Frozen Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  She shakes her head. “No, but I think Dad had some kind of preburial plan with the Johnson Funeral Home. They did my mom when she died.”

  I jot down the name of the funeral home and then say, “There’s one other thing I’d like to ask you. I want to go by your dad’s house and take a look at the car and the garage. I’d like to do that tonight, if it’s okay with you.”

  She shrugs, blows her nose in what’s left of her tissue, and then digs in her purse. She hands me a single key on its own key ring and says, “There’s a carriage-style light mounted next to the front door and the top of it opens so you can change the bulb. Dad usually kept a key taped to the inside of the lid. But take this one in case it’s not there. The house was still open when I left and I don’t know if the cops locked the place up when they were done. I don’t want to go back there tonight.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s locked,” I tell her. “How can I reach you later?”

  She gives me her home address and her cell phone number, which I write down. In exchange, I hand her a card for the ME’s office and tell her we’ll be in touch, but that she can call anytime she wants to.

  I leave her in the chapel and head back down to the ER, calling Izzy on my cell phone as I go. When he answers I fill him in on what I’ve discovered so far.

  “So I’m thinking this might be a suicide and the cause of death could be carbon monoxide poisoning,” I conclude. “I’m going to go by his house and check out the scene tonight but I’m thinking we’re going to have to post him.”

  “I agree,” Izzy says. “That’s an excellent catch. Do you need me to come in and help you with anything tonight?”

  “No, I think I’ll be fine. I’ll call Johnson Funeral Home and have them transport the body, then I’ll check out Minniver’s house.”

  “Holler at me if you need any help.”

  “Thanks, Izzy.” I disconnect the call and make another one to the funeral home. They give me an ETA of twenty minutes, so I settle back in at the ER desk and look at Mr. Minniver’s chart again so I can get his home address.

  That’s when I get my second big shock of the day.

  Chapter 8

  I’m stunned to discover that Mr. Minniver’s house is right behind Hurley’s. When I look at the times on Minniver’s chart, I realize that he was found and brought to the hospital just before I arrived at Hurley’s place for dinner.

  I make a call to the police station and it’s answered by Heidi Cronen, the dispatcher on duty. “Hey, Mattie, what’s up?” she asks.

  “I need to take a look inside the house of Harold Minniver, the man who was found dead in his car earlier this evening. Are any of the officers still there?”

  “Hold on, let me check.” She puts me on hold for half a minute, then comes back on and says, “They’ve already locked the place up.”

  “I have a key,” I tell her. “But I’d like to have one of the officers who was on scene meet me there and go through the place with me.”

  She puts me on hold for another thirty seconds. “Ron Colbert said he can meet you there in five if you want,” she says when she comes back on.

  “I need to get Minniver’s body back to the morgue first. Can you tell him to meet me there in an hour instead?”

  “Will do.”

  I hang up and start filling out all the paperwork necessary for processing Minniver’s body but I’m quickly distracted. The ER is not an easy place to focus at times, and tonight proves no exception. Within minutes two ambulances pull up and the ER staff starts jockeying beds, trying to find a place to put the latest victims. As the EMTs wheel their respective patients into the main part of the ER, two things become apparent: the victims are hunters, and they are royally pissed off at one another. The first fact is obvious from their dress. Both men are wearing insulated bib overalls made out of a camouflage fabric. I’m guessing hunters wear this get-up so the deer won’t see them as easily, but over the top of the camouflage both men are wearing vests and earflap hats—standard hunting fare—done in a blaze orange so bright it’s likely visible from Mars. Despite this precaution, every year a couple of hunters are shot—supposedly by mistake—because some yahoo thinks deer have blaze-orange fur.

  Here in Wisconsin we’ve learned to adapt to this idiocy because hunting is as much a rite of passage as growing pubic hair. In fact, I know a hunter or two who thinks the act of killing an innocent animal is what gives you pubic hair. During deer hunting season the air is filled with the sound of gunshots, the roads are riddled with carcasses of fleeing, frightened deer, and girlfriends and housewives everywhere are holding hunting widow parties—all-female get-togethers that often involve recipe sharing, chick-flick marathons, and frank discussions of everything from sex to what to pack in the kids’ school lunches. Deer hunting season is as much of a holiday as Thanksgiving and since the two often overlap, it’s not unusual to see people taking the entire last half of November off from their jobs, or schools that provide “teacher days” because they know many of their students will be missing from class.

  That the two hunters entering the ER are pissed at one another is obvious because they are trading obscenities. The red flush in their cheeks tells me their blood pressures are reaching Mt. Vesuvius levels as torrents of their alcohol-laden breath waft through the air, quickly permeating the entire department.

  The first guy, who is heavyset, bearded, and has a blood-soaked dressing wrapped around his right foot, is screaming and wagging a finger at the second man. “You shot me, you frigging asshole! You tried to kill me and don’t you deny it. I knew you were pissed about that stock tip I gave you. I just knew it.”

  The second man, who is lean, tall, and has a neck like a giraffe, is grimacing in pain. His left leg is splinted from foot to hip and I can see dressings covering a large protuberance in his lower leg—an open tib-fib fracture. He glares back at the other man, and through gritted teeth says, “It was an accident, you fucking moron.”

  “The hell it was,” grumbles the first guy. “You tried to kill me!” Seeing that he now has a larger, newer audience, he raises his voice several decibels, points to Giraffe Guy, and yells, “This fucker tried to kill me!”

  Several state troopers have arrived with this entourage and I see one of them roll his eyes and shake his head. After a quick game of musical beds, the two hunters are finally ensconced in their separate rooms, each with a trooper close by to babysit. The eye-rolling trooper, a twenty-plus-year veteran named Hans Volger, enters the nurse’s station and drops into a chair with an exhausted sigh.

  “Rough night?” I ask him.

  “Ya, you betcha,” he says, tagging himself as a hardcore Norwegian. “Always is during hunting season. And these two drunken yahoos take the cake. Get this . . . the tall guy decided he didn’t want to risk scaring off the deer by climbing down from his tree stand to take a dump. So what does he do? He drops his drawers, squats over the edge of the stand with his bare ass in the breeze, and tries to squeeze one out. Except the idiot lost his balance, fell ass backward, and broke his leg. Unfortunately he grabbed at his rifle when he felt himself falling, and he accidentally fired off a shot as he went down. The bullet went through the floor of another tree stand and hit the second guy in the foot.” He shakes his head. “I’ll bet all the deer out there are still laughing.”

  My funeral home transport arrives and I see that it’s the twin sisters from Johnson’s: Cassandra and Katherine, who go by the nicknames Cass and Kit. Their parents, who established the funeral home over thirty years ago, have always had a twisted sense of humor and it was never more apparent than when they named their daughters. The girls seem to have taken to their nicknames and the family business to a surprising degree. Not only are they both very involved in the day-to-day work, they both look the part with Morticia-like skin, builds, and hair.

  After bidding Hans adieu, I take the twins into Minniver’s room and assist them as they wrap him up, strap him up, and load him into their transport vehicle,
which looks more like a soccer mom’s minivan. I head out to my hearse and follow the funeral home car to the morgue.

  Other than weighing Minniver on the huge floor scale in our take-in area, I leave all the rest of the processing for morning. After the sisters help me place Minniver’s body in the fridge for the night, I finish my paperwork and leave.

  Five minutes later I am in front of Minniver’s house expecting to see a yellow-taped crime scene area, but the place looks like every other house on the street. As I pull into Minniver’s driveway to park, a squad car pulls in behind me. I watch in my rearview mirror as Ron Colbert climbs out, and then I grab my evidence kit and get out to greet him.

  “How come there’s no crime scene tape here?” I ask him.

  “Wasn’t aware there was a crime,” Colbert says with a shrug. “They said the guy had a heart attack.”

  “They who?”

  He thinks a minute, scowling. “His daughter told us he had a cardiac history. And the EMTs said it looked like a heart attack.”

  “Looked like doesn’t mean it is. And in this case, it probably isn’t. The guy’s heart was given a clean bill of health recently. Don’t you guys typically preserve a scene until you know the cause of death?”

  Colbert looks abashed, but then he brightens. “Well, we did lock the place up after the ambulance left so no one could get inside.”

  “No one without a key,” I say, dangling the one Minniver’s daughter gave me in front of his face. “Plus he kept a spare one hidden.” I lead the way to the front porch, feeling my stomach knot when I see that the top to the porch light is open. Sure enough, there is no key there. “Interesting,” I say.

  “What?” Colbert asks.

  “His spare key is gone. His daughter said he kept it taped to the underside of this lid,” I explain, pointing at the light fixture. “We might need to dust that lid for fingerprints.”

  Colbert frowns again and asks, “Are you saying you think there’s something fishy with this guy’s death?”

  “I think he may have committed suicide,” I tell him, filling him in on what I’ve learned. “I want to take a look at his car to see if it was running. Your guys didn’t take the keys out of the ignition or anything like that, did you?”

  Colbert blushes and looks guilty as hell, making my hopes sink. “I don’t know, to be honest. Let’s go take a look.”

  I unlock the front door with the key Patricia gave me and step inside. It’s a tidy Cape Cod furnished with comfortable-looking, mismatched pieces. Several lamps that were left turned on lend the interior a warm glow. I see an ashtray on a table at one end of the couch and inside it is an intricately carved pipe. The air smells of apple-scented tobacco, a scent that triggers a vague memory in my mind of a tall, brown-haired, pipe-smoking, smiling man I think is my father. But since my father left my mother when I was five, I can’t be sure. My visual memories aren’t nearly as vivid as the olfactory ones and whenever I’ve asked my mother what my father looked like, her response has always been “Like the devil himself.”

  “Should we glove up?” Colbert says, trying I imagine, to make up for the lack of protocol earlier. I nod, set down my evidence case, open it, and remove two pairs of gloves: one pair for me and one pair for Colbert. I also take out two pairs of booties, which we stretch on over our shoes.

  I take my camera out and turn it on as Colbert leads the way. After taking a few shots of the living room, I follow Colbert toward the kitchen. There we find a plate of partially eaten food on the table bearing the remnants of Minniver’s last meal: baked macaroni and cheese, broccoli, ham, and a glass of what looks like iced tea. His fork, still holding a few bits of macaroni in its tines, is on the floor beneath the table. I snap pictures of all of it as well as a few shots of the room.

  From there Colbert heads to the garage, which is just off the kitchen. Parked inside is Harold Minniver’s car, a Toyota Rav4. I head around to the driver’s side door, which is still open, snapping pictures as I step over several ripped-open, empty packages: debris left from the EMT’s efforts. Harold’s keys are still in the ignition but it is not turned on. After taking a picture of it, I reach in and flip the ignition over. The car starts up without hesitation.

  “The gas tank is full,” I tell Colbert, watching as the needle rises to the top and then taking a picture of the gauge. I’m not sure if I’m overdoing it with the picture thing, but since this is the first scene I’ve been to without Izzy, I want to err on the side of caution. “It looks like he never started the car, that he died right after getting in. The food on the table and the fork on the floor make me think that whatever happened to him, happened while he was eating. He dropped his fork, headed for the garage, and died before he could get his car started.” I turn and look at Colbert. “His daughter told me she found him slumped behind the wheel and that the car wasn’t running. It wasn’t running when you guys got here, was it?”

  Colbert shakes his head. “No. That much I’m sure of.”

  “So much for my suicide theory then,” I mutter. I turn the engine off, bag & tag the keys, and hand them to Colbert. Then I take some pictures of the garage interior.

  “So we have another incident of foul play?” Colbert says, his eyes huge with eager excitement as he watches me. You got to love that about new cops; murder and mayhem to them is like a freezer full of Ben & Jerry’s to me.

  “Not necessarily,” I say, dashing his hopes. “There are plenty of other natural causes that might have killed him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a blood clot in his lung, or a ruptured brain aneurysm.”

  “So you’ll be able to tell what it was when you do the autopsy?”

  “Hopefully, though sometimes we don’t find an immediate cause of death.”

  “What do you do when that happens?”

  “Run toxicology tests, look at the blood work, reexamine the scene . . . but in this case I’m betting that we’ll find something physical. There really isn’t anything to suggest foul play.”

  “What about that key you said was missing?”

  I frown at that. The missing key does bother me, but even so, I doubt it’s very significant. I say so to Colbert but then caveat my statement by adding, “But just to be thorough, we should get someone to come out and dust the light for prints.”

  Colbert gets on his phone and calls into the office to arrange for an evidence tech to come out. While we’re waiting, we look through the rest of the house but nothing else looks out of place. When the evidence tech arrives, we watch as he dusts the light cap, but the surface of the cap is pebbled and he tells us he’s not likely to pull anything off it because of the texture. His prediction proves true and he’s gone a few minutes later. Colbert and I prepare to follow suit but a niggling thought makes me head back to the kitchen. After rummaging through some of Minniver’s drawers, I find some plastic baggies and collect what is left of his last meal. I pour a sample of his drink into an evidence vial from my scene kit, and then I put his fork and empty plate into a paper bag, sealing it all with evidence tape.

  After locking the house, I head back to the morgue with Colbert following me. He watches as I log in the evidence, looking thoughtful, and I wonder if he’s mulling over the possible ramifications of screwing up a crime scene.

  As soon as Colbert leaves I head for the library, which serves double duty as my makeshift office, to finish my paperwork.

  Just as I’m about to shut down the computer for the night, I take one last look at my notes and see where I jotted down Minniver’s daughter’s comment about her father being involved in a lawsuit of some sort with a neighbor. At the time she said it, I hadn’t yet made the connection between Minniver’s address and Hurley’s. A strange tingle runs down my spine as I consider the possibilities, but even as I do, I dismiss the idea as ludicrous. It has to be a coincidence. There is no way Hurley could be involved in this death, too. Is there?

  My hand hovers over the mouse, ready to click on SHUT D
OWN, but I hesitate. Thirty seconds later my curiosity gets the better of me. I launch the Internet browser and click on the Wisconsin Circuit Court site. I type in Minniver’s name and only one case pops up. When I click on the link and see the name of the defendant, my heart sinks. It’s Steven Hurley.

  Chapter 9

  I spend the night tossing and turning, unable to sleep as I ponder the significance of Harold Minniver’s death and the lawsuit he had against Hurley. Is it merely coincidence that two people who were close to Hurley are now dead? I debate how much information to share with Hurley and what to tell Izzy and Bob Richmond. I want to give Hurley a chance, but what if I’m protecting a dirty cop, a clever killer disguised as a gorgeous, tightassed hunk of man-meat?

  The next morning I take Hoover outside to do his thing before taking my shower. As I watch him make yellow snow I’m reminded of Bob Richmond and wonder how diligent the man is going to be in his investigation. I’ve gotten kind of used to Hurley’s way of doing things and despite the fact that I sometimes overstep my bounds when it comes to investigating things, Hurley has been not only tolerant but supportive. I suspect Richmond isn’t going to be quite as accommodating, which will make doing my own investigation for Hurley much more difficult.

  Hoover and I head back inside, and after stripping off my flannel jammies, I’m standing naked waiting for the shower water to heat up when my cell phone rings. Thinking it’s Izzy with a death call, I groan. But when I look at the caller ID I see it’s Hurley. The idea of talking to Hurley while I’m stark raving naked makes me start to sweat despite the frigid temps outside.

  I grab the phone, flip it open, and utter a cheery “Good morning!”

  “Hardly,” Hurley snaps. “Did you know about Minniver?”

  This isn’t the greeting I was expecting and I’m struck dumb for a moment. That’s enough for Hurley to figure things out.

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “He was the case I was called out on last night when I was at your house,” I admit. “I didn’t know he was your neighbor until after I got to the hospital.”