Dead Firefly

by Victoria Houston

  Osborne reached down and with a delicate nudge of his instrument he was able to get a closer look at one side of Chuck’s forehead. And he knew. Or thought he did.

  He looked up at Lew: “I see the early signs of an abrasion or a contusion—a slight, very slight change in skin coloration. The forensic pathologist with the crime lab will know better, but I suspect Chuck was blindsided with something harder than that whiskey bottle.”

  Once again Lew looked around the room. This time she paid attention to the six worn wooden stairs that led from the main floor of the barn down and into the room that Chuck had outfitted for his fly tying. It must have been a storage area back when the old barn housed dairy cows.

  “Whoever did this wants us to think Chuck had been drinking, fell down those steps, hit his head and . . .” Then she was quiet, thinking.

  Osborne waited.

  * * *

  Lewellyn Ferris may not have gone to college, but she had had excellent training in law enforcement, she was as savvy about people as she was about the inhabitants of a trout stream, and, more important, she was confident in her own judgment. More than once, when he had been deputized to help with an investigation, he had been impressed with her logic and her willingness to take a chance on a personal hunch.

  “Tell you what, Doc, let’s keep this to ourselves until we have an official report from the pathologist. For right now, if the press gets wind of this, the word is we’re investigating a fatal accident. If whoever is behind this wants us to think it was an accident, we’ll go along with that. Encourage them to make another atrocious error.”

  “Lew, no matter how this looks to us right now,” said Osborne, “I’m not sure he was killed here. What about in his car? Or outside this building? Or on his way here from his office?”

  “The office. Good point,” said Lew. “He may have met someone in the office and driven here—or run into someone on his way here? Who knows? But there could be evidence in his office. . . .”

  She exhaled as the scope of the investigation dawned on her. “I better see if the Wausau boys can send more people and I’ll have Dispatch reach the sheriff’s office. It’s going to take more manpower than myself and Officers Donovan and Adamczak to secure these sites.”

  Stepping outside to place her first call, Lew grimaced as Ed Pecore answered on the first ring. “Darn,” she mouthed, looking over at Osborne. Taking care to mask her disappointment, she gave Pecore directions to the two-lane road leading to the barn. “There’s no fire number on the county road, Ed,” she said, “so keep your eyes peeled once you’ve passed the Pelletier driveway, which has a blue mailbox.”

  About to make more calls, she was alarmed to see Osborne leaning against his car with his arms crossed, a baleful expression on his face. “Dammit, Lew, I should have gone right to Chuck’s office—not made all those foolish phone calls. . . .” He shook his head as he spoke.

  “But how could you know this would happen?” asked Lew, hearing the despair in his voice.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Osborne. “But given what Chuck told me this morning . . .” Again he shook his head. “Gordon Maxwell and that goofy wife of Chuck’s better have damn good alibis for the last two hours.”

  Lew decided to let that remark go, saying, “Excuse me, Doc, I’ve got Pecore on his way and I need to put in a call in to the Wausau boys—”

  “Insist on Bruce Peters,” said Osborne, interrupting. “He’s the only one of those razzbonyas knows what the hell he’s doing.”

  “All right, okay. Doc, I want you to take a deep breath,” said Lew, placing a hand on Osborne’s right arm. “I know this isn’t easy but I don’t want you jumping to conclusions, and I have to caution you against saying something that might jeopardize the investigation.”

  “I know, I know,” said Osborne, removing her hand. “I’ll calm down. It’s just”—his eyes glistened—“this is so . . . hard. If you knew what Chuck had been through . . .”

  “You’ve told me, Doc, and I will do my best to get Bruce in on this. But right now it’s critical that you not jump to conclusions on Maxwell. Could be he and Chuck were both set up.”

  While she was talking, Ed Pecore drove up in a battered Toyota Camry. Wheezing as he eased his overweight body out from under the steering wheel and swung his pudgy legs onto the ground, he managed to say, “Okay, Ferris, what’s up?”

  Osborne snorted at the intended rudeness: Pecore never failed to make it obvious he was allergic to addressing Lew by her correct title.

  “Morning, Ed,” said Lew in a brisk tone that ignored the insult. “Say, didn’t I just see your car parked over at Three Pines Tavern? That’s half a mile away.” She glanced at her watch. “I called you fifteen minutes ago—what took so long?”

  “Oh, you know, checkin’ in with my buddy, Jack Oelrich. He’s the fire marshal, y’know. I heard there was a grassfire over on Shepard Lake Road. . . .”

  “Sure you weren’t sampling his supply of Leinies?” asked Lew, referring to Wisconsin’s homegrown beer. She relished needling the jerk.

  * * *

  Ed Pecore had been appointed to the position of Loon Lake coroner immediately after his brother-in-law, Phil Andrews, was elected mayor of Loon Lake. Until then he had owned a small tavern back on County Road MB, where it was rumored he spent his days overserved while sitting on his own barstools. If the joke was that consuming alcohol was Wisconsin’s “state sport,” Ed Pecore was a leading scorer.

  But that was no concern of the new mayor, who had been more interested in his sister, Pecore’s wife, being able to count on the coroner position’s annual salary and health benefits.

  Lew would never forget what Phil had said when she questioned the appropriateness of appointing a bartender to be the town coroner: “Hey, Chief Ferris, if he can figure out a dead soldier [referring to an empty beer bottle], he can figure out if a body is living or dead, doncha know.” And he had laughed off her suggestion that he choose a health professional for the position.

  So Ed Pecore got the job and he would keep the job until Phil Andrews got divorced or lost the next election. Since Phil had been reelected twice to a position no one in their right mind wanted, Lew resigned herself to doing the best she could to manage the Loon Lake Police Department’s files in spite of Pecore’s talent for messing up the chain of custody for critical evidence on those occasions when he had to report a cause of death “due to unknown circumstances.”

  She also kept an eye on the conditions surrounding the reporting of a deceased individual, as Ed had the bad habit of bringing his two Dobermans with him when called in as coroner. More than once, when he had arrived to confirm a death, he had let the dogs follow him into the room where a body lay. Grieving relatives should not have to deal with dogs nuzzling their loved one even if it was, as Ed had said, “just a sniff or two. Didn’t hurt a thing.”

  The only good news was that since Pecore was neither a medical examiner nor a pathologist, Lew could banish him to his favorite barstool whenever identification of a dead body was required. And turn to her best friend, Dr. Paul Osborne.

  Theirs was a friendship forged in a trout stream on a summer night when Osborne, recently widowed, was under the impression he was going to have a lesson on casting a fly rod from a guy named “Lou.” But “Lou” turned out to be “Lew”—not a guy at all.

  And the lesson turned out to be about more than just casting a fly rod as Osborne discovered a woman who could laugh easily and with a warmth that surprised him. Lew was impressed, too. He might be awkward with a fly rod but he tried hard, did not condescend as men often do to women who fish—and, thanks to a stint in the military during his years in dental school, he turned out to be proficient in the field of dental forensics, a scientific interest he continued to follow even after his retirement.

  Not even the Wausau boys in the crime lab an hour away from Loon Lake could boast of being able to afford having an odontologist on staff, so Lew was able to deputize Dr. Paul Osb
orne to help identify corpses. This was most helpful when Pecore was unavailable due to what his wife called an “indisposition” (known to locals familiar with Pecore as a “hangover”).

  In time Osborne’s role as a deputy coroner had expanded when an investigation demanded more man-hours than Lew and her two officers could manage, including interrogations.

  Thirty years practicing dentistry had also taught Osborne the rare skill of listening past the obvious (“Dr. Osborne, I feel a spot on my gum up here”) to the subtle hints that a patient’s problem might lie elsewhere than in their mouth; i.e., from hypochondria to the abuse of painkillers to symptoms of physical abuse and more.

  Lew recognized early on that Osborne’s listening skills were different from her own—so different that when conducting an interrogation together they made a valuable team.

  But theirs was not a strictly professional relationship. It may have been the third lesson in the trout stream or it may have been the second time that Osborne helped with the identification of a body found decaying in a swamp (an Alzheimer’s victim who had wandered off weeks earlier) that Lew became acutely aware that the widowed retired dentist might be sixty-three years old but he was damn good-looking for a man of that age. That was when she decided life was too short not to risk fooling around. After all, they were both adults.

  And so today, two years into sharing a daily morning coffee in the office of the Loon Lake chief of police—and helping on investigations when needed—Osborne still couldn’t believe his good luck.

  * * *

  “Whoa, stop right there, Ed,” said Lew loudly as Pecore started toward the entrance to the barn. “Where are your shoe covers?”

  “Whaddya talking about?” asked Pecore. “Trying to tell me this is a crime scene?”

  “We don’t know if it is or isn’t.” Lew shot Osborne a quick glance as she spoke. Pecore was famous for unloading the details of his professional duties at the nearest barstool on his way into town.

  “But just in case, I have established an entry and exit path and I’ll need you to stay within that with shoe covers on. And, puh-leeze do not touch anything. Keep the chain of custody clean this time. Got it?”

  Pecore gave a grumpy shrug as he opened the trunk of his car for shoe covers. After Lew repeated her instructions on where to walk so that he wouldn’t disturb or damage any trace evidence, Pecore followed them back into the barn and down the stairs into the room where Chuck Pelletier’s body lay.

  A few minutes earlier, while waiting for Pecore to slip on the paper slippers, Osborne had noticed that the coroner’s eyes were bloodshot and he needed a Kleenex for what was happening to his nose. But Pecore, unconcerned with his symptoms, proceeded to lean down for a look at the body just as he let go with a hearty sneeze. Snot flew across the room.

  “Out of the building, Ed,” said Lew, sharply. “Now.” She emphasized the word and stared at Pecore until he stepped back. “With that cold you could contaminate this entire crime scene.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘crime scene’?” asked Ed, wiping at his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his denim jacket. “Don’t you smell the whiskey? Whoever this commode is, he prob’ly drank himself to death. That’s what I’m putting on my coroner’s report. No doubt about it. Not when the place smells to high heaven of booze.”

  “Ed,” said Lew, pointing to the doorway as she spoke, “you put alcoholism down as ‘cause of death’ and I can assure you the City Council will hear from me. And don’t you forget—they can overrule your brother-in-law. You want to keep your job? I suggest you inform me right now, officially, that you have a contagious head cold and need to be excused from your duties.” Pecore’s eyes widened in protest.

  “Don’t worry, Ed,” said Lew with a wave of her hand. “You’re on salary, so you’ll still be paid. But if you will do that, then I can deputize Doc Osborne and have him complete the paperwork so I can turn the victim over to the Wausau Crime Lab.”

  Pecore looked at her in amazement. “You’re calling in the Wausau boys? Jeez, Ferris, they cost money. I know this is no crime. You got a guy drank himself to death. I see it, I smell it.”

  Lew gave him the dim eye. “Need me to repeat what I just told you?”

  “Okay, okay, I’m done here. But”—Pecore wagged a finger at Lew—“I’m going to tell Phil what you’re doing.”

  “You do that, Ed. And you be sure to mention it took you fifteen minutes to get here because your damn car was parked at a tavern half a mile away.”

  Ed shrugged and walked toward the door, sneezing as he went. This time he put up an arm to block the sneezes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Osborne pulled over a chair to sit beside Chuck’s body while Lew made phone calls. Unreasonable though the feeling was, he didn’t want to leave his friend alone. Plus someone had to stay with the body.

  After he had completed filling out the coroner’s report, he leaned down to give Chuck’s still shoulder a reassuring pat as he said in a soft voice, “I hope you were hit from behind, friend. I hope you never saw it coming.”

  Meanwhile, standing outside the barn to get better cell service, Lew was able to reach the Dispatch operator. To her relief, a twenty-year veteran of the department was on duty. “Marlaine, please alert Officers Adamczack and Donovan that I need them to report to me at this location as soon as possible. I know Officer Donovan is off duty until later today, but please explain to him the following situation.”

  After giving a brief description of the questions surrounding Chuck Pelletier’s death, along with the addresses of the Pelletier home, the barn, and Chuck Pelletier’s office, she said, “Once you’ve reached my officers, please notify the sheriff’s department that the Loon Lake Police have a fatality on the Pelletier property.

  “Be sure to tell them that while the circumstances are uncertain at this time, I need their help securing the entire property, as it may turn out to be a crime scene. Ask them to meet me here at the barn and we’ll determine who should be assigned to which site. Any questions?”

  “Nope. Got it, Chief.”

  Debating whom to call next—Ray Pradt or the Wausau Crime Lab—Lew opted for Ray. She needed him at the barn with his cameras as soon as possible. And she was also curious as to what he may have seen on her property. He answered immediately.

  “Yep, Chief, you’ve been . . . robbed.”

  “I know that. That’s not why I called—”

  “Yep . . . shot those photos and”—he let the word hang out there—“dang vehicle was a four-wheeler for sure with . . . a trailer.”

  “Ray, I’m calling for another reason.”

  “O-o-h yeah? Shoot.”

  Finally, thought Lew, exhaling in exasperation. Hurriedly she described the scene at the barn and the need for him to get there as soon as possible.

  “You know the drill, Ray,” she added, “I need photos of the victim and every detail of the room the body is in—as well as photos of the entry to the barn and the clearing in front of the barn.”

  “Not to worry, Chief. Sounds like you’re pretty sure this wasn’t an accident so don’t worry—I’ll get it all.”

  “As soon as possible, Ray, before anything changes that might damage trace evidence. Any questions?”

  “Ah-h, yes, one,” said Ray. He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said without lingering over a word, “The victim. Isn’t he . . . ? Wasn’t he Doc’s good friend? Nice fella. What in the hell—?”

  “No idea. Best-case scenario, Bruce Peters and his crew will be able to help me out, but until I know for sure—”

  “Look, I’ve got my cameras in the truck. Be there in five. Oh, and, Chief, while I was out at your place a guy from the DNR drove up. Said you’d texted him about the birches on your back forty. He took a look and said to tell you looks to him like you’re a victim of the same crowd’s been working other locations up here.”

  * * *

  Off the phone with Ray, Lew called the Wausau Crime Lab. �
�Hello, Chief Ferris,” said the secretary for the director of the crime lab, “I’m afraid Director Shultz can’t take your call. He is out for three days—a family funeral. Is there anyone else you’d like to speak with?”

  Holding her breath and hoping, Lew said, “Bruce Peters, please.”

  “Certainly. I’ll put you through.”

  Within seconds an excited male voice was on the phone—so excited Lew could visualize Bruce’s bushy black mustache bouncing up and down. “Chief Ferris! I was just going to give you a call. How the heck you doing? I hear they’re going to be stocking twenty-two-pound brown trout up in your neck of the woods—”

  “Whoa, slow down, Bruce,” said Lew. “Brown trout, brook trout, rainbow trout—put that aside for the moment, please. Afraid I have what I believe to be the victim of a murder that occurred a couple hours ago. I could be wrong but I doubt it. I need someone from the crime lab up here ASAP. Can you swing that or do I have to call your acting director for an approval?”

  “No, no, I’m the acting director. Sure, I can be up there right away but give me a few details.”

  Lew described the scene in the barn and the connection between Osborne and the dead man, though she decided to leave out the information that Chuck had shared with Osborne regarding Gordon Maxwell and Chuck Pelletier’s wife until they could speak in private.

  “The victim recently moved to Loon Lake,” said Lew, “he was a senior executive—the CFO—for the NFR’s Partridge Lodge, which means there may be serious media interest. I’m hoping to keep this quiet until we know for sure if this was an accident or . . . not.”

  “You mean that new fly-fishing place? The huge expensive private one?”

  “That’s the place. A multi-million-dollar development that’s been under way up here for about nine months. The victim was the CFO.”