3

An hour and a half after leaving Chris at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Mars pulled his car under a gas-station canopy, went through the motions of paying at the pump, then, as his tank gulped unleaded regular, headed into the station store.

It was just before 11:00 A.M. He had two and a half hours to drive the remaining seventy-five miles to Redstone Township to make his meeting with Sigvald Sampson, the former chief of police in Redstone.

Two and a half hours to drive seventy-five miles on a road where he’d maybe see ten cars between here and Redstone. Two and a half hours to drive seventy-five miles on a road where if you’d been able to lock your steering wheel in place, you could have read a book while you drove. Two and a half hours to drive seventy-five miles on a summer day where the biggest weather issue was a thermometer that was reading eighty-six degrees before noon.

Bottom line, he could have gone into the office for at least an hour before leaving for Redstone Township.

There were reasons he hadn’t done that. None of them particularly logical, all of them specific to Mars Bahr’s character and the increasing dissatisfaction he’d been feeling on the CCU as the convenience-store abduction cases failed to jell.

The truth was, spinning out the road trip to Redstone felt only marginally less dishonest to Mars than not going into the office before he left.

This moral parsing of work ethics was new to Mars, and he wasn’t much good at it. Mars had to acknowledge that what drove his anxiety about what was or wasn’t an honest day’s work was part of a much bigger problem than the workday clock.

For most people, having a job where you had regular hours and didn’t work weekends would have been an advantage. For Mars, it symbolized everything that was wrong with the job. No surprises, nothing urgent, no fresh blood that made the hairs rise on the back of your neck.

He liked and respected other members of the Cold Case Unit he’d met—maybe especially respected their ability to work doggedly, with their own brand of passion, without the urgency of a still-warm body and the chaos of raw grief. Whatever it was that allowed them to bring dedication to case facts that had long ago gone stale was a mystery Mars had not begun to solve.

*   *   *

“Can I help you?”

The guy behind the counter asked the question in a pointed way. He’d noticed Mars looking the place over.

Mars held his can of Coke up as he headed toward the door. “No, but thanks for asking.” He meant it. How many convenience-store security tapes had he seen where a perp had been in the store looking things over in advance of actually pulling the job?

He left the convenience store, a little shocked by the flat, hard slap of heat that hit him after the store’s icy interior. Back in the car, the car’s air-conditioning fan blowing full blast, Mars thought through what he knew about Andrea Bergstad’s 1984 disappearance.

There had never been a body. For that matter, there was no hard evidence that Andrea Bergstad had been abducted. She was working at the store, on the phone with a friend, when she said she had to go. Someone was coming in. The store’s surveillance tape showed Andrea moving toward the door, talking to someone, then she was gone.

The Redstone Township’s case records indicated that periodic checks had been made in public records to see if Andrea Bergstad had resurfaced. After five years those checks—or at least a record of the checks—had stopped.

Could you be sure after five years that someone was dead? Was it possible for no part of a body to surface in five years?

The answer to the first question was maybe. The answer to the second question had always been yes. And now, as Mars drove down the empty rural road toward Redstone, surrounded by thousands of acres of fields that had not been trampled by a human foot for maybe twenty years, by marshes that had grown more clogged with undergrowth each year, what seemed remarkable was that they ever found missing bodies.

So it hadn’t bothered Mars that in one of the three cases there was no conclusive proof that an abduction or a homicide had taken place.

What did bother him was the absence of productive emotion. The Cold Case Unit’s policy was to take cases that had been unsolved for ten years or more. After ten years, grief transformed itself into a protective emotional barrier. Families were afraid to hope. They’d told and retold their loved ones’ stories so many times that the stories they told were more real to them than the long-dead victim. Mars was reminded of a movie he’d seen about a woman who’d developed an obsessive love. Years after the relationship had ended, still obsessed with the idea of the love, the woman had passed the man on the street without recognizing him. Mars couldn’t stop himself from wondering if these families were to pass their loved one now, ten years or more later, there would be no recognition.

Coming to that conclusion filled Mars with guilt. These were real people, who’d suffered real losses, and those losses were greater, not less, because the murder had never been solved.

Mars was used to dealing with people who were hysterical with emotional pain, whose lives had been slammed to a halt—and often into chaos—by the horror of murder. He felt deep frustration that cold case survivors revealed nothing in their words, their expressions, their silences, that led him to a subtle understanding of the victim and the circumstances that had led to the victim’s death.

At an intellectual level, he knew this was his problem. It was not the survivors’ fault that time had changed their loss. His colleagues in the Cold Case Unit were not to be faulted because they could find meaning and purpose in the abstractions of death. It was a weakness in his own character that made fresh murder necessary for him to do his job. He didn’t take any pride in that. It made him feel ashamed.

*   *   *

Six miles out of Redstone he followed a directional sign from the county road he’d been driving to the interstate. He wanted to take the exit from the interstate to the One-Stop Station that had been the scene of the 1984 abduction. He knew from reading case reports that in 1984 the One-Stop had been almost a mile off the freeway and that there had been no other buildings within three miles.

This area of the state had been in economic decline over the past two decades, moving downward in tandem with the farm economy. So what Mars expected as he approached the Redstone exit was that things would be pretty much unchanged from what they’d been in 1984.

He was wrong. Taking the Redstone exit, Mars drove by a Dairy Queen, the Redstone Industrial Office Park, a Country Inn, and a Kmart before he saw the One-Stop. Maybe a quarter mile beyond the One-Stop was a small cluster of tract houses.

Go figure. Every other rural community in this area of the state was dying on the vine, and the outskirts of Redstone were sprouting new life.

The development that surrounded the One-Stop meant Mars had to use his imagination to envision what the One-Stop would have looked like in 1984, just off the interstate, a couple miles from town, nothing else around, on a black October night.

“Like a shit magnet,” he said out loud as he pulled into the One-Stop parking lot. The thought of seventeen-year-old Andrea Bergstad being alone inside the isolated One-Stop in the middle of the night brought the bile back.

For a moment Mars felt that exposing that risk was something worth doing. For a moment Mars felt a little of the old fire in the belly.

Mars knew the inside of the 1984 One-Stop by heart. He’d examined the police diagrams based on the surveillance video and watched the videotape four times before driving down to Redstone.

What he found now looked pretty much unchanged. The key locations within the store—the rest rooms, the aisle where Andrea Bergstad was last visible, the checkout counter—were just where they’d been in 1984. One thing had changed. There was no wall phone back by the refrigerated cases, next to the corridor leading to the rest rooms. Very few convenience stores had indoor phones anymore. Too convenient for the wrong kind of customer. Cell phones had made a big difference. If you doubted that, just try to find a pay phone these days. They were going the way of typewriters and carbon paper.

The other thing that appeared unchanged were the security systems. It had been obvious coming in through the front door that the outside cameras weren’t functioning; they looked like they’d been there since 1984 and out of commission for most of the time since then. Only one of the two monitors behind the counter was live.

“I’m starting to obsess on this subject,” Mars muttered to himself.

The fact was, no amount of security or surveillance would have put him back here in 1984. And that’s where he wanted to be. He wanted this cold case to be hot. He wanted to be the one who’d gotten the call.

He wanted to be Sigvald Sampson in 1984.