Leech Lake Laundry
Prologue-Chapter 2
I have been toiling away on a Thriller novel about a former Military Policeman and LAPD Missing Person’s detective and his brilliant but troubled 19 year-old estranged half-sister who team up to resolve a family member’s disappearance on Minnesota’s most beautiful and unfortunately named lake.
Here is the prologue and first two chapters. I hope you enjoy and let me know you’d like to read on. Thanks for taking a look!
Prologue
If self-reflection is neither practiced nor learned, the shit hitting the fan is not a teachable moment.
Kyle and Deena weren’t trying to figure out how it all went wrong as they clung to the underside of the pontoon boat, hovering above the water while the spotlights searched around them.
Deena thought mostly about how much great work her ass was getting in the upside-down plank she was crushing. Gripping her hands and feet to the cold-welded metal while the rest of her remained taught and tucked upside-down above the pontoons.
Kyle was doing what Kyle was always doing: plotting the next move. Although the list of options to plot had decidedly narrowed.
If they were going to make it out of there alive, they were running out of time. The search boats were drawing closer and sooner or later the pursuers would be in position to take a good look under the pontoon boat.
“Babe!” Kyle whispered.
“Ya Babe!” Deena whispered back.
“I’m going for a little swim. It’s time.”
“OK, Babe.”
“Count to fifteen after I drop down, then you go.”
“OK, Babe.”
“Do you remember where to meet?”
“Ya Babe.”
Kyle, feet first, quietly dropped. Once his thighs were submerged, he then let go of the underside of the boat. Deena could see the vague outline of his torso and hands silently slipping underwater.
As she counted, Deena listened to the purr of the idling motors on the approaching boats getting closer. At the count of seven, the pontoon boat rattled back and forth. A small grinding sound began to echo though the hollow metal of the pontoons. Deena knew it was Kyle underwater cutting at the anchor rope. At twelve, the noise stopped and Deena mentally acknowledged Kyle having cut through. As she started to drop into the water, Deena noticed both the motors and a spotlight had come much closer. The sound of the rope being cut through the metal must have been noticed.
At the sound of bullets being chambered, Deena held her breath and let go. She didn’t worry about making a splash. As she slid underwater and flipped over to swim, Deena heard an underwater “Thwap” and felt the sizzle as a round sliced the cool water. It was close.
PART 1-The Slow Melting Glacier
ONE
There was a time in Oliver Kirkland’s life when being woken up at 6:00 a.m. would have been a downright luxury. In basic training, being yelled out of bed at 4:00 am was the coldest, hardest welcome to adulthood he thought he would ever experience. That was, of course, before Afghanistan and Iraq. There, it wasn’t so much the waking up early as it was the never actually sleeping. But that was a long time ago. Since, he’d found his way to a nice 1:00 am to 9:00 am sleep cycle. A fine reward for his service and sacrifice.
As the phone rang, Oliver emerged from a mild sleep coma in his nicely appointed, newly constructed one bedroom condo overlooking Vine Street in the heart of Hollywood. He made a quick note that he was alone. Nothing new there. He then registered his iPhone’s screen. It was his mom calling.
“Is this a butt dial, Mom?” It wouldn’t be the first time. Oliver had spent more than his fair share of time yelling “Mom!” into his phone while listening to Becky Johnson (formerly Kirkland) power-walking around Lake Nokomis while complaining to her friend Ginger about “the damned Republicans”, or sitting on an exam table describing an area of discomfort to a doctor or just driving and listening to NPR.
“No, Ollie,” his mom’s all-business voice was on the clock. “This is not a butt dial. Your cousin Kyle and his girlfriend have gone missing on Leech Lake. I told your Uncle Kurt that you would come home and find them.”
TWO
Oliver found himself trying to peel back the fogs of sleep and childhood memory at the same time. Kyle Johnson was Oliver’s first cousin on his mom’s side. And that was about as much as Oliver currently knew about him. Kyle was two years older than Oliver, which would make Kyle now 40. He recalled running around with Kyle at family reunions and weddings back in North St. Paul when they were kids. If memory served, Kyle had a bit of a mean spirit to him. Often wanting to sneak up on the younger kids and take their toys or find some other way to spoil their fun. He also loved to wrestle and fight. Oliver flashed on Kyle having some very uncouth grabbing practices in the heat of battle. After a particularly nasty incident in which Kyle had really screwed over Oliver in their earlier teens, Kyle had stopped showing up at family gatherings as had his father, Kurt.
Oliver had a vague recollection of some family drama when Kurt’s wife left him sometime when Oliver and Kyle were still very young. Scraped from that were more vague memories of his uncle Kurt being an angry sort. At the moment, Oliver couldn’t remember if Kurt’s wife had left because he was the angry sort or if Kurt was the angry sort because his wife had left. Either way, he could now assume neither of those facts helped heal the other. Once, when Oliver asked his father what the deal was with Kurt, Big Ollie said, “He’s kind of a piece of shit.” In the morning light of his bedroom in Hollywood, Oliver now guessed it took one to know one.
“Mom, I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t really know Kyle and don’t know how I could help in finding him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Oliver Randall. You’re a police detective.”
Oliver sighed, she was using his full name. “I was a police detective, mom. I’m not anymore.”
“So you’ve forgotten how to be one?” Becky Johnson (formerly Kirkland) was not one to let Oliver turn his back on her. Not again.
For Oliver, not knowing anything about how/why/when his cousin went missing, he didn’t want to be callous about that which could be tragic, but he also didn’t really know why she had volunteered him to fly home and save the day.
“Okay, mom. Why don’t you tell me what happened and I’ll see if I can advise somehow.”
“Kyle and his girlfriend Deena were vacationing up in Walker and they never came home.”
“Okay, what else?”
“What do you mean what else? If everyone knew what else, they wouldn’t be missing.”
In his relaxed moments, Oliver tended to forget his mother’s blunt, sarcastic side. It was offset by love of her only son, fiery advocacy for all things that mattered to her and an award-worthy smile. At present, Oliver couldn’t see that smile over the phone and all the other good qualities seemed to be on their lunch break.
“What are the police in Walker saying?” Oliver failed to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“That Kyle and his girlfriend drowned. They had rented a pontoon boat and never brought it back. The boat was found drifting, but they haven’t found any bodies. It’s been over a week.”
Now Oliver could hear the concern in his mother’s voice. He had no memory of his mom having any special feelings for her nephew, but he did know that she was always trying to look out for her younger brother. Regardless, or maybe even because of his less than sunny disposition.
“Listen, mom” Oliver softened, “I don’t know anything about this. And it’s been years since I’ve seen or even thought about Kyle. Please forgive me if I sound crass, but if the local authorities are saying he and his girlfriend drowned, they probably did. Leech is a deep and complex lake. There are a lot of ways for people to find themselves in trouble out there.” Oliver waited a beat to see if there would be any pushback. When there was none, he continued. “I know you want to help Uncle Kurt, but I don’t know what use I can be.”
“I understand all of that, Oliver.” Something in his mother’s tone told him he was about to lose the argument. “But my brother doesn’t know where his son is. And I raised a son who knows how to find people.”
That sentence had some spin on it. Finding people was the special skill that Oliver had dined out on throughout his professional life. He had a unique knack for it.
It started as a kid. Cambridge, Minnesota, where Ollie’s grandparents lived, held an annual “Cambridge Swedish Days Hunt for the Golden Snuss Box”, a town-wide scavenger hunt for a fake gold-plated chewing tobacco tin. With hourly clues on the local radio station as to the location of the oddly celebrated item.
In his early teens, Ollie, who loved to explore, examine clues and solve riddles would stay at his Grandparents the week of the hunt just to participate. With a notebook, pencil and map of the town, he would sit by the radio and decode the clues. Once he had the scent, Oliver would hop on his bike and go hunting. For three straight years between the ages of 11 and 14, Ollie found the Golden Snuss box and claimed the $250 prize that went along with it. Although he declined his rightful spot on the Swedish Day’s parade float because he wasn’t in it for the fame.
His “dog with a bone” mentality found it’s place in the Army. As a Military Police Investigator, he had risen through the ranks and grown a reputation tracking down soldiers who had gone AWOL in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them had been GI’s who had either been too drunk, too broken by combat or some combination of the two to return from leave. Those cases, to Ollie, were as unremarkable as they were sad. But there had been more complex jobs in which Ollie’s efforts and skills had made the difference. Most notably chasing down a rogue Colonel who had sold troop locations to a Russian mercenary group working as paid support to ISIS. The Colonel had disappeared into Syria and Ollie had gotten a whiff of the trail by finding the base security patrol who had snuck the colonel off base in exchange for drugs.
That case paved the way for Ollie’s next life. An attack on US troops in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq that had been facilitated by leaked information from the rogue Colonel had killed the sister of an influential LAPD captain. When Ollie left his military service, the Captain, grateful to Oliver for having brought his late sister some measure of justice for having captured the man who made her death possible, helped pave the way for Ollie to join and accelerate through the LAPD and wind up in the Missing Person’s Unit.
The most notable case Ollie caught in his time as a cop was the teenage daughter of a high-powered studio exec who had run off with whom she thought was a college boy. After getting into her text messages, interviewing her friends, filtering about a thousand social media posts and doing a canvas of UCLA, where the boy had purported to attend, Ollie determined she had been groomed and ultimately kidnapped for human trafficking purposes. With a dangerously ticking clock, Ollie, along with a heavily fortified SWAT unit, had recovered the girl and nine other young women from across the country in a San Diego warehouse before they had disappeared out of the country, likely never to be found again.
On the heels of that case and now fifteen years of combined military and police service, Ollie had been burnt out on the chases and the cases that had often ended in trails gone cold or shallow graves and was starting to think about what a life away from it all would look like. A very grateful studio executive provided the answer.
At a lunch to thank him for finding her daughter, she told him about a procedural TV series her studio had just sold to a major TV network. “BOLO” centered around the LAPD’s Missing Person’s Unit and the handsome and diverse cops who went through personal hell finding and saving (and sometimes losing) the people who disappeared into the fabric of the city every day. The writers of the show had been great at crafting dialogue and characters but focus group research had come back saying audiences were finding the crimes themselves unbelievable and the investigative process far-fetched. She offered Ollie a job working as a law enforcement consultant to the production and a paycheck that blew his mind. This wouldn’t be the first time Ollie had made a split-second decision that changed the course of his life. This would just be the first time he got paid REALLY WELL for it.
Having made his way over three seasons from Consultant to Writer and Producer, Ollie found himself with enough money to find ways to deal with the boredom that came from only making up life or death situations rather than being in the middle of them. Even with the funds and fun they provided, Oliver had to admit he still felt the phantom limb of the career’s he had amputated on the way to this point. And it seemed his mom had somehow picked up on that and was using it on the phone with him.
“You may have stopped being a real cop so you could play make believe in Hollywood, but now the real world is calling on you to come home and help your family. I don’t care what power lunch you have to cancel or what actress you have to stand up. I expect you to get your ass up and back to Minnesota to help out now, Goddammit.” The phone went dead.
Still holding the phone, Oliver looked down and saw that he just had a very long, very intense and very dramatic phone call with his mother while completely naked. Well now it’s all weird, he thought to himself.
Upon examining his options, Oliver felt there was only one. Call his mother back and tell her he was sorry to hear about his cousin, but his was a busy life and he had far too many commitments to go running back to Minnesota at the drop of a hat. Realizing he would be required to give examples of his plethora of commitments, he popped open his calendar. Not due back in the writers room for three weeks. A lunch with his agent that said agent had rescheduled two times already. A couple of training sessions at the gym down the street and a whole bunch of reminders to start brainstorming stories to pitch for the next season. Suddenly, Oliver, who had been spending his days since wrapping the last season going to the gym, Dodgers games and Barney’s Beanery, realized he really didn’t have much at all to do. And maybe needed a new adventure if he was going to come up with some new stories. He hadn’t been up to Leech Lake, the sight of a million childhood memories since the weekend he graduated from high school.
Ollie got his ass up and put on some clothes.
