Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  Dutch looks at him with what I imagine is supposed to be a wry smile. He wags a finger and his eyes become fixated on it for several seconds, making him nearly fall over. “I can’t tell you that ’cause you’ll arrest me.”

  “You have amnesty for the moment,” Junior says, impatient. “Anything you tell me right now comes with a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  Dutch apparently finds this hilarious; he leans forward and bellows out a laugh. The motion gives him just enough momentum that he staggers away, loses his balance, and ends up sitting on the ground. He tries to get up and falls down again. Then he gives up, crosses his legs, and leans forward, elbows on his knees.

  “There’s this group of people,” Dutch begins. “They travel around and scope out neighborhoods in smaller towns where people are used to leaving their doors unlocked during the day. We hooked up with them and hit up a neighborhood of nice older homes, with a mix of family types. Lacy and I cruised the neighborhood on foot after dark had settled, knowing we might draw unwanted attention if we did it during the day. We saw an elderly couple step out of their house with their dog and head up the street, and we waited until they were out of sight and then walked up to their front door like we owned it. Sure enough, the front door was unlocked, and we just waltzed inside. We found the woman’s purse sitting on a table in the foyer, and we found the man’s wallet sitting on his dresser. We took all the cash they had and then hightailed it out of there. Total time, less than five minutes. Total haul, over five hundred bucks—and no one paid us the least bit of attention.” He pauses and smiles smugly, clearly proud of the crime they pulled off.

  “We got lucky with that one,” Dutch continues. “Those two had a lot of cash on hand. That tends to be the way with some older folks, though. They don’t trust the banks and don’t like using credit cards.”

  Dutch’s story makes me angry. He and those like him are taking advantage of neighborhoods in towns like Sorenson that suffer from something of an identity crisis. Many of their inhabitants still think of them as insular communities populated with friendly, kind people who have old-fashioned, small-town values. This is still true to a large extent, but it’s changing rapidly. Despite the steady uptick in crimes like the one Dutch and Lacy committed, plenty of people still leave their houses and cars with the doors unlocked.

  “So you took the cash you stole and used it to buy drugs?” Junior says.

  Dutch nods. “We scored at the Somewhere Bar and then went down by the river and got high. After that, we headed back here, but our car broke down out on the highway. Lacy got out and started walking back to our cabin. I must have passed out in the car, ’cause next thing I know, an ambulance is there loading me up and taking me to the hospital.”

  If Dutch’s story can be believed, Lacy might have been picked up by her killer as she was walking along the road. Had he then driven her back to her cabin here at Troll Nook and killed her? The lack of any defensive wounds suggests that Lacy was incapacitated in some way when the stab wounds were inflicted. That makes me wonder.

  “Dutch, did you have drugs left over when you and Lacy got in the car to drive back here?”

  “A little bit,” he admits. “I guess Lacy took it with her, ’cause when I went looking for our car, someone at the hospital told me the cops had it towed. No one said anything about finding anything illegal in it, so I’m guessing Lacy took what was left of what we bought.”

  Junior walks over to Dutch and holds out his hand. “Get up,” he says.

  Dutch takes the proffered hand and staggers to his feet.

  “Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” Junior says, taking a pair of handcuffs from his pocket.

  Dutch gapes at him. “You said I had amity,” he protests.

  “The word is ‘amnesty,’ ” Junior says irritably, “and I lied.” He proceeds to recite the Miranda warning to Dutch and then walks him to the car, tossing him into the backseat. “Do we need anything more from the cabin?” he asks me.

  I shake my head. “I think we’re okay for now. I just need to get my scene kit and tape the place off.”

  “I’ll let Clyde know he’s got one less rental to worry about for now.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we are on the road, headed back to Sorenson, listening to Dutch cuss us out from the backseat.

  CHAPTER 6

  I check in with Hurley when I’m ready to call it a day and tell him I’ll pick up Matthew and meet him at home. We briefly discuss dinner, but before we can come to any kind of agreement, Hurley has a call on his office line and our conversation is cut short.

  By the time I drive to Izzy and Dom’s house to pick up Matthew, it’s after six and Izzy is already home. Izzy’s life partner, Dom, is my primary source for childcare. When Matthew was born, I lived in a cottage behind Izzy’s house. It had been built for Izzy’s mother, Sylvie, who had broken a hip and needed closer supervision. Sylvie rallied, and after a year, she moved out. I’m sure she would have preferred to continue living close to the son she dotes on, but Sylvie struggles with the fact that Izzy is gay. To this day, she continues to bemoan the fact that he hasn’t found himself a nice girl and settled down.

  In the beginning, Sylvie ignored Dom for the most part, but now that he and Izzy have Juliana, Sylvie has come around some. She still lives in her world of denial and acts as if Dom is simply a male nanny hired to care for Izzy’s child, but she knows that if she wants to spend time with Juliana—and she does—Dom is part of the package.

  Dom has certainly done his part to win her over. The man was born to be a caregiver, and he loves to be a homebody. His cooking skills are divine (I have the thighs to prove it!), his sense for interior design is exquisite (as I learned when trying to decide on the décor for the new house Hurley and I had built last year), and he is an easygoing and natural parent. His ability to woo Sylvie—though “tolerate” is probably a better word—has done wonders for their relationship. Good thing, as Sylvie’s health has again taken a turn and she is now back in the cottage, this time for good.

  I lived in that cottage for the better part of two years, hiding there after I left David. Having discovered his dalliance by accident, and in an undeniably shocking way, catching him in flagrante delicto with a woman who was a coworker of mine at the time, it took me some time to figure out what I was going to do. Since he and I also worked together, I fled my job at the local hospital at the same time I fled my marriage. The drama behind the dissolution of our marriage is still fodder for gossip at the place, and I’m glad I never went back.

  Izzy’s assistant at the time had just quit, so he offered me the job. Since I knew how to slice and dice and had a better than average understanding of human anatomy, it was a good fit. My basic nosiness also made the investigative part of the job a natural for me, and after several seminars and educational programs, I have advanced my career and can now call myself a medicolegal death investigator. The title is a mouthful that basically means I spend a lot of time with dead people and I get to stick my nose into other people’s business. I also get to work with my hubby, an additional perk.

  When Matthew was born, using Dom for childcare came easily and naturally, since I lived mere feet away at the time. Now that Hurley and I have built a home just outside of town, the commute is longer, but Dom is still my primary childcare person. Hurley’s daughter, Emily, who lives with us now that her mother is dead, and my sister, Desi, another person who was born to be a parent, fill in as needed. Emily has been particularly useful for those middle-of-the-night calls that both Hurley and I get, because we can leave Matthew asleep in bed and not have to drag him out. That’s going to change in the not-so-distant future, however, since Emily will be going away to college in another year.

  One of the delights of having Dom as a caregiver is that he’s always cooking or baking up something sinfully delicious. I’ve envied Izzy on more than one occasion. Being able to come home to one of Dom’s delicious meals is a little slice of heaven. Not that
Hurley can’t cook. He can and does, but his offerings tend to be a bit more pedestrian than the stuff Dom makes. Not that I have room to criticize, since my own cooking skills are limited to what can be boiled, poured from a can, or ordered from a restaurant. For tonight, Dom is fixing a meal of beef tenderloin, baby red potatoes, asparagus, and homemade sourdough bread. The smell of his kitchen is the best aromatherapy I can imagine. Apparently, my son agrees, because he doesn’t want to leave and come home with me.

  “Izzy said you guys are going to Eau Claire tomorrow, so I’m assuming you’ll be dropping Matthew off in the morning?” Dom says to me as I help my son put on his jacket.

  “Yes,” I say. “We’ll be by around eight to pick up Izzy and drop off Matthew.”

  “You can leave Matthew here for the night, if you want.”

  “Maffew stay!” Matthew says, trying to wriggle out of the jacket sleeve I just got his arm into.

  The offer is tempting, but I decline. As it is, it seems like I have so little time to spend with Matthew, and it’s the same for Hurley. Our family unit is a bit ragtag at times, with all four of us going in different directions, particularly now that Emily has her driver’s license and her own car. We see less and less of her as she opts to spend more time with her friends and with her boyfriend, Johnny Chester, whom Hurley refers to as Chester the Molester. It’s an unfair moniker to hang on the kid, who has proven to be smart, trustworthy, and well-behaved. But he comes from a family that has cell blocks named after them at most of the state’s prisons, and Hurley is convinced Johnny will one day follow suit and join the family business: Felonious Crimes, Inc.

  Emily is home when Matthew and I get there, and Hurley arrives twenty minutes later. Faced with the rare opportunity to have all four of us together for dinner, I offer to cook, but both Hurley and Emily quickly nix the idea. Though I’m not known for my cooking skills, I’ve been trying to improve and learn. For the past six months, I’ve been experimenting with new recipes and techniques, with admittedly mixed results. Even our dog, Hoover, has turned his nose up at some of the leftovers from meals I’ve fixed, and he’s been known to eat anything.

  Given the vociferous objections to the idea of me cooking, I call one of our favorite restaurants in town, Pesto Change-o, and order a variety of our favorite Italian dishes. There are audible sighs of relief from both Emily and Hurley. After I go out and get the food and return home, bearing my packages, Matthew claps his hands with joy and says, “Pasketti!”

  My son loves spaghetti. Unfortunately, he likes doing more than simply eating it. Something about that long, stringy pasta brings out the artist in him. He decorates himself and everything around him with it. Hoover has become quite adept at slurping noodles that are hanging off the edge of the table or Matthew’s arm.

  I decide tonight to try giving Matthew spaghetti without tomato sauce, hoping to minimize the mess, but he has a major meltdown over it. After squalling about his “bad pasketti,” and resisting my encouragement to just try it, he takes the entire plate of spaghetti and turns it upside down on top of his head. The plate slides off and lands on the floor, some of the pasta falling with it, the rest of it draping itself over Matthew’s head, shoulders, and lap. Since I had buttered the pasta, Matthew’s hair and clothing are now greasy.

  I tell him in my stern mommy voice to knock it off, but not satisfied with his degree of protest thus far, Matthew climbs down from his chair and pushes it over on its side. Hoover is at his side in a flash, trying to grab the pasta hanging from him. Hurley yells at Matthew, and then Matthew utters a word he might have heard me say a time or two, even though I try not to say such things aloud. It’s not standard two-and-a-half-year-old vocabulary and it’s the kind of word that makes other mothers gasp in horror, as if they don’t say the same things at times.

  In the brief, silent aftermath that follows this utterance, Hurley and I both stare at one another. Showing an uncanny ability to size up the situation and take advantage of it, Matthew runs from the room and goes upstairs, leaving a trail of “pasketti” behind him. Hoover is busy vacuuming it up, living up to his name. Emily, also no slouch when it comes to home combat survival, quietly slides off her seat and heads upstairs as well.

  “Where did Matthew learn a word like that?” Hurley asks.

  “Oh, come on, Hurley,” I say, rolling my eyes. “You know very well that we’ve both said things in front of him that we shouldn’t. How does that saying go? ‘Little pitchers have big ears’?”

  Hurley looks like he wants to argue the point, but then he takes on a faraway look, which tells me he’s summoning up some memories. Apparently, they are memories involving his role in this, because his expression softens and he smiles at me.

  “We need to be more careful in the future and make it clear to Matthew that such words are inappropriate,” he says.

  “I agree.” I reach over and give his hand a squeeze, hoping the doubt doesn’t show on my face. Fact is, we’ve been trying to focus on this for a while now. So far, our efforts have produced mixed results. Cussing comes easily to Hurley and me.

  Hoping to change the subject, I ask Hurley, “Did Junior fill you in on our talk with Dutch?”

  “He did. Interesting, but not much help in figuring out what happened to Lacy between their time in the car and when she was killed in that motel cabin. Though Dutch is apparently singing to help lighten his sentence, and that will help solve several home robberies that have happened around town lately.”

  “You know, Lacy had no defensive wounds of any sort, yet her stab wounds were inflicted pre- or perimortem. We can’t be sure of the exact order of the stab wounds, but there were fibers from the pants she was wearing inside the chest wounds, indicating that the pelvic wound was administered before the chest ones. It’s as if she just lay there and let the killer do what he wanted.”

  “It sounds like she was pretty high when she and Dutch parted company that night,” Hurley says.

  “And she left with the rest of the goods they had bought. If she shot up some more, or someone shot her up, it might explain the lack of defensive wounds. It will be interesting to see what her tox screen shows.”

  With work talk out of the way, I clear the table and do the dishes while Hurley heads upstairs to “prep for tomorrow.”

  Despite his “pasketti” meltdown, or perhaps because of it, Matthew goes to bed more easily than usual. Pleased that we’ve avoided the drama that sometimes accompanies his bedtime, I head for our own bedroom, where I find my husband sitting up in bed wading through some files. The headboard for our king-sized bed is a large bookcase that contains shelves, cubbyholes, and overhead lights. Hurley and I both take our work to bed at times, probably more often than we should. We have a fourth bedroom on the upper floor that currently serves as a home office. Late nights in our bedroom, however, is the one place in the house where we can have privacy and discuss the cases we’re working on, the details of which are often too gory and graphic for the tender ears of our son.

  Emily would likely love to eavesdrop on our work conversations because she is intrigued by what we do. She’s been talking about pursuing an education in forensic science, with a secondary focus on art. The girl has an amazing talent for drawing, particularly faces. A few years ago, when she was sitting in the library in my office waiting on her father, she focused on a skeleton hanging there and used the skull to draw a woman’s face, not knowing that a portrait of the woman whose skeleton it was hung in another part of the office. The bones belonged to the wife of a previous pathologist who, at his wife’s request, had donated the skeleton. Emily’s drawing was notable not only for its resemblance to the once-living person, but also because she had no idea whom the skeleton belonged to or even if it was male or female. Somehow she had intuited the details and then rendered them with amazing precision and accuracy. The kid has an amazing talent; it’s an innate ability that I think will segue nicely into a forensic pathology career.

  As I approach our bed, I
see two glowing orbs beneath it. It’s one of our two cats, Tux and Rubbish, both of whom were rescues I took in while living in the cottage behind Izzy and Dom’s house. The cats seem to take great delight in hanging out under our bed, but only if Hurley is in it. Hurley doesn’t like cats. He’s afraid of them, truth be told, but he’s asked me not to say this to people. I think he’s afraid it will have a deleterious effect on his macho image. The cats, conniving creatures that they are, seem to sense Hurley’s fear and take delight in lurking beneath the bed, making just enough noise for Hurley to know they are there.

  I’ve tried to quash Hurley’s fears by pointing out how the cats lovingly attempt to make sure we are fed and cared for by bringing in any number of fresh kills to feed us—mice, moles, voles, baby rabbits, the odd bird or two, and, recently, a small turtle. They always leave them on Hurley’s side of the bed, often on his pillow. But he continues to interpret their attentive kindness as a subtle form of intimidation. He’s convinced the cats want him to move out—though there are times when he’s said he thinks they want him dead—so they can have me all to themselves.

  It’s a true testament to his love for me that Hurley tolerates what he refers to as “those vile creatures,” and lets them share his space. The fact that I also brought our dog, Hoover, to the mix has helped. Hurley and Hoover bonded early on. Hurley has Hoover keep guard on the floor next to our bed at night when the cats are stalking from beneath it. This gives Hurley a false sense of security, because Hoover is even more afraid of the cats than Hurley is.

  I climb onto our bed from the bottom, crawling on my hands and knees toward my husband, who looks incredibly sexy wearing the new cheaters he’s had to buy because his close-up vision is starting to go. I think the glasses make him look professorial, wise, and a tad bit nerdy. Oddly, this look turns me on.

  “Hey, handsome,” I say, reaching up and taking the folder from his hands.