Everything You Want Me to Be(20)

While Jake radioed him, I poked around the parking spot by the beach. The gravel was dry and snow-free, so no chance of pulling tire tracks to see who else might have driven in here. I walked over to where the trail started and squatted down. It was a dirt path that you could hardly see in the summer, winding through the surrounding weeds and grasses, but now, just after the thaw, it was exposed plain as day. The ground was smooth, tramped down by years’ worth of feet hiking around the lake. There were a couple half-prints here and there—not much to go on. A dozen people could have walked this path Friday night and you wouldn’t know.

I followed the trail around to the barn—it wasn’t far, maybe half a mile—and checked the shoreline to see if anything had washed up in the last few hours. Nothing.

When I got back, Jake was fiddling on his phone next to the beach. “So far Shel’s got a case of empty beer bottles with the labels all washed off. Looks like leftovers from last summer.”

“How much area has he got left?” I asked.

“He’s covered over half the lake. Or so he says.”

I glanced at Jake, who sneered. “He drives a boat like a twelve-year-old girl.”

“Better than whining about opening a case file like a twelve-year-old boy.”

Jake grunted.

“So Hattie gets out of the truck and Tommy thinks she’s walking home, but she walks to the barn.”

“The barn window’s on the other side of the building. You wouldn’t be able to see any lights inside from here.”

“Exactly.” I faced it again.

Physically, it was the same decrepit pile on the horizon I’d seen every fishing season, but its substance had changed. Now it held a horror inside, the memory of a dead girl who’d been so bursting with life and plans, who’d swatted me on the shoulder every time I called her Henrietta and told me once with a cheeky grin, “I’m going to arrest you for defamation of character.”

I’d laughed and explained you couldn’t defame someone’s character by calling them their legal name. And then we’d had a long talk about free speech and what was and wasn’t legal, with Bud looking on, shaking his head like he was proud and kind of confused all at the same time about where this girl came from.

“So, if Hattie went there by herself, either the killer was waiting for her, or knew she was there and came later.”

I turned away from the barn and the memories I didn’t need right now. “Agreed. Odds are strong against a chance meeting out here. Someone knew she was going to the barn on Friday night.”

“You don’t like Tommy as a suspect.” Jake said, watching the water.

“He’s all we got at this point and he admitted a fight besides.”

“You don’t like him for the killer,” he said again.

“Mmm.”

A yell came off the lake and Shel waved wildly at the monitors. I waited motionless, hoping for the knife, while he hauled up his find and motored back to the launch. It was a purse instead, found about twenty yards from shore and one-third of the way down the trail from the barn. A quick check revealed Hattie’s license and school ID inside, which told us the killer probably tossed it as he left through one of the parking lots.

“You want to call off the field search?” Jake asked as we cataloged the contents on the cruiser’s hood.

“After today. Keep them tracking along the main field paths until sundown, just to see if anything else turns up.” There was no sense wasting the borrowed manpower I had from Olmsted County.

We bagged and tagged everything in Hattie’s purse, from her waterlogged phone down to the empty Lifesaver wrappers that littered every pocket, and after ten minutes of methodical examination there was only one thing that interested me.

“This guy.”

I held up the bag with a business card we’d found in Hattie’s wallet. It was black on one side, white on the other, and some fancy writing said Gerald Jones with a website underneath. On the white side someone had written a phone number.

“I want to know who this is and why Hattie had his card. Check the number. Find out where he is.”

Jake nodded while he fiddled with another evidence bag. “I think the phone’s completely toast. Too bad.”

“Suppose we’ll have to do our police work the old-fashioned way.”

Jake slid right into our standing argument as he gathered up the purse evidence and we got back into the cruiser.

“Del, the old-fashioned way is antiquated. You want to know about this Gerald Jones? If the phone had worked I could’ve just looked him up in her address book and seen when she last talked to him.”

“So you have to get a warrant for some phone records. You’re breaking my heart.”

We argued until we got back to Pine Valley and then Jake went to pick up some Dairy Queen while I had Nancy finalize the press release. Neither one of them seemed to think about going home on a Sunday night. Usually if Jake had to work overtime, he would’ve started complaining by now, but I didn’t hear a word out of him. Nothing about some date with legs up to there or the beers he was missing with his buddies. There was a silent understanding that we were all in this case together, to whatever end.

I talked to the field teams while we ate. Shel hadn’t turned anything else up in the lake and the dogs were coming up empty. If we couldn’t find the murder weapon, our hard evidence depended completely on the autopsy results and the forensics report on the items they’d found in the lagoon. We needed some prints or some DNA, badly.