Dead Deceiver

by Victoria Houston

  Grasping the steering on his sled, Osborne moved the headlight beam back and forth across the water. Nothing moved except light ripples in the night breeze. The opening in the ice was long enough and wide enough that it had to be the result of a spring down below. He heard a slight burbling from underneath the ice. The sound of an engine dying?

  No sign of Lew’s sled. He looked towards the island shoreline. Darkness. He pulled off the snowmobile parka and holding it, he walked towards the hole in the ice. When he felt a quiver under his feet, he knelt and, holding one arm of the parka, he threw it ahead. Pushing it in front of him, he crawled closer and closer. When he felt the ice give ever so slightly, he stopped. Waited. If she surfaced, she could grab the sleeve, he could maybe pull her far enough up on the ice …

  A numbness took over as he refused to think that Lew’s life could have come to this harsh end. Two minutes at most had passed since he’d stopped. From experience he knew people survive longer in icy cold water. Still, the window for life is a short twenty minutes and even then … A shudder passed through his body.

  Nothing to do but wait. He thought through all the scenarios that might make it possible for her to survive: she wasn’t belted onto the machine, her helmet might hold some air but it would weigh her down and be difficult to remove if water got in. Worse, she was outfitted in heavy, padded snowmobile clothing … the boots.

  He pushed his face down into the snow. It isn’t fair. He lost his mother when he was six. He lost Mary Lee. Now Lew. His tears made tiny pockets in the snow.

  A tug on his right boot. Another tug and a familiar voice, “Doc, inch back slow. You are too close to that open water.”

  “My god, Lew, you’re okay!” He pushed himself up on his elbows.

  “Goddammit, Doc, I said ‘move slow.’ The ice is cracking in front of you.”

  “Okay, okay.” Moments later he got to his feet, suddenly freezing in the night air.

  “Oh, Doc, I’ve been so worried you wouldn’t see the open water in time,” said Lew as they embraced. “Here, put your parka back on before you freeze to death.”

  “I thought you went down,” said Osborne, holding her tightly. “I couldn’t see any sign—”

  “Sheer luck. I swerved right just as the Cat went down and barely missed going in after him. But I hit something and got thrown from the sled. I think I blacked out for a few minutes. The sled is wrecked,” she said, pointing towards the dark shadows of pine trees. “I might have a concussion but otherwise I’m okay.” She tipped her head back to look up at him. “Are you, all right?”

  “Just fine,” said Osborne, his voice hoarse. He kept his arms wrapped around her and held tight. “Just fine.”

  Within fifteen minutes, a large pontoon-like iceboat flew towards them, traveling over the ice on a cushion of air. Three divers, outfitted in black dry suits, hoods and masks leaned over the sides as the boat hovered twenty feet from the hole then dropped onto the ice. As they clamored off, strapping on scuba tanks, Lew asked the driver, “How’d you guys get here so fast?”

  “Chief Ferris, we have been on call all week. With all the traffic on this lake and the vehicles, we’ve been waiting for somebody to go through. You’re our first call. We thought it was you who’d gone through, Chief.”

  “I managed to avoid that little trick,” said Lew. “But I was after a suspect who did go down, I’m afraid. So you folks have work to do here.”

  “Thank God, it’s not you, Chief Ferris. That would be a bummer.”

  To say the least, thought Osborne, still pinching himself to be sure he wasn’t dreaming.

  Challenging though the conditions might be, there was excitement in the dive captain’s voice. Osborne couldn’t believe it: these people relish diving under the ice.

  “The suspect—who was on a sled—went down about twenty-five minutes ago. Think it’s too late?”

  “We’ll do our best. This water is murky even in daylight. My people have strong headlamps but it will be tough to see. At least we know the site—that’s usually half our problem.”

  “Excuse me,” said Lew as the first diver disappeared into the black water, “I have some people to check on.” Sitting nearby, Osborne listened as she reached Todd who, along with Beth, had followed the ambulance carrying Dani. “Oh, that’s a relief,” said Lew. “And Beth? Is she doing okay?” As Lew listened, her face relaxed. “Thank you, Todd.”

  Closing her phone, she turned to Osborne. “Dani has a nasty bump and a flesh wound but nothing more serious. The emergency room doc thinks the metal barette she was wearing deflected the bullet. She’s been x-rayed and they are going to keep her overnight for observation.

  “Beth has headed home but Todd is going back to the college to be sure the crime scene is well protected.”

  Osborne reached over to pat her hand. Good, Lew, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”

  Forty minutes later and just as Osborne’s feet were turning to ice in spite of snowmobile boots guaranteed to forty below, the divers pulled the body, still in its helmet, from the water. The rider had plunged into a tangle of sunken timbers where his sled had lodged between two logs, trapping one leg.

  “Whew! I sure am glad I won’t be on the salvage crew tomorrow,” said one of the divers as he climbed back onto the iceboat. “It’s a mess down there. Logs, debris. Guy never had a chance.”

  Back on shore, the tournament officials hurried to curtain off the First Aid area so the divers could deposit the body and make room for Osborne to officially establish time and place of death. No doubt the man had drowned but determining the cause of death would be left to the pathologist at St. Mary’s Hospital where the body would be kept in their morgue.

  As soon as the dive team had laid the body on a gurney and left the small room, Lew and Osborne approached to study the face. The rider was heavy-bearded but he had familiar cheekbones and flat grey hair the same shade as his brother’s. The eyes that had charmed Dani were vacant.

  “Lewellyn,” said Osborne in a quiet voice, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is the fellow who tried to run me and Ray off the site of the old Russian camp down the road from Walter’s place. Let’s get Ray in here and see if he agrees. I am sure that’s the same snowmobile we saw in the back of his truck unless everyone is driving red racing sleds.”

  But Ray was busy. “Chief, I’ll be down as soon as I can. You know I checked with the switchboard and they said you were okay so—”

  “So what’s the hold up? I want to get the body moved and call Charles Mason in for an official ID. How soon can you get here?”

  “Give me ten minutes. I won the contest—”

  “Oh,” said Lew, “you mean you got first place?”

  “I did! I won First Place and I’m just finishing up with the photographers. Have to be here at the crack of dawn for an interview with THE TODAY SHOW. Oh, and Chief? If you reach Suzanne before I do, would you tell her she’s got to get that grad school application in? Now. We have a deal.”

  Lew turned a happy face to Osborne. “Ray won the ice shanty contest. Looks like he’ll be here when he gets here. That’s okay,” she said, giving a sigh of exhaustion as she sat down on a nearby chair, “I don’t mind waiting.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Morning came too soon but Osborne did not want to miss Ray’s star turn with the television crew. Lew, too tired to even think of spending the night at his place, had headed home to her farm. Even though he hadn’t gone to bed until after two that morning, when the alarm rang at six Osborne was up and pulling on layers of warm clothing: a perfect day for fleece, lots of fleece. Better to wear too much and peel down later.

  He could hear the coffeemaker brewing in the kitchen and Mike was wheeling in circles, eager to go out—little did he know it was thirty below zero. Osborne had to chuckle as he watched the dog prance across the yard. Eager doesn’t work when you have delicate paws no matter how much you need to pee. Osborne opened the back door to a dog very interes
ted in lying by the fire.

  Wolfing down cereal and a banana, he marveled at how good he felt in spite of four hours of sleep. He decided it had to be his profound relief that Lew was alive and well. Those moments of staring into the treacherous black water would stay with him for a long time.

  The television crew had set up by the time Osborne arrived at Benny the Bluegill. The morning sky was just beginning to turn pale as a cameraman took B-roll of the exterior of the ice shanty, then crept inside to shoot Ray where he sat jigging over a hole in the ice.

  Osborne noticed Ray was letting his beard grow back and he looked resplendent in a silver fox fur hat and black parka with a matching silver fox fur collar. Osborne suspected Ray had persuaded Ralph to open the sporting goods store early that morning in order to spend all his savings on the outfit—savings that were originally intended to get him through the winter. Yep, someone’s neighbor better prepare to be hit up for a loan or two.

  Hanging back by the crew’s van to stay out of the way, Osborne watched the footage on a monitor along with a young woman who introduced herself as the producer’s assistant. Alternately gazing into the camera and sounding quite relaxed, Ray demonstrated his depth finder with its shadow images of large black crappies circling his Swedish Pimple lure—sweetened, he pointed out “with the eye of a perch.”

  “Cool—the eye of a perch,” said the producer’s assistant. “Very cool. This will air in an hour,” she said. “I’ll make a copy for Mr. Pradt after we edit for time.”

  “I’m planning to patent Benny,” said Ray with a satisfied air as he and Osborne drove out to the Russian camp right after THE TODAY SHOW had aired.

  “Well, Bud,” said Osborne, “you could not have looked more professional. Good show.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  When they arrived at the cabin that Dick Mason had renovated during his months of squatting on public land, Bruce Peters met them at the door. “Morning, fellas. Step inside—it’s freezing out there. But do me a favor and stand right over here, will you?” Bruce pointed them to a small area that had been used as a kitchen.

  “Bruce, are you moving to Loon Lake?” asked Osborne, surprised to see him.

  “Nah, but I stayed over last night to watch the tournament judging, which turns out to be a good thing. Chief Ferris got me on my cell this morning—told me Dick Mason went through the ice and asked me to check this place out.

  “I’ve only been here a couple hours but I’ve found plenty—got a twenty-two pistol that was lying on a table in here. Couple deer rifles, too. Chief Ferris says they found a .357 magnum on the guy’s body. This pistol was recently fired and I’m going to bet ballistics can match the bullets to the ones that killed the old man. I found a bullet casing at the old man’s shack that had rolled into a gap in the floor under the bed. So we got something to work with though I doubt there’s any question Mason shot the guy.”

  “But what threat could that old man have possibly posed to him?” asked Ray.

  “Remember your note from the old fella saying he found what you wanted in the garage?”

  “Right,” said Ray.

  “Well, I checked that new shed out behind this building,” said Bruce, “and found …” He held up a red aluminum snowshoe. “You assumed he was referring to his own garage but he meant this one.”

  “Kathy Beltner’s other snowshoe,” said Osborne. “Walter knew we were searching for that.”

  “I’ll betcha he must have been poking around over here and Mason saw him,” said Bruce. “See the crow’s nest on this place?” Bruce pointed overhead. “It’s new and there’s a ladder over there to access it. Mason may have used it to shoot a deer or two but he really used it to keep watch. His brother said that he never told him where he was staying because people were looking for him.”

  “Walter said he’d had an encounter with the guy. We suspected he was keeping an eye on him …”

  “No doubt Mason figured that out fast. Probably thought the old man would tell the Department of Natural Resources or the forest rangers that he was squatting out here.”

  “Too bad old Walter wasn’t still playing hermit,” said Ray. “Would’ve kept him out of trouble.”

  “But my best find,” said Bruce, holding up two small metal devices, “are these jump drives. I just stuck one in my PC to check it out and there’s a ton of personal data stolen from the college emails—the students responding to those fake offers. These, my friends, go straight to the FBI.”

  “Whoa, that will make Chief Ferris’s day,” said Ray. “Bruce, any reason Doc and I can’t take a walk around the place? I’m thinking that since that snowshoe has shown up here maybe we can find some sign of where Kathy Beltner might have lost them or—”

  “Go right ahead,” said Bruce. “The outdoors is all yours.”

  Ray stepped outside and gazed in the direction of the swamp and the Merriman Trails. “Let’s start on the edge of the swamp, Doc. For once, we haven’t had any new snow these past few days. That might help.”

  The morning sun was high in the sky and as they neared the swamp, Osborne saw pink splashes sprayed out across the snow.

  “Ray? Check this out but don’t get too close. We need Bruce out here.”

  Standing a yard away, they could see where the rough trunk of an old aspen bore witness to Kathy Beltner’s death. Only the impact of a .357 magnum can do that kind of damage.

  Osborne had no doubt Bruce Peters would find blood samples and, if they were lucky, a few teeth, maybe even the slug that killed her. Ray studied the spot then backed away to the west. Nothing. He walked up to the tree and backed away at different angle, each time going at least forty paces in each direction.

  “Jeez, Doc,” he said after the third try, “I still cannot figure out how Kathy got this far off the trail. Oh, wait, look here,” he said suddenly, pointing down to a well-trod deer trail that ran along the edge of the swamp in the direction of the Merriman Trails. Thanks to the fact that deer are creatures of habit and multiple deer will follow the same trails over and over again—nosing out the original trails even when they have been buried under deep snow—this trail was wide enough for a human to traverse with ease.

  After alerting Bruce to the evidence among the trees, Osborne and Ray set off along the deer trail. They trudged for over a mile to a point where the deer trail merged with the Merriman snowshoe trail for a quarter mile before turning further east.

  “The heavy snow the night she was killed covered this deer trail or we would have found it sooner,” said Ray as they explained their finding to Lew later that afternoon. “When Kathy set out, it was dark but not that much snow had fallen and the deer trail is so wide that it would have been easy to misread. We think she wasn’t watching and made a wrong turn. Next thing you know she runs into Dick Mason, who was keeping an eye out for ‘people looking for him.’ With his brother turning against him and knowing old Walter might have put the word out—he was desperate. Poor Kathy.”

  Before he left to return to the Wausau Crime Lab, Bruce Peters was able to report what appeared to be a match between the blood samples on the aspen, two nearby trees and Kathy Beltner’s blood type. Days later, a more accurate analysis would prove that the blood was indeed hers.

  CHAPTER 32

  “But I didn’t!” exclaimed Dani, a hurt expression on her face—or at least as much of her face as showed under the bandage she was wearing. She was already in a bit of a pout since half her bountiful head of hair had been shaved, requiring the rest to be chopped back in order to give a little balance to her looks.

  It was Saturday morning, the day after the funeral Mass for Kathy Beltner and Beth and Dani were meeting with Lew in her office. “I didn’t go looking for who was online,” said Beth, repeating the denial. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “Then what were you doing?” asked Lew.

  “I was looking for Dickie to tell him I couldn’t ride with him ‘cause my boyfriend, Zach, would get mad—”

>   “Dickie being this man but with a beard, right?” asked Lew, holding up one of Dick Mason’s mug shots.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that’s who he was. He told me he was one of the janitors. But when I went to find him in the cafeteria, there he was on one of the computers the college keeps in the box office, he turned around and had a gun in his hand. That’s when I slammed the door behind me and to tried to run through the cafeteria but … I don’t remember the rest. Just waking up in the hospital.”

  Dani’s shoulders shook and Beth, who was sitting beside her, reached over to pat her on the back. “It’s okay, Dani,” said Beth. “Chief Ferris and I—we’ve needed to hear from you exactly what happened. This makes sense to me. Does it to you, Chief Ferris?” asked Beth, looking over at Lew.

  “Yes,” said Lew, “it makes a difference knowing you didn’t deliberately do what we had specifically instructed you not to do. A big difference. Did Beth tell you that Dick Mason is the same man who shot her friend, Kathy Beltner? I can’t tell you how lucky you are—we are—that you’re alive.”

  Dani wiped a tear from one eye and sniffled. “I know. My mom is still so upset.”

  “Okay, then,” said Lew, pushing her chair away from her desk and speaking in a lighter, brisker tone, “where do we go from here, ladies? Beth, why don’t you share with Dani the plan you and I have been discussing.”

  “Sure. Dani, Chief Ferris and I have met with Dr. Schumacher and we got the go-ahead to start an internship program for selected computer science students to spend time at the police department assisting with public record searches and other database projects.”

  “Really?” said Dani. “What about that consultant, Julie Davis, who showed us how once someone gains access to a directory of user names and passwords, they can take over an entire network? It was so amazing to learn how to trace the hackers. I’m really into that stuff now. Professor Hellenbrand,” Dani turned to Beth, “is there any chance the college might bring our consultant here? I would love to meet her.”