Dead Loudmouth Read online

  “I have no idea,” said Ty, waving the world away with one hand as his shoulders slumped. “I may never know because I’m going to lose my job over this.”

  “No, you won’t, Ty Wallis,” said Lew. “If you’ve been honest with me about these shenanigans—and I think you have—I will make it clear to those gentlemen that the only way to keep their names out of the press going forward will be to cooperate with our investigation. Cooperation is critical if the Deer Creek Fishing and Hunting Preserve wants to salvage their reputation in the midst of this mess.”

  Ty threw her a doubtful glance. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m not right, I’m serious. If any one of those three men gives you any trouble,” said Lew, “you call me ASAP. They should have reported the fraud the moment they saw it happening and not have enlisted you to cover up their foolishness.”

  A loud knocking on the wall near the hallway caused everyone to turn around. A tall, gangly man in khaki fishing shorts, a red T-shirt, and two cameras with long zoom lenses slung around his neck stood waving at them. Bright dark brown eyes over a full head of auburn curls with sideburns that met in a tangled full beard gave him the air of a friendly bear loping their way.

  “Where do you want me to start, Chief Ferris?” asked the man, an individual familiar to Osborne and Lew, as he walked through the Entertainment Center. He had long, tan legs that seemed never to end. Osborne’s buddies at McDonald’s liked to kid the thirty-two-year-old college dropout that his lower appendages entered a room at least a day before the rest of his long, lanky body.

  “Better that than your beer bellies,” Ray would respond with a cheerful wink.

  As he neared, it was easy to read the bold white lettering on his T-shirt:

  Romance, Excitement, and Live Bait

  Get it all fishing with Ray

  “What is he doing here?” Before anyone could say a word, Ty Wallis was racing across the room shouting, “Goddammit, I told you to stay off the preserve property—”

  “Hold on,” said Lew, running after Ty and grabbing him by one arm, “this is one of my deputies, Ray Pradt. He’s here to help with the investigation.”

  “A deputy? This commode a deputy? You got to be kidding me.” Ty’s face was turning redder by the minute. “I’ve kicked this . . . this . . . whoever he is . . . off our lakes so many times. Do you have any idea how many of our trophy walleyes he’s poached?”

  “Yes,” said Lew, “I believe I do. But Buddy’s Place is not on the Deer Creek Preserve. It may be a crime scene and I have deputized this man. So, Ty, please settle down. Ray is the best tracker north of Mexico and I may need his eyes and ears today.”

  Ty’s eyes widened as she spoke and turning back to stare at the elevated piano, he said, “You mean this wasn’t an accident?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” said Lew, “but I’ve observed enough this morning that I’ve had good reason to request the expertise of both the Wausau Crime Lab and Ray Pradt so I can be sure that we get an accurate picture of what happened here.”

  “But this idiot—”

  “I know, I know,” said Lew. “Please, be assured I know who I am working with and why. Now if you will leave us alone, I need to give direction here.”

  Reaching for her walkie-talkie, she buzzed Roger. “Officer Adamczak, would you please come into the main room here? I’d like you to escort all the folks here out to the foyer so I can speak in private with Ray and Doc. Thank you.”

  Grudgingly, Ty Wallis joined Fred, Joyce, and Karen to head down the hallway with Roger. Watching them go, Osborne caught Lew’s eye. They exchanged a hint of a smile. Neither of them could blame Ty for his frustration with Osborne’s neighbor.

  The misdemeanor file on Ray Pradt was one that Police Chief Lewellyn Ferris sometimes felt she kept for entertainment. His record of poaching on private water extended back to when he was age ten and her predecessor had questioned him one morning after he had begged to have a trophy walleye he had caught displayed in the windowed ice chest that sat on the sidewalk outside Ralph’s Sporting Goods.

  “Tell me, son, where did you catch that fish?” asked the chief of the Loon Lake Police, peering into the ice chest at the impressive fish. “I haven’t seen a walleye that big since old man Carstenson stocked his pond. Sure you weren’t fishing over at his place?”

  Ray had made the mistake of taking a young neighbor, Robbie, fishing with him that morning. Robbie, only eight years old, was standing guard at the ice chest and so excited to have been fishing with his hero that when he heard the police officer’s question, he jumped to answer. Before Ray could say a word, Robbie had piped up, “Oh, Chief Sloan, it was so exciting. I got one, too, but not as big as Ray’s.”

  “Really”—the chief of police had turned to Robbie—“remember where that was?”

  “Sure do. We rode our bikes out to Perch Lake Road, turned right, and then we just followed the No Trespassing signs.” Robbie’s grin faded when he saw his good buddy invited to take a ride in the officer’s squad car.

  While Ray never lost his proclivity for finding fine fish in all the wrong places, in his twenties and timed with the launch of his guiding service, he learned to avoid most felony behavior patterns: He kept his indulgence in cannabis to a minimum and a dangerous dalliance with alcohol was cut short thanks to a stint in rehab. On the other hand, his addiction to dumb jokes never abated.

  What made him valuable to the Loon Lake Police Department, in spite of the poaching relapses, was his talent for tracking bear, deer, grouse—and humans (lost, fleeing, or catastrophically down on their luck, as in dead)—through the forests of northern Wisconsin. The McDonald’s coffee crowd might boo his jokes but no one challenged the fact that he had the eyes of an eagle.

  Ray may have been born into one of Loon Lake’s “good families,” the son of a respected physician with an older brother who became a surgeon and a sister who was a renowned litigator in Chicago, and destined for an Ivy League education, but it was the lakes, rivers, and tall timbers that filled his heart. He survived high school only to flunk out of college. Happily.

  Instead he spent his late teens and twenties harvesting wisdom from the old hermits who lived down back roads, men who had learned that the secret for surviving nature at her angriest was to live in solitude and subsist on what they could catch, shoot, or trap. And so it was that Ray Pradt found himself mentored by the shrewdest trackers in the Northwoods: men as cunning as their prey. He never forgot a lesson.

  While the misdemeanor file expanded over time the new pages benefited the Loon Lake Police in an unexpected way: Ray strayed far enough from what was legal by game warden standards that he earned familiarity if not a dubious respect from other miscreants; i.e. a pipeline of contacts privy to truth behind rumor.

  When Roger’s group had disappeared down the hall, Ray turned to Lew and said, “Sorry, Chief, didn’t mean to upset that guy.”

  “Forget it,” said Lew, “and don’t worry about taking photos. Bruce Peters is on his way up from Wausau with one of his colleagues. They can handle photographing the scene here.

  “What I need you to do is . . .” She paused and motioned for Osborne to join her and Ray at the far side of the room. After walking Ray to the front of the Entertainment Center, Lew explained what he would find on the piano once he went up the narrow stairway.

  “Please do not touch or move a thing,” she reminded him. “The Wausau boys are on their way and Bruce wants nothing disturbed. Nothing. That’s why I haven’t had the piano lowered beyond where the EMTs left it.”

  Ray nodded in understanding. “Hey, so our man, Bruce, will be up? I owe him an afternoon on my boat once this fishing tournament is over. Tell that razzbonya to hang around, will you?”

  “Good luck with that,” said Lew. “He’s got his work cut out here. Now, Ray”—she pointed to the footprints on the workbench—“see those? I need you to see if you can find more outside.”

  “I see, I see, and say . .
. not . . . another word.”

  Raising his right hand, Ray spoke in a pattern of pausing before uttering critical words: a pattern designed, Osborne was convinced, to hold his audience hostage until he deigned to deliver valuable insights (valuable by his standards, that is). “I . . . will scour . . . the landscape. Lucky for you . . . it rained hard two days ago so . . . chances are . . . we got g-o-o-o-d sign out there. If . . . there is sign . . . to be . . . got.

  “But . . . I want to shoot those footprints. I’ll need an image for comparison . . . with what I may . . . or may not . . . find . . . outdoors. Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” said Lew.

  Ray checked his watch. “Whoops. Got to be somewhere pretty darn soon. I’ll get to work right away.”

  Funny, thought Osborne, when Ray had a deadline in his world his speech sped up. Oh well.

  “I got a meeting with my fishing team at five this afternoon,” said Ray.

  “Say, Doc”—he turned to Osborne, who was waiting at the bottom of the stairs—“you’ll have Mason out at my place by four, won’t you? I have to show her the tackle, tell her what her job is. Did you know she’s working for me?”

  “She’ll be there,” said Osborne, not sure how he was going to manage that and meet with Tiffany Niedermeier’s mother, but he knew he’d have to make it work somehow.

  Lew must have seen the expression on his face. “I’ll make sure Doc has her there on time.”

  “Okay.” Ray stepped off the stairs with a final glance up. “So that’s Tiffany Niedermeier, huh. Jeez . . . last time I saw her she was dancing at Thunder Bay with no visible means of upper-body support. Wonder what she was doing here?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Walking out of the building with Ray, Lew and Osborne were greeted with a scene of controlled chaos: though Roger and his four charges remained inside the foyer, outside was the crowd of bystanders, which had doubled since Lew had arrived. Added to the increasing number of people and vehicles was a large SUV from the local television station.

  Lew waved away a woman reporter carrying a microphone and in the midst of setting up a tripod for her camera with a simple, “Sorry, miss. Not till we’ve notified next of kin. We’re still trying to find out what happened here.” She turned her head to one side and muttered under her breath to Osborne, “So much for Ty wanting to keep this out of the press.”

  She was in the midst of saying, “No, I am not at this time prepared to make an official statement of any kind—” when an unmarked car followed by a large white unmarked van pulled into the parking lot beside her police cruiser: Bruce Peters, a colleague named Rich, and the two men who would retrieve the victims’ bodies had arrived.

  “Welcome to Loon Lake,” said Lew to the newcomers as she herded them into the building and away from inquisitive ears. “This is one of our top tourist attractions: Buddy’s Place. I’m kidding. It’s a gentlemen’s club that has only been open a few months.”

  Once inside she gave all four men a brief description of what they would find in the Entertainment Center and the names of the victims. After walking them down the hallway to the Entertainment Center, she and Osborne stood quietly at the back of the room while the four took in the scene. “No one has moved that piano since you got here, correct?” asked Bruce.

  “With the exception of Joe Teske, the paramedic who wore gloves and lowered it enough to be sure he didn’t have an injured individual needing emergency transport, the answer is yes—no one has moved it, Bruce.”

  On hearing her answer, Rich moved forward with his camera to begin documenting the layout of the room while Lew used her walkie-talkie to ask Roger to send Joyce down the hall to meet with them.

  When Joyce arrived Lew motioned toward Bruce as she said, “Joyce, this is Bruce Peters and he is a senior forensics expert with the Wausau Crime Lab. He will have plenty of questions for you so please share everything you know.

  “Bruce, this is Joyce Harmon. She is the janitor for Buddy’s Place and the Deer Creek Fishing and Hunting Preserve next door. Joyce cleans here in the mornings and called this in right after she arrived this morning. She is also the person who knows the most about the operation of the piano. She handles all the maintenance on it. Correct, Joyce?” The woman nodded.

  “One of the men back in the foyer with Officer Adamczak, the guy with the buzz cut wearing dark green, is Joyce’s boss. That’s Fred Smith and he is the head of maintenance for the Deer Creek Preserve and this place.” Lew dropped her voice. “My guess is Joyce does all the work here.”

  “Good, good,” said Bruce, eyebrows bouncing with excitement.

  A tall, muscular man in his late thirties, he was clean-cut but with black hair and a thick black mustache that matched heavy eyebrows: eyebrows that refused to hide what he was thinking. “You would make a terrible undercover cop,” Lew once told him. “I can tell what you’re thinking just by watching those eyebrows jump.” But if Bruce’s feelings were at times too transparent, his attention to detail was impeccable.

  “First thing, Mrs. Harmon—” he said with a notebook out as he faced Joyce.

  “Joyce, just call me Joyce.”

  “All right, Joyce, if you will wait over there.” He motioned to a nearby table. “I see Chief Ferris has marked off a walkway for us so we won’t contaminate anything and if you will wait there, I’ll be over to get your prints right away.”

  “Why?” Joyce looked alarmed. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Didn’t Chief Ferris say you know how to operate the hoist for the piano?”

  “Well, yes but—”

  “I will need your prints in order to determine who is the most recent person to have raised or lowered the piano as well as someone who is expected to have operated the apparatus on a regular basis. Isn’t it likely you raised and lowered the piano while lubricating it or maybe just cleaning things up recently?”

  “Yes, of course. I lubricated the pulleys last Saturday.”

  “Well, then, I need your fingerprints. Does your boss work with the piano?”

  “No, never.”

  “Excuse me, Bruce,” said Lew, reaching for his arm to pull him off to one side of the room and away from Joyce. She motioned for him to bend down so she could speak low enough to keep their conversation out of Joyce’s hearing. “One more thing—the other man waiting in the foyer with Roger, besides Fred Smith, is the manager of the Deer Creek Fishing and Hunting Preserve and the woman standing with them is the widow of . . .” And she pointed up at the piano. “Doc needs to get information from her for the death certificate. Is it okay if I leave you here with Joyce while Doc and I take care of that?”

  “Please tell her that I’ll need to see her when you’re finished,” said Bruce.

  “Will do. Then after we finish with Karen Wright, Bruce, Doc and I have to leave to notify the mother of the female victim of the fact her daughter is no longer alive. That has to happen as soon as possible. Not sure how long that will take but I’ll return immediately afterward.

  “In the meantime, I have instructed Ray Pradt to secure a one-mile radius around this property.”

  Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “Why is that?”

  “S-s-h,” said Lew, urging him to lower his voice. “You’ll see when you look behind the curtain over there to the right. We found sandy footprints on top of the workbench that’s up against the outside wall and under the window. Could be old but I think the sand looks like it might still be wet. Hard for me to tell.”

  Outside again, Lew saw Ray studying the terrain around the large trash bins. She heard him call to Osborne, who was about to follow her in his car. “Don’t forget, Doc, I have to have Mason at my place by four if not earlier, okay?” Osborne waved assurance as he climbed into his Subaru.

  • • •

  Irene Niedermeier lived on the west side of Rhinelander on a street of homes built nearly a hundred years ago for executives at the paper mill, homes significantly larger, grander, than the boxy single-st
ory ones six blocks away and destined for mill laborers. Those houses hugged the loading zones and cowered under fumes not yet regulated by the EPA.

  A paved walkway wound past a border of blooming white and coral impatiens and led to a heavy wooden door set inside rock and stone walls and tucked snugly under a cedar-shingled roof: an elegant façade. Lew reached for the brass lion’s head adorning the door and knocked. The woman who answered was as elegant as her home.

  She had the prominent cheekbones and fair skin that signaled Scandinavian heritage. Her silver hair was pulled tight into a bun with not a wisp out of place. She wore light makeup, a pale blue dress, modest beige heels, and simple gold studs in her ears. She impressed Osborne as someone who dressed with care every day and kept a pristine household. He wasn’t sure they had the right house.

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman before Lew could open her mouth, “but don’t you see that sign in the yard? No solicitors.” With a firm push, she shut the door so hard it nearly hit Lew in the face. Lew knocked again.

  “What is it?”

  Setting all etiquette aside, Lew spoke fast. “I am Lewellyn Ferris, chief of the Loon Lake Police, and I am here about your daughter.”

  The woman stared at her for a brief instant before saying, “I don’t have a daughter.” The door shut.

  “I better check the address again, Lew. Sorry about this,” said Osborne as they walked back toward their cars. They hadn’t gone twenty feet when the door opened behind them.

  “All right,” said the woman in a blunt tone. “That’s not the case, but I haven’t seen my daughter in twenty years. Well,” she shifted her eyes to one side, “that’s not exactly true either. She did call me a few years ago. But she didn’t come to her father’s funeral and I don’t want to see her. If she’s in trouble that’s her problem.”

  Lew walked back up to the entryway saying, “She’s not in trouble. May Dr. Osborne and I come in for a few minutes? We have important personal news to share with you. You are Irene Niedermeier, mother of Tiffany Niedermeier—am I correct?”