Forty-Two

After Ariel went to work Thursday morning, Chloe found a re­cipe for Polish doughnuts called pączki —just the thing for a depressing morning. Ariel had kept secrets, and Chloe didn’t know how to get around that. First my guy, and now my friend, Chloe thought. Lovely.

She also found herself in a difficult spot. Toby would surely become Suspect Number One if the cops learned that he’d gone to the mill to put the fear of God into Whyte. Chloe believed that Toby had only wanted to protect his sister from further harassment. And she believed that Everett Whyte was, despite his many accomplishments, a slimy little jerk. Still, Ariel and Toby had withheld information that might be of critical importance to the detectives working the case. So … what was she supposed to do now?

Chloe was still trying to figure that out when the last bit of sweet dough had been transformed into a filled doughnut. As she cleaned the counter, she unearthed a stack of index cards—and snatched them as if Roelke had transported them there, just for her. She settled down with pen, mug of coffee, and a doughnut. She sampled her handiwork—oh my, was it good—before writing Everett Whyte on one of the cards.

Toby wouldn’t be off the legendary hook until someone discovered the truth behind Whyte’s death. The drowning might have been accidental, but knowing what kind of man the professor had been opened up a world of new possibilities. Chloe jotted notes and ideas on cards, surveying them, arranging them, making associations, and arranging them again. She’d met too many men like Whyte, men who used their power to demean women. He had done so to Ariel, evidently without fear that he’d be held accountable. What other women had he abused? Other students? Colleagues?

What about women at the mill? Girls like Star must have appeared particularly powerless and vulnerable. But girls who survived on the street—or in the mill—were tougher than Ariel. Perhaps Whyte had threatened one of them, and the intended victim had struck back.

Chloe wrote, Ask Sister Mary Jude about the girls. She knew them best. And, Talk to Jay. He may not have noticed any unacceptable behavior, but if nudged to think back, looking for telltale signs, he might have insights, too.

Chloe called the State Historic Preservation Office. “Jay Rutledge is working at the mill site today,” the receptionist said.

“Thanks.” Chloe hung up and chewed her lower lip. She was not keen on returning to the mill, but maybe Jay was working with the crew by the river again, and she could talk to him outside.

She licked jelly from one finger and considered her cards. This system truly is helpful, she thought. And scribbling on index cards did evoke Roelke’s presence in a comforting way.

So … what other bits of cop advice could she retrieve? Chloe replayed the lone conversation they’d had on Tuesday night, when he called to ask about Polish folk art and chickens. I’m spending time in the old neighborhood, he’d said. When a crime occurs, it’s important to go back to the people who live in the community. They know the place, the people, better than anyone.

In this case, the neighborhood was the mill. Sister Mary Jude had mentioned that the detectives had tried to interview people living in the mill, with poor results. But the detectives were men. If homeless women had been harassed by Whyte, they’d be much more likely to talk to the nun. Or to Officer Ashton. Or to her.

Chloe glanced at the clock. Ten past noon. She tucked the cards away and reached for her coat.

Roelke called Fritz three times on Thursday morning. “Got anything with those prints? Find a match?”

“Nothing yet,” Fritz muttered, three times. “Call back in an hour.”

The waiting was unendurable. Roelke felt wired and tired and jumpy. After doing what he needed to do at Forest Home Cemetery, he drove aimlessly—east to Lake Michigan, north to Mequon, west to Elm Grove. Everything was the same and everything was different. Rick was gone and Chloe felt gone, and one of the few friends he had left might soon be revealed as a killer.

At one o’clock he dialed the now-familiar number again. Fritz came onto the line. “Roelke.” His voice was heavy.

“You found a match.”

“Yeah. Jesus.” Fritz’s voice quivered with rage or grief or both. “The gun you found at Kozy Park was definitely handled by a cop.”

When Chloe arrived at the mill, she wandered down to the riverside ruins. No sign of Jay. “Shit,” she muttered. So much for Plan A.

She made her way to a mill window and peered inside, expecting to find Sister Mary Jude cleaning up from lunch. Although her VW was parked nearby, there was no sign of her, either. So much for Plan B.

Chloe retreated to her car. Her theory—that someone had retaliated for Whyte’s abuse—didn’t explain why someone had tampered with the roller stand that injured Owen. She was not going into the mill alone.

Forty minutes later backup arrived in a Minneapolis Police Department car. Chloe got out to meet Officers Crandall and Ashton, trying to invent Plan C on the fly. “Good afternoon,” she said brightly. “I was looking for Sister Mary Jude, but maybe lunch ended early.”

“Her car’s still here.” Crandall scratched his butt. “She’s probably in there coddling some nutjob.”

Yes, Chloe thought, you are still a jerk.

“She should just—hey! You kids have no business down here!” Crandall scowled as two preteen boys flew around the corner on bikes. The boys, amazingly enough, stopped and waited as he lumbered in their direction.

Chloe turned quickly to Officer Ashton. “Could I get a little of your time? Just yours. I want to look for a young woman in the mill. She’d never show herself if Crandall comes, and I’m too chicken to go by myself.”

A smile twitched at Officer Ashton’s mouth. “I’d call that wise, actually. Sure, we can make that work.”

Five minutes later Crandall was off on a coffee break, as suggested oh-so-respectfully by his partner, and Chloe and her escort were inside the mill. Officer Ashton asked, “What’s this about?”

“I’m wondering if Everett Whyte hassled some of the runaway girls. I’ve heard rumors.” That understatement sent heat to Chloe’s cheeks. “I met a girl called Star the other day. She might talk to us.”

“You really should take this to the detectives working the case.”

“Are either of the detectives female?”

Officer Ashton sighed. “Okay. I’ve got maybe forty minutes before Crandall picks me up.”

The two women worked upward, floor by floor. “I’m looking for Star,” Chloe called. “I just want to talk.” By the time they got to the eighth floor they’d found blankets and shopping bags and discarded lighters. They’d heard voices and the sound of running feet. They’d seen exactly no one.

“Either this young woman isn’t here, or she doesn’t want to talk,” Officer Ashton observed.

Chloe wasn’t ready to admit failure. They’d stopped near the huge dust collectors. Chloe shone her flashlight in the corners, behind the massive equipment, along the brick walls. Graffiti glowed like neon. Some of it was electric blue.

“Star might have left some of this graffiti,” Chloe said, remembering the vivid shade she’d noticed on the girl’s coat.

Officer Ashton considered the spray paint. “This is surreal, isn’t it? Not what you typically see. Weird how the stick people are up high, while constellations are near the floor.”

Chloe felt a sinking sensation. Not constellations. Stars. Fallen stars.

She crouched for a better look. Each star in the little clusters had two letters inked in the center. Initials, probably. These girls had almost lost their collective voice, but one had felt compelled to leave a record. “This must be where the girls sleep at night.”

“Sad thought.”

“It truly is.” Chloe straightened and studied the rest of the impromptu mural. Each floating stick figure had a particular anatomical detail. Male, all of them. Chloe could only speculate about the first two—a father, a teacher, a next door neighbor back home? But the third … “Look,” she said. “This one is holding—”

“Whoo-hoo!” someone shouted.

Bang! A flash glinted in Chloe’s peripheral vision. A whiff of smoke induced instant panic. Explosion! Flour dust! Conflagration!

“Smoke bomb,” Officer Ashton muttered. “Fool kids! I’ll be right back.”

“Sure thing.” Chloe hoped her thumping heartbeat wasn’t audible. Enough with the hysteria, she told herself. Time was ticking by, and she wanted to decipher what she could of Star’s pictographs.

She looked back at the third man-figure, holding a small box with something protruding from it. A camera with telephoto lens? If so, Everett Whyte was almost certainly one of the men who’d trampled Star beneath his feet.

Officer Ashton’s voice drifted from the next room: “You could break your necks running around in here! Why aren’t you in school?”

The vivid blue graphics progressed along the wall. Chloe slowly followed, deciphering what she could of Star’s biography. A swing set, a school bus … the story seemed to move backwards in time, before Star came to the mill and completed her descent.

The pictographs were about waist-level here. Chloe stepped back to get a better view. Was that a house? She side-stepped—and her right foot met only air. Thrown wildly off-balance, she half-fell. Her right shoulder slammed into concrete. Her left leg was jerked sideways with a painful wrench. Her flashlight flew from her hand, thunked against something metallic, and went out.

What the hell had just happened? Gasping, blinking against tears and the sudden gloom, Chloe tried to make sense of the last twenty seconds. When she did, her mouth went dry. While following the graffiti, she’d wandered into the room where they’d found Everett Whyte’s body. She remembered Jay imploring them all to use caution here because of trapdoors in the floor. Each of those trapdoors in the floor leads into a nine-story bin that held twenty thousand pounds of grain, he’d said.

Someone had opened one of the trapdoors. She had stepped into the hole and partially fallen through. Her body weight pinned her right arm against the hard edge of the opening. Her left hand was free, but there was nothing to grab.

Why hadn’t Officer Ashton come back? Was she in earshot, or had she felt compelled to escort the boys all the way outside? “Help!” Chloe tried to cry, but the word emerged more as a croak than a yell. Her body was starting to tremble.

All right, focus, she ordered herself. You haven’t fallen yet. You can do this.

Clenching her teeth, she leaned farther to the right. With another painful wrench she bent her left leg and tried to draw the knee closer to the edge of the hole. If she could just manage to kneel … and wriggle her right arm up to brace on the other side of the opening … maybe she could rise high enough to get her butt up on the floor.

She was straining to accomplish that when something rustled behind her. “Officer Ashton?” Chloe panted. “Help me!”

Footsteps came closer. Then a foot rammed her left knee. She tried to resist the unyielding pressure, but could not. Her left leg slipped through the hole. Pain burst in her hip, then her left elbow as they hit concrete in fast succession. Her legs pedaled frantically. She felt dizzy. She heard herself panting, too terrified to scream.

Her left shoulder struck the edge of the trapdoor, then her head followed. Grab hold! her shocked brain commanded, but she was already falling all the way through the hole and into blackness.

Roelke was defeated by a locked garage. Through a side window he could see a Ford Thunderbird—new model, stylish, red. Five minutes inside, and he might have had proof. But he couldn’t get at it.

He swore under his breath. Fritz’s news had fueled the rage now threatening to devour his self-control, and it took everything Roelke had to not kick the door in. You’re a better cop than that, he told himself, over and over. You are.

Besides, this was a residential neighborhood. He’d taken a risk just in checking the garage door. If some nosy neighbor called the cops, he could probably talk his way out of it. That would take time, though. And he didn’t dare risk missing the rendezvous at Forest Home Cemetery. Since he’d failed here, that trap offered his last opportunity to nail Rick’s killer.

Chloe’s plunge lasted a split second and an eternity. She bounced off something hard and unyielding before hitting something hard but pliable. A harsh and metallic clang echoed from above. Then—nothing.

Awareness returned with pain and confusion. Chloe knew she must have blacked out. The notion was appealing because everything hurt. Everything. Worst was a throbbing pain in her left wrist. She had a headache, too.

Where was she? The air tasted fetid. The darkness was thick and black. Sitting up seemed impossible, so she tried moving her fingers. Miniscule pellets shifted beneath her skin. She froze. The tiny pellets were wheat seeds, poured twenty years earlier into a concrete bin designed to hold twenty thousand pounds. Falling on grain is like falling into quicksand, Jay had said. Every movement makes you sink.

Did breathing count as movement? Surely it did. With that assessment, Chloe instantly began hyperventilating.

Lovely. She could hold her breath until she suffocated on top of the wheat, or breathe until she suffocated in the wheat. A surge of hysterical laughter bubbled inside, and she fought to stay calm. And at least this particular bin wasn’t empty. If she’d fallen into an empty bin, she’d already be dead.

And, while she had a vague memory of landing on her side, she’d rolled onto her back. That was good, right? If she hadn’t bounced against whatever it was she’d bounced against, she might have torpedoed feet-first into the grain. Owen had spoken of that: Even if a guy got buried just up to his waist, he’d have eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch against his legs. It would have been impossible to pull him out.

Her fuzzy brain tried to replay what had happened up there. She didn’t know who had actually opened the trapdoor—idiot teen on a dare, idiot kid with a smoke bomb, idiot college student here to clean up the distributor room for the reception. But she remembered the feel of that foot shoving her all the way through the hatch. She remembered hearing that clang overhead as she fell. Someone had watched from the shadows as she stumbled into the hole, shoved her on through, and deliberately shut the trapdoor. That someone was probably Whyte’s killer.

It was all horribly unfair. “Why me?” she whimpered. “What did I do?”

Speaking brought an almost-imperceptible shifting beneath her. No more talking, she mentally commanded. No sniveling. The whys can come later. Right now, you need to focus on getting out of here.

Chloe did focus on that, for a good twenty or thirty seconds. But she couldn’t come up with an exit strategy that didn’t require movement. Maybe her best option was simply to wait motionless for help. Knowing that she must not move, however, simply made Chloe twitchy. It also switched her brain to overdrive. Maybe Whyte hadn’t been killed because of his deplorable actions after all. Maybe there truly was a maniac roaming the mill, and she made as good a target as any.

And … maybe that maniac was headed downstairs right this minute. This bin’s bottom hatch must have been shut since 1965. Suppose the killer was on his way to open it? If so, a billion-zillion kernels of wheat could start flowing any second. She’d be crushed. Or suffocated. Or both.

Chloe felt cold sweat soaking through her clothes. Her heart hammered. Her tongue tasted of iron. Her fingers clenched convulsively, gathering fistfuls of grain, terrified of the power these miniscule kernels possessed. Wheat was supposed to give life, not take it.

Had some poor mill workers died in this very bin? Chloe forced her breathing to slow, tried to become still and open her awareness, to reach out. Um, guys? I’m terribly sorry about what happened to you, but right now, I could sorta use some help here. Any suggestions?

Chloe expected to perceive, if anything, a sense of masculine horror lingering from a doomed man’s last moments.

Instead she became aware of something strong and calm and feminine. No whispered words, no tugs on her sleeve, no ghostly light illuminating a ladder. But there was something, and it helped.

Okay, Chloe thought. Since waiting passively in the dark didn’t work, I need a plan to get myself out of here.

She remembered bouncing against something hard as she fell, right before she passed out. Holding her breath, moving with exquisite stealth, she oh-so-slowly eased her right arm up from the grain. Clenching her teeth against pain she reached through the blackness—back and forth, up and down, cringing against every tiny shift beneath her. Something other than wheat was in here …

Her arm was trembling with effort before her hand finally struck something hard. Moving kernels whispered beneath her, but she hardly noticed because her fingers were exploring wood, rough and splintery but beautifully unyielding. Someone over the years had dropped a plank down here. It seemed to be wedged tight at an angle above her.

The lure of something so solid was irresistible, and Chloe’s fingers closed over the board in a vise-like grip. She pulled herself to a sitting position and wrapped her right arm around the board. “Thank you,” she whispered, feeling a sense of reprieve. She had no way of knowing if the lower end was sitting on grain or lodged against the cement wall. She wasn’t safe … but she wasn’t paralyzed with fear anymore, either.

All right, damn you, she told whoever had shoved her through the hatch. You may think you did me in, but I’m not dead yet.