Spilled Blood

21

The box of evidence supplied by Michael Altman took Chris back to the early hours of Saturday morning.

The first responder was a Spirit County sheriff’s deputy, whose emotionless report from the crime scene belied the horrifying reality of what he’d found. It was strange that an act like murder, which was bound up in so much emotion, could be distilled to bloodless facts.

I responded to a referral from a 911 emergency operator that a teenage girl, identified as Ashlynn Steele, seventeen years old, of Barron, was potentially stranded in the ruins of the unincorporated town of Bell Valley. I arrived in the town at 5:43 am and discovered an orange Mustang convertible, license plates 489 BAW. The vehicle was unoccupied, and the driver’s side rear tire was flat. Registration of the vehicle was to Florian Steele of Barron. I made several verbal announcements of my presence in an attempt to locate the missing girl. When I received no response, I began a search of the area, including the unoccupied buildings. Seven minutes later, I observed the body of a woman in a park approximately one hundred yards from the vehicle. I determined that the woman was deceased and noted a gunshot entry wound in the center of her forehead. Her face matched the driver’s license photograph of Ashlynn Steele. I saw no sign of a weapon at the scene of the crime. At that time, I reported the incident and remained on-site to secure the scene pending the arrival of investigative and medical personnel.

That was all it took to mark the end of a young life and begin the ripples that threatened to destroy many more.

Chris removed the police material page by page and organized the documents into piles on the table in the hospital lounge. Olivia was talking with the counselor Hannah had hired, and Chris passed the time by reviewing the chain of events that had led from Rollie Swenson’s 911 call after Tanya awakened her father on Saturday morning, to the arrest of Olivia two days later.

He laid out witness statements and interview reports. Diagrams and crime-scene photos. Early test results. Warrants. Records pulled from Ashlynn’s life. Records pulled from Olivia’s life. Reading between the lines, he could see an overarching theme emerging from the first minutes of the investigation.

This was an open-and-shut case.

The police knew who did it. They had Tanya’s statement about Olivia and Ashlynn. If you already had a theory of the crime, you looked for evidence to support your theory, and you tended to play down evidence that pointed in other directions. Rather than widen the search, the police focused on making sure that the evidence gathered against Olivia would hold up in court. No screw-ups in the chain of custody. No procedural errors. No technicalities. Not with the daughter of Florian Steele as a victim.

Chris looked at the evidence from a different perspective. A perspective where Olivia was innocent, not presumed guilty. A perspective in which Ashlynn was alive when Olivia left her in the ghost town.

In the early hours of the police investigation, there was no suspicion that Ashlynn’s personal life was a contributing factor in her death. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a St. Croix girl who was obsessed with the blood feud against Mondamin. The initial interviews with Florian and Julia revealed nothing about Ashlynn’s relationships or her pregnancy. Either her parents didn’t know or they didn’t divulge it. No one mentioned Johan.

That changed after the autopsy. The follow-up interview with Julia reflected shock and horror that Ashlynn had been pregnant and that her daughter had made the decision to terminate the fetus. According to the interview notes, Ashlynn’s mother had flatly refused to believe the coroner’s findings. She told police that her daughter would never make such a godless choice, no matter what the physical evidence showed about her body. However, faced with the reality of Ashlynn’s pregnancy, Julia did confess a secret not shared by her husband – that Ashlynn had secretly been dating Johan Magnus for months. After that revelation, it didn’t take long for the dominoes to fall. The police discovered that Olivia had dated Johan, too, and that he had dumped her to be with Ashlynn.

Olivia knew about their affair. She had a whole new motive for murder.

Chris wasn’t surprised that the physical and personal evidence had cemented suspicions among the police and the county attorney about Olivia’s guilt. If he’d been in their shoes, he would have believed it, too. Even so, there were holes in the case. Johan had covered up his own visit to the ghost town when the police questioned him. There was nothing about Mondamin and the company’s struggles with environmental activists. No one had asked about threats against Florian’s family. No one mentioned Aquarius.

When he checked the inventory of Ashlynn’s personal effects compiled from her wallet, her Mustang, and her bedroom at Florian’s home in Barron, he also discovered a surprising omission. Something that should have been there wasn’t on the list, and he checked it three times to be sure he hadn’t missed it. It was possible that the police had failed to note it in their catalog, but that seemed unlikely. Ashlynn had packed a small suitcase for her trip, and the police had found the case in the trunk of the Mustang. It included the usual personal items, such as clothes and toiletries, but nothing else. No books. No homework.

No laptop.

There was no computer in her car. There was no computer in her bedroom, either, according to the inventory and photographs. To Chris, that was inconceivable. The daughter of Florian Steele owned a laptop. Where was it?

It was missing. Why?

He dug in the box for the girl’s cell-phone records and found a copy of an online statement showing activity for the preceding month. If the police had already done the legwork of tracing each number, they had opted not to make it easy for Chris by writing the results down on the copy they had given him. Instead, as he reviewed the list of calls that Ashlynn had made and received, he booted up his own laptop and went to a reverse directory web site to identify the numbers.

He was surprised at how few calls he found to other teenagers in Barron, and he remembered Maxine Valma mentioning that Ashlynn had withdrawn from that circle because of the feud. Based on her phone records, she hadn’t replaced the Barron clique with a different group of friends. Her life looked lonely.

He saw numerous calls from the same phone number early in the month, and he tracked the number to Johan Magnus. Most of the calls were no more than a minute in length. Ashlynn had ended their relationship a month before her death, and in the days following the split he had obviously tried repeatedly to get in touch with her. Either she had let the calls go to voice mail, or she had hung up after answering. Eventually, he’d quit trying to change her mind. There had been no calls between them for two weeks.

Instead, he saw calls back and forth between Ashlynn and the very clinic in which he was sitting. The Barron hospital. He wondered: Was that when she discovered she was pregnant? He’d assumed that her pregnancy had prompted the break-up with Johan, but maybe he was wrong. Regardless of the timing, the day after the last call she received from the clinic, she’d dialed a new phone number. He recognized the number without having to feed it to the reverse directory. It was the number for the Grohman Women’s Resource Center.

Ashlynn had made her choice.

There was an ominous silence in her phone records in the succeeding days, as if she were wrestling with her demons alone. She made no calls for nearly a week. None. To anyone. She received no calls either. Then he saw an out-of-state number on an outgoing call, and he traced it to the switchboard at Stanford University. He remembered Florian’s comment that Ashlynn was looking at her options for college applications. Shortly after the call to Stanford, he spotted another local call, this time to Maxine Valma, and he wondered if Ashlynn was asking the principal to write a college reference letter. Maybe she’d begun to make peace with her decision about the baby and had started to turn her eyes back to her future. Or maybe she was just trying to think about anything other than the reality she faced.

Days later, she left for Nebraska.

During that awful period, he saw one call to her home number. It made him wonder whether Julia Steele had lied about knowing what her daughter was doing in those days away from home. Or maybe Ashlynn had lied to her mother and covered up her pain and grief and told her that everything was fine. The church project is great, Mom. Don’t worry, I’ll be home on Friday.

There was another call, too. He noted one outgoing call from Ashlynn’s phone, lasting five minutes, on the day before she made the long drive back to Barron. The day before her death. She must have been in Nebraska at the time, recovering from the abortion procedure. Chris ran the number through the reverse directory, and when he did, he rocked back in his chair in surprise. It was about the last thing he expected to see on the girl’s phone records.

There she was, alone, miles from home, experiencing the worst event of her young life. She made only one call that night, like a prisoner calling for help, and it was the last call she ever made.

Ashlynn called Tanya Swenson.