Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  Izzy starts rooting through the girl’s dirty hair, pulling the strands taut so he can see her scalp. After a moment, he looks at Hurley and says, “She does.”

  “That’s confirmed,” he says into his phone.

  Izzy and I exchange excited looks. I feel certain we are about to identify our victim, a huge step in trying to figure out who killed her.

  “That would be great,” Hurley says, and then he disconnects his call.

  “Was that—”

  Hurley puts up a hand to stop me, staring at his phone screen. “Hold on,” he says. After a few seconds that feel like an eternity, there is a ding from his phone and he swipes at the screen. He looks for a moment, then carries the phone over to the victim, holding it up next to her face.

  “What do you think, Izzy?” he says, scowling. “This picture is a few years old and before she got serious about the drugs.”

  Arnie and I walk over and peer around Hurley’s arm at the picture. I see what he means. On his phone is a photo of a young woman with blond hair who looks to be in her early twenties. She is pretty, with a wide, bright smile, unblemished skin, a full set of straight white teeth, and about thirty more pounds on her than the woman on our table.

  Izzy sighs. “Hard to say. The basic physical characteristics, such as hair and eye color, fit, but that’s about all I can confirm. Well, that and the port-wine stain, but those types of birthmarks are more common than you might think. And the location of this one is also quite common. It’s not enough for a definitive ID, but perhaps a tentative one. I’ll need to get DNA if we can.”

  Hurley nods. “There may be DNA available, according to the cop who sent the info. The mother of this missing girl has all the teeth she lost as a child, as well as her hairbrush and some other items that might be helpful.”

  “Who is she?” I ask.

  “Her name is Lacy O’Connor. She’s from Viroqua and she’s twenty-seven. She’s been missing for two years, and for a year and a half before that, she was hanging with a guy named Dutch Simmons, who was heavy into drugs. Lacy started using and things escalated. Her mother tried interventions a couple of times—apparently, the father is dead—but Lacy kept running away and hooking up with Simmons again. Then Lacy went missing. The cops in Viroqua think she and Simmons hooked up with a group of traveling druggies that move from town to town, performing purse snatches and home break-ins so they can get money for more drugs.”

  Arnie’s eyes grow big. “Since she was found here, does that mean they’re in this area now?”

  “Could be,” Hurley says. “I’ll check with Junior Feller to see if he’s had an uptick in robberies recently. And we should check out Troll Nook.”

  Troll Nook is a 1950s-era motel/camp comprised of a collection of individual cabins that were popular with families when it was first built. The cabins used to border a small lake, but it was a man-made lake that dried up in the ’70s when the water was diverted upstream for farm irrigation. In the decades since, the place has fallen into disrepair and it now attracts a different type of crowd, thanks to the “kitchen facilities”: a microwave, a sink, and a hot plate, which many of the current residents use to cook things other than food.

  “I doubt a group of drug-addicted people would have any motive, not to mention the wherewithal, to create a copycat murder of one of their own,” I say. “That means we still have the issue of this girl’s murder matching the MO of the guy the Eau Claire cops put away.”

  Hurley nods, sighing wearily. “I might need to have a chat with our Mr. Ulrich,” he says. “And it looks like I’m going to be taking a trip to Eau Claire.”

  “I’d like to go with you,” Izzy says.

  It’s a surprise proclamation to me, and judging from the looks on their faces, I see also to Hurley and Arnie.

  “Eau Claire is one of the counties that still has a coroner system in place, at least for now, though they’re piloting a training program there for forensic pathologists. I’d like to see how it’s going, and maybe review the autopsies on the victims in the Ulrich case,” Izzy says.

  Hurley looks over at me. “Are you up for a road trip?”

  “Absolutely, assuming we do it tomorrow. Christopher’s on for the next few days.” My job-sharing coworker, Christopher Malone, and I split the weekdays between us, overlapping on Wednesdays and alternating coverage on the weekends, since our job also entails answering death calls at all hours of the day and night.

  “Does tomorrow work for you, Izzy?” Hurley asks.

  Izzy nods. “As luck would have it, tomorrow is Otto Morton’s first day back after his accident.”

  Otto Morton is a forensic pathologist who was readying for retirement, until Izzy had a heart attack several months ago, and someone else had to step in. Otto found he liked our office and the work here, and he decided to stay on when Izzy made the decision to come back to work on a part-time basis only. This decision was triggered in part by the fact that Izzy and his partner, Dom, had adopted a baby girl named Juliana. During a bad winter storm several weeks back, Otto was involved in a car accident and broke his arm, putting him on the injured reserve list for a while.

  “Oh, goody,” I say. “It sounds like we’re up for a road trip.”

  Hurley says, “I’ll get it set up, and I’ll also look into this boyfriend of Lacy’s, see what I can find.” He cocks his head to one side and looks at Lacy with a sad, tired expression. “Do you have a time of death for me, Izzy?”

  “Not exact, but I can narrow it down some. She’s already gone through full rigor and it’s nearly receded completely at this point. I can’t be sure how much temperature played a role, because we know she wasn’t killed where she was found, but we don’t know how long she was by the road, or where she was before that. But based on rigor alone, I’d say she was killed sometime between the hours of ten p.m. and six a.m. the night before last.”

  Hurley goes off to make the arrangements while Arnie gathers up the flower petals and other trace evidence we collected earlier from Lacy’s clothing and hair. Arnie heads back to his lab, and I re-glove and start to help Izzy with the autopsy.

  We spend a long time combing over Lacy’s body surface, looking for more trace evidence and documenting every bruise, needle mark, sore, and cut she has. And there are a lot of them. Several of the bruises on her arms, neck, and face appear to be new, suggesting that they might have been left by the killer. We photograph each one and then swab them on the off chance that there might be some foreign DNA left behind.

  Lacy also has several clusters of raised red wheals on her arms, legs, and torso. “These look like bedbug bites,” Izzy says. “They tend to leave a distinctive pattern of three bites in a cluster, with two close together and the third a little ways off.” He points out two such clusters on the girl’s arms. “Sometimes they form a line like these.” He points to another cluster and I shrug my shoulders to eliminate the crawling sensation I suddenly feel.

  “That’s one more reason to check out Troll Nook,” I say. “I talked to one of my friends who runs with EMS the other day and she was telling me about all the overdoses they’ve picked up out there. She mentioned that they have a very bad bedbug infestation. They’ve had to practically rip apart the insides of their ambulances a couple of times to get the bugs out.”

  Beneath Lacy’s broken, ragged fingernails, we find bits of what look like dirt, decayed leaves, and moss consistent with the area where her body was dumped. We’d found more of the same material in her clothing and hair during our initial exam, and even though we know it’s unlikely to be of any great evidentiary value, we photograph, document, and collect it all. The only unexpected thing we find is a small piece of gold thread snagged between the two broken bottom teeth she has.

  When we finally open Lacy to examine her insides, we’ve been working on her for over two hours. The actual autopsy reveals little in the way of surprises. Lacy’s lungs show evidence of her smoking habit—both cigarettes and drugs—her liver is cirrhotic,
and her heart is enlarged and shows evidence of a simmering endocarditis. Without intervention, that would have likely killed her within the year, had someone not stabbed her to death first.

  Notification to her mother would have to wait until we can get the DNA results, but it’s a good bet she already has a strong suspicion, given that the local cops in Viroqua have asked her for samples for DNA comparison, as well as a description of any identifying and distinctive birthmarks, tattoos, or scars. Based on what Hurley told us about her, it sounds like Lacy’s mother tried her best to turn Lacy around, to no avail. How heartbreaking this must be for her. I feel for her, but as a parent, I also fear being in her shoes someday. What makes a kid go astray?

  I’ve seen some situations where the parents can easily be blamed, but I’ve also seen others where the parents and the home situation seemed ideal, yet the kid went off the rails anyway. It raises the whole question of nature versus nurture, and based on what I’ve seen, heard, and read, there are no easy answers to that question. There are no training classes for being a parent and raising kids, so most of us function on what we’ve seen and experienced ourselves. We learn as we go, do the best we can, and sometimes make mistakes. I’ve personally known some family situations, my own included, where I think it’s pure luck that the kids turned out okay, given the way they were parented, which makes me lean more toward the nature side of the equation.

  By the time we’re done with Lacy’s autopsy, Hurley has called to let us know that he has spoken to Mason Ulrich’s current lawyer, who has arranged for us to meet with Ulrich at the Columbia Correctional Institution, where he’s serving his life sentence. Our appointment is for nine o’clock the following morning, so we will need to leave around eight.

  Hurley has also arranged for us to meet with and talk to the detective in Eau Claire who oversaw the Ulrich investigation, and then visit with the doctor who performed the autopsies. I’m surprised the autopsies were done locally, given the nature and seriousness of the case. Izzy, however, tells me that the training program there requires a board-certified forensic pathologist to supervise any procedures. That means the autopsies were overseen or perhaps were conducted by someone who might have performed them if the bodies had been sent to Milwaukee or Madison.

  Christopher comes in at noon and we settle in at the conference table in the library so I can fill him in on the case. I end it with the caveat that I plan to stick with the investigation for now and will be going with Hurley tomorrow to talk to both Ulrich and the Eau Claire detective.

  “Sounds like quite the can of worms,” Christopher says.

  “Speaking of cans of worms,” a male voice says from the door to the library.

  We turn and see Junior Feller, another of Sorenson’s detectives, standing there. Junior was a patrol officer for many years, but was promoted to detective two years ago. His focus is on vice crimes, but the vices typically indulged in by Sorenson residents are neither serious enough nor frequent enough to keep Junior busy all the time. That being the case, he often helps Hurley and the other homicide detective, Bob Richmond, with their cases and investigations.

  “Hurley wants me to help him out today with this Jane Doe case,” Junior says. “Though I understand she’s no longer a Jane Doe.”

  “We don’t have DNA yet,” I say, “but we’re pretty certain about her ID.”

  Junior nods. “Hurley’s tied up with getting some police reports from Eau Claire, or something like that. He said he wanted me to check out Troll Nook to see if our victim might have stayed there.”

  “I think it’s quite possible,” I tell him. And then I explain about the bedbugs. Junior shivers and subconsciously brushes at his arms while I’m describing the bites, and I suppress an urge to do the same.

  “So, which one of you is going with me?” Junior asks, looking back and forth between Christopher and me.

  “That would be me,” I say, my enthusiasm waning some. “Give me a second to grab my scene kit and then we can go.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Junior offers to drive and I follow him out front to a four-door dark blue sedan that looks like it was pulled from the prop department for a movie about unmarked police cars.

  “If we don’t find what we want at Troll Nook, I have some other leads on this Dutch Simmons guy this girl was hanging out with,” Junior says. “I think he might be an associate of some drug dealers in the area that we’ve been trying to bust.”

  During our drive, Junior fills me in on some facts about Troll Nook. “It’s currently owned by a man who lives in Milwaukee, but there is an on-site manager named Clyde Rivers, who lives in one of the cabins and is supposed to handle the rent collections, repairs, maintenance, and other issues. The rents are cheap and available on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. As a result, for the past six years or so, the cabins have served as temporary housing to a variety of desperate people and societal lowlifes. Drug use is rampant and we get called out to the place nearly every week for overdoses.”

  The place is even smarmier-looking than I had imagined. Judging from the condition of the grounds, which is mostly dirt spattered with a few scrubs of grass bravely clinging to life, I figure maintenance isn’t high on Clyde’s list. Based on complaints Junior tells me about from some of the residents, repairs aren’t a priority, either. But if the stories of the residents can be believed, Clyde is apparently quite persistent when it comes to collecting the rent money.

  “He’s kind of a scary dude,” Junior says.

  There are only two cars parked out front when we pull into the lot, but this doesn’t mean the place isn’t busy. A lot of the people who stay here don’t own a vehicle. Clyde’s cabin is at the center of the front row of cabins. It has a hand-painted wooden sign hanging cockeyed over the front door and it says MANGER. Apparently, spelling isn’t high on Clyde’s list, either, though based on what I’ve heard about the condition of some of the cabins, it’s quite possible that the inside of Clyde’s resembles a straw-filled barn.

  I follow Junior to Clyde’s front door and stand back a few feet while Junior knocks. We hear rustling inside, and then a loud bang followed by a muffled curse. Then the door opens and Clyde is revealed in all his glory.

  I’ve never seen or met Clyde, though I’ve heard stories about him. In the past, I’ve heard him described as “scary-looking” and “intimidating,” but without much in the way of specific description. Now I see why. Clyde is huge, standing six-eight at least, with legs the size of tree trunks extending out from a pair of cutoff sweatpants. His hands look like two canned hams, and his broad chest is covered with a tattered, holey T-shirt. WTF? is written on it in six-inch-high letters. His feet are bare, filthy, hairy, and huge—at least a size seventeen, I’d wager. Here is someone who makes my feet look small, and that’s no easy task. There’s a reason Hurley’s nickname for me is Squatch.

  Despite all this oversized flesh, Clyde has a surprisingly small head; so much so, it looks like it belongs to someone else and he just borrowed it to have a head for the day. Or maybe he just returned from a vacation to an island inhabited by head-shrinking natives. His facial features are small, too: a tiny nose, little rosebud lips, and small, close-set eyes. His expression is flat, utterly devoid of emotion. The ears make up for it all, to some degree; he apparently borrowed those from Dumbo. But the overall look of the man is oddly unsettling. He just looks . . . wrong.

  “Mr. Rivers,” Junior says, his head tilted back to look up at the guy. “I’m Detective Feller with the Sorenson Police Department and I’d like to talk to you. May we come in?”

  I’m hoping Clyde says no, because there is no way I want to go inside this cabin. I try to see past the bulk of Clyde’s body to the interior to prep myself, just in case, but I can’t see anything. It’s dark as night in there.

  “Not much room in here,” Clyde says, delivering his second surprise.

  I expected a deep, rumbling voice to emanate from that body, something that sounded like a volcano erupt
ing. Instead, his voice is breathy, soft, and slow, each word carefully enunciated and barely above a whisper. It’s somehow creepier than the booming voice I expected.

  “What you want to know?” Clyde asks. He takes a step forward and pulls the cabin door closed behind him.

  Junior is prepared. He has a picture of Lacy with him and shows it to Clyde. “Has this girl ever stayed here?”

  Clyde stares at the picture, taking hold of it in his canned-ham hand. The five-by-seven-inch picture looks wallet-sized inside his massive grip. “Yup, she’s been here,” he says, handing the picture back. “Rented cabin eighteen last week. But I haven’t seen her for a couple of days. She owes me some rent money, so I’m guessing she ran out of cash.” He hands the picture back to Junior.

  “She ran out of life,” I say, and it’s all I can do not to take a step back when Clyde raises his head and fixes his beady eyes on me. “Someone killed her.”

  For a split second, Clyde’s face softens, morphing into something resembling sadness. But then it corrects itself and becomes expressionless again. “That means the boss is going to hit me up again,” he says.

  “Hit you up?” Junior echoes.

  “Yeah, if I don’t get the rent money up front, the boss man takes it out of my pay. And I let Lacy slide for a couple of days. She’s been good for it before, so I figured she would be again. Lesson learned.”

  Based on what Junior told me about Clyde, he’s not known for his magnanimity or patience, so I’m betting the reason he let Lacy “slide” is because she paid him with something other than cash. The thought makes my stomach turn.

  “Did she stay here by herself, or was someone with her?” I ask.

  Clyde looks at Junior, then back at me. “Why you want to know?”

  “Like the lady said,” Junior answers, “someone killed her.”

  “And it’s possible it was a serial killer, one who kills both men and women,” I add. This is essentially a lie, but I want to hit Clyde where it might hurt. “The reason you didn’t get Lacy’s rent money is because she died. Your other tenants are at risk, too.”