Dead Tease (19 page)

The water could not have been more than a foot and a half deep, but the bottom was rocky and the current pounding. Osborne grabbed for the back end of his kayak, trying to keep his shoulders and head out of the water. His legs were useless as the current battered them against the rocks. Fear rose: was he going to break his legs?

Lew was still ahead of him, clutching her kayak and, somehow, managing to drift off to the left toward the riverbank. Osborne knew if he could get there, too, he could at least get his feet under him. Fighting to see, he got his head above the frothing water long enough to see Ray looking down from his kayak with worry as he was swept by, “Are you okay, Doc?”

“How the hell should I know?” said Osborne, adding a string of words that he rarely used but that fit the occasion. As he cleared the rapids, he was able to kick and paddle off toward the shoreline just beyond where Lew had managed to get her footing.

“Oh, no, Doc—grab my rod,” she cried as her fly rod floated by him. A sweatshirt followed, but Osborne opted to scramble for the fly rod. As he did so, his glasses case went floating by. By some stroke of luck, he was able to grab that, too.

Crawling on his hands and knees, Osborne managed to get out of the water, hauling his kayak behind him. He threw himself on the sand near Lew who was sitting, knees akimbo, breathing hard. “I am so bruised,” she said, “I’ll bet you my legs will be purple tonight.”

“I’m glad we’re alive,” said Osborne. “You can drown out there.”

“Tell me,” said Lew. “Ray should have told us about the rapids. Hey, here comes the guilty party.”

“You two did everything all wrong,” said Ray walking up river and pulling his kayak behind him. “When you fall out of a boat like that, don’t fight the rapids. Rely on your life vest and float feet out in front—use your feet to push off the rocks.”

“Use your head and shut up,” said Osborne. “You almost killed us. Why didn’t you tell us about the rapids?”

“Ray Pradt, I bet you anything those are Class Four rapids,” said Lew. “Are you out of your mind?”

“I didn’t know. Believe me, I didn’t know.”

Ray was so stricken, Osborne took a deep breath and did his best to calm down.

“Do we have any idea where we are?” asked Lew. “My cell phone drowned. Can’t use that to call for help.”

“Ray, I think we’ve had our excitement. I’m ready to call it a day,” said Osborne.

“Me, too,” said Lew. “I need bandages.” She offered up her left leg with a scrape along the shin.

Ray heaved his kayak onto the shore, reached into it for a small hand pump, and started to pump the water from Osborne’s kayak. “If I can get us all going again, I know that George Stocker’s got a place on the river. Down a ways still but we can beach there, borrow a vehicle, and I’ll go get the truck so we can load up the kayaks. Or did you want to fish?”

The glares from Osborne and Lew answered his question.

“I’m soaked and I’m cold and I want dry clothes,” said Lew. “Where’s Bruce?”

“Oh, he’s okay. After we saw you two go over, we hugged the far right side of the falls and made it fine. He’s waiting for us down around the bend.”

“Not fair,” said Lew.

When Ray had got enough water pumped from each kayak so that they could tip the rest out, Osborne and Lew were able to climb back into their boats. When they reached Bruce, they found he had managed to grab Lew’s sweatshirt as it floated by: all was not lost.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“For the third time, I demand to see my child,” said Gladys Daniels, grinding out her words.

“Mrs. Daniels, I really, really don’t think that is a good idea,” said the director of the funeral parlor. “Your daughter’s remains have been prepared with care for the crematorium. To view the departed now would only cause you more emotional distress. Please, let me help you plan the memorial—”

“Damn you, I insist,” said Gladys, pounding her fist on his desk. “Let me be clear, young man, I am not leaving this building until I have seen my daughter.” Her voice rose in near hysteria.

“All right, all right.” The funeral director raised his hands in surrender. “I’ll alert the staff.”

Gladys drove straight home, marched into the big house and straight into the dining room, where she pulled open the top drawer in the dining room buffet. She reached under the linen place mats for the gun case. She loaded the revolver and tucked it into her purse.

She would wait until dark. Just like that fat wife had waited in the shadows for Cynthia.

“Don’t you try to tell me Cynthia had an ‘accident’ in the boathouse,” Gladys muttered out loud. “I know exactly what happened. Jim must have called just like he used to and invited her for an evening on his boat.”

A sad smile crossed Gladys’s face as she recalled how happy Cynthia had been after the first time she had spent an evening with Jim McNeil on his boat. That was what had been so special between Gladys and Cynthia: mother and child told each other everything.

When it came to Jim McNeil, Cynthia shared every detail. That’s when Gladys knew deep in her heart that those two were meant for each other. You don’t have a love affair as intense as theirs and not be meant to spend your lives together.

That slimy little Jennifer had hit on him, clouding his judgment—as it would any healthy male. But not for long. Gladys had seen to that.

Flashing the money had made it easy for her to convince young Alvin to take care of the little bitch. Maybe it was the drugs he was taking, but he was none too bright, that dummy. Now, with him long gone, who would ever know?

And just as she had taken care of Alvin, she would see to the fat wife, too.
My child is dead and it is all her fault, all her fault, all her fault
….

All she had to do now was get the bitch out of her house.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Doc and Lew scrambled up the riverbank behind Ray and Bruce, grabbing tag alder branches for support. At the crest of the steep bank, they found themselves staring down into a ravine someone was using as a dump. Discarded appliances, old doors, paint cans, bedsprings, broken-down farm equipment, rusted-out cars, and rolls of discarded chicken wire littered the pit below.

“Where on earth are we?” asked Lew. “Whew! This place smells of dead animals.”

“This is ol’ George Stocker’s place,” said Ray. “He cuts wood, hauls trash—whatever you’ll pay him for.”

“He hauls trash, all right,” said Lew. “He’s in violation of county regs on this crap. Look, there’s a refrigerator with the door still on.” Lew pointed to a large, white upright appliance that had been dumped on its side near the edge of the pit. “That’s against the law. Some little kid could crawl in and die.”

“Chief,” said Ray, “can we go easy on old George? He can’t afford fines. Old man has a hard enough time making ends meet to buy food. C’mon, let’s see if he’s home and has a vehicle I can borrow.”

The four of them picked their way along the edge of the ravine. Beyond the pit was a sandy, weedy trail, which wound around a small bog green with algae and along two rows of stacked firewood.

On the other side of the firewood, Osborne saw a patchwork hovel of boards and windows: someone’s excuse for living quarters. An ancient Ford pickup was parked near a dilapidated shed whose roof had caved in. A beat-up van that had once belonged to a plumber, his name painted over with a couple swipes of white paint, was parked in front of the house.

Knocking at the front door, Ray hollered, “George? You home, you razzbonya?”

Yes, George was home. “Ray Pradt? What the hell? What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

The man who opened the door had a face like Santa Claus: round and sunburn red with bleary eyes visible above a dirty gray beard that ballooned onto his chest. Filthy overalls over a T-shirt with its sleeves ripped off completed the picture. Osborne figured George Stocker weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds and would have found a teeth cleaning to be a terrifying experience.

“My friends and I had a problem on those river rapids back a ways,” said Ray. He gestured toward Lew and Osborne who were so wet their clothes clung to them. “I need to get them back to their vehicles parked up at the public landing. Got time to give me a ride?”

“Yep, I can do that,” said George, hawking a wad of tobacco off to one side. “Got a little something to cover my gas?”

“Five bucks do it?” asked Ray.

“Umm, you betcha.”

“Mr. Stocker,” said Lew, stepping forward, “I’m Chief Ferris with the Loon Lake Police Department and I don’t like what I see on your back forty there. Looks to me like you got some toxic chemicals back there. You got a permit for all that dumping?”

The look George gave her answered that question. “Nope. Never needed one. Been hauling for folks ’round here for years. Ain’t nobody said nothin’ to me never.”

“Maybe so, but the county maintains a landfill for that specific purpose—and you are dumping too close to the river to boot.”

“Landfill costs money. Some folks can’t pay.” He spat again. Osborne worried Ray’s ride was about to disappear. They were at least ten miles from where they had put in. He put an arm across Lew’s shoulders and whispered, “Take it easy.” She shrugged his arm off.

“Mr. Stocker, are you married?” Lew asked.

“Yep, but my wife passed last year.”

“Do you have grandchildren?”

“Yep. Got six of ’em.”

“Do they visit you here?”

“Sure. Most weekends, why? I watch ’em times my daughter works at Wal-Mart.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” said Lew. “If you will take the door off that refrigerator you got sitting on the edge of the dump, I’ll not bug you about the rest of the trash right away. I’ll give you a year to get the hazards cleaned up.”

“Great idea,” said Ray, “George, I’ll help. I got a buddy with a backhoe. Hell, we’ll just bury everything.”

“Hold on, Ray,” said Lew. “Talk to me before you do that.”

“Absolutely,” said Ray. “Me and George—we’ll do up a plan. Sound good to you, George?”

George appeared to give a rat’s ass. “C’mon, Pradt,” he said, “I’ll give you a lift in my van. The rest of you wanna pile in the back?”

“No thanks, we’ll wait here,” said Osborne. “Ray, why don’t you get my car? Keys are behind the rear license plate. That way we can all drive back, then you and Bruce come back here for the kayaks. Does that work?”

“Wait a minute,” said Lew. “George, you got tools close by? While you and Ray get the car, we’ll take care of getting the door off that appliance down there.”

George shrugged and said, “Ain’t a refrigerator, it’s a freezer. Tools in the back of my truck over there. You might wanna take a hammer or somethin’—the old lady padlocked the damn thing. Don’t hurt yourselves.”

After they drove off, Lew turned to Bruce and Osborne. “Give me a hand with that freezer. You know damn well that once we leave here, the old man won’t take care of it. Knowing he has little kids running around this place—I’ll have nightmares if we leave that door on.”

Two blows of the hammer and Bruce had the padlock popped off the freezer door. What remained of Alvin Marski greeted them with a blast of bad air. The combination of an unplugged freezer and the hot August sun had done its damage. Only the blue jeans and the blue Oxford shirt were identifiable. Even Bruce had to back off, way off.

On the shelf above Alvin was a plastic bag holding a decomposing critter nestled in red fur. The bag was labeled “P. Osborne” in black marker. It was the fox that Osborne had given to Marv Daniels for mounting shortly before Marv’s death years ago.

“Too bad Dr. Cynthia Daniels isn’t around to answer a few questions,” said Lew later that afternoon. Bruce had stayed with the freezer and the body while she and Osborne had raced to town to change clothes, then hurried back to the site just as an ambulance arrived for the body along with a tow truck that could move the freezer.

“I would like to know how and why Alvin Marski ended up in her mother’s freezer,” said Lew.

“If I remember right,” said Osborne, “that’s the freezer Marv used for his taxidermy business. He used it to store carcasses until he had time to work on them. I remember him telling me how hard it was to find one large enough to hold a bear.”

“Or a man,” said Lew. “Bruce did an initial exam at the morgue and he is quite sure Alvin took at least one bullet in the head—maybe more. And there appear to be bullets lodged in the interior walls of the freezer. He sent the corpse down to Wausau for a complete autopsy.

“He found bloodstains on the shoes that he said don’t match the blood patterning from the bullet wounds so he’s going to have those tested, too. Thank goodness, poor Alvin had a wallet on him—could have taken months to identify those remains otherwise.”

“Lew, the boy only had a few dollars in that wallet. Why would someone kill a guy for a few bucks?”

A knock at the door to Lew’s office and Dani poked her head in. “Can I interrupt? Chief Ferris, I got something here you have got to see. Really, I need to show you right away.”

“Will it take long?”

“No, just a few minutes. But look at this,” said Dani setting her laptop computer on Lew’s desk and motioning for Lew and Osborne to gather behind her in order to see what she had on the screen.

“This is my Facebook page, and remember I told you Chet Junior ‘friended’ me right away? Well, you won’t believe what he posted for everyone to see….

“There—that tattoo?” Dani clicked on a lurid tattoo that read “The Enforcer.”

“That’s his profile picture. Then he posted this.”

Dani stepped back so Lew and Osborne could read the sentences next to the profile tattoo:
“Just got off the phone with my dad. He’s hiring me to be the new Chief of the Loon Lake Police Department. I’m packing my guns, guys and gals. Can’t wait to get up there and kick some ass.”

“Whoa,” said Lew. “That is highly inappropriate language for a law enforcement professional.”

“Unbelievable,” said Dani. “Now you know why I’ve been bugging you.”

“I think we have an excellent case against hiring this guy,” said Osborne. “Why don’t you let me take care of the discussion with his father, Lewellyn?”