Broken Ice--A Novel Page 9

  “I think Linnea’s been here.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Something’s not right. I don’t know what. Just something … Walk through this with me, will you?” I pulled a pair of latex gloves from a wire mesh cart labeled CSU-DO NOT TOUCH then led Ellegaard to the front door, which was closed. “When I got here, the front door was ajar an inch.” I opened the door. Outside, a throng had gathered to look at whatever there was to see, adorned in their Patagonia and L.L. Bean and Turtle Fur. I shut the door.

  “It’s not our case, Shap.”

  “Yeah, I was just saying the same thing to Detective Waller. Our job is to find Linnea Engstrom.”

  “Is it? Our client is dead.”

  “You think Anne’s going to give up looking for her daughter after what happened to Roger?”

  “The woman’s in shock. She can’t make that decision right now.”

  “Just stay with me for a few minutes. Then you can get back to looking for whoever’s stealing Post-it notes at BrainiAcme.” Ellegaard was too polite to tell me to fuck off, so he just sighed. “I walked inside and called out to see if anyone was home. No answer. I walked through the foyer and into the kitchen, which was spotless.”

  “Are there dirty dishes in the dishwasher?” said Ellegaard, both proud and irritated with himself for thinking of the question.

  I pulled open the dishwasher and saw three plates in the lower rack, each speckled with toast crumbs. Three knives smeared with bits of butter and red jam. Three coffee mugs in the upper rack along with three juice glasses. Winnie Haas didn’t rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I’ve never understood people who do. That’s what the damn machine is for. There’d be DNA aplenty to identify the breakfast eaters. I pulled on the door of a base cabinet with the handle at the top and two plastic bins slid out: one for garbage and one for recycling. The recycling bin contained an orange juice carton. The garbage was empty.

  “Huh.”

  “I’ll see if CSU has checked the garbage can outside,” said Ellegaard.

  “There should be paper napkins or paper towels on top. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Follow me.” I led Ellegaard down into the basement mechanical room. I looked through the glass door of the front-loading washing machine. It was empty. Same with the dryer. “This is what’s off—no dirty clothes. No laundry.”

  “It’s probably in hampers upstairs or she did it last night or early this morning.”

  “Maybe. But if she had company this morning for breakfast and if she used cloth napkins, she wouldn’t throw those in the second-floor hamper. Why not just throw them down the chute? And if she did laundry this morning, did she have time after breakfast to run the washer and dryer then fold everything and put it away?” I opened the door of the laundry chute bin, stuck my head in, and looked up. Nothing but black. “Stay here. I’m going to find the top and call down to you.”

  I went upstairs. On the main floor, I saw Detective Waller talking to two uniforms. “Time to share,” I said. “Walk with me.” She excused herself and followed me up to the second floor. I found the laundry chute in the main hall, opened it with my gloved hand, and looked into it. Nothing but black. “E,” I said. No response. “E!” I said, louder. Still nothing.

  “What are you doing?” said Waller.

  I got out my phone and took off the latex so I could touch the screen. I called Ellegaard. “I can’t see any light from up here and you can’t hear me,” I said. I turned on the phone’s flashlight and pointed it down. I stuck my head in as far as it would go, which was enough to see a clump of dirty clothes topped with cloth napkins. I pulled my head out and turned to Waller. “Grab a few of your people and meet me in the mechanical room. Something’s blocking the laundry chute.”

  13

  The lowest-ranking Woodbury cop, round-faced and eager, stepped into a white jumpsuit seemingly made of the paper-like material houses wear under their siding. He crawled into the laundry bin and shined a spot up into the chute. “Looks to me like a brown paper bag,” he said.

  Waller said, “Check the chute door and around it for forensics, then retrieve that bag.”

  Another young woman cop with a blond ponytail entered the mechanical room and said, “Detective, he’s ready now.”

  Ellegaard, Waller, and I climbed the stairs to the second level and entered a guest bedroom. It was furnished in simple-lined antiques made of bird’s-eye maple. Ben Haas lay on a full-size bed, his eyes red and swollen. He had exhausted himself from crying and stared at the ceiling. His dead mother lay two rooms away.

  The school counselors insisted on remaining present. One was a midforties woman with bangs and long, dry, light-sucking hair the color of bad coffee. A pair of drugstore reading glasses hung from a drugstore chain and rested on her teal, cowl-necked sweater that was threadbare on the elbows and bursting with pills everywhere else. She looked the type to have a poster of Jungian archetypes on her office wall and a nightstand full of mouthpieces to combat her TMJ.

  The other counselor was a pasty white man. Burgundy sweater vest over a red-checked shirt and camel-colored pants that I can best describe as slacks. His curly hair was the color of the sun and I couldn’t tell if it was natural, lightened from a faded brown, or darkened from white to mask albinism, the latter possibility suggested by his sapphire blue eyes that no doubt soaked in a container of saline as he slept.

  “Ben,” said TMJ, “are you okay to answer a few questions right now?” He nodded. Then TMJ turned to us with an authority she didn’t possess, “A few questions will be all right.”

  “Thank you,” said Waller. TMJ nodded and almost succeeded in suppressing a smile, her cup of self-importance filled to the brim.

  Then Sweater Vest said, “I’m going to ask that you please be sensitive to what Ben is experiencing and feeling right now. There will be plenty of time for more questions later.”

  “Of course,” said Waller. Sweater Vest and TMJ looked at each other with shared satisfaction, then Waller said, “I’m sorry, Ben. I know how hard this is, but please try to answer the best you can.” He lay there and stared at the ceiling. “Did you see Roger Engstrom at home this morning before you went to school?”

  He shook his head.

  “Was anyone else here at the house this morning that you know of?”

  Again he shook his head.

  “What time did you leave for school?”

  He took a breath. “Six thirty. I had zero-hour jazz combo.”

  “Did you eat breakfast this morning?”

  He nodded.

  “What did you have?”

  “Toast,” he said. “And orange juice.”

  “Did your mother eat with you?”

  He shook his head. The tears started again.

  “Something’s blocking the laundry chute. Do you know what it is?”

  “No,” he said. It came out as a whisper.

  Waller said, “Ben, did your mom have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Any past boyfriends?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How does she get along with your dad?”

  “Fine. I don’t know how they ever ended up together. They’re really different. But they get along okay, other than him making fun of this house.”

  Waller looked at me and raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to convey your witness.

  “Ben,” I said, “have you ever seen Roger Engstrom here at the house before?”

  “No. I didn’t even know my mom knew him.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. Never met him.”

  “Last night we talked about how well you do or don’t know Linnea Engstrom. If you want to clarify anything today, no one’s going to hold it against you, and it may help us find who did this to your mom.”

  He kept his eyes on the ceiling. Tears leaked toward his ears. TMJ handed him a tissue from a box she clutched on her lap. She had de
signated herself the great bequeather of tissues. Ben wiped away the tears and waited for his breath to steady. “When Haley drove down on weekends, sometimes Linnea would ride with her. Haley would drop her off. I don’t know where. And then pick her up on Sunday and they’d drive back to Warroad together.”

  “Did Haley know why Linnea came to the Cities?”

  “No, and she didn’t seem to care. I wasn’t bullshitting last night. Haley never talked about Linnea. Or almost never. She’d only say stuff like Linnea drove for a few hours so Haley could take a nap.”

  “Weren’t you curious about the nature of their friendship?” said Waller.

  “No,” said Ben. “Haley was so weird. Whatever she was doing when she wasn’t with me, I didn’t want to know about. I really didn’t.”

  “So just to be clear,” I said, “you’ve had no contact with Linnea?”

  Ben shook his head. “I swear.”

  The round-faced jumpsuit-wearing police officer stepped into the room holding a wrinkled Kowalski’s grocery bag rolled shut at the top.

  Waller said, “Do you recognize this bag, Ben?”

  He rolled onto his side and looked at it. “Looks like a regular grocery bag.”

  “That’s enough for now,” said Waller. “Thank you, Ben. And again, our deepest sympathy.”

  In the garage, Anne Engstrom’s sister sat next to Anne on a plastic chair at a plastic table. She was about forty and wore rimless teardrop glasses over gray eyes. Unlike her sister, her lenses were small and sized more for a human face than for the Hubbell telescope. She wore her brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. Her skin was clear and smooth and pale. She carried an extra few ounces on her cheeks that weighed down her face into something dumpy and adorable. A brown crewneck sweater and faded Levi’s completed her library-dweller look. Ellegaard said something to her and gave her his card. She nodded then put her arm around Anne. Detective Waller asked Anne if she’d seen the bag before. She shook her head no.

  We stepped outside and into an overgrown police van that had taken the liberty of parking on the driveway. Reporters hurled questions at us. We ignored them like TV commercials and entered the van. Waller and I stood comfortably, but Ellegaard barely fit. The vehicle contained a rack of guns ranging from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles. On the opposite wall hung riot shields, Tasers, cans of teargas, and canister launchers. Quite a militarization for an outer-ring, wealthy suburb that was closer to rural Wisconsin than it was to St. Paul.

  Detective Waller removed a wand from a charging base and waved it on all sides and underneath the bag. It contained no metal. She opened it.

  “Ufda,” she said. Then she held the bag open for Ellegaard and me to see.

  “Sheesh,” said Ellegaard. The bag was full of cash. Detective Waller dumped it onto a stainless steel table and, with gloved hands, counted the bundles.

  “A hundred thousand dollars, give or take,” said Jamie Waller. “This sure mucks up an already mucky pond.”

  “Sheesh,” Ellegaard said again.

  I stared at the bundles. “You can count how many pairs of underwear were stuck in the chute on top of the bag and we’ll most likely know how many days the money was in there. Winnie didn’t seem the type to let laundry pile up before tossing it down the chute. If the number is zero, someone stashed the money in there this morning.”

  Ellegaard said, “Before cleaning up breakfast.”

  “Yes.”

  “I questioned Anne Engstrom earlier,” said Waller. “She was unaware Roger even knew Winnie Haas or that Winnie or Ben even existed. Whatever the relationship was, Roger hid it from his wife. He told her he had a business meeting this morning.”

  “Maybe it was business.”

  “Maybe,” said Waller. “We’ll see if anyone had sex with anyone else and check cell phones and email and social media to piece together their communication. God dammit. This money makes no sense.”

  “Now you’re getting to know what it’s like to work with Nils Shapiro,” said Ellegaard. He was not smiling.

  Waller looked at me. “You lied to me, Nils.”

  “Did I?”

  “You said you aren’t one of those savants who can take one look at a crime scene and figure out what happened.”

  “I have no idea what happened other than someone stuck Winnie Haas and Roger Engstrom with arrows.”

  “But you knew something was wrong because there was no dirty laundry in the bin.”

  “That’s not how it happened, but if that’s the story you want to tell yourself, go ahead.”

  “I’ll need you to come down to the station and sign a statement.”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “I need you to do it today.”

  “Today doesn’t work for me.”

  “It’s imperative.”

  “Listen, Detective. I know you have a job to do, but I’m on day two of looking for a seventeen-year-old girl and so far all I got is a hole in my shoulder that starts in the front and goes out the back. You strong-arm me into giving you a statement now, you’ll get a bunch of facts and nothing more.”

  Waller looked at Ellegaard who had braced himself by pressing his hands against the van’s ceiling. He offered her no help. “Fine,” she said. “Tomorrow morning at 8:00. Sharp. Take my card. Just in case.”

  I took it. “See you then, Detective.”

  Ellegaard and I returned to the house. He spent a few more minutes with Anne Engstrom, and I went upstairs to find Char Northagen measuring how far the arrow shafts protruded from each body. “Same arrows?” I said.

  “We have to talk,” said Char, keeping her eyes on her work. “Now.”

  14

  Char Northagen bagged her instruments and corpses, working around the arrows, which she’d sheared off just above the bodies. She’d remove the rest at the morgue. Then we left the house on Crestmoor Bay, got in my car, and drove away.

  “Nice Volvo wagon,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a stay-at-home wife who’d drive the kids around in one of these.”

  “I thought there was a law all lesbians have to drive Subarus.”

  “There is,” she said, “but it only applies to lesbians with dogs. Lesbians with kids can drive anything they want.” Char adjusted the dashboard vent to give herself some air. “Shap, I finished the autopsy on Haley Housh.”

  “She didn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  “She did. But she was also sexually active just before she died.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Whoever she had intercourse with used a condom. I found no sperm, but I did find traces of lubricant and spermicide associated with condoms. It also appeared to be consensual. No evidence of forced penetration.”

  “Have you found any DNA belonging to someone else?”

  “Not yet. She probably showered afterward. I found little bacteria built up in the places it usually builds up.”

  “So she had sexual intercourse, but we have no idea who her partner was.”

  “That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

  We crossed Valley Creek Road and parked in front of Caribou Coffee. “So that’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “That’s the preamble. For the rest I need coffee.”

  The Caribou Coffee looked like every other Caribou Coffee in town with its slate and wood floor and moss-green walls. Arts and Crafts–style lanterns hung from chains to create a cozy, cabin-like atmosphere, except behind the fake panes of mica, energy efficient bulbs generated a thin greenish light that was far from cozy. Char ordered a soy latte. I ordered an Americano.

  The place was crowded with the usual weekday Minnesota suburban coffee shop activity: business casual informational interviews, insurance agents reviewing policies with clients, post-school-drop-off parents talking about whatever the hell they talk about, and the ever-present Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor/sponsoree meetings where the two recovering alcoholics, each with an open book before them, take turns reading aloud s
o everyone in the place can overhear words like steps and amends making the anonymous part not so anonymous, after all.

  We spotted an open table in the corner and headed for it. Char drew her share of stares and sucked a few decibels out of the room. Her six-foot-two frame stands out even in a land of giants like Minnesota with its Northern European gene pool, especially with her magazine cover face, giraffe neck, and mile-long legs.

  We sat, and Char got right to it. “The arrows I just examined appear to be the same as the one that lodged in your shoulder. I won’t know if the arrowheads will be an exact match until I remove them in the lab.

  “But here’s what’s interesting: the UK developed a technique for recovering fingerprints from metal even if someone wiped them off. I won’t bore you with all the science but the oil in fingerprints causes corrosion on metal almost instantaneously, even on stainless steel. So no matter how well the oil of the fingerprint is removed, an indelible image of the fingerprint is left behind. It takes some monkey business in the lab to reveal it, but when it’s over, the fingerprint is crystal clear. There’s a lab in Minneapolis that can do it. Yesterday, I sent them the shaft and arrowhead we took out of you. I got an email last night saying they found a print on the hosel of the arrowhead.”

  “Have you run it through IAFIS?”

  “Yes, and, so far, there are no matches.”

  “But a print is a print.”

  “That it is. And here’s the kick in the crotch. SPPD officially reprimanded me for ordering the lab work in Minneapolis and the IAFIS search. They said I overstepped my bounds as a medical examiner and should have left that work to forensics. I said forensics didn’t think of it or, if they did, they didn’t act on it. We had a bit of a shouting match late last night.”

  “Why do they care, if you’re all working for the same team?”

  “My guess it’s because last month I filed suit against the St. Paul Police Department.”

  “For?”

  “Sexual harassment. I don’t mind a little ribbing here and there, but it crossed the line. And not just one time from one cop, but dozens of times from several cops. Gay marriage is the law of the land, and a lot of Joe six-packs have come around. Problem is, it’s easier for some guys to accept a gay woman they don’t find attractive. If they want to sleep with you, they think the reason you prefer women is because you’ve yet to spread your legs for a man like them.