The sheriff walked in with an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth and an empty coffee cup in his hand. “What’s so interesting?”
“I’m putting up pins representing all the locations involved in the Aaron Roberts disappearance,” Floyd explained. “It looks like Aaron may have stolen an ATV the night he disappeared. It was recovered where this yellow pin is stuck.”
The sheriff leaned close to the map and looked at the arrangement of pins. “You couldn’t have made this arrangement any more random if you’d used a shotgun to pick the locations.” He stepped back. “I didn’t know we picked up Aaron Roberts’ fingerprints from a stolen ATV.”
“We didn’t know to look for them. The ATV wasn’t reported stolen until the next spring.”
The sheriff pulled the cigar out of his mouth and pointed at the map. “You mean to tell me that you’re conjuring up crazy scenarios trying to tie this Aaron Roberts thing to some old burglaries, too? Tell me we’re not spending a lot of the taxpayers’ money on this.”
“It’s costing the taxpayers almost nothing. From here on, Pam and I will work on it on our own time and we won’t even charge mileage on our personal cars,” Floyd said with a smile.
“Don’t use your own cars and you don’t need to use personal time, but if the county board finds out we spent one dollar of overtime on this, someone’s goose will be cooked.” The sheriff jammed the cigar back in his mouth and poured coffee. “Furthermore, if we ignore some other crime because of this, I’ll be the one cooking the geese.”
The sheriff started for his office, but stopped short of the hallway. “Pam, my wife said the wedding shower you and Mary threw for Sandy’s fiancee was great. I guess Sandy’s girl, Barb, is quite a character. My wife says she hasn’t laughed so hard in years.”
Pam watched the sheriff leave. “Is he really mad about the Roberts investigation?”
“You’ve got to remember,” Floyd explained, “the sheriff’s job is to run this place within the budget, to keep fifty-one percent of the voters happy, and to keep a majority of the county board members happy. If that happens, he gets re-elected and our budget doesn’t get cut.”
“He said someone’s goose would be cooked.”
“Don’t worry,” Floyd said, waving off the comment. “If he gets too upset I’ll tell him that I’m going to retire and he’ll cool off.”
“How does his compare with our jobs? I thought we were supposed to find missing people and arrest bad guys.”
“Oh, that’s our job. That, and making the sheriff look good enough so that those fifty-one percent of the people will want to vote for him in the next election. You see, there are several things at odds here. The county board wants us on the road 100 % of the time and driving past their houses at least once a shift. They want all felonies solved within twenty-four hours and all court papers served the day they’re issued.
“We need to do those things, but we also need to do the invisible things that make Pine County a safe and wonderful place to live and raise a family. Part of that is tracking down unsolved crimes and not giving the sheriff too much information that would make him culpable in case something goes very wrong with an investigation.”
“He needs deniability,” Pam summarized.
“That, and he needs to know enough so he can leverage outside resources for us, like the BCA. He needs enough information to make the press happy and to make it look like we’re being competent and diligent. Sometimes, though, I need to plow ahead with something that’s not glorious just to make sure we’re pursuing our jobs diligently. Those things I do quietly until it’s obvious that they’re going nowhere, when I drop them, or until they break. Then I feed the information to the sheriff so he can take it to the press and the county board.”
“Seems stupid.”
“Get used to it, Pam.”
CHAPTER 35
The fax machine came to life with a whirr. The tones signified the sound of another machine attempting to complete a connection. Floyd poured a cup of coffee while the sheets slowly fed into the tray.
“You’re expecting something?” Pam asked.
“I had a discussion with Mark Roberts today. He left me a little uneasy about his relationship with Aaron, so I called his employer to see where he was when Aaron disappeared.”
“He made you uneasy in what way?”
“He’s extremely homophobic,” Floyd explained. “When I asked about Aaron coming out of the closet just before he disappeared Mark flew over the table at me screaming that his son was no queer.”
“Oh, great. Not only is he a misogynist, he’s a bigot, too.”
“Would you have expected anything less?” Floyd asked as he picked up the fax sheets from the bin. “He said he found out about Aaron’s disappearance when he called his dispatcher from Grand Forks two days later.” Floyd studied the sheets, and then said, Here he is on Monday, picking up a load in Minneapolis, which means he could have been in Pine City Sunday morning. So much for his alibi.”
“Do you think he’d hurt his own son?”
“He told me if he had a son who was gay that he’d straighten him out,” Floyd said. “I’m betting that a gay son would be ‘way bad’ on Mark’s list of bad.”
The dispatcher’s voice crackled over the intercom directing Floyd to pick up line three. He was surprised to hear the librarian’s voice.
“Hey, Floyd, it’s Brenda Engelbrekt. You piqued my interest the other day, so I did some more searching in the newspapers about Aaron Roberts and Ken Solstad. I have a few pages printed out if you’d like to look at them.”
“Is there anything special?” Floyd asked.
“Well, the most interesting thing is an article about Ken Solstad’s funeral. I guess I hadn’t thought about it much, but his family brought the body back from Iowa to have him buried here. The article says the funeral ceremony was a couple days before Christmas and it must’ve been a slow news week because it lists the people who attended. Right after that article is news about the lutefisk dinner. I thought that’d give you a chuckle because the church served over two hundred pounds of lutefisk and one hundred fifty pounds of meatballs.”
“I never thought you’d find enough crazy Scandinavians to eat two hundred pounds of lutefisk,” Floyd said with a chuckle. “I’ll swing by and pick up the article about the funeral. That might be interesting.” Floyd paused, wracking his brain for the idea that had passed through before he’d been diverted by the Lutefisk data. “Say, Brenda, I assume the funeral article mentions where Ken Solstad’s accident occurred. Do you have a database where you could check a local newspaper and get a follow-up article about the car accident that killed him?”
“Hang on,” Brenda said. Floyd could hear papers rustling. “The accident was outside Des Moines, Iowa. I’ll pull up The Des Moines Register website again. If you give me an hour I may have something for you.”
“Thanks!”
Pam had listened to Floyd’s half of the conversation with curiosity. “What do Ken Solstad’s car accident and funeral have in common with two-hundred pounds of Lutefisk?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Floyd replied. “Brenda and I were talking about a lutefisk dinner when I was at the library. Separate from that she did some research to find Ken Solstad’s obituary and funeral article. The funeral and the lutefisk dinner were the same week, right before Christmas. We’d laughed about the lutefisk and she was just passed along the information about the amount of lutefisk eaten.”