Funeral for a Friend

14

Dan Erickson hadn’t changed.

Maggie hadn’t seen Dan in more than five years, but when he came into the conference room the next morning, it was as if no time had passed. His cologne always advertised his arrival. He wasn’t tall, but if she measured by ego, he was a basketball player, and he walked into every room like he owned it. His skin had the artificial glow of hours spent in a tanning bed. His hair was blond, with a trimmed corporate cut. He wore a well-tailored dark suit with a loud red tie that made people notice him.

She couldn’t deny to herself that he looked good. He always did. He still made her feel like a naïve kid, having sex with a married man, foolishly thinking he’d leave his wife to be with her. Dan slumped into a chair and leaned far back, putting his leather shoes on the table. His lips drew into a Tom Cruise grin.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.”

“Hello, Dan.”

“I like the long hair. It looks good. I was never a fan of the bowl cut.”

“I’m so relieved. If you didn’t like it, I would have gone right out and cut it off.”

He chuckled at her sarcasm. “Oh, Maggie, still the same. Still that sharp tongue of yours. Of course, I won’t lie, your tongue was always one of your best features.”

“Fuck you, Dan.”

He didn’t look offended. “And the nasty mouth, too! Dirty talk turns me on, but I’m sure you remember that. Come on, Maggie, lighten up. I was excited when K-2 said we’d be working together. You, me, just like the good old days.”

“I don’t remember the old days being very good,” Maggie replied.

“Seriously? I’m disappointed. How many years has it been since we had our little fling? I assumed we were finally past the hard feelings. I mean, come on, it didn’t last long.”

“As I recall, nothing about you lasted very long.”

“Ouch! Another poison arrow. Look, I know you and Stride were hoping you’d seen the last of me, but here I am. The bad penny back again.”

He was right about that. Dan was a punching bag who kept bouncing back and never stayed down for too long. In his early years as the St. Louis County Attorney, he’d been buzzed about as a statewide political candidate. He had the right connections, the right look, the right wife, the right bank account. But when his appetites got the better of him, he’d lost it all, including his wife. Dan had resigned in disgrace, but he’d remade himself since then as a corporate lawyer. Judging by his appearance, he’d made back most of the money he lost.

Dan opened the thick police file in front of him. “Shall we get down to work? What do you think? Did Stride do it?”

Maggie gave him a frozen look. “Dan, if you can’t be objective—”

“I’m being completely objective,” he replied. “I read the file. I heard your interview. Stride’s the obvious suspect.”

“Well, he didn’t do it. He told me flat out in my interview that he didn’t do it.”

“Oh, wow, a suspect denied committing murder during interrogation? Shut down the investigation and let’s all go home. Is that the standard you’d apply in any other case, Maggie? Seems to me the only one not being objective here is you.”

Maggie hated being outdueled, and she hated even more that Dan was right. “Okay. You’re in charge, not me. How do you want to proceed?”

Dan’s eyes glittered with satisfaction. “That’s more like it. I like seeing the submissive side of you. Look, I know you and Stride go way back and you think he’s innocent. I also won’t deny that he and I have had our difficulties over the years. That doesn’t mean I’m out to get him, but it also doesn’t mean he gets a free pass. As far as I’m concerned, we treat him the way we would any other suspect. We go where the evidence takes us. Period. That work for you?”

“Fine.”

“So what do we know? Not what do we think, not what do we assume, not what do we hope, not what anybody else tells us. What do we know?”

“Everything we know is thanks to Stride,” Maggie replied. “He opened up the case himself, which he didn’t need to do. He’s the one who told us about Steve Garske’s dying declaration. That’s the only reason we found the body.”

“Okay,” Dan agreed. “Point goes to Stride. Have we heard anything from the medical examiner about the autopsy?”

“Yes, Violet just sent over her report. She confirmed the body is Ned Baer. We got records from Ned’s dentist in Colorado, and the match is perfect. It’s him. Cause of death was exactly what it looked like, 9 mm to the skull. Violet recovered the bullet, and we’re sending it through the BCA to see if any matches show up in the system. That’ll take a while.”

“What else do we have?” Dan asked.

“Not much. Seven years ago, we were still trying to ascertain why Ned disappeared. We didn’t uncover any evidence to suggest a crime had been committed, so we didn’t investigate it as a murder. The circumstances suggested that it was probably an accidental death.”

“Except Stride was the one who drew that conclusion, right?”

“So did I,” Maggie said.

“But you based it on Stride’s description of events,” Dan said.

“Yes.”

“A description we now know to be false.”

Maggie frowned. “Yes.”

“You still think he’s not a suspect?”

Maggie said nothing.

Dan took his feet off the table and dropped them heavily on the floor. “Well, it’s a homicide now, and we’re starting from scratch. We need to build a picture of what this guy was doing before he got shot. We’ve already got his cell phone records in the file, so let’s have Tubbo start following up on the calls Ned made to find out who he was talking to and what they were talking about.”

“Guppo,” Maggie snapped.

“Huh?”

“It’s Guppo. Not Tubbo.”

“Short guy? Mustache? Built like the Death Star?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. I always thought it was Tubbo. Anyway, he can chase down the calls.”

“What about me?” Maggie asked. “What do you want me to do?”

Dan gave her another wolfish grin. He opened up a laptop computer in front of him, and he patted the chair next to him. “I want you and me working together. Side by side. So close we can read each other’s minds.”

“Read my mind, Dan. What do you think it’s saying?”

He patted the chair again. “Come on, sit over here. I set up a call with Debbi King. Ned’s editor.”

Unhappily, Maggie relocated to the chair next to Dan, where they were squeezed so closely at the end of the table that their legs were forced together. His thigh rubbed against hers. He booted up the MacBook and used FaceTime to dial a number. A few seconds later, they were connected with a woman in a Denver office. Through the window behind her, they had a blurry view of the foothills.

“Ms. King?” Dan said. “My name is Dan Erickson. I’m leading the investigation here in Duluth regarding Ned Baer. This is my partner on the case, Sergeant Maggie Bei. We appreciate your talking to us today.”

“Your investigation is about seven years late, Mr. Erickson,” King snapped.

“Yes, I understand that.”

“Have you confirmed that the body you found is Ned?”

“We have. I’m very sorry.”

King shook her head in dismay. She was quiet for a while, and then she looked out the window and wiped her face. Maggie guessed that the woman was around fifty years old, which was the same age Ned Baer would have been if he’d lived. She had a shock of curly gray hair, and her face looked weathered and lined from time in the Colorado sun. Her nose was short and hooked, and she had pale eyes.

“Is it true that Ned was murdered?” King went on.

“Yes, he was shot.” When the editor didn’t react, Dan went on. “You don’t sound surprised to hear that.”

“I’m not.”

“Why is that?”

“Ned was an investigative reporter. It’s a nasty business. We get threats all the time. They’re usually just people trying to scare us off a story, but the risk is always there.”

Maggie leaned forward. “Ms. King, can you give us some background on Ned Baer? Given that he wasn’t from Duluth, we don’t know very much about him. Had he worked for you for a long time?”

“Ned didn’t work for me,” King replied. “He was my business partner. He and I started FR Online together twelve years ago. Before that, we both worked at the Post for fifteen years until we were laid off.”

“So you must have known him well,” Maggie said.

“Of course. We were good friends. I met him while I was still in college in California. He was a roadie for ZZ Top one summer, and I met him backstage when the tour came through San Jose. We were both journalism majors and both archconservatives, which is a pretty rare combination. We hit it off. We spent the whole night talking about Reagan and Bush. We had a very similar philosophy. Even back then, we both believed the future of the media was in advocacy. Having a point of view. We were convinced that ‘objectivity’ was simply bullshit covering up a left wing bias. Seventeen years later, that’s what led us to start FR Online.”

“Did the two of you move to Colorado together after school?”

“That’s right. The Post was hiring, and we both signed on. Like I said, we became close friends.”

“Were you involved romantically?”

King chuckled. “Me and Ned? No, our friendship was purely platonic. Oh, he hit on me when we first met, but I shot him down. He wasn’t the kind of man who gets my motor running. Honestly, Ned never dated much. He always had kind of an inferiority complex about his looks. Small guy, not much hair, beady eyes. So he never had much of a personal life. To be honest, he could be prickly, too. Angry, hard, always convinced the world was out to screw him. Not exactly the ideal e-Harmony profile. But that’s also what made Ned a terrific reporter. He loved cutting powerful people down to size. I still miss him.”

“Ms. King, can you tell us about that summer in Duluth?” Dan asked. “What exactly was Ned doing here?”

“Well, as you know, the Minnesota Attorney General, Devin Card, was running for the US House of Representatives. Card checked a lot of the Kennedy boxes. Liberal, good-looking, but also a reputation for bad behavior. When the anonymous rape accusation leaked to the press, there was a feeding frenzy to find out who was behind it and whether the allegation was true. Ned was convinced he could find the woman. He saw an opportunity to take down a rising Dem star.”

“Did he?” Dan asked.

“Obviously not. Card won the election. Now he’s running for the Senate.”

“No, I meant, did Ned find the woman behind the accusation?”

King rocked back in her chair. “I don’t know.”

“You sound like you think it’s possible?”

“Well, I told you, Ned was good at what he did. Unfortunately, he was also secretive. Reporters are competitive, and Ned usually didn’t share stories with me until he was ready to go public. But he was dropping hints that he had something big.”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of hints?”

“Well, it was nothing he said. He never told me if he was close, or if he had the woman’s name. That wasn’t his style. But I’d worked with Ned for a long time. He had certain quirks. I knew his voice when he was onto something. He was like a puffer fish, and I could almost hear his ego inflating. That was how he was that August.”

“How did Ned work when he was doing research?” Maggie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did he take paper notes? Use a laptop? Voice recordings?”

“Yes, all of those things, but Ned was old school. He still wrote things down. He’d fill dozens of yellow pads with ideas.”

“We didn’t find any notes in his motel room,” Maggie told her. “No notebooks and nothing electronic either. His car was broken into, and we think his laptop could have been stolen. But there were no paper notes anywhere.”

King didn’t say anything immediately. She grabbed a pen from her desk and twisted it between her fingers. “So he had the story.”

“What?”

“He had the story. That’s what got him killed. Whoever did it took his notes. Did you talk to Devin Card? That son of a bitch had to be the one who killed Ned. If he thought his whole career was going down the crapper, he would have found a way to make Ned disappear.”

“Do you have any proof of that?” Maggie asked. “Did Ned mention any conversations with Card?”

“No, but what else could it be? Damn it, I knew that was what happened. As soon as I heard he was missing, I figured it was because of the story. I’ve been waiting seven years to hear that Ned was murdered.”

“I wish you’d shared your suspicions with us,” Maggie said.

King’s face screwed up with anger. “What are you talking about? I told the Duluth Police exactly what I’m telling you now. You were the ones insisting it was an accident, that Ned drowned in some river. I never believed that.”

Dan shot a glance at Maggie. “Ms. King, do you remember who you talked to at the Duluth Police?”

“Sure I do,” she replied. “I wrote it down. It was a police lieutenant named Jonathan Stride.”