Twelve

Chloe finished her kuchen, still thinking about flour. During her career she’d helped tell the beginning of that story (planting, growing, and harvesting grain) and the end of that story (creating baked goods from scratch) at historic farms from Wisconsin to Switzerland. She’d never had opportunity to consider the middle phase, though—turning grain into flour. The mill’s interpretive possibilities really were exciting.

She read the research reports, scribbling ideas as they came. An hour later she reluctantly acknowledged that she should be going. She made sure the fire was out, bundled up, and fetched her skis from the front porch. The cast iron skillet she’d baked the kuchen in, which now needed cleaning, was a heavy addition to her pack.

But it was worth it, Chloe thought, as she kicked off. My love life might be falling apart, but I do enjoy my work.

Her optimism carried her back to the Education House. She’d endured her assigned workspace in a dilapidated trailer through the fall, but once the weather turned cold, she humbly begged Byron for corner space in the cottage he shared with the curator of research. She’d found an old wooden desk in a storage shed, scrubbed away all evidence of mice, and bribed a maintenance guy to help her haul it to her new digs. She had no privacy at Ed House. Byron was on the phone a whole lot, potential interpreters came for interviews on a daily basis, and she now was expected to help answer the museum’s main phone line if it rang more than twice. Still, the move had been good.

Byron’s car was the only one in the Ed House lot. “I come bearing kuchen,” she called as she walked into the main room.

“Good,” Byron said. “Say, somebody’s been trying to reach you.”

Roelke, maybe? Chloe’s heart rose, making her I’m an independent woman psyche nervous. But Byron added, “A friend from Minnesota.” He handed her several little While You Were Out slips.

“Ariel,” Chloe said automatically. Then she frowned. The From line on each slip was blank, and the number listed below was unfamiliar.

Chloe went to her own desk and placed the call. A man answered after one ring. “Hello?”

“This is Chloe Ellefson.”

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “This is Toby, Ariel’s brother. I need your help.”

Chloe felt every muscle go taut. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Ariel,” Toby said. “She’s been arrested.”

Fortified by his pierogi, Roelke drove to his old district building. He sat in his truck until shortly before second shift started. Inside, he gave the desk guy a friendly wave—Hey, it’s just me—as he walked by. Sergeants would be busy with roll call—inspecting uniforms, checking weapons, handing out lists of stolen cars’ license plates, sharing whatever the beat guys needed to know.

He reached the communications room as Olivette was shrugging into her coat, which was an astonishing orange number. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t speak until joining him in the corridor. “You want another favor.”

“You did offer,” Roelke reminded her.

She sighed. “I did. What do you need?” She began walking. Her old-fashioned boots, the kind that came to mid-shin and fastened on the side with button-and-loop closures, made rubbery whispers.

Roelke fell into step beside her. “I need the list of specific call boxes Rick used for his mark calls during his last shift.” A cop couldn’t make a mark from the same box twice in a row, and a record was kept to prove he was covering his beat. “I know what Rick’s habitual pattern was. Maybe comparing his mark locations with the call list you gave me will present something new.”

“That’s out of my jurisdiction, hon. Did you ask the clerks?”

“I’m trying to be low-key here, Olivette.”

“Right.” She mulled that over. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks. What’s the mood in the building?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “You know about the gun?”

“Yeah. Anything new come to light?”

“Nothing that’s been announced. The mood around here?” She shook her head. “It’s ugly.”

“Ariel’s been arrested?” Chloe repeated.

Toby sounded frantic. “I’ve never heard her so hysterical before.”

“But why on earth was Ariel arrested? What can the cops possibly think she’s done?”

“I don’t know! She said she’d been arrested, and then she hung up.”

“Did you try calling back?”

“Of course I tried calling back!” Toby said. “The cop I talked to said she had terminated the call herself, and wouldn’t provide any further information. I’m desperate to get down there, but my wife’s sick and can’t really take care of the baby, and—”

“Let me see what I can do,” Chloe said. “I’ll call you back.”

She dialed Ralph Petty to request time off. Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so helpful at the staff meeting this morning, she thought. The site director had never liked her. Baiting him and then asking for a favor was not a good strategy.

When he picked up, she plunged in. “My colleague in Minneapolis needs help. She’s trying to finish that interpretive plan proposal in time to meet a grant deadline on Friday—”

“Go ahead. We’ll consider it a professional favor to a sister in-
stitution.”

“—and I’d like to …” Chloe realized belatedly what Petty had said. “Um … Okay. Thanks.”

She hung up and looked at Byron. “Petty only agrees to my ideas if they involve me leaving town. Coincidence?”

“I think not. But I’d just go with it.”

Chloe waited until she got home to her rented farmhouse to make personal calls. Her friend Dellyn said she was happy to kitty-sit Olympia again. “Sorry,” she murmured to Olympia, who clearly understood that Chloe was going to leave again, and was clearly aggrieved. “Lots of lap time when I get home, I promise.”

Then Chloe dug out Toby’s phone number and used a pencil to dial. “Hey, it’s me. I told my boss that I have a wonderful opportunity to consult with the Minnesota Historical Society on the mill project, and I got permission to take a few days off. I’ll leave for Minneapolis first thing in the morning and call you when I know what’s going on.”

Her last call was to Roelke’s cousin Libby. “I wanted to be sure that you’d heard about Rick’s death.”

“I saw it on the news,” Libby said grimly. “This is straight out of my worst nightmare.”

“Have you talked to Roelke?”

“I haven’t been able to reach him. How’s he holding up?”

“I’d have a better idea,” Chloe said, “if he would actually talk to me. He’s in Milwaukee. My company is not wanted.”

“Oh.”

“That being the case, I’m going to Minneapolis for a few days. A friend of mine is having a hard time. Here’s the number, in case you need to reach me.” She dictated the digits.

“Got it.”

Chloe nibbled her lower lip. “Will you … I don’t know … could you keep trying to get in touch with Roelke? Maybe he’ll talk to you.”

“Probably not.” Libby paused. Chloe pictured her in her kitchen, thinking. Finally Libby said, “Time with the kids would do him good. Their dad just let Justin down for the zillionth time, and that will give me an opening. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks. I’m worried about him.”

“Yeah,” Libby said. “I’m worried about him, too.”

After leaving Olivette, Roelke drove downtown. While the MPD district stations operated with a large degree of independence, the Police Administration Building served as a clearing house and repository for all records. The central property guys circled through the districts every couple of days, picking up firearms, knives, baseball bats, croquet mallets, pot, cocaine, and everything else that cops had seized from bad guys and stored temporarily in their own inventory room. Even dinky stuff got moved here. A gun that had killed a cop? That would be locked down tight.

Roelke made his way to the clerical division, an enormous room filled largely with files designed to hold five-by-seven-inch cards. One of the police aides looked up from a typewriter. “Can I help you?”

This guy can’t be more than seventeen, Roelke thought. The aides were kids who wanted to be cops, high school graduates waiting to turn twenty-one so they could apply to the academy. Roelke fought the urge to grab this kid’s shoulders and say Are you sure you want to be a cop? Really sure? Instead he said, “I’d like to see Fritz Klinefelter.”

“Here I am.” A heavyset man with a Santa Claus beard wheeled himself from a passageway between banks of files. “Hey, McKenna.”

Fritz Klinefelter had once been a field training officer. Tough but fair, his rookies said, which was the best a guy could hope for. His FTO career ended when a drunk driver plowed into his squad car. Now Klinefelter used a wheelchair and ruled the clerical division.

When the older man rolled around the desk, Roelke pulled one of the visitors’ chairs over and extended a hand. “It’s good to see you.”

“You, too. You remind me of good times in the bad old days. Remember the car wars?”

Roelke laughed—actually laughed out loud. Milwaukee cops, if they were assigned a car at all, were lucky to get one with four wheels. Still, there was nothing worse than coming out of a tavern and discovering an empty spot where the car used to be. “I figured I was off probation when you moved my car around the corner.”

Klinefelter’s grin faded. He looked over his shoulder. “Hey, guys? Take ten.”

The baby-faced kid looked up from his typewriter. “But I haven’t finished—”

“Take ten.” He didn’t raise his voice, but all three aides filed silently from the room. Klinefelter turned back to Roelke. “First of all, I’m sorry about Almirez.”

Roelke was looking forward to the day when every conversation did not begin with expressions of sympathy. “Yeah.”

“You know the gun came from district Evidence?”

“I do.” Roelke’s knee began to piston. “Somebody inside that building broke into Evidence, snatched the gun, and shot Rick in the head.”

“It seems so.”

“Rick got along with everybody. You ever hear otherwise?”

“No.”

“I’ve talked with Banik and Bliss, and neither of them can think of anyone who had a beef with Rick. He’d just gotten engaged to a wonderful girl, so I guarantee you he wasn’t sleeping with somebody’s wife. But something’s going on. Maybe somebody got sucked into drug stuff, and Rick saw something.”

“Did he report anything like that?”

Roelke made a frustrated gesture. “If so, nobody would tell me. I talked to Sergeant Malloy but didn’t get very far.”

“Try talking to one of the detectives?”

Yeah, right, Roelke thought. “There’s nobody I know personally. Besides, I’m trying to work back channels.”

“So you came to me?”

“I did,” Roelke said, hoping Klinefelter would understand that he meant it as a compliment. To be sure he added, “I don’t know who to trust right now. I thought you might let me check through Rick’s FI cards.” Field investigation cards, he meant. An information-gathering form printed on rectangles of yellow cardstock. Active cops turned in a lot of FI cards, and they ended up here for long-term storage. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but maybe he recorded an incident that might give me something to go on.”

“Could be,” Klinefelter said. “But somebody beat you to it.”

“Well, I figured that might happen,” Roelke admitted. “It’s been two days already. Standard procedure for the detectives, I guess.”

Klinefelter leaned forward in his chair. “But here’s what’s not standard procedure. I was home when I heard about what happened. I came in Saturday morning to pull all of Almirez’s cards for the detectives. It’s what I could do, you know? When I got here, all of those cards were gone. Somebody had pulled every damn card with Rick’s name on it, going back six months.”

Roelke did not like what he was hearing. “Did you check in with the detectives working the case?”

“Straight off. The guy I talked to thanked me for pulling the cards and leaving them on his desk. I have no idea who put them there, or what cards might have been removed from the stack first.”

Roelke felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. “What does that mean?” he asked, although he knew.

Klinefelter’s eyes flashed with anger. “It means that while some beat man may have pulled the trigger, somebody higher up is involved. Somebody with access to a key to our records.”

Roelke pressed a knuckle against his forehead. What the hell was going on inside the MPD?

“Now, I got something to say to you. I don’t like it, but facts are facts.” Klinefelter worked his jaw. “I’ve got a twenty-nine-year old daughter with Down Syndrome. She’s going to need expensive care after me and my wife are gone. A lot of cops work security when they retire, but once the MPD puts me out to pasture, I’m not going to have a lot of job offers come my way. You understand what I’m telling you?”

A warning throbbed in the back of Roelke’s skull. “I’m a Lone Ranger here.”

“I’m sorry, McKenna.” Klinefelter looked torn up. “You deserve better, and so does Almirez. But that’s the way it is.”

“It’s okay, really.” Roelke tried to focus. “Just a couple of things before I go. Do you have any idea what might have been in the records that made somebody so nervous?”

“No. The kids do the actual filing. It’s unlikely they’d remember anything, and I’m not asking them. I do not want them involved, even a little bit. They got their whole careers ahead of them.”

And Fritz Klinefelter believed that meddling in this investigation—even something so mild as trying to remember who Officer Rick Almirez had written up recently, and why—might end those careers before they even entered the recruit academy.

“Watch yourself, McKenna,” Klinefelter said grimly. “We already got one dead cop.”

Jesus, Rick, Roelke thought as he drove west from Milwaukee. What the hell did you stumble into? And why didn’t you tell me about it?

They’d had opportunities to talk. Roelke often spent the night at Rick’s apartment after band practice. They’d wasted the usual amount of time grumbling about work stuff—repeat-offender drunks, cranky sergeants, a change in the overtime policy. Rick had not hinted at anything more dire. Maybe he was trying to protect his friends, Roelke thought. Maybe he’d sniffed out something dangerous, and he didn’t want me or Dobry anywhere close to it.

But Rick hadn’t said he was about to ask Jody to marry him, either. Roelke remembered Dobry’s disappointment when he heard that news: He decided to pop the question, and he didn’t tell us about it?

By the time Roelke left the interstate, his head hurt. His eyes were gritty. His nerves felt pan-fried and crispy. All he wanted to do was go home, take a hot shower, and hit the sack. But as he neared Eagle, it occurred to him that he hadn’t heard from Banik or Bliss since he’d asked each to keep him posted. Could be that a message was waiting at work.

Roelke drove to the EPD. The squad car was gone, thank God. He wasn’t up to chit-chat. Inside, he found two message slips in his mailbox. The first: Libby called. Urgent. Trouble with J.

“Oh, hell,” he muttered. He did not have time or energy to deal with new problems. But … Trouble with J. The hard times Libby and her two kids faced after an ugly divorce were the reason he’d left the Milwaukee PD in the first place. Justin was a great kid who had a lot of problems, all—in Roelke’s opinion—stemming from the fact that his father was an asshole.

Roelke called his cousin. She answered on the first ring. “Roel­ke? I know what happened. Are you okay?”

“I’m holding it together.”

“Come over for supper.”

“Can’t. What’s going on with Justin?”

Libby exhaled audibly. “He’s got a huge social studies project about ethnic heritage to do. Dan promised to take him to the Milwaukee Public Museum tomorrow after school, but he canceled. Justin is hurt and angry and taking it all out on me and his little sister.”

“Put him on. I’ll talk to him.”

“What I really need is for you to take him through the exhibits at the museum.”

“Libby, I can’t.”

“Why not? Chloe said you were spending most of your time in Milwaukee.”

“You talked to Chloe?” Roelke tried to figure out why that bothered him.

“She’s going back to Minneapolis, by the way.”

He didn’t have to figure out why that bothered him. Holy toboggans, what the hell was wrong with him? His best friend was dead and he’d just sent his girlfriend packing.

“So, will you take Justin through the museum? Just the history part.”

“I’m not the best person to spend time with Justin right now.” His voice was husky.

“Justin needs guy time. He needs you. Look, we can meet you there. Just give him an hour, okay? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need your help.”

“I know you wouldn’t.” He cleared his throat. “Okay.”

After finalizing logistics Roelke hung up and looked at the second message slip. Dobry Banik called. No message. Dobry probably wanted to be sure that Roelke knew about the gun coming from Evidence. Well, he’d touch base with Dobry tomorrow.

Roelke rubbed his forehead. After what he’d learned from Fritz, he’d also warn his friends to watch their backs. I need to take better precautions myself, he thought. He’d spent the past couple of days in jeans and flannel shirts. Time to add his bullet-resistant vest.

He opened his locker. The photograph of Erin Litkowski, the woman who’d gone into hiding to avoid her whacko-brute husband, caught his attention again. Something niggled at the edge of his mind. He frowned, struggling to grasp it. Then he snatched the photo.

For the first time, Erin reminded him of somebody else. He flipped through a carousel of mental images. It wasn’t that long ago that he’d seen someone who …

Knowledge came like a punch to the gut. This morning, at Kip’s, two waitresses had been getting ready for first shift. One had looked familiar. She had short, straw-colored hair, not the red curls in the photo. But the face—the face was older, but the same. He was sure of it.

Erin Litkowski was back in Milwaukee. Erin Litkowski was working for Kip at the Bar.