The Noding Field Mystery

by Christine Husom

  “And what about the importance of Gage being a youth group leader? A man you described as ‘having no morals’. A man who married a disabled adult woman who was in that group.”

  “The important thing was that Gage lasted a very short time there. The truth about it is, as soon as he married me, that leader role lost its charm. I told you, he could pretend to be the kind of person he needed to be to get what he wanted.”

  “I know Gage Leder is a sensitive subject for you, but it saves the taxpayers money when people come clean with information and don’t act like they’re holding out on us.”

  She nodded. “Sorry.”

  “Anything else you’ve thought of?”

  She shook her head.

  I got back to the courthouse at two-thirty and headed straight for the conference room where our phone records team had added dates and initials under the ones on the row under Gage Leder’s initials and last known phone number. “More progress,” I said.

  “Getting there. I got a call from the Daviess County Sheriff in Kentucky a few minutes ago, and they will have Rennie’s work records checked by tomorrow and forwarded to us. And the principal at Bridget’s school has been sorting out the calls to and from her direct line, and will hopefully have that done by tomorrow as well. He looked at Edberg. “Bob, tell her what you found out about Sheila Walker.”

  “I called the nursing home where her mother-in-law lives, and several nurses and nursing assistants remembered her husband being there, sitting with his mother, but nobody remembered seeing her there.”

  “You’re kidding. Her boys said they took care of her cat because they were both out of town.”

  “So she wasn’t home. We just don’t know where she was at this point. I stopped by her house, but no one was there.”

  I looked at Smoke. “Maybe we can try her again on the way back from Allandale.”

  “Sure.”

  I glanced at the piles. “We’ve got an hour until we need to leave, so direct me to a stack.”

  Smoke pointed, and I sat down and started circling. At three-thirty, he said, “We’ll wrap things up for today. Trudy, Kate, we surely do appreciate your help. I think you’re even faster than old Bob here.”

  Edberg’s lips tugged up a tad and he shook his head. “The pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Let’s gather up the completed piles and put them on my desk.” We all helped, and followed Smoke to the detectives’ cubicles in the sheriff’s department. One by one we set the piles down. Trudy laid the first pile straight, Kate laid the next one sideways on top of the first, and so on.

  When we’d unloaded all the records, Trudy and Kate returned to their desks for the last hour of their workday, Edberg headed off to communications to check on the status of the cemetery camera, and Smoke and I left for Allandale. It was my turn to drive. Smoke phoned Larry Vaccaro on the way over. Larry said he was home and would help us access Gosser’s apartment if we needed him to.

  CHAPTER 20

  Leanne Gosser did not answer her door for the second day in a row, so Smoke tracked down Larry and his master key. Larry was in his forties, small and wiry. He fiddled with his ring of keys until he found the one he needed. He knocked once for good measure, then called out, “Leanne, it’s Larry. Are you home? I’m coming in to check.”

  He keyed the lock and opened the door. The smell of death hit us all in the face, and Larry started gagging. He pulled his tee shirt up over his mouth and nose. I held my breath for as long as I could then let air in slowly to take in as little of the odor as possible.

  Leanne Gosser’s tiny body was lying face up on the couch, starkly white against the brown leather. She was wearing a silky lavender nightgown. Her eyes were closed and her feet were bare. Her arms were at her sides, palms cupped, like she was expecting something to be dropped into them. A wheelchair sat next to the couch.

  The apartment was simply decorated and tidy. One entire wall was lined with shelves filled with videos in brown cases. There was no visible, obvious sign of a break-in or an assault. Smoke and I automatically reached for the latex gloves in our pockets and pulled them on.

  After taking in the scene, the color in Larry’s face drained until it was nearly as pale as Leanne’s. “I’ll be outside,” he said as he backed out of the apartment.

  “Well, this is a helluva deal,” Smoke said. “Got any menthol on you?”

  “In the car. I’ll call this in, and be right back.” Larry was sitting on a molded plastic chair under a nearby tree. He was bent over, holding his face in his hands. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  He looked up at me and nodded. I radioed communications as I opened my trunk and dug through a bag. “Six-oh-eight, Winnebago County.”

  “Six-oh-eight,” Robin answered.

  “Requesting that major crimes and the coroner respond to fourteen hundred Jackson Street in Allandale.”

  “Ten-four, at sixteen-oh-nine.”

  I found the tin of mentholated ointment and swiped some under my nose then grabbed my 35mm camera. I closed the trunk, took a quick look at Larry, and headed back inside. My phone rang as I stepped into the apartment. “Sergeant Aleckson. . . . Yes, Sheriff. . . . We don’t know yet.” I handed Smoke the tin. He took a generous amount, wiped it around his nose then dropped the tin in his pocket. He held up his hand for my phone. “Sheriff, Dawes wants to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, Gosser has been dead for a while. Maybe since last night. She’s got south windows, and they’re all closed up tight, but even with the curtains drawn, it’s very warm in here.” Smoke looked around until he spotted the thermostat on a wall. He walked over and read the number. “Seventy-eight degrees. . . . It’s not obvious, and at this point I wouldn’t want to guess. But it seems an unlikely coincidence she died naturally. And less than two weeks after her friend did. . . . All right, we’ll do that. Bye.”

  Smoke handed the phone back to me. It rang again. Bob Edberg. “You heard?” I said.

  “Yeah. Guess that means you won’t be visiting Sheila Walker later.”

  “No. We’ll be tied up here for who knows how long.”

  “I’ll go back out to her place.”

  “Thanks. And ask her what she knows about Leanne Gosser. They have the classmate connection, at the very least. See if she knows about Gage’s involvement with her.”

  “I’ll do that, and we’ll be in touch.”

  “Later.” I closed my phone.

  “Seven-ten to Three-forty or Six-oh-eight.”

  Smoke nodded at me to answer. I pulled my portable radio from my belt and depressed the talk button. “Go ahead Seven-ten.”

  “We’re rolling with Unit Three and will be there in fifteen.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Winnebago County, Six-oh-eight.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Doctor Melberg’s ETA is sixteen-forty.” Four-forty.

  “Copy, thanks.”

  Smoke moved closer to the body. “Natural, suicide, homicide?”

  “She looks so small on that big couch. I’d say under five feet and maybe eighty pounds.” I turned on the camera and started snapped photos of the body and surroundings.

  “That’s about right. She is tiny.” He bent over and touched the insides of her elbows. “No needle marks that I can see.”

  “She almost looks posed. Pretty nightie, lipstick, mascara, and blush on, hair combed.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t think she just happened to die in her sleep. Even without the aspect of her hair and makeup being done, if she laid down to take a nap—or go to sleep for the night—she’d use that blanket. It’d get chillier at night.” He indicated the afghan folded over the back of the couch. “She doesn’t have an ounce of insulating fat on her to keep her warm.”

  I looked around at the end tables, coffee table, and television cabinet. “I don’t see a suicide note anywhere.” I glanced at the wheelchair and pointed. Her portable home phone was lying on the seat. “But there’s something
that may come in handy.” I picked up the phone and hit the Caller ID/menu button. Nothing there. “She must have only basic service. No Caller ID.”

  “Yeah, well, it figures. Getting a recent phone number for Leder has become the impossible dream. Let’s check the rest of the apartment.” Smoke headed for the bathroom.

  I hooked the camera to my belt loop, and went into the bedroom. Gosser’s full-size bed was made. The room was filled with furniture: a dresser; a media center with a television set, a VCR player, and a DVD player; a computer desk with two computers and two monitors sitting on it; a desk chair. The surface of a bedside table held a lamp, a few brown plastic video boxes, and two electronic remotes. The dresser had few items on the top. A clock, a jewelry box, a library book. I pulled open the top drawer. It was filled with sex toys.

  “Smoke, come and look at this.”

  “No medication bottles in the bathroom. Not even aspirin.” He walked in and over to my side. “What have you got?” He stared at the contents for a minute. “We should probably confiscate this stuff for DNA matches. On the other hand, if the involved parties are both deceased, what’s the point?” He looked around the room. “Lots more going on in here besides sleeping. Computers, TV, video players, videos.”

  Smoke picked up the top brown video holder from the stand, opened it, and shook his head. “Porn. I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise.” He opened up the other two boxes and held them up so I could read the titles. One implied it was pornography involving children.

  I cringed. “Ah, eew. That is sicker than sick. I thought she had all those videos in cases because she was a neat freak. Maybe not.”

  Smoke walked to the desk and hit the on buttons of the two computers. I checked the rest of the dresser drawers and Smoke looked around the room while the computers loaded. When they lit up, we each took one, signed onto the Internet, and checked the viewing histories. One pornographic site after the next. “They were the king and queen of sickoville. Adult porn is one thing, but when it involves children, that is the worst of the worst kind of depraved,” Smoke said.

  I agreed. “Either our guys, or the BCA, can trace the IP addresses back to where they originated, hopefully put some suppliers and distributors away.”

  “The trouble is, you put one away and twenty more pop up. The World Wide Web has made it way too easy for these dirt bags to expand their operations.”

  Internet crimes task forces were busy around the clock, tracking down criminals, breaking up operations. “Now we know what Gage Leder was spending his money on.”

  Smoke nodded. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

  We headed to the kitchen. There was a glass tumbler sitting next to the faucet. Aside from a coffee pot, it was the only other item sitting out.

  “It doesn’t look like she even cooks in here. She makes Mister Clean look like a slob.”

  “That’s for sure.” I opened a cabinet drawer to the right of the sink. “I found her medication supply.” I set the bottles on the counter, and Smoke looked them over.

  “I’m not very familiar with MS drugs,” he said.

  I picked up a bottle. “This one’s empty. Zoloft. I know that’s an anti-depressant.”

  “Yeah, and anti-anxiety.” He took the bottle from my hand and read the label. “Huh. Prescribed on the fourteenth. Says to take one twenty-five milligram tablet per day. It’s the twenty-ninth, so unless she gave some away, she shoulda had about fifteen or sixteen of them left.”

  “She took the fifteen or sixteen pills, laid down on the couch, and went to sleep forever?”

  “That’s a distinct possibility.”

  “I’d get rid of all those incriminating videos first.”

  “If both of the guilty parties were gone, who is there to incriminate, to charge?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so, but still.”

  Todd Mason and Brian Carlson, the major crimes team for the week, radioed they were at our location. I met them at the apartment entry door. They had their crime scene jumpsuits and protective gloves on.

  “Man, it’s hot in here.” Mason said as he and Carlson walked over to the couch, and looked at Gosser’s body. “She was one of Leder’s girlfriends?”

  “According to the landlord,” I said.

  “She’s about as big as a minute,” Carlson said.

  “No sign of trauma to the body, on her front side, anyway. No defensive wounds on the hands, arms,” Mason said.

  “Kinda like Gage Leder,” Carlson said.

  “Except he was naked and tied to stakes in a field.”

  “Except for that.”

  I shook my head. “We didn’t find a suicide note but we did find an empty Zoloft bottle that should have had around fifteen pills in it yet.”

  Smoke came out of the kitchen. “Mason, Carlson. Yeah, I left the bottle on the counter, and there’s a water glass there that she likely used to take the pills—if it turns out a drug overdose is the cause of death.”

  Mason nodded. “We’ll get them into evidence bags.”

  Smoke went to the bookshelves stacked with brown video cases, withdrew one from a shelf, opened it, and turned it so the three of us could read the title. Carlson rolled his eyes and Mason shook his head. Smoke put it back and withdrew one from another shelf. He opened it, glanced at the inside, shuddered, and put it back. “This is the part that’s going to take half the night. Taking all this smut into evidence. There must be over a hundred of them.”

  “It’s not illegal to have pornography in your possession,” Mason said.

  “Not adult. They got children’s too,” Smoke said.

  Mason screwed up his face. “Oh geez.”

  “And since we don’t know which is which, we’ll take it all and sort it out later,” I said.

  Smoke nodded. “That’s the best way to handle it, all right.”

  There was a knock at the door then Dr. Gordon Melberg stepped inside with his black bag. His eyes first locked on Leanne Gosser’s body stretched out on the couch then scanned the room. “I feel like I’m on a movie set. Perfectly neat place. Perfectly neat corpse.”

  “It gets creepier,” I said and explained about her connection to Gage Leder, and their addiction to pornography. He stared at Gosser like he was trying to imagine it all. Then Smoke told him about her medical condition, her array of medications, and the prematurely empty bottle.

  “Hmm. Zoloft. That’s often prescribed for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This apartment is OCD city. Well that gives the M.E. a lead on what to look for in her system. Find any signs of vomiting?”

  “No,” I said.

  “If overdose was the cause of death then she probably got very tired and went to sleep, never to wake up in this life again.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “There’s no sign of a break-in. All the windows are closed and locked. She would have had to let a visitor in, and the landlord said Gage Leder was the only visitor he ever saw here.”

  “And he died long before she did,” Melberg said.

  “The landlord huh? That’s one way to throw suspicion away from himself. To say she only had the one visitor who just happens to be dead,” Carlson said.

  “We’ll do a thorough check of the apartment, Brian. See if we find his prints where they shouldn’t have been,” Mason said.

  “Meantime, the deceased needs our attention,” Melberg said as he leaned over Gosser’s remains and began his examination.

  Melberg estimated Gosser had died during the previous night, perhaps around midnight. There were no marks on her body to lead us to suspect foul play. Lividity indicated she had died in the place and position we had found her. Larry Vaccaro had never been fingerprinted, so Mason used his portable kit and lifted Vaccaro’s prints to compare with those found at the scene. If Gosser’s fingerprints were not on file, they would be taken at her autopsy. Determan’s Funeral Chapel and Services in Allandale picked up her body and transported it to Hennepin County.

  I found Larr
y Vaccaro still sitting under the shade of the huge maple tree in front of the building at five-thirty-five. He was glued to the chair, seemingly unable to move.

  “Mr. Vaccaro, did Miss Gosser give you emergency contact information? We need to make notification.”

  He thought for a minute. “Yeah. It’d be on her application. If I remember right, she only listed a cousin who lives in California.”

  “Okay. If you could get that for us.” He pried himself out of the chair and started into the building. I followed him to his apartment. It was spic and span, almost as clean as Gosser’s. I waited as he went through a file cabinet that was stored in a closet off the living room. He found the form he was looking for and handed it to me. I wrote the name and number on my memo pad then handed it back.

  “What kind of a tenant was Leanne?”

  He shrugged. “Fine. She took good care of her apartment. No complaints. But now I feel like I should have done more for her. I didn’t expect her to just die. She’s even younger than me.”

  “Death is often unexpected.”

  “She must have been lonely after her boyfriend died. I’ve heard of people dying from a broken heart before.” He leaned his back against the cabinet, still clutching the file. “She never talked about the Leder fellow and I didn’t feel it was my place to snoop around, ask questions. But then after he died, and I figured out who he was, it seemed like the right thing to do was call you guys and let you ask Leanne the questions. Not that she can answer them now.”

  “It was the right thing to do, even though it didn’t turn out the way we’d hoped. When was the last time you had contact with Miss Gosser?

  “Yesterday morning. About ten, ten-fifteen. She was getting her mail from the box in the hallway when I happened to walk through. We said ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ That’s about it.”

  “Did she seem depressed, upset?”

  “No, I’d say she seemed kinda happy even.”

  “When Gage Leder came by, did he talk to you, did you talk to him?”