Lake Country (5 page)

Maya sensed a trap. “Have I?”

“At first I assumed you were pregnant, but you
don’t appear to be showing. And there was all that gin.”

“Jesus, Rose Ann. No, I’m not pregnant.”

“That’s reassuring. No terminal illness, one assumes.”

“I’m fine,” Maya said. “Everything’s fine.”

Rose Ann glanced at the archives stacked on the deck, representing Maya’s first six-odd months in the Twin Cities. “I wonder,” she said.

“Why are you asking me all this?”

“You mean besides the fact that you’re hiding out mooning over auld lang syne in the middle of a working news day?”

“Hiding?”
The door was open
, Maya thought. She tilted her head. “Mooning?”

“Think up your own words if you like.”

“Then, yeah,” Maya said. “Besides that.”

Rose Ann came over and sat down against the edge of the console. She took a moment to arrange herself, then settled her hands in her lap. “Culling from my vast and varied experience, there’s only one other condition I can think of that makes a good reporter look the way you do. Perhaps it’s time we paused to evaluate the situation.”

“You say that like there’s a situation.”

“A manageable one, I hope.”

“And what is it you think we’re up against?”

Once more, Rose Ann looked at the younger Maya frozen on the monitor screen, half blurred. She looked at the Maya in the chair. Eyeglasses folded in one hand, battle-scarred BlackBerry in the other, she smiled a little too kindly and said, “We all get tired.”

We don’t know how to measure tired
, Maya
thought, but she said nothing. The air in the sound-sealed pod suddenly felt too compressed. Tupperware for newspeople.

“Want to talk about it?”

“I thought you wanted this for the six?”

“I think we can safely spare a few minutes.”

Maya pretended to check her watch. Rose Ann waited. After the silence had stretched to a point she deemed long enough, Rose Ann said, “Do you want to know what I think?”

“Sure,” Maya said.

“I think we reach … points. Mile markers, call them. Fiftieth birthdays, five year anniversaries. These are random examples.”

“Of mile markers. I’m following you.”

“Places where it seems perfectly natural to stop and look back.” Rose Ann shrugged. “I think that News7’s Maya Lamb has reached a mile marker.”

News7’s Maya Lamb said nothing.

“The question is, when you look around, what do you see?”

That was the question, Maya thought, mildly annoyed with Rose Ann for hitting the target with so little effort. The truth was, she’d been sitting here wondering where that other Maya on the monitor screen had gone. And she didn’t know the answer.

Looking at the monitor, what she saw was a dewy young hotshot filled to the brim with ambition and goals. At the time this piece had aired, she’d just arrived from her previous station, serving a much smaller market in the bluffs of western Iowa, where she’d broken a career story involving vigilante cops, an accused pedophile, and a teenager who’d thrown
herself from a bridge. That earlier Maya had barely gotten her desk here in order when Wade Benson swerved into Becky Morse’s path.

In the five years since, she’d covered all manner of human suffering: rapes, stabbings, shootings, beatings, fatal car wrecks, fatal boat wrecks, and fatal fires. She’d made a living out of being the first person to show up on people’s doorsteps on the worst days of their lives, and Rose Ann was right: She was good at it.

But somewhere along the way, the Maya on the screen had turned into the Maya sitting here in the chair. The Maya who couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to fall asleep at night without Ambien, or gin, or—more and more regularly these days, it seemed—a helping of both. The Maya who hadn’t been a bit surprised to learn that Juliet Benson hated her.

The truth? She’d have been surprised to learn otherwise.

“This Benson story,” Rose Ann said. “You’ve covered worse.”

Maya thought of the I-35 bridge collapse during rush hour. She thought of the young couple in New Hope who’d found their infant son cold and blue in his crib. She thought all the way back to her teen bridge-jumper in Clark Falls. Worse? Better? Equally bad?

“Why does this one get under your skin, do you think? Apart from being a mile marker.”

For a mile marker, it looks a lot like the same place I started
, Maya thought.

What she said was, “I don’t know.” Then she gave
it an honest thought and added, “But I could use a happy ending for a change.”

Rose Ann held her gaze a moment. Grinned. “I was going to say a raise and a vacation,” she said. “But whatever makes you feel better.”

Maya stuck out her tongue, not realizing that it would be more than ten hours before she laid eyes on Wade Benson again, without a happy ending anywhere in sight. A vacation would have been nice. Starting a week ago. It was 3:41 p.m.

The Hennepin County Adult Corrections Facility housed six hundred residents and an institutional worm farm on an eighty-acre tract of land between two small lakes, some twelve miles northwest, and a world apart, from privileged Linden Hills.

Deon got them there in the live truck at ten minutes past four. They rolled up through the line of young budding trees on either side of Shenandoah Lane. They parked in the visitor’s lot of the main building: a squat, art deco brick edifice that rose from two wings in a chevron-tipped tower and accommodated, alongside various administrative units, the men’s detention section. At 4:15, they entered the public lobby through the big double doors in front, right on schedule.

By 4:30, Maya smelled something rotten.

At 4:45, she began to lose patience. By 4:55, she’d lost diplomacy.

“We’re scheduled to meet with Officer Hanscomb,” she told the detention officer now stonewalling them. Officer Brooks, according to the nameplate pinned to the right chest of his duty shirt. He looked like a slab of beef with a mustache and behaved, Maya couldn’t
help noticing, like a total penis. “Corrections approved this three days ago.”

“I’m not aware of that schedule,” he said.

“Which is why I’m asking to speak with Officer Hanscomb.”

“Yeah, but you’re not asking nice, though.”

“May I please speak with Officer Hanscomb?”

“If she had anything to speak to you about, I expect she’d be the one out here speaking to you,” Brooks said. “Instead of lucky lucky me.”

What was it with this guy? In Maya’s view they could have been perfectly civil with one another, but, no, he wanted to break her balls for some reason. She shone her brightest TV smile in his face and motioned to Deon, who put the camera on his shoulder. “In that case, should I be talking to you instead?”

“I wasn’t aware you’d stopped.” The two-way radio on the detention officer’s belt beeped twice, then chattered softly. Brooks batted his eyelashes for the camera and stepped a few paces away to answer the call.

Deon said, “I don’t think he wants to talk to you, Maya Lamb.”

“You got that, huh?” In the past quarter hour, a pair of uniformed sherrif’s deputies had materialized outside, in front of the building. They appeared to be standing post on either side of the entrance doors. Maya looked around the empty wooden benches lining the vacant waiting area and said, “What’s going on around here?”

Deon shrugged, working a ragged toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. He turned with
the camera and found the cops outside through his viewfinder.

Officer Brooks came back, radio on his belt. “Congratulations,” he said. “Officer Hanscomb is en route.”

“En route?”

“That’s a law-enforcement word. It means you can wait over there.”

“Actually it’s two words,” Maya said. “A phrase, if you want to get technical.”

“Hey, I know another phrase,” Brooks said, but he was interrupted by the door to the secure area behind them, which buzzed, then opened. A woman emerged into the waiting area, striding briskly beneath the arm of another officer holding the door for her. Her ID badge jounced on a lanyard around her neck.

“Well, that wasn’t such a long wait,” Maya said.

Brooks smirked at her.

“Miss Lamb,” the woman said, extending a hand as she approached. She stood five feet flat and weighed all of fourteen ounces in slacks and a blouse, with a springy mop of curly blond hair, owlish eyeglasses, and straight white teeth that seemed half a size too large for her mouth. “Jackie Hanscomb. I apologize for the confusion. And for making you wait.”

“Not at all,” Maya said. She felt like a giant shaking Hanscomb’s small hand. “Has something come up?”

“You could say that.” Hanscomb pressed her lips together in a grim line, and Maya got a good look at her eyes. Efficient posture aside, the diminutive media officer looked as though she’d come through some
kind of wringer this afternoon. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to grant your interview after all.”

It wasn’t even supposed to have been an interview, Maya thought. Just a quick bit of B-roll, then done. She said, “Can you tell me why?”

“If you’re able to spare fifteen minutes, I have somebody you can talk to.” She nodded politely at Deon. “But not the camera. I’m sorry.”

Maya glanced at Deon. He worked his toothpick, shrugged, lowered his camera. She turned back to Hanscomb and said, “I’m all yours.”

“All right, then. Please come with me.”

To Deon, Maya said, “Call the station, will you? Tell Miles I’ll touch base in fifteen.”

“Happy to,” Deon said, crumpled pack of smokes already in hand. “Let’s see if I can get a better signal outside.”

The detective from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office was a new face to Maya. He looked to be somewhere in his forties, wore shirtsleeves and dress pants, a clip holster and a wedding ring, apparently took care of himself, and met her with a far more collegial disposition than had Officer Brooks in the waiting area. “Roger Barnhill,” he said, shaking her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” she said, still gaining her bearings. Hanscomb had brought her down a hall and up a flight of stairs to the jail superintendent’s office, which had a bank of security monitors on one wall, leather-bound volumes of the
Annotated Minnesota Statutes
going back to the 1950s on another, and a massive
old wooden office desk in between. Against the edge of the desk leaned the superintendent himself, Terry Spilker, whom Maya had met a couple of times before. “Terry, nice to see you again.”

“Always,” Spilker said. He unfolded his arms and stepped over to join in on the hand-shaking. “Apart from the circumstances.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about those.” Maya looked around the faces in the room: Spilker, Detective Barnhill, Jackie Hanscomb, and a tall, well-heeled man she knew to be Morton Clay, Benson family attorney. Clay, who hadn’t approved of Maya’s presence in the first place, appeared to have softened on that point. Other than that, none of the faces told her much. “I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something.”

“I think we’re all still getting up to speed,” Barnhill said. “Thanks for the time, I know you’re short on it. Frankly, so am I, and I believe we may be in a position to help each other.”

“Is there something News7 can do for the sheriff’s office today?”

“That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. Officer Hanscomb tells me you came to the facility in a broadcast truck. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. I’m scheduled to go live from here top of the hour.”

“I’m going to share some information with you,” Barnhill said. “Some of it I need to go out on the air to the public as soon as possible. Most of it I need to stay in this office. For now.”

“That’s not something police normally say to reporters,” Maya said.

“No, I don’t suppose it is. But I want you to understand the situation fully.”

Her senses were on full tingle now. “I appreciate that.”

“First, some ground rules.”

“What kind of ground rules?”

“If you agree to keep a tight lid on everything I want you to hold back, then I won’t hold back anything,” Detective Barnhill said. “And when your competition from the other affiliates and the print outlets show up, I’ll remember all the trust you and I have established.”

“By observing the ground rules,” she said.

Barnhill touched a finger to his nose. “As long as you hold up your end of the deal, no other reporter gets any information from me that you didn’t get first. I’ll give you my word on that. Your thoughts?”

Maya thought that this man Barnhill from the sheriff’s detectives was already planning a press conference in his head, and he didn’t appear to be enjoying it. She glanced at Morton Clay in the corner. Benson’s attorney didn’t appear to be enjoying it either. She said, “I’d say that sounds doable.”

“Then we have an agreement.” Without further preamble, the detective walked over to the desk, where Maya saw two matching BlackBerry mobile phones sitting side by side on top of a plain manila file folder. “What I’m about to show you falls under the stuff-we-keep-in-this-office category.”

Maya nodded.

Barnhill picked up one of the phones. “This is Cheryl Benson’s PDA.” He picked up the other phone, so that he now held one in each hand. “This one belongs
to her husband. Mr. Benson arrived here at the facility just over an hour ago. Shortly after that time, both phones received the same transmission, copied simultaneously.”

“What kind of transmission?”

Barnhill fiddled with one of the phones, then brought it over to Maya. “Remember,” he said. “Inside this office only.”

Maya took the device and looked at the screen. At first she couldn’t make sense of what she saw there. “Is that …” She looked closer. Her pulse spiked. “Is this Juliet Benson?”

“Her parents assure me it is.”

Maya drew in a breath.

“What you see there was sent from Juliet’s phone,” Barnhill told her. “Whoever sent it went through and picked
Mom
and
Dad
out of the girl’s contact list. That phone, hers, is now offline.”

“Holy shit.” Maya stared at the image in the palm of her hand: a digital photo, presumably taken with the camera on board Juliet Benson’s phone. The resolution wasn’t great, but the image was legible enough for Maya to recognize Wade Benson’s daughter, bound and gagged in the trunk of a car. “When did you say this came in?”