Funeral for a Friend

17

Maggie climbed out of her banged up yellow Avalanche in the parking lot of the Two Bridges Motel. The cheap truck stop was located in an industrial area south of the city, on the other side of a rusted fence from the speeding traffic on I-35. Warehouses and auto shops surrounded it, and a maze of power lines ran overhead. Rows of motel windows faced the freeway, with identical white curtains hung in each room. The baby-blue building needed new paint.

Dan Erickson got out, too, and put his hands on his hips. He chewed gum at a rapid clip. “This is where Ned Baer stayed that summer?”

“Yup.”

“Man, the life of a reporter, huh?”

They headed for the motel office. It was mid-afternoon, and the parking lot was mostly empty, in the slump between checkouts and check-ins. The office was warm, and a fan with a noisy motor blew air around the snug space, but it couldn’t get rid of the mildew smell. A faded print of Jesus in a cracked glass frame was hung on the wall above an array of tourist brochures. Maggie found herself thinking that Jesus had already suffered enough and didn’t deserve to spend time here.

The motel owner sat behind the desk, his feet up, reading a library copy of a book called Dead Man’s Mistress. He eyed Maggie and Dan from behind a pair of reading glasses.

“You guys want a room?” he asked in a rumbling voice.

Dan laughed cruelly. “Here? Yeah, no.”

“So what do you want?”

“Dan Erickson. Maggie Bei. Duluth Police.”

The owner got to his feet slowly, rubbing his back as he did. He checked out Dan’s expensive suit. “Cops, huh?”

“We’re here to talk about Ned Baer,” Maggie told him. “You may not remember, but my partner Lieutenant Stride and I talked to you seven years ago when Mr. Baer first disappeared.”

The man shrugged. “I saw on TV about his body being found. I figured you guys would be back here sooner or later, although I don’t know what I can tell you that I didn’t tell you then.”

“It was a disappearance then,” Dan said. “It’s a murder case now.”

“Well, I’ve owned this place for twenty-two years. This would be murder number four for people staying here. One more, and I think I get a ribbon or something from the motel association.”

The man came out from behind the desk. He was tall and slightly bent over, and he wore a baggy Twins T-shirt and loose-fitting blue jeans. He couldn’t have been more than fifty, but he had the weathered look of someone who’d led a hard life. He had milk chocolate brown hair that curled slightly where it fell below his ears. His eyes were dark and bloodshot, and his eyebrows were permanently arched into cynical question marks. He had a broad, prominent nose and jutting chin, with deep wrinkles on his face.

“What’s your name?” Dan asked.

“Adam Halka,” the man replied. “Look, not to be rude or anything, but how about you ask your questions and go? I’ve got a business to run.”

“Ned Baer,” Maggie said again. “Tell us what you remember.”

Halka shrugged. “Baer showed up that summer, wanted an open-ended rental. I don’t get too many of those. But his credit card was good. That’s really all that matters to me.”

“Anything unusual about his stay?” Maggie asked.

“Not really. He was a weird little guy, really paranoid. I remember he only wanted maid service once a week. The girls hated that. It takes twice as long to do a room when it hasn’t been cleaned in a while.”

“Is that all?”

Halka’s eyes went back and forth from Maggie to Dan. “Well, one time he told me there was a break-in.”

“Somebody broke into his room?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I don’t recall you telling us this seven years ago,” Maggie said.

“I guess it slipped my mind.”

“What happened?”

“I have no idea,” the motel owner replied. “I remember Baer stormed in here one night pretty late. My night guy was on, but Baer insisted on waking me up so he could talk to me. He was all on about someone being in his room, and was it me, or was it the maids, and did I have security cameras so he could figure out who was there. He was steamed.”

“Do you have cameras?” Dan asked.

“No. If guests think I’m keeping too close an eye on them, that tends to hurt business.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over with him and checked the door. It wasn’t busted or anything. If someone got in, they picked the lock or had a key. Baer didn’t invite me in or anything, but when he opened the door, I could see that nothing was torn apart.”

“Did he say if anything was stolen?”

“No. It didn’t sound like they took anything. He just said somebody was in there looking at his papers. I wasn’t even sure how he knew, but he swore up and down it wasn’t the way he’d left it. I told him if he felt that way, call the cops. But he didn’t want to do that. Said there was nothing they could do. So I left. End of story.”

“Did you know why Baer was in town?” Dan asked.

“Yeah, he told me. I made some comment one day about being a Duluth lifer, and he asked if I knew Devin Card. I said sure, I went to high school with him. He got real interested then. Started asking me a lot of questions about Card and some of the summer parties.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Oh, hell, there wasn’t much to tell. I was stoned and drunk most of the time. I don’t remember those years too well.”

“But you knew Devin Card?” Dan asked.

“It’s not like we were buddies, but everybody knew Devin. Football quarterback. Girls hanging on him. I hoped he’d grow up fat and bald, but it didn’t work out that way.”

“What about the summer when the rape supposedly occurred?” Maggie asked. “That would have been a few years after you left high school, right?”

“I guess. That’s what Baer said. I’d been out of school for three years by then, but you know, Duluth’s a small town. Everybody still hung out together on the summer weekends. Concerts, parties, whatever. If there were girls anywhere, Devin was always around. Him and Peter Stanhope.”

“Did Baer ask you about the rape?”

“Sure. I never heard about it. To me, that made the whole thing sound fishy. Devin Card raping a high school girl? Everyone would have heard about that.”

“Did Baer ever tell you he found the woman who made the allegation?” Maggie asked.

“No. He didn’t say anything like that.”

“Do you remember him getting any visitors?”

Halka shoved his hands in his pockets. He took a little while to answer. “It was seven years ago. Are you kidding?”

“What happened after Baer disappeared?” Dan asked.

The man shrugged. “I didn’t know anything about it until the cops showed up. I hadn’t seen the guy coming or going for a few days, but I didn’t give it any thought. Last time I saw him was when he was heading to the Deeps. Guess that’s also when he kicked it, right? But I didn’t know that.”

“How did you know he was going to the Deeps?”

“He asked me how to find it.”

“Why was he going there?”

“It was a hot day. I figured he wanted a swim. He didn’t say anything else. Anyway, you guys already knew about that.”

Maggie and Dan exchanged glances. “What do you mean?” Dan asked.

“A cop came by that night after Ned left. He wanted to know where Ned was, and I told him I thought he was heading to the Deeps.”

“What did he look like?”

“The cop? I don’t know. Plain clothes, like you. Seems to me he’s the same guy who came here with you a few days later. He talked to me, and you went and talked to the housekeepers.”

“Stride,” Maggie said with a frown.

“If you say so.”

“So you sent Lieutenant Stride to the Deeps to find Ned Baer,” Dan concluded.

“He asked if I knew where Baer was. I told him.”

“Did Stride tell you why he was looking for Ned Baer?”

“Not that I remember.”

“What was his mood?” Dan asked. “Was he angry? Agitated?”

“I have no idea. He was a cop. Do cops have moods? He wasn’t here more than a couple of minutes.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Like I said, nothing. I had no idea Baer was gone until you showed up and said he was missing. I told you, the guy only wanted his room cleaned every week, so it’s not like the maids would have noticed that he wasn’t there. His bill was on the credit card, so I didn’t care.”

Maggie kept hearing Stride’s voice in her head.

Ned didn’t contact me for a meeting. I was the one who sought him out.

Stride had come to find Ned Baer at this motel, and the owner had steered him to the Deeps. And then what? All Maggie knew was that Ned Baer had never been seen again after that evening, until his body showed up in Steve Garske’s yard with a bullet in his skull.

“When we visited you after Baer disappeared, his room was clean,” Maggie said.

“Right. So? My girls went in and cleaned it.”

“When I searched the room, I didn’t find any papers, notebooks, computer equipment, anything like that,” Maggie added. “There were just personal items. Clothes. Toiletries.”

“Then that’s all there was,” Halka snapped. “My girls wouldn’t have touched a thing, particularly because Baer was so paranoid. If the guy had papers, computers, whatever, they would have still been in the room.”

“Could someone have broken in there without you knowing about it?” Dan asked.

“What, like after the guy disappeared?”

“Exactly.”

Halka rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess. Hell, I don’t know, if somebody killed him, maybe they grabbed his key. If they took any of Baer’s stuff from his room, I wouldn’t have known about it.”

Maggie nodded. “But just to be clear, you and your staff never removed anything from Baer’s room?”

“Not a thing.” But the man suddenly looked uncomfortable, shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet. Maggie knew a lie when she saw it, and so did Dan.

“Mr. Halka?” he went on sharply. “Did you take something from Ned Baer’s room?”

“What I took wasn’t his,” Halka said, with a pained expression on his face. “It was mine. I was entitled to take it.”

“What was it?”

“My high school yearbook.”

“Your yearbook? Why did he have that?”

“When Ned found out I went to the same school as Devin Card, he asked if I still had any of my yearbooks from back then. So I let him borrow the one from senior year. He had it for a couple of weeks, and I was getting worried about ever getting it back, you know? I didn’t want him walking off with it. So one of the times that the maid went to do his room when he was gone, I went in and took it back. He never said anything about it. I figured either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care.”

“Do you still have it?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

The motel owner disappeared into a back room. He was gone for a couple of minutes, and then he returned with an oversized book that had the team logo for Denfeld High School on the cover. Halka passed it to Dan, who began flipping through the pages.

“Can we take this with us?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah, but remember, I want it back.”

Dan opened the book and laid it flat on the motel counter. “There are a bunch of girls from freshman and sophomore years with circles around their photographs. Some of them have X’s through the pictures. Did you do that?”

Halka shook his head. “Nope. Pisses me off, too. Baer must have done that.”

“All cute, all blond, all the right age,” Dan said.

“He was looking for the girl,” Maggie concluded. “He had a bunch of names, and he was crossing them off as he eliminated them. He was trying to find the one who made the allegation against Devin Card.”

Dan kept flipping the pages. Then he whistled.

He picked up the yearbook from the counter so that only Maggie could see it, and he pointed at a photograph that had been circled several times, with an asterisk added to the book in a different color ink.

“Well, well, well,” Dan said. “Look who we have here.”

Maggie read the girl’s name under the picture.