Dead Water (5 page)

The morning Mary Lee realized why her roses were flourishing was one of the few times Osborne got in the way of his wife’s ballistic behavior: “You’re winning awards for the damn flowers, woman,” he had said, “so put a lid on it.”

She was so stunned, her jaw dropped. But Osborne wasn’t finished: “The last thing we need is inspectors over there who might drop by here. You hassle Ray Pradt on his plumbing, and I can guarantee I’ll be tearing down that gazebo you insisted on building ten feet too close to the shoreline.” Mary Lee shut up, though she stomped around the house all day.

That afternoon she went golfing with her girlfriends. Osborne, extremely pleased with himself, strolled down to Ray’s dock with a six-pack of cold Leinenkugel’s and the news that Mary Lee had been told to back off. Early the next morning, he found a mess of fresh-caught bluegills on the back porch, filleted and ready for the frying pan. Prized catch in hand, he stepped into the kitchen only to be confronted with yet another surprise. During the night, Ray had moved the trailer twenty critical feet, twenty feet that restored Mary Lee’s vista and made her happy for an entire day. She backed off Ray for a few weeks after that, but soon she found other matters to niggle about. Basically, his very presence aggravated her, and she made no effort to hide it.

That February, a blizzard blew out of the northwest, closing roads and whipping snow so deep into driveways that travel was hopeless. Late on the worst night of the storm, Mary Lee’s viral bronchitis turned deadly. It was four in the morning when Osborne knew he had to get her to the hospital. Desperate, he called the only man with a pickup that could plow through their driveway.

Ray hitched the heavy blade on in thirty-below-zero temperatures and three feet of blowing snow, plowed them out, then insisted on driving behind them to the hospital. “If you go in the ditch, Doc, it’s all over.” And so the two men did everything they could to save the life of a woman who had made them both miserable.

When it was over, Ray was there to drive Osborne to Erin’s to deliver the grim news. On the way, Osborne tried to apologize for all the abuse that Mary Lee had heaped on the younger man, but Ray had only shrugged and smiled. “Doesn’t matter, Doc. Never did.”

That was as much of the story as Osborne chose to share with Lew, though he suspected she knew the rest.

In spite of the fact that Mary Lee had been a hard woman to live with, her death left a hole in Osborne’s life, a well of loneliness he tried to fill in all the wrong ways. So wrong that some mornings he awoke on his living room floor, never knowing how he got home. He had, in fact, a vague memory of being helped one night by a police officer who closely resembled Lewellyn Ferris. Why he didn’t end up dead, in jail, or without a driver’s license, Osborne never quite knew.

It was Erin who intervened, demanding he get help or lose his children and grandchildren, too. She drove him to Hazelden for rehab. Weeks later, back in Loon Lake, he drove himself to AA. The Loon Lake chapter met every Tuesday night. On his first visit, he entered to find an unexpected but familiar face.

“Hey, Doc,” said Ray, “take a seat over here if you’d like.”

“Thank you, Ray,” Osborne had said, walking past other familiar faces. Several were former patients. Two he knew to be drunks, but the others were a real shock. The room was silent as he took his chair. Then Ray curled his right upper lip and let go with a bird trill that brought the other six people in the room to their knees in hysterics. That’s when Osborne knew for sure he could change his life. He went home happy for the first time in years.

“Years?”
Lew had asked him as he finished his story.

“You betcha.” He was happy that night, too, that he was alive to hear the ripples of the river and see the glow of the moonlight in those dark eyes.

Yep, he owed Ray more than the loan of a gun.

Lew’s radio hummed suddenly: “Chief Ferris?”

“Lucy.” Lew grabbed the handset. “What’s up? I’ve got Doc Osborne in the car, and we’re heading over to a logging road that’ll put us close to the victim. Looks like it’s about a third of a mile past Fire Number Forty thirty-nine. I’ll call in after I see exactly what we’ve got.”

“Fine, but a call just came in from some folks over in Pine Lake, Chief. They found a fatality on the road to their house about half an hour ago. Looks like some woman was out jogging and had a heart attack or something. Wait—hold on a minute, the emergency line is ringing …

As Lew pulled off the county highway and continued down the dirt road, she held the microphone open, waiting for Lucy.

“That was them again,” said the switchboard operator. “Not a heart attack. They looked closer and … well, they sound pretty upset. Apparently someone out there thinks she was shot.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Lew, “will you please tell them not to touch a damn thing.”

“I did, Chief,” said Lucy. “Do you want me to get Roger out there?”

“Yes, please, and tell
him
not to touch a damn thing.”

“Okay,” said Lucy.

“Anything else?”

“Hank Kendrickson called. Wants to know if you can go to dinner and fly-fishing with him tonight. Or fly-fishing and dinner, whichever, depending on your schedule.”

Osborne froze. Kendrickson was fairly new in Loon Lake, a well-to-do businessman, who appeared to be in his late forties and who Osborne had met only once. Osborne relied on his cronies at McDonald’s, with whom he had coffee most mornings at seven, to update him on local gossip. But when it came to Kendrickson, all anyone had gleaned to date was that the man had plenty of money, drove a Range Rover, and had bought the game preserve over in Hazelhurst with money he made in the stock market. Osborne hadn’t paid much attention to the gossip. He sure would now.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said you were booked pretty solid with two murders and a bat loose in a house over on Lincoln Street.”

Lew snorted.

“I said you’d get back to him,” said Lucy. She was an older woman, kind of a blowsy blond with penetrating blue eyes, early wrinkles from smoking too much, and a no-nonsense attitude she applied to shield her boss from the ridiculous: the missing pets, angry mothers-in-law, and late trash pickups. Right now, she was doing her best to keep the tension level under control, given that she was well aware that two deaths in one morning was a very serious matter for Lew.

“Jeez,” said Lew. “Why does everything happen at once? Lucy, would you mind calling Hank back? Tell him we’ll do it sometime next week.”

A few more back-and-forths with Lucy, and Lew was able to set the handset back on its hook. “That woman’s a pro, Doc. Don’t know what I’d do without her.”

“So, how did you meet Hank Kendrickson?” asked Osborne in what he hoped was a carefree tone of voice.

“Jerry Redfield put us in touch,” said Lew, referring to an elderly man considered the guru of fly-fishing. Lew had learned much of what she knew from old Jerry. “He’s learning to fly-fish and asked me if I had time to help him out … like I do with you.”

She looked over at Osborne, and he thought he caught a sly twinkle in her eye. “Of course, I’m not getting a thousand bucks a day. Just a dinner every now and then.”

“Oh?” He hoped he sounded a lot more nonchalant than the awful thud in his stomach indicated.

Osborne glanced at the clock on Lew’s dashboard. Holy cow, it wasn’t even eleven o’clock, and already he was feeling like he’d been taken apart and put back together. What a Tuesday.

six

“Fishing is a cruel sport … how would you like it if fish and angler were reversed?”

Robert Hughes

Hot,
still air and a dingy cloud hung over the old railroad tracks. Osborne felt sluggish as he pushed along behind Ray and Lew. They plodded, too, as if the thick air was holding them back.

A recently logged forest stretched off ahead and behind them. The landscape was grim: a stripped slash punctuated with scraggly, dying spires of trees that hadn’t made the cut and jagged branches of birch and pine thrown about like a basket of broken pencils upended from a desk. A by-product of the paper mill economy, slash was exactly what Osborne always tried to avoid.

Even though he knew that aspen and fern would soon take over and green it up again, he found the whole scenario depressing as hell. The mill had done its damage and would do it again in forty years. But right now, it was a red pine burial ground. Even wildlife avoided areas like this: No cover means no safety.

The three of them were about a hundred yards from the skeleton of the old trestle when Ray waved a halt. Osborne and Lew paused, eyes fixed on Ray. He was looking up. Three turkey vultures circled overhead, their blackish wings raked back to expose ugly red heads.

“Now those fellas,” said Ray, looking up at the vultures, “those fellas … hunt … with their noses.”

“Which means …” Osborne tried to hurry him along. The long pauses combined with the humidity to make him not a little crabby. Ray ignored the question.

“They never show up … until their meal … is … at least,” he turned around to Lew and Osborne and pointed up with both index fingers as if to frame his remark, “at
least
twelve hours old.”

“Twelve hours,” said Lew.

“At least.”

Katydids trilled in the stillness. A bead of sweat trickled down Osborne’s right cheek. Ray moved forward about ten yards, then stopped to stare down to his left. The bank dropped away from the rail bed. The clear-cut below was identical to what they had passed earlier: stumps, piles of brush, mounds of dirt, and deep ruts in the sandy soil.

“Those goombahs ever hear of selective cutting?” said Osborne to no one in particular. “Jeez, I hate to see this.”

“Costs too much. That new wood jockey running the show in Rhinelander wants to save a few bucks,” said Ray. “We’re back to land rape.”

“Eh, you pick your battles. It’s private land, no law against it,” said Lew, dismissing the issue. Both men nodded. They knew that she knew that paper mill taxes went a long way to cover the costs of Loon Lake’s new jail and offices for Lew and her crew.

“See over there?” said Ray, pointing down at an angle. “I think we got something.” Sidestepping down the incline, he moved carefully over to where a barely discernible set of ruts had crushed a bed of brush and run up to the bank, where they ended in a patch of sand. Ray crouched over the sand. “I’d have Wausau take a mold of the tire tracks you see here,” he said. “Could be loggers, but why would they be driving off-road when the job is done? In fact …” He stood up and cocked his head to examine the ruts from the side. “Looks like an SUV to me.”

“How so?” said Lew. “The configuration of the tires?”

“That, and they’re too new to belong to a logger,” said Ray. “The tread is barely worn. Loggers
work
, doncha know.”

Ray backed away from the ruts, his eyes scanning the ground. “Oh, oh … get a load of this. You got footprints, too. Funny … the soles are completely smooth. No tread, no pattern, but flat, not heeled like a street shoe. What do you make of that, Lew?”

“You got me.”

Lew and Osborne sideslipped down from the rail bed, being careful to avoid the area that Ray was examining. As he walked by the ruts, Osborne shook his head. He would have missed them completely.

“Now isn’t
this
interesting.” Again Ray pointed. Again Osborne could barely make out any pattern whatsoever. “Whoever it was got out of their vehicle here … messed around over here … and set off thataway.” He looked up in the direction of the trestle. Then he looked down again. “Doc, what ya got in that bag? Anything I can use to measure the depth of these footprints?”

“Depth?” said Osborne. “Depth? How the hell can you see depth in these?”

“Like I said, Doc. When the good Lord gave out eyes, I thought he said ‘knives’ and asked for some sharp ones.”

Lew groaned.

“Okay, okay, I’m sure I’ve got something.” Osborne unzipped his black bag and tossed a probe at Ray. “Here, it’s marked in three-millimeter increments. Will that work?”

Ray measured one set of footprints, then another, hidden behind a clump of brush and leading up to the rail bed. At that point, even Osborne could see where the tracks led up, forcing the sandy soil into clumps. Or did they lead down? Osborne couldn’t be sure.

As Ray worked, moving slowly and methodically, the haze from the sun and dull buzz of the katydids lulled Osborne into a heavy-lidded sense of sleepiness. Blinking, he tried to stay alert while Ray hovered over another set of footprints. A sudden poke in the ribs startled him.

“Doc!” The smile in Lew’s eyes woke him right up.

“Yessiree.” Ray straightened up and stretched his back. “Looks to me like the same in … di … vid … ual emerged from their vehicle here.” He pointed. “Then took up a burden through the tailgate there.” He turned. “And scooted up thataway. Then …” He stepped sideways. “Over here … we have the return trip. Lighter.”

“Can you tell how much of a weight difference between the two?” asked Lew.

“Nope, but it was more than taking a leak.”

“Any chance you can state that in a way that I can put it in my report?” asked Lew.

Ray winked. “Sure. Got your notebook?”

Lew reached into her back pocket. Face serious, Ray remeasured, then jotted down each calibration. “If Wausau can’t figure it out, talk to a structural engineer. One of those guys can tell ya the weight difference. In fact, talk to Pete Phelan. He helped me file for the patent on my walleye jig. He can figure that out.”

“I’ll put through something for your time,” said Lew when he had finished. “I’ll have Roger photograph these, and I’ll make sure Wausau takes molds.”

“Better make sure old Roger gets out here before it rains,” said Ray.

Lew looked up at the heavy sky. The crisp blue of the morning had disappeared in a weather change typical of the Northwoods. “Damn, I’ll bet I can’t get him out here in time. Ray, you have your camera in the truck?”