Death at Gills Rock (28 page)

“Did you know who she was?”

“Not initially. I'm not sure if she used her surname when she first came or if I just didn't catch it. She had a lovely voice and was very kind. She'd bring cookies from Smithson's Bakery and we'd share a pot of tea. I started looking forward to her visits.” Tweet snorted. “Me! I never liked women but she was special. I asked her where she was from. ‘Gills Rock,' she said. I was better then, sitting up in the chair, and we were here, in this room, by the windows like now. I asked her to tell me her name again. When she did, I started to tremble. She worried that I'd gotten chilled and went and brought a blanket and tucked it around me. I remember her hands, the pink nail polish, and as she was helping me, it all came back. Nils, the war, the whole sordid mess. I felt a visceral hatred for Huntsman, not just for what he did to his fellow soldier, a man he'd grown up with, but what he'd done to hurt this woman.”

“You told her?”

“Not immediately. She'd seen some of my collection, of course, and wanted to know if I'd served and, if so, where. We talked a lot about the war and when she found out I'd been in the Aleutian Campaign, she asked me if I'd known Nils and what it was like for him and the others.”

“You showed her the photo?”

“I showed her dozens of pictures from the islands. That one included. She recognized Big Guy from the shoulder patch and asked if I remembered when the photo was taken. I figured she had a right to know. Now I'm not so sure. I wonder if I didn't cause her more pain.”

Cubiak studied Tweet. “I saw you at the funeral.” Then as now Tweet was in a wheelchair. “Can you walk?”

The old man smirked. “Am I ambulatory? Not in the way you'd define it. A few steps maybe but only on a really good day. You're not thinking I flew up out of my chair and played gallant knight to the lady fair?”

“I consider all possibilities.” Cubiak pointed to a dagger on the desk. “What's something like that go for?”

“That's a personal item and not for sale. But a couple of weeks ago, I sold a similar one for two thousand.”

“Your entire collection is worth, what? Half a million?”

“Conservatively.”

With that kind of money, a man could pay for a lot of dirty work, Cubiak thought.

A
choppy sea rocked the
Can-Do
on the return ride. Nightfall came fast on the water and the sheriff drove cautiously, alert to the occasional shoreline light and fighting to prevent the prow from being pushed off course.

Only after he tied up at the marina and got behind the wheel of the jeep was he able to relax and think about what he'd learned that day.

Tweet's photo seemed to support Marty's theory that his father and the other two men had lied about their attempted rescue of the injured Christian Nils. If not, why would the three men succumb to the reporter's soft form of blackmail? For decades they felt it necessary to hide their sexual orientation but Tweet's threat had nothing to do with that issue.

Had Tweet suffered a sting of conscience after telling Ida the story and arranged the murders of the men he'd leeched off of for years?

Marty Wilkins had reason to want to see the men hurt, but enough to kill them? He said he came back when he got his mother's message; but what if he was lying? What if he'd come back earlier for his own reasons? He could easily have tampered with the heater and then put things right afterward.

Walter Nils also had motive. He claimed he acted on behalf of his son but what if he stumbled on the photo in the box of stolen archives and drew his own conclusions? Or talked to Marty, who already had suspicions about the importance of the picture? Maybe the two of them were in on it together. Walter's story about stuffing the vent with leaves could be a red herring, something he trumped up to draw suspicion away from Roger.

Indeed, Roger. The angry young man saw his life ruined by a series of events put into motion by his own grandfather. Could he have overheard Marty and Walter down in the garage while he sat upstairs in the loft, photo in hand, and listened as the two bitter men pieced together a drunken, whispered story of treachery and deceit?

Then there were the ladies.

Agnes freely acknowledged killing her husband. If she'd murdered the others as well, why not admit her guilt?

The three widows had spent the evening together and could easily have driven back to the cabin in Ida's car and confronted their husbands, avenging years of lies. But how? Even more important: were the women capable of killing?

Under pressure to pay off Tweet, the three vets copied his methods to create their own money-gouging plan. “Everything on the up-andup,” Tweet had said. Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins would probably use the same argument to defend what they'd done. In the end, enough money flowed through the pipelines to support the comfortable, even lavish lifestyles of four separate households. Maybe one of the local men being bilked finally had had enough.

W
hen Cubiak opened the back door to his house he knew he had left the dogs for too long. The kitchen stank; the floor was filthy; the puppies were soiled. It took him nearly two hours to clean up. At ten thirty, he sat down on the couch with a bottle of beer, still thinking.

F
ussing with the pups, Cubiak forgot the time. He was late getting to work, and when he arrived he was puzzled to find Lisa's chair empty and the lobby strangely quiet. The sheriff fumbled for his keys. At home he had been preoccupied thinking about Tweet's photo and the effect it might have had on Ida and hadn't bothered with coffee. If his assistant didn't bring any in, as she often did on Fridays, he'd either have to go back out or settle for the sludge that dripped out of the canteen vending machine. Maybe Lisa had coffee and was caught in traffic. That could happen, if the new bridge was up.

Still, where was everyone? he thought as he opened the door to his office.

The light flicked.

“Surprise! Happy Birthday!” Amid the cheers, Lisa stepped forward with a platter of frosted cupcakes. Rowe handed him a cup of coffee. Before he could respond the small crowd began to sing.

Cubiak faltered. He'd forgotten the day. In his former life, Lauren never forgot. His last birthday with his family, she'd baked a dozen chocolate cupcakes, and then she and Alexis had serenaded him in the kitchen behind twelve blazing candles.

A thousand years ago.

The serenade left Cubiak nodding his thanks and shaking hands with the staff. Lisa gave him a hug and a cupcake with a candle. He hoped it wasn't chocolate.

“I made carrot cake. Is that okay?” she said.

“It's perfect.” He blew out the flame.

The party lasted the time it took for everyone to eat one cupcake. Rowe helped himself to a second and lingered.

Left with the sheriff, he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Not much of a birthday gift, I'm afraid,” he said, flattening the page on Cubiak's desk. “These are the results from yesterday. I made a couple of graphs, one for each round of testing. Time passed, here”—he pointed to the baseline of the top chart and then tapped the vertical component—“and measurement of CO here.”

The charts clearly showed that the carbon monoxide readings in the cabin were higher when the vent was filled with leaves than with insulation, but overall, the levels were surprisingly low. Even after four hours, neither produced enough dangerous gas to be deadly.

“The pieces of Styrofoam kept falling out. A couple of times, I had to pick up the stuff from the ground and shove it back in.”

Rowe had moved to the window, and in the natural light Cubiak noticed a faint red line running across the young officer's brow.

“What happened to your forehead?”

The deputy rubbed the crease. “Still there, huh? I thought it would be gone by now. It's from the gas mask. I put it on plenty tight. Didn't want to take any chances.”

Rowe retrieved his coffee from the desk. “What's this all about anyway? I thought those two confessed? One of them must have done it.”

“Maybe, but your results cast serious doubt on that notion.”

Rowe bent over the charts again. “Well, if Walter or Roger didn't kill those guys, what happened? You think maybe we need to take another look at the space heater? Hey, what if our experts weren't really that expert—or they're the ones who did it!”

“Motive?”

“Who knows? It could be anything. Gambling, like you said at the start.”

Back to square one, Cubiak thought.

T
he sheriff knew he wasn't back to square one, not exactly, but he was still far from a definitive answer. He was sure he'd missed a vital clue, something he'd heard or seen, a small detail that by itself lacked significance but was crucial to understanding what had happened at the Rec Room. After finishing with Rowe, he headed to the nearby county park to walk and think.

The park ran alongside the shipping canal that connected the waters of Green Bay and Sturgeon Bay to Lake Michigan. Before the late 1800s when the passage was dug, ships had to sail around the peninsula to reach the lake. The canal cut more than a hundred miles off the trip. It also severed the land connection between the peninsula and the rest of the state, technically making a large part of Door County an island, a distinction generally ignored. Cubiak liked the park. Even during the height of the tourist rush, it was largely underused and offered a quiet, easy escape from the office.

T
hat birthday morning, the bright sun infused the day with spring-like warmth. As he strode east toward the lake, he started to replay the conversation with Rowe but found himself overrun by the sentiment that had welled up earlier. For a few precious moments, Cubiak opened the part of his heart where memories were stored and stepped back into the life he'd known with his wife and daughter in Chicago. Love. Pain. Loss. The emotions overwhelmed him, and then slowly they settled into a peaceful calm that he tucked away once again.

A loud whistle blew. A man hailed from the deck of an approaching barge. Cubiak returned the greeting and watched the vessel recede down the waterway. Alone again, he gazed into the cloudless sky and then to the narrow blue waterway and gravel path that ran side by side, cutting parallel lines through the nascent green landscape.

Something about the colors and shapes held Cubiak's attention. Without meaning to, he began to recall various objects and people he'd encountered during the previous two weeks. As the impressions came to him they formed a mental pastiche, and he gradually realized that everything he was remembering was connected to the deaths at Gills Rock. He closed his eyes and let the collage expand, drawing in details from the deep recesses of memory. What had he missed earlier? What had he seen but failed to comprehend? If he conjured up something significant now, would he grasp the importance of it?

Cubiak ran through events, from beginning to end. Still nothing. He opened his eyes. Once before, standing at the base of the wide bay outside Huntsman's home, he had looked to the water for answers and come up empty. This time, standing alongside the ribbon of water in the canal, he felt himself being pulled toward a resolution. What he was looking at reminded him of something he'd noted earlier that day at the office, something he'd seen before.

He went back to the first morning: the phone call from Rowe, the ride up the peninsula, the people he'd met and talked with. And there he came to the missing link, the clue for which he'd been searching. The key to the deaths of the Three of a Kind, the seemingly negligible detail, had been evident the day the men had been found dead inside the old cabin. He'd noticed it shortly after he reached the Huntsmans' homestead, but until this morning, he hadn't realized its relevance.

There was no doubt that Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins had been murdered; that Agnes was not the culprit, though she was guilty of her husband's vengeful shooting; and that gambling had not played a role in the tragedy.

Finally, he understood the MO, the motive behind the crime, and the identity of the killer.

With a heart full of regret, Cubiak turned his back on the splendor of Door County and retraced his way to the jeep.