“I don’t have a cell phone.”
“Do you know the company he used? His provider?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Do you have caller ID? You know, that would show his number?”
“No. He never called me.”
“Never?” I glanced down at my memo pad while I mentally processed that.
“Uh uh.”
“Okay, then let’s talk about Gage. Tell me how you met.”
Tonya slid to the right side of her chair, then back again. “He started coming to my church. He brought Morgan—that’s his daughter—to our Bible studies. Once he brought me home, then he started visiting sometimes.” She smiled shyly. “One time he kissed me and I liked it. I haven’t had many boyfriends. Only a few before my brain got hurt.”
“When was that, Tonya? When did you get hurt?”
“I was eighteen.” She counted on her fingers. “Eight years ago. Mama and Papa died, then.”
“I’m very sorry about that. And you lived here alone until you married Gage?”
She thought a moment. “No. First I was in the hospital, then I went to Chip and Gina’s. But I wanted to be in my own house again, so they helped me. They got someone to help me clean and cook until I could do that on my own. I had ther-py.”
“What did your cousin say when you said you were getting married?”
“Chip wondered if it was a good idea, then he got happy about it for a while, because I was happy. But then he didn’t like Gage at all. I’m not sure about Gina. It seemed like she liked Gage fine.”
“Why didn’t Chip like Gage?”
“Chip said Gage spent too much of my money. Gage said he loved me and wanted to take care of me, but Chip said he didn’t always act like he loved me. Like because he was gone so much.”
I knew Tonya had an identification-only card. “You don’t drive?”
“Uh uh. I’m too scared. I was driving when my mama and papa died. I guess I didn’t see a truck and I pulled out on the highway. The other side of my car got hit. The side my parents were sitting on. I don’t ’member any of it, but that’s what they told me.”
I nodded and waited a moment before changing the subject with my next question. “You knew Gage’s daughter, Morgan, from church. Did you see her outside of church?”
Tonya shook her head.
“When was the last time you saw Morgan?”
“I don’t ’member. Gage said she was away at college.”
“Was Gage still going to church with you?”
“Uh uh.”
No surprise there.
“Tell me about finding the snowshoes this morning.”
“It scared me. I didn’t know why someone would be here without telling me. Chip thought maybe someone who knew Gage was bringing them back.”
Someone like Chip? Didn’t he have a key to Tonya’s garage?
“Did you ever go snowshoeing with Gage?”
She shook her head, then her eyes wandered as she looked at nothing in particular. It seemed our official conversation was over, so I switched to casual topics until Smoke returned with Chip.
CHAPTER 11
We’re in snowshoe hell. Everyone and his brother have a bunch of pairs laying around,” Smoke said as he backed out of Tonya’s driveway with me in the passenger seat.
His uncharacteristic lament made me snicker. “Even my mother has some in her barn. This is Minnesota. Land of ten thousand snowflakes every other day all winter long.”
Smoke chuckled. “Like I said, everyone and his brother, or sister, if you will, has some.”
“So the pair at Ashland’s doesn’t match either pattern of the ones found at the scene?”
“Afraid not. Ashland has an aluminum pair, a modified bear paw design with a different cross pattern altogether.” He picked up his digital camera from the center counsel and handed it to me. “Take a look.”
I turned it on. “No sign of the transport sled?”
“No. That’d be a good piece of evidence. Of course, our suspects were so thorough in cleaning Leder’s car, and probably the snowshoes, all trace evidence would likely be washed away. But there’d be some distinguishing characteristics.”
“We can still match the track pattern.”
“Yeah, that we can do. And we have the fiber evidence to match to the snowshoes.”
I scanned through one hundred or more photos of the crime scene, the Leder brothers’ shed, the snowshoes left in Tonya’s yard, and those hanging in Chip’s barn. “Chip’s are distinctively different.”
“Which still does not remove Ashland from the list of suspects. He could have the matching pair hidden somewhere, or used the ones he was trying to put back in Tonya’s garage. ”
“Is he near the top of your list?”
“I can’t say that. Maybe I’m not being objective enough here. Maybe I’m thinking how I’d feel if a guy was taking advantage of someone I loved. But I keep coming back to the strange scene of staking Leder out in a field, naked no less. There is a significance there to someone.”
Smoke’s phone rang. “Detective Dawes. . . . Yes, Morgan, our sympathies to you. . . . My partner and I would like to meet with you, ask a few questions. . . . What does your schedule look like later this afternoon? . . . Five is fine with us.” Smoke lifted his hand partially off the steering wheel and indicated a writing motion. He repeated Morgan’s address out loud and I jotted it on my memo pad.
“Good,” he said when he hung up.
“I’m glad she called. It shows she has respect for the law. How did she sound? Upset?”
“She did. Gage Leder may not have been a good person, but he was her father. I’m sure she wants to know what happened if anyone does.”
“Dustin and Aaron weren’t overly curious.”
“Let’s chalk that up to being in shock for now. They did say they went to work because they didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s true.”
“Oh, I gotta touch base with Weber and Zubinski, tell them the pairs of snowshoes they need to take to the BCA are multiplying.” He made the call to major crimes and left another message.
“They’ll need a larger transport vehicle if we find any more.” I thought about the autopsy and toxicology report. “Smoke, why didn’t you tell Tonya and Chip about Leder’s cause of death?”
“I didn’t want Ashland to know until we talked to him, officially. Tonya may or may not have known about Leder’s condition. I’m guessing not. We have his cause of death, but we still don’t know the manner. We can pretty much rule out natural means, at any rate. What we don’t know is, was it an intentional homicide, or an accident?”
“Like they set out to scare him, he dies, then they put his body on display in the field as a warning?”
Smoke’s shoulder went up in a half shrug. “And what kind of warning? Whoever did it must have known that the field belonged to his sister and brother-in-law, and I’m wondering about the significance there.”
“So it could be they wanted Willie Noding to find Leder’s body for a reason? Somebody had it in for both of them?”
“That’d make more sense if they had business dealings together, but Willie strikes me as an up-and-up guy.”
“Yeah.”
“You got Donna Noding’s number?”
I pulled my memo pad from my breast pocket and found it for him.
Smoke handed me his cell phone “Go ahead and dial it, and I’ll talk to her. I’ll give her the toxicology report.”
Donna picked up on the second ring and I passed the phone back to Smoke. They talked for several minutes about the report. When he hung up, Smoke said, “She’s grateful we’re keeping her in the loop. Whether she liked her brother, or not, she says deep down she still loved him.”
Smoke pulled into the sheriff’s department lot and parked. “I need to take care of some things at my desk, then we’ll see what we can squeeze out of old Chipper and his wife.”
The sheriff’s receptionist at
the front window called me on the squad room phone at twelve-fifty to say Chip and Gina Ashland had arrived. I went to meet them and introduced myself to Gina, nodded at Chip, then escorted them to the interview room to wait for Smoke. When I asked them to be seated at the table, Chip pulled a chair out for his wife. After she sat down, he did too. He crossed his arms on his chest and stared at his knees. Gina fixated on me.
“We do feel bad about what happened to Gage,” she said.
Chip raised his eyebrows and gave Gina a side look indicating that wasn’t quite true.
“This is my first time inside a sheriff’s department. Everyone seems really busy,” Gina said.
“There’s usually quite a bit going on around here,” I said.
Smoke opened the door wearing a mild frown. “Thanks for coming in.” He squeezed past me, tossed a half inch thick file on the table, and sat down across from the Ashlands. I pulled a chair to the end of the table and slid onto it. After paging through a few papers in the file, Smoke closed it, straightened in his chair, and looked at Chip.
“Tell me the story. How your cousin came to marry Gage Leder. What you knew about him.”
Chip repeated what we already knew: Tonya had met Gage at church and managed to convince all of them how much he loved her and wanted to take care of her, protect her.
“What do you know of his sister and her husband? Donna and William Noding.”
“I know who they are, but haven’t met them.”
“No family gatherings?”
Chip made a face.
“Farm gatherings?”
“No. I’ve maybe seen them at the county fair, I don’t know.”
“Seems to me you would have talked to them about Gage Leder’s behavior.”
“What for? I blame myself for being a fool in the first place. I think a lot of it was selfishness on my part,” he said.
“How so?” Smoke said.
“Having Gage take over would lift some weight off my shoulders. You know, making sure Tonya was all right. But it didn’t turn out that way. He turned out to be a bigger burden.”
“Must be a relief, now that burden’s gone.”
“I can’t lie about that.”
Smoke looked at Gina. “And you, Mrs. Ashland, what was your take on Gage Leder’s involvement with Tonya?”
“I was like Chip—optimistic. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t see his true character until it was too late.”
Smoke nodded. “And, like your husband, you’re relieved he’s gone.”
She shrugged slightly. “Yes and no. We were hoping to convert him, help him reform. Come to know Jesus as his personal savior. Now it’s too late for that.” Gina reached for her husband’s hand. He wrapped both his hands around hers and nodded.
“A lotta people had cause to hate Gage Leder. Is there anyone you witnessed him talking to, any conversations you overheard that might have seemed suspicious? Any names of anyone you recall him using?” Smoke poised his pen, ready to write.
Both Chip and Gina shook their heads. “No, but we hired a private investigator to follow him for a couple of days.”
Smoke’s eyebrows went up. “Oh. When was that?”
“Last month.”
“Anything interesting pop up?”
Chip leaned forward, withdrew an envelope from his back pocket, and handed it to Smoke.
“Pictures of two of the women he was seeing. Two days, two different women.”
Smoke pulled out the photos, visually scanned them like he was committing the images to memory, and passed them to me. “And the names to go with the snapshots?”
“Yeah. Lynn Gibbons and Trina Novak. First one—the blonde—is married. Second one is barely eighteen, we found out. Younger than his own daughter.”
“What’d you do with this information?” Smoke asked.
“We tried to explain it to Tonya, but she didn’t want to listen. We’d hoped it’d convince her to file for divorce. We talked to Leder and he just laughed.”
“That must have made you angry.”
“About as steamed as I’ve ever been in my life.” Chip’s voice rose a decibel.
“What’d you do then?”
“I got out of there right away. Before I did something I’d regret.”
“So you’ve had a month to think about this. The way Leder added insult onto injury.”
Chip frowned. “We wanted him gone, not dead, necessarily. Certainly not enough to ruin our own lives getting rid of him. And as my wife—who is much more devout than I am—said, we hoped he’d turn from his wicked ways before it was too late.”
CHAPTER 12
Usually I like when a door or window opens in a case, but at every turn we add another twist. This is the most damn complicated thing I’ve worked for about as long as I can remember. Two more names: recent lovers. I’ll turn them over to Edberg.” Smoke gathered the file papers together.
“I wonder, why didn’t Ashland tell us about hiring the private eye right off the bat?” I said.
“Two reasons I’ve learned over the years. Know-ledge is power, and ‘what I know, but they don’t know can’t get me into trouble.’ In Ashland’s case, I’d say it’s a case of the latter. He’s got about as much motive of anyone on our list so far, and he’s smart enough to know that.”
“In his favor, even though it makes him look suspicious, Ashland hasn’t tried to hide his animosity toward Gage Leder.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“And I don’t think his wife would have anything to do with leaving Leder’s body out in the field like that.”
“Could be she’s a good liar, or could be Ashland had a different accomplice. Say, Willie Noding.”
“Willie Noding? Chip and Willie both acted like they didn’t know each other.”
“Good word. Acted.”
St. Catherine’s College was in St. Paul, about forty-five miles from Oak Lea. We battled afternoon rush hour traffic, which added about thirty minutes to the drive. Smoke had factored in fifteen extra minutes, not thirty, and phoned Morgan Leder to tell her we were running behind.
“I would never have the patience to do this every day,” Smoke said.
I looked at the profiles of drivers as we passed them. “You mean commute?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why audio books are so popular. If I commuted, I’d get tapes, listen to the books I haven’t had time to read, maybe learn a foreign language.”
“That’s an idea. I should get some language tapes for my road trips. Brush up on my German. See what I remember from high school.”
“I took French and haven’t spoken it since. I remember a little. I could tell a French guy I loved him. Je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime. Je t’aime. No wonder they call it the language of love. Sounds more romantic than the German version, ‘Ich liebe dich.’ ”
“I bet it sounds good to another German.”
“I bet it does.”
Morgan asked that we meet her at the coffee shop on the second floor of the Coeur de Catherine building. She had given Smoke detailed directions, so it was easy to find.
When Morgan spotted us, she stood and waited for us to reach her. The first thing that struck me about her was the single frown line between her eyes. It was already forming a wrinkle on her young, otherwise smooth and striking face. She was a younger version of her mother, in looks and stature.
Morgan was polite when we exchanged introductions, then sat down at the square cafeteria table, and set her coffee cup down in front of her.
“Do you want anything to eat or drink? They have great fruit smoothies here,” she said.
Smoke had a coffee and I had a water on the ride in. “No, thanks,” he said as I shook my head.
“I should tell you, my mom’s not happy about this. She wanted to drive down here, but I said, ‘what for?’” Morgan looked at me and shrugged. “I am an adult, after all.”
I could relate. My mother would feel the same way if I wer
e eighteen and in Morgan’s shoes.
“We’re sorry about what happened to your father, Morgan,” Smoke said in his deep, soothing tone.
Her frown eased slightly and she looked at her cup as she wrapped both hands around it. “Thanks. It doesn’t seem real. It’s like one of those creepy cases they have on one of those CSI shows, which I don’t watch because, eew, all that gore.”
“You should know that even though the circumstances were not natural, your father died of natural causes. Did you know about his heart condition?”
Her frown line deepened again and her eyebrows lifted. “No, I didn’t.”
“He had a condition called supra ventricular tachycardia. He died from arrhythmia.”
“So did my grandpa. But I don’t get it. I thought someone killed him and tied him up out in that field, so like the wild animals would eat him.”
Was that what someone told her, or was it her imagination’s interpretation of the crime?
Smoke resisted smiling at her take on it. “Huh. Well, we don’t know why he was taken to your aunt and uncle’s land after he died, but when we catch whoever is responsible, hopefully we’ll get the answer to that.”
Morgan studied her coffee cup, processing the new information.
After giving her a minute, Smoke broke the silence. “What are you studying here?”
“Nursing.” A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “I guess not everyone can handle what nurses do, either. But I don’t mind. I’m sort of following in my stepmom’s footsteps.”
We knew which stepmother she meant, but Smoke said, “Oh. Who’s that?”
“Rennie. The only one of my father’s wives who was around very long. I mean, I’m pretty close to Bridget too, but more because she’s my friend Lea’s mom than because she was married to my dad for like five minutes.”
“Any idea what happened to end their marriage so quickly?”
Morgan didn’t answer right away. “Yes, but it’s not up to me to say. It’s personal.”
Check. But Smoke let it go. For the time being. “You still keep in touch with Rennie?”
The Noding Field Mystery Page 9
