Mission: A Novel

By Peter Robertson

When a drowned man is pulled from flooded Boulder Creek, an amateur sleuth’s sense of unease kicks in again with a vengeance.

In Mission, Peter Robertson’s sequel to his debut novel, the precarious world of a Colorado mountain town’s homeless population becomes a focus for a semi-retired businessman and a victim pool for a driven killer.

A decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan in the previous Permafrost, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee Nye Prior for a life of craft beer and bicycling. He isn’t necessarily any richer or happier, but he’s certainly older and fitter.

On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young man pulled from flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn’t so very unusual. In fact another man who was homeless drowned in the creek the month previous. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before. But Tom hasn’t, and the instincts that drove Tom far north of Chicago in the previous book kick in with a vengeance, and he’s soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

Fifteen years have softened the yuppie heart of Tom. He’s lost most of his prized possessions and opted for a simpler life. He’s also looking for love, and he finds a librarian who likes to bike, and, more importantly, isn’t averse to helping out with the sleuthing chores. In addition, Tom befriends Reggie Hawkins, a Boulder cop with a secret life. Tom is determined to find a killer. Nye is determined to brew the perfect stout, and fans of Permafrost will once again discover a potent brew of rich characterization and tense plot in this second in a projected trilogy of Tom novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibson House Press
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780985515850

Peter Robertson

Peter Robertson grew up under what you might consider unusual circumstances in rural Tasmania, Australia, within the 'Secret Sect'. Born in 1958, the youngest of seven children, forbidden to take part in any sport or social events, Peter often felt isolated and lonely, until at age fourteen he forged an exceptional friendship with another youngster of the sect. A friendship that would end in devastating tragedy. Peter, no longer a member of the sect, now lives in Forth, Tasmania, with his wife Grada and their six children and fifteen grandchildren. A passionate researcher, after twenty years in the medical field as a clinical nurse and midwife, Peter transitioned into functional medicine. Peter has trained under respected, world class leaders and has helped over 13,000 people locally and around the world, get their body out of pain and functioning as close to perfection as innately possible. Together, Peter and Grada created the Purple House Wellness Centre in 2000, renowned throughout Australia for cutting edge health solutions and advanced healing practices. Peter understands the nature of suffering and offers people a shortcut to health and happiness. Peter lives by what he teaches.

Book preview

Mission_cvr.jpg

MISSION

A MYSTERY

Peter

Robertson

ALSO BY

PETER ROBERTSON

Permafrost

Colorblind

GIBSON HOUSE PRESS

Flossmoor, Illinois 60422

GibsonHousePress.com

© 2013 Peter Robertson

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-5-0 (ePub)

Cover design:

Christian Fuenfhausen

DEDICATION

for my family

One

In the morning,

on the occasion of my forty-eighth birthday, I rode my bicycle, received a text from my best friend, drank a free cup of coffee, and helped pull a dead body from a flooded creek.

All this took place before the traditional activities of the day: the ingestion of too much alcohol, the somber rather than sober pondering of one’s mortality and the inevitable hard reckoning, and the dismal count of the ever-dwindling days still allotted.

Of course, I still had more time left than the unfortunate gentleman floating dead and blue and still in the icy waters of Boulder Creek on a warm morning in March.

* * *

"Get his leg

loose, Kaitlyn." The Boulder cop standing on the bank was a tall white man with cropped fair hair in his late twenties. The EMT was a curly-haired white girl with large eyes in her early twenties. She was standing waist deep and shivering in four feet of cold tranquil water.

The body was partially floating on the surface of the runoff pool only a few yards from the overpass at Frontage. The pool stood where a section of the creek path split into two, one smaller branch curling around to join the sidewalk on Frontage, the other heading east to Sixty-Third. The police car and the EMT vehicle were both on the overpass, half on the path, half in the traffic, both with their roof lights flashing.

A second older cop, with swept-back brown hair and his left arm in a bright blue sling, was observing the other EMT, a short, portly gentleman in a dark green down vest, as he pulled open a stretcher from the back of the EMT vehicle. Both these men were talking on their cell phones as one languidly worked and the other languidly watched. They were in no apparent hurry.

Frontage backs up against Twenty-Eighth-Route 36, which moves most of Boulder’s perpetually heavy traffic between Denver and Denver International Airport to the south and Estes Park some thirty miles to the north.

I watched silently as the young EMT pulled the dead man’s leg free from between two large rocks. The body drifted to the bank and the cop began to drag it ashore. It wasn’t an easy task for one person. He turned to me. I set my bike down on the grass, and we struggled together for a while. Eventually we wrestled the inflexible body up onto the grass.

I knelt down beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder.

His head seemed misshapen; all broken and bruised and pale and bloodless. He was a young man of no more than twenty-five. One sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt was empty. He had one arm. No, that wasn’t right. It was wedged deep inside his sweatshirt, which was either black or a very dark blue. A shoe was lost. A sock was missing. There was a green sneaker on the other foot. It was a green Puma sneaker and there was no sock inside it. He wasn’t wearing socks. One trouser leg rode up high above the left ankle and there was a tattoo, a single word, a name, Amy, black in ornate swirling script, black against the paper-white skin.

He had known someone named Amy.

All this I observed in a process of silent cataloging, as my hand still lingered on his lifeless skin.

He was tragically boyish, impossibly thin, a post-death color of pale blue fading to white. He had cropped dark hair and a mouth empty and slack and wide open. There was no belt and his jeans were loose in a way that I knew wasn’t some sort of dated statement of homeboy street style. He was just rail-thin in his sad hand-me-down clothes.

Two college boys had jumped from their mountain bikes and were watching us now. Kaitlyn the EMT had gotten out of the water. She was shaking as she pulled a brown wool blanket from the back of the truck and wrapped herself tightly in it. The cop with the sling and the other EMT were still talking on their cell phones. Then the older EMT abruptly hung up and begun pulling more equipment from the back of the truck. I saw the twin paddles of defibrillators, stock props on television crime shows in which everyone stands back as the grim-faced doctor waits for the correct voltage, then presses down firmly, kick-starting the heart, staring at the flat line until it jumps and the attending nurse swoons.

The still-shaking Kaitlyn and the other EMT now began to wheel their cart full of well-intentioned science down the path toward the patient body.

The cop with the sling joined us. He was probably around fifty, close to my age, tall and thin with his hair much longer than I imagined was typical cop style. With the stretcher in place, the younger cop and the older EMT gently lifted the body up. The loose trousers slid down to mid thigh. There was no underwear. The young cop looked at me and smirked. I stared back at him without smiling.

The older cop walked quickly over to the stretcher and, using his good arm, yanked the dead man’s trousers up to his waist. As he did this I saw him glance at the tattoo for a second, and I imagined him mentally filing the image and the single word away. He looked hard at the younger cop and all traces of the previous smirk quickly withered.

It was good of you to help. The cop with the sling spoke to me quietly.

It was nothing, I said.

He shook his head before he replied. It was something.

There was silence. Then I spoke again.

What happens now?

They make sure he’s really dead.

Why?

It’s what they do.

It’s a waste of time.

He didn’t argue. It’s still what they do.

As he said this I noticed about a dozen brightly colored braided bracelets wrapped around his wrist inside the blue sling.

The two mountain bike boys slouched over to stand in place beside us.

We all stood in a line. There would now surely come the inevitable shared moment wrapped in somber quiet. I assumed that, like me, the other witnesses would silently ponder the myriad mysteries of life and death. Why would they not, at a moment of unique perspective like this? Then one of the two cyclists chose to speak, and the wordless eloquence of the moment was indelibly transformed.

Dude. Did you see the size of his dick?

I did. And they did. We all did.

Two

A torrent of early spring rain

had fallen sometime in the middle of the night, and in the morning the lingering snowfall from a previous day had all been washed away. When the storms had moved away, the abandoned air had been crisp and pure and impossibly clear.

In the Colorado springtime, the snow on the Flatirons overlooking Boulder can melt rapidly, adding an abundance of crystalline water to the natural reservoirs located high in the hills. On rare and dangerous occasions, the melting snow and the heavy warm spring rains arrive at the same time, filling the mountain canyons in a matter of minutes, before rushing downhill in a surge that originates high and west of the city.

Boulder Creek is something between a stream and a river and a series of drainage ditches and culverts that run, trickle, dry up, and very occasionally flood their way right through the center of Boulder. It runs under the main streets, past the parks, past the well-used tennis courts, alongside the elegant condos and the more humble student residences, and under a series of low flat bridges carrying bikes, pedestrians and cars over the ever-changing waters.

People walk and run and bike Boulder Creek Path year-round. There’s a child-friendly fishing area where foot-long trout are available for catch and release, and parks filled with metallic, angular sculptures and solemn wood carvings for Frisbees, leather-skinned housewives hard at their yoga and dogs with bandanas to avoid.

In the summer the young meet along the creek and bullshit and tube in the water that warms up a fraction in the hotter months, while the city’s homeless sleep uneasily en masse along the creek banks and under the overpass bridges on the generally temperate summer nights.

As it heads east, the creek breaks down into a series of manmade branches, not much more than concrete strips of drainage aqueduct that terminate suddenly, deliberately, dissipating into a wide flood plain that the environmentally attuned city considers a green enough methodology to subvert the likelihood of a flood.

As is my habit, I had woken at close to seven thirty that morning, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on my baggy swim shorts, my old grey Merrell water shoes, and a Belvedere Brewing T-shirt (the words Oh, Belvedere! were in large print under a picture of a bulldog improbably holding a full and frothy pint glass in his big paw). When I had walked onto the large yellow wood porch on the front of my small yellow wood house on Twenty-Second, the temperature was in the low fifties and the ground was soft and muddy and still very wet.

My bike is a five-year-old Gary Fisher hybrid with disc brakes and thin Kevlar tires, and it was chained somewhat optimistically to the leg of a loose patio chair. I had gone back into the house and found my grey Giro helmet, a bike bottle chilling in the fridge, and a sweatshirt that I quickly put on before walking back out to stand and gaze for a moment up at the new rust glow on the closest peaks of the Flatirons, and then further back into the range, where the snows still lingered stubbornly on the highest of the mountain peaks.

Half a block away on Pearl, a truck full of shuddering Futons had slammed on its brakes. I checked my iPhone weather app; mid sixties in Boulder by ten this morning was audaciously being offered, and we were promised no more rain for a while.

It was 8:22 when a text arrived from Nigel Prior, my business partner and my friend. It was both brief and to the point. They say it’s your birthday. I have sent you beer and I will talk to you later today. Please find someone pleasant to drink it with. Nye.

My keys, my iPhone, and my wallet all went inside the seat pack after I locked the front door. I unlocked the bike and slipped the water bottle into the cage. Then I put on my helmet and rode away.

Pearl had been empty at that time of the morning, and I playfully swerved and dodged the puddles for the first ten minutes of the ride. One of the drainage culverts ran along the right side of the road, past the discount Futon warehouse. The water was a cold black torrent, inches from the level of the road, and clearly audible, a hissing, ambient rush I couldn’t remember ever having heard before. In the middle of the summer that same culvert stood stony dry and cracking for long weeks at a time.

A post-grad girl at a paper-thin dull metal Apple laptop with a Hello Kitty tattoo where her left thumb met the rest of her hand had been the only other customer at Cygnet on Twentieth and Pearl. Rather than having a conventional door, the coffee shop opened up onto the sidewalk by the lifting of one continuous sliding panel made of equal parts painted metal and clear glass. Four tables had stood empty outside. An elderly Alsatian was loosely tied to one of the table legs as it slurped messily from a deep red plastic bowl. The heat was blasting inside the café and the metal door was raised to waist level.

Terrible Love by The National was playing very loudly that morning over four small overhead corner-mounted speakers, but the Hello Kitty girl had her own tiny earphones wedged firmly in both ears for protection.

Cygnet always looked something like a cluttered consignment shop stocked mostly with tacky crap salvaged from an English country pub. Jesse was Cygnet’s owner, and he had silently placed a large coffee in my hand when I had shown up.

Jesse wore his hair very long, and it kept escaping from a hastily constructed ponytail. He also wore cargo shorts and T-shirts year-round, today’s choice being a green and white football strip that doubtfully proclaimed his allegiance to Hibernian FC. He had begged me piteously until I had finally relented and handed it over.

Jesse had married in the last year and had appropriated two pounds for each month of blissful married life. He seemed unconcerned with his expansion. The Hibs uniform, on the other hand, was putting up a more than token resistance.

I had stood with Jesse at the raised door. I was half cold on my bare legs and half warm from my waist up. The feeling was actually not unpleasant for the first moment or two, but I eventually had to pull my sweatshirt off over my head before the top half of me passed out. I offered him some of my money, which he cavalierly and uncharacteristically waved aside.

Jesse had spoken then. Happy Birthday, Tom, he said gruffly.

He looked at the front of my T-shirt, arched both of his brows in a quizzical manner, and half smiled.

I like the dog, he said.

I saw him in a cartoon, I had answered him with what I hoped was an enigmatic air.

He changed the subject quickly. The creek flooded hard last night.

Was that the sirens I heard during the night?

Jesse nodded. It got up close to four feet. They closed down Boulder Canyon for a while and the underpass at Sixth. They’re both open again. Are you riding?

I thought I would.

It’ll be slippery.

I had smiled at his unusual display of mother hen-like concern. Thank you for the coffee. Nye’s sending some beer later today. Should I bring it over?

What do you think? Jesse had looked a little pained. Is it the porter?

It was a good question. He didn’t say. I think so.

Jesse had smiled darkly. He must know it’s my favorite. What do you call it?

Jolly Jack Tar.

You always chose the name?

I had nodded proudly.

What else do you do?

It was time for a modest shrug. Collect the rent. Make stupid suggestions that no one asks for. Not too much else, I concluded lamely. Please tell Natalie to join us.

That means less beer for us. His tone had become suddenly mean and rather calculating; it was an altogether nastier aspect of his character.

But she’ll worship you for making the supreme sacrifice, I gamely reasoned.

Jesse had smirked nastily at that. I’m getting marriage advice from you.

I returned the smirk and handed him my coffee cup. Then I crouched low and under the raised door.

My bike was unlocked and propped up against one of the outside tables. The old Alsatian had finished spraying her water all over the sidewalk and sniffed at my leg.

Good boy, Saber, I said to her as I pulled my sweatshirt on and rubbed at her old dog chin, grey-white speckled and outstretched.

Her name’s Rose, Jesse had called out in a tone of tired exasperation. Only his freshly plump legs were visible under the café door. They weren’t especially attractive.

* * *

Wanting to see

the post-flood damage for myself, I had cycled up Pearl and turned left onto Sixth. The creek path under the Sixth overpass had been slick, but the flood barriers had stood unlocked and were wedged wide open. The runoff pools were filled to capacity, and the creek water was lapping high at the edge of the path.

I rode the creek west, following the path as it eventually latched onto Canyon and climbed gradually up into the mountains. I’d given up on dodging the puddles. The path runs along the side of the road then cuts underneath, well beyond the edge of town. From there on, the ride becomes a mountain trek, turning much steeper and relinquishing some of its urban gentility. Past a certain point, there are fewer pleasure walkers with unleashed dogs or small children, and the bikers and runners start to look gaunt and serious.

Uninterrupted stretches of muddy water forced me to slow down to a near crawl.

At Boulder Falls, ten miles or so west of the city, I had sat on a flat and unmistakably wet grey rock and drank the now lukewarm contents of my Belvedere Brewing Bike Bottle, emblazoned with a picture of a chubby old lady in struggling spandex on a racing bike, with the words Fat Tires Slow You Down underneath and conveying, to my mind, an open invitation to a costly lawsuit. Where the water fell thirty feet to the ground loudly and idyllically was the spot I had designated as the turnaround point in my almost daily morning ride.

The falls had seemed louder as I lingered there. There was a collection of wet rocks where I remembered noticing only dry ones, and the rickety collection of wooden steps up to the falls were damp and green and more awkwardly negotiated. There had clearly been a water surge, but I had no way of gauging the size and extent.

The ride back to town is always faster, mostly a matter of freewheeling downhill. I touched my helmet reassuringly with one hand. The few times I had fallen on this ride usually happened then. Nothing had been too serious. I had looked utterly stupid of course, and skinned my knees, and scraped the helmet, and received a more than abundant mocking from the smug and sedentary Jesse the next morning, on the singular occasion when I had been foolish enough to own up to my pratfall.

But this morning I had survived.

* * *

Now I stood

beside the two Boulder policemen as the diligent EMT team worked quickly and hopelessly, performing a predetermined series of restorative rituals, gamely tending to the cold soft remains laid out on the stretcher. The cop with the blue sling and the gaudy bracelets thanked me again for helping and took my name and cell phone number. He also introduced himself as Reggie Hawkins.

I had watched earlier as the younger officer went hastily through the sodden pockets of the dead man. He seemed to be in a hurry and he found nothing.

Now the three of us waited as an untimely death was gamely offered a token resistance.

What do you think happened to him? I asked both men.

The cop with the sling shrugged with his other arm. It looks like he fell in and drowned further upstream. The water must have smashed him around some as it carried him all the way here. Some of the homeless stay too close to the creek when it floods. It’s happened before. He’s not the first. They don’t usually want to be moved to someplace safer.

Was he a homeless man? I asked.

Yeah, he was.

Was he sleeping on the creek last night?

He nodded. I think so. It wasn’t cold last night and some like to sleep outside all year long. They only go to the shelters at night when it snows or if it freezes. They want to be left alone and they like to sleep where they want.

Do you know who he was?

He nodded again. I think we do.

I was surprised at that. But how do you know that?

* * *

Did the cop

smile? We got a cell phone call about half an hour ago. He must have seen the body in the water and he called it in. It had to be from another homeless guy because he told us the dead guy’s name. He must have recognized him.

The cop looked at his watch. He seemed to be recalculating. We got the call . . . then it took us ten minutes to get here . . . we’ve been here for about twenty minutes . . . that’s probably about right.

He looked at me. You were the first solid citizen to actually stop.

What about the caller?

We think he left.

The cop smiled at me and continued. He called on a cell phone. The dispatcher asked him to stay and wait until we got here.

I couldn’t help looking around. The two mountain bikers had left, but there were now a few other people standing around. Except for an older man in a baggy red sweatshirt, they all looked solidly prosperous.

He obviously didn’t care to hang around. Reggie the cop smiled ruefully at me. But we can find him if we have to. He said this last part quietly to himself.

I understood that emergency calls to the police are automatically tracked and the cell phone number is stored. In the middle of a dry summer, I had once reported a small grassfire burning out of control on a Chautauqua hiking trail.

The notion of homeless people having cell phones had once surprised me. I don’t know why, because basic phones and basic phone plans are cheap enough, and all people want to stay connected, or at least most people do.

I looked at the still figure on the stretcher. The two Emergency Medical Technicians were slowly disconnecting their equipment. I watched the older EMT in the down vest touch the younger one on the shoulder as she lingered over the pale body. Did she want to keep trying? Was he trying to tell her that they should stop?

I asked the cop who the dead man was. To my surprise Reggie Hawkins hesitated for a moment. In a day or so it would be both in the media and common knowledge. But at this moment, Hawkins looked as if he might have told me too much. At this early stage, was the identity a more valuable piece of information?

I had no idea. So I waited.

His name was Nitro, was what the policeman finally told me.

* * *

At what juncture

does an idle piece of contemplation segue into an exercise in enduring obsession?

Because I thought only about Nitro as I rode away from the creek, and as I swam later in the morning, and as I drank later in the early evening.

He was perhaps half my age, and for all I knew he may well have died on my birthday. Was Amy his best girl? Or was she the first girl he ever loved? Was she his mother? Or his sister? Or the first pet he ever loved? Was he a married man? Was he alone? Was he mostly happy? Were his few unremarkable sins forgiven him in his passing?

Did his short truncated life pass before him as the mythic drowning scenario would have us believe? Or was the battering his poor head had taken what had prematurely ended his days in