ALONE AT NIGHT

By KJ Erickson

Copyright 2004 KJ Erickson

A door with height charts running either side of the frame is a door you should think twice about walking through.

     Not that anybody does.

     The last thing people walking into a convenience store think about is that they’ve just got up close and personal with the possibility of real trouble.  The kind of trouble their car alarms and home security systems aren’t going to help them avoid.

     Marshall Bahr thought about trouble every time he went into a convenience store.  He knew what every law enforcement officer knew:  anytime a guy with a gun walked into a convenience store with a gun, anybody else in that store was one wrong move away from injury if you were lucky or death if you weren’t.

     Mars did more than think about trouble when he went into a convenience store.  He thought about how lousy convenience-store security systems were.  Not enough security cameras.  Crummy video quality.  Inadequate lighting.  No hidden panic systems wired to police dispatchers.  No security cages for employees.

     And his personal favorite.  A convenience-store clerk working alone at night.

     Just the thought of a convenience-store clerk working alone at night made Mars grind his teeth, made bile rise in his throat.

     He was counting on that bile in his throat to give him the energy he needed to be an effective cold case investigator.  Energy that had been missing since he’d left his job as a special detective in the Minneapolis Police Department and joined the State of Minnesota’s Cold Case Unit.

     After all, it had been a convenience-store murder his first day on the job as a uniformed patrol officer that had begun his career and that had confirmed for him that law enforcement was a job worth doing…..

*   *   *   *

What Mars needed now was a great start to his cold case career….It had been Nettie, running the data backward and forward against a variety of criteria, who’d suggested looking at abductions of convenience-store workers.  She’d given Mars three cases, two involving the abduction and murder of a convenience-store employee, and one that involved an abduction where no body had been found.

     The perpetrators’ method of operation in the three cases was similar from one case to the other.  All the convenience stores were located within 150 miles of each other.  All the stores were located near an interstate highway.

     And all three involved a female convenience-store employee working alone at night.

     A circumstance guaranteed to raise bile in Mars Bahr’s throat.

     They’d begun with the two cases where the abduction victims’ bodies had been found.

     But after two months of re-reading case files, re-interviewing families, friends, and suspects—after two months of running sexual predator files to identify possible connections to the areas or the victims, after two months of re-testing, re-examining forensic evidence—they knew no more than when they’d started.

     “So, what do we do next?”  Nettie said.

     “We go with what we’ve got left,” Mars said.  “Andrea Bergstad.  1984.  Redstone Township, Minnesota.  Working on an October night at the Redstone One-Stop, never to be seen again, dead or alive.”