A Carnival of Killing

Glenn Ickler

ISBN 978-0-87839-584-2

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Edition: September 2012

Electronic Edition: September 2012

Published by

North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

P.O. Box 451

St. Cloud, Minnesota 56302

The author expresses his gratitude to the following for advice, encouragement and information that contributed to the writing of this novel:

Stephen Rogers of the New England Chapter of Mystery Writers of America; Carol Monroe of the Ramsey County Manager’s Office; Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner; Karen at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in St. Paul; and the Web sites for the St. Paul Winter Carnival Association, the Klondike Kates and Vulcanus Rex.

Body on Ice

It’s never good news when the phone rings before sunup.

Publishers Clearinghouse does not call at 5:46 a.m. to inform you that you’re a millionaire. The IRS does not call to tell you that there’s been a gigantic tax error in your favor. Your attorney does not call to say that a distant and previously unknown uncle has died and willed you a five-bedroom, beachfront home on Maui.

Who does call at that hour is my boss, City Editor Don O’Rourke of the
St. Paul Daily Dispatch
. And, as previously noted, it’s never good news.

When the bedside phone rang on this particular late January morning, I groaned and tried to roll over and grab the receiver. However, Martha Todd and I had been working our way through the book
101 Positions That Lovers Will Love
, by Swami Sumi Something-or-other, and we had fallen asleep still locked in the fifty-seventh position, with my right arm pinned beneath Martha’s left hip.

“You gotta roll off,” I muttered, pushing against her right hip with my left hand. She mumbled something similar to “moomph,” untangled her right foot from behind my knees and rolled away. I rolled the opposite way, groaned at the numbers I saw glowing on my digital clock, picked up the receiver and mumbled something similar to, “Hullo?”

Don never wasted time with such formalities as an actual greeting. Or even an identification. I think he assumed the content would point to the speaker. “The cops have a female body in a driveway on Mississippi River Boulevard,” he said. “Your Siamese twin’s already on the way.” He gave me a house number and the nearest cross street. I said I’d be there in twenty minutes.

“Make it fifteen,” Don said. “And dress warm. It’s twenty-five below out and the wind chill is minus forty.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, but he’d already hung up. The temperature didn’t surprise me. The St. Paul Winter Carnival had begun, and this celebration almost always ushered in the coldest twelve days of the year.

“What’s happening?” Martha asked.

“A woman’s body in a driveway on Mississippi River Boulevard,” I said. “And the temperature is twenty-five below with a wind chill of forty below.”

Martha groaned. “Call Don back and tell him you’ve got the flu. Then come back to bed,” Martha said in a muffled voice. I turned and saw that she’d pulled the covers over her head to escape the chilly bedroom air.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Al’s on his way. I have to be with him.”

“Would you go with Al if he jumped off a bridge?”

“He wouldn’t risk breaking his camera.”

I’m Warren “Mitch” Mitchell and, thanks to Al’s help, I’m a reporter for the
Daily Dispatch
. Al is Alan Jeffrey, the paper’s best photographer and my best friend since our college days. Ten years ago he dragged me out of a bottomless pit of alcoholism, where I’d sunk after my wife and baby died in a car crash, and hauled me to the Hazelden treatment center. When I returned to the real world, Al helped me find an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter and slide into a reporting job.

Because Al and I worked and played together frequently, Don labeled us the Siamese Twins. He said we were joined at the funny bone, which in our case was the skull.

Noting that one of my allotted fifteen minutes had already gone by, I shuffled into the bathroom, peed and brushed my teeth as rapidly as possible and examined my face in the mirror. A shadow of stubble covered the whisker-friendly areas not encompassed by my sand-brown mustache, but I decided to leave shaving for another time. I’d already used up five minutes.

“I hope the poor woman isn’t nude,” Martha said as I pulled on my woolen long johns. “Tell me that Don didn’t say she was nude.”

“Martha, the woman’s dead. She can’t feel the cold.”

Martha, who really was nude, sat up and let the sheet slide off her breasts, a stimulating sight even in the dim light coming through the open bathroom door. “How do you know that? Have you ever been dead? Who knows what the dead can feel when it’s way below zero outside? Besides, she might have been alive when he dumped her there.”

“He?” I said.

“The man who killed her.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

“It always is.” Her voice had gone muffled again. I assumed she had submerged under the covers again.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll tell the cops.” While we talked, I got into my warmest skiing combination of black stretch pants, orange wool socks, red turtleneck, blue sweater, green down jacket and yellow wool hat. I’m a regular rainbow on the slopes.

Martha popped out from under the covers again and sat up. “Oh, my God. Get out of here,” she said. “You’re hurting my eyes.”

“I’m gone.” I leaned down, kissed her lips and gave her right breast a parting pat. “Stay warm.”

I grabbed my cell phone off the bedside table and stuffed it into an inside jacket pocket. On the way to the hall door, I pulled on a pair of fleece-lined après-ski boots and my heaviest leather ski gloves. As bulkily bundled as I was, the air stung my face and sucked my breath away when I stepped through the outside door. Moisture from the atmosphere had condensed, frozen into tiny crystals and fallen onto the blacktopped parking lot, coating the surface with a slick layer of ice. The effect was that of a skating rink illuminated by a streetlight at the outer edge of the lot.

Walking gingerly, I reached my three-year-old Honda Civic without falling. I had seven minutes remaining on Don’s time table when the engine turned over with a complaining groan and sputtered into life. I turned the defroster on full blast, got out with my scraper and cleared a patch of windshield in front of the driver’s side. The defroster would melt the rest as soon as the engine warmed up.

With every moving part in the Civic creaking from the cold, I backed out into the alley and turned toward the side street that led to Grand Avenue, a normally congested commercial-and-residential street that ran past the front of the building. As I turned west on Grand, I found it all but deserted thanks to the time and the temperature, and I coaxed the Civic up to forty miles per hour on the frost-slicked roadway. Eight minutes and three slip-sliding turns later, I was going south on Mississippi River Boulevard.

A voice on the radio was warning drivers to use extra caution because of the dangerous road conditions as I pressed the gas pedal closer to the floor. On my right, the earth dropped away to the level of the river more than a hundred feet below. I said “thank you” to the Civic for the stability of its front wheel drive and kept the pedal down.

Multiple sets of flashing red and blue lights heralded my arrival only two minutes later than Don had demanded. Half a dozen squad cars, two unmarked police cars, and an ambulance were parked at various angles on the street adjacent to the driveway. All engines were running, emitting white clouds of frozen exhaust fumes that gave an ethereal effect to the scene.

The body was sprawled near the end of the blacktopped driveway, surrounded by warmly-dressed cops, both uniformed and plainclothed, who had tramped away most of the frost. This entourage was in turn encircled by a streak of yellow crime-scene tape that kept Al Jeffrey, three TV cameramen, and two TV reporters a good fifty feet away from the action. The presence of two red-faced, shivering uniformed cops just inside the tape discouraged any efforts to sneak a closer peek.

Al was also bundled in his heaviest winter wear, topped with a red jacket and ski cap. His dark mustache was rimmed with frost from his frozen breath.

“You look like a fire hydrant in that outfit,” I said as I approached.

“I feel like a sausage in a tight casing,” Al said. “I’ve got three layers under this jacket—sweater, turtleneck, and T-shirt.”

“What about the body? Martha wants to know if she’s nude.”

“Why? Has she suddenly got a thing for nude women?”

“She wants the naked truth. Actually, she’s afraid the poor girl is suffering.”

“Judging from what I saw before the current mob scene convened, the bare facts are that the girl is neither nude nor suffering. In fact, she’s wearing quite a fancy dress. But her arms are bare.”

“Martha won’t like that,” I said.

“Why not? Americans have a Second-Amendment right to bare arms.” Al’s jokes weren’t always stand-up comic quality, but they helped relieve the tension at sickening scenes like the one before us.

What appeared to be a five-and-a-half-foot-tall mushroom wrapped inside a brown tent-like, ground-length, fur-trimmed woolen coat with the collar turned up, topped by an oversized red knit ski hat, moved away from one of the TV cameramen and stopped in front of us. “Any idea who the victim is?” asked a voice that echoed from within the mushroom.

All I could see between the hat and fur collar was a pair of blue eyes above a dripping red nose, but I recognized the voice. Inside the bundle was Trish Valentine, a blond and buxom reporter for Channel Four.