Dead Frenzy (4 page)

So Catherine Steadman was back in town…. Osborne backed out of his parking spot carefully. No, wait … Steadman was her name from her first marriage. He knew she had been divorced at least once. Wonder what number husband Jimmy was? He should have asked her name—oh well, with luck he wouldn’t run into her again.

Catherine Steadman, maiden name
Plyer.
She had been dangerous once—but to people other than himself. Mary Lee’s accusations had been way off the mark. Catherine was a problem, all right, but in a way his wife would never suspect. He’d never let her in on it either.

He was halfway home and deep into memories of the young Catherine before he remembered that he had wanted to stop by Erin’s house to see if she’d had any news from Mark. He decided to give her a call as soon as he had the chicken in the oven.

Lew
was early by twenty minutes but Osborne was ready. He knew what drove that woman. Alert to the thermometer mounted on his deck, he was well aware that the late afternoon temperature had dropped about ten degrees—an excellent harbinger for trout during a month that tended to be too hot. No, sirree, if he could predict anything about Lew Ferris, it was that when conditions were right, her internal clock matched that of the hatch.

“I feel helicopters,” she said, confirming his hunch with a big grin through the open window of her truck as she shifted the well-worn Mazda into idle. She waited as Osborne hurried to the back of the truck to load the gear he had already set out in the driveway.

“Sixty-three degrees, Lew, could be a good day,” he said loud enough so she could hear. He was a little taken aback by how happy he felt suddenly, but Lew had a way of doing that to him. “Now when you say ‘helicopters,’ you mean spinners, right?”

He hoped that was what she meant. The vocabulary of the fly-fishermen who knew their insect hatches was a universe that he was struggling to master: spinners, sinkers, helicopters, woolly buggers…. geez. At least he wasn’t still a rank beginner thinking only dry flies and wet flies. And if he died still short of being able to identify the damn things, at least he would die happy—he had had a great teacher.

Lifting the cardboard box packed with his picnic surprise, he wedged it tight between his fishing duffel and the inside wall of the truck so it wouldn’t slide around. When Lew drove off-road, the little vehicle could lurch so violently that he wanted to be sure nothing would tip or spill.

“Need some help?” she asked over his right shoulder. He hadn’t heard her come around the truck. She looked at the box, then up at him. Her eyes were quick and dark, eager. “Hey … what have we here?”

“Nothing … just a little something for later,” said Osborne, throwing his waders over the box to hide it and trying his best for a casual, noncommittal tone.

Lew looked as good as ever, her face glowing dusky and tan against her light khaki fishing shirt. She always wore the same shirt fishing and he loved her in it. Loved the hint of her breasts against the pockets, loved how she tucked her shirt down into her pants so her waist emphasized the firm curve of her hips.

Once, when she was in uniform and he was waiting for her, he had found the shirt thrown onto the front seat of her truck. Holding it to his face, he inhaled deeply. For a woman who wore no makeup that he could discern, it surprised him to find she smelled of fresh-baked bread and lily of the valley—she wore perfume. Later, the first time they embraced, as he rested his face against hers, he had smelled it again—a light, lovely fragrance.

Tonight the shirt was tucked neatly into a pair of comfortable-looking faded Levi’s, which fit snugly but not too tight. Lew was not a small woman. About five-eight, she had wide shoulders and hips to match. But she was toned and strong. She made women like his late wife seem soft, too soft. In sharp contrast to Mary Lee, Lew had a hard, muscled body and was easily able to shoulder half a canoe, whether wood, aluminum, or fiberglass.

Osborne could feel her peering over his shoulder. He had folded closed the top of the box, partly to keep the contents cool and partly for the surprise effect. He lingered, enjoying the feel of her standing so close. Curious, she didn’t back off. But Osborne refused to give away his little secret until the time was right. Leaning back as he pulled down the hatch, he grinned down at her. His lips could have grazed her forehead under the baseball cap that she clamped down over her dark hair, but he resisted the urge. He knew better than to push his luck.

And he was very pleased with how everything had turned out so far. The chicken legs moved easily in their sockets (Mallory’s test for doneness); the tiny orzo pellets had boiled themselves up into a reality that he still couldn’t quite believe. And at the last minute he had decided to tuck in a blue-checked tablecloth with matching napkins (a set Mallory had given him for Father’s Day) so he had quite a spread with which to impress her later.

The only unfinished business was that Erin had not answered his phone calls. Even though he knew he could try again later, the lack of contact nagged at him. He resolved to set that worry aside until he could do something about it.

“Well, I have my own surprise tonight,” said Lew, walking around to the side of the truck near the driver’s seat. “See those?” She pointed to the interior of the truck.

Osborne had been concentrating so hard on getting his box of food situated that he hadn’t even noticed two large inner tubes crammed into the back.

“Float tubes, Doc. We’re going up to a secret place of mine and give these a try.”

“Are both those yours?” What had looked like tubes at first glance, Osborne now realized, were more like large inflated chairs covered with zippers.

“Ralph let me borrow one for you—he usually rents ‘em out but I told him I had a new fly-fishing pal who just might turn into a customer.”

“Did you name names?”

“Of course not,” said Lew as she bounced up into her seat and tipped a sidelong glance his way. It was no secret between them that Lew deliberately did not tell the pretentious owner of the local fly-fishing shop just how much time she spent fishing with Osborne.

In Osborne’s opinion, Ralph was obsequious when it came to Lewellyn Ferris, downright
obsequious.
Ray had confirmed Osborne’s worst suspicions, too. The jerk might be married, but Ray had learned from some of the fishing guides working the lakes north of Loon Lake that he had shown up at more than a few fish fries in Boulder Junction with a woman who wasn’t his wife—hard evidence Ralph fooled around.

Nope, Osborne didn’t trust him for a second around Lew. Instinct triumphed over logic when it came to assessing the competition. He figured Lew found it to her advantage to keep Ralph guessing, guessing and falling over himself to supply her with the latest weather, water, and hatch updates, not to mention new equipment to test.

Osborne climbed up onto the hard vinyl seat on the passenger side. Pulling off his fishing hat, he set it on the seat between them. The fishing truck might be twelve years old and lightly rusted on the exterior, but Lew kept old Nellie so pristine that the inside looked brand-new.

As she turned the key in the ignition, Lew said, “With the temperature like this—and no humidity—we may get lucky tonight, Doc. Plus, we’ve got an early start,” she added, checking her watch. “It’s only five o’clock and no overcast—we could get more than four hours of light even.”

Osborne watched Lew as she backed out of his driveway. Black ringlets of naturally curly hair, which she often cursed, escaped from under the forest green cap, clustering over her ears and across the back of her neck. The extended brim framed her face, emphasizing the firm lines of her jaw and cheekbones.

Once upon a time, before he understood the basics of making a living, he had considered sculpture as a career. While his father cured him of that idea quickly, he had never lost his eye for volume, space, and defining line. It was one reason he had come to love dentistry. And silly as it was, nothing matched the pleasure he got from letting his eyes linger over the curves and hollows of Lew’s face.

That, plus she always looked younger than he remembered. Better yet, she always looked happy to see him.

How many years had he arrived home after long hours spent bending over to work in small, often diseased, spaces—only to see irritation flicker across his late wife’s face. It wasn’t Mary Lee’s fault; her mother had prepared her: Men were good for paying the bills, the rest you put up with. He had laughed, during their courtship, when she told him how her mother blocked out one hour every Sunday afternoon for Mary Lee’s father. Ten years into their marriage, he found he had inherited that hour—and he was lucky if it was once a week. But Osborne had to admit he’d been warned: He and Mary Lee had dated for a year before their wedding.

The wedding. He would never forget that night. Mary Lee had allowed twenty minutes for his husbandly rights. Granted they had been together once before then so it wasn’t exactly a ceremonial event. But he never expected what followed. She leaped from the bed, turned on all the lights, and spent the next hour and a half opening cards and counting money. Actually, now that he thought about it, she spent the next thirty-eight years counting money!

But those days were past and tonight it felt good just sitting next to Lew. He liked to kid her that she loved to fish so much just the
sight
of a fly rod made her sparkle. Her response was an unladylike snort. Sparkling or snorting, Lew’s good humor was contagious to the point that tonight she made even Erin’s situation seem a little less serious.

“Boy oh boy, did I run into an old nightmare today,” said Osborne as Lew turned onto Highway 45 heading north. He wasn’t quite ready to break the spell of the late afternoon with talk about Erin.

“Oh yeah?”

“Remember Catherine Plyer?” said Osborne. “She’s older than you, I think—had two younger brothers, both troublemakers, and her father was a general practitioner in Rhinelander.”

“I knew Patty Boy. He was a year behind me in high school. There was a kid had problems—”

“Everyone had problems with that guy,” said Osborne, interrupting her. “He was trouble right from the start. Yep, he was the younger of the boys. Dickie’s the other one. I think he moved to Florida. Anyway, I hired Catherine to work in my office one summer. She was seventeen and I needed a receptionist for two months while the woman who had been working for me took a maternity leave.

“Everything was just fine at first. Catherine was a tall, attractive, articulate young woman. She was very good on the phone, friendly with patients, could type, help with the billing. And it was only a summer job—what could possibly go wrong, right?”

Lew looked straight ahead. “Plenty, if I remember right. I know the old man drank himself to death, died in a gutter down in Madison. The mother left years before, when those kids were still small, I think. What I remember most was those brothers and their father—they were tall, good-looking men. You would never expect such … well, that was one crazy family.”

“Oh, you have no idea—” Osborne turned toward her eagerly, but just as he looked over at Lew, his eye was caught, as they passed, by rapid movement in the window of a black Mazda Miata pulled off the road heading in the opposite direction. Lew saw it, too: a woman’s hands fluttering like a grouse in flight.

“What the hell—?” She slammed on the brakes.

Before Osborne could manage an answer, Nellie was in a power slide sideways up Highway 45.

“Dammit
!” Lew smacked the steering wheel with the heel of her right hand as the truck sashayed along the shoulder back toward the parked car. “I knew I should have a radio installed in this truck. Damn! Damn!”

Arms up against the dashboard, Osborne braced himself and said nothing. He had mixed feelings about that. The most selfish was knowing full well that having a radio in the truck would sabotage the few hours of uninterrupted fishing that Lew was able to squeeze into her busy days.

As head of the department, she was already on call twenty-four hours a day every day. All she ever tried to take off was an hour or two—well, okay, three if you added in travel. And she always left someone in charge. Plus, this was Loon Lake, for God’s sake—how much could go wrong in that short a time? No-o-o, thought Osborne to himself, no radio if he could help it. On the other hand, if not having a radio meant they were about to lose the person in that car …

Before Nellie had skidded to a stop behind the Miata, Osborne was out the door in a dead run.

He didn’t even have to think. When it came to CPR, he was on automatic pilot—able to see pages of the training manual in his mind. Throwing open the door of the little car, he wrenched on the seatbelt, then pulled the young woman down onto the pavement.

No longer convulsing, she was unconscious. Not breathing? He straddled the limp form, gripped the jaw hard with his left hand, and thrust his finger down, searching for the tongue. Then lifting and pressing, he was forcing air into her lungs even as Lew ran up.

“Cell phone on the seat!” he rushed the words as he lifted his head to inhale.

“Let’s hope to hell it works.” Lew leaned into the car to grab the phone. She punched in numbers and waited.

Tourists were always stunned to discover their cell phones didn’t work in the northwoods where few cell towers existed and even those were good only within five miles of the nearest town, sometimes not even that. And a town could be forty, fifty miles away. Until Sprint PCS executives felt a driving need to be in touch with the home office while
they
were fishing, cell phones would remain next to useless in the northwoods. For Lew, the radio in her police cruiser was still the best option.

“Doc, it’s ringing,” said Lew, relief in her voice. “Hey, Chief Ferris here—I need an emergency vehicle on Highway 45 about five hundred yards north of Ginty Road. Tell ‘em to come across County C! Right now, the victim is … victim’s convulsing.

“Yes, we’re doing CPR but the victim is not conscious. Okay, I’ll hold…. ”

Osborne kept working. Phone to her ear, Lew waved off a car that had pulled over.

“EMT’s on their way? Good—then patch me through to my switchboard. No, I have no idea what the problem is. We saw her convulsing or choking—I don’t know. Please, I need my switchboard—”

Lew looked down with exasperation. “Doc, sometimes I wonder…. ”

Just as she spoke, the girl moaned. Osborne slowed his movements. The girl gagged and coughed. Off in the distance he could hear Lew giving directions to whoever was on duty at the police switchboard, but his focus was the limp form beneath him. The girl was still a strange blue-white, her eyes rolled up behind the lids—but she was breathing.

Raising himself up onto his knees, he listened … she kept breathing. He moved off to the side, never taking his eyes off the girl’s face. The eyes remained half-open, unseeing.

“Looking better, I hope?” Lew leaned in for a better view.

“Slightly.” Osborne laid the back of his right hand against the girl’s forehead, “I’m guessing but I think she’s got a high body temp, Lew. It’s not that hot out…. ”

“Her hair is wet with sweat,” said Lew. “I thought she was choking—”

“Looked like convulsions to me,” said Osborne. He felt around the girl’s neck, just under the edge of her collar, then glanced down to her wrist. “No ID necklace or bracelet to indicate she’s got epilepsy or diabetes.”

“Fever, maybe?”

Osborne shrugged. He could hear the wail of the approaching ambulance. They would know the answer to that.

The girl was slight, blond, and dressed in a short-sleeved lime green T-shirt over a pair of slacks the same color. No bra, which had made Osborne’s efforts easier. The left foot still wore a matching lime green sandal; the other had fallen off when he pulled her from the car. Lew stooped to remove the other sandal, then set both neatly on the front seat of the girl’s car. As she did so, she picked up a tan leather fanny pack that was lying there.

Opening the fanny pack, Lew pulled out a small French coin purse. Tucked into that was a driver’s license. “Ellen Andrews … age nineteen … Wausau street address.” Lew turned the license over to examine it. “If it said she was twenty-one, I would say it’s a fake ID—but this looks like the real thing.”

Just then three EMTs, two women and a man, jumped from the ambulance and ran toward them. “Good, Chris is on tonight. I know him,” said Lew of the stocky, fair-haired man leading the way. Osborne guessed him to be in his mid-twenties.

“Jessie?” said Osborne as the women neared. He was surprised to see that one of the two was a former patient. “What are you doing here? I thought you worked in advertising.”

Even as he asked the questions, Osborne stepped back and out of their way. Jessie could answer his questions later. Lew, meanwhile, had run off toward two more cars that had pulled over. With an emphatic swing of her arm, she motioned for them to keep going.

Osborne stood back and watched the EMTs, relieved to turn over the responsibility. Jessie certainly seemed to know what she was doing. Oldest of the four Lundberg kids, she was tall, slightly overweight, and quite a pretty brunette with soft, round features and shy brown eyes. He knew from the years of annual school checkups that she had a voice that matched her eyes: soft and pleasant.

Jessie was one of Loon Lake’s stars. Now in her early thirties, she had logged ten years as a television news producer in Australia and on the East Coast, only recently returning to her hometown to open a small ad agency producing television commercials.

All of Loon Lake had speculated on the reasons for her return. Erin was convinced she was recovering from a broken heart. Mallory, who had been a year ahead of Jessie in school, thought otherwise. Jessie was so soft-spoken and gentle, it was Mallory’s guess that she lost out to the hard chargers in her field. Whatever the reason, her little agency had already snagged the account of the local hospital and seemed to be doing nicely. At least, that’s what Osborne had heard from her father over coffee at McDonald’s.

Jessie must have seen the look of astonishment on Osborne’s face because she stood up and stepped back to stand beside him while her two colleagues continued hooking up an IV and preparing to roll the young woman onto a stretcher.

“Tell me when you need help, guys,” she said, then turned to Osborne. “Surprised to see me, Dr. Osborne?” she said. “I’ve been training as an EMT this past year, taking classes at Nicolet College over in Rhinelander. I got certified a couple months ago, now I’m training for the next level.”

“Wow,” said Osborne. “After a long day in the office?”

“Well … I don’t have a personal life,” she grinned a little sheepishly. “And I’ve been thinking about making a career change—maybe going back to school in medicine, so I thought this would be a good test.”

“You don’t want to give dentistry a shot?” he kidded.

She gave him a quick smile and shook her head. “How come
you ‘re
out here tonight?”

“Chief Ferris and I were on our way to do a little fishing when we saw something was wrong—”

“Oh?” Jessie glanced over at Lew, then back at Osborne. A funny look in her eye triggered a feeling of mild embarrassment, which Osborne did his best to shake off. But Jessie’s amusement faded fast. “Whatever—that girl is lucky you two came by. Excuse me—”

At a wave from Chris, Jessie stepped forward to carry the IV and supplies as the other two lifted the stretcher. As another siren wailed in the distance, Lew and Osborne followed the EMTs as they carried the stretcher to the ambulance.

“Chris, is she in good enough shape for you to wait until my deputy gets here? He’s about thirty seconds away,” said Lew.

“Sure,” said Chris, “she’s stable. We can wait a few minutes, Chief.” He appeared to be in charge of the operation.

“Chris?” Jessie called out from inside the ambulance as they eased the stretcher into place. “Do you know Dr. Osborne? He’s a dentist in Loon Lake, friend of my dad’s.”

“Retired,” added Osborne, shaking Chris’s hand.

Jessie backed out of the ambulance and looked at her male colleague. “This looks like another overdose to me, Chris. What do you think?”

“What do you mean
another
?” said Lew with an edge in her voice.

Stripping off his disposable rubber gloves, Chris paused before answering. “I’m just a paramedic, Chief, but I think you should know that we got a call on another young kid, a boy, about two hours ago. Similar symptoms—high body temp, seriously dehydrated. He wasn’t convulsing but he’d passed out. My guess is Ecstasy.

“Picked that one up down near Elcho. Bunch of kids held a rave back in on some farmland over off Highway 55 this weekend. I heard they had ten thousand people show up.”

“Ten
thousand
?” Osborne gasped. “Where do they come from?”

“Everywhere,” said Jessie. “Wausau, Madison, Milwaukee. And they party all day and all night. It’s crazy.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this.” Lew looked at Chris as she spoke.

“When we brought the boy in, someone at St. Mary’s called the Rhinelander cops,” he said. “First they heard anything, I know. Shouldn’t they have called you, too? Those kids are going in all directions.”

“Hell, yes, they should have called me,” said Lew. “But what really makes me mad is I’ll bet those jerks down in Wausau knew all about this and never said a word to any of us up here. Elcho and that area off Highway 55 may be out of my jurisdiction but this location sure as hell isn’t.”

Chris looked uncomfortable. “I have no idea what the story is—but I’ll sure have someone at the hospital get in touch with you.”

Just then one of the Loon Lake police cruisers pulled up behind Lew’s truck. A slight man, late middle-aged and balding, hurried over. The expression on his face was always the same: a mix of worry and hesitation as if he was about to be asked to do some real work.

Poor Roger. Osborne was quite familiar with the deputy’s distress. Several years earlier, the man had made a bad decision. Thinking he had discovered an easy way out, he had traded the pressures of running a small insurance agency for a position as a police officer, a deputy. Roger’s plan had been to coast into an early retirement with a nice pension.

He had assumed his most serious duty would be the emptying of parking meters. But life took an unfair turn. The northwoods became a “lifestyle destination” for young professionals from Milwaukee and Chicago. Almost overnight, the population base outside the township limits exploded as monied newcomers bought up lake property. Tourism had always added twenty thousand people to the summer population—now that number was soaring exponentially as well. Loon Lake had become a magnet for real estate investment and all the attendant misbehavior.

Then Lewellyn Ferris was promoted to chief of police. With the full support of the mayor and city council, she took an aggressive stand when it came to errant fishermen, hunters, snowmobilers, and idiots running their personal watercraft too close to shore. No more meter maid for Roger; he had to perform. And he wasn’t happy. Nor was Lew for that matter; she was counting the days until his retirement. Meanwhile, she had to make the best of it.

“Roger,” said Lew as the deputy edged his way toward her, shoulders hunched as if he expected to duck a flying object, “I want you to follow this ambulance and stay with the victim. I want confirmation from the emergency physician on duty that this is a drug overdose.
Under no condition
do you let this young woman leave the hospital until I am able to question her when she regains consciousness. Understand?”

Roger’s face brightened. Sitting outside a hospital room? Reading magazines? He could do that.

Lew turned to Osborne. “Doc, I better pass on fishing tonight. With Roger at the hospital, I need to head back. Someone has to be available if we have any other problems tonight and Todd Reimer is at a training session in Green Bay.” Todd was her other Loon Lake police officer.

Phooey, thought Osborne. What a frustrating day this was turning out to be.

“Chief Ferris?” Chris called out from where he had just climbed into the driver’s seat in the ambulance. Jessie had climbed in beside him and both their windows were down. “I don’t know that it’s really necessary to have an officer at the hospital,” said Chris. “I understand your concern but no one has to accompany us. This girl will be kept overnight for observation, regardless.

“When there is any question of drug use by a person under twenty-one—and there certainly is in this case—our policy at the hospital is no release until family members arrive to sign her out. You go fishing, Chief; she’ll be in supervised care through tomorrow morning, I promise.”

“I’m on duty until midnight,” said Jessie. “I’ll keep a close eye on her, too. This is probably the most activity we’ll see until the drunks head home after closing time.”

“You might have more of these kids,” said Lew.

“We don’t think so,” said Chris. “Rhinelander sent two cops over to clear the area. This girl must have left just before they got there. We would know by now if there was any trouble between here and there, I’m sure.”

“Well …” Lew hesitated. “Roger, just to be sure, why don’t you drive down that way. Doc and I have to buy licenses at the Michigan border and I’ll call in to see if everything is okay.”