Lake of Tears

by Mary Logue

  CHAPTER 8

  The call Claire had been waiting for all day came in just as she was leaving work. She had almost walked out the main door, but the secretary caught her as she was heading home.

  Claire walked back to her desk to take the call, pulling out paper and pen to take notes.

  A man’s precise voice came over the line. “Just as I thought. That pelvic bone told the story.”

  “Dr. Pinkers?” Claire checked.

  “Yes, sorry. I’ve got some preliminary information for you. Thought I should call you with it.”

  “What do you know?” Claire started drawing the shape of the pelvic bone. In her doodle, it looked like a big bow.

  “As I had surmised yesterday at the scene on the lake, I feel very confident in saying that the bones belonged to a young woman.”

  Claire couldn’t help thinking that “belonged” was an odd word to use about something that actually made up a part of the person. And the use of the past tense was also disconcerting. “Can you estimate the age?”

  “Well, I say young, advisedly. At this time, I would put her age between twenty and thirty. Her bones had fully matured and there is no evidence of any arthritis or osteoporosis yet.”

  “Okay, that helps.”

  “But I’m afraid that you do have some sort of case on your hands. Unfortunately, the back of the skull had sustained some trauma. I would say that it was hit with some sort of blunt instrument—a board, a bat—which causes hairline fractures throughout the surface of the skull. The impact, rather than being focused on one spot, is generalized across the base of the skull.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “What I saw was a depressed skull fracture, which is comminuted, with broken portions of the bone displaced inward. The way I read it, it was done with a lot of force. This was a bad fracture and put a lot of pressure on the brain.”

  Claire sank down into her chair. “And do you still think that she was alive? That she was, in fact, burned to death?”

  “I’m afraid I do, but the good news is that with this kind of fracture I doubt very much that she would have been conscious. I suppose whoever put her there might even have thought she was dead. With that kind of trauma to the brain, there is a very good chance that she was not cognizant of what was happening to her.”

  “I hate to think … .” Claire said.

  “I will continue to gather my notes and will send you a full report by the end of the week, but I felt that you should know this as soon as I was comfortable with my findings. This will give you something to go on.”

  “Listen, we’ve got a missing person report just filed—a young woman about this age. Are you able to check dental records against the teeth you have?”

  “Yes, if you can find out who her dentist was and get her most recent dental records, I can see how they compare to her remaining teeth.”

  “All right. Sounds like a plan. I’ll locate the dentist and talk to you tomorrow.” Claire took a deep breath. “Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”

  Right after Claire hung up, Amy walked into the department. She headed Claire’s way.

  “What’s the news?” Claire asked.

  Amy slouched over, leaning on the corner of Claire’s desk. “She didn’t show up for work.”

  “Our missing woman?”

  “Yup, Tammy Lee was supposed to work the evening shift at the Pump and Dump. Fran claims that she’s been real reliable. Her mom told me that she has done a walkabout before. But also that lately she’s been working really hard to pay for her wedding. Which would make it unlikely that she’d skip work and not at least call.”

  “Got some news on our bones.”

  “And?”

  “Woman in her twenties, that’s what the good doctor thinks so far.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Can you find out who Tammy Lee’s dentist is?”

  “Hey, Grandma.”

  A thin old woman looked out at him from the doorway, her eyes squinted in a glare. Her gray hair was pulled back in a thin ponytail, and she was wearing a faded blue sweatshirt with a big daisy on the front. “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you know me? It’s Dougie.” If he hadn’t been standing at her door, he wouldn’t have recognized her, either. Grandma Schubert looked so much smaller than he remembered, and she looked about twenty years older than the last time he saw her, which had only been about five years ago. Before Mom and her had had the big fight. He couldn’t even remember what they fought about. But he knew they hadn’t talked since.

  “Dougie. I haven’t seen you in forever. Come on in. What’re you doing here?” She shuffled back and let him enter her house.

  He walked into the kitchen. The place looked clean, hadn’t changed much since last time he was there, but it didn’t smell so good. Like someone had forgotten to empty the kitty litter box for a couple months or so. “Just thought I’d stop by. I’m going to see a buddy of mine from the army. He lives pretty close to here and you were right on the way.”

  “You were in the army?”

  “Yeah, fought over there with the jinglies in Afghanistan for two long tours of duty.”

  “Way over there?”

  “That’s where they sent me.”

  She walked closer to him and touched his face. “You’re not old enough to go to war, are you?”

  “I’m twenty-two, Grandma. You can join the army when you’re seventeen and a half.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  What he really wanted to do was fall asleep on her couch, but he figured he better talk to her for a while. “Sure. You got any grub?”

  “I could make you some toast. With peanut butter.”

  “Sounds good, Grandma. How’ve you been?”

  She wasn’t walking so good, more like a shuffle. Didn’t help that she was wearing big furry slippers. She put two pieces of bread in the toaster, then turned and leaned on the counter, her arms folded. “I’m not so good, Dougie. I got that cancer. Been eating me up.”

  “Really? You got cancer?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been giving me chemo, but it’s worse than the cancer.” Suddenly, she turned sharp and said, “But don’t you go telling your ma. I don’t want her to come sniveling around here just because I’m sick. She’s not getting this house or anything from me.”

  “I won’t tell her.”

  Grandma smiled and he could see what she used to look like for a moment. “You’re a good kid, Dougie. Always were a good kid. How is your ma?”

  “She’s okay. Me and her kinda had a fight, too. I’m not doing so well myself since I came back. Don’t seem to wanta do anything.”

  “You got bad nerves?” The toast popped up and she slathered it with butter, then peanut butter.

  “I guess you could call it that. It’s got some fancy name—posttraumatic syndrome, you know how those doctors are.” He tried to keep the thoughts from coming, thoughts of the life outside the wire, deep in the suck of it all.

  When she put the plate of toast down in front of him, something in him started to crack. He wanted to go back to when he was ten and he would come to visit, and she would mess up his hair and tell him to wash his hands before he ate. He wanted it to be before all the stuff he had seen and couldn’t get out of his head.

  “You eat that now, Dougie.”

  “Thanks, looks good.” He took a bite, chewed it slowly, then swallowed it. His head fell forward and he started to cry. “I don’t know what to do, Grandma. I don’t seem to be able to come back.”

  “Is this Bria Johansen?” Amy asked when a woman answered the phone. She had a clear picture of seeing Bria at their five-year high school reunion. She had worn a long black sweater with a fur collar that had seemed incredibly stylish to Amy, who had thrown a light blue cotton sweater on over her jeans. She had made Amy feel as awkward as she had always felt in school.

  “Yes, this is she.”

  Amy recognized the voice—breathy, but rather sophisticated. Hard to beli
eve that she had gone to school in Pepin County. “This is Deputy Sheriff Amy Peterson. I’m calling about your sister.”

  “Hey, Amy. My mom said you stopped by. She hasn’t shown up yet? I wish I could say I’m surprised, but this is not unusual for Tammy.”

  “Well, she didn’t show up for work and her fiancé Terry is getting quite worried. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure, glad to help.”

  “Both you and your mom have said that she’s done this before. Why? What does she do, exactly?”

  “Well, Tammy Lee likes to party and she has a lot of friends. In Minneapolis, all over the place. Sometimes she’ll go out with friends and Mom won’t hear from her for a few days.”

  “Does she do drugs?”

  “Probably. She and I don’t talk about that stuff much, we don’t hang out with the same people, but I’ve seen her when she seems kinda messed up. I wouldn’t say she has a problem, but I doubt she says no to anything that’s offered.”

  “Has anything been going on recently that would cause her to disappear?”

  “Well,” Bria sighed on the other end. “I hate to tell on her, but you know she’s getting married soon, right?”

  “Yes, your mom said before Thanksgiving.”

  “Tammy Lee and Terry have been going out for a while. He popped the question early this summer. They picked a date and everything. Then Andrew Stickler came back to town.”

  “Andrew? Why, I work with Andrew.”

  “I heard he got a job with the sheriff. Anyhow, Tammy said that he’d been trying to see her and all. I don’t think she ever got over Andrew. So now she’s having mixed feelings about Terry.”

  “You mean you think that she might call off the wedding?”

  “She’s been hinting at something like that, but she’s so changeable. One day she’ll say she can’t stand Terry, the next she’s buying her wedding dress. I didn’t think too much of her indecision. At one time she and Andrew were real tight, but then when he left, well, Tammy Lee’s not one to wait around.”

  “So she broke up with him?”

  “I guess she texted him to say it was over. Isn’t that awful. Here he is, halfway around the world. Sounds worse than a Dear John letter to me. But I was surprised when she did it, because she was pretty whipped on him. Even after she claimed they were through, she would still talk about him. She got real patriotic and everything. She threatened to join the service herself. Thank goodness she didn’t take it that far. Although maybe the military would have been a good thing for her, teach her some life lessons.”

  “When was the last time you talked to your sister?”

  “I think it was Thursday night. Yeah, it was and now I remember, she said she was meeting Andrew. She sounded real excited. She said she was going to meet him at that big fire they do down at the lake. What’s it called again?”

  “Burning Boat.”

  “Yeah, she said she was looking forward to watching it all go up in flames.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Claire stared at the x-ray that Dr. Pinkers had slapped up on the lightboard. Ghostly teeth shone out of a black background.

  This was why she had driven the dental x-rays to Dr. Pinkers’ lab herself, even though it was an hour away. She wanted to see how he did this, she wanted to know how he matched them or didn’t. Plus she wanted to know the news right away, to know if they had found the person the bones belonged to.

  “Very good,” Dr. Pinkers said. “This full-mouth x-ray should give us all the information we need.” He pointed back toward the table she was standing by. “There’s our comparison.”

  Claire moved in closer and looked down at the teeth and jawbones that had been gathered from the burn site. While there was some darkening of the bones, the teeth remained fairly clean. Or maybe Pinkers had cleaned them. “I’m amazed how good they look. Doesn’t seem like the fire hurt them at all.”

  “Oh yeah, teeth last through almost anything. They’re the hardest part of the human body, the last thing to go. That little fire didn’t come close to destroying them. They can last in blast furnaces up to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”

  He walked up to the x-ray, took off his glasses and stood inches away from it, staring with the intensity of a creature ready to pounce. “These are going to serve the purpose.” He pointed at the x-ray with his glasses. “These are decent x-rays, which will make my work easy.”

  “Can you always get a positive ID?”

  “Not always. If we have a strong suspicion, if the teeth have been damaged in some way and we’re not sure, we can extract DNA from the pulp and make a positive ID using that method.”

  Pinkers went back to staring at the x-ray. Claire stared with him. She could see the eye sockets floating like ghoulish orbs above the flattened jawbone—the teeth were lined up like a rock wall with the roots stretching out above and below them. The whitest objects on the screen were the bright almost-twinkle of the fillings. She counted eight white splots, mainly in the back teeth.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked. “What do you concentrate on to do the match?”

  “I study the arrangement of the teeth, the fillings, and other dental work. I count the teeth to see if any are missing. I look for any anomalies—broken teeth, noticeable crookedness. Every mouth is different. Even the bite marks are recognizably different.”

  “I know about that. I’ve worked on cases where we’ve had to take an imprint of a bite mark from an assailant.”

  “Yes, that can work.”

  “What do you think?”

  Dr. Pinkers circled the x-ray with his finger. “Looks like she had braces. Her teeth are pretty regular and evenly laid out. But she has a lot of fillings. Must have eaten candy when she was a kid.”

  “Who didn’t.”

  “I don’t really care for candy myself.”

  Somehow she was not surprised. Claire stepped back and watched him. He continued to look at the x-ray from very close range, his eyes traveling up and down the film, his mouth moving with no sound coming out as if he was holding a private conversation with himself. He snuffled through his nose; he nodded his head; he turned and put his glasses back on.

  “I would say that the teeth that we have found definitely match the teeth in this x-ray. What did you say her name was?”

  “Tammy Lee Johansen.”

  “And her family filed a missing persons?”

  “Her fiancé.”

  “Sad. She will not be getting married. But at least they can bury her, knowing what has happened.”

  “Not everything. Not who did this.”

  Doctor Pinkers stared at Claire in the same way that he had been looking at the x-ray, close and concentrated. “My work is done. That is your job.”

  The Johansens lived just on the outskirts of the small town of Arkansaw, only about a ten minute drive from Durand. Pretty country, rolling hills, with a creek running right through town.

  By the time Claire got to their house, the sun was setting and she could see the ghostly light of a TV flickering in what she guessed was the living room. Claire knocked on the front door, staring right at an orange pumpkin head that had been hung at eye level. Yes, Halloween was on its way.

  A woman with straw blond hair and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth came to the door. She looked to be in her forties and dressed like she was in her twenties: tight jeans, tight top with writing on it, and her hair pulled close to her head.

  She took the cigarette out of her mouth and said, “Yeah,” then did a double take when she took in the uniform. The woman sucked in her breath. “Tammy Lee?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Johansen?” Claire asked.

  The woman nodded, but didn’t step back inside the house. Then she said, “Bobby, you can call me Bobby.”

  “Is your husband here?”

  “He’s not home yet. What about Tammy Lee?”

  “May I come inside?”

  “You’re going to tell me bad news.” Bobby
still didn’t move. She held her cigarette like it would burn her.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire started.

  Bobby crumpled. She jabbed the cigarette into her jeans and then fell to a heap on the floor. “Not Tammy Lee.”

  Claire reached down and tried to help her up. “Let’s go inside and talk.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know what happened to her. Can’t you go away?” Anger and fear mixed in the woman’s throaty voice.

  If it were only that easy, Claire thought. She got Bobby on her feet, took her into the house, and sat her on the couch. Because there was no chair close by, Claire perched on the end of the coffee table. The TV was going on about the specials at the Furniture Barn.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I know how hard this is, but I must tell you that we are quite sure that your daughter is dead. I’ve just come from a positive identification of bones found in Fort St. Antoine as belonging to your daughter.”

  “Bones? What’re you talking about?”

  Claire hated to have to tell her about the bones. She reached out and put a hand on the woman’s knee. “Tammy Lee was knocked unconscious and then put into the Burning Boat. Her bones were found in the ashes.”

  Then the screaming started. Bobby opened her mouth and a high piercing shriek came out that wavered, then went on even louder. Claire couldn’t stand it. She stood up and went into the kitchen to get Bobby something to drink and find something to wipe her face.

  Even though Claire didn’t want to hear the screams, she respected them. They were the last gasp of motherhood, trying desperately to get a child back, trying to scream her back into existence. When they stopped, Bobby would have to face the truth. So Claire let her scream a while longer, then walked back into the living room to tell Bobby what she knew.

  Meg sat at the kitchen counter, cutting up carrots for Rich. She had to keep her hands busy while she was waiting for the phone to ring. She hadn’t heard from Andrew all day yesterday, and now most of today had passed as well. Curt and she had always talked every day when they were a steady thing. At least a check-in call. It didn’t have to be very long. But since that was the only relationship she had been in, she wasn’t sure what was normal, especially with an older guy.