And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(58)

Dan was at the hospital. “My daughter is in a room on the third floor. My wife’s in a separate room on the second.”

“What happened to Patty?”

“She went into a frenzy when I told her about Sam’s accident. She was drunk, of course. I tried to get her to sit on the couch with me, but she ran around like she was trying to chase a bat out of the room. She twisted her ankle and banged her head on a table. I had an ambulance come out and pick her up. She’s got five stitches in her forehead. I asked them to keep her overnight so she could sleep it off. My sister-in-law is coming by to pick her up and take her home this morning.”

“How’s your daughter?”

“Shannon is sedated. They put her on a ventilator to protect her airway from aspiration. The doctors said it was good you found her when you did. They think she was hypoxic for some time. She had pinpoint pupils and blue lips by the time they got her to the hospital. She’s on an IV for fluids.”

“I really need to get in there and talk to her about her brother.”

“She doesn’t know about Sam yet. She’s barely been awake since I’ve been here. Her doctor said they’ll take out the breathing tube later today.”

Packard knew he should sympathize with Shannon’s addiction issues and the loss of her brother, but all he could think was that she was impeding his investigation. He needed to know what she knew about her brother’s drug business. Everything else was secondary.

“Thanks for the update, Dan. I’ll call you again later today to see how she’s doing.”

***

Packard went down to the lake in his wet suit and swam. The weight of the case felt like a drag on him in the water. He tried to put it out of his mind while he rewarmed his cold bones in the sauna. At the bottom of the narrow window in the sauna door, Packard could still see the smears from where Jarrett used to rub his nose while Packard was steaming inside. In the end, he’d had Jarrett, Marcus’s dog, longer than he’d known Marcus.

When he looked back on it, Packard knew fleeing from Minneapolis to Sandy Lake had been what they call in recovery circles a geographical cure. He thought his problems were with the city and the job and the rumors about him and Marcus. He’d expected to leave his troubles behind, but two years on he still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Marcus. In death, Marcus had become perfect. Untouchable. Packard was the asshole who kept him at arm’s length during their year together, wary of what his life would be like coupled with another man.

One of things he missed most about Marcus was hearing him sing in the bathroom as he got ready to go somewhere. Marcus liked looking good and smelling good, and took his time doing it. He could spend an hour in the bathroom wearing nothing but a white towel, his black skin glistening with steam from the hot shower he’d continue to let run while he went through his ablutions. Nobody would have guessed that the rough, tough cop had more moisturizers and colognes than Macy’s.

Packard thought he’d built this bathroom as a retreat for himself, but now, looking through the narrow window in the sauna door at how he’d spent almost $20,000, he saw it for what it was—a shrine to Marcus. A gift for someone who was never coming around to receive it.

***

The lead investigator from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had called a meeting for 10:00 a.m. to share the findings so far on the drug runners killed by the overturned semi. No one had called Kelly, so an inordinate amount of time was spent finding the keys to the conference room, figuring out how to turn up the heat on a Sunday and make enough coffee for the half-dozen people assembled for the meeting. Packard had to laugh at how some of the best investigators around could be so confounded by a commercial-grade coffee machine with only two buttons.

Once everyone was seated, the BCA agent in charge, a guy with the last name of Parks, went around the table and gave each person a stapled brief. Parks was tall and bald, dressed in a white shirt and khaki cargo pants. Age had hollowed out his face and slackened his neck. He smelled like cigarettes as he passed behind Packard.

“The driver’s identity has been established and confirmed with authorities in Fargo.” The packet had a photocopy of a North Dakota driver’s license belonging to a white male with short, wet-looking hair cut across his forehead in a severe line. “His address is a trailer on a lot owned by an oil-drilling operation. We’ve got local eyes on it in case anyone shows up looking for our victim or his cargo, but so far it’s been quiet. We still don’t know the identity of the female. The body was too damaged to get a good photo for identification purposes.”

Packard flipped through the pages, only half-interested in the presentation. The conference was a courtesy more than anything. By the end of the day, everyone who wasn’t local would be gone, the investigation split to focus on Fargo and Duluth. The destroyed car and the weed in the trunk would be gone, too. Packard was happy to let it all go. The victims weren’t locals. If they’d made it five more miles down the road, they’d have been in another county and this would have been another sheriff’s problem.

Thielen peeked through the window in the door while the meeting was in session, and he gave her a nod so she’d know he’d seen her. The meeting lasted an hour while they went around the table and every other agent reported on their part of the investigation. It took another hour of conference calls back to Minneapolis headquarters, side conversations, and general bullshitting about the weather and the bass-fishing season before Packard could disengage.