Dead Creek Page 16

  sixteen

  The best chum I ever had in fishing was a girl, and she tramped just as hard and fished quite as patiently as any man I ever knew.

  Theodore Gordon (1890)

  “Jeez, they got an air conditioner running in that place,” said Lew about twenty minutes later as they were paddling upstream. “It’s fifty-five degrees out.”

  “Or an air compressor,” Osborne responded, “all my dental units ran on compressors that sounded like that. But what would they be doing with an air compressor?”

  Though it was dark and the fog thick, in less than ten minutes Ray had run the canoe silently along the brush-lined lakeshore, swung expertly into the cove, and pointed them back up the now-narrowing stream. The forest underworld that had seemed so dark and muted during the day was now a deep, impenetrable black to Osborne. Ray, however, seemed to be able to see just fine.

  Once they had found the stream and paddled in a good 500 feet, Lew spoke, keeping her voice low in the darkness, “Ray, I’d like to try down that road with the B-and-B sign as we head into town. Not too far, just enough to get an idea what’s back there. We’ll come back out tomorrow.”

  “Fine with me,” said Ray. They paddled upstream in silence, finally reaching the point where they had put in. Hoisting the canoe onto their shoulders, they trudged back through the dense brush and down the rutted logging road past Ted Bronk’s body to Osborne’s car.

  “I’m not letting the dog out,” said Osborne as he reached up to help Ray lash the canoe onto the police boat. “That would be one big mistake.”

  “Damn,” said Lew, stomping the mud off her boots before climbing into Osborne’s car, “I forgot we didn’t have my cruiser. I have to report that we found Ted right away. Let’s skip going down that other road and hustle back to the main highway. I saw a tavern out there where I can call in.”

  “Lew,” said Ray, a cautious tone in his voice. “I know it’s important that you do that, but I’d like to drive down the road a bit while we know that plane and its pilot are there, which might not be the case in the morning.”

  “Good point,” said Lew. “Okay with you, Doc?”

  Osborne agreed with Ray and made a slow arcing left turn off Highway C onto the dirt road heading toward the B-and-B. About a mile in, they passed the little log cabin inn. The place had been one of the small family resorts that flourished in the forties and fifties, then fell on bad times when Americans decided they all had to go to Disneyland. These resorts were made up of a series of tiny cabins, each with about twelve feet of lake frontage for wading and swimming and one larger lodge that served as office, dining room, and recreation center. Tonight, lights were shining in the main lodge and a dark-green Volvo with Missouri plates was parked in front of one of the tiny cabins.

  “So they’re open for business already?” Lew turned her head in surprise.

  “They probably stayed open all winter for snowmobilers,” said Osborne. “I don’t know who owns that place anymore. Emily Swanee used to own it, but she sold and moved to Chicago a few years back.”

  The car had hit a rough gravel road, barely one lane wide. Osborne slowed, uncomfortable with the loud grinding noise his wheels were making. They moved on in the dark. At one point an owl suddenly flew up from the right, thick and oblong like a large rock, and bounced hard off the windshield.

  “There we go again,” said Ray, “we’re close.”

  And they were. The road ended abruptly at an old squat brick building fronted with an overgrown clearing infested with a few random rusted lumps of machinery. At first glance, the place looked abandoned. At second glance, tire tracks were clearly visible in the dirt.

  “Well, well, one of the old Cantrell warehouses still standing. I was right. This is where they ran the paper mill once upon a time,” said Ray. “Herman told me they tore the original plant down some time in the late forties. This is the one that piped into Dead Creek. Shall we check it out?”

  Neither Lew nor Osborne said a word. If anything, Osborne felt like he sure didn’t want to, but there was no choice.

  Instead, he cut the car engine but left the lights on and opened his door very slowly, as did Lew and Ray. The three of them stepped into the dark and stood listening. Then Ray jogged up to the door of the old building. He ran the beam of his flashlight over it, then he walked back and forth across the front of the building and checked back along both sides to the rear. He turned and walked back to the car where Lew and Osborne stood waiting.

  “Someone’s working around here, all right. They’re using the back way. See?” He aimed the beam of the flash, and they could see a well-worn track over the grass that led to the back of the building.

  “This must be the road Erin found,” said Lew. She had already begun to walk forward with Ray. Osborne got the distinct feeling that he didn’t want to stay by the car alone. He quickly caught up to the other two.

  “Ray …” Lew stopped and pulled at Ray’s sleeve, “shine that light through the windows here.” She had stopped in front of the darkened building. Ray did as she asked. “That’s interesting,” said Lew. The flashlight illuminated a pile of cardboard boxes neatly stacked one upon the other. Beside the stack were several large wooden crates, each about six feet wide and four feet high. Steel wire gleamed in the beam of light. “These are not old boxes,” said Lew.

  “No, they’re not,” said Osborne.

  “Maybe it’s a new UPS drop site,” said Ray. No one laughed.

  The tire tracks meandered behind the old building then seemed to end in a garbage pit, heaped with old springs, a couple of car skeletons, and other debris. Ray walked around the pit to the right and stopped, then he walked to the left. A huge boulder, about six feet wide and four feet high blocked the way. He looked it over. Fifteen tons minimum. Lew and Osborne stood right behind him and followed the beam from Ray’s flash as he ran it over the ruts in the track, obviously made by cars and maybe deep enough to be from trucks as well.

  “This doesn’t make sense.” Ray’s flash showed the tracks ran right under the boulder. “How dumb do they think we are? Hold this.” He handed the flashlight to Lew. Then he bent his knees as he wrapped his arms around the boulder and lifted it lightly. “Whaddya say, about seven, eight pounds?” He set it aside. The tracks ran forward, past the dump and up a slight rise.

  “Keeps hunters out,” said Lew.

  Lew, Ray, and Osborne moved forward as a threesome. When they neared the top, Ray put his arm out to stop them. The cloud cover overhead had broken, and a very bright moon was shining through.

  “I think we’ve got a little too much light, folks. We may not want to broadcast our silhouettes,” he whispered. “But I smell water. Let’s get down on our knees to look over the top of this hill.”

  All three dropped for cover, and he was right. Just over the rise, the road curved slightly to the right, and there stood the same log house. No lights were shining, but the moonlight caught every detail of the full porch running around the outside.

  “I’m sure this is the house that Erin found,” whispered Osborne.

  “Yeah, she drove in during the day, and that boulder was set aside,” said Ray, his voice low. “I have no doubt we’ve located the same building we saw from the lake, too. Same color and frame, and the distance feels right.”

  “We can’t go any farther,” said Lew. “See?” She pointed the beam of her flashlight to a tree on which was posted a bright red No Trespassing sign. “I’m gonna check the fire number. That’ll tell us something.”

  “There is no fire number,” said Ray.

  “I can tell you something else,” said Osborne, his voice soft and grim. “See that car parked over to the left?” Lew and Ray looked to where the moon was illuminating a white Cadillac, just barely visible at the corner of the house. “I’d know that car anywhere. It’s always parked behind mine at 6:30 Sunday Mass … Judith Benjamin.”

  Back in the car, Osborne pulled them onto the gravel road, and they headed
out. “Lew,” he asked, “you made the comment the other day that you knew a few things about Judith Benjamin you might tell me sometime. Is this a good time?”

  Lew chuckled. “Sure. Ray, you may know this stuff already.”

  “I dunno,” said Ray, “depends.”

  “Judith is what, forty-two, forty-three, now? This goes back a good twenty years,” said Lew. “Long before I entered law enforcement. I was redoing some of our files a few years ago, and I found one on Miss Judith. Seems that in her teenage days, she specialized in leading certain prominent Loon Lake gentlemen into compromising situations, then blackmailing them.”

  “Oh really?” said Osborne, genuinely surprised. “Like who?”

  “I’m not getting into that. Several are still around, and they learned their lesson the hard way,” said Lew. “But she had a very nasty habit of enticing them into various infractions of statutory rape only to—literally—pull a knife or a gun on them.”

  “I’m not sure I might not be a little on her side,” said Ray. “Sounds to me like some old geezers who deserved it, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said Lew. “Except for the guy we found in the rest area on Highway 51 with his throat slit. She was never charged because there was no evidence linking her, but I am ninety-nine percent sure it was our Miss Judith.”

  “What made her stop?”

  “We don’t know, except that right around that time, she was able to buy her first tavern, and she’s been legit, so to speak, since.”

  “Doc, I’m just letting you know that she has a way about her,” said Lew. “She’s pretty high on my list right now for questioning about Ted Bronk and the missing dancer. And now this business with the plane and the hidden house? What the hell is she up to?”

  “What about me?” said Ray in mock dismay. “I thought we started out to find out who clonked me on the head.”

  “That’s becoming obvious,” said Lew. “You stumbled onto some property where you weren’t welcome for all the reasons we’re beginning to see here.”

  “But who hit me?” said Ray. “That’s the weird part. See, now I remember going in to try to find the place where the babies where found, okay? I remember parking my truck and unloading my canoe—but that’s all. Then you found me. So who hit me?”

  “Maybe the creep that Erin saw at the house,” said Osborne. “That could fit.” Then the three of them fell silent.

  Osborne mulled everything over as he drove. The news about Judith was particularly interesting. And now that ass Brad Miller is hanging around her, he thought. That pompous, prententious mean little son of a bitch. Well, maybe this time he’s picked the right friend. Maybe this time, Judith Benjamin has a real sucker on the line. Osborne couldn’t help enjoying a mildly homicidal wish that smart-ass Professor Bradford Miller would get his.

  Osborne and Ray waited in the car at Mary’s Tavern so Lew could call in news of Ted Bronk’s body. Both were lost in their thoughts until she returned.

  “The report is in from the Wausau boys,” she said when she returned. Osborne and Ray waited expectantly. “They expect to ID all of them by tomorrow and this YPO lead is right on,” said Lew. “One looks to be an executive, a company president, from Ames, Iowa, whose family finally reported him missing. They want the Bowers’s lawyer to do an eyeball ID tomorrow, so we’re gonna have to get her over to Wausau.”

  “Cause of death?” asked Osborne.

  “Very curious,” said Lew. “They found no marks, but the men were frozen before their bodies went into the water. They know they froze to death, but they did not have water in their lungs nor any indications that would mean freezing in water. The report is very specific, according to the way Roger read it to me. Also—that fourth body? Traces of a theatrical adhesive across the lower half of the face.”

  Lew took a deep breath then and sighed heavily.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ray.

  “You,” said Lew. She had a succinct way of getting to the point that Osborne found rather startling. Most women he knew always hedged their way into confrontrations. Not Lew, she was straight on.

  “Sloan called in from the hospital and insisted I take you off this case, Ray. He’s complaining to the town board if I don’t. He considers you a convicted felon and everything else!” She threw up her hands in frustration.

  “From my high school days, he hasn’t forgotten.”

  “C’mon, Ray,” said Lew, “you’re still a pothead. News travels. On the other hand, I’m getting very tired of John Sloan behaving like he’s still in charge.”

  “He thinks you’re a girl, Lew,” said Ray.

  They all sat silent for a long, long minute in the car. Osborne was sorry this was happening. Ray’s presence when they were in the woods or on the water was the one thing that made Osborne feel a heck of a lot safer than he might if he were on his own. He knew Lew wasn’t a skilled woodsman. They were already ahead on the case just because Ray knew which way to turn.

  “Maybe I could talk to him,” said Osborne finally. “This isn’t good.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lew. “And I refuse to make an issue over the information from Shanley. I want to keep that under wraps. I know the board, and if I have to tell everyone, then the whole story will be all over town. The mayor is a different story. Him I can trust to keep his mouth shut, and his backing is all I need. I wish to heck I had something other than the Shanley connection to say in Ray’s favor.” She turned to look hard at Ray. “You know, it’s your own fault.”

  “Okay, okay.” Ray leaned forward. Now it was his turn to sigh deeply. “Lew, if there is ever the least hint, if any of my local buddies ever even suspects that there is a remote possibility that I’m undercover for the DNR, I’m going to lose a lot of business. You know what I mean? God forbid Sloan even hears such a rumor.”

  “That’s a preposterous rumor.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” said Ray, “but if it gets out, you know what’ll happen to me. I’ll never dig a grave in this town again.”

  “Trust me, Ray, I don’t intend to destroy your livelihood.”

  “Thank you, Lew. Are we in business?”

  Osborne noted that Lew simply reached over the car seat and shook Ray’s hand. Nothing more was said about the DNR. Not then and not ever again.

  seventeen

  O give me the grace to catch a fish

  So big that even I

  When talking of it afterwards

  May have no need to lie.

  Anonymous, “A Fisherman’s Prayer”

  Osborne was surprised to see it was only 8:30 when he dropped off Lew and Ray at their cars in the jail parking lot. The day had seemed a month long. But as he started home past Saint Mary’s Church, parked cars lining both sides of the street indicated the Sunday night Lenten service was still going on. He pulled the station wagon over, feeling a little too wound up to go back to the dark silence of his house quite yet.

  As he entered and took his usual seat in the eighth pew on the far right, it calmed him to hear the familiar singsong phrases, the muted responses from the small crowd attending. Tonight he even savored the smell of incense in the air. It was all familiar, it was all safe, and it kept him from wondering what the hell he was getting himself into.

  The ceremony was over in less than ten minutes, but Osborne sat quietly until most of the parishioners had left. Then he rose and walked over to the nook under the statue of the Blessed Virgin, Mary Lee’s favorite. He slipped two quarters into the scuffed tin box attached to the stand of vigil lights and heard them rattle loudly in the now-empty church. He picked up a taper and book of matches from the little tray beside the coin box and lit two candles. They would be the only two burning that night. Then he bent his knees and lowered himself slowly onto the kneeler before the statue of the Holy Mother.

  The Virgin was hidden under a dark-purple Lenten shroud, and Osborne wondered if the churches in the big cities still followed that ritual. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and menta
lly ran through a “Hail Mary” while trying to summon up a prayerful calm and an image of Mary Lee, but all he could see in his mind’s eye were the twinkling dark-brown eyes of Lew. He clenched his eyes shut and tried to concentrate.

  “Dr. Osborne?” A gentle hand touched his shoulder. Startled, Osborne jumped involuntarily and opened his eyes to see Father Vodicka studying him intently.

  “Are you in a rush?” the elderly priest had an eager look in his eye.

  “I have a few minutes. What’s up?”

  “Well, ah, we’d planned a demonstration for folks this evening, after the services, but, ah, well, no one has stayed, and I was wondering … well, it would be a little less embarrassing if you wouldn’t mind …?”

  “Of course.” Osborne got the picture instantly. The poor guy. Father Vodicka was taken for granted in the parish, even as he struggled to bring modern ways to the church with not a little resistance from his flock. “What are we demonstrating, Father?”

  The relief on the priest’s face was palpable as he shepherded Osborne toward the door to the adjoining offices.

  “Oh, Dr. Osborne, this is quite impressive. We’ve had our first computer installed, and a computer sciences student from Nicolet College over in Rhinelander is inputting all the baptismal records onto a database.”

  The chapel office was brightly lit and a distinctly hip-looking young man with long hair and a semi-insolent look on his face was typing away on a keyboard. He looked up with some interest as Osborne entered the room.

  Clearly, he and Father Vodicka had been looking forward to showing off their achievement to someone. Osborne was happy he was a professional man with the title Doctor. It would lend weight to the significance of their little meeting. It might even make the snub from the other parishioners a little easier to take. And Osborne was a past president of the church board, so that would help, too.