Frozen Stiff mwm-3

by Annelise Ryan

  “Who was that?”

  “The girl at the receptionist’s desk.”

  “Ah, Misty.”

  “Yes. She seemed to think you were working for my mother and me.”

  Uh-oh.

  “But you’re not. So who are you working for?”

  “I can’t reveal that. Sorry.”

  “Is it that prick, Mike Ackerman?” Even without her colorful descriptor, the venom in her voice when she mentions his name makes it clear what she thinks of him.

  “Why do you think he’s a prick?” I ask, avoiding her question.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she says. “I’m not sticking my neck out so he can chop it off. If you’re working for him, you’ll tell him what I said and then he’ll be coming after me. Next thing you know, I’ll be dead, too, just like my sister.”

  Her words hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Clearly she thinks it was Ackerman who killed Callie.

  “You tell that son of a bitch that I’ve already gone to the cops and if anything happens to me they’ll be on him like flies on shit,” she says. She’s trying hard to pepper her words with lots of bravado but I detect an underlying shakiness in her voice that tells me her fear of Ackerman is very real.

  Sensing that she is about to hang up, I say, “I’m not working for Mike Ackerman. I can’t tell you who I am working for, but I can tell you it’s not him.” She doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her breathing on the other end so I know she hasn’t hung up yet. “Do you think Mike Ackerman killed your sister?” I ask her. The phone beeps three times just as I finish asking the question and I realize the battery is about to die. All I hear of Andi’s answer is “—did.”

  “I’m sorry, you cut out and I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said the bastard . . . beep . . . to keep her quiet . . . beep . . . tell his wife . . . beep.” After her last comment is broken up by three more beeps, the phone goes dead.

  “Damn it!” I throw the cell aside and hear Hoover whimper behind me. “Sorry, boy,” I say.

  I sit and think for a minute about Andi’s final comment, trying to make some sense of the part I heard. The words keep her quiet and tell his wife make me wonder if my suspicions about the relationship between Ackerman and Callie are right.

  I turn my attention back to the diary and flip it open to the page with the note about police corruption. As I read it again, something nags at the back of my mind and I struggle to figure out what it is. It isn’t until I look at the dead cell phone that it hits me. Callie’s diary entry mentions a phone call and if there was a phone call, there’d be a record of where it came from. I make a mental note of the time and date of the entry so I can later compare it to calls Callie got. Though the entry may have been written hours or even days after the call, I figure it’s worth a shot. If I had my own cell phone, I could call Bob Richmond and ask him if he’s run Callie’s phone records yet, but since I don’t, it’ll have to wait.

  Phone calls aside, it all comes back to Hurley. He is the one thing that is common and central to everything that has happened, though not everyone knows it yet. With that thought in mind, I finish my breakfast and drive over to his neighborhood. I cruise down the street slowly, studying the other houses, and then circle around the block to Harold Minniver’s street. I do this several times, not sure what I’m looking for but feeling like there is something here, something that will help me put all the pieces together.

  Eventually I park, leash Hoover, and walk up to Hurley’s house. After several rings of the doorbell and a few knocks, I deduce he isn’t home. Curious, I head off the porch and walk around the side of his house to the garage area where the boat is parked. Nothing looks much different than it did when I was here a couple of nights ago.

  I peek through the side window into Hurley’s workshop. Sunlight coming in through the window in the bay door creates several sparks of light within the room. I realize it’s coming from bits of metal scattered about and I remember the metal fragments we found in Callie’s hair. One more piece of damning evidence against Hurley.

  I study the other doors in the garage and see that the one to the outside has a dead bolt on it, but the one leading from the workshop to the house has just a keyed knob lock. The dead bolt probably doesn’t offer much of an obstacle to someone with Hurley’s lock-picking talents, and once someone gained access to the workshop, getting into the house proper would be easy. Heck, even I could do that and, in fact, I have. I bypassed one of those knob locks once when I was a teenager and locked myself out of the house. All I had to do was slide my library card into the door crack and use it to push back the latch.

  I wander out into Hurley’s backyard, to the rear line of the fence where it butts up against Minniver’s yard. There is police tape across Minniver’s back door, which opens into his garage. Similar doors, similar locks—access to one would make it easy to access the other. And that’s assuming that both Hurley and Minniver were religious about locking their doors. Here in small-town America, people often don’t. Plus there’s the missing key to Minniver’s house.

  I head back out to the street, Hoover sniffing the ground as we go. Just before we round the front corner of the house, Hoover stops dead in his tracks and raises his nose to the air. Then he barks excitedly several times. Thinking it might be Hurley, I head for the front yard at a fast clip and nearly trip over a white blur that runs into my feet as I round the corner of the house.

  “Oh, my, I’m sorry,” says a female voice. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  The white blur has materialized into a small dog—some type of poodle-looking thing—and I see that the female voice belongs to an older woman with brown eyes and a gray Joan of Are hairdo.

  Hoover sits dutifully at my feet at first, watching the white fuzzy dog approach him. Seconds later he is desperately trying to stick his nose in the little dog’s butt, while the little dog yips and barks and bounces around like it’s on meth.

  “Antoinette!” the woman yells, tugging on her leash. Unfortunately, the efforts of the two dogs have resulted in their leashes becoming intertwined and wrapped around my legs, so I nearly fall when the woman keeps pulling.

  “Could you please ease up?” I say, trying to hop on my one good foot. The woman finally seems to realize what’s happening and she drops her leash completely. I do the same hoping to make the untangling process a little easier. But the fuzzy white wonder keeps darting in and out between my legs, nipping at Hoover’s heels and making a general pest of herself. As Hoover tries to avoid her bites and sniff her butt instead, he starts running between my legs, too. Finally, in desperation, I reach down and unhook him from the leash completely. Sensing his newfound freedom, he immediately takes off for a nearby bush. Antoinette follows and I manage to get her leash unwrapped from my ankle in the nick of time.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman asks, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “I’m sorry, who are you?”

  “Helen Baxter.”

  The name rings no bells so I start to do my own introduction. “I’m Mattie Win—”

  “I know who you are,” Helen says, cutting me off. “You’re that nurse who works at the ME’s office now, right?”

  I nod, not surprised she knows me. My face along with other more delicate parts of my anatomy recently appeared on the cover of a national tabloid thanks to a rather high-profile case our office handled. That, combined with the fact that I live in a small town where the only thing that moves faster than good news is bad news, has made it hard for me to remain anonymous.

  “What are you doing here?” Helen asks again.

  “I’m trying to investigate—”

  “You’re looking into Harold’s death, aren’t you?” she says. “I live over on the next block and I saw you there at Harold’s house with that cop the other night, and now I see there’s crime tape up on his door. Was Harold murdered, because it wouldn’t surprise me if he was. There have been some very strange things going on in this n
eighborhood lately.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, getting the distinct impression that Helen doesn’t miss much of what goes on in the area.

  But rather than answer me, she yells, “Stop it, you little slut!”

  I’m about to be offended when I realize it’s her dog she’s yelling at, not me. Hoover is sitting next to a bush trembling, his eyes big and round. Mere inches in front of him, facing away from Hoover with her shoulders on the ground and her butt stuck up in the air, is Antoinette. Her knobby little tail is twitching back and forth, back and forth, as she whimpers. Helen walks over and scoops Antoinette off the ground, giving me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Antoinette is in heat and I’m afraid she’s rather desperate to compromise herself.”

  I think of Hurley and empathize with Antoinette. Hoover looks up at me with an expression of sad yearning while Antoinette squirms in Helen’s arms, desperate to get down. Helen tightens her grip and says to me, “I’m a nurse. I used to work at Mercy.”

  “Really? I don’t recall ever seeing you there.”

  “You wouldn’t. I’ve been retired for nearly twenty years, and I’d imagine that was before your time.”

  “What department did you work in?”

  “I used to be the Director of Nurses, before that odd job took over.”

  The odd job she is referring to is Nancy Molinaro, a short, stout, hirsute woman who was recruited from outside the hospital to head the nursing department. It’s rumored she used to be a former mob hit woman—though some think she used to be a man—who entered the witness protection program. It’s easy to see how the rumors got started. The woman talks with a whispered lisp, has spies peppered throughout the facility, and eliminates employees she doesn’t like with frightening efficiency. Plus there is the acronym derived from the Director of Nursing title: DON.

  “Anyway,” Helen goes on, “ever since my husband, George, died, it’s just me and Antoinette here. I kind of keep an eye on things in the neighborhood, especially during the day when most of the other folks are gone.”

  “Did you know Mr. Minniver?”

  “We chatted every week or so. As the two old folks on the street, we had a pact of sorts to watch out for one another, you know? When you get to be our age, things can happen.”

  “Did you see Mr. Minniver on the day he died?”

  She nods. “I didn’t speak to him, but I saw him fetch his mail that morning when Antoinette and I were out on our walk. I take her out twice a day every day and walk a circuit of several blocks. Keeps me young, you know. That’s how I spotted that strange man.”

  “What strange man?”

  “The one who kept parking a black sedan around the neighborhood, different time and place every day. Sometimes he was on this street, sometimes on our street, sometimes he was on a side street, but he was here every day for the better part of a week.”

  I frown.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Helen says with a sneer. “Crazy old woman gets paranoid about some guy parking on the street.”

  I don’t respond because she’s right; that’s exactly what I’m thinking. “What did this guy look like?”

  She shrugs. “I never got a good look at his face. He was always wearing one of those hooded things the kids like so much these days. I was going to call the police about him but then he disappeared. Do you think I still should?”

  “I don’t think it will do much good since he isn’t here anymore,” I tell her, wishing she had called them sooner. “Black sedans are a dime a dozen. They won’t have any way of finding him.”

  “Even if I give them a license plate number?”

  It takes me a couple of beats to register what she just said. “Do you have a license plate number?”

  “I do. I wrote it down in the pad I carry with me whenever I walk, in case I need to leave a note for someone. Like the time I left a note for Mr. Abbott saying I needed a plumber and wondering if he’d give me the name and number of the one I’d seen coming to his house twice a week for the past two months.” She gives me a wink. “The Abbotts don’t live here anymore,” she says drily. She bends over and sets Antoinette down, then fishes in her slacks pocket, pulling out a small spiral notebook. “Let’s see,” she says, flipping pages. “Here you go.” She rips the page out of the notebook and hands it to me.

  “It was an Illinois plate?” I say, reading what she wrote.

  “Yep, one of them damned flatlanders. That alone was reason enough to find him suspicious if you ask me.”

  “Thanks, Helen. I’ll have the police run this and see what we come up with.” I tuck the slip of paper in my pocket and turn to look for Hoover. Antoinette has dashed back to the bushes and Hoover is there tentatively sniffing her nether regions. Antoinette drops herself down so that she is flat on her belly on the ground, her legs extended straight out behind her, her tail standing at attention. “I think your poodle has a crush on my dog,” I tell Helen.

  “Antoinette is not a poodle,” Helen says, all indignant. “She’s a purebred bichon frise.”

  “A bitch on what?”

  Helen gives me a look that rivals my mother’s. It must be one of those things that improves with age. “I think you and your mutt had better leave now,” she says, making a face like she just tasted dog shit. “If he gets my Antoinette pregnant, there will be hell to pay.”

  “Well, if your furry slut would quit enticing him, it would help,” I say. “Besides I don’t think my dog is old enough to do anything yet.”

  “Judging from the fact that his red rocket is out and looks ready to launch, I’d say you’re mistaken.”

  I walk over and hook Hoover up to his leash, pulling him off Antoinette. Just as Helen said, Hoover’s winky-dink is primed and ready. As soon as I rein him in, Helen walks over and scoops the slut back into her arms.

  “Thanks for the license number,” I tell her, dragging a humiliated Hoover toward my car.

  “You’ll let me know if it leads to anything, won’t you?” Helen asks.

  “Sure.” When your bichon freezes over.

  Chapter 25

  A few minutes later, I’m pulling into the police station parking lot. There’s no sign of Hurley’s car anywhere so I tell Hoover to stay and head inside with the slip of paper Helen gave me. The day dispatcher, Stephanie, greets me with a smile.

  “Hi, Mattie. How are things?”

  “They’re good. How are you doing?”

  “Fine. I was sorry to hear about the fire. Is David okay?”

  “He seems to be, yes. Thanks for asking.” Before she can pursue the topic of David, the fire, my old house, and my marriage, I add, “Listen, I wonder if you could do me a favor. I have a license plate number I’d like you to run for me.” I hand her the slip of paper and she studies it for a second.

  “Illinois, eh?”

  “Yep. You can still run it, can’t you?”

  “I can. Just give me a sec.”

  Steph starts typing info into the computer and as I’m waiting, the door behind her opens and Bob Richmond comes out. “Mattie! I was going to call you this morning to see if you wanted to go to the gym with me but when I heard about the fire, I figured I should wait.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if you did call because I’ve temporarily misplaced my cell phone. Besides, considering that I feel like I smoked an entire carton of cigarettes last night, I’m thinking it might not be the best time to start an exercise program. And I have a couple of broken toes to deal with.” I stick my foot out and show him my Frankenstein shoe.

  “Here you go,” Steph says, handing me a sheet of paper. I take it, fold it up, and stick it in my pocket, hoping Richmond won’t start asking questions. But there’s too much detective left in him.

  “What’s that?” he asks, gesturing toward my pocket. “Who are you running?”

  “It’s nothing,” I say, but I can tell from the way he narrows his eyes at me that I’ve only heightened his interest. “It’s just some asshole who
tried to run me off the road yesterday when I was in Chicago. I want to call him up and give him a piece of my mind.”

  Richmond frowns at this explanation, no doubt because it isn’t a legitimate use of the system. Then I see the scared look on Steph’s face, who is no doubt worrying if she’s about to get into trouble for helping me. “Look, Bob, I know it isn’t exactly kosher, but this guy was one of those rich assholes driving some big fancy Cadillac Escalade and acting like he owned the whole damned road.”

  Bob looks sympathetic and mutters, “Assholes” under his breath. I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief when Steph says, “I think you’re out of luck anyway, because that plate is registered to a rental car company at O’Hare Airport.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Listen,” Bob says, “if we go to the health club today, all they’ll do is an orientation. They show you how to work the machines and then they develop an exercise plan for you. It won’t be anything too strenuous and they have plenty of stuff you can do that won’t involve your foot. I’m sure they can take that into consideration.”

  I’m starting to regret ever agreeing to Bob’s harebrained proposal and I’m about to beg off when the pathetic hangdog look on his face stops me. “Tell you what, Bob. I’ll make a deal with you. Have you pulled phone records for Callie Dunkirk yet?”

  “Yeah,” he says, clearly confused about where I’m going with this. “For her cell phone, anyway. Her work phone is part of a main trunk line going into the building so there’s no way to know for sure what calls go where in that place.”

  “I want to take a look at them. Let me have a peek now and I’ll go to the gym with you later.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to learn about this investigative stuff and I figure you probably know more about it than anyone, given your years of experience.” I pray that a little flattery will help sway Richmond and keep him from questioning my motives too closely. And it appears to be working since he’s pursing his lips as if he’s considering my request. “I know it’s not my job to look at stuff like that, but it helps me get a better grasp of the overall picture. If you could go over it with me and explain how stuff like that works, and how it all ties together when you make a case, it would really help me. I want to learn from the best,” I say, laying it on thick.