MAURICE OFFICIALLY INSTRUCTED me on Wednesday to stay away from the investigation for a week to heal. I was frustrated, but Serena had made the last couple days the best I’d lived. I worked out in the morning, then picked up the ingredients needed to have a gourmet meal ready when she was done with her work day.
One benefit to my obsessiveness was that, when I finally convinced myself to shut off work, it was off. So, I focused on making my environment Serena-friendly—a red wine blend she loved, fresh fruit, and a great dinner. After our meal, we went for a walk, shared back rubs, and she stayed the night to “assist with my recovery.” It was so peaceful to finally lie in bed and not have numbers churning through my head. I had never experienced that tranquility with anyone else. I still had a headache from my wound and the pain in my hand, but I slept.
A little after 6:00 p.m., Sean Reynolds paid a brief visit to my apartment to make sure I was doing okay. The gesture felt genuinely benevolent. He had returned to the BCA headquarters in St. Paul to pick up forensic reports.
The reports indicated Brittany hadn’t been shot. Even though it had the appearance of a bullet aperture, the wound was made with a long tool, probably an awl. The awl had been run completely through her leg from the front, then pulled back out, leaving large blood stains on both the front and back of her sweatpants. This explained why no one heard a gunshot.
Sean rubbed the top of his head as he constructed a new theory. “The entrance and exit wounds in Brittany’s leg would be the perfect angle if she was a passenger sitting in the front seat, and Jeff stabbed down on her leg from the driver’s seat.” Sean slowly imitated a stabbing motion that could have been taken from Psycho. He added, “She had to be struck hard.”
I pointed out, “But there was no blood in his vehicle.”
“Yeah, it had to happen outside,” Sean said. “Maybe in the ditch.”
Sean’s short intrusion brought me back to thinking about work periodically throughout the evening.
At midnight, Serena was lying prone on my couch with her bare backside presenting a pleasant, natural horizon. Her smooth skin was lit by the city lights shining from below through the open curtain. She still had a glow in her eyes from making love. I delivered a bowl of vanilla bean frozen yogurt topped off with malt, dark chocolate, and my home-roasted almonds, which I had prepared for our late-night dessert.
Serena demurred, “You’re spoiling me.”
She lifted her feet as I sat on the couch, then, feeling comfort in the contact, rested them in my lap. I told her, “I need to return to Little Falls tomorrow. Even if I can’t work on the case, I want to be brought up to speed.”
Serena’s tone became serious. “How is Victor doing?”
“Okay.” I massaged the backs of her calves with my good hand while she enjoyed a spoonful of dessert.
Serena silently enjoyed the massage for a moment. “I always liked Victor. He introduced me once by saying, ‘She invented flowers.’”
I started massaging a foot. “He obviously likes you. Victor associates positive events with positive people.”
“Like you associate numbers with stories?”
“I guess we’re both a little crazy.”
Serena lifted her other foot to my good hand, suggesting I rub that one, too, while she playfully contradicted her unspoken request. “You don’t have to rub my feet. I feel like I’ve been spending my evenings at a love spa.”
I kissed her foot. “Then it’s working.”
Serena turned over, sat up, and stilled my hands with her own. “I hate to even ask this, but do you think it’s possible that Victor killed Mandy? You said he used to wander around the farm at night, and Mandy was just down the road. I think she walked to your house that night.”
I told her, “Victor wouldn’t have killed Mandy. At that time, his meds had finally stabilized, and he was doing well. Victor never hurt anybody, even when he was struggling. He was an easy target for bullies because he didn’t have the self-preservation to stand up for himself.”
Serena was careful to not bump my injured arm as she slid her arms around my waist. “I’m sorry I brought this up,” she said. “I want to work through this with you, so it helps me to know what you’re thinking.”
Anticipating more questions about my family, I said, “Theresa was living out of state at the time, and my mom just wouldn’t have done it.” I hoped that put to rest any suspicions.
AFTER SERENA LEFT, I found a crumpled piece of paper with what appeared to be a list of suspects she had compiled in Mandy’s disappearance. The list included my brother, my dad, Clay, Randall Davis, Whitey, and most concerning, Serena herself.
As I drove to Little Falls, uneasiness started to stir inside me. I began to envision a scenario where an argument between Serena and Mandy resulted in Mandy getting out of the vehicle and Serena taking off. The worst part of being obsessive was that a slight discrepancy could become a disturbing snag that must be addressed. Investigators are taught to pay special attention to the last person who was with the victim. In Mandy’s case, it was Serena.
Last night, Serena had asked me if I’d ever consider walking away from this investigation. She appeared to ask out of fear for my well-being. When I was with her, I was one-hundred percent convinced of her innocence, but now that I looked at the evidence, doubt crept back in. Despite my concerns, I was progressively falling harder for Serena. I wanted her, and there was no doubt she reciprocated my affection. It would be just my luck that the only person with whom I could get a good night’s sleep was a killer.
AS I APPROACHED LITTLE FALLS, my phone buzzed with a text from Serena, saying, “Thank you for the last few days. Hope to see you tonight. Han-xu.” I reached out again to my friend at the BCA, who shared that han-xu is pronounced “han-she” and is Mandarin Chinese. He stated that, even though the Internet suggests it means “reserved,” in China it generally refers to when a woman loves a man, but is unable to properly express it to him. I simply texted back, “I love you,” because it was honest. I didn’t know how to proceed with the investigation of Mandy’s disappearance, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.
I DECIDED TO STOP at the AmericInn. Someone had tried to shoot me, and I wanted to see if my room had been disturbed.
It was a cool, sunny morning. A hard-looking young woman paced outside the hotel smoking a cigarette with intensity, as if it would be her last. Her pale skin had a tinge of purple, and she was underweight. At first glance, I thought, A history of methamphetamine abuse, but clean now. I guessed her to be in her mid-twenties. She was tall—maybe five-foot-ten—and all angles, with bony shoulders, elbows, and knees. She wore her hair short and dyed an unnatural red. The piercing in her nose seemed to accent the knob in the middle of it, rather than to highlight any beauty. Her burgundy lipstick was out of place with her tattered jeans and gray hoodie. Yet, underneath her tough exterior, she was pretty, once.
When I stepped out of my car, she marched up to me and nervously asked, “Are you Jon Frederick?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “I am.”
Throwing her cigarette on the ground and crushing it under her Converse tennis shoe, she spoke quickly. “If you want to find out about Jeff Lemor, follow me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, just jumped into a dented and dusty, gray Grand Am, and lit another cigarette as she started her car. I was curious enough that I dropped back into my car to see what this was about. I called the sheriff’s dispatcher and asked her to run the license plate, while I followed the young woman east on Highway 25, toward Pierz. For my own protection, I left Maurice a message indicating where I was headed.
The dispatcher called back soon after with information. The Grand Am belonged to a Vicki Ament, whose criminal history included a charge for possession of a controlled substance, meth-amphetamine, two years ago. Her physical description on the arrest report matched the woman I was following, adding that she had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her shoulder, and tattoos of a pair of hands on her buttocks. The dispatcher added in a low voice, “Now, how do you suppose those hands stick out of a bikini bottom? Oh, here it is, like someone’s holding her from behind. Now, isn’t that Godly?” She added with disdain, “Her grandparents must be very proud of her.”
I FOLLOWED VICKI TO A FARM in the Pierz area, grimacing as I watched her discard cigarette butts out the window along the way.
When I exited my car, the air felt pleasant and calm. “Halcyon” would be the perfect word for it. The farm had a long, narrow gravel driveway splitting large, black banner-like fields. I saw an old barn with aged gray wood showing beneath chipped white paint. Not far from the barn was a faded white, two-story box-like farmhouse, with a few narrow windows. A dim light glowed inside, giving it a sense of warmth. A large, dark, barren oak tree shadowed the farmhouse with its long, twisting branches. Beneath it sat a small child’s swing and a larger wooden swing, which looked big enough for two adults to share. A small flurry of wind set the swings in motion. The chains rattled, and there was an eerie screech of metal scraping against metal. In a matter of seconds, the feeling changed from tranquility to a scene reminiscent of a Stephen King movie. Being shot heightened my awareness of sounds and movement around me. I unbuttoned my jacket enough to allow easy access to my gun in its shoulder harness beneath.
Vicki ran a package of diapers into the house, and then came back outside to greet me. She motioned toward the wooden swing, and I followed.
Vicki patted the space next to her on the swing. “Have a seat.”
The wooden seat was small enough that our legs were close to touching. I was uncomfortable with the close proximity, but reasoned that if she was okay with sitting this close to me, she wasn’t setting me up to be shot.
Vicki showed no discomfort with the closeness. She gave me a strained smile, and said in a voice bruised from smoking cigarettes and, most likely, hard use of meth, “I wanted to talk to you because my grandparents know your parents, and they trust you. They told me that the only reason people accused you when Mandy Baker disappeared was because your family is poor. It’s easy to accuse poor people, because nobody’s gonna help them.”
I appreciated her sincerity, but I had no desire to probe into my past with her. “Tell me about Jeff.”
She looked out at the fields. “If you check my record, you’ll see I have drug charges. I want you to know I’ve been clean and sober for two years. I got pregnant, and I didn’t want to be a pump and dump mom.”
“Pump and dump?”
“You know, one of those breastfeeding mothers who goes out and gets wasted, and then has to pump and dump all of her milk the next day so she doesn’t totally mess up her kid. My sperm donor liked the idea of having a kid, but when I started getting fat, he just moved on.”
“What can you tell me about Jeff Lemor?”
Vicki pushed a stray strand of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I was with Jeff at his trailer at one o’clock last Sunday, on the day Brittany Brennan disappeared. I know everybody wants him locked up because he’s a so-called ‘sex offender,’ but he didn’t have anything to do with Brittany.”
“How long were you there?”
Vicki rested her chin on her fist as she thought. “About an hour. We got into an argument and I took off.”
It would have taken Jeff about twenty minutes to get home, driving fast, from where Brittany disappeared. He still could have abducted her, but he wouldn’t have had the time to submerge her body. “What was the argument about?”
Vicki muttered, “Acceptance.”
“Acceptance of what?”
She scrutinized me. “Acceptance of your life. I can’t drink. I can’t do drugs. If I use, I’m picking using over living with my daughter. I’ve accepted that. If social services told me I couldn’t wear red in order to keep my daughter, I wouldn’t wear red. When you mess up, they put rules on you. Your opinion of the rules doesn’t matter. He was trying to tell me there’s nothing wrong with having a few beers on a Saturday night, and I told him, ‘You just don’t get it. You took innocence away from a fifteen-year-old girl, so the judge took things from you. Nobody gives a shit that you don’t like it. Just accept the deal you got, and go on.’”
“That’s good.” I had miscalculated Vicki’s wisdom at first glance. “Can you tell me exactly when Jeff arrived home on Sunday?”
“He was home when I got there.” Vicki scrunched her forehead in thought. “Why don’t you just see when he called in?”
“The phone surveillance system wasn’t working that day.” I didn’t bother to tell Vicki this wasn’t the first time the county’s sex offender call-in system had failed. “What was Jeff’s mood like? Was he angry?”
Vicki responded with a long, drawn out, “Noooo.” She pulled her feet up onto the swing, further narrowing the gap between the two of us. “He was trying to find an excuse for drinking, but he knew there wasn’t any, so he started saying things about his mom dying, over and over again.”
I considered this. “Like a man who had just been involved in something traumatic?”
“No. I’ve seen this a hundred times with guys who were hungover. Kinda sad, and still kind of drunk.”
Vicki had given me the information we needed to keep Jeff in custody. He had violated probation by drinking alcohol. I challenged her to convince me Jeff was innocent. She suggested we visit Jeff’s trailer, as he had a place where he hid items of value inside his home. She thought viewing the items would give me a better understanding of his “good nature.”
I warned her that the BCA had already obtained a search warrant for Jeff’s trailer, so we might have company.
We drove together to Lemor’s. On the way, Vicki gave me an adolescent grin. “I was once with your friend Clay at a party.”
The comment caught me by surprise. I asked her to convince me Jeff wasn’t the killer, and she brings up Clay? I looked at her in confusion, but patiently waited to see where she was going with this.
Vickie continued. “I know you used to hang around in school with him. In junior high, you notice the cute older guys.”
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Vicki knew Clay. Pierz is a town of only a thousand people. I remained silent, aware Vicki would fill the void.
“I know Al and Mary Brennan, too,” she said. “When I was about fourteen, I talked to them at parties.”
Needing to get her focused, I asked, “So, what’s at Jeff’s?”
If she had an answer, it was lost with her sharp gasp of breath as Jeff’s trailer came into view. The molding was torn loose from the bottom, and there was a large pile of cobweb-infested straw nearby, which had been pulled from underneath the dwelling. Sherriff’s deputies were hauling items through the doorway of Lemor’s home, under Sean Reynolds’s direction.
I stepped over the carelessly discarded Sports IllustratedSwimsuit Edition and Automobile Trader magazines as I approached.
In a moment, Vicki’s mood changed from concern over Jeff’s trailer being trashed to her asking, “Who’s the cute black guy?”
Sean turned and called into the trailer, “Paula, Jon brought a visitor.”
Vicki gave him a flirtatious smile and led us to the kitchen. She opened a drawer, sharing that she believed the drawer had a false bottom.
Paula Fineday looked like someone had dragged her down a gravel road on her back. She was obviously the one who had been under the trailer. She removed the contents of the drawer while Sean took a knife off the counter and carefully peeled back the bottom. Beneath it were about thirty pictures of Lemor’s hippielike mother and himself at various ages. Sean carefully sifted through the pictures while leaving them all in their exact location.
I noticed an item which would be of particular interest to Vicki, so I stepped back and motioned for her to peer inside.
Vicki’s eyes welled up at an image of her and Jeff, both in their early teens, sitting on the hood of a car together, their faces bright with the uninhibited laughter only kids share. Vicki asked, “Can I have that picture?”
Without looking at her, Sean answered sternly, “Not at this time.”
I politely asked Vicki to wait outside, as Sean, Paula, and I had noticed something intriguing about the way the pictures were placed in the drawer. They were pushed to the side, leaving a triangular space. An imprint where a handgun once rested, which looked very similar in size to a nine-millimeter, was etched into the felt on the bottom of the drawer. The false bottom was tight enough to press the handgun into the felt. Even though we now knew Brittany wasn’t shot, I had been. This was an incredible break, as it put a gun into Lemor’s possession.
Sean commented, “Vicki doesn’t have a clue, does she?”
I shook my head and added, “I feel like I’ve underestimated Jeff Lemor.”
Sean continued to study the drawer. “This is an incredible piece of work. It had to take considerable time. Where did he get the tools?” Sean ran his finger across the groove in the drawer where the false bottom had rested. “He needed a router for this. I haven’t seen anything like that here.”
Paula brushed some flecks of straw from her thick hair and added, “Perhaps there was an awl among those tools, too.”
I told Sean and Paula, “I know this looks bad for Jeff, but I’m not convinced he’s the one who assaulted Brittany.”
Paula’s dark eyebrows furrowed as she skeptically responded, “Tony told me a meth whore had contacted him about being Lemor’s alibi. Tony didn’t buy it, so now she’s here with you. We have a suspect with a criminal history, with a weapon, and witnesses who put him at the scene. Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?”
I nodded. William Ockham was a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar who produced works in logic. Occam’s razor—spelled differently than his name, as a result of a conversion to Latin—is a theory in science that you need to shave away the long shots and focus on what’s obvious.
Paula warned, “It’s simple. Don’t be distracted.”
I had an argument, but couldn’t pull it to consciousness. I’d struggled with retrieving thoughts since I was shot.
Paula went back to work, suggesting, “We’re going to want to take a picture of this drawer from the top before we remove the photos.”
Sean nodded his approval at me. “Good work. Ask Vicki if she knows of any other hiding places, then get her out of here. We’ll need to do a very thorough examination of the inside of this trailer.”
I asked, “Should I put some of that straw back under the trailer? If the temps dip below freezing again, his pipes might freeze and he’ll have a big mess here.”
Sean flatly said as he walked away, “He isn’t coming back.”
That wasn’t an acceptable answer for me. “Are you done underneath the trailer?”
Surprised, Sean gave a bewildered nod. “Yeah. Have at it.”
Once outside, Vicki watched as I got on the ground and, with my one good hand, began pushing the straw back underneath the trailer. I made sure I had it packed around the pipes. If the pipes froze and broke, it would be an expensive repair bill for a young man who was barely getting by. I don’t like destroying people’s property. I know all too well how long it takes impoverished people to pay things off. When I was done, Vicki helped me push the molding back into place as best we could.
Surprised by my efforts, Vicki stepped to me and hugged me. “Thank you. That was really nice of you.”
I DECIDED TO SPEND THE NIGHT at the AmericInn. My head was pounding and pain pulsated through my left hand. I had pushed myself a little too hard today, and now I just wanted sleep. I was told I could observe Jeff’s interrogation tomorrow morning, if I stuck around.
Despite having found additional evidence to add to Jeff’s prosecution, I had a problem that complicated this case. The sequence of events didn’t make sense if you knew the geography of the area. Consider the BCA’s theory: Jeff Lemor first drove by the Brennans’ south field, and then headed north down the gravel road, where he found Brittany. He then continued north for a half a mile further, sexually assaulted her, and buried her in a culvert. The Bosers stated that after the truck went by, it never returned. So, why would he shoot at me for looking for evidence in the south field? Nothing in the south field could connect Jeff to Brittany, because he drove by that field before he encountered her. And another problem? Vicki honestly believed Jeff didn’t assault Brittany, and I believed Vicki. Even though she was rough cut, Vicki wasn’t wearing love-struck blinders. She viewed Jeff with pensive eyes.