Savage Lake

by Dan Ames

  So, two bits of information there. The killer had meant to keep this hidden for some time and the killer messed up. Stupid or rushed? Or both?

  I allowed my gaze to move over the rest of her.

  The water had bloated her body. Her lips had turned blue and her skin was unnaturally pale. Her hair was still wet and clung to her back and face. Her eyes were closed but looked puffy.

  I’d seen a few drowning victims before. The thing about murders on television is that they were all cleaned up. They didn’t show, for instance, the way a hanging victim’s face swelled up and turned purple like a grape.

  When I saw drowning victims on television shows, they looked so peaceful. Like someone was just lying out on the beach getting tan.

  This was nothing like that.

  She must have been pretty, I thought. Not that that made any of this sadder, but it might speak to motive.

  I turned my attention back to the rope. Her arms, I realized now, had been forced behind her and tied. Was that necessary? The answer was simple. No. The killer had done that for some other reason, gave him some sick joy, I guessed.

  Her ankles were tied together as well.

  “She was alive when he put her in,” I said to no one in particular.

  Donovan responded, “You think?”

  I nodded to the rope around her ankles and wrists. “He didn’t want her to swim.”

  “He could have tied her before to keep her from fighting or running and just thrown her in after, still tied.”

  I didn’t think so. “Maybe,” I said.

  “Guy who found her, Richie Tobin, says there was some weight attached to her,” Donovan continued. “He had to cut it off to haul her onto his boat.”

  I’d already known this, but it was good to get confirmation.

  Peyton and two EMTs carrying a body bag walked up. They waited at a distance while Peyton moved closer.

  Her gaze washed over the girl. Her face paled, but she held it together. “Are you done? They’re here to…” She motioned as if saying the words out loud would be intrusive.

  I nodded. “No scene to preserve here. The crime… even where she was discovered… neither’s here.”

  The dead girl looked waxy and pale, like a discarded doll.

  We didn’t know her name yet. But I knew one thing. I was going to catch the bastard who did this.

  Chapter Four

  The fisherman who had found the girl, Richie Tobin, had moved or been moved from his earlier position on the docks to a bench hidden from the view of prying eyes.

  He was beyond middle-aged, a burly kind of guy in dirty blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a dirty Detroit Lions baseball cap. He was wrapped in a blanket, for comfort or to battle shock.

  I looked at Donovan. “Get us some coffees.”

  “What? I’m not—”

  I gave him a hard stare. He glanced at the obviously shaken fisherman and made a face of impatience, but he went.

  Peyton walked up with two crime scene techs as they took the dead woman to the van to haul her to the morgue. For now, Tobin and I were alone.

  After introducing myself, I nodded to the bench beside him, asking permission to sit. He granted it by pulling the blanket to one side a bit.

  “I don’t know why they gave me this. I told them I’m fine,” he said. “Been stuck on my boat in weather so cold it turned my nuts into ice cubes.”

  “Officer Donovan says you found the woman?”

  He nodded again. “I come out most mornings. The wife doesn’t like it, says I should be working around the house, but it relaxes me…”

  He let the words drift off and I knew he was recognizing the irony in them, considering what he had discovered this morning.

  “Whereabouts were you fishing?” I asked.

  He motioned to the left. “Not too far out beyond the cove. Far enough I don’t scrape bottom. There are a few pockets where you can get shallow dwellers and the deep divers. But there’s things out there that can snag a boat too. Bring you down if you aren’t careful or don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “So, you anchored the boat and had been out there fishing for a while?” I asked.

  “Been out about an hour. I was getting ready to move actually. No bites. That’s when I saw it.”

  He seemed to catch himself.

  “Her…” he corrected. “She was floating. It was hard to see at first. There was still mist on the water. At first, I thought it was a bundle of clothes or something. I don’t know what. You don’t expect… I never expected…I’ve never—” He shut down and looked at me as if needing some kind of understanding from me that finding a dead girl floating in the lake was not an every week occurrence for him.

  “Of course not. Not many people have,” I assured him. “Donovan said you thought that she was weighted down with something? Any idea with what? Did you see anything? Pull it up at all?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t think to try and pull it up too. I was just thinking about getting her out of the water. I just cut the rope.” He flushed. “I probably shouldn’t have done that, right? Messing with evidence or something? But I couldn’t… I couldn’t just leave her there. And I guess I thought I was either wrong, that it wasn’t a person, or maybe that she was still alive.” Confusion from his own actions clouded his eyes.

  “I used my fishing rod to grab her,” he added, almost in a whisper. “Then once I had pulled her close, I saw the rope. It went straight down and when I tugged on it, I felt weight on the end. So I cut it, pulled her in, came back to shore, and called the police.”

  Donovan walked up, two Styrofoam cups filled with what I guessed was coffee in his hands. He gave one to Tobin and took a sip from the other. I smiled inwardly at his passive aggressive mode. Whatever helps get him through his day.

  Tobin drank from his coffee and I followed up with a few other questions, but it was clear he wasn’t holding anything back. I told him we were done but that we might want to get back in touch with more questions.

  Donovan and I walked back towards my car.

  “What do we have?” he asked. He hadn’t taken another drink of his coffee since he’d walked up.

  “One dead girl and an asshole who killed her,” I replied.

  Hopefully, that was it.

  I reached up, took Donovan’s coffee and dropped it into a nearby trash can. At his blink, I added, “Next stop. The morgue.”

  Chapter Five

  The next stop wasn’t literally the morgue. Mainly because just following the body there wasn’t going to bring me any new information. I had to wait for someone to come in and actually look at the body first. Good Isle didn’t have its own medical examiner. We hadn’t had enough murders to hold one on staff permanently.

  Instead we imported one from the state police.

  Allison Shelton was their M.E. and I gave her an hour to travel, and then messaged Donovan to meet me at the morgue or what we used as a morgue. It was actually space in the basement of a local pediatrician’s clinic, conveniently located across the street from the Pack and Mail.

  There was, happily, a separate entrance in the back that opened directly into the morgue space. So, I didn’t have to wander through stressed parents and coughing kids.

  The front room was empty. Good Isle didn’t have money for a receptionist either. I walked past some folding chairs set out in case of visitors and into the first exam room. Donovan was leaning against one wall, looking bored. He pushed himself away when he saw me.

  “Is Shelton here yet?” I asked.

  “She is. Had to hit the john or something.” He walked to the table where our victim was laying and shook his head. “She looks real young. Early twenties, I’d say. Who’d do this to a young thing like her?”

  Who’d do this to anyone, young or old? It was a redundant question, though and I didn’t answer.

  His reaction reminded me that this was not Grosse Pointe. My brother, John and I had seen plenty of awful cases in our time there.
This sort of thing was new and unusual in Good Isle.

  “Random or someone with a grudge?” I mused out loud more to myself than Donovan.

  My gut was telling me that this wasn’t a personal murder—but I had no evidence to the contrary. For now, we had to operate under the assumption that the murderer was someone who knew the victim and needed her gone.

  I grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a cardboard box. “Any reports of missing girls that might be her?” I asked, pulling them on.

  Donovan didn’t answer. Instead, he shrugged. “Not yet, but I haven’t had time to check completely.”

  In other words, he’d stopped for lunch. Probably hadn’t even been near a computer. I started to say as much but stopped myself. He had a right to eat. I had spent the time walking around the dock and along the shore looking for someone who might have seen something, but that was me.

  Instead, I turned back to our victim and carefully felt her dress. It was a lightweight, dark green slinky thing the kind some women wore when they went out. No pockets.

  “Guess they didn’t find a handbag no one told me about, did they?” I asked.

  Donovan shook his head.

  I slid my hand under the dress. She was wearing a swimming suit underneath it.

  That was interesting. I didn’t know many women who wore a swimsuit when dressed like this. The bottoms maybe if you were short on laundry, but the tops? No bikini top was a replacement for a good bra. Going completely sans bra was more likely than substituting a swimming suit top for one.

  “We need to check missing persons,” I told Donovan. For once, he didn’t pull an attitude. He knew he’d screwed up.

  The doors to reception opened and Peyton walked in with the ME in tow. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  I nodded at Shelton. She’d done the autopsy on the Holloway case a bit ago. “I wish I could say I’m happy to see you again.” I motioned with my head to the dead girl.

  “Me too,” Shelton replied. She grabbed her own pair of gloves and pulled them on.

  We gathered around the body for her to give us her initial impressions. Although at this point, I suspected she wouldn’t be able to tell us much that we couldn’t see for ourselves.

  “Age is probably mid-twenties.” She picked up one of the girl’s hands and flattened out her fingers. “Her nails have been done. Probably at home.”

  That was a bit of a disappointment. Good Isle only had one nail salon. Knowing the girl had had a professional manicure might have been a good lead so far as identifying her. If the girl was actually from or staying in Good Isle that was…

  “Dress looks like she was going out.” Shelton looked up at me. “There aren’t many hotspots in Good Isle, are there?”

  She was right. None that I could think of that would warrant this kind of dress.

  “Maybe she just liked to dress up,” Donovan offered.

  It was possible.

  “Get a picture,” I instructed Donovan.

  As he snapped a few photos of the dead girl with his phone, I continued, “Send them to me and get a good one printed out. Then hit all the night places where that dress might blend.”

  Donovan paused. “In Good Isle?”

  “In wherever. You’ve got a company car. Use it.”

  I left them to do their respective jobs. I had paperwork to finish and then some sleuthing of my own to do.

  This murder didn’t feel like a one-off to me.

  But that’s all it was…a feeling.

  Chapter Six

  Most of the rest of that day and a good part of the next was spent searching through unsolved cases from around the area. When anything looked closely related to our case - age of victim, victim’s dress and general appearance, being dumped in a body of water—I called the police officer in question. There were a lot of trails to follow, but none delivered pay dirt.

  Frustrated, I picked up the phone and dialed Dr. Shelton.

  “I’ve got an initial report,” she told me. “You might want to head back over and take a look.”

  I got in my car and drove to the morgue. It was after the pediatrician’s hours now. The building was empty except for the doctor and me. She led me to the back and pulled the sheet that had been covering our victim’s body.

  “First,” Dr. Shelton took a breath. “Because I believe in delivering the worst news first: she was raped.”

  It didn’t surprise me. That didn’t make it any easier to stomach, though. “Okay.”

  “I’m guessing more than once,” Dr. Shelton added.

  “One guy or more?” I asked.

  She considered my question for a bit. “Probably one, but there’s really no telling. I didn’t get any semen. My guess is the guy or guys wore a condom.”

  So he’d planned ahead or he just always had condoms on him.

  “I’ve taken some swabs and will send them off to see if we can get any DNA that doesn’t match hers. We’ll send the dress and her swimsuit too, of course. But that will take some time to get results.” She picked up the girl’s hand. “I checked but there’s no evidence of skin or anything under her fingernails or in her mouth. No bruising on the knuckles.”

  “So, she didn’t fight back.” I rolled this around a bit. There were a number of reasons a rape victim might not fight back, drugs and fear being the top two that jumped to mind.

  Dr. Shelton shook her head. “But I think I found the explanation. I’ll need to wait for the official toxicology report but if you look here…”

  She showed me a small mark on the back of the girl’s shoulder.

  “A needle mark?” I asked.

  Dr. Shelton nodded. “I think she was drugged.”

  “Is that what killed her?” I asked.

  Dr. Shelton shook her head. “No, cause of death was definitely drowning. There was water in her lungs.”

  I looked down at the girl. “So, she was alive when he tied her to whatever was on the end of that rope and dropped her into the lake.” My lips compressed against each other. Hopefully, the girl had been unconscious by then too.

  “The guy knew what he was doing, though,” Dr. Shelton added. She indicated the rope, which was now piled up on a side table. “Those knots were good. Didn’t bite into her skin but impossible for her to undo herself.”

  Had he wanted to keep the body pristine? I wondered.

  The doctor hesitated as if not sure she should continue.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, this is a bit outside my professional area, but I grew up on this lake. Whoever tied those knots probably had sailing experience.”

  I nodded. That might be helpful. Of course, the girl had been found in the lake. So we already knew her killer was at least somewhat comfortable on the water. I looked at the victim’s wrists. “By your estimation, did the rape happen before or after she was bound?”

  “It’s impossible to tell. The ropes didn’t leave marks, like you would expect if she’d been struggling in them, but she may have been too out of it to resist. We’ll know more if we can pin down what drug was used. And, of course, it could have been both.”

  What all had this girl been through? And how aware of what was happening to her had she been? These were the kinds of questions that would haunt me until I knew the answers and had found her killer.

  This wasn’t a crime of passion, pulled off with no forethought, I figured. This had been premeditated.

  Had the killer known the victim or just hunted her? Was he out there hunting again, right now?

  I forced down the grim thought and looked back at the doctor. “Anything else?”

  “Her stomach contents showed alcohol, but not enough to get her drunk,” Dr. Shelton said. “I won’t know any more about what drug was used on her or anything else like the DNA, until I can get this all to the lab and get a report back. I’ll ask them to rush it through, but I can’t say how soon we’ll get results.”

  “Yeah. A rush would be good. Whoever did this… I have a fee
ling…”

  “He might kill again?” she finished for me.

  We stared at each other in silence. She broke it by closing her eyes and letting out a sigh before opening them again to meet my gaze. “I’ll let them know.”

  She would, and I would too. Patience wasn’t a virtue in my world. Not when a killer was walking around free and possibly hunting his next prey.

  Chapter Seven

  The girl was standing at the corner under a maple tree to protect her from the sun, consulting a map. The old-fashioned paper kind. He liked that. She was also pretty, with dark brown hair and big blue eyes. Short and petite, with a sweet and innocent face. Just how he liked them. She was wearing a sundress and flat sandals. Weather appropriate, but demure. Not tawdry like the dress the last girl had worn.

  Maybe this one was different. Truly the sweet picture she presented.

  He mulled that over a little, knowing it was too good to be true. None of them were sweet. They all set you up and turned on you eventually if you gave them enough time. Which he didn’t. Not anymore.

  He had long ago perfected the art of bumping into someone and making it look like an accident. He pulled out his phone as if checking something and then turned, pretending to glance up at a nearby sign. As he did, he brushed his backside against her. “I’m sorry,” he exclaimed, pivoting in place. He held up both hands and stepped back as if the brushing of his body against hers had been both accidental and something he regretted.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” the girl replied. She smiled. What lovely lips and teeth.

  They’d look wonderful when she screamed, or with a gag shoved between them.

  He slipped his phone back into his pocket and took a step back toward her. Within range of touching here, he eyed her map. “I hope I’m not prying, but are you new in town?”