Brian Freeman - Spilled Blood

Rollie backed up in his chair, putting distance between them. He spread his hands. ‘I’m a lawyer, Chris, just like you. I share information on my terms. Not yours. Not Altman’s. Not the sheriff’s.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I already told you. My only concern is my daughter. Before I said anything that might put her in danger, I needed to know what was really going on. Ashlynn had already been murdered. For all I knew, Tanya was next.’

‘So you withheld critical information?’

‘I wasn’t sure the information was relevant at all. The evidence was overwhelming that Olivia killed Ashlynn. The police considered it an open-and-shut case.’

‘The police didn’t know about the phone call,’ Chris said. ‘Ashlynn told Tanya she had evidence against her father the day before she was killed. Do you really think that’s a coincidence?’

Rollie shrugged. ‘I have no idea whether Ashlynn had proof of anything at all. She was a kid. Who knows whether she really found anything?’

‘If that’s true, then why are you so afraid Tanya is in danger? Did something change between that phone call on Thursday night and now?’

Rollie’s face flushed again. He pounded the desk. ‘Of course, something changed! Kirk Watson tried to assault my daughter!’

‘What makes you think that had anything to do with Ashlynn’s phone call?’

‘I know Kirk. I know what the son of a bitch is capable of, and I know he’s mixed up with Florian.’

‘So talk to the police,’ Chris said. ‘Once the facts are out, no one’s going to touch her.’

‘You don’t know that. Besides, it’s not that simple anymore.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not just about Kirk.’

Chris watched Rollie’s face and saw another side to his fear. ‘What happened?’

‘Someone else contacted me.’

‘Who?’

Rollie closed his eyes and squeezed his fists against his forehead. He looked torn with doubt. Finally, exhaling loudly, he opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a single sheet of paper. Chris saw the block printing and recognized it. He’d seen it before.

He thought about Michael Altman. We’ve found him.

‘This was in my mail box yesterday,’ Rollie said. He handed the paper across the desk.

TO THE ATTENTION OF

MR. ROLAND SWENSON

SAY NOTHING

SPEAK TO NO ONE

SILENCE WILL KEEP YOUR DAUGHTER ALIVE

SHE IS NOT PART OF MY PLAN

DO NOT FORCE ME TO DO

WHAT I WISH TO AVOID

MY NAME IS

AQUARIUS

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.’