Dead Water Page 3

  Ray, meanwhile, having positioned himself across from Robby at the round kitchen table, sat with his legs crossed, arms folded, and fish hat resting in front of him, while his face did its darnedest to look serious.

  “Canoe,” said Ray.

  “Canoe who?” The short legs kicked faster.

  “Canoe come out and play?”

  “Oh, you!” Robby slammed one fist on the table and hit his forehead with the other. If there was ever a question of Robby’s fishing with Ray, the look on Marlene’s face sealed the deal.

  She’s a Northwoods woman all right, thought Osborne. Probably married and divorced a city boy and relieved to finally find a man who could do for Robby what her father had done for her. Yep, chances were good the little guy would see a cane pole, a bobber, and one of Ray’s famous egg salad sandwiches before the week was out—not to mention a stringer of big, fat walleyes. Ray might have to poach to make Robby’s dream come true, but poaching was just one of the illegal acts that Ray could indulge in when absolutely necessary.

  “Doc.” Ray looked over at Osborne with a sideways glance. “Any problem my hearing what you have to say to Lew, or do you need me to leave?”

  “Stay right where you are,” said Osborne.

  As he spoke, the back door opened.

  “Turns out I do have a missing person,” said Lew in her clipped way after Osborne had finished describing the scene at Lost Lake. She had taken the chair next to Ray at the kitchen table and gratefully accepted a microwave-warmed mug of black coffee. She was hardly relaxed, however, positioning herself on the edge of the chair and swallowing the coffee in gulps.

  Osborne couldn’t take his eyes off her. The police department’s summer uniform of khaki pants and a matching shirt, buttoned to the neck and anchored with a forest-green tie, set off the warm brown of her skin, lightly toasted by a late-spring sun. Her mouth was generous, smiling easily, exposing the even whiteness of her teeth. Osborne could never get over the fact she had the blackest eyes, the liveliest eyes of any woman he’d ever known. Right now, those eyes were focused on him.

  It had crossed his mind in recent weeks that Lew had a way of filling a room. At least, he was acutely aware when she was nearby. Not a small woman, Lew Ferris stood about five feet eight inches tall, with a figure Osborne described to his oldest daughter, Mallory, as “trim, extremely fit, and with enough upper-body strength to slam a two-hundred-pound drunk to the deck so fast he’d never know what hit him.” This morning her khaki shirt was tucked neatly into the belted waistband of her smooth, narrow-legged trousers, but not so loosely that Osborne wasn’t aware of her breasts pushing against the crisp cotton.

  Even though Lew had a tough edge to her—she had been brusque in her introduction to Marlene—she exuded confidence, a subtle warmth, and something more. Erin had nailed it. As a Loon Lake wife, mother of three, parttime lawyer, and chairman of the Loon Lake school board, she knew people. Better than that, she knew women. It was Erin who had commented to Osborne after watching Lew during a county commission meeting when she was being grilled on her annual budget that she considered Chief Ferris one of the few women she knew to be “happy in her skin.”

  Osborne was not sure exactly what that meant, but he knew he was happy when she waved to him if their vehicles happened to pass going in opposite directions, when she invited him to share a trout stream on a calm summer night and, at the moment, he was doubly happy that she was inhaling coffee in his kitchen. At the same time, he was refusing to think how deeply pleased he would be if she drafted him to be a deputy on this case.

  “Just as I was leaving the office after Marlene’s call,” Lew was saying, “Phil Herre stopped in to tell me he and Georgia haven’t been able to reach their daughter, Sandy, for a couple days now. She’s got her own place, so they didn’t worry too much at first, but when she didn’t show up for a nephew’s baptism yesterday, they got concerned. And she hasn’t been answering any phone calls. He asked me to go with him to her town house on my way out here, which I was happy to do….”

  The kitchen was quiet as Lew took a long sip of her coffee. “No sign of the woman. She’s got a bassett hound, and the poor dog was left in the house the entire weekend. Phil said it was not like Sandy to leave him with no food or water, having accidents all over the place—”

  “Sandy Herre?” Osborne interrupted. Bracing both hands on the kitchen counter where he stood, he dropped his head, thinking hard. That mouth, the crowded teeth on the lower jaw … it had looked so familiar. “Sandy Herre,” he repeated himself. “Excuse me a minute.”

  Osborne hurried around the garage to the little room off the back where he cleaned fish. Using his shoulder, he shoved at an inside door that opened reluctantly to a narrow storage area running across the rear of the garage. Here he had hidden the old oak files that held all the dental records from his practice. Mary Lee had insisted that he throw them out. Instead, when she was out playing bridge one night, he had enlisted Ray to help him hide them back in here. Fortunately, she had never thought to look in this musty, cobwebbed room.

  The files were meticulously organized. He had separated his thirty-five years of dentistry into decades, then alphabetically within each decade—a system that had evolved from his habit of making up new files for each patient every ten years or so.

  He loved these files. They spoke to him of his pride in his work and his affection for almost all the people that had needed him. He and Ray often joked that the dental file was to Osborne what the headstone was to Ray: a point of departure for a good story. And if Ray insisted that the inscription on a headstone was a clue to character, Osborne could argue that what he found in a mouth was a metaphor for a life: sparkling clean or crummy with unnecessary plaque; teeth broken and left unrepaired or strong from healthy habits; every space accounted for or gaping holes where teeth should have been, holes left open for reasons beyond the owner’s control.

  To find Sandy Herre, he had to go back only seven years. He was lucky she was there. Anything more recent than five had been left with the young dentist who took over his practice.

  Osborne pulled the file and opened it to find a set of full-mouth X rays taken when she was sixteen. Turning toward the light from the doorway, he held up the narrow strip of white cardboard with its small gray black inserts. As he studied the X rays, he could recall Phil Herre’s voice as he, a man of modest means, and his daughter had decided she could live with the slightly crooked lower teeth because the bill for orthodontics would have crippled the family’s finances.

  Lew rose from her chair as Osborne returned to the kitchen, the question in her eyes making them seem even darker. She said nothing as Osborne stopped and looked at her, his right thumb cupping his chin as his index finger pressed against his pursed lips. He cursed his autonomic nervous system as he had so often in his life when emotion reduced him to silence. Feeling his eyes tear up, he cleared his throat, but no sound came out. Where should he start? Sandy was just a kid. Only twenty-three. Younger than his daughters. Phil and Georgia would be devastated. And they were such good people….

  Ray spoke first, laying a firm hand on little Robby’s shoulder, which caused the child to quiet down instantly. Osborne was always amazed at the intuition of young children: Robby’s eyes, watching Osborne, were as worried as his mother’s.

  “Ah, so it is Sandy.” Ray’s deep tones filled the silence. Osborne nodded.

  “Hmm …” Ray looked down at the table as he twisted a curl of his beard; then he glanced around at the group, the easy humor gone from his face. “This will be one tough grave to dig.” His voice was matter-of-fact yet soft in the quiet room. “She was a good … kind … woman.” Ray had a way of drawing out his words when the situation was serious.

  “Good, kind, and dead,” said Lew, with not a little anger in her voice. “Son of a bitch.” She set her coffee mug down hard as she spoke. “Bring that file along, Doc?”

  Osborne nodded.

  She walked past him t
o the door, then gave him a sidelong glance. “Got time to work on this?”

  He nodded again. Funny how life turns on a dime.

  “Ray.” Lew stopped and turned, her right hand resting on her nine-millimeter SIG Saur holster. “Nobody knows that damn swamp better’n you. What’s the best way to get there from here?”

  “The best or the fastest?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Let’s look at a map. Any chance of suicide?” asked Ray, unfolding his long body from the kitchen chair.

  “Nope,” said Osborne, “not unless you can shoot yourself in the back of the head. And, Lew, I suggest you call your bug man right away. If you can get him in to set time of death, you can probably shave two to three days off your billing from the Wausau boys.”

  “Good idea, Doc. Bob Marlett is terrific with maggots, best in the region, and he lives just over in Point. Boy, if I can get him up to the site before we bag the body … well, let’s just hope he’s not on vacation.”

  Marlene, who had been leaning against the kitchen counter behind her son’s chair, suddenly brought both hands to her face and burst into uncontrolled sobbing.

  “Oh, golly,” said Osborne. He set the file down on the table and walked over to fold his arms around her. “There, there.” He patted her heaving shoulders as if she were one of his own daughters. “Marlene … kiddo,” he murmured into her ear, “take it easy. I’ll tell you what. Mallory is driving over from….” He paused, deciding not to tell her where Mallory was coming from. “She’ll be here later today. Why don’t I have her give you a call? You two can catch up. Take your mind off this. How’s that, huh?”

  He looked over at Lew, expecting her to follow his attempt to console the young woman with something reassuringly official like a request for a brief statement. Instead, he found her watching him with a peculiar look on her face. A look that made him acutely aware that he had his arms around a young and attractive woman. It was a look he had never expected and one he would mull over again and again in the coming days, secretly pleased each time.

  five

  “At the outset, the fact should be recognized that the community of fishermen constitute a separate class or subrace among the inhabitants of the earth.”

  Grover Cleveland

  A quick study of the Wisconsin Gazetteer, an atlas of back roads that Osborne kept in his car, along with a suggestion from Ray, pointed them in the direction of an old logging lane running parallel to the abandoned North Central Railroad tracks. With luck, they could park close to the body.

  Lew waited while Osborne double-checked the contents of his black bag, making sure he had all the dental instruments he would need for an on-site exam. He slipped Sandy’s file in, too.

  “Call the Herres, Lew?” he asked before they left the kitchen.

  “Not until I’m absolutely positive.”

  “Doc,” said Ray, walking them out to Lew’s cruiser, “I’ll take care of Marlene and Robby … put their kayak in my truck and give them a ride over to her cottage. But I stopped by for a reason.” Ray thrust his hands into his pockets and looked at Osborne with unsmiling eyes. “I hope you don’t mind; I have a favor to ask for one of my clients.”

  “Sure,” said Osborne, opening the door on the passenger side of the police cruiser and wondering why Ray looked so uneasy.

  “I would like to borrow your Browning, if I may.”

  “My twenty-gauge?” Osborne, who had just bent to climb into the car, straightened up to stare at his friend. Ray knew better than that. The Browning was one of his treasures. He had purchased the Belgian-made side-by-side shotgun with the small inheritance he had received from his father. The Browning was more than a gun; it was a cherished relic. He loaned it to no one, not Erin, not Mallory. Not even the man who had saved his life.

  “What are you doing after you drop off Marlene and Robby?” asked Lew, buying Osborne time to consider the request.

  Ray checked his watch. “It’s ten-thirty now. I have to meet my client at the gun club at one. Doc, it’s that Gabrielle from Dallas. Her fiancé is taking her wing shooting in Ireland, and he has some fancy twenty-thousand-dollar shotgun from Holland & Holland. She wants to impress him, and I had mentioned your Browning—”

  “Do you have time to meet us at the site in half an hour?” interrupted Lew.

  “I can do that.” Between his question and her questions, Ray looked a little discombobulated.

  “Let me think about the gun,” said Osborne, still perplexed by the request. He knew all about the client. Ray had been thrilled to book the flashy Texan who was staying at the exclusive Dairyman’s Association in Boulder Junction. She was paying him a thousand bucks a day for crash courses in walleye fishing, skeet, and shooting clays, courses she hoped would coax a wedding ring out of her billionaire boyfriend. Osborne wavered. If the gun was worth another five or ten thousand for Ray, who could really use the cash, and if it would help to land Hubby Number Four, garnering Ray a serious bonus even, should he be selfish? Ray would take good care of the firearm.

  “All right, all right,” Osborne called out with some reluctance as Ray was opening the door to the back porch, “you can borrow the gun. Take it out of the cabinet while you’re in there. You know where I keep the key.”

  “Thanks, Doc.” Ray smiled and stepped into the house.

  “You sure you want to do that?” asked Lew as she turned the ignition key. “The look on your face—”

  “No,” said Osborne, “I’m not. The last thing I want is that gun in the hands of some overaccessorized blond, but the woman is the best piece of business Ray’s ever landed. I don’t think I told you about her, Lew.

  “Gabrielle Westbrook is a well-preserved divorcée, maybe in her forties, and stalking Husband Number Four—maybe it’s Number Five—who the hell knows with people like that. She called Ray out of the blue two months ago and told him she wants this big-game goombah to think she’s an expert outdoorswoman. Offered to pay him a thousand a day—”

  “A thousand bucks a day?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a lot of money for Ray.”

  “That’s a lot of money for anybody, especially up here … and I owe him, Lew. He’s been there for me when it counted. You know that. So he can have the damn gun.”

  And Lew knew exactly why he owed the younger man.

  Taking cover under an overhang of the Wolf River while trout fishing late one night, they had had to wait nearly an hour for a thunderstorm to pass. An hour during which Osborne had told the story of his wife’s death. He wanted her to know the details of that night because it explained his loyalty to Ray Pradt.

  Lew tended to come down hard on Ray, needling him for his bad jokes, his ill-timed bird calls, and his record of misdemeanors, a lengthy list that included repeated citations for poaching on private land and, at the same time or on other occasions, smoking a popular controlled substance. It was the latter that caused her to balk at deputizing Ray just when he was most needed.

  Lew might deputize Osborne for help in identifying victims and early clues to cause of death, but when she needed a jump on some nogoodnik hunkered down in an abandoned whiskey still somewhere deep in the Northwoods, she would need Ray, arrest record and all. At least Osborne thought so. No one—meaning no one on the police force or in the Loon Lake telephone directory—could cut through woods and cross water like Ray. It was as if he had been born with the instincts of an eagle. It had crossed Osborne’s mind more than once that where Ray’s father had been a cutter of the body, Ray could go to the heart of nature. Unerringly and without fear.

  And so he had taken advantage of the lightning strikes over the Wolf River to make Lew listen. Methodically, as if detailing a new technique for root canals, he had described Mary Lee’s dedicated torture of the young and not-so-innocent fishing guide.

  It started when Ray lucked into ownership of the property next door to the Osbornes’ newly constructed lakeside home because he happened to
be at a grave site, waiting to fill it in, just as the deceased’s heirs discussed their plan to put the land up for sale. Loon Lake being one of Wisconsin’s top five trophy muskie lakes, Ray, shovel in hand, made an offer over and above the asking price.

  Days later, the parking of the “Pradt Mobile,” the scruffy trailer Ray called home, in full view of Mary Lee’s living room picture window, was the catalyst for full-scale warfare. The president of the Loon Lake Garden Club was not going to have that trailer trash ruin “everything I’ve worked for in my life.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating. Over the thirty-eight years of their marriage, Osborne had come to realize that he’d married a woman who prized her possessions above all else, certainly above him. Nor was she happy unless she was in full control of any life that touched hers. This meant she was seldom happy.

  If Osborne had fine-tuned the art of escape through fishing, Mary Lee had turned negativity into her artistic achievement. The most pleasant remark or gesture from her husband—or a friend—was always interpreted as a cover for some hidden, dastardly agenda. Only her daughters were viewed as benign.

  And so it was that Ray met one of the few people who ever hated him.

  He took it on the chin. Where Osborne had learned to duck and cover, Ray stood his ground, a sheepish, amiable grin flitting across his features as Mary Lee conducted herself like Rumpelstilskin, stomping along the property line, hands hard on her hips or fingers jabbing into the air, and all the while shouting demands.

  “I hear you, Mrs. Osborne,” was Ray’s gentle response. Just those words and nothing more. One morning, pushed to the edge by Ray’s refusal to move his trailer and the Oneida County sheriff’s determination that the Pradt Mobile was legally sited, she even called Ray’s heritage into question. At that point, Osborne suggested she quiet down. He reminded her it was Ray’s mother who had proposed Mary Lee for membership in the Rhinelander Garden Club, a group considered more prestigious because it drew from a population ten times the size of Loon Lake.