A Cold Case of Killing Page 8

  “About that,” Love said. “Give or take an inch or so. Hard to remember exactly that far back.”

  “That’s close enough. Thank you very much for your help, Mr. Love.”

  “You’re very welcome,” he said. Bless the nursing home age.

  So Jimmy Bjornquist had been nineteen years old and stood six feet tall, give or take an inch or so. And Skeleton X had been in his late teens or early twenties and stood six feet tall, give or take an inch or two. I wondered if the cops were checking the Bjornquist DNA. I picked up the phone to call Brownie.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Looking for a Match

  TO MY AMAZEMENT, Brownie answered on the first ring. “Homicidebrown.”

  “Dailydispatchmitchell,” I said. “Got a question for you.”

  “You’re a reporter and you have a question? I’m shocked. Stunned, in fact.”

  “I knew it would amaze you. The chief said you’re checking for DNA matches. I’m wondering if you’re checking with the Bjornquist family.”

  “You’re thinking Skeleton X might be the long-gone Jimmy?”

  “Skeleton X comes very close to Jimmy’s height and age.”

  “You been hacking into our records? How’d you know Jimmy’s height?”

  “A little birdie told me. No, I haven’t been hacking. If I was a good enough hacker I’d never have to call you about anything.”

  “Well, Mitch, I can’t comment on whose DNA we are testing. All I can say is that you are right about the similarity in Jimmy Bjornquist’s and Skeleton X’s statistics.”

  “So you haven’t ruled out Jimmy Bjornquist as the potential victim found in the Andersons’ backyard?”

  “We haven’t ruled out any adult male with those statistics.”

  “I wouldn’t be wrong in speculating that Skeleton X might be Jimmy?”

  “Speculate all you want. Have a good day, Mitch.”

  When I put down the phone I realized that Al was standing beside me with a coffee cup in each hand and a manila envelope clamped under his right elbow. “Was that Brownie?” he asked.

  “It was,” I said, taking the proffered cup of coffee.

  “What did you find out from him?”

  I took a sip of coffee. “He thinks Skeleton X might be Jimmy Bjornquist but he can’t say so on the record.”

  “Why would Jimmy Bjornquist be buried in the Andersons’ backyard?”

  “One scenario I can think of is that Jimmy killed Marilee, and Jack Anderson found out and killed Jimmy and buried him in the backyard.”

  “So where’s Marilee’s body?”

  “Only Jimmy Bjornquist could have told us that.”

  “Frustrating,” Al said. He put his coffee down on a small square of open surface on my desk and pulled out the manila envelope. “Maybe Jimmy can’t talk, but what I have here will tell us something.”

  He pulled an eight-by-ten sheet of paper out of the envelope and handed it to me. It was the photo of an attractive blonde woman with intense blue eyes. “Marilee Anderson at age forty?” I asked.

  “Exactly. My camera club friend delivered this just a few minutes ago.”

  “Did you show it to Don?”

  “I scanned a copy into the computer and sent it to him. He wants you to write a short piece to explain what it is and how we got it.”

  “Including ‘courtesy of Jill Anderson,’ I assume. Which reminds me, we’ve still got the original.”

  “That I don’t know. You could ask Don.”

  “Those blue eyes still stand out, even in the twenty-five-year projection.”

  “The eyes have it. Like light bulbs on a Christmas tree.”

  “This is fabulous. We’ll have our readers staring at every blue-eyed blonde between the ages of twenty and sixty in the Twin Cities.”

  “She cleans up pretty good as a forty-year-old.”

  “She does indeed. Better looking than I’d have guessed from the original.”

  “Maybe Jimmy Bjornquist could see into the future.”

  “I’m sure we’ll start getting calls from people who are positive that they’ve seen her.”

  “I’ll let you handle them. I’m heading out. See you later.”

  I wrote a brief story asking readers to phone the police if they’d seen this woman and noting that the original photo, which we’d be running alongside the new one, was courtesy of Jill Anderson, and sent it to Don. Minutes later, the before-and-after display was in the online edition. A few additional minutes later I was putting my computer to bed and preparing to go home when I received a call from a totally unexpected source.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lauralee

  THE VOICE WAS FEMALE but deep and husky, the kind of voice that would make any man eager to see the lips from which it came. I’m thinking Lauren Bacall in those old black-and-white movies with Humphrey Bogart.

  “You’re the one who’s been writing about the Marilee Anderson cold case, right?” she said.

  “Right. And you are?” I said.

  “I’m Lauralee Baker.”

  I waited for further explanation. Receiving none after an embarrassing passage of time, I said, “May I ask why you’re calling me?”

  “I thought you’d like some inside information about Marilee.”

  “I’d love to get some inside information about Marilee. What do you know about her?”

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “Other than your name, no. Should I know more?”

  “If you’d done all your homework, you would. I’m Marilee’s cousin. Her mother and my mother are sisters.”

  Ouch! I’d been chasing Marilee’s relatives on the Anderson side but hadn’t even thought about those on the mother’s side. “You’re right,” I said. “I haven’t done all my homework, and I’m embarrassed. Were you very close to Marilee?”

  “We were buddies since we were babies,” she said. “We were born only one day apart and our mothers gave both of us names ending in Lee, which was their maiden name. We were almost like twins when we were little girls. I’ve missed her every day for twenty-five years and now that the case is in the news again, I’d like to help find out what happened to her.”

  “Your help would be most welcome. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  “I’m teaching summer school in Roseville and I live in an apartment near the high school,” Lauralee said. “You could meet me there.”

  I’d have gone a lot farther than Roseville, which touches on St. Paul’s northern border, to meet the owner of that voice. “Sounds good,” I said. “When can we meet?”

  “How about tomorrow right after school. Say about three o’clock.”

  “Give me directions and I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  I’D BEEN RIGHT ABOUT phone calls. When I arrived in the newsroom Friday morning, Don handed me a list of thirty-six people who had left messages on our call-in line Thursday evening claiming to have seen Marilee Anderson. “It’s your story—check them out,” he said.

  My e-mail contained a message from Brownie saying the police had been swamped with something like eighty-eight calls, and why the hell hadn’t I warned him that the photo was running.

  I replied that I had e-mailed him a copy of Marilee’s image as a forty-year-old the previous afternoon at the same time we’d put it online, which was less than thirty minutes after it had been placed in my hands.

  Either Marilee Anderson was covering a lot of ground or there were a lot of fortyish blondes with intense blue eyes running loose in the Twin Cities. I called the first number on the list of call-ins and got a woman’s voicemail. I anticipated getting a lot of voicemails; it was, after all, a work day.

  I worked my way down the list and talked to people of various ages and IQs who had seen the spitting image of Marilee in the supermarket, at a Twins game, at the airport, at the Como Park zoo, on a street corner, in the candy store, in a Lutheran church, in a Catholic church, on the beach at Lake Phalen, in a liquor
store, at the beauty parlor, on the bus, standing at Seven Corners, at a high school concert, and at the movies. The times of the sightings ranged from “just a couple of days ago” to “sometime in June, must have been seven years ago.” The descriptions of what the woman was wearing ranged from a yellow bikini swimsuit to a black dress that made her look kind of like a nun. I thanked them all for their help, and when I had accumulated eighteen comments I wrote a story about some of the possibilities, omitting the names of the callers.

  “Really gets around, doesn’t she?” Al said, looking over my shoulder at what I was writing.

  “It’s a wonder her parents or her cousin Lauralee didn’t see her in one of those places,” I said.

  “Did any of them sound legitimate?”

  “Most of them sounded loony. But there were a couple that might bear checking. I e-mailed their information to Brownie. It might make up for our not giving him a longer warning time before we ran it online.”

  “He’s pissed about that?”

  “Somewhat. They’d had eighty-eight phone calls by the time I got in this morning, and I got the impression that he hadn’t opened the e-mail with the photo attached that I sent him yesterday afternoon.”

  “That’ll teach him to look at his e-mail more often.”

  “Can’t teach an old detective new tricks, but it taught me to call him when I’m sending something like that.”

  “They say you can learn something new every day. Right now I need to learn what time we’re meeting cousin Lauralee.”

  “At three, near the high school,” I said. When I’d told Don about this new development he’d assigned Al to accompany me. “We’ll need to leave about two thirty.”

  * * *

  AT 2:17 P.M. THAT DAY, the driver of a red convertible with Wisconsin plates cut off a semi-trailer on I-94 about two miles east of the St. Paul city limits. The truck driver’s evasive maneuver caused the semi to jackknife and tip over, scattering a load of fresh ripe tomatoes from the broken trailer. Truck parts and squished tomatoes spread across the highway, blocking all three of the eastbound lanes. The driver of the red convertible with Wisconsin plates went merrily on his (or her) way to the Cheese-head State, while seven cars and two pickup trucks molded themselves into a pile of twisted metal behind the flattened semi and a sea of juicy red pulp. Behind this instant junkyard, scores of eastbound vehicles came to a screeching halt.

  A photographer was needed and the only ones in the building were Alan Jeffrey and Daniel Hendrickson. Daniel Hendrickson is also known as Downtown Danny because he suffers from an emotional affliction that makes it impossible for him to leave the boundaries of St. Paul. The crash was in Lake Elmo, so obviously Don could not send Danny. Thus Al was ordered to the scene of the wreck.

  My interview was in Roseville, also beyond the confines of St. Paul, so Don could not send Danny with me. Thus it was that I stood alone as I rang the bell at Lauralee Baker’s apartment on the third floor of a building near Highway 36.

  When the door opened, I was amazed at what I saw.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Summer Heat

  KNOWING THAT LAURALEE Baker was Marilee Anderson’s cousin, and having heard Lauralee describe herself and Marilee as virtually twins, I was expecting the door to be opened by a blue-eyed blonde of medium height.

  What greeted me instead was a jade-green-eyed brunette who stood nearly six feet tall. Her dark, nearly black hair was pulled back in a waist-length ponytail and large gold circles dangled from her ears. She was wearing a shiny red, yellow, and orange robe that was held together by a matching belt knotted around her stomach. The robe was short on both ends, revealing a generous portion of two sensational breasts at the top and stopping six inches above her knees at the bottom. Below the hem were two extra-long legs shaped like those you see in TV commercials for short shorts and bikini swimsuits.

  Apparently my face reflected my amazement because the spectacular woman in the doorway said, “Are you okay, Mr. Mitchell?” The low, silky voice was the one I’d heard on the phone.

  I realized that my mouth was hanging open so I closed it. Finding it difficult to speak in this configuration, I opened it again, and words tumbled out. “I was expecting you to look more like your cousin.”

  “Blonde, you mean?” she said. “My mother is light, like her sister, but my father is dark like me. His genes seem to have won the battle.” She stepped aside, gestured me in and waved me toward a deep brown leather chair. “Please sit down, Mr. Mitchell.”

  “Please call me Mitch,” I said. I caught a whiff of a pleasantly spicy perfume or bath salt as I passed her on my way to sitting. Lauralee settled herself into a matching chair facing me and crossed her legs, showing enough thigh in the process to make me wonder if she was wearing anything under the red, yellow, and orange robe. Merely a reporter’s curiosity, of course.

  Other than the chairs we sat on, I can tell you nothing about the apartment. My focus was so locked on Lauralee and her abbreviated apparel that I wouldn’t have noticed an elephant on the other end of the living room.

  “Mitch, I hope you don’t mind that I got into something comfortable,” she said. “It’s a hot day outside and I don’t like to run the air conditioning at the freezing point.”

  “What you’re wearing is just fine,” I said. “I don’t like too much air conditioning myself, either.”

  “I love bright colors, don’t you?” She stretched out her arms, pulling the silky material taught against her breasts. I decided that she was not wearing anything under the robe on the upper part of her body.

  “They look very nice on you. Goes really well with your dark hair.” I felt like I was babbling foolishness.

  “Can I get you a drink of something before we chat, Mitch? A beer or a gin and tonic or whatever?”

  “No, I’m just fine, thanks. Better if I don’t drink anything while I’m working.” No point in discussing my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous.

  “How about some water then, or some iced tea? You look a little warm.”

  She was right, I was a little warm. I loosened my tie and undid my collar button. “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  She smiled and leaned back in the chair, causing the hem of the robe to slide upward another two inches. I felt my temperature rise another degree and decided to get down to business.

  Opening my notebook with sweaty hands, I asked if she knew anything about Marilee’s relationship with Jimmy Bjornquist.

  “I know she was putting out for him,” Lauralee said. “She told me all about how it was when she did it for the first time with him, because up to then we were both virgins.”

  “I know young guys brag about having sex with girls but I didn’t know girls talked about it.”

  “Marilee and I talked about everything, right down to how it felt when he put it in the first time. It didn’t sound that great to me, but I still tried it the first chance I had. That wasn’t so great, either.”

  This was more information than I needed; certainly more information than I could put in print. As I was trying to think of my next question, Lauralee slowly uncrossed her legs and crossed them in the other direction. At this point, I was betting that there was nothing but Lauralee anywhere underneath the robe.

  I wiped a trickle of sweat off my forehead with the back of my left hand. “Do you think they got serious about each other, or was it just hormones?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about Jimmy, but Marilee had feelings for the guy. I mean, she had no loving at home—her father beat her on her bare ass and her mother was such a wimp she let him do it. The only person she was ever close to was me until Jimmy started talking to her in the store. Eventually she started sneaking out at night to see him and they’d do it in the backseat of his car.”

  “So, do you think that she hid somewhere and went with him the next day when he took off for California or wherever?”

  “I’ve always thought of a couple of possibilities. One is that they did what
you just said. The other was that Jimmy blew up and killed her when she wouldn’t have an abortion.”

  Two of the same scenarios that I had imagined. “She was pregnant?” I asked.

  “She missed two periods, so she went and got one of those test kits at the drug store,” Lauralee said. “The stick turned the right color—or maybe I should say the wrong color in her case. I was there when she did it.”

  “So she told Jimmy she was pregnant, and he wanted her to have an abortion?”

  “He said he couldn’t afford to have a kid. Didn’t want a kid even if he could’ve afforded it. They argued about it. She never said that Jimmy got violent, but you never know. The timing is pretty suspicious.”

  “I guess I’m surprised that she refused the abortion.”

  “She wanted the baby. She wanted somebody that would love her. And she’d been brought up Catholic and believed that abortion was a sin.”

  “Makes sense when you put it that way. So which of those two scenarios do you think is the most likely?”

  “I hate to say it, but I think the one where he kills her. Might have been by accident, you know, in a fit of rage. But I think if she was alive she would have contacted me somewhere along the line. Like I told you, we were like twins.”

  “If that’s what happened, what do you think Jimmy did with the body?”

  “I’m thinking he hid it in the trunk of his car and took it with him when he ran off the next day. He could have buried her anywhere between St. Paul and California.”

  “Have you ever told this to the police?” I asked.

  “The police have never asked me anything,” she said. “Like you, they went after Marilee’s parents and her creepy uncle.”

  “What about the uncle? Why do you call him creepy?”

  “Because he was creepy. Marilee said he was always feeling her up every chance he got and pressing his dick against her when he hugged her. He did practically everything but rape her; I think he was scared to go that far.”