Wolf Hour

56 Departure, September 2022

The story ends there. Full stop. There is no more. Because stories aren’t like life, which always has more to offer.

So I don’t know what more life has to offer to Kay Myers, only that, six years on from the Mike Lunde case, she is now head of the Homicide Unit and shacked up with a younger colleague.

Nor do I know what life has to offer Brenton Walker. For a while he was a likely candidate as the city’s next chief of police until a diagnosis of cancer slowed him down.

Hector Herrer made a full recovery and now works for the governor of Minnesota.

Kevin Patterson wound up in Washington DC, not as a politician but as a well-paid lobbyist for the agricultural sector. He never made it to the House of Representatives, something some commentators attributed to the damage done to his reputation by NRA lobbyists in the wake of his change of stance on the issue of gun control.

But life has nothing more to offer Marco Dante. He was discharged from hospital a week after the dramatic climax of the Mike Lunde case. Two days later he walked to his car outside the Jordan projects. It was the middle of the day and there was no one else around when he unlocked his car. He didn’t notice the tiny jerk in the door as he opened it, nor did he see the two strands of fishing twine wound around the door handle on the inside. Attached to the other end of them were the two pins Dante had just jerked loose from two hand grenades, placed beneath the pedals in such a way that when he pushed down on them he would press on the levers. Dante started his car. He pushed down on the accelerator with his foot, felt a resistance and then felt the resistance give way. That was when he knew something was wrong. Looking down at the floor between his legs he saw one of his own hand grenades with its lever lying next to it. A thinner man than Marco Dante might perhaps have made it out in time. But to cut a short story even shorter: life had no more to offer him.

One who didn’t think life had much more to offer was Bob Oz. How wrong can you be? I push open the door to Town Taxidermy, and there he is. The red hair is a little thinner than in the pictures from back then, the face more lined. But the cashmere coat is the same, and for an instant it occurs to me that the man sitting motionless on a chair between a bear on its hindlegs and a leaping lynx has turned into the Bob Oz I wrote about in my story; stuffed, frozen in time, arrested in mid-movement. But then — as the bell above the door jingles — he looks over, his eyes light up and a smile spreads across his face.

‘Holger!’ he says as he gets to his feet.

Over the past two years Bob and I have exchanged hundreds of emails and spent hours of screen time in each other’s company. I’ve offered him a percentage of any royalties from the sales of my book, but he rejected the offer, said the conversations were free therapy for him. Bob has become what I would call a friend. Even though this is the first meeting in person it feels natural to give each other a warm embrace.

He and Liza have moved into a small house in — ironically enough — Chanhassen, just two streets away from where Emily lives. He’s left the police and now works as head of security for a tech company. Not just because the pay is twice as good, but because two years ago Liza gave birth to their baby boy, and Bob wanted a more structured life. And Liza has been offered the chance to take over a bankrupt bar in downtown for next to nothing. The brewers are actually going to pay her to get the place back on its feet again. Bob has admitted that there are times when he misses police work, but that his decision to leave remains one of the few he never regrets.

We sit down. We talk a bit about family stuff, and then I say:

‘So this is where you and Mike were sitting that last time?’

‘Right here.’

We fall silent. I look out into the street as the scene plays itself over in my mind.

‘You must have been afraid,’ I say.

‘Actually no. He was so calm. And it was all so quiet. Like in a... like in a church.’

‘I see.’

‘Have you been out to Lakewood Cemetery?’

I nod. Less than two hours earlier I had been standing in the company of his sister Emily by the grave where Mike and his family lie buried. A full stop carved in stone. Although in fact, for Mike, life had come to a full stop long before that.

‘You told me you remember Mike as happy,’ says Bob. ‘I never got to see that side of your cousin.’

I nod. ‘We used to go drinking in Dinkytown. Me, him and Monica, the love of his life. Sometimes Monica brought along a friend who I think they hoped I would fall for. I never met anyone with such faith in the existence of deep and lasting love. I don’t mean a naive faith, but a... well, an overwhelming conviction that it existed, despite the negative experiences of the majority.’

‘I know what you mean,’ says Bob with a wry smile.

‘What do you think of love?’

‘What do I think of love? I think...’ He scratches himself behind his ear. ‘...that just occasionally, in between all the little loves, a big one comes along. But it doesn’t necessarily look all that big on the radar, so you need to have your wits about you. And that sometimes a little love can grow, given the right kind of care and nourishment.’

I give him a long look. ‘Was that your line when you were One-Night Bob, picking up all the girls?’

Bob gives a loud laugh. ‘One-Night Bob was a pig. But he had integrity, and he never used the word “love”. That’s something only the new Bob has earned the right to say.’

The door to the workshop opens and a young man wearing a blue apron comes in, pulls off his latex gloves and says hello. His name is Alan, he’s the new owner of the store, and from our correspondence I know that when he graduated from his taxidermist studies in Iowa he was one of only three students. But he’s optimistic about the future of the business, he thinks the customers are on the way back. We’ve arranged for him to show me how Mike Lunde made his mask, and he takes us into the workshop, where a deer’s head is mounted on a stand. Alan explains that the process wouldn’t be very different if a human head were involved. I take notes as he demonstrates how you begin by cutting a Y-shape in the back of the head with a sharp knife.

‘You always cut from inside the skin out, so you don’t cut off the hair. Then...’ He holds up an ordinary, flat screwdriver which he says you insert under the skin and then push along, and little by little the skin comes loose from the cranium.

I can see that Bob is thinking about Mike.

Alan explains how he cuts across the earhole, folds the skin up over the head, then moves to the mouth, separating the gums from the skin and folding it back again. He then presses his index finger into the eye socket from the outside, and the thumb from the inside while cutting with the sharp knife, careful not to leave any disfiguring marks visible from the outside.

Bob leaves the room, and I excuse myself and follow him, leaving my notes behind.

We stand in the street outside.

‘There are times when I wish I was still a smoker,’ says Bob, stamping his feet on the sidewalk. The air is cold and sharp today, like the start of the Minnesota winters I’ve heard about but never experienced personally.

‘What’s on your mind?’ I ask.

‘I’m wondering what it is that makes a person want to kill, when killing and causing suffering to others can no longer bring your loved ones back to you.’

‘You wonder because you don’t understand?’

‘No. I wonder because I’m made that same way too. When Frankie died I wished someone had killed her. Because that way I would have had someone I could take my revenge on.’

‘You think that would have eased your pain?’

‘Yes. A bit. Why are we made that way? Why fight for what’s already been lost?’

‘Hm. The teachings of evolution maybe? If we just swallow our losses and allow the powers of evil free rein, the same thing will just happen over and over again. So we fight for a future in which we might, just possibly, get another chance.’

‘That’s very naive.’

‘Naive, or optimistic. At least better than apathy and quiet resignation.’

‘So your book is going to be a defence of violent revenge?’

I shake my head. ‘I just want to tell a story about how good people can become monsters. For a little while back there, Mike was probably the most famous serial killer in the whole of the United States. Then there was another school shooting, or someone taking revenge on their old workplace, some news item with more victims than there were here, and Mike gets forgotten. And, strangely enough, that can make for a better and more general story.’

‘What do you mean?’

On the other side of the street I see an old lady who’s just bought something from a cart I noticed particularly because it advertises Ambassador Hot Dogs, which I used to dream about as a boy when counting the months and weeks until my next trip to Minnesota.

She’s bought two hot dogs.

‘Jack London, as I’m sure you know, was an author as well as a journalist,’ I say. ‘He said that fiction is truer than fact. And that the best thing you could do with the facts was to make them look like fiction.’

‘And that’s what you intend to do?’

I shrug, and watch as the old lady bends to a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk with his back to the wall of a building. She gives him one of the hot dogs, straightens up, they exchange a few words, she laughs at something and then walks on.

‘I’m going to try, at least,’ I say. ‘It’s probably the only thing that gives any meaning.’