Dead Creek Read online

  Osborne listened to Sloan and the deputies exclaim or suck in their breath. Then he watched Ray, who looked hard in silence, then moved closer, bracing his long arms against the gunwales. He hung over the boat for a long couple of minutes, studying the bodies in the cage. Several times he looked up to study the Norway pines, the tamarack, and the dense brush that crowded the creek. Spring air and sunlight hadn’t penetrated all of the forest yet, and clumps of snow still guarded sections of the slowly thawing ground.

  “I’ll tell ya what,” he said. “Let’s get those floods hard on this, then let me shoot that knoll before anyone gets out of the boat. Just in case we’ve got some tracks over there. Okay? I don’t think they brought this in by boat.”

  “Sure, Ray,” said Sloan, “take your time.” As Ray slipped a lens and flash onto his camera, Sloan motioned to the deputies to follow Ray’s instructions.

  Ray propped his right leg up on the bow of the boat and leaned forward, his motor drive whirring. Then he swung off to the right and aimed toward the woods. “Interesting,” he said. The motor drive whirred. Then he lowered his camera and stepped up onto the edge of the knoll.

  He looked around, paused, and waved the camera toward the ground, gesturing with it as he talked. “Now this is real interesting, folks. Someone drove in through the brush … on a snowmobile. You got tracks in the snow cover back under that brush. Great definition. I’ll shoot some macro so you’ll have close-ups. Sure looks like an Arctic Cat with one rider to me.”

  “C’mon, Ray, how the hell?” asked Roger, the doubt clear in the deputy’s voice.

  “How do I know it’s an Arctic Cat? I own one. These are the tracks my machine makes,” said Ray. “Now shut up while I shoot.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got five thousand snowmobiles coming through here some weekends,” said Sloan. “This’ll be like trying to identify a Nike shoe print—every goombah in the county owns one.”

  “Look for one with blue paint scratched off the sides,” said Ray, focusing his lens on the trees. “They scraped past a couple a Norways to get to the water. Take a look. And they were in a hurry, ripping those branches back. See that paint on the tree trunks?”

  Sloan and the two deputies were silent. Osborne remembered the McDonald’s crew talking about Ray one morning when he wasn’t there: “That razzbonya can track a snake over a rock,” somebody’d said. It probably ate his shorts, but Sloan had to know that, too.

  “Yeah, we’re lucky to be here tonight, too, because that thaw we’re supposed to get tomorrow will melt this stuff. These tracks will be slush in a couple of days,” said Ray.

  “Anything else?” Sloan asked gruffly, not a little irritated to be so beholden to Ray. Roger was still shaking his head, if not in doubt then in surprise.

  Osborne, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised at all. The hours he had spent fishing with Ray had made him aware of two simple truths about the man: One, he could be trusted. Two, the wearing of the stuffed trout hat was a ploy. An invitation not to take him seriously. But anyone who fell for that made a serious error, which most people did. Osborne was one of the few who knew Ray Pradt was easy to underestimate. Ray knew it: he banked on it.

  Why was that, anyway? It was a question Osborne couldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Instead, after fishing with his friend, he would indulge in a pleasant little pastime he had come to call his “Ray Ramble”—a meditative polka set to the tune of Ray’s rhythms.

  After stowing his fishing gear, Osborne would settle in on the wide front porch overlooking Loon Lake, a newspaper on his lap and a cup of coffee in hand, as he watched the winds stroking the waves. Before lifting the paper to read it, he would reflect on the hours he had just spent with his neighbor, usually with a smile on his face.

  Seldom was there a time, watching or listening, when he hadn’t learned something from the man. Something sensible, practical, yet leavened with a goofy grin or self-deprecating remark as if humor would mask the value of the insight, protect Ray from a world designed to take him too seriously, to demand commitment. Osborne knew, as did just a few other Loon Lake residents, that behind the grins and guffaws was a man of serious talent. No one could read the shadows on the water or the shudders of the forest like Ray. He had the vision of an eagle scanning for prey. Nor could anyone else hear the voices that haunted the woods as acutely as Ray, except, perhaps, a deer.

  The men worked swiftly in the dark cold. The boat was rigged to drag for drownings, so it took only moments to hook the submerged crate and pull it up to hang vertically from the winch at the front end of the boat. Sloan had relaxed about anyone seeing their lights since they were more than enough upstream to hide the spill from the floods.

  Osborne stood back, watching the deputies work. From high above and behind them, the distinctive call of the great horned owl who owned that side of the lake signaled that the forest was watching. Osborne couldn’t help but wonder what the magnificent old bird might be thinking.

  The sky was clear, so from his perch under the bright half-moon and a million stars he would be looking down on the brilliant circle of light thrown by Sloan’s floodlights onto the boat deck and the brushy shores of the creek. He would see a rusted metal cage, not unlike a dog crate, pulled up and tipped forward, its contents ready to be emptied onto the deck and pried one from the other. Leathery clothing stuck to limbs, and features were frozen by the icy water. Working around them would be five live men who would avoid thinking too hard about what they were doing.

  “Wait a minute! I’ve seen a crate like that before,” exclaimed Ray from his vantage point on the hillock. He squatted to shoot several frames. Then he stood and studied the suspended crate.

  “Geez—now where did I see that? Boy, I can’t remember….” He twisted his fingers in his beard, then he shrugged and gave up. “I’ll think of it.” He shot more photos as Sloan and the deputies struggled to separate the bodies, which had been looped over and around one another. As neatly wedged, thought Osborne, as a fresh can of King Oscar sardines.

  One by one, they set each on a tarp laid across the bottom of the boat. Osborne stepped carefully over each body, looking hard at the faces before jotting notes on each. “No oxygen means no decay,” he said as an aside to no one in particular. “Facial detail is well preserved, these faces are remarkably unblemished. I don’t believe the expressions will get in the way of any relatives identifying the victims.”

  “You know what’s weird?” said Ray, as he followed behind Osborne, shooting close-ups, “they all look like they’re sleeping. They don’t look like they were terrorized or anything….”

  “I’m not so sure … at least not a relaxed sleep,” interrupted Osborne with an edge to his voice.

  “How do you know that?” asked Sloan, stepping forward to study the faces more closely himself.

  “I don’t—more a sense maybe—maybe …” Then Osborne stood up straight and sighed heavily. His back hurt from leaning over so long. “Maybe the tightness in the jaws … on each one. I don’t know, John. I’m probably wrong, it’s been years since I did this.”

  “Yeah,” said Ray, nodding and ruminating, twisting his fingers in his beard. “You never think about it, you know, but the look on your face when you die is how a lotta folks will remember you….”

  “That’s enough, Ray,” said Roger, giving him a look of friendly disgust. “Not that most of us get to plan how we’ll look….”

  “These guys might have.” Ray ignored the snide tone in the remarks. “They look so damn peaceful, y’know?”

  “Guys!” snorted Roger. “Can’t you tell a woman when you see one?”

  Silence settled over the boat as the five live people studied the faces of the four dead ones. Roger was right; they were looking at three men and a woman, all dressed for cold weather fishing except for hats. Only the woman wore one, an oilcloth drover’s hat pulled down far enough that only a few strands of white-blond hair escaped to frame a squarish face obviously softer
and more feminine than the others.

  “Could be worse,” said Sloan.

  “You’ve seen a lot more than I have,” said Osborne. He shrugged. This speculation was going nowhere, and a cold wind was picking up. “Peaceful, maybe, but they don’t look happy to be doing whatever it was they were doing. Does that make sense?”

  No one answered.

  Sloan nodded to himself as if he agreed with Osborne. “Okay, Doc, what do we do next here?”

  Osborne leaned in over the first body. “If you’ll hold this one to the side like this,” he said to Roger as he deftly pulled the jaw open. “Fine, good.” The adrenaline rush worked well to keep his hands and fingers warm in their thin rubber gloves. He ran an index finger across the ridges of the tooth surfaces, back behind the molars; he set both hands to each side of the jaw, measuring from ear to chin; then he quickly sketched on a small pad notes detailing fillings, caps, crowns.

  The second jaw held a partial denture.

  “Jackpot,” Osborne said softly and looked up at Sloan. “This denture will have a registration number on it you can trace to the lab where it was made.”

  As he had with the first, he made a rapid sketch of the jaw and skull configuration. The act of sketching took him back to his youth, a time when he thought he could choose between being a concert pianist or a sculptor. Reality set in later, of course; dentistry paid the bills. But even in dental school, he had loved studying skeletal structure, the sculptor in him admiring of the aesthetics that made the difference between male and female.

  Male skulls, like the ones he was examining, aside from their differing overlay of flesh were, in fact, very similar: robust, knobby, and larger than female skulls, with more pronounced jaws and heavier brows.

  As Osborne worked, he numbered the pages in the corners, then took one piece of paper, put only a number on it and set it on the body for Ray to shoot so notes and bodies could be easily matched.

  Sloan stood alongside, making notes of the clothing and other details of each body to bolster the ID as a backup, should any of Ray’s photos not turn out. As Osborne finished, Sloan had Roger confirm the sex of each victim while the younger deputy tried to peg hair color and Ray shot close-ups of everything.

  “No wounds that I can see,” said Roger, huffing a little as he heaved the bodies through the process.

  Osborne’s hands moved deftly. The ice had preserved the bodies well, and no exposure to air meant no odor.

  “I feel like I’m working on statues,” he said, before leaning into the last mouth. “This isn’t nearly as bad as my war work. You may want to mention in your notes, John, that these are mature adults, and they are likely to be fairly well-to-do. So far, each one has had good dental care, expensive dental care. In my opinion, these are people who certainly cared about their appearance. Professionals, perhaps?” He looked down at the fourth and final victim. He had saved the woman for last.

  Osborne loved the female skull, so smooth and gracile, as if it had been spun into life on a potter’s wheel, shaped by caressing hands. This one was no exception, all its edges planed and beveled beneath the flesh.

  Osborne ran his index finger matter-of-factly along the ridges of this last set of teeth, then dipped it back behind and forward again. He stopped. He peered in. This time he ran two fingers through and paused at three spots.

  “Gold inlays,” he said in mild surprise, “haven’t seen those in a while.”

  He reached for another instrument and started to tap along the teeth. He stopped suddenly, “John, can you bring that light in a little closer?” He leaned forward and studied the interior closely. He closed his eyes as his fingers slipped back and forth over the surfaces beneath them. He knew those slopes and curves as intimately as he’d known his wife’s body.

  Osborne pulled his hands from the corpse’s mouth. Then he sat back and looked down at his hands. He looked off to the left, away from the men. He had to take a deep breath before he spoke. “This is my work,” he said softly. “I did these inlays. They are gold, they were done many years ago—but I did them. I must know this person.”

  He looked closely now at the face beneath him. It was a wide face on a squarish head. The nose was wide and short with half-open, opaque eyes placed unusually far apart. The woman carried some weight on her; she might be small-boned, but she was not a small woman.

  “Recognize her?” asked Sloan. Everyone stopped their work and gathered around.

  “No,” said Osborne after a long, long pause. “I don’t. Does anyone else?”

  The group was silent. Sloan motioned to Roger to complete the exam. The deputy removed the sodden, frozen clothing with some difficulty. He looked up in surprise, “It’s a man,” he said.

  “What?” Osborne leaned over. “Are you sure?”

  “Give me a break, Doc. I know a dick when I see one.”

  He was right. Osborne stood up, mystified.

  “What’s going on?” Sloan leaned forward. His dark, thick eyebrows joined over his nose as he thrust his head close to the corpse.

  “I don’t know,” said Osborne. “The bone structure is female, at least what I was taught was female, but obviously I’m wrong.” He decided to examine the jaw again.

  But before Osborne could move, Ray had moved in close over the body, his camera in hand. “Hold on, guys,” he said, “I know someone who will want some good shots of this.” The motor drive whirred and whirred as he shot from north, south, east, and west, jumping over and straddling the still form.

  As he moved, one of his feet tugged at the tarp beneath the body, causing the fishing hat to slip back off the head. Along with the hat went the hair.

  “Weird!” exclaimed the younger deputy. “Guy’s totally bald.” With a reflex action, he jumped to catch the soft swatch as it was lifted into the air by a sudden gust, then dropped it onto the tarp as if it was a wolf spider.

  “Calm down. Haven’t you ever seen a hairpiece before?” said Sloan sharply. “Now, don’t lose that thing.”

  Sheepishly, the deputy reached back down for the hairpiece.

  “Doc,” said Ray, glancing over at Osborne, “you tell me if this doesn’t look like those mink I was telling you about.”

  “Mink? For Christ’s sake!” Sloan shook his head.

  Osborne set down his instruments slowly. He was puzzled. Something connected him in a visceral way to this body, yet it just didn’t figure….

  The clothing had been pulled away to expose the genitals. “Who-o-a, hold on Charlie….” said Ray to no one in particular but with an unmistakable note of satisfaction building in his voice. “Do you see what I see? Or—should I say—don’t see?”

  Osborne’s professional mind-set kicked in instantly and he moved the penis aside with his gloved hand to get a better look. Yep. Undescended testicles. No wonder Ray was happy. He just made himself an extra hundred bucks. At least. Maybe a lot more.

  “It’s all yours, Ray,” said Osborne pulling his hand back. “But I sure hope you’re wrong.”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” said Sloan.

  “You know the research that environmental studies group has been doing up at Dead Creek?” Osborne asked, looking up. Sloan and the deputies shook their heads no. “You better tell ‘em, Ray.”

  “I’ve been guiding a Dr. Rick Shanley for the last year and a half,” said Ray, “to a couple of sites where they’ve found adult mink, infertile mink, with malformed reproductive organs.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes. What the hell would that have to do with this?” Sloan snorted. Roger rolled his eyes.

  “Hey,” Ray shrugged, “men, mink, whatever. When it comes to reproductive organs, the basics are the same. I’ve seen the deformed mink, and now I’ve seen this. One reminds me of the other. I’m conjecturing, Chief, strictly conjecturing.”

  “Like what exactly are we talking about here?” demanded Sloan.

  Ray paused as if thinking over what he could and could not say. Finally, he spoke.
“Shanley works for the Ford Institute of Environmental Health. His team is studying a range of problems affecting the reproductive systems in the fish-eating population up here. Eagles, hawks, otters, walleyes, bottom-feeders, salamanders—different problems at different levels of the food chain. FIEH has a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the extent of the problem in this region.

  “I’m involved because I harvest specimens for them.”

  Osborne knew they paid him by the specimen. This would be a big one, probably bigger than they were expecting.

  “Up here, you say?” Sloan looked shocked.

  “You betcha,” said Ray, his eyes very serious. “They have a significant situation over in Green Bay. No one knows yet how far it extends throughout the Great Lakes region.”

  Sloan shook his head. Green Bay was only 150 miles east of Loon Lake, Lake Superior less than two hours north.

  “The scientists are finding all sorts of hormonal discrepancies,” said Ray. “For example, a walleye or a trout might appear to you and me to be male, but the hormone count is off-the-charts female. Starting last September, Shanley asked me to watch for any mammals that appear to be one sex but have characteristics of the other—so that’s all I’m saying about this body,” said Ray, still straddling the corpse. “A human is a mammal. This one is unusual and, I repeat, John, I’m conjecturing, strictly conjecturing.”

  Ray stepped away carefully, capped his lens, and continued, “They suspect that chemicals used in paper and pulp production, which we all know have been dumped for years into the rivers and streams around here, are causing this. Over time, the chemicals break down, causing the hormones in these different life forms to go crazy.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Sloan, his lips puckering as if everything Ray said left a bad taste in his mouth. Osborne didn’t like what he saw: the rude dismissal of his good friend’s remarks.

  “The scientists call them endocrine disruptors,” said Osborne, bolstering Ray’s authority with medical jargon he knew would intimidate Sloan. He hoped Ray was happy now that he had taken Osborne into his confidence, even though Shanley had insisted Ray keep the project confidential. Ray’s excitement over the project had led him to confide in his neighbor.