“We were ashamed of him,” Dustin said.
“We even talked about taking Dad’s last name when we were teenagers—”
“But Mom said we could turn Leder back into a name people respected if we lived by the Golden Rule.”
Smoke nodded. “We’re wondering if your father phoned you recently, so we can track his incoming and outgoing contacts. We didn’t find his cell phone.”
Dustin thought for a moment. “I can’t remember the last time he called.”
“How about e-mail?”
Aaron shook his head. “When we were kids, he said he hated computers. He didn’t have one then, probably still didn’t.”
Smoke jotted that down. “Easy enough to check. Okay, getting back to my original question. You haven’t had much contact with your father for some time, but do you have any idea at all who may have wanted him dead? Enough to do something about it?”
“There are probably a lot of people who aren’t sorry he’s gone. But to actually want him dead?” Dustin shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Dustin, I’ll ask you this first, as a matter of formality. Can you account for your activities this past Saturday, Sunday, and Monday?”
He thought a minute. “Saturday and Sunday, we did a lot of stuff around the house. Laundry, cleaning, washed our trucks. We went fishing both afternoons. And Mom and Dad were out of town, and asked us to take care of some stuff—get their mail, check the house. They have a cat so we made sure she had food and water. During the week we keep a work log from eight to six most days. I’ll check Monday.”
Aaron pulled the log out from its hiding place under the business checkbook, and turned it so we could read it.
Smoke reached down and turned back a page. “Pretty full schedule. What about those evenings?”
“Um, Saturday night we met some guys for a beer at Charlie’s Tavern. Got home about ten, ten-thirty,” Dustin said.
Aaron nodded. “We were in bed by eleven. And Sunday evening we stayed a while at Mom and Dad’s, hung out with their cat.”
Dustin consulted the big calendar on his desk, then looked up. “Monday night. Where were we, Aaron?”
Aaron pulled out his phone and pushed some buttons. “We were at the county meeting about the variance around Lake William.”
“That’s right.”
“So, Dustin and Aaron, you were together those three days?”
Dustin shrugged. “We’re together most of the time. Not all. I mean not when Aaron or I have had a date, but most of the time, I guess.”
“Aaron, you agree with what Dustin said about your activities?”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Dustin, maybe we are together too much.”
“It’s apparent you two get along exceptionally well. And it looks like you’ve worked hard to build your business here.” Smoke pulled out a card and held it out. Dustin took it. “All right. If you think of anything Gage said, or that you overheard over the years that might give us a lead, give me a call.”
They both nodded and Aaron said, “Will do.”
We said our goodbyes and headed out the office door. As we neared the outside door, Smoke stopped and I spotted the reason why. Several pairs of snowshoes were resting in the corner where the small office wall intersected with the north wall of the building.
Smoke handed me his car keys. “I got a box of latex gloves in the trunk. And should have some large garbage bags back there, too. Grab some gloves, bags, and the camera, if you would.”
When I got back with the items, Smoke was in the corner examining the snowshoes. Dustin and Aaron came out of their office.
“What’s going on?” Dustin said.
“These snowshoes belong to you?”
They looked puzzled. Dustin was frowning, Aaron’s eyebrows were raised.
“Ah, yeah. Why?” Aaron said.
“When was the last time you used them?”
Aaron looked to Dustin for the answer. “We have aluminum ones at home we use now. These were some from when Gage used to take us snowshoeing when we were teenagers. Why are you asking about old snowshoes, anyway?”
Smoke faced them. “The suspects used them at the scene.”
Dustin and Aaron had almost identical reactions. They pulled their chins into their necks and blinked in surprise.
“You got three pair here. You know your snowshoes?”
“What do you mean?” Aaron asked.
“Two pair are the tear drop style, and one pair is the bear paw. Is that what you had here? Any missing?”
“No. Well, one pair’s been missing for a long time. We figured Gage had it. When we moved into our own house, we took all the stuff we had stored in Mom and Dad’s garage, including these. We have a lot of storage space here. More than at home,” Dustin said.
“So you were missing a pair before you moved them here? What style?” I asked.
Aaron nodded. “Yeah, a pair of bear paws. But we barely ever used that design anyway. They’re fine if the snow isn’t very deep, but we like to get out when the snow is deeper. The weight of the long tail of the tear drop style brings the front up when you’re walking in deep snow.”
I had never been snowshoeing and didn’t know the different designs were for specific functions. I thought it was all a matter of taste.
Smoke held out his hand to me and I gave him a pair of gloves. He pulled them on with an extra snap. “When did you say you used these last?”
Dustin shrugged. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. It’s been years, I guess. I just don’t know how many.”
Smoke picked up a tear drop snowshoe and turned it to look at the back. “You haven’t used these in the last few days?”
“No,” Dustin said.
“Huh. There’s dirt caught in the crosspieces. You use them to walk across fields?”
“No.”
“Notice these were gone in the last week?”
“No, but why would someone steal them, then bring them back
“Good question. Who has access to your building here?”
“Just about anybody, I guess. It’s open during the day, locked at night.”
“I’ll need to take these in, as evidence.”
Dustin nodded and I helped Smoke bag them up.
CHAPTER 9
Mind if we have a look around your building?” Smoke asked the young men.
Aaron shrugged. “I guess not. But what for?”
“There were other items at the scene which are commonly used in construction projects. If someone borrowed your snowshoes, they may have helped themselves to other things as well.”
The rest of the wind was knocked out of their sails. “Okay,” Dustin said.
Smoke started on one wall, and I started on another. We visually scoured over the piles of materials looking for metal stakes and twine. Halfway down the length of the building, I found a pile of stakes, like the ones used to secure Leder’s body to the ground. I called for Smoke.
He joined me and waved the Leder boys over. “Any idea how many of these stakes you have on hand?”
“Gosh, no. We use them when we fence off an area around a site. Probably fifty. We don’t keep an exact inventory during the year. They get stolen from sites. We count them once a year to see how many have disappeared, you know, for tax purposes,” Aaron said.
“So you wouldn’t miss three or four?”
Dustin shook his head.
“Okay.” Smoke took pictures of the pile, then we continued our search. At the far end of the building was a large assortment of wires, ropes, string, and twine. Most were on rolls, some were loosely tied together.
Smoke picked up a roll of twine that had been cut from. Its end was hanging loose. “I’ll be needing this to check against some twine found at the scene.”
“Sure. Whatever you need,” Dustin said.
Dustin and Aaron watched with bewildered looks on their faces as Smoke took more pictures. We gathered our collected evidence and left them to wonder what was next
.
“They seemed genuinely surprised, I’ll give them that,” Smoke said on the drive back to the office.
“We’re not bringing them in for further questioning?”
“Not at this point. We’ll see if the dirt samples and rawhide slivers match what we got on the snowshoes. It’s all circumstantial, anyway. They don’t lock their building, for heaven’s sake. Anyone could help themselves to whatever they want. It’d never stand up in court. If the snowshoes and twine are a match, we’ll check out their alibis and put a little more pressure on them. See if they know more than they’re letting on.”
“They didn’t say they hated their father.”
“No, but they hated what he did, how he lived.”
“Is that a strong enough motive?”
“I imagine we’ll find out sooner or later.”
Back at the sheriff’s office, we recorded our items and placed them in evidence lockers. Then I phoned major crimes and left a message for Weber and Zubinski. They would be the ones responsible to transport the snowshoes to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to have them tested against the dirt and rawhide fibers found at the crime scene.
We discussed our next steps then Smoke pulled his phone from its holder on his belt. “I’m going to check with daughter Morgan, find out what her schedule is like today. Her mother said she has finals, but I hate to wait to talk to her. She should be able to squeeze us in for a half hour or so.”
“Good luck,” I said as he dialed.
He got Morgan’s voicemail and left a message for her to return the call. “Good luck,” I said again after he hung up.
“While we’re waiting to hear back from Morgan—and no, I’m not holding my breath—let’s pay a visit to Tonya. Besides getting Gage Leder’s banking and cell phone info, I’d like to know more about the meeting, courtship, et cetera. How he managed to wiggle his way into a marriage with her.”
“Maybe the Ashlands will have more to say on that. What time are they coming in?”
“One o’clock. After lunch, and before their afternoon chores. Let’s head out.”
We chatted on the way to Smoke’s car. After we climbed in, he jotted a few notes in his notepad, then started the engine, and we were on our way.
A thought crossed my mind. “Say those snowshoes and that twine match what we found at the scene. If it was someone other than the boys, why would the bad guys use them and then put them back? Why wouldn’t they just ditch them somewhere, or even put them in the trunk with Leder’s possessions?”
“My guess is that they thought they had covered their tracks by using snowshoes in the first place. They knew the ground was hard and maybe thought they wouldn’t leave identifiable prints. The snowshoes certainly disguised their own shoe prints. We have no idea if we’re looking at size eight or size fourteen.”
“I suppose if they put the snowshoes in the trunk with Leder’s body, it’d alert us there was a reason they were there. We could trace them to the scene, and possibly to the owners. However, by borrowing them from the boys, and returning them before the boys realized they were missing, who’s the wiser?”
“I wish I was by now. Wiser.” Smoke tapped the steering wheel.
“Me too. Have you pretty much erased Dustin and Aaron from the list of suspects?”
“Not completely erased. We’ll keep digging, check out their alibis. We have a lot of people who may have wanted Leder out of the picture, but we haven’t uncovered a compelling reason any one of them did anything about it.”
“Those lines are a little blurry in my mind.”
“They are that. We both know people have killed without any reason at all, compelling or not. But this was no random crime. It was carefully planned. Whether it went off exactly as planned, we won’t know until we find out who did it and get a confession.” Smoke turned into Tonya’s driveway and followed the drive to the back of the house.
Chip Ashland and Tonya stood together by the garage. Chip was holding a pair of tear drop snowshoes and Tonya clutched a pair of bear paw snowshoes, one in each hand.
“This is too easy,” Smoke said as he turned off the ignition then hopped out of the car. I caught up to him and we approached Chip and Tonya. Their surprised expressions confirmed they had not expected to be caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
“Wrong season for those,” Smoke said.
CHAPTER 10
Smoke’s phone rang before either Chip or Tonya could respond. He glanced at his phone and said, “Excuse me a minute.” He looked at me. “Hold down the fort. It’s the call we’ve been waiting for from toxicology.”
Smoke walked back to his squad car. The only part of the conversation I heard was, “Detective Dawes,” then he opened his car door and slipped in, preventing us from overhearing anything else.
“We’ll wait until the detective gets back to continue.”
Chip Ashland couldn’t stop himself. “Did something else happen? I was supposed to meet him at one. And Tonya didn’t even have an appointment with him.”
“The detective will explain why we’re here.”
Chip started toward the garage man door with his armload. “Mr. Ashland, I need you to stop. Hang tight for a minute.”
He kept moving. “I was just going to put these away—”
I raised my voice. “I said stop.”
He did. Chip’s eyebrows shot up and his mouth opened slightly like he had something to say, but changed his mind. Tonya looked from me to him, and her lips trembled, like she was about to burst into tears.
“It’s okay, Tonya.”
I heard Smoke’s car door slam and he was at my side a moment later. He half-turned his back to Tonya and Chip and waved his hand for me to do the same.
“They tested for the common illicit substances—marijuana, cocaine, meth, heroin. No drugs in Leder’s system. Not even the one that should have been there to prevent his heart from going into arrhythmia. Either his captors knew about his condition ahead of time and deliberately withheld his meds, or Leder told them he needed his meds, but they refused to give them to him. As far as the needle mark in his arm, whatever drug it was they injected, it was out of his system by the time he died.”
“Since there was only the one needle mark, isn’t it possible it was medical? That he got a shot at the clinic for some reason?”
“In the light of everything that went down shortly thereafter, I’d say it’s possible, not probable. We can check with the doc that prescribed his meds. Back to the business at hand.” He turned to Tonya and Chip. “Tell me, Mr. Ashland, what are you doing with snowshoes at this time of the year?”
Chip shrugged. “Tonya called me because she found these sitting by her garage door and didn’t know why.”
A likely story.
“Gage has snowshoes,” Tonya said.
Smoke pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket and reached for the snowshoes in Tonya’s hands. “Did these belong to your husband?”
“I don’t know. He has some in the garage.”
“Tonya is pretty good about making sure the garage door is locked. At night, for sure.”
Smoke ignored Chip, staying focused on Tonya. “Do you think someone borrowed these and was returning them?”
Tonya shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Smoke turned to Chip. “Was it you? Did you bring these back, but you didn’t have a key so you left them by the door?”
“Why would I borrow snowshoes in the summer? I have my own, anyway. Why are you making such a big deal about this?” Chip’s face was turning pink.
“Two pairs of snowshoes were used in a recent crime. We stop in here and there you are holding snowshoes. It’s curious, don’t you think?”
“I guess it is when you put it that way. What kind of crime?” he asked.
Smoke ignored him again. “Sergeant, grab a couple of evidence bags, will you?”
When I returned with the bags, Smoke was examining the set Chip was holding. �
�You wash these?”
“Wash ‘em?”
“They’re awfully clean.”
“I guess they wouldn’t get dirty walking across snow covered land.”
“No, but they would walking across a plowed field.”
Chip didn’t have an answer to that. If he’d figured out the crime Smoke was referring to, he didn’t let on.
“We need to take these in as evidence. And I’d like to have a look at the ones you own also, Mr. Ashland, with your permission.”
He thought a minute. “Okay, yeah, it’s all right.”
“Can I come too?” Tonya asked.
Smoke looked from Tonya to me. “Actually, Sergeant Corky here wants to talk to you, Tonya, so I’ll go with Chip to his house while she does that, and we’ll see you when we get back.”
“Okay,” Tonya said, staring at me.
We bagged and loaded the sets of snowshoes in Smoke’s trunk, then Chip and Smoke drove off in Smoke’s vehicle.
“Let’s go sit at your kitchen table,” I said to Tonya. We walked side by side to the back door and I followed her in, once again surrounded by a shrine of roosters. I pulled out a chair and sat down on the seat pad of roosters. Tonya sat across from me.
“Tonya, you know we’re working to find out who hurt Gage, and you can help us.”
Her eyes widened. “How?”
“You can tell me two things. First, where did Gage do his banking?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“No statements came in the mail?”
“No. But he didn’t get mail here.”
“Oh? Where did it go?”
“One time I heard him tell someone to send something to his P.O. That means post office.”
“Which post office?”
Tonya shrugged.
“Okay, we’ll check around. How about a cell phone? Did you have his number written down?”
“Uh uh. He said he’d call me so I didn’t have to call him.”
“What about his cell phone company? Did you share a plan?”
The Noding Field Mystery Page 8
