Nineteen
Twenty minutes later Roelke sat in his truck with engine on and heater blasting. Right now he couldn’t face even a friendly waitress. He didn’t want any more coffee. He didn’t want anything to eat. He just wanted to figure out what the hell Rick had gotten himself into.
He pulled his stack of three-by-fives from his pocket, gathered the People cards, and set the rest aside. First, Captain Heikinen. Heikinen had access to call sheets, Evidence, probably even the downtown records. He’d also made a private and inappropriate call to Olivette to ask what the heck Roelke McKenna was doing. “More than you know,” Roelke muttered, before turning to the next card.
Next, Kip: Hired Erin. Lied about Rick. Hiding something. Roelke underscored that last word savagely.
He reached for a blank card, trying to dig the name of Erin Litkowski’s husband from his memory. Steve, wasn’t it? Steve Litkowski. Had Erin turned to Rick for help? Roelke didn’t have any trouble with the picture of Steve Litkowski going after a cop who tried to assist Erin. But how could Litkowski have gotten his hands on a gun locked up in police Evidence? Roelke wrote, Check up on Steven Litkowski. Time to learn what the asshole was up to these days.
On another blank card he wrote Lobo/Wolf. Sherman says Lobo was talking to Rick in the Rusty Nail shortly before the shooting. Recently released from Waupun. Seems to have disappeared from MKE.
Roelke lined these four cards up neatly on his dashboard—Captain Heikinen, Kip, Steve Litkowski, Lobo. He willed his brain to find a link, some connection. None of it made sense. He’d never heard even a hint of any shady stuff about Heikinen. Same with Kip—he was straight as a signpost and ran a clean place.
Litkowski was a bully and a wife-beater. Lobo was a felon. How might those two have connected? And how did Erin fit into this? Why had she come back to Milwaukee? How did she end up working for Kip? And why, Roelke demanded silently, did she run from me?
Maybe it was time to contact Erin’s sister. Roelke considered, then decided against it. If she was hiding Erin, she probably wouldn’t say anything. If she hadn’t known Erin was back in Milwaukee, she’d be devastated to discover that her sister had come back but disappeared again.
Roelke wondered once more if drugs were in the middle of this mess. Cocaine didn’t discriminate. Some people got involved for the money; some for the kicks. Maybe Lobo had been a dealer, and Litkowski had a secret habit. It wasn’t unheard of for some big-time dealer to manage his business from prison. Roelke still couldn’t fit Kip into the puzzle, but if Rick had discovered that Captain Heikinen was on the take, maybe he’d been trying to get Lobo to flip. Roelke could almost hear Rick: “Come on, man, you just got out! You want to go back to prison? Or do you want to help take down a dirty cop?”
Just one problem with that theory: he hadn’t found any evidence of drugs. Somebody had stolen a gun from Evidence, and somebody had used that gun to shoot Officer Rick Almirez in the back of the head. Everything beyond that was conjecture.
Roelke felt a wave of loneliness as he watched pedestrians pick their way over snowbanks. I’m a Lone Ranger, he’d said to Klinefelter. Well, he was still discovering what that felt like. During his days as a Milwaukee patrolman, he’d always had Rick to kick ideas around with. More recently, he’d had some good conversations with Chloe about investigations. She hated being in the middle of crime stuff, but she was smart. She approached things differently, and she’d helped him a lot.
But he couldn’t think about Chloe right now.
Instead he made a new to-do list:
1. Call Jody & ask about Lobo and Heikinen
2. Ask Dobry to check Steven Litkowski’s address, and check for arrest record
3. Ask Dobry about Linka-Małgorzata
Roelke stared at the next blank line for a long time before cursing, gritting his teeth, and finishing:
4. Go to Waupun
He stuffed the cards away, found a payphone, and called Jody. “It’s me,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“I never know what to say when people ask me that.”
“Me either. Listen, I need to ask you a couple of things. Do you know if there was any bad blood between Rick and Captain Heik-
inen?”
“As far as I know, Rick didn’t have any direct dealings with the captain. He would have been more likely to talk about that with you.”
“He never said anything to me. I was just wondering. Here’s another one: did you ever hear Rick mention a bad guy named Lobo? It could be a nickname.”
“I don’t think so. Is it important?”
“It could be. I just found out that Rick was talking to a guy called Lobo in the Rusty Nail that night.”
“Wolf,” Jody murmured. “Is that who shot Rick?”
“It’s too early to know that,” Roelke cautioned. “But it’s a start. Evidently this Lobo guy just got out of prison, so maybe Rick had arrested him.”
“You can check that, right?”
“I’m going to try. The thing is … it’s possible that some of Rick’s records are missing.”
“Missing?”
“Somebody got to Rick’s field reports before they could be officially pulled. They ended up on the detective’s desk, but I’ve got no way to know what, if anything, disappeared on the way.”
Silence.
“Listen, Jody. It looks like a cop is involved. Maybe more than one.”
“What? I don’t understand!”
“Me neither. But I’ll get it. I swear I will.”
“I didn’t think I could possibly feel any worse.” Jody’s voice was hollow. “But I do now.”
Roelke pressed one knuckle against his forehead. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No.” The hollowness was replaced with a gritty strength. “I need to know, Roelke. Don’t try to shelter me.”
“Just don’t mention any of this to anyone, okay? I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
Chloe kept Owen company for the rest of the afternoon. She had nowhere else to be, and she was interested. Besides, she was pretty sure she’d get lost if she tried to leave the mill on her own. If she even had the nerve to try.
On the way back down, they paused on the fifth floor. Owen opened an interior door. “Take a peek.”
Chloe walked into an office that might have been vacated moments earlier, not almost two decades. The desk still held a big blotter, typewriter, pens. A woman’s sweater dangled from a coat tree. A placard—Every day is safety day!—hung on the wall. A sign on a time clock reminded workers that cards could be punched no earlier than ten minutes before shifts started.
“It looks like the employees just stepped out,” Chloe said.
“When the mill shut in 1965, the workers got no notice. Some of them learned about it on the evening news.” Owen studied the room. “When I’m here alone, I half-expect one of the old millers to tap me on the shoulder.”
“Yeah.” Chloe was glad that she wasn’t the only one tuned to the workers who had come and gone.
They stopped next on the second floor to see rows of roller stands. “The grinding floor,” Owen said. “They called it ‘the money floor.’ These rollers were so much more efficient than millstones that they revolutionized the entire process. Groups of roller mills were designed to grind grain into finer and finer flour.”
“Ah,” Chloe said sagely.
He tapped a roller mill. “I’ve isolated this one so we can simulate an operating machine. Fortunately I’ve had help from a couple of undergrads, and a millwright who got laid off in 1965. He loves tinkering with the machinery.”
“Is he bitter about the mill closing so abruptly?”
Owen considered. “It broke his heart, but I wouldn’t say he’s bitter. Now, there were some ugly labor problems in the early 1900s. Union men versus owners, that sort of thing. Some guys lost their jobs, so I imagine that caused hard feelings.”
Some things never change, Chloe thought.
They left the complex as the afternoon sun sank in the west. “Say,” Owen said as they passed—legally—through a gate in the fence. “Did you ever see Bohemian Flats?
“That community down by the river?”
Owen clicked the gate’s padlock. “Right. Even with all the automation, two million pounds of flour a day did not make itself. The city’s population increased by something like thirteen hundred percent between 1870 and 1890. A lot of immigrants found work in the mills. And some of them lived down on the Flats.” Owen glanced her. “I’d feel better if we go down together, okay? I’ll drive.”
“If it will make you feel better,” Chloe said magnanimously.
He drove no more than a mile or so before Chloe saw a low flatland between the river and the road. Owen pulled over. “This was Bohemian Flats, although there’s not a lot to see now,” he said apolo-
getically.
Chloe didn’t care. There was something here, something that compelled her to get out of the car. Behind them, steep bluffs rose to the city proper. A bridge ran almost overhead, connecting the highlands here on the western bank of the Mississippi with the equally impressive bluffs on the east side.
Owen got out, too. “At one time this was a community of maybe five hundred people. Lots of Slovaks, Czechs, Irish, Swedes, Germans, Poles …” He hunched his shoulders against a knife-like wind. “It’s hard to imagine, now that everything—and everyone—is gone.”
“Oh, I can imagine it,” Chloe assured him. It was strange to be here in this silent, windswept pocket. The bustling modern city on high seemed more than a steep climb away. She squinted into the growing shadows and had no trouble at all imagining the people who had once called this place home.