Spilled Blood

37

The police cars surrounding the barn glistened in the driving rain. Their flashing lights made halos of red and blue. Rivers of brown water wound through the overlapping tire tracks toward the highway, and the swift-moving black clouds looked low enough to touch. The barn itself was weathered, with a rounded roof and patchy blue siding, and two winter ash trees waggled their bare branches overhead. There was a farmhouse nearby, with frilly lace curtains in the windows. The deserted farm was surrounded by miles of fields. The gravel road north of 212 wasn’t far from the South Dakota border. Chris didn’t think Rand McNally had ever mapped it.

He opened an umbrella as he got out of his car, but the wind bent the downpour into his clothes. He approached a young cop in a yellow slicker at the crime-scene tape and asked for Michael Altman. The kid used a wet microphone against his face to squawk out a request for the county attorney.

Chris waited. He counted two dozen uniformed police and evidence technicians processing the scene at both buildings. They probably doubled the population in the ten square miles around the farm.

Aquarius had chosen well. No one was likely to stumble onto his remote lair.

The cop’s microphone came alive with a growl of static. ‘Altman’s in back,’ the kid told him. ‘Stay out of the barn.’

Chris bent down under the crime-scene tape. Stretches of muddy tarpaulin had been laid out on the ground, leading toward the rear of the barn. Where the tarp didn’t cover, the earth was like quicksand. As he passed the open door, he peered inside and saw technicians examining empty metal shelves and a rubber-lined floor. The interior was shockingly bright against the dark day. Otherwise, the barn itself was vacant.

When he followed the tarp behind the barn he found a brown Honda Civic hatchback parked out of sight of the road and an oversized metal garbage bin with its lid open. A makeshift tent had been staked out close to the edge of the fields, and he saw the county attorney talking to two police officers who were sifting through bags of cross-shredded paper on a long table.

Altman gestured at him.

‘Aquarius is still a step ahead of us,’ the county attorney told Chris when he joined him under the tent. Rain hammered rat-tattat on the plastic. ‘He’s already gone, but he was here recently.’

‘Do you think he’s coming back?’

‘I don’t think so. The interior of the barn has been cleaned out. We’ve got spotters near the crossroads in case anyone heads this way, but I’m not counting on it. I don’t know if he smelled us on his tail or whether he’s getting ready for whatever the hell he’s planning.’

‘Have you found any clues about what he’s up to?’ Chris asked.

‘We’re just getting started. It took us two hours to get clearance to go inside. We needed to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped. Whatever he was doing, he set up a generator and a lot of interior lights. He had a vehicle inside, and based on the indentations in the rubber floor, it was heavy.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Neither do I,’ Altman said. ‘We’re beefing up security outside Mondamin. I don’t think this guy is faking. I think he’s the real deal.’

‘So how did you find him?’

Altman took off his fedora and smoothed raindrops from it. He repositioned it carefully on his head and tugged on the knot of his trench coat. ‘I’d like to tell you we found this place through painstaking investigation, but in truth, we got lucky. So lucky that it can’t be an accident. Aquarius wants us to chase him.’

‘You think he deliberately led you here?’

‘I do. We lifted a fingerprint off one of the Aquarius notes and matched it to a graduate student in Ames who’s heavily involved in the fringe environmental movement. He’s been arrested at protests all over the Midwest during the last five years – including right here in Barron outside Mondamin. At that point, I figured we had him. He was Aquarius.’

‘He’s not?’

The county attorney shook his head. ‘No, he’s been in jail for six weeks. An Iowa judge finally got tired of this guy being arrested for vandalism, B&E, harassment, whatever, and decided to teach him a lesson.’

Chris shrugged. ‘So Aquarius must be one of his furry friends.’

‘Yes. We began looking at people in the environmental organizations he’s connected to, but the break in the case came from somewhere else. It turns out this activist has a night job at an Ames hotel. One of the things he does all the time is fix paper jams in the printer for guests who use their business center. Hence his fingerprint.’

‘How do you know the paper came from the hotel?’

‘The Iowa cops showed him one of the Aquarius notes. He said there was no way it came from a printer at any of the organizations he worked with. They only use paper with a higher recycling use of post-consumer waste. I guess that means you can still see flecks of fecal matter from the toilet paper they re-use. Anyway, he said it looked like the standard office supply stock they use at the hotel.’

‘So you think Aquarius stayed there?’

Altman nodded. ‘That’s right. At first, I figured Aquarius might be setting up this kid as a fall guy. Anyone familiar with the environmental movement knows his name and knows his fingerprints would pop in the system. Then we ran a guest list at the hotel for the past six months, and one name leaped out.’

‘Who?’

‘Vernon Clay.’

‘So that’s why it raised a red flag that Ashlynn was talking about him. You think Vernon is back?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. Nobody at the hotel remembered him or recognized a description of him. If it’s not Vernon, it’s someone who knew we’d spot the name immediately. The address on the register led us right here to this farm. That’s not an accident. He wanted us to find the kid, find the hotel, find the guest list. He made it hard but not too hard. He wanted to get our attention.’

Chris looked at the Honda Civic parked behind the barn. ‘What about the car?’

‘The Minnesota plates don’t match the VIN. We’re trying to trace it.’

‘If Vernon Clay really is Aquarius, has he been hiding out here?’

‘It doesn’t look that way. The house is largely untouched. He’s been doing his work in the barn. The property belongs to the family of a widow who passed away three years ago. None of the kids are local. The place has been vacant since she died, and they haven’t been able to sell it. Someone called them in December about renting it for a year and sent them a lump sum in cash. They didn’t ask a lot of questions.’

‘Did you talk to Florian?’

‘I did. He says there is no reason why Vernon Clay would bear a grudge against himself or Mondamin.’

‘What about Ashlynn? Did you tell him that she was asking questions about Vernon Clay?’

Altman shoved his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. ‘I did.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said her mind had obviously been poisoned by Glenn Magnus and his son.’

‘It was more than that,’ Chris said.

‘She knew something.’

‘Is that a guess, or do you know that for a fact?’

Chris hesitated. He thought about Rollie and Tanya. ‘I’m not sure what I can say right now.’

The county attorney didn’t hide his annoyance. ‘I’ve kept you in the loop, Mr. Hawk, because you made a connection between Ashlynn and Vernon Clay at the same time that Vernon’s name appeared in the context of our Aquarius investigation. However, the favor goes both ways. I expect you to share anything you know that might help me find this man. Whatever he’s planning, the threat is real.’

Chris had to make a snap decision, and he chose to trust Michael Altman. ‘Ashlynn told Tanya Swenson that she had proof that Florian was involved in a cover-up connected to the deaths in St. Croix. This was the night before she was killed.’

Altman’s lips wrinkled with distaste. ‘What kind of proof?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘So how exactly does that help me?’

‘Aquarius knew about it,’ Chris said.

‘He sent a note to Rollie Swenson warning him to keep quiet. He threatened Tanya’s life.’

‘Why didn’t Rollie tell me about any of this?’ Altman asked.

‘He’s scared for Tanya. He probably has reason to be. If Vernon Clay really is Aquarius, and if Ashlynn found him, then you have to admit it’s a possibility that he killed her to keep her quiet.’

‘Let’s wait to see how this plays out,’ Altman told him. ‘Right now, I just want to find Aquarius and stop him.’

‘Kirk Watson may know something,’ Chris said.

‘Kirk’s just a thug.’

‘Yes, but he works for Florian. Rollie thinks Kirk tried to assault Tanya to intimidate her into silence. There’s something else, too. Ashlynn went out with Kirk a few times last fall, but Johan said she wasn’t interested in him. It wasn’t romantic. Now I wonder if she was trolling for information about her father and Mondamin. And maybe Vernon Clay, too.’

‘Kirk’s not going to tell us anything. Not if it involves Florian.’

‘You may be too late anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Johan Magnus told Tanya he was trying to find a gun. She thinks he’s going after Kirk.’

Altman closed his eyes and let out a slow breath in frustration. ‘It’s Pandora’s box in this town. Bad things are happening, Mr. Hawk, and I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to stop it before we all get swept away.’

‘I’d like to know what Ashlynn found out about her father,’ Chris said.

The county attorney frowned, as if he were again debating how much to share. He walked away from Chris and spoke to the police who were sifting through fragments of shredded paper. When he returned, he had a sealed plastic bag in his hand. ‘Did you say that Ashlynn told Tanya Swenson that she’d found proof connecting Mondamin to the deaths in St. Croix?’

‘That’s what she said.’

Altman held up the plastic bag. There was a single sheet of paper inside. ‘Aquarius left us another bread crumb.’

‘What’s that?’ Chris asked.

‘We found bags of shredded paper in the garbage. It will take us weeks to figure out what it all is. However, there was one page in the middle of the pile that wasn’t destroyed. This page. He obviously meant for us to find it.’

Chris leaned closer to study the paper. The plastic was speckled with rain. He didn’t recognize the document inside, but he could see that it wasn’t a note from Aquarius. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s the cover page of a report prepared by a woman named Lucia Causey.’

He shook his head. He’d heard the name, but he couldn’t place it. ‘I’m not familiar with her.’

‘Lucia Causey is a Stanford epidemiologist,’ Altman explained. ‘She was the special master in the litigation against Mondamin. She wrote the scientific analysis that the judge used to dismiss the lawsuit.’