C Box - Below Zero

APRIL KEELEY

WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

And her birth and death dates.

“We used to come here every month,” Marybeth said. “Remember? Then it turned into every few months.”

“Yup.”

“Joe, we haven’t been here for over a year. I feel really guilty about that.”

Joe nodded.

“Did we forget about her?”

“No,” he said. “Life went on, I guess. Let’s not beat ourselves up.”

They stood in silence. The only sound was a whisper of breeze high in the remaining treetops that sounded more like the river than the river itself.

She said it: “Is it possible there is someone else in the grave, Joe?”

“I was thinking about that.”

“An unknown child? It’s too painful to even consider.”

Joe said, “I didn’t see any other children in that trailer, Marybeth. Only April.”

“But we know the Sovereigns had other children with them. We don’t know what happened to them after the fire.”

Joe remembered the week after the raid when the county coroner and the team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation dug through the charred trailers in the campground. The snow had finally stopped, but in its place an incredible blanket of cold-day after day of twenty, thirty below zero-had descended on the mountains as if to punish them for what had taken place. He had purposely looked away when the investigators cleared blackened sheet metal from the site of Brockius’s trailer, when the coroner shouted out that he’d located three bodies-two adults and a child. Joe had no doubt at the time who they were: Jeannie Keeley, April’s birth mother; Wade Brockius, the leader of the camp; and April. Joe never looked at the bodies, didn’t need to. All he saw were the body bags-one stuffed full like a sausage (Brockius), one stiff and thin (Jeannie), and one with a body so small it seemed empty. The body bags were carried by investigators to an ambulance and taken away. The autopsies of Jeannie and April were cursory-neither had dental records to match up, and the state chose not to run a DNA confirmation because at the time the process was slow and expensive and no one doubted who the bodies were. The decision was made in no small part because of Joe’s own eyewitness testimony.

“We could have the body exhumed,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to go about it, but I can find out.”

Joe shook his head. “It could take months. We’d need a court order. To get the order we’d need to go to a judge and explain what this is all about. We’d need to try and convince the judge that April might be out there somewhere. We’ll need more than those text messages, Marybeth. Even I can’t completely convince myself she’s alive. We need more.”

“We need her to text again,” Marybeth said.

“At the very least.”

“Joe, there’s something else.”

He knew there was. She’d alluded to it the night before, when she said she’d been doing an Internet search using the place names from the text thread.

“I DID AN ADVANCED Google search,” Marybeth said, seated at her desk in her office. She wore her reading glasses that made her look serious and thoughtful, Joe thought. She tapped the monitor of her computer with an index finger. “I did several combinations of the words Chicago, Madison, Cheyenne, Mount Rushmore and words like crime, murder, killing, police. I got thousands of hits, of course. Then I narrowed down the search to the last two weeks, because April said she’d been on the road for two weeks, right?”

“Right.”

“So since she said she used to live in Chicago, I assumed the two weeks in the car started there. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but that’s what I’m guessing. So I narrowed it down to the second week of August. Guess how many murders took place that week?”

Joe shrugged.

“Eight. It’s a big place. Of the eight, four were ‘gang-related,’ but I guess we can’t rule them out until we get more information from April. The others run the gamut, from the murder of a doctor-wife arrested-to a truck driver in a suspected road-rage incident. And a brothel owner got shot in the head but nobody saw anything. So who knows?”

Joe agreed. “All we’re going on is that one line she wrote- some people died. We just don’t know enough. We need to get her to tell us more.”

“Right,” she said, doing another Google search. “But let me see if I can find what I found last night. Madison is smaller than Chicago, of course, and there was an unexplained murder there eleven days ago.”

Joe’s antennae went up because of the way she said it.

“Here,” she said jabbing the screen. “From the Capitol Times. I’ll print it out, but here’s the headline: CONTROVERSIAL BLOGGER SLAIN.”

It meant nothing to Joe, and he shrugged.

The printer purred, and she snatched out the sheet that slid out and handed it to Joe.

By Rob Thomas, Staff Writer

MADISON-Madison Police are looking for suspects in the alleged slaying of controversial anti-environmentalist blogger Aaron Reif, 38, author of “PlanetStupido.com.” According to MPD Spokesman Jim Weller, Reif’s body was found Tuesday night in his studio apartment at 2701 University Avenue slumped over his computer. According to Weller, Reif had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon at point-blank range. Because there were no signs of forced entry, the police assume the alleged assailant may have been an acquaintance of Reif, according to police sources who asked to remain unnamed.

PlanetStupido.com attracted national and international notoriety last year when Reif publicly accused the proprietors of several international carbon-offset brokers of fraud and corporate malfeasance. Police sources refuse to speculate whether the alleged murder was connected with the website or Reif’s high-profile activities.

Weller stated in a hastily called press conference at police headquarters that Reif’s body was discovered at 9:47 P.M. by a pizza de liveryman who arrived at the apartment to deliver a pizza that Reif allegedly ordered, leading the police to believe that Reif was killed between 9:20 P.M. when the order was received and the time of delivery. The Madison Police Department urges citizens who may have been in the vicinity of 2701 University Avenue between 9:15 and 10:00 P.M. to report any suspicious persons, vehicles, or activities…

“Interesting,” Joe said. “I’ve never heard of this website, have you?”

“No, but when we get done here, I’m going to spend some time on it,” she said. “But first I’ve got to show you something else.”

She found no major crimes in Cheyenne or at Mount Rushmore, she said. But when she looked at the road atlas for South Dakota, she noted how many small communities there were around the monument. Hill City, Custer, Keystone, and Rapid City, the only city of any size.

“Keystone,” Joe said, sitting up. “Wasn’t that where-”

“Yes,” she said, leaping in. “That’s where that old couple from Iowa were found murdered a week ago in that RV park. Remember that they thought those poor old people had died because their motor home caught fire while they were sleeping, but they later found they’d been shot first?”

“With a small-caliber weapon,” Joe finished for her.

He sat back, his head swimming.

“This proves nothing, I know,” Marybeth said, spinning in her chair to face Joe, whipping her glasses off. “But you’re right-we need to ask April more questions.”

As they looked at each other they both came up with the same thought.

Marybeth returned to the keyboard and the Google home page, typed ASPEN + MURDER, and directed the search within the last twenty-four hours.

Joe observed her as she read the screen. Suddenly, she gasped, sat back in her chair, and covered her mouth with her hand.