Lake Country (12 page)

Bryce smiled and said, “I assume this thing has a good old-fashioned GPS map of planet earth?”

In northwest Minneapolis, just inside the city limits, tucked into the grassy nook of the intersection where Webber Parkway met Lyndale Avenue, there was a footpath. The path meandered away beneath Interstate 94, through the trees along Shingle Creek, and emerged into a seventy-acre surprise of densely wooded parkland, hidden by the freeway wall from car-bound view. These woods rambled north for a mile along the western bank of the Mississippi River, and if a person didn’t know to look for the area, they might not know it was there at all.

Quite a number of people knew to look by the time Maya caught the toss from the anchor desk at the top of the ten o’clock newscast. Most of these people were sworn law-enforcement personnel from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, Minneapolis PD, and the Minnesota State Patrol.

She and Deon delivered their second live shot of the evening from the parking lot of the Camden Center strip mall, where crews from two of the remaining three network affiliates had assembled to do the same.

By the time Sheriff’s Detective Roger Barnhill addressed
the media formally, the circus had come to the Three Rivers Park District in full.

Mike followed the lane back into the woods, through dark tunnels of old reaching oaks and high walls of tall shaggy pine. The sky was inky black over the tree-tops, the moon bright and nearly full. Every so often he glimpsed ghostly white birches that looked like slashes of bone in the silvery light.

Little by little, the lane widened, then took a long, slow bend, finally spilling out of the woods into broad, open ground. Here, in this sudden clearing, sat a small cabin on a small, spring-fed lake. Hal Macklin’s own private retreat hidden away in the trees. Rockhaven.

At the first sight of the water, Mike felt a thump in his chest. He rolled the truck to a stop and sat there, idling. The headlights illuminated a reedy stand of bulrushes clogging a jut in the shoreline, and for a moment he considered dousing the beams. Then he thought,
Why?

The sooner Darrell saw him coming, the better.

On the far shore, across the moonlit water, lights blazed in the ground-floor windows of the cabin at the end of the lane. The cabin itself was nothing fancy—a simple gambrel-roofed cottage with a half-story loft, clad in weather-scoured wood that had come from the same barn, according to Hal, that had provided the sign at the mouth of the driveway. Chunks of rugged stone around the cabin’s foundation mimicked the craggy riprap along the shore of the lake. According to Hal, all the rock had been
trucked in from a nearby granite quarry a load at a time, a hedge against erosion that had given the place its name.

From where Mike sat, the whole scene seemed almost welcoming. Warm and familiar.

All except for the unfamiliar vehicle he saw parked in front of the cabin.

It was the sight of the strange car that dried Mike’s throat and kicked up his pulse. He realized that he’d been hoping—however irrationally, given the scene he’d left behind at the house in St. Paul—that when he arrived here, he’d find find the crap-trap Skylark waiting for him after all. The hypnotic separation of the long drive up here had almost convinced him that this whole day had been some kind of dream.

But he wasn’t dreaming. Mike took a breath and followed the lane around the wide curve of the lakeshore, vaguely noting the open door of the canoe shed as he rolled past. He pulled the truck in next to the car, a little 4x4 Subaru.

The car’s vanity plates bore the initials
JMB
. Mike thought of the news report he’d watched with Hal back at the Elbow:
Police are seeking the public’s help in locating Juliet Marie Benson, the twenty-two-year-old Twin Cities woman last seen this afternoon .…

He killed the lights and cut the motor. He tapped the horn twice, blasting a pair of holes in the stillness. Then he sat and watched the porch. Waiting.

Nothing happened. Mike hit the horn again. He leaned on it this time.

The front door of the cabin didn’t open. No shadows darkened the windows; none of the curtains
moved. The Power Wagon took no small arms fire. Other than the honking, all was peaceful.

You’re still stalling
, he thought.

Mike took one last look at the little Subaru sitting next to him. It didn’t belong here, that car. He shouldn’t have been able to find it.

He braced himself, climbed out of the truck, and went to see what else he could find.

At five minutes past midnight, Maya stood near a picnic shelter in the cold, watching her new photographer shoot B-roll of the state patrol helicopter circling overhead.

It had been nearly three hours since members of the sheriff’s volunteer emergency squad had tracked the GPS chip in Juliet Benson’s cell phone to a drainage culvert feeding into Shingle Creek, two hundred yards upstream from where the creek fed into the Mighty Mississippi.

There they retrieved, stuffed an arm’s reach inside the culvert, a black plastic garbage bag containing the phone, a mud-caked women’s overcoat, and a pair of size 6 women’s mules. According to the off-record text message Maya had received from Roger Barnhill an hour ago, the girl’s parents had identified the sodden apparel as their daughter’s.

The helicopter scanned a dark patch of woods with a bright column of light. Down the line, spotlight beams played along the banks of the swollen creek. Flashers strobed the scene in hot reds and cold blues. Beneath the rhythmic thump of the chopper’s rotors, over the steady rush of tumbling water, Maya listened
to the voices calling back and forth in the dark. She could hear the distant whine of the search dogs moving through the timber. Police radios squawked and chattered all around.

“Something tells me this gets worse before it gets better,” the new photog said.

“Yep,” Maya said, watching a pair of sheriff’s deputies trudging up the near slope of the creek bank. “Definitely a good day to be in the news business.”

New Guy glanced away from his viewfinder momentarily, trying to judge whether or not she was kidding. His name was Carter something. The station had sent him, along with the two additional nightside crews now working the other side of the park, after the ten o’clock broadcast.

He’d been with the station a year and a half, Carter had said on arrival, all of it on the nightside, and Maya had never worked with him before. Apart from an apparent knack for stating the obvious, he seemed okay. She didn’t know why she was busting his chops.

“Sorry,” she told him. “Long day, bad joke.”

“Yeah,” Carter said. He seemed genuinely empathetic, but even that annoyed her.

The truth was, Maya felt unreasonably abandoned since Deon Bledsoe had accepted his long-overdue shift change. She thought that she even envied him a little. Photographers got to go home, story or no story. But for a reporter, the news policy of most stations was not unlike the retail-merchandise policies of yesteryear:
You broke it, you own it
.

Like it or not, she was in this for the long haul. Carter came over, shrugged off the camera, and said, “Hey, Miss Lamb. You okay?”

Miss Lamb. Jesus. How many years did this kid think she had on him?

How many years
did
she have on him?

Maya hugged her arms, worked out a kink in her neck. She’d dressed for six o’clock in Plymouth, not midnight on the riverfront. “Cold,” she said. “Tired.” She smiled. It felt like a smile-shaped piece of cardboard stuck to her face. “Do I look that horrible?”

He was too smart to step into that trap, Maya had to give him credit. Carter set the camera down on the concrete slab of the shelter, took off his News7 wind jacket, and handed it to her.

Maya glanced at the jacket. She glanced at Carter. She almost declined the offer out of random stubbornness, then she sighed.

“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. The jacket more or less swallowed her when she put it on over her suit. The lining was still warm and smelled like men’s deodorant. “You win the Nice Guy Award.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’ll take one of those.”

“You earned it, mister.”

He smiled and nodded at her hand. “I meant one of those.”

Maya looked down and realized she was still holding the half-crumpled pack of Parliaments Deon had left with her an hour and a half ago.
Call it a hunch
, he’d said on his way out.

She’d quit smoking before she left Clark Falls. Unless she’d forgotten a drunken relapse at some point along the way, Maya hadn’t had a cigarette since the last time she stood around waiting for a search party to pull a young girl’s body out of the drink. Funny. Maybe Deon could have been the reporter.

Maya almost handed the whole pack over to Carter in trade for the jacket. Then, at the last minute, she shook one out for him and kept the pack in her hand instead.

“Thanks,” he said, hanging the cigarette between his lips.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing with these,” she told him, slipping the matchbook out from between the pack and its cellophane wrapper. She struck one and cupped her hand around the flare. “I quit years ago.”

“Yeah, me too,” Carter said. He leaned in, cupping his own hands around hers to help shield the small flame against the breeze. Teamwork.

When he was lit, Carter straightened, pursed a stream of white smoke toward the black sky, and said, “Sweet mother, that’s good.”

Maya shook out the match and nodded toward a small crowd milling around one of the other picnic shelters. “What’s going on there, I wonder?”

Carter looked and said, “I heard some people from the neighborhood association brought down coffee. Want me to bring you a cup?”

Coffee sounded good. Coffee sounded better than good. Coffee sounded better than anything Maya could think of at the moment, unless it was coffee and one of Deon’s hand-me-down cigarettes. “I’ll go with you,” she said.

They were halfway to the spot when a lightbank fired up ahead of them, illuminating the picnic shelter in a sudden bright splash. Maya realized they weren’t walking toward kindly members of the Webber-Camden Homeowners Association but yet another
camera crew. A few yards closer, she saw the subject of the camera’s attention.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

Carter said, “What?”

“This has to be a new record,” Maya said. “Even for that douchebag.”

“Who?” Carter said.

Maya looked at him with genuine surprise. “You don’t recognize that guy?”

As they walked, she cocked her head toward the man standing in the center of the light ahead. He was sixty-something, square-shouldered, dressed in the full signature getup Maya had come to identify on sight, even from a hundred paces: cowboy boots, sheepskin jacket, rodeo buckle, straw Stetson. With his early-white hair and matching walrus mustache, he looked like a cross between Wilford Brimley and the Marlboro Man.

Carter took a moment, leaned forward, and said, “Is that Buck Morningside?”

“The one and only,” Maya confirmed, walking faster. “Come on, I want to hear this.”

Hubert Humphrey “Buck” Morningside, now holding court in the picnic area at North Mississippi Regional Park, was a billboard bail bondsman whose three-foot mustache and laser-whitened smile overlooked freeways and high-volume thoroughfares all across the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

Maya Lamb had first encountered the man in person during her second year at News7, while covering the story of a missing thirteen-year-old Richfield boy named Timothy Herman. Herman had disappeared without a trace one sunny May morning on his way to school, and for about a week it had seemed that nobody who knew the young teen had a clue where to find him. Foul play was quickly considered, then suspected, and finally presumed.

Then, several days into the investigation, Buck Morningside—working privately for the Herman family—had shown up the state and local authorities by tracking the inexplicably vanished seventh-grader to a Starlite Motel room in Apache Junction, Arizona.

Young Timmy Herman, it turned out, had been
on his way to California with Charlagne Meredith, the twenty-nine-year-old divorcée who worked day shift at one of the convenience stores along Herman’s route to school. Minnesota law enforcement had taken a beating in the press over it. Charlagne Meredith, pregnant with the middle schooler’s child, became national shock-news fodder for a brief period of time. And Buck Morningside had been finding new ways to get his cornball mug on television ever since.

Maya had crossed his path more than once since the Timmy Herman debacle. By virtue of repeated exposure and a little grapevine intelligence, she’d learned a few things that Morningside had somehow managed—miraculously, it seemed—to keep from smudging his hokey-folky public persona. Starting with his given name, which was not Hubert Humphrey Morningside.

It was McNally Owen Spooner III. Nor was he from Black Hills cattle-rancher stock, as the bio on his website claimed (the only website for a bail-bonding company Maya had ever seen that featured a downloadable press kit).

In truth, Spooner had been a lawman himself, once upon a time. A one-term sheriff, according to Maya’s sources, voted out of Yellow Medicine County in the mid 1980s amidst unproven allegations of nepotism, graft, and general skulduggery. Spooner had disappeared for a while, largely unmissed, resurfacing under a new name several years later to become, figuratively and literally, the face of surety bail bonds in greater Hennepin County.

It would have been predictable to find him here eventually, Maya thought. A missing girl, an active search, lots of news cameras—it was all right there in the front window of Buck Morningside’s favorite candy store. But this was moving quickly even for him.

Maya walked up to a young guy with artsy black-framed eyeglasses and a North Face fleece. He was standing a few feet behind the camera operator, holding a clipboard.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “Who are you with, anyway?”

The guy flipped her a cursory glance. Then he took a second look, brightened a little, and said, “Oh, hey. Maya Lamb, right? News7?”