Dead Boogie (22 page)

Ray had pulled out his plat book and was studying the page. “That Garmin Family Foundation property borders state land. I’ve hunted there. We could come in from the side along the bog and not be seen. I know a logging road that we can take in. It’ll bring us alongside the property line. Be a five-minute walk at the most—and safe as hell because that’s all balsam and spruce. Good cover.”

“All right, Ray. Since you’ve been there before, I’ll follow you.”

The pickup rocked its way down the lane to an open area near the edge of the bog. Lew pulled up behind, jumped from her car, and opened her trunk. “I want you two wearing bulletproof vests—just in case.”

Ray jumped into the bed of his truck to unlock the steel case he kept there. He pulled out his .357 magnum and a box of cartridges. He proceeded to load the gun. “You say we don’t know who we’re dealing with? Forsyth, maybe?”

Lew, her Sig Sauer out of its holster and ready, said, “No—for all I know, it could be some lunatics left over from the Country Fest.” Osborne slipped two shells into his shotgun.

They started along the edge of the bog. Lew took the lead, Ray and Osborne behind her. The cloud cover had cleared and the summer sun was still strong in the sky. Osborne could see across the bog to the Nehlsons'. Just beyond a thicket of tag alder, they found themselves blocked by the decaying trunk of a massive white pine that had been struck by lightning. Lew and Ray circled off to the right, scrambling over the wide trunk.

To save time, Osborne went left, pushed his way through the dead branches, and hurried to catch up in the clearing on the other side. He had good footing along the edge of the bog, when suddenly he lost traction. Down, down, the water was up to his chest before his feet hit the bottom hard. Too hard—he wasn’t in muck, which was strange. He held his arms high, trying to keep the shotgun from getting wet.

“Doc!” Ray stopped and turned back to help. He teetered at the edge of the bog. As Lew came up behind him, Ray put both hands back to keep her from getting closer. “Careful,” he said, pointing down at his feet, “someone has been cutting along here, right through the bog. And, look—tire tracks leading right up to this point.”

“Take my gun,” said Osborne, edging forward toward Ray until he felt his feet begin to slip off the hard surface he was standing on. As soon as his gun was safe in Ray’s hands, Osborne backed up, took a deep breath, and ducked down, his fingers reaching to define whatever it was under his feet. He came up for air. “I think I’m standing on a car.”

“Give me a hand, Ray,” said Lew. The logger’s chainsaw and the action of the vehicle as it sank had loosened sections of the bog, making it easy to push a section off to the side.

The water of Lake Alice was crystal clear. Beneath Osborne’s feet they could see the roof of a dark blue pickup. Osborne pushed at the bog and it separated enough for him to see a human arm, sleeve rolled up to its elbow, suspended in the quiet water near where the truck’s window would be.

“So that’s where ol’ George has been sleeping,” said Ray.

Though he couldn’t see it, Osborne knew what they would find on the inside of that forearm: the symbol for patience, the praying mantis. “I’d just as soon not go down there again,” he said, accepting a hand from Ray to hoist himself high enough to gain firm footing.

A gunshot rang out. They looked across the bog toward the Nehlsons’ big house. More gunfire. “I see the shooter,” said Lew. “By that tree in the yard to the rear of the house. Be very careful.”

Joan Nehlson was hunkered down behind a towering basswood tree surrounded by a ring of white gravel. The tree was in the center of the long, sloping lawn, midway between the house and where the road crested to meet the driveway. From where they were crouched behind an outbuilding at the far end of the drive, Osborne could see that she was holding a revolver in both hands—aimed at the house.

As they watched, she pulled the trigger and one of the long windows along the back wall of the house shattered.

“Joan!” shouted Lew. “Hold your fire. This is Chief Ferris. Please, put down your gun.”

“I can’t do that,” said Joan, twisting sideways to look in their direction. “Every time I move an inch, he fires at me.”

“Who fires at you?”

“Parker. He’s in the foyer with a deer rifle. He’s trying to kill me.”

“Take it easy, Joan. You’ll be safe. Just put down that gun.” Joan remained where she was. She did not put down her gun.

“Parker!” called Lew. “I want you to come out with your arms over your head.”

“Chief Ferris?” cried a male voice through an open window in the house. “Is that you?”

“Yes. Please, Parker. Come out with your hands up.”

The front door opened and Parker, wearing red plaid Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt, took half a step out, his right arm held high. The gun in Joan’s hands barked and Parker spun around, falling back into the house.

“Goddamnit, Joan—what are you doing?” said Lew.

“He was faking. I saw a gun in his left hand—he was going to shoot the minute he saw me.”

“Ray,” said Lew, her voice low, “think you can get into the house from the lakeside? Take Parker from there?”

“I can try.” Ray ducked back around the building and dashed across the drive. A line of balsams guarded the perimeter of the long yard. Osborne could see flashes of Ray’s khaki shirt as he darted along behind the trees. So could Joan. She swung to the right and, holding her revolver in both hands, leveled it at Ray.

Lew’s gun flashed six times as Joan dropped. She never got a shot off.

Bleeding from his left shoulder but conscious, Parker lay where he had fallen inside the front door. Osborne grabbed towels from the nearby bathroom and applied pressure to staunch the bleeding until the EMTs arrived.

“You’ll be okay, Parker,” he said. “Just lie still. The bullet may have shattered some bone but it doesn’t look like it hit an artery.”

“She’s had me trapped in here for over an hour,” said Parker, wincing through his pain. “She cut the line on the house phone and took the cell phones so I couldn’t call for help. Every time I tried to get out of the house, she shot at me.”

Ray found two guns in the house. One was an antique deer rifle still hanging on its rack above the fireplace in the den. The other was a loaded 12-gauge shotgun that was resting on a table on the sun porch near the front door.

“Is this your shotgun, Parker?” asked Lew as they waited for the ambulance.

“No, when we got back here this afternoon, Joan had me bring it down from the upstairs den so she could polish it. Said she was planning to sell it to some woman she knew from the casino. It’s always been in the gun cabinet but it belonged to Hugo,” said Parker. “I’m not a hunter. I’ve never shot a gun in my life. I wouldn’t know what to do with that thing. I—I,” he stammered, “if I was going kill someone, I’d have to club them to death with a nine-iron.” He gave a weak laugh.

“Ssh, that’s enough now,” said Lew. “No more talking until we have you fixed up.”

Joan’s acid yellow hair, still splayed across the white pebbles surrounding the basswood, was turning black with blood. Lew would testify at the inquest that with her deputy’s life at risk, she had aimed to kill. But it was Joan’s sudden movement as she took aim at Ray that may have put her in the path of the bullet that slammed into the base of her skull, killing her instantly.

Osborne turned to Lew as the ambulance carrying Parker headed back up the driveway. “Why on earth was she shooting at Ray?”

“My hunch is Joan thought we would take her word that Parker was armed and shoot him. And if we didn’t, she would. Then lie and claim he had been terrorizing her so she shot in self-defense. With his prints on the shotgun, it would be easy to believe.

“But if Ray got to Parker first—we would know the truth.”

thirty-two

Fish like an artist and per adventure a good Fish may fall to your share.

—Charles Cotton,
The Compleat Angler/Part Two

Two
hours later, after the emergency room physician had cleaned the bullet wound and found no shattered bone, Parker was weak but able to talk. Lew and Osborne pulled up chairs next to his hospital bed.

“After you told me about Joan’s gambling debts and the lien on the house, I decided to confront her. At first she denied it. Then I asked how involved she was with what had been going on at Ed’s clinic. That’s when she told me there wouldn’t be a problem because Ed wasn’t going to be around to tell anyone.”

“And what do you think that meant?” said Lew.

“I asked her and she just gave me this look. I could be wrong,” said Parker, “but I think she killed him. I’m certain she had something to do with Peg’s death. She said ‘I’ve taken care of things so I am next of kin. Mother’s money is my money.’ Those were her exact words.”

“Well, that’s one time she was telling the truth,” said Lew. “Gina Palmer was able to check the phone records on your lake house phone and found that George Buchholz placed a call to your house from the pay phone at the bar the night the women were killed. Joan hired George to kill Peg and her friends and sabotage the car. When it didn’t work out quite as they had planned, he was supposed to burn the car the next day but the forester found it first.”

“So you talked to George?” said Parker.

“Oh no, no one’s talking to George,” said Lew. “About an hour after we packed you off to the emergency room, Robbie Mikkleson pulled George’s truck out of the bog by your house. George was still at the wheel, and he had a check in his wallet from your wife for twenty-five thousand dollars. Payment for services rendered. He also had a bullet in the head—from the back. Same type of bullet as used in your wife’s Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. His own gun was found in the cab.”

“It may take six weeks for the Wausau boys to get around to it, but I’m confident we’ll have a ballistics report that’ll match Joan’s gun to the bullet that killed George, and George’s .22 Long Rifle to the bullets that killed Peg and her friends.”

“What about Ed?” said Parker. “What did she—”

“That we don’t know. These lakes keep their secrets. But he hasn’t made any attempt to access any of his bank accounts so we have no reason to believe he’s left the country.”

Parker picked at lint on the hospital blanket before saying, “I told her I wanted out. I told her I wanted a divorce—that no way would I put myself in a position of being an accomplice to what she has been up to.”

“Is that what set her off this afternoon?”

“That and the fact that she finally realized that Peg’s will leaving everything to Christopher was a valid legal document. I saw the look in her eye today when I got into the car after seeing you people. So when I told her I wanted out of the marriage, I also said that if anything ever happened to that boy and his family—that I would point the finger at her so fast …” Parker shook his right index finger as if it were Joan, not Lew and Osborne, sitting at his bedside. “ ‘You’ve been warned,’ I said to her. ‘You’ve been warned.’ ”

“What happened after that?”

“I left the house. Went for a walk in the woods, tried to get my head straight. I didn’t really know what to do next but I knew I had to get out of there. Right after I got back, all hell broke loose.”

Osborne reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an envelope. He slipped out the photo of Mary Margaret at the age of seven and handed it over to Parker. “Have you seen this before?”

Parker averted his eyes. “Yes. When Joan and I were in the lawyer’s office for the reading of her mother’s will, she was given a letter and that picture. The letter was her mother’s confession that she had covered up Hugo’s abuse and this picture was proof of what Hugo had done.

“In her letter, Mrs. Garmin said that since Joan had received her inheritance already, she wanted the rest of the money to go to Peg and some to the Church. She never knew that Joan had lost all her money in the stock market. The will stunned my wife. She never expected not to inherit her mother’s money.

“And the old lady’s last sentence was that she wanted Joan to find a way that she and Peg could be friends.”

“Orders from the grave to be sisterly,” said Lew.

“Made Joan furious. She hated Peg. With all her heart she hated Peg since they were kids. Joan always felt that Peg got all the attention. That no matter how well she did in school, no matter how hard she worked to be the socialite her mother wanted, it was Peg their mother focused on. Was she up to something new and awful that would damage the family name? That was the constant refrain. When it came to Joan, her mother was always critical, always giving orders—rarely, if ever, showed her any affection. I saw it myself.”

“And you had an affair with Peg. That couldn’t have helped,” said Osborne.

“I was stupid. It happened when Peg was home after one of her wild runaways. She was so pretty and she really came on to me …”

“Which is not unusual for girls who’ve been sexually abused as children,” said Lew. “Unless they get good counseling, they’re in danger of acting out. And they can be very seductive. How did Joan handle it?”

“Mrs. Garmin made me swear not to tell her. She didn’t want any cloud over our wedding. Joan didn’t know about the pregnancy until six months after we were married. She found out by accident when I had to sign papers for the baby to be given up for adoption. Not one of the proudest moments in my life,” said Parker.

“Did you have
any
good years in your marriage?” Osborne asked the question before thinking, but Parker didn’t seem to mind.

“At the time I got engaged to Joan, I thought I loved her. Of course, at that age who knows what love is. Half the reason you get married is to make your parents happy. Then Joan turned out to be … difficult. But I learned to put up with her. It was easier that way. My dad put up with my mother. Mrs. Garmin put up with Hugo. What can I say?”

Leaving the hospital, Lew linked an arm through Osborne’s. “So sad, Doc. Old Mrs. Garmin is the one who should be held responsible. She damaged both her daughters: One she refused to protect, one she bullied. Money for both—but love? None.”