Dead Creek (3 page)

“I’ll do that, too, if you want,” volunteered Ray. “I do my own processing. Why don’t you wait until we’re at the scene and decide? You may be fine waiting till tomorrow on ‘em. Otherwise, my place is just down the road right next door to the Doc’s. It’ll take less than an hour to get you some eight-by-ten black-and-white prints, even color. You tell me, I can do both.”

“Color.” Sloan turned to Osborne, “Doc, can you do a dental ID?”

“He sure can. Let’s go!” said Ray, jumping off his stool and heading for the door.

Osborne turned to his buddy with a look of astonishment on his face.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“What’s your problem, Doc? You did a great job for Lew on that body in the river.”

“That was one body,” said Osborne, “and I knew the victim. She was a patient. This is different.”

“C’mon, Doc,” urged Ray. “Chief Sloan, the good dentist here told me he ID’d corpses during the Korean War.”

“That’s right, I did—for about two days,” said Osborne, shooting Ray a dirty look. “I did bodies in bad shape, too. But today they use DNA….”

“Pecore?” Ray snorted. “You kidding? He uses Braille with his gloves on.”

“What do you say, Doctor?” Sloan’s eyes looked brighter. “If you could just log the basics, that gives me enough. Here’s all I got to do: Get enough of an ID so we can match each body later with what we see tonight. My men can pack them carefully for the morgue, then the state boys take over in the morning and do a complete forensic analysis. But we’ve got to get over there before I’ve got the whole town on the scene and before anybody fools around and moves a thing.”

“C’mon, John, they aren’t going to touch those bodies.” Osborne found himself very leery to get close to the nightmare.

“They’re sure as hell going to trample all over any evidence on the ground and they’re going to grind up any marks you might have on some of those submerged boulders,” said Pradt quietly. Both men looked at him. He was right.

“Sure,” said Osborne suddenly, bluntly. “I’ll do the dental ID. John, I’ll do the best I can. In the war, I did a full-mouth exam on site and later, when I assisted on reconstructive surgery for some of the men who’d had their faces blown to hell, I did some bone work that might help here. If you want, I can sketch the muscle and bone profile for each jaw….”

“He’ll knock the socks off the Wausau boys,” said Pradt.

“I don’t know about that.” Osborne stood up from the bar stool. It’d been three years since his retirement, and he was finding it felt good to be an expert again. He’d handled dead bodies before and managed. With the cold water as a preservative this might not be as bad as some he’d worked on.

“John, can you give me a ride down to my house so I can get my dog squared away and pick up my instruments?” Since helping Lew six months ago, he had kept his black bag just inside the linen closet, hoping he might have the chance to use it again. Too bad she was out of town. That made the job grim and only grim.

As he started to walk out behind Sloan, Osborne glanced into the mirror behind the bar. He saw himself looking quite normal, which surprised him, given how tense he felt. As usual, he was in his fishing khakis with his favorite dark green fishing hat clamped down tight to protect his bald pate. His deeply tanned face looked the same, too. The high cheekbones inherited from his mother’s family stretched his skin so he still looked younger, he always thought, than his sixty-three years.

He glanced back at Ray, slouching along behind him. Ray’s eyes caught and held his in the mirror. As he plopped his trout hat back on his head, the younger man raised his eyebrows in speculation. Osborne figured they were both thinking the exact same thing: Just where was this little ride going to take them?

Loon
Lake was black under the big police boat. An icy froth sprayed their faces as the boat turned sharply from Keane’s to fly on a diagonal across the lake. A north wind blasted Osborne full in the face. Though it was still light, the sun had dipped below the tree line on the shore they were approaching, casting lengthy shadows out across the water.

“Slow down,” he shouted after five minutes had passed and the boat neared the shoreline. He could feel his face turning wooden in the cold as he hollered over the roar of the engine. “There’s a rock just under the surface along here that I use as a marker. You hit it and that’s the end of your propeller.”

Sloan cut the engines and guided the boat in sudden silence along the shore. Osborne rose from his seat, legs wide apart to steady himself in the flat-bottomed cruiser and raked the beam of a large floodlight through the water beneath them until he spotted the huge rock. “Hold up, we got it. Okay, sharp right.” He moved from the left side of the boat to the center. He did not want to be the first to touch base this time.

“No lights,” said Sloan. “I don’t want anyone following us in here until I’m ready.” They had spotted a few fishing boats at a distance, but none seemed concerned about them. The entry to the creek was well disguised by a peninsula of tamarack that jutted out and curved to hide the inlet.

Ray stood in the back of the boat, his camera hanging from a strap around his neck. He, too, spread his legs for balance as he scanned the woods while the boat nosed its way up the creek.

The boat drifted forward. The only sound now was everyone in the boat breathing. Sloan stood beside Osborne with two deputies leaning, one on each side, against the sides of the boat, their eyes raking the water. Osborne didn’t know the younger one well. Lew had hired him the week before she left for the East Coast. But Roger, a mild-tempered man who’d failed in the real estate business, was a former patient. A bland soul in Osborne’s book, Roger struck him as quite out of place in law enforcement, but then, thought Osborne, maybe his agreeable nature made it work. After all, his job tonight was to do the dirty physical work so Sloan could stand by with his hands in his pockets and look important.

Ray kept vigil in the back of the boat. A cloud cover was hastening nightfall. Matte blackness moved in from behind. Dense brush closed in on all sides as the boat, which suddenly seemed smaller, drifted forward.

“Maybe we missed it?” Sloan’s voice cracked hoarsely. A barred owl hooted from a few feet into the brush, and everyone jerked around.

Suddenly, a soft grinding sound came from right beneath their feet.

“Bull’s-eye,” said Osborne and pointed to his right. “There’s a knoll over there where you can pull up. Be careful, this is all swamp back in here, you can slip and go up to your shoulders.”

The boat swung to the side and away from the hazard in the shallow creek. Dusk had definitely settled, and the surface was opaque.

“How deep?” Sloan grunted.

“Four maybe five feet,” said Ray. “I had some leech traps back in here a couple years ago. Looks a little deeper now with the ice melt. I think the beavers moved things around, too.” As Ray talked, Sloan took the floodlight from its perch and turned it onto the water.

“Holy shit!” he jumped back. He quickly recovered and moved back, training the light so everyone else could see. Osborne stepped aside. Examining what someone else had touched and moved would be one thing; seeing this vision again was quite another.

Osborne listened to Sloan and the deputies exclaim or suck in their breath. Then he watched Ray, who looked hard in silence, then moved closer, bracing his long arms against the gunwales. He hung over the boat for a long couple of minutes, studying the bodies in the cage. Several times he looked up to study the Norway pines, the tamarack, and the dense brush that crowded the creek. Spring air and sunlight hadn’t penetrated all of the forest yet, and clumps of snow still guarded sections of the slowly thawing ground.

“I’ll tell ya what,” he said. “Let’s get those floods hard on this, then let me shoot that knoll before anyone gets out of the boat. Just in case we’ve got some tracks over there. Okay? I don’t think they brought this in by boat.”

“Sure, Ray,” said Sloan, “take your time.” As Ray slipped a lens and flash onto his camera, Sloan motioned to the deputies to follow Ray’s instructions.

Ray propped his right leg up on the bow of the boat and leaned forward, his motor drive whirring. Then he swung off to the right and aimed toward the woods. “Interesting,” he said. The motor drive whirred. Then he lowered his camera and stepped up onto the edge of the knoll.

He looked around, paused, and waved the camera toward the ground, gesturing with it as he talked. “Now this is
real
interesting, folks. Someone drove in through the brush … on a snowmobile. You got tracks in the snow cover back under that brush. Great definition. I’ll shoot some macro so you’ll have close-ups. Sure looks like an Arctic Cat with one rider to me.”

“C’mon, Ray, how the hell?” asked Roger, the doubt clear in the deputy’s voice.

“How do I know it’s an Arctic Cat? I own one. These are the tracks my machine makes,” said Ray. “Now shut up while I shoot.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got five thousand snowmobiles coming through here some weekends,” said Sloan. “This’ll be like trying to identify a Nike shoe print—every goombah in the county owns one.”

“Look for one with blue paint scratched off the sides,” said Ray, focusing his lens on the trees. “They scraped past a couple a Norways to get to the water. Take a look. And they were in a hurry, ripping those branches back. See that paint on the tree trunks?”

Sloan and the two deputies were silent. Osborne remembered the McDonald’s crew talking about Ray one morning when he wasn’t there: “That razzbonya can track a snake over a rock,” somebody’d said. It probably ate his shorts, but Sloan had to know that, too.

“Yeah, we’re lucky to be here tonight, too, because that thaw we’re supposed to get tomorrow will melt this stuff. These tracks will be slush in a couple of days,” said Ray.

“Anything else?” Sloan asked gruffly, not a little irritated to be so beholden to Ray. Roger was still shaking his head, if not in doubt then in surprise.

Osborne, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised at all. The hours he had spent fishing with Ray had made him aware of two simple truths about the man: One, he could be trusted. Two, the wearing of the stuffed trout hat was a ploy. An invitation not to take him seriously. But anyone who fell for that made a serious error, which most people did. Osborne was one of the few who knew Ray Pradt was easy to underestimate. Ray knew it: he banked on it.

Why was that, anyway? It was a question Osborne couldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Instead, after fishing with his friend, he would indulge in a pleasant little pastime he had come to call his “Ray Ramble”—a meditative polka set to the tune of Ray’s rhythms.

After stowing his fishing gear, Osborne would settle in on the wide front porch overlooking Loon Lake, a newspaper on his lap and a cup of coffee in hand, as he watched the winds stroking the waves. Before lifting the paper to read it, he would reflect on the hours he had just spent with his neighbor, usually with a smile on his face.

Seldom was there a time, watching or listening, when he hadn’t learned something from the man. Something sensible, practical, yet leavened with a goofy grin or self-deprecating remark as if humor would mask the value of the insight, protect Ray from a world designed to take him too seriously, to demand commitment. Osborne knew, as did just a few other Loon Lake residents, that behind the grins and guffaws was a man of serious talent. No one could read the shadows on the water or the shudders of the forest like Ray. He had the vision of an eagle scanning for prey. Nor could anyone else hear the voices that haunted the woods as acutely as Ray, except, perhaps, a deer.

The men worked swiftly in the dark cold. The boat was rigged to drag for drownings, so it took only moments to hook the submerged crate and pull it up to hang vertically from the winch at the front end of the boat. Sloan had relaxed about anyone seeing their lights since they were more than enough upstream to hide the spill from the floods.

Osborne stood back, watching the deputies work. From high above and behind them, the distinctive call of the great horned owl who owned that side of the lake signaled that the forest was watching. Osborne couldn’t help but wonder what the magnificent old bird might be thinking.

The sky was clear, so from his perch under the bright half-moon and a million stars he would be looking down on the brilliant circle of light thrown by Sloan’s floodlights onto the boat deck and the brushy shores of the creek. He would see a rusted metal cage, not unlike a dog crate, pulled up and tipped forward, its contents ready to be emptied onto the deck and pried one from the other. Leathery clothing stuck to limbs, and features were frozen by the icy water. Working around them would be five live men who would avoid thinking too hard about what they were doing.

“Wait a minute! I’ve seen a crate like that before,” exclaimed Ray from his vantage point on the hillock. He squatted to shoot several frames. Then he stood and studied the suspended crate.

“Geez—now where did I see that? Boy, I can’t remember….” He twisted his fingers in his beard, then he shrugged and gave up. “I’ll think of it.” He shot more photos as Sloan and the deputies struggled to separate the bodies, which had been looped over and around one another. As neatly wedged, thought Osborne, as a fresh can of King Oscar sardines.

One by one, they set each on a tarp laid across the bottom of the boat. Osborne stepped carefully over each body, looking hard at the faces before jotting notes on each. “No oxygen means no decay,” he said as an aside to no one in particular. “Facial detail is well preserved, these faces are remarkably unblemished. I don’t believe the expressions will get in the way of any relatives identifying the victims.”

“You know what’s weird?” said Ray, as he followed behind Osborne, shooting close-ups, “they all look like they’re sleeping. They don’t look like they were terrorized or anything….”

“I’m not so sure … at least not a relaxed sleep,” interrupted Osborne with an edge to his voice.

“How do you know that?” asked Sloan, stepping forward to study the faces more closely himself.

“I don’t—more a sense maybe—maybe …” Then Osborne stood up straight and sighed heavily. His back hurt from leaning over so long. “Maybe the tightness in the jaws … on each one. I don’t know, John. I’m probably wrong, it’s been years since I did this.”

“Yeah,” said Ray, nodding and ruminating, twisting his fingers in his beard. “You never think about it, you know, but the look on your face when you die is how a lotta folks will remember you….”

“That’s enough, Ray,” said Roger, giving him a look of friendly disgust. “Not that most of us get to
plan
how we’ll look….”

“These guys might have.” Ray ignored the snide tone in the remarks. “They look so damn peaceful, y’know?”

“Guys!” snorted Roger. “Can’t you tell a woman when you see one?”

Silence settled over the boat as the five live people studied the faces of the four dead ones. Roger was right; they were looking at three men and a woman, all dressed for cold weather fishing except for hats. Only the woman wore one, an oilcloth drover’s hat pulled down far enough that only a few strands of white-blond hair escaped to frame a squarish face obviously softer and more feminine than the others.

“Could be worse,” said Sloan.

“You’ve seen a lot more than I have,” said Osborne. He shrugged. This speculation was going nowhere, and a cold wind was picking up. “Peaceful, maybe, but they don’t look happy to be doing whatever it was they were doing. Does that make sense?”

No one answered.

Sloan nodded to himself as if he agreed with Osborne. “Okay, Doc, what do we do next here?”

Osborne leaned in over the first body. “If you’ll hold this one to the side like this,” he said to Roger as he deftly pulled the jaw open. “Fine, good.” The adrenaline rush worked well to keep his hands and fingers warm in their thin rubber gloves. He ran an index finger across the ridges of the tooth surfaces, back behind the molars; he set both hands to each side of the jaw, measuring from ear to chin; then he quickly sketched on a small pad notes detailing fillings, caps, crowns.

The second jaw held a partial denture.

“Jackpot,” Osborne said softly and looked up at Sloan. “This denture will have a registration number on it you can trace to the lab where it was made.”

As he had with the first, he made a rapid sketch of the jaw and skull configuration. The act of sketching took him back to his youth, a time when he thought he could choose between being a concert pianist or a sculptor. Reality set in later, of course; dentistry paid the bills. But even in dental school, he had loved studying skeletal structure, the sculptor in him admiring of the aesthetics that made the difference between male and female.

Male skulls, like the ones he was examining, aside from their differing overlay of flesh were, in fact, very similar: robust, knobby, and larger than female skulls, with more pronounced jaws and heavier brows.

As Osborne worked, he numbered the pages in the corners, then took one piece of paper, put only a number on it and set it on the body for Ray to shoot so notes and bodies could be easily matched.

Sloan stood alongside, making notes of the clothing and other details of each body to bolster the ID as a backup, should any of Ray’s photos not turn out. As Osborne finished, Sloan had Roger confirm the sex of each victim while the younger deputy tried to peg hair color and Ray shot close-ups of everything.

“No wounds that I can see,” said Roger, huffing a little as he heaved the bodies through the process.

Osborne’s hands moved deftly. The ice had preserved the bodies well, and no exposure to air meant no odor.

“I feel like I’m working on statues,” he said, before leaning into the last mouth. “This isn’t nearly as bad as my war work. You may want to mention in your notes, John, that these are mature adults, and they are likely to be fairly well-to-do. So far, each one has had good dental care,
expensive
dental care. In my opinion, these are people who certainly cared about their appearance. Professionals, perhaps?” He looked down at the fourth and final victim. He had saved the woman for last.