Spilled Blood

9

The squat building that housed Rollie Swenson’s office was located behind a parking lot on a side street between downtown Barron and the Spirit River, with a view across the water toward the city park. It was built of tan stucco, dirty and cracked, and the sign on the outside window said simply: ‘Law Office.’

When Chris arrived with Tanya, Rollie hugged his daughter ferociously, then read her the riot act for leaving school without calling him. Maxine Valma had obviously filled him in about the fight. As he listened to the parental lecture, Chris remembered what it was like to have a child in his life every day, balancing love and discipline, security and independence. He missed it.

Seeing Rollie Swenson was like seeing an alternative version of his own life. Rollie didn’t wear business suits. He wore a blue polo shirt and tan dress slacks and a comfortable pair of loafers. The slacks sported a coffee stain near the pocket. He was tall and stocky, with a bulging stomach that sagged below the top of his belt. He was in his late thirties, and he had messy black hair and a dark beard line. A yellow highlight marker had been shoved above his ear and forgotten.

Rollie looked like a lawyer who scraped for business with ads in the yellow pages. Generic brochures on personal injury, bankruptcy, divorce, and foreclosure, published by the Bar Association, were stacked on the counter. His law degree was in a drugstore photo frame on the wall. An empty air freshener sat on the lobby table among copies of farm and sports magazines. The waiting room smelled of grease. Inside Rollie’s office, behind the counter, Chris saw an open white foam box on his desk with a half-eaten cheeseburger and fries. Rollie’s lunch sat among a mountain of legal files.

‘Not exactly Faegre & Benson, is it?’ Rollie asked with an ironic smile. Faegre was the state’s largest corporate law firm, with a blue-chip roster of Fortune 500 clients.

‘I wish I charged their hourly rates,’ Chris said.

‘Oh, I bet you do okay.’ Rollie patted Tanya on the back and pointed her toward a spare office with a sofa, television, and conference table. ‘You hang out with your iPod for a while, okay, baby? I want to talk to Mr. Hawk.’

‘Sure.’ Tanya gave Chris a nervous glance as she retreated into the office. Rollie’s eyes lingered on his girl as he pulled the door shut, and it was obvious that his daughter was the center of his world. Not his work. Not his clients. Chris wished he’d learned that lesson years ago.

‘Come on back, Mr. Hawk,’ Rollie told him. ‘Sorry, I’m just finishing lunch.’

‘Call me Chris.’

‘You like fries, Chris?’

‘Love ’em, but not anymore.’

‘I hear you.’ Rollie led him into his office, took four fries in his hand, and munched them together. ‘I admire your willpower. Me, I can’t say no.’ He picked up the burger and took a large bite and washed it down with Coke. ‘Poor Tanya, she got my genes. My ex-wife is a beanpole.’

‘So’s mine. Olivia was lucky.’

Rollie sat down and leaned back in his chair. ‘Thank you for bringing Tanya here. I appreciate it.’

‘Of course.’

‘You look like hell,’ Rollie said.

‘Other than a splitting headache, I’m fine.’

‘You want some Advil?’

‘Actually, that would be great.’

Rollie dug inside the top drawer of his desk and found an old plastic bottle that looked as if it had been used and re-used dozens of times. He unscrewed the top and poured three red tablets into his hand. The pills looked fresher than the container in which he stored them. He passed them to Chris, who swallowed them down.

‘Tanya thinks Kirk Watson was trying to abduct her,’ Chris warned him.

Rollie’s chest swelled with a long, fierce breath. ‘Kirk.’

‘You know him?’

‘I’ve known him for years. Actually, I defended him when he killed his father.’

‘Kirk killed his father?’ Chris asked.

‘About seven years ago. He beat him to death with a hammer and then cut up the body.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah. Kirk’s dad beat the crap out of the younger boy, Lenny, whenever he could. With the evidence of abuse, I got the whole thing handled with a juvie sentence.’

‘I’m surprised Kirk would harm Tanya after you got him a slap on the wrist for murder.’

‘Kirk thought he should have walked.’

‘Tanya says the police around here won’t touch him,’ Chris said. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yeah, Kirk always seems to have an alibi when things happen. Or witnesses get cold feet and decide not to testify. It’s ugly.’

‘Do you still represent him?’

‘Hell, no. Not anymore. Even ambulance chasers like me have some standards. I’m not in it for the money. Good thing, because I don’t make much. A lot less since the Mondamin lawsuit.’

‘Oh?’

‘People in Barron think I’m a traitor. They didn’t like me representing the families in St. Croix. Fortunately, there are still enough people who want to dump their spouses or who get DUIs doing 105 miles an hour on Highway 7 to keep me in business. I’m about the only game in town, and my rates are cheap.’

‘Did you grow up around here?’

Rollie took another bite of his hamburger. ‘In other words, why would I be practicing law in a town of five thousand people if I’m not a native? Yeah, I still live on the family farm a few miles south of town. It’s all weeds now. My mom was pretty upset when I chose law over farming, but I could read the writing on the wall. Farming was a dead end. Plus, these hands weren’t meant for manual labor.’

‘It’s just you and Tanya?’

Hearing his daughter’s name made Rollie smile. ‘Yeah, it’s her and me. I met her mother when I was in law school at Billy Mitchell in the Cities. It was one of those relationships that should have fizzled after a couple months, but she got pregnant, and we got married. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she hated small towns, hated being a mother, and hated me, not necessarily in that order. Tanya was only two, and I wanted custody. Sarah didn’t put up a fight.’

‘Are you still in contact with her?’

‘I don’t have a clue where she is, and that’s fine. Tanya does okay with me as a Dad and Mom rolled into one.’

Chris wondered if that was true. He thought about Olivia growing up without him for the last three years. Rollie Swenson didn’t have any trouble reading his mind.

‘What’s the deal with you and Hannah?’ Rollie asked. ‘If you don’t mind a personal question.’

‘Hannah’s roots are here. When her mom died, she wanted to come back and make a difference.’

‘She’s done that. There aren’t many people in this region without an opinion about your ex-wife. They love her or hate her.’

‘What about you?’ Chris asked.

‘Me?’ Rollie took another French fry and chewed it bite by bite. ‘I wish I had her passion. Somehow she held onto her idealism about this part of the world, and I lost mine a long time ago.’

‘You took the case against Mondamin,’ Chris pointed out. ‘That’s pretty idealistic.’

Rollie smiled. ‘Hannah was relentless. She had Glenn Magnus and the other parents who had lost kids sitting here in my office. I told them the suit was a loser, but she said they didn’t care about money. They wanted discovery. They wanted to get past summary judgment and tear open the company’s records and start interviewing their scientists. She was pretty sure that we’d find plenty of dirt once we started looking.’

‘What kind of dirt?’

‘Environmental violations. Questionable science. Bad actors. There was one scientist in particular they had suspicions about, a whack job named Vernon Clay who lived near St. Croix. He disappeared, and we tried to find him. No luck.’

‘The whole thing sounds like an uphill climb from a litigation standpoint.’

‘Well, I was hoping we could prompt a settlement offer to make us go away,’ Rollie admitted. ‘Florian was in negotiations to sell the company, and I figured he didn’t want bad publicity to screw the deal. But he’s a hard-ass. I got out-lawyered and out-resourced. The Bible may say different, but most of the time, when David goes up against Goliath, David gets his ass kicked.’

‘Causation is almost impossible to prove in these cases. That’s not your fault.’

Rollie shrugged. ‘In my line of work, I don’t have too many opportunities to be on the side of the good guys. I really wanted to come through for those people, but I let them down.’

The younger attorney finished his burger and dumped the empty foam container into a wastebasket under his desk. He sucked up his Coke through a straw, until there was nothing left but an empty slurp, and then he threw the cup away, too. He sat silently in his office chair and studied Chris with a thoughtful expression.

‘So,’ Rollie said finally. ‘Now that we know each other, should we talk about why you’re really here, Chris?’

‘Okay, sure. I’d like some information about the night Ashlynn Steele was killed.’

Rollie rolled around the mouse on his desk, and the twenty-four-inch flat-screen monitor for his computer awakened. He typed in a password to reaccess his files. Chris counted at least fourteen keystrokes.

‘That’s a pretty long password,’ Chris commented.

‘Yeah, I learned about security during the Mondamin litigation.’

‘How so?’

‘My office was broken into twice. I could never prove it, but I think Florian hired somebody to see what data we’d uncovered.’

Rollie accessed his recent documents and sent two files to a printer in the open closet behind him. He grabbed the sheets and handed them to Chris. ‘Those are copies of our statements to the police. Mine and Tanya’s.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m sure you’ll get them from the sheriff soon enough, but this way, you don’t have to wait.’

‘I have some more questions for Tanya, too, if you don’t mind.’

Rollie eyed him across the desk. ‘Here’s my problem, Chris. This is the point where our legal interests don’t coincide. I’m sure you understand. I’m fond of Olivia, but my only concern in this case is the welfare of my daughter. As a lawyer, I know what you have to do. I don’t blame you for it, but I won’t let you make Tanya into a suspect.’

‘Tanya may know things that will help me prove that Olivia wasn’t involved in Ashlynn’s death.’

The other attorney didn’t hide his surprise. ‘You’re planning to argue that Olivia is innocent? You’re not using emotional distress?’

‘I’m not arguing anything yet.’

‘Maybe so, but that makes me even more nervous about letting you talk to Tanya.’

‘Tanya can help me corroborate Olivia’s story. She already told me that she talked to Olivia after she got home. Olivia told her that she left Ashlynn in the ghost town. Alive. That’s important.’

Rollie frowned. ‘You interrogated Tanya?’

Chris knew he’d made a mistake. He tried to backtrack, but it was already too late. ‘I asked her a couple questions. I told her she didn’t have to tell me anything.’

‘Don’t play dumb with me, Chris. Did you ask Tanya whether she went back to the ghost town that night?’

‘Yes, I did,’ he admitted.

‘In other words, you tried to get her to incriminate herself.’

Chris said nothing, and Rollie stood up. His demeanor made it clear that the meeting was over. ‘You have our statements,’ he announced. ‘For now, that’s all you get. Let me be clear about something else, too, Chris.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you want to talk to Tanya again,’ Rollie told him, ‘you talk to me first.’