The Occupied Page 16

  “Everybody here in Manitou knows who Ashley Linderman is. I thought you were from here originally.”

  “I was.”

  “The Red Owl robbery? That ring a bell?”

  “Not at all. Must have been after I left.”

  “Sheriff Daniel Linderman? It was in all the papers.”

  “Like I said, I may have left for the East Coast by then.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Are you working with Detective Ashley Linderman on this case?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I was shown the corpse of a deceased person at the Manitou incinerator who may or may not have anything to do with this case.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Detective Linderman and I had ice cream together.”

  Donny Ray jumped in. “Aw . . . lovebirds.” And he giggled some more.

  I’d had enough. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I’ve got the same question for you,” Taggley said.

  “I’m not an agent of the sheriff’s department, and I’m not formally working with them to prosecute your client, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “Good to know. Did they tell you anything else about the murder?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Taggley hadn’t bothered to ask me about hearsay information from a secondary source, so I didn’t feel compelled to tell him what Dick Valentine had told me.

  That was all Taggley wanted from me, which, in the end, was pretty paltry. So I started in on Donny Ray.

  “Were you at the scene of the crime, and if not, where were you and who were you with?”

  “I wasn’t there. Okay? Got that? I was with my brother Karlin. Drinking. At my place. Watching the ball game.”

  “Which one?”

  “Brewers and Cardinals.”

  “Who won?”

  “Geez, I don’t know. We both finished off a pint of brandy apiece, and a case of beer too, partying pretty good, so I dunno . . .”

  “You don’t know who won?”

  “I just told you that. Don’t you got ears? You know, I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

  “Yes, you do. I’ve got a piece of paper from your lawyer with his signature on it that says you do.”

  “How about I give you a brain concussion right now?” Donny Ray put a fist in front of my face. His lawyer calmed him down.

  I ignored the tough-guy routine. “What time did the game start?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Where were they playing?”

  “Not in Milwaukee.”

  “Okay, so in St. Louis, right?”

  “Duhhhh,” Donny Ray said, laughing and sneering.

  “Which means central time.”

  Donny Ray cocked his head to the side. “Maybe eight or something, at night. Like I said, Karlin and I were drinking hard and blasted out of our gourds.”

  If he was telling the truth, that would have been when Bobby, on the other side of town, miles away, had just been killed. “Okay. Anyone else see you in your apartment that night?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know of any other evidence that would prove your innocence, other than your alibi? That at the time of the murder of Bobby Budleigh, you and Karlin were in your apartment drinking and watching the Brewers game?”

  Taggley shouted, “Don’t answer that.” Then he turned to me. “I’m not having my client give you my whole theory of defense. You think I’m crazy? What kind of lawyer do you take me for?”

  I was tempted to answer Taggley’s question candidly, but I refrained.

  When we were done, and Howard Taggley and I were back in the basement lobby of the jail, I had a question for him. “Is Karlin Borzsted, Donny Ray’s brother, around?”

  “Sure. He lives here in Manitou.”

  “An upright citizen?”

  Howard Taggley laughed. “Just got out of prison, like his brother. You figure it out.”

  “What else can you tell me about Karlin?”

  “He’s bigger than Donny Ray.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, he’s meaner.”

  35

  By the time I arrived back at my hotel I knew that the surf ’n’ turf restaurant had stopped serving. That left only the late-night pizza delivery guy. Fifty-five minutes later he arrived at my room with a medium-size thin-crust margherita pizza that was no longer hot and had left a grease spot on the inside of the soggy pizza box. But I was famished. Lukewarm pizza is still tasty if you’re hungry enough.

  I silenced my phone and fell asleep quickly, this time with the lights turned off but with the air-conditioning unit still buzzing.

  The next morning I slept late and awoke to a message on my cell. It was the one I had been waiting for. The one I had been hoping for.

  Detective Ashley Linderman said she wanted to talk and would swing by at 11:30 a.m. sharp. So I was there by the sliding-glass doors at the front of the hotel, waiting at exactly 11:30, holding the Styrofoam cup of coffee that I had grabbed from the complimentary breakfast bar just off the lobby. I knew Detective Ashley Linderman would be all business and that lunch wasn’t going to happen.

  Ashley swung her unmarked patrol car beneath the hotel carport, and as I approached her window, she told me to hop into the front, so I figured it was good news that I wasn’t relegated to the backseat behind the metal mesh; at least I wasn’t going to be arrested. But she had something else in mind. I was about to be treated like an insect hitting one of those electric zapper boxes that you hang outside in the summer, and you forget are hanging there until you hear the zap as the bugs get the shock treatment.

  “Tell me,” she said as she swooped her black Dodge into traffic, “how was your little chat with Donny Ray Borzsted?”

  ZAP.

  I played it cool. “I wish I could tell you. But I signed a piece of paper that says I can’t voluntarily disclose that to you. Not without an order from the court, and not until after I put up a fight in court first. Any disclosure has to be, you know, involuntary.”

  “Then I could make it involuntary,” she said. “I could Taser you until you talk.” I studied her when she said that. She never broke a smile.

  ZAP.

  “Let’s get real,” I shot back. “You’re going to have to honor my agreement with Howard Taggley or else file a motion with the judge. Those are your two options.”

  “I’ve got a third option.”

  “Oh?”

  “I could start pressuring you, squeezing you like a pimple till you spill everything.”

  “Thanks for the word picture,” I said. For an attractive female detective, Ashley was still rough around the edges.

  After a while I noticed that she had taken a route that was heading west, toward the bypass that eventually led out to Country Club Road.

  I tried to bridge the silence. “Sorry I can’t tell you much.”

  No response.

  My mind was clicking. I needed Detective Ashley in my mission to find out about Bobby’s murderer. And I needed Howard Taggley. And Taggley’s seedy client too. Somehow I had to find a way to straddle all of that.

  “You know,” I led off, “my criminal defense practice was in New York.”

  She glanced in my direction.

  “So, I was wondering,” I said, “whether here in Wisconsin, you’ve got a notice of alibi law. Requiring defense counsel to give notice to the prosecution, a certain amount of time before trial, that the defendant is going to claim that he was not at the scene of the crime when it happened, but was somewhere else. Just a hypothetical question.”

  She looked at me again.

  “Just wondering,” I added.

  “Yes. We’ve got a statute like that.” She kept throwing me side-glances as she continued. “If the defendant claims he was somewhere else.”

  “Another question,” I said. “Just curious. I was also wondering what you might know about Donny Ray’s fa
mily.”

  “Mom’s out of state. Dad’s in some kind of long-term assisted living facility. Donny also has a brother.”

  I smiled and nodded. “I bet he’s an interesting fellow.”

  “His name is Karlin. Just got out of prison.”

  “You don’t say.” Then I asked, “You watch much baseball?”

  “Some. But my job keeps me pretty busy.”

  “I bet a lot of people around here watch the Brewers games. You know, with family members and all. A brother watching with a brother. National pastime.”

  As she listened to me, there was movement at the corners of her lips. Not exactly a smile, but close.

  “Now, from hereafter,” I said, “if you want to know anything about my contact with Taggley or his client Donny Ray Borzsted, I’m going to have to enter the Forrest Gump plea.”

  I planned on having to give an explanation. But Ashley got there first. “You mean, ‘That’s all I have tuh say about thay-ut’?” she said in an impressive Tom Hanks impersonation, and I chuckled. A detective with a sense of humor.

  After a while we reached the intersection of the Highway A bypass and Country Club Road, and we stopped at the light.

  I decided to resurrect something about my late friend from high school. “Augie Bedders, the deceased man at the incinerator—I learned that his wife, Susan, was killed at this intersection,” I reported. “That’s why the stoplight is here now.”

  “Donny Ray told you that?”

  “No. Somebody else.”

  She drove straight ahead on Country Club Road for a mile or two and then pulled over to the side of the road where there was a cattle grate in the ground at the opening to a farmers’ service road. I knew why we had stopped.

  I looked over to the hill a half mile away and recognized the spot in the trees where so many years ago Bobby and Marilyn and I had our picnic, overlooking Pebble Creek. I knew the stream was nearby because I could hear it trickling and flowing somewhere, accompanied by the sour odor of decay in the warm summer air from the muddy swamp of the wetlands.

  “This is where it happened, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Ashley nodded. Then she reached under her seat, produced an envelope, and pulled out a photograph and handed it to me. “Sorry I have to show this to you,” she said. “But this envelope is about you.”

  It contained a police forensics photo of Bobby Budleigh as he lay dead along the banks of the creek. He was on his back and he was bare-chested. An open gash, ragged and red, was evident on the left side of his chest, where the heart must have been extracted. Underneath the open wound, there was a message scribbled in blood on his body. And when I read it, the breath was sucked from my lungs.

  Wrong side, Trevor.

  ZAP.

  36

  Ashley wasn’t talking as she drove me to my hotel. Neither was I.

  After seeing the photo of Bobby’s lifeless body and visiting the area where he had been slain, death seemed to be everywhere. I found myself repeating in my head something that I had read in the Psalms. “I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” For me, it was a prayer, steeling me against the message written on Bobby’s corpse. It was clear that the someone, or something, that had murdered Bobby also knew I would be coming to Manitou.

  When Ashley Linderman pulled up to the hotel, and before I could climb out of the front seat, she asked me a question. The same question she had put to me back on Country Club Road. “You’re telling me you don’t know why your name was written on Bobby Budleigh’s body? And that message—the business about ‘wrong side’—you don’t know what that means?”

  I gave the same answer. “Like I said, maybe Augie did it, maybe he didn’t, but I’m not going to give you some wild guess about why it was written on his body or what it means. All I know is that back in New York, I defended a guy who wrote a question on his victim, but it was different from the message here.” I took a second, then added, “But I have this inescapable feeling that there are forces at work that link all these killings together. Location of the mutilations on the body. Lack of motive. And most important, the sequential timing.”

  “What does that tell you?” she asked.

  “It’s the dreaded D word, Ashley. I’m thinking demons. You asked, so I answered. God and the devil. The battle between heaven and hell. Ever since Jesus gave me a U-turn, I can’t see these types of cases any other way.”

  Ashley’s jaw tightened, but she remained silent.

  I had my own questions for the detective. “Okay. Now it’s my turn. Can you tell me about the Red Owl robbery and Sheriff Daniel Linderman? Was he your father?”

  She raised an eyebrow and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. I hadn’t noticed before that her nails were painted. Red, but not flashy red. Soft red. Like the color of a rose.

  She said simply, “I don’t know you well enough yet.”

  But as I cranked open the passenger door and began to climb out she added, “Maybe later, sometime.”

  “One more question,” I said, still half in the car. “I’m convinced about God being who he is and about the devil being who he is. So, just wondering, off the record, where do you stand on that?”

  “Same answer. Some other time.”

  As I entered the lobby, I nodded to the desk clerk, trudged into my room, and after throwing some water on my face, I dumped into bed. I could have ordered another pizza to be delivered, lukewarm and greasy, but I wasn’t in the mood for food.

  So I caught another reality TV episode of Big Jim Torley, the Alaskan mountain man. This time he was concerned about a pack of gray Yukon wolves that were prowling around his cabin. Big Jim said that wolves were a “top predator . . . top of the food chain,” and that even though the experts discounted any real risk to humans by healthy wolves, Big Jim wasn’t buying it.

  Looking straight at the camera, he said in his big, barrel-chested, basso profundo voice, “Them nature ‘experts’ don’t know what they’re talking about. I heard about a boy at Icy Bay getting attacked by a wolf. For no reason. No provocation. Then there was this guy on a bicycle riding down the Alcan Highway. A big gray comes out of nowhere charging at him, snapping and snarling. So the man on the bike blasts the big gray in the face with some bear repellent. Thinks, Okay, that’s that. But it wasn’t. A couple of seconds later, the Yukon wolf comes back and jumps up on the back of the bike and starts biting at him like the thing was possessed.”

  On the TV screen there were images of Alaska late in the day, with shadows growing and the sunlight getting low and dusky, but of course the sun was not going to fully set, and Big Jim had his favorite wolf-hunting rifle, the AR-15, tucked across his arm as he paced around the outside of his cabin, surrounded by thick forest. He was looking for wolf tracks on ground that had been covered with a light dusting of snow. Then he stopped and said out loud so that the camera could catch it, “I hate them wolves when they come in packs, ’cuz they are especially bold and take no prisoners. And I hate ’em specially in the daylight when there’s woods around, like out yonder . . . ,” and he pointed to the tree line about fifty feet from his cabin. “’Cuz they’re mixed colors, gray and white, and they blend in when there’s snow on the ground and when the trees and underbrush is all gray-like. So, if they’re standin’ still in the woods in the daytime, you can’t hardly see ’em.”

  Then he stops and looks at the camera and grins so you can see his yellowed teeth. “Prefer ’em at night . . . ’cuz with a flashlight mounted on your gun barrel, you can shine ’em, and you know where they are ’cuz you can see them devil eyes glowing in the dark.”

  After Big Jim’s program was over, I did more channel flipping and then the late news. Meanwhile I took two bites from a breakfast bar that I had picked up at a quicky-stop store as Ashley was driving me home. That was all I could stomach. The forensic photo of Bobby’s corpse had broken my heart and killed my appetite.

  Around midnight I clicked off the television and then the light
next to my bed. I had set my alarm for a decent rising time the next morning because I knew what my next move would be. I needed to track down Donny Ray Borzsted’s brother, Karlin, the guy who held the key to Donny Ray’s alibi. I wanted to get resolution, yes or no: Did Donny Ray have anything to do with Bobby’s murder, including any connection with Augie Bedders, who, tragically, may have played some part?

  Sleep came slow. After tossing and turning I could finally feel myself start to sink into the bed. Muscles relaxed. I had managed to shut off the thinking machine in my skull, almost. In the dark of the room, darker than I had remembered the night before for some reason, I heard only my own labored breathing and the crinkle of the starched pillows under my head as I shifted position.

  A sensation began to materialize. But I tried to ignore it. From the part of the thinking machine that had still not been shut down entirely, I ordered myself to stop thinking, and to ignore it and go to sleep, which of course then guaranteed that I could not. Especially after the next thing that happened in that room.

  When I actually felt something hovering over me.

  Then I heard my name spoken, but not by a human voice. More like someone saying Trevor Black while coughing up a blood clot.

  Then hands around my neck squeezing down to the larynx and two red eyes glowing in the dark and coming down close to my face. I screamed and bashed out with both fists, sending roundhouse punches that connected with something solid and in a humanoid form, banging my knuckles. I tried to scramble out of bed but was caught in the sheets and tumbled to the ground, face-first.

  While I was on the floor I heard the voice again, and it was chuckling and making a gurgling, guttural noise.

  I tried to scramble to my feet, but I was picked up and then tossed back down to the floor like a wet bath towel. Then a crushing force on my chest. There was a foot pressing on me, and I couldn’t breathe.

  A simple thought. This is it.

  Then a flash from behind me in the room like a comet hitting the atmosphere. A blinding light that lit up the room. Whatever was crushing the life out of me was gone, along with the blood-clot voice and the glowing eyes.