Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman Page A

Purdue. “If I describe him to you, can you tell me if he sounds familiar to you? Like you know him from somewhere?”
    “Okay.”
    “A muscular man, not too tall. Very pale skin, short red hair, red beard. Scars on his forearms.”
    Purdue said nothing, but the color vanished from his face.
    “Purdue?” Lisa asked urgently. “Are you okay?”
    “He was one of the men. He was there.”
    “You know him? Who is he?”
    “The other men called him Liam. He looked just like you said.”
    “There were other men? What do you remember about them?”
    The boy’s brow furrowed as he tried to puzzle it out. “There were four of them. Two policemen. They had uniforms and badges. And an old man. He was the boss. But the man with the red hair was there, too.”
    “Where?” Lisa asked. “Where did this happen? Where were you?”
    “By the water,” Purdue replied. “I remember we were all by the water. That’s where they killed the man.”

12
    Lisa leaned over the bridge railing above the torrent surging through the Lake Bronson Dam. The current erupted into white foam as it squeezed into the narrow channel of the river. The noise was as loud as thunder. She held Purdue’s hand and watched his face, which looked awestruck at the tumbling water. That was the strange balance of being a child. One minute you could be remembering something terrible, and the next you could be staring at a river without a care in the world.
    They wandered to the south end of the bridge. The reservoir on the other side of the dam was calm and gray. The cold rain from the clouds had begun hardening into sleet. Her pickup was parked not far away in one of the campgrounds of the state park.
    “What do we do now?” Purdue asked as they crossed the road.
    “We’ll hang out here until Will calls me back,” Lisa replied. “Depending on what he says, we can decide what to do next.”
    “Are you scared?”
    “Scared? No, why should I be scared when I’ve got a big strong man like you to protect me?”
    Purdue giggled.
    She led him past an empty fishing dock that jutted into the quiet water, and then they followed a path into the trees, which were a palette of reds and yellows. The rain was lighter in the woods, but the shadows around them made the afternoon in the park feel like night.
    As they walked, she tried to wrest more details out of Purdue’s memory.
    “So you saw someone’s fingers being cut off,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “And now you remember someone being killed near the water. Was it the same person?”
    “I think so.”
    “Man or woman?”
    “Man.”
    “Do you know who he was?”
    Purdue shook his head.
    “Did you see his face? Do you know what he looked like?”
    “Well, it was dark. He was pretty big, like a football player.”
    “So this happened at night?”
    “Yes.”
    “Was it last night? The night you came to me?”
    “I think so.”
    “And did you actually see this man being killed?”
    “Yes.”
    “That must have been terrible. Can you tell me what happened?”
    Purdue nodded. His face was serious, as it usually was. He related the events in a detached, emotionless voice, which made what he said even more horrifying.
    “They stuffed something in the man’s mouth so he couldn’t scream,” he told her. “Then I watched them cut off his fingers one at a time. All of them. The man with the red hair did that. Liam. He had a big pair of clippers, and one of them would put each finger between the blades and hold it there. The man tied to the tree kept trying to get free, but he couldn’t. There was all this blood.”
    Lisa tried to hold back the nausea she felt. “The man was tied to a tree?”
    Purdue nodded. “Uh-huh.”
    “Where?”
    “By the water.”
    “A lake? A river?”
    “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I just see bits and pieces. I was hiding by the water.”
    “That’s okay. What happened next?”
    “They killed him.”
    “How did they do that?”
    “The white alligator shot him in the