Dead Hot Mama (3 page)

“The
legs are gone? What do you mean the legs are gone? Roger, settle down … what’s the guy’s name? Bruce? Okay, put Bruce on … that’s okay, I’ll wait.”

Lew’s cell phone had rung as the three of them were trudging up the stairs towards the Kobernots’ house. Motioning Craig Kobernot to go on ahead, she had stopped to take the call. Osborne paused beside her. As she waited, they both looked back down towards the snowbank.

Osborne was concerned that snowmobilers might show up before Lew could close off the trail, although the lights that had been bobbing in the distance had since turned away, traveling northeast. And given that this was a week- night, riders would be few and far between. Tomorrow- Friday before a holiday—it would be gridlock on the trail. Right now all he could make out were intermittent points of light where the windows of fishing shacks glowed in the distance. Glowed with the warmth of the bonfires and gas stoves and camaraderie that drew so many to ice fishing. A warmth that would never touch the young woman who lay naked beneath her crystalline coverlet of ice and snow.

“Bruce,” said Lew, “thanks for driving up. Now what on earth is Roger talking about?” She listened, her eyes fixed on her right boot, which was kicking repeatedly at a chunk of ice. “Two, huh,” she said after a long stretch. “Two bodies but no snowmobiles anywhere, huh? Okay, but what do we do out here on Loon Lake? I’m going down to secure the area and close down the trail, but I need direction from you on how to protect the scene and the victim I have here.” Again, she listened. “How soon can you meet me?” A long pause. “Yes, I can arrange that. Of course.” She clicked off the phone.

“You won’t believe this, Doc, but they found another body in a snowmobile suit under the ice, not far from the first one. Both are missing their legs.”

Osborne was stunned. “Their legs?”

“Right. Bruce said the only animal that touched those two was human—well-equipped with all the right tools.”

“Whoa,” said Osborne.

“Frustrating news is Bruce—that’s the new guy they sent up from Wausau—said he can’t work this scene tonight. Too risky to try to find trace evidence in the dark.”

“You’re kidding. What do we do with—it’s going down to 25 below tonight, too cold for you or anyone to stand out here.”

“He’s bringing a special type of tent for the corpse—with this deep freeze, we won’t lose anything as far as the body goes. But you hit on the problem: Someone has to be here tonight.”

“Not me, not you, kiddo. You’ve worked late every night this week, Lew, and I’m way past my days of winter camping.”

“You’re right, Doc. I’ll have Terry take over. He’s young, he can manage.”

“Why don’t I call Ray and see if you can borrow that portable ice shanty of his? He hauls it to the Willow Flowage in the back of his truck—no reason he can’t drive it over from his dock.”

“Now that’s a thought,” said Lew. “With a gas heater inside, I won’t lose Loon Lake’s newest police officer to frostbite. Doc, are you available to do the dental exams on all three tomorrow morning?”

“Of course.” He could put off getting the Christmas tree; the storm wasn’t due in until late afternoon. The look of relief on her face made any inconvenience for him worth it.

As he followed her up the stairs towards the Kobernots’ back porch, Osborne felt a flush of guilt. Proximity to death should never make someone happy, and yet he couldn’t help but be relieved with this turn of events. That she needed the dental exams was a good sign. If he got lucky, she might require more help.

He’d begun to think of their relationship as if it were a river with stretches of smooth water, here and there a few riffles and ripples caused by potential hazards, then a series of modest rapids—and always a deadhead or two. Ice fishing was a deadhead: Lew hated it.

Fishing was the one good excuse he used to spend time with her: fly fishing for trout and smallmouth bass in the spring and the fall, bait fishing for muskie and walleye when the streams grew too warm in midsummer. If fly fishing was her first love, fly fishing with her was his. But her hatred of ice fishing had made the winter ahead look bleak. How quickly life changes.

Patrice Kobernot was waiting at the porch door. The couple was a study in opposites: She was petite, gifted with an oblong butt turned horizontal and a mouth bookended with a healthy set of jowls. Right now, following a polite request from Lew, the jowls caught Osborne’s eye as they jiggled in tandem when she spoke.

“That is absolutely out of the question. You know perfectly well some stranger did this on our property. And I am so upset, I’m calling a patient of Dr. Kobernot’s that I know you know—Senator Breske.” Patrice was doing her best to imply that the planting and discovery of the body was a deliberate act of the Loon Lake Police Department.

“Before you pick up that phone—let me make two things clear, Mrs. Kobernot,” said Lew. “First, it’s not your property. You do not own the lake. Second, I head up the police department with jurisdiction over this area, and I insist that you and your sons take a look—now. The victim is young and could be a school friend of the boys.” Patrice’s jowls shook again, but Lew refused to let her comment.

“Out of respect for this poor person, if there is any chance that we can immediately identify the victim—and be able to inform a family that must be so very worried about their daughter. Mrs. Kobernot, if this were a member of your family, you would expect the same courtesy.”

Patrice snorted. “You don’t understand, my husband is the head of neurology over at St. Mary’s—” Was the woman asserting that MDs and everyone connected with them never misbehaved? Osborne was enjoying this.

“You
don’t understand,” said Lew, waving a finger at Patrice. “If you don’t do what I’ve asked, I’ll be happy to take your entire household into town, and we can continue our discussion at the police station. But I hardly think you want the appearance of your family members being suspects in the event that this is foul play. Now will you and the boys please follow me down to the dock and take a good look?”

Patrice stepped down from the dock first, hoisted herself over the snowbank, and studied the still form. “No, Mrs.—”

“Chief Ferris.”

“No, Mrs. Chief, I have never seen this woman in my life.” Patrice threw a look at Lew. She was damned if she would acknowledge Lew’s authority over the situation.

Lew ignored her and motioned the two boys over.

“Your names, fellas?”

“Craig Junior,” said the taller of the two boys. He looked like his father.

“Patrick,” said the younger boy. He resembled his mother, though he had a friendlier face. Both boys looked so worried, Osborne wondered if they had ever seen the dead person before.

As the boys stepped forward together, their mother’s eyes raked their faces. Boy oh boy, thought Osborne, she’s more terrifying than what they see in the snow. If she was
his
mother and if he did know the dead girl, he’d be damned if he’d tell the truth.

Both boys shook their heads. “No,” said one after the other.

“Okay, you folks are excused. Please do not use the rink or the entrance to the trail here—or your ATV—until we’ve completed our search of the area.”

Once Patrice and her sons were out of hearing distance, Lew turned to Osborne. “Doc, it may take an hour or more for me to get everything under control here. Could we use your place as a command center for the next twenty-four hours? I doubt Dr. and Mrs. Kobernot—”

“Please, Lew, whatever you need—and I’ll save you some pizza. I’m going to track down Ray and that fishing shack right now.”

“Dammit,” she said, looking around, “this site is right on the trail, isn’t it.”

“Is that a problem?” and Osborne, wondering why she sounded so frustrated.

“Yeah,” said Lew, “it means any traces of vehicles or people have been wiped out with all the snowmobile traffic going by.” As if to underscore her point, the beam from a single headlight swept across their faces, coming at them from across the lake.

“They
removed the legs with a knife—quite carefully disarticulating the joints,” said Bruce Peters, hands clasped as he leaned forward on his elbows over Osborne’s kitchen table.

Eyes snapping with energy in spite of the fact he’d left Wausau early in the morning and it was now well past eight, Bruce was obviously pleased to be at work on his first serious cases since joining the Wausau crime lab. Either that or he had drunk way too much coffee.

“I’m the project manager assigned to the region, sir,” he had said, introducing himself as he stepped through Osborne’s back door thirty minutes earlier. He had then taken great care to knock the snow off his boots before setting them to the side in perfect alignment.

“You make this sound like road construction,” said Osborne, helping Bruce out of his heavy jacket and giving it a shake before hanging it on the oak coat rack just inside the kitchen door.

“Well, we do construction, that’s for sure,” said the young man with a grin. “We just build backwards is all.”

Tall, big-boned, and as square-headed as Osborne’s black lab, Bruce Peters wore his dark hair short and trimmed carefully around his ears. An equally neat moustache hid his upper lip, and every few seconds the nose above it twitched while the fingers on his left hand drummed and the foot at the end of his right leg jiggled. Interested as he was in what the young man had to say, Osborne found himself mesmerized by the body action.

“What does that mean exactly—the
disarticulation
of the joints?” asked Lew, who was sitting across from Bruce, a paper plate with two generous slices of pizza in front of her.

“Disarticulation means they cut through the joints rather than the bone to take the entire femur,” said Bruce. “They knew what they were doing, and they wanted to work fast. Amateurs would have used a chainsaw—or a hacksaw and cut through bone at the crotch. And, frankly, it’s too bad they didn’t. Much easier to trace.”

“They?” asked Lew. “You’re sure we’re talking more than one?”

Bruce raised his hands as if admitting defeat. “Good call, Chief Ferris, I have no documentation yet to prove if it was one perpetrator or two. I’m
assuming
two or more because both victims are male, weigh at least 180 pounds each and were wearing heavy snowmobile suits and helmets—plus other gear like mitts and boots.

“Dismemberment is difficult under any circumstances, and that’s a lot of weight to haul around. But I could be wrong. In grad school, I assisted on a case out of Little Scandinavia where a teenage boy chopped up his stepfather who weighed over 300 pounds, wrapped him in freezer paper, and stacked him in the family freezer—in six hours. Yeah, I suppose one person could do this.” He looked around the table at Lew and Osborne as if they might know the answer.

“How long since you’ve been out of grad school?” asked Osborne. He could not believe the kid was a day over twenty-five.

“Six months.”

“A trapper could do it easy,” said Lew, biting into her first piece of pizza, “and a lotta guys around here butcher their own deer. I’d sure keep the door open on that assumption. Umm, I think I was starving—good pizza, Doc. Thank you. Did you get enough?”

“Plenty. Bruce, help yourself to some pizza,” Osborne said, shoving the box of pizza across the table.

Mark had arrived with three large pizzas, two of which Erin, Mallory, Mark, and the children had wolfed down within fifteen minutes. Then Mallory, aware Osborne was anxious to shelter his grandchildren from the activities down at the rink, insisted they all go rent a video to watch at Erin and Mark’s.

“I’ll be back by ten, Dad, okay?” she said.

“Fine,” said Osborne. “If I’m not here, I’ll be down at the Kobernots’.”

Minutes later, as Osborne stood in the doorway watching them pile into their cars, Erin had run back for one of the kids’ neck scarves. “Dad,” she had said, speaking fast and keeping her voice low, “I’m worried about Mallory.”

“Why? She looks okay to me.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t spent any time with her since she got here, have you.” The edge in Erin’s voice pushed an old button of guilt.

Osborne had never been the father to Mallory that he should have. While he and Erin had always been close—she was the daughter he’d loved teaching to fish and hunt—Mallory was her mother’s child. And the coldness that had grown between Osborne and his late wife had resonated, for reasons he didn’t understand, between himself and his eldest daughter.

It wasn’t until Erin stepped in, forcing Mallory to face the same family tradition that had nearly destroyed Osborne, that he realized how alike they were. Maybe that was the problem.

But with Mary Lee gone two years now, he had been trying to change that. Apparently he wasn’t doing a very good job. Erin was right—how the hell could he know how Mallory was? He hadn’t seen her in three months, and their only conversation of any length today had taken place over a dead body.

“She told me she got some unpleasant news this week—Steve has been dating Bridget Kelly, one of her best friends in Lake Forest.”

“But, Erin, Mallory wanted the divorce. Why would Steve’s seeing anyone upset her?”

“She found out from somebody that those two were seeing each other
before
the divorce. Dad, Bridget was a guest in their home so many times—it’s one thing to be betrayed by your husband, but by a woman you trusted? A close friend? I just … I know she’s feeling a little rocky, that’s all.”

“Oh …” He hated the sound of that. Mallory was just getting her life back on track. She was completing a graduate degree in business, she was seeing a psychiatrist she liked and, as far as he could tell, she was not drinking. He knew from his own experience that “rocky” was not good.

“Bruce, I’m sure you know that a human bite leaves a unique impression,” said Osborne. “In a situation like this, is the same true of a knife?”

“Sure,” said Bruce, “any cutting tool. Take hacksaws, which happen to be the tool of choice these days—easily available, easily disposed of, very efficient cutting edge. And every hacksaw leaves a definitive mark on bone that can be easily traced.”

“Hacksaws?” said Osborne, emphasizing the plural. “Are you trying to tell us dismembering bodies is all that common?”

“Dr. Osborne, the interstate highways between Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago are
haunted
with drug deals gone bad. Hacksaws, chainsaws. When I was at the university, we called it Chain Saw Alley. But most of those cases involve cutting through bone—nowhere near the touch I saw today—and usually they cut up the whole body.”

“Ah,” said Lew, “that’s what I’ve been wondering—why just the legs?”

“I have an idea,” said Bruce. “I need to see more before I say anything. And check some files. I don’t want to send us off in the wrong direction.

“But going back to what Dr. Osborne asked: Yes, the slash marks from a knife will leave distinctive markings. Once I get to work on those, we’ll have something to go on. Granted it’s not as good as if he had cut through bone—”

“So you’re not looking for a woman?” said Osborne.

“How often do you see a female orthopedic surgeon? Bone work takes a great deal of physical strength.”

“You two worry about slash marks; I want to find
where
those two were killed and
how,”
said Lew.

“We’ll likely know the cause of death sometime tomorrow, Chief Ferris. This deep freeze makes our job a whole lot easier.”

Bruce’s reference to the deep freeze reminded Osborne of the young woman lying so perfectly preserved beneath her coverlet of ice and snow. He was anxious to do his own exam. More than once he had used teeth and dental work to identify a victim. Even if he didn’t know the individual, he might recognize the work of their dentist. Whether it be a crown, an amalgam filling, an implant or a denture—every dentist leaves a signature as unique as the teeth they treat.

And unlike Lew’s law enforcement colleagues in adjoining towns and counties, dentists stay in touch. A past president of the Wisconsin Dental Society, Osborne had remained active with the local chapter of the organization in spite of his retirement. If that young woman had dental work done within a six-county radius, he was likely to know exactly where and by whom. And if he didn’t know, he knew whom to call.

Tuning back into the conversation between Bruce and Lew, he heard Bruce say, “Bones are biohazards—if people aren’t careful they can be infected with something like HIV. Same with teeth, right Dr. Osborne?”

“Oh, gosh, that reminds me,” said Osborne jumping to his feet. He headed for the back porch. Reaching into the pocket of his hunting vest, he felt for the packet he had wrapped so carefully out in the woods. Back in the kitchen, he set it down on the table, turned up the rheostat on the antler chandelier suspended overhead, then carefully pulled away the wrapping.

“I found these in the woods when I was hunting today,” he said. Osborne reached for his reading glasses, then leaned forward to examine his prize. Lew, having finished her pizza, shoved the paper plate to the side and looked over at him, mildly curious. She checked her watch.

“Those look like my great uncle’s,” said Bruce.

Osborne picked up the dental plates separately, turning each back and forth under the bright light. “Odd,” he said after a few seconds. “I should see some ID engraved on these—a name or a Social Security number—but …” He turned the dentures over, peering closely. Finally, he set one on top of the other and leaned back in his chair.

“Now that is the strangest darn thing …”

“Expensive items to forget, huh, Doc?” said Lew. “What’s a full set of dentures cost today? Five, six thousand bucks?”

“Something like that,” said Osborne. “But not these—these were never meant to be worn. The teeth you see in dentures are artificial—these are real.”

“Whoa, biohazards,” said Bruce, scraping his chair back as he stood up to reach for his jacket. “Be careful, Dr. Osborne. Maybe you should have gloves on?”

“And each tooth is from a different person … the wear patterns on the biting surfaces don’t match.”

“You’re the expert, Doc. You tell us,” said Lew, standing up to put her paper plate and napkin in the trash.

“And none have been ground to fit,” said Osborne. He looked over his glasses at Lew. “These are not dentures, they’re models, sculptures. Someone assembled these with no intention of anyone ever wearing them. And to find all these teeth and fit them so well … someone spent
years
making these. Years finding teeth so closely matched in size and color. Now why would you do that?”

“Maybe they’re very old and were used in a classroom once upon a time,” said Bruce.

“That’s a thought,” said Osborne.

“Would they be worth money?” asked Lew.

“Well, they could have historic value—who knows? They could be a collector’s item … they could be priceless.”

“If you’re into teeth,” said Bruce.

Lew laughed.

Osborne reached into the kitchen drawer behind him for his needle-nosed pliers. Grasping one tooth, he gave a gentle twist. Off it came, exposing the gold pin that anchored it to the base. Osborne held the pin up to the light.

“This is expensive gold,” he said. “You can’t even buy gold like this today.”

He looked up at Lew and Bruce. “I had planned to put these back right where I found them, but now I’m not so sure I should do that.”

Lew shrugged. She could not be less interested. She was right, of course. Who cares about a bunch of used teeth when you’ve got four legs missing.

“Doc,” said Lew, checking her watch again, “could we try Ray one more time?”