by Steven James
I pulled up the emails I’d downloaded from the Pickrons’ computer, checked the times they were last opened, and found that almost all of Donnie’s emails on Mondays and Fridays were last accessed before 6:00 a.m. In some of them he’d written that he was “on his way out the door” so it seemed reasonable to move forward with the working hypothesis that he checked his email and left for work soon afterward.
I made a note to find out when he was expected to arrive at the sawmill on those days, then reviewed my notes, specifically what we knew about the murder weapon.
Apparently, Donnie had a gun cabinet in his basement. An empty rack and .30-06 cartridges told me that Deputy Ellory’s guess about the type of gun used was probably correct. Two handguns were still in the cabinet.
Why take the rifle with you on the snowmobile? If you wanted to either kill yourself or protect yourself, why not just take one of the handguns along?
I couldn’t help but think that a hunter like Donnie would have chosen a shotgun or maybe a handgun for the crimes. Rifles are better for long distances. Why use a rifle in the close quarters of a house? Did the shooter fear that Ardis or Lizzie would flee and want to be able to pick them off before they got away?
And where was Donnie now? At the bottom of Tomahawk Lake? And if not, who drove that snowmobile off the ice?
That last one was the key question to address this morning.
At last, at 7:55, with all of this cycling through my mind, I laced on my boots, gathered my coat, gloves, and cap, and headed for the lobby.
The continental breakfast offered at the Moonbeam Motel consisted of sludgy, cold coffee and a box of day-old donuts. Instead, I opted for two large glasses of orange juice, telling myself that it was the equivalent to a plateful of fruit. As I was finishing the second glass, my phone rang.
Tessa’s ringtone.
“Hey, Raven, how are you?”
“Good.”
“How was the winter session yesterday?”
“Lame. I bailed so I could check out the places Mom wrote about in her diary when she went here. So that’s been cool.”
I wasn’t excited about her skipping the class, but knowing Tessa, her reply didn’t surprise me. “Has the food gotten any better?”
“They have, like, no vegetarian dishes. Just hamburgers or steak, or whatever, every day. It’s troubling.” I would’ve expected that the university would offer vegetarian alternatives, but I took Tessa’s word for it.
As a big fan of cheeseburgers myself, I’d been trying for months to come up with good reasons to get her to expand her culinary interests to include animals. I had a zinger. “Tessa, if God didn’t want us to eat cows he wouldn’t have covered ’em with meat.”
“He covered you with meat.”
Okay, that was not a bad comeback.
“Um.” I had to take a second to regroup. “So you got my messages then? About leaving early? Are you on your way up?”
“You said it’s like a four-hour drive?”
“Maybe a little longer to get to Woodborough.”
A pause. “There’re still some places here I want to visit. I’m not sure when I’ll be back in the Twin Cities. I’d like to see ’em before I leave.”
I flipped open my laptop and checked the weather one more time. “I can understand that, but if you’re going to come”—NOAA was now calling for up to eighteen inches—“you should probably leave right now.”
A small, tight silence. “The Walker Art Center doesn’t open until 9:30. Mom used to go there all the time.”
“Then I guess it makes the most sense for you to stay there in the Cities. I can try to catch up with you later this weekend before you fly back home.” Actually, because of the storm, I was a lot more thrilled about this scenario. The last thing I wanted was for Tessa to get stuck somewhere on a back road in Wisconsin in a blizzard.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ll just swing by the center, then get going. I shouldn’t have any problem.”
“Just stay in—”
“Patrick. We live in Denver. I can deal with a little snow. Besides, I’ve never met Amber and I haven’t seen Sean in like forever.”
As a girl who often seemed four years younger emotionally than her real age and yet four years older intellectually, Tessa had always been an enigma to me, and now I couldn’t tell if she was excited about driving over or not. “All right,” I said, “here’s how we’ll play this. For now, as long as you leave by 10:00 I’m good with you driving over. But if the storm moves in faster and I give you the word, you need to stay there in the city.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“And on the way you’ll stop at a hotel if the roads get too bad.”
“Yes, Dad.”
Dad—lately that word had been coming out more and more often and sounding more and more natural and welcome to me each time.
“So,” she said, “we’re staying at a hotel there, right? I mean, instead of at Sean and Amber’s?”
She knew a little about my history with my brother and his wife, but we’d never talked specifics. And now she was displaying a little more intuition than I liked. “A motel. Yes. It’ll give us all some privacy.”
“Privacy.”
“Yes.”
“They invited us to stay with ’em, didn’t they?”
I tapped my finger against my leg. “It’s better if we don’t.” I tried not to be too stern but to also make it clear by my tone that we were done discussing the topic. “Text me when you leave and call me if anything comes up.”
“I will.”
I reserved a room for her, and as I was slipping the keycard into my pocket, Jake emerged from the doorway. After a quick “Good morning,” he filled up a coffee cup, grabbed two donuts, and we headed for the car.
It had to be close to zero outside, and the windchill made the air feel like a wire brush scraping across my face.
“Gonna be a cold one,” he said.
It already is.
“Yes,” I replied.
Though the sun was still low, the day had started shockingly bright, with the early morning sunlight splintering sharply off the snow. It didn’t look at all like a blizzard was on its way.
Looks can be deceiving.
I used the voice recognition on my phone’s GPS program to ask for directions to Tomahawk Lake, and we took off.
17
Snowmobile trails paralleled us on either side of the road, just beyond the snowbanks that had been shoved onto the shoulders by the plows.
If you’ve never seen a snow-covered field or forest in the North, you might imagine that the snow all looks the same, but it doesn’t. Because of the various angles of the flakes reflecting the sunlight, the woods look like they have thousands of tiny diamonds winking at you as you drive by.
Although we were a little north of Wisconsin’s prime farm country, I still saw a few cement silos resting beside barns nestled on rock or concrete foundations to help the boards weather the snow.
But most prominently, I was impressed by the sight of the forests all around us, rolling dense and thick over the hills. Birch and poplar filled in the gaps between the picturesque pines, most of which were burdened with a thick layer of postcard-worthy snow. And, from growing up in this state, I knew that beyond those trees, hidden deep in those woods, were impenetrable marshes and countless isolated lakes—Wisconsin has over fifteen thousand lakes, more than nine thousand of which still remain unnamed.
But the one we were going to was not.
We arrived at Tomahawk Lake and parked at the north shore boat landing.
No state troopers or sheriff’s deputies were there yet, and I was glad because it gave me the chance to look around uninterrupted.
Rather than police tape, yesterday’s responding officers had set up wooden blockades and orange highway cones enclosing the snowmobile tracks that led to the broken ice. Considering the locale and the likelihood that this was the scene of an accident rather than a homicide, it was about all
they could do.
A twelve-foot extension ladder was chained to a sign beside the boat landing. I guessed the officers or state troopers had laid on it in order to get closer to the break in the ice when they were placing the cones.
From my research last night, I knew that the lake’s open water was caused by a series of powerful underground springs. The ribbon of water, at least a hundred meters long and a dozen meters wide, looked like a giant eel twisting along the ice, rolling over whenever the sharp wind troubled its surface.
Though we weren’t far from Highway K, the snow-laden trees lining the shore softened the sound of cars and distant snowmobiles, leaving a deep silence that only a few birdsongs tapered into.
Jake avoided the ice for the moment and walked along the shoreline. I saw that he was on the phone.
I took some time to study the lake before heading onto the ice. Tomahawk Lake was vaguely oval-shaped, a mile or so across and nearly four miles long with a series of inlets on the western shore. To the south, the water beneath the ice dispersed into a flowage that eventually fed into the Chippewa River.
Mentally overlaying the trail system against the topography of the area, I decided that the most direct route from the Pickron house to Tomahawk Lake would have been the Birch Trail, which led along the hilly northern shore stretching away from me on either side.
On a snowmobile it would probably take fifteen minutes or so to get to the lake from his house.
Although the tracks to the open water had been noted by an ice fisherman, based on the absence of ice fishing shanties, I could see that there wasn’t much interest in this side of the lake from sportsmen, probably because of the unpredictable currents that carried the warm spring-fed water from this area westward, causing invisible and deadly fault lines of thin ice to finger across the surface.
However, snowmobilers apparently weren’t scared off the ice along the other shoreline because, in the morning sun, I could make out tracks stretching across it. I imagined that if you started at one end of the lake and let loose you could hit the sled’s top speed before reaching the far shore. I wasn’t certain how fast that would be, but with the advances in the last few years, some of the newer sleds had engines as powerful as compact cars and could probably reach speeds of 110–120 mph. I figured if you could top out at those speeds anywhere, you could do it here.
The only set of snowmobile tracks leading toward the open water were the Ski-Doo 800 XL tracks the FBI Lab had been able to identify.
Somewhat tentatively, I stepped onto the frozen lake.
As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, I’d had an almost pathological fear of falling through the ice. The idea of dropping into the terrifyingly cold water was disturbing enough, but the thought of coming up beneath the ice and not being able to find the place you’d fallen through was even worse—that frantic and desperate search while your air gives out horrified me back then and, honestly, still did.
After I’d taken a few steps onto the ice, the morning stillness broke open with the harsh grind of the blades at the sawmill across the lake as they powered through logs to get them ready to be shipped to the paper mills in Neenah and Menasha. At first the sound gave me a start as I thought it might have been the ice cracking underfoot, but then I realized it was just the sawmill Donnie worked at, the one I was planning to visit later in the day.
I’d been told there were no footprints near the break in the ice when Ellory first arrived at the scene yesterday, but now I counted eight different sets of boot imprints that led toward it. All of them stopped ten to fifteen meters from the water, now writhing in the escalating wind.
Some of the impressions were undoubtably left by the law enforcement officers and first responders, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if some came from curious civilians stopping by last night to have a peek at the site after all the officers left.
I studied them closely, photographed them with my phone. We would need to confirm it, but one set of boot prints appeared to match the ones found outside the laundry room door at the Pickron home.
The high-pitched whirr of a snowmobile on the other side of the lake caught my attention, but then it was overwhelmed by the sharp whine of a blade at the sawmill ripping through another log.
Jake joined me. “How could this have been an accident, Pat? Anyone going under here would’ve had to be aiming for that stretch of open water. I’m thinking suicide.”
It certainly appeared that he was right, but I said, “I think it’s a little premature to go there, Jake.”
“I don’t think this case is as complex as you seem to want to make it.” The friction in his voice was no doubt sharpened by our past and how infrequently we agreed about the best approach to solving the cases we worked. Two investigations in particular stuck in my mind. In each, his cocksure insistence on the accuracy of his profile had detoured the investigation, wasting precious time. Three people were dead now who might have been saved had local law enforcement broadened their investigative strategies and not given two serial killers more time to abduct those final victims.
To top things off, at the press conferences Jake had emphasized how his profile had helped crack the case wide open. Personally, I couldn’t care less about press coverage or credit for a case, but I did care about murders being averted.
And I did care about the arrogance of the people I worked with.
“Either Donnie came home,” Jake said, “and found his family dead, then snapped and took his own life, or for whatever reason, he shot his wife and daughter and then killed himself. Think about it, Pat, a man kills his family then himself—not that unusual.” Then he added, a tight thread running through every word, “As you’re so adept at pointing out, we may never know his motives, but his actions speak for themselves.”
“You’re assuming too much, Jake.”
He folded his arms. “Then give me another scenario that fits the evidence.”
Alternate scenarios were not the problem—sorting through them to find the truth of what happened was.
“First of all, we have no body so we don’t even know if Donnie or someone else was riding the snowmobile when it went under.”
“You’re thinking someone jammed the throttle or tied it off?”
“I’m not thinking that yet because I have no reason to. I’m just considering it as a possibility.”
He shook his head. “Pat, the water is a hundred yards from shore.”
He was right. And the tracks were straight, aimed directly and unfalteringly at the open water. It seemed hard to believe that the sled would go that straight and that far without a rider on it, even if someone had secured the throttle.
“Jake, how many suicides have you worked that involved someone purposely drowning himself?”
“It’s rare,” he admitted.
“What about through a hole in the ice?”
He was quiet.
“If Donnie intended to commit suicide,” I said, “why not just turn the gun on himself or shoot himself with one of the handguns he kept in his gun cabinet? I’m guessing that most people would consider drowning in ice-cold water in a frozen lake a lot more frightening way to go than a quick, fatal gunshot wound. The open water is clearly visible, so it’s unlikely the rider accidentally went in. Also, the killer made no attempt to cover the bodies, and—”
“I know,” he said impatiently. “Killers with close relationships to the victims normally position them in more reverent ways. I thought of that yesterday at the scene.”
I let his rough tone go unchallenged. “Also, why would Donnie remove the spent cartridges and the murder weapon? And what about the nuclear submarine records and the Navy’s interest? Why would they even get involved if they thought it was either an accidental death or a suicide?”
Jake didn’t reply.
Four patrol cars turned onto the road leading to the boat landing.
Jake turned his face from the wind to look at them. The black eel of water rippled uneasily behind him.
“So what exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying that at this point we don’t know who, if anyone, went down with the snowmobile. We don’t know if Donnie is alive or dead. We don’t know who called Ardis’s cell phone at 1:54 or why the Navy is interested in this case. We don’t know how many people were present at the house when Ardis and Lizzie were killed, and we don’t have any idea who they might have been.”
“So you don’t think it was Donnie?”
“If you set aside assumptions about domestic homicides and look at this case objectively, everything except Donnie’s relationship with the victims and his disappearance points to someone else as the shooter.”
Ellory and the two officers who’d stood sentry at the house last night crossed the ice toward us. Four more officers followed them.
Often when the Bureau gets involved in joint investigations, local jurisdictions feel as if we’re stepping on their toes. It can become a point of contention that only serves to hinder the investigation, but so far I’d seen no indication that we were going to run into trouble with that here, and I was thankful.
Far behind the officers, a bank of low, gray clouds was crawling into the western horizon.
As Ellory approached, he followed my gaze. “Here comes the storm.”
It made me think of Tessa again.
A slight tickle of concern.
“Listen, we need to get some divers down here as soon as possible.”
“I told you yesterday, there’s no one around here who dives.”
“What about Ashland? That’s less than an hour and a half away. With all the shipwrecks in Lake Superior there’ll be plenty of cold-water divers up there.”
A question rolled through my mind: If the Navy is so interested in this, why haven’t they sent a SEAL team over to the area for body recovery?
I had no answers.