Spilled Blood

‘Okay, tell her I’ll be there soon.’

Hannah didn’t protest further. ‘Fine. You’re right, she needs you. Just remember that you don’t know this girl, Chris. Not anymore.’

‘We talk all the time.’

‘That’s not the same thing. Believe me. You see the girl she wants you to see.’

As his ex-wife hung up, he’d wondered if that were true.

A lifetime had passed – three years – since Hannah left him to go back to the small farm town called St. Croix where she’d been raised. He saw his daughter every few months, but to him she would always be a girl, not a woman. He didn’t know anything about the mix-up of emotions a teenager faced. She hadn’t said a word to him about what was in her head. She talked about meaningless things. Easy things. He should have realized there was much more to her than a girl who missed her father.

It didn’t change what he had to do. Olivia needed him, and he had to go.

Now, hours later, he was deep in the western farmlands of Minnesota, with the rain coming down, with Jesus on a billboard asking if he was ready. It could have been Antarctica; it could have been Mars. Every mile here looked like the next. This part of the world was terra incognita to him. He was a creature of the noise, asphalt, and people of downtown Minneapolis. He owned a two-bedroom condominium near Loring Park, which he used mostly to sleep. He didn’t cook, so he ate fish and chips and drank Guinness at The Local and ordered take-out pho from Quang. He spent his days and nights negotiating contracts for industrial parks and strip malls. Steel and concrete – those were things that were real, things he could touch and measure.

In the city, he was an insider. Not here. Out here, he was an alien.

Ahead of him, through the sheets of rain, Chris saw a highway sign for the Spirit Dam. The town of Barron, where Olivia was being held in the county jail, was on the river side of the dam, three miles to the south. He drove his decade-old silver Lexus onto the roadway, but he stopped in the middle of the bridge. For some reason, he found himself hesitating. He got out of the car and shut the door behind him. Rain lashed across his face, and he squinted. He didn’t care about getting wet.

Chris looked down at the wild water squeezing into whirlpools through a dozen sluice gates. Downstream, the Spirit River settled into a mucky brown calm as it wound toward Barron, feeding a web of narrow streams, including one that flowed behind Hannah’s house in the tiny town of St. Croix a few miles to the southeast. On the north side of the dam, the water sprawled like a vast octopus into miles of man-made lake. The river pushed toward the valley, and the dam pushed back and said, Stop. That was exactly what he had to do. That was his mission. Olivia was in the path of a flood, and he had to stop it.

Still, Chris lingered on the bridge, staring at the water.

He was a tall man, almost exactly six feet. At forty-one, his hair was still thick and brown, without any gray to remind him of his age. He wore contacts over his dark eyes; years of poring over realestate contracts had killed his eyesight. Since the divorce, he’d had no excuse for avoiding the gym. He’d dropped twenty pounds and added several inches of muscle to his chest. He looked good; the various women who chased him told him that. It wasn’t just his lawyer’s wallet that attracted them. Even so, he hadn’t agreed to a date in seven months, hadn’t had sex in over a year. He told himself that it was his busy schedule, but the truth was more complicated.

The truth was Hannah. He’d never stopped loving her. Her voice on the phone was enough to awaken the old feelings. She was what was holding him back.

Ready or not, Chris drove across the dam and turned south toward Barron. The river followed the highway, winking in and out behind trees that grew on the shore. Houses appeared. A school bus pulled in front of him. The city sign advertised the population: 5,383. Out here, that was a metropolis, a hub for the whole county. As he neared the town, he felt as if he had crossed back into the 1950s, as if decades of progress had hopscotched over this section of land. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this place would not be as intimidating as it seemed.

Life in the city was fast and complex; life in the country was slower and simpler.

A mile later, he realized that he was wrong.

On the outskirts of Barron, he passed an agribusiness facility built on the western bank of the river. It was one-story, white, clean, and almost windowless. The plant looked more like a prison than an industrial site, because it was protected by a nine-foot fence wound with coils of barbed wire to keep intruders from reaching the interior grounds. The single narrow gate in the fence, just wide enough for trucks to pass, was guarded by two uniformed security officers who were both armed with handguns. As he drove by the plant slowly, he noticed their eyes following him with suspicion.

He noticed something else, too. Outside the fence, he saw a dramatic marble sign ten feet in height, featuring the company name in brass letters. Mondamin Research. Its logo was a golden ear of corn inside a multi- colored helix strand of DNA. Two workers in yellow slickers labored in the rain to sandblast graffiti that had been spray-painted in streaky letters across the white stone. Despite their efforts, he could still see what had been written.

The graffiti said: You’re killing us.

Chris found the Riverside Motel a quarter-mile beyond the Mondamin headquarters. From the parking lot, he had a perfect vantage on the plant’s barbed-wire fence glistening in the rain. Ahead of him, he saw the main street of Barron. Between the two landmarks was the chocolate-brown ribbon of the river.

The motel was a U-shaped, single-story building with two dozen rooms. The white paint had begun to peel away in chips, and the gutters sagged from the shingled black roof. The doors were cherry-red. After parking and retrieving his bag, he ducked through the rain and opened the screen door of the motel office. The interior was humid, and a fan swiveled on the desk, which was unusual for March. On the left wall he saw an ice machine and two vending machines selling snacks and pop. He approached the check-in counter.

‘I’m Chris Hawk,’ he told the man seated behind the counter. ‘I called this morning about a room.’

The motel owner nodded pleasantly. ‘Welcome to Barron, Mr. Hawk.’

Chris guessed that the man was in his early fifties. He had an olive Italian cast to his skin. His hair was black-and-gray, buzzed into a wiry crew cut. He had a jet-black mustache, a mole on his upper cheek, and a silver chain nestled in the matted fringe of his chest hair. He slid out a reservation form, which he handed to Chris with a pen.

‘I’m looking for the county courthouse,’ Chris mentioned as he filled in his personal details.

‘Yes, of course. Well, you can’t miss it. It’s downtown, beautiful old building, red stone.’

Chris stopped writing and looked up. ‘Why “of course”?’

‘Oh, everyone knows who you are, Mr. Hawk, and why you’re here.’

‘Already?’

The motel owner shrugged. He was short and squat, with bulging forearms. His T-shirt, which fit snugly, advertised Dreamland Barbeque. ‘This is a small town. If you fart in your bedroom, your neighbors start gossiping about what you had for dinner.’

Chris laughed. ‘That’s good to know.’

The man extended his hand. His handshake was a vise. ‘My name is Marco Piva.’

‘Since you know why I’m here, Marco, can you tell me what people are saying about what happened on Friday night?’

The motel owner snuffled loudly. He wiped his bulbous nose above his mustache. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear that.’

‘They think my daughter murdered Ashlynn Steele.’

‘Oh, yes, everyone says she did. No one thinks it was an accident or a game. I’m very sorry. I have to tell you, I knew something like this would happen. Violence begets violence, and someone dies. It’s a shame two young girls were involved.’

Chris handed the registration form back to Marco and turned as the screen door banged behind him. A teenage boy, the kind of fresh-faced Scandinavian Lutheran that Chris expected to find in this part of the state, stood in the doorway. He had wavy blond hair that was plastered on his head from the rain and the sturdy physique of a football player. His eyes were sky-blue. He wore a form-fitting white T-shirt that emphasized his muscles, crisp jeans, and cowboy boots. Chris figured he was seventeen or eighteen years old.

‘Johan,’ Marco called. ‘This is Mr. Hawk.’

The boy didn’t look surprised. ‘Hello,’ he said.