Dead Spider Page 14

  “Beth, what on earth happened?” asked her father.

  Standing back from his daughter and her husband as they listened to their child, Osborne watched the color come back into their faces. He glanced at Lew and she gave him a slight smile. He knew he looked better, too.

  Talking quickly Beth told them how she had been stalked by the boyfriend of the woman she had met when she was being held before being cited after the marijuana incident with her friends. She told how he had ambushed her in the storage shed at the courts and hit her in the head, knocking her out.

  “His name is Pete Bertrand and, Dad, he OD’ed right beside me.” That was as much as Beth could manage before sobbing.

  The deputy came back on the line. “Mr. and Mrs. Amundson, Chief Ferris, we’re going to take her over to the hospital and have her checked over but aside from a goose egg on the side of her head, she appears fine.”

  “We’re on our way to pick her up right now,” said Erin, talking over him.

  “That’s fine,” said the deputy, “but we’ll meet you halfway. That’ll give us a chance to debrief her and there is no reason for you to drive all the way up here.”

  “I have a question,” said Lew, “can you check the car that this Bertrand was driving? We had guns, jewelry, some cash, and drugs stolen from a nursing home here and the goods may be in that car.”

  “I did check it once,” said the deputy. “Found one gun, fifteen thousand in cash, and a small amount of drugs. We think he was on his way to pay a supplier somewhere up near the Canadian border. We’ll be testing the drugs because this guy OD’ed on something stronger than OxyContin—at least that’s our theory right now.”

  “Please be sure I get a printout of the names on the drugs, please. I need to match them to the prescriptions stolen to be sure we don’t have more floating around out there.”

  “Will do. We’ll get you the girl, the guy’s car, and its contents—and the drug info. What we need from you is more information on this deceased individual. He may be a drug addict but somewhere there is likely to be a mother who loved him.”

  “Or a girlfriend,” said Lew. “Yes, you need next of kin and I think we have someone in custody who may be able to help us with that.”

  Later that morning, during the eight A.M. conference call with the governor’s office, Lew and Bruce assured them that the investigation was moving forward. Off the phone line, they rolled their eyes at each other. “We hope,” they said in unison.

  Free of the conference call with the governor’s staff, Lew and Osborne strolled two blocks to the Loon Lake Pub for a hearty breakfast after which she sent him off to get some sleep. It was nine o’clock when Lew walked into the cell where Wendy Stevenson was being held.

  “Ms. Stevenson, we’ve located your friend, Pete Bertrand,” said Lew to the young woman dressed in jail-orange and sprawled on the cell’s cot with a pout on her face.

  The pout vanished as the young woman scrambled to sit up straight. “Didn’t I say he’d be in touch?”

  “Umm, that’s not quite how we reached him,” said Lew. “He drove north with a friend of yours, Beth Amundson. Remember her? They were on their way to Duluth to meet someone. Did you know they were traveling together?”

  “N-n-n-o-o.” After a moment’s thought, a classic “I knew it” look replaced the relief. She tightened her lips. Lew recognized the expression now crowding her features: revenge.

  “Want to tell me where he lives? The more information you give me, the shorter your sentence. You’ll be a cooperating witness.”

  “Sure.” The word was spat out. “Out past the city cemetery and the old dump. You know where the Loon Lake Grocery has its bakery? Take that road a third of a mile to a house trailer. That’s his grandmother’s. He lives in the barn behind her place. You can’t miss it.”

  “His grandmother lives there, too?” asked Lew. “Do you know her name?”

  “Why? She didn’t do anything. She doesn’t know what he does either. Her name is Marge. That’s all I know.”

  “We need to reach his next of kin.”

  Wendy’s eyes widened. “Are you saying—”

  “He’s dead. Your friend OD’ed on his way to Duluth.”

  Stunned, the girl sank back against the pillow on the cot. “You should know, too, that Beth Amundson did not agree to go with him. He stalked her, hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious, tied her up, and abducted her. Do you have any idea why?”

  The girl’s face fell as Lew’s news sunk in. She dropped her head in her hands before saying in a subdued tone, “Kind of . . . maybe . . . I told Pete I knew she was selling weed at the high school—so we thought she might be a good way in, y’know.” Wendy raised her eyebrows as she said in a sad voice, “I knew he thought she was really pretty but I didn’t think . . . ” She didn’t finish the sentence. Lew felt sorry for her. The tattoos alone would be a constant reminder of the man who deceived her.

  Tired though she was, Lew made her way past the cemetery and the bakery to the small house trailer with the well-kept front yard. To the right of the dirt drive was an old barn with a well-trodden path between the trailer and the barn. The woman who answered the door was heavyset and mild-faced with wispy white hair, some of which was tucked into a knot on top of her head. Lew guessed her to be in her seventies.

  “Mrs. Bertrand?” asked Lew. “I’m with the Loon Lake Police and we need to talk. May I come in?”

  The woman stepped back with a nod but without saying anything. Lew walked into a small, tidy kitchen. Before she could say more, the woman said, “Bertrand was my daughter’s name. She’s dead. My name is Marge. Marge LeFevre. Is this about my grandson?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to have to tell you that he died sometime very early this morning of a drug overdose.”

  Marge closed her eyes and reached behind her for a chair. She sat down. “I knew this day was coming,” she said, keeping her eyes closed and nodding up and down. It struck Lew she had had news like this before.

  “I’m afraid I have to get some information from you.”

  “Of course. Please sit down.”

  Once Lew had the specifics, Marge said, “My daughter died of a heroin overdose years ago. I knew she was doing drugs but I couldn’t stop her. Peter—I’ve always called him ‘Peter’—was only three years old when his mom died. I thought Peter was with the man she’d been living with but turns out that guy went to jail and Peter ended up being moved in and out of foster homes. Some pretty bad. I didn’t get him until he was fourteen. He was pretty messed up by then.

  “He had his own reality is how I guess I would put it. Couldn’t hold a job ’cause he would fight with whoever the boss might be. But lately he’d been doing okay. At least he stopped stealing money from me.” She gave Lew a half smile. “You take a little kid who doesn’t think he has a home and something has to happen. Problem was Peter had his way of doing things and once he set his mind to it—no changing.

  “Funny thing though. He told me two days ago he had seen an angel.” She nodded up and down. “Do you think he had a premonition?”

  “Could be,” said Lew, sympathizing but thinking of Beth. After explaining that there had been a burglary and she had a warrant to search where Marge’s grandson had been living, Marge got to her feet. She reached for a cane beside the door and, walking slowly, led the way.

  “I gave him the barn,” she said. “He’s been living there with that girl, Wendy. Now that girl—she’s a strange one if you ask me. You met her?”

  “She’s in custody,” said Lew. Again Marge nodded but said nothing.

  Lew was relieved she didn’t want to know more. Instead she motioned for Lew to follow her to the barn where she pushed open a door to one side of a barricaded entrance to the barn. “He got running water out here thanks to my late husband. He was my third,” said Marge. “He’s dead now but he put the plumbing in back when we thought we could turn this place into something.

  “I’ve always thou
ght it was a good thing he died before Peter got here. That would not have been good.” Marge shook her head. “Ernie was a hard worker and he would not have put up with Peter.”

  Inside the barn, the living and eating areas were neater than Lew was expecting—as if a woman’s hand had been at work. She suspected Wendy for all her goth décor was desperate for a husband and a home. She wouldn’t be the first.

  Behind the bedroom a door opened to the interior of the barn. Sunlight pouring through windows running along the walls made it easy to see Pete had been busy. One stall that had once held a cow was now the home of two flat-screen TVs, three laptop computers, a leaf blower, and two lawn mowers. Half a dozen expensive-looking bicycles, too.

  In another stall and near a well-worn sofa was a cardboard box. Inside were fourteen handguns; a shopping bag filled with bracelets, necklaces, and earrings; and a large Ziploc containing vials of pills. Lew recognized names on two of the pill containers and realized the box contained the belongings of the residents of the Northern Lights Nursing Home.

  Osborne woke from his nap, listened to Mike scratching at the back door to go out, and made a decision that brought a smile to his face. Before picking up his cell phone, he pulled out a credit card and the Orvis catalog with the list he had made two nights earlier.

  Without flinching he agreed to overnight shipping. It meant he would have at least two days to assemble his purchases—just in time. Clicking off his phone he made yet another decision: He would host an early birthday dinner for the woman with whom he loved to watch sunsets. How could she turn down his offer after this surprise?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Bruce Peters had promised to be back in Loon Lake early Monday after spending the weekend at home with his wife outside Wausau. When he hadn’t called or shown up at her office by ten that morning, Lew reached him on his cell.

  “Okay, Mr. Peters, are you holding out for another lesson in the trout stream?”

  “Maybe,” said the eager voice on the other end.

  “I’m serious,” said Lew, “if this is the only way I can speed up my access to lab results from you Wausau boys . . . ”

  “Not necessary,” said Bruce, sounding chastened. “I’m running late like I always run late on Monday mornings. Sorry but I promise I’ll be in your office in less than thirty minutes and I have interesting news.”

  “Good news? You’ve identified the shooter?”

  “Umm, not that good but close. I’d tell you more but I think it’ll be better if I can show you details on my laptop.”

  Lew clicked off and tried to focus on the paperwork in front of her. She was anxious to know if there had been any DNA match to the spittle found on Chuck Pfeiffer’s head. Though multiple viewings of the video showed no sign of Rikki’s motorcycle-riding ex, Jim Nickel, approaching the Pfeiffer booth, she kept hoping that a match to Nickel’s DNA, which would be in the state’s crime database since he had been in prison, might give them a “person of interest”—even if temporarily. Or enough to get the governor’s office off her back. Some woman on his staff had bugged her twice over the weekend.

  And while Patience Merrill kept underscoring her point that they could be overlooking something in the video of the crowd passing by Chuck, Lew could not imagine how that might be.

  Off the phone, Lew called Osborne. She caught him in the midst of puzzling over the directions of how to set up the fly-tying desk, which UPS had dropped off early that morning. “Doc,” she said, “looks like Bruce has an update for us—something to do with our Pfeiffer investigation. Wouldn’t share it till he gets here but I’m thinking you might like to be in on this.”

  Osborne walked into Lew’s office moments before Bruce arrived. He found Lew finishing up her phone conversation with the pathologist who had handled the autopsy on Pete Bertrand. Taking one of the chairs in front of her desk, he waited until she was off the phone to say, “Lewellyn, I still don’t understand how my granddaughter ended up in that man’s car. It doesn’t make sense that he would just grab her off the tennis courts.”

  “I know,” said Lew, studying the features of her dear friend as she debated how much to share of what she had learned from Beth. After encouraging the girl to get a good night’s sleep after the long drive home with her parents, she had arranged for the two of them to meet in Lew’s office late Saturday afternoon. No parents, no grandfather, just the two of them.

  “Beth, I know there is more to the story,” Lew had said without taking her eyes off the girl’s face. “I don’t know what it is but I want you to tell me. Even if it means incriminating a close friend, you have to tell me.”

  Without flinching, Beth sat straight, shoulders back, as she said, “No, Chief Ferris, no one else is responsible for what happened to me. Just . . . me.”

  “Okay . . . ” Lew had waited, worried.

  She liked the girl but she knew the hazards, especially the opportunity for bad judgment, of adolescence. Her own marriage at eighteen to a man who turned out to be alcoholic and abusive had been a disaster. Talk about bad choices. And she must have made serious parenting mistakes or why else would her teenage son have spiraled into the abuse of drugs and alcohol that led to his death in a bar fight at the age of seventeen.

  She hoped her awareness of her own grievous errors in life made her a more compassionate law enforcement professional. Lew knew how easy it could be to do the wrong thing.

  “Remember when I got picked up when my friend, Kevin, was buying that weed from the guy who met us behind the Loon Lake Market that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I had to wait in a room with another person before I was cited and my parents were called?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “There was a girl there, Wendy was her name. The way she was dressed, her hair and stuff—she was so sick.” Seeing the confusion on Lew’s face, Beth said, “I mean, she was what you and my folks would call ‘cool.’ Know what I mean? I feel stupid telling you this now but she made me feel like I was a nerd or something.

  “And, um, when she told me she was in for something to do with drugs, she was so sick about it that . . . um . . . ” Beth hesitated.

  “I know what you mean,” said Lew, “keep talking.”

  “I told a lie, Chief Ferris. I let her think that I had been caught selling marijuana so she wouldn’t think I was a total nerd. That I was a stoner kinda like her even if I did play tennis.” Beth gave a sheepish smile as if she knew how absurd it all sounded.

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Guess so because she and her boyfriend, Pete, drove by me the next morning when I was walking to the tennis courts and stopped to talk to me. They wanted to see if I would work for Pete at the high school—you know, sell weed. I said I wouldn’t do that but he didn’t believe me ’cause he came up to the courts again. Again I said no, absolutely not, but he wouldn’t leave me alone. Made me sick to my stomach.”

  “So he knew where to find you.”

  “Yes, he stalked me for two more days. I could see him hanging out behind the courts.”

  “I wish you would have told someone.”

  Beth burst into tears. Lew handed her a box of Kleenex and when the sobbing had eased, Lew said, “I appreciate you telling me the truth, Beth. Now I understand how this happened.” Lew leaned forward and patted her hand. “I wonder if you know how lucky you are. Something very bad could have happened . . . ”

  “I know. I know, I know.” Shaking her head, Beth shut her eyes in an effort to squeeze back tears.

  “Worse than what did happen. It isn’t everyone who has to watch someone OD on drugs.”

  “I feel so bad,” said the girl, wiping at her eyes. “What was I thinking? I’m happy to be a nerd, trust me.” She gave a forlorn little chuckle. “Do you . . . am I going to be punished?”

  “Listen, kid,” said Lew with an understanding smile, “you’ve been through enough. This can stay between us. But I will need your help with one matter. The deputies up
north will need you to testify that you witnessed Peter Bertrand entering The Wolf Den tavern without the Ziploc you’ve described and returning to the car with the Ziploc in hand—and that the powder that killed him came from that same Ziploc.”

  The relief on Beth’s face was all the answer Lew needed.

  “Doc,” said Lew, hoping she could give him an answer that would satisfy his confusion over why his granddaughter had ended up in Pete Bertrand’s Jeep, “Beth and I had a talk Saturday afternoon. Turns out she met Pete Bertrand’s girlfriend when she was here in the police station waiting to be cited after the attempted drug purchase behind the grocery store last week. The girlfriend misunderstood why Beth was being cited and she told Pete Bertrand that she thought Beth could be a conduit for selling drugs into the high school.

  “Total fiction, of course, and when they approached her Beth let them know that was never going to happen. But Bertrand refused to take no for an answer. It’s obvious he was quite attracted to her and started stalking her.”

  “Why didn’t she tell someone?” asked Osborne, confused.

  “I’m sure she thought she could handle it. That if she ignored those two, they would go away. There may have been some guilt in the back of her mind, too. Like if she hadn’t been with her friend the day he was trying to buy marijuana that this would not be happening. Her mistake was thinking she was dealing with reasonable people who would take no for an answer.”

  “But he wasn’t a reasonable person.”

  “Hardly. But Beth didn’t know that. For a young guy—he was only twenty-one—he had a history of arrests for petty theft and domestic violence with former girlfriends. Some of his behavior I can understand after listening to his grandmother who tried to get him professional help. She shared with me that after the death of his mother, her daughter, the father had abandoned him when he was still a young child. He was shuffled through the foster home system until she learned what was going on and tried to rescue him. But the damage had been done.”