSI team over at Juneau Hall. Annika Nakrivo’s dorm room has been ransacked.”

  “What? Ransacked?”

  “It’s a mess. No sign of Annika, though.”

  “Do you think she’s been kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know. She left work early today.” Bernadette tilted her head as close to ninety degrees as she could and looked under the plywood bookcase. “I’d like the room fingerprinted.” She paused. “The university would have Nick LaSalle’s prints on file from when he applied for a job, right?”

  “Probably. You suspect that he’s the kidnapper?”

  “It’s a gut feeling. He got that huge scholarship from the shell company owned by Parr Medical. And he’s the main suspect for putting the keyloggers on our victim’s PCs.”

  Dunn exhaled loudly. “Didn’t Reverend Roundhouse go up there Monday night? You don’t suspect her?”

  Bernadette glanced around the room. “Could be her. The place is a mess, but nothing looks broken. Might be the politest ransacking I’ve ever seen. I could see the Reverend hurriedly searching for something but not wanting to damage property.”

  “I’ll contact our missing persons unit.”

  “Good.” Bernadette started to rise to her feet when a yellow sticky note on the carpet caught her eye. It lay face up, and a message in block letters:

  * * *

  Meet at Superior S&F

  * * *

  Bernadette reached for it before she remembered she had no gloves on. Instead, she took her phone out and snapped a picture of it.

  The sticky note looked recent, as if it had been written earlier that day. Could it have fallen out of a book from the bookcase? A church study group? No—that didn’t make any sense. The ink appeared fresh, th
e yellow of the sticky note bright, not faded.

  “Bernadette? You still there?”

  “Detective,” Bernadette said, “I just found a note that says, ‘Meet at Superior S&F.’ That’s the warehouse where Agios Delphi keeps the light blue van, right? Suzanne Thao owns it?”

  “You found a note? And it says, ‘Meet at Superior S&F’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it was meant for you?”

  Bernadette hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe whoever took Annika meant to meet someone else there, and dropped the note while they were ransacking the room.”

  “Or,” Dunn said, “maybe it was meant for us to find. Maybe Superior Feed is where we’ll get a ransom demand.” She sucked in a breath. “Are there any other indications about where Annika might be?”

  “Not that I see,” Bernadette said. “I might have missed something. But this note is the only thing in plain sight.”

  “Could be a trap,” Dunn suggested.

  “So far, it’s the only clue we have. I think we have to at least follow where this goes.”

  “Okay,” Dunn said with determination in her voice, “I’ll have a team meet you over there. It’s at the end of Bay Street. Want me to call Lieutenant Stevenson?”

  “Yes.” Bernadette put the phone on speaker and pulled up directions in her mobile map. “If there’s a chance the kidnapper is still there—”

  “Right, you need backup. Wait for the officers to show up. Don’t go in by yourself.”

  “Of course—but we don’t know when she was taken. It could have been an hour ago, or it could have been as soon as she walked out of the Freshie. I don’t know what we’re up against.”

  “There’s been no request for ransom,” Dunn pointed out.

  “You don’t know that,” Bernadette said quickly. “People sometimes don’t get the cops involved.”

  “We’re involved now,” Dunn said. “I’ll get a team to Superior Salt & Feed right away.”

  Bernadette turned left onto East Bay Street and hit a pothole, which rocked the entire SUV. Her phone rang. An unfamiliar 414 number. Her finger almost slipped off the answer button because of the bumpy road.

  “Becker.”

  “Hi, Agent Becker, this is Lesley Gill. I’m a researcher with the Milwaukee Police—I work mostly on identity theft cases, but I heard you needed some extra help with this investigation.”

  “Hi, Lesley. Yes, my boss told me you’re the forensic accountant assigned to this case.”

  “Good. I heard you and Dr. Woodhead had some questions about Annika Nakrivo?”

  “Considering I’m about to invade an abandoned salt warehouse with several officers to try to locate her, yes, we’ve got some questions.” Bernadette crossed under the elevated freeway. While she knew Lake Michigan was directly in front of her, the view was blocked by the huge warehouses and a trio of grain elevators towering over her SUV. A white Toyota Camry with a Kilbourn Tech logo on the side was parked in front of the warehouse closest to Bay Avenue.

  A Kilbourn Tech car. Someone from the Freshie? Or maybe it was Nick LaSalle.

  About a hundred yards long and seventy yards wide, the building was roughly twenty feet high on the sides with a roof that rose slightly in the middle. Bernadette smelled manure and decay, and she hit the recirculation button on the climate control. “Oof. No one told me it would stink out here.”

  “That must be the fertilizer factory,” Lesley said. “And the sewage treatment plant. It’s pretty bad over there when the wind is blowing the wrong direction.”

  “Okay, Lesley, make it quick. As soon as the cavalry gets here, we’re all headed in.”

  “Sure. Your team pointed out a gap in Miss Nakrivo’s whereabouts between October and January. We located a booking in her name on a plane from Miami to Cleveland on October seventh.”

  “How did we miss that? We checked the airlines.”

  “But not the charters. Those are in a different system. And she didn’t go through the regular TSA checkpoints. That’s why we missed her the first time.”

  Bernadette shook her head. “Let me guess. The plane was chartered by Parr Medical.”

  “Sorry, Agent Becker, I don’t have that information yet.”

  Bernadette chewed her lip. “Uh—Lesley, I’m not an agent.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.” She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m a case analyst.”

  “Case Analyst Becker is kinda difficult to say.”

  She pushed down the negative thoughts. “Then call me Bernadette.” She heard sirens behind her get closer, then go silent. “Okay, they’re almost here. Anything else?”

  “It can wait.”

  “Are you in the fifth division?”

  “Nope. I’m in the police administration building on State Street.”

  “Working late?”

  “As long as you need me. Give me a call at this number when you’re done.”

  “Thanks, Lesley.” Bernadette ended the call. For a moment she considered calling Sophie, but it was too late. And Sophie would panic. She blinked hard.

  Get it together, Becker.

  Two police cruisers arrived, sirens silent and switching their red-and-blue lights off as soon as they pulled into the lot. The night wasn’t as dark as Bernadette expected; the sky was clear and the moon three-quarters full, its light shimmering off the snow piled up on the sides of the parking lot.

  Both cruisers parked behind Bernadette’s SUV. Bernadette opened the door and was hit in the face with a wave of fertilizer stench. She gagged but pulled out her identification and forced herself to walk to the first cruiser like nothing was wrong.

  She stood next to the cruiser door as the driver rolled down his window.

  “Officer,” she said, holding out her CSAB identification and nodding to the policeman behind the wheel. Oh, it was the same officer who’d been at the front desk two days before. And she was standing in front of him in her boxy puffy purple coat. Good thing it was dark—though even in the darkness, she could tell his eyes were tired. “Good evening, Officer Chesapeake. Nice to see you again. Is there a plan?”

  “Hello again.” Chesapeake nodded and smiled. “In situations like this, the protocol is for at least two officers to make a sweep of the outside of the building while others watch the exits. But we’re providing support to a federal operation, so you give the guidance.”

  Bernadette shook her head. “I won’t contradict your protocol, but this might be nothing. I found a sticky note on the floor in Annika Nakrivo’s dorm room. We might be knocking on the door of an empty building and then we’ll all go home.”

  “We still check out false alarms.” Chesapeake motioned to his passenger, a thirtyish, stocky, pale-skinned officer with a crew cut. “A few years ago, dispatch thought a prank call came into nine-one-one, but Schroeter here broke up a home invasion in process.”

  Schroeter stared straight ahead.

  Bernadette leaned down so she could see into the car better. “Good evening, Officer Schroeter. I’m Case Analyst Bernadette Becker.”

  Chesapeake motioned with his head to the white Camry. “That vehicle is from Kilbourn Tech. Is it the only one here?”

  “Seems like it.”

  Chesapeake craned his neck to look in his sideview mirror. “We’ll call the university. See who might have checked that vehicle out. We’ll want to know who we’re dealing with.”

  Schroeter pulled the laptop, mounted on an arm between the seats, in front of him. The screen lit his pale face from underneath as he began to type. “On it.”

  “I think it might be Nick LaSalle,” Bernadette said. “He oversaw the computers at the Kilbourn Tech facilities outside of campus. I assume he has a work vehicle to get from worksite to worksite.”

  “Why do you think he checked out that car?”

  Bernadette paused. “There’s a chance Annika Nakrivo was kidnapped, and Nick is the most likely Kilbourn Tech employee to be involved.”
Bernadette looked down at the asphalt and tapped her foot. “He received a large payment recently. We believe the money was in exchange for installing a keylogger program on our murder victim’s computer.” She cleared her throat and blinked, Curtis’s face flashing in her mind. “I mean, our first murder victim.”

  “Good to know,” Chesapeake said. He shifted in his seat.

  Bernadette hesitated, then spoke, trying to conceal the nervousness in her voice as she locked eyes with Chesapeake. “So your nameplates give me your last names. I don’t think I know your first name. Names.”

  Chesapeake smiled easily. “Officer Lamar Chesapeake. This”—he motioned to the officer working on the laptop beside him—“is Lance Schroeter. We’ve got a couple officers from the second district behind us.”

  Bernadette stood and raised her hand in greeting to the cruiser behind Chesapeake’s. “And the other two will guard the back door?”

  “That’s the idea.” He tilted his head at Bernadette. “This is our protocol without confirmation of a hostage situation. Right now, we’ve got one car at an abandoned warehouse and no threats on anyone’s life. If we can get visuals on a hostage, that would be different, but there are no windows in the warehouse.”

  Bernadette sighed, and the stink of the air made her immediately regret it. Her eyes started to water. She blinked rapidly and cleared her throat, hoping Chesapeake wouldn’t notice. “Do you have one of those infrared body-heat detectors?”

  Chesapeake shook his head. “You overestimate the Milwaukee police budget. We’ll try to establish some visuals, but don’t hold your breath.”

  Bernadette looked at the warehouse. “Okay. There’s a front door. Is there a back exit?”

  Chesapeake nodded. “If this is a kidnapping and whoever’s holding Nakrivo flees, chances are they’ll use the rear.” He stuck his head out of the window and looked back at the other cruiser. “There are five of us. More on the way if needed.”

  “You two around the building, those two guarding the back exit, me at the front door?”

  “If this does turn into a hostage situation, do you have experience?”