Hook, Line, and Homicide

by Mark Richard Zubro

  Ten yards into the woods, Turner asked Ian what he’d found out.

  Ian said, “Screw this case.” He swatted at several bugs hovering near his right arm. “I’m walking in the goddamn woods. If I see another green leaf, I’m going to puke on the nearest person with a fishing pole.”

  Turner said, “There’s millions of leaves. You’d have to be a puke master to heave that much.”

  “I’m a master—”

  “Don’t go there,” Paul said.

  “What if we get lost in these woods? What if we come upon a bear?”

  “What did I tell you to do?”

  “Don’t run. Look big. Make noise? Don’t make noise? I don’t remember which. Be carrying a bazooka? What good is a bazooka going to do if we get lost?”

  “It’s your bazooka,” Paul said. “This is a nice path. It’s maintained by the province. Some of the woods are parkland. It’s quiet, peaceful. There are little markers here and there giving details about the various trees and flowers.”

  “Who makes a living doing that kind of thing?”

  “Somebody must want to do it,” Turner said.

  “Maybe it’s Canadian torture,” Ian said.

  “Maybe your imagination is running away with you.”

  “What did you guys find out yesterday?”

  Turner filled him in.

  “I get no sense of who did it,” Ian said. “Sure are a lot of people who didn’t like him. Motive never solves murder,” he ended with the oft-repeated cop axiom.

  Turner knew that was true. They were taught from day one it was clear physical evidence that won convictions. Here half the town would be locked up in jail forever if motive was the answer.

  “What did you find out?” Turner asked.

  “I tried to talk to his friends. That went nowhere. You had better luck than I did with them. I visited the parents of the friends. The parents of Cory Dunsmith, the one who blabbed, and Oliver McBride’s mom and dad had a few things to say.”

  “They didn’t try to minimize their kid’s involvement with murder?”

  “They all did that, but I got an earful from Dunsmith’s and McBride’s folks. The McBrides hate the Krohns. Passionately. Either mother or father would cheerfully take a gun to the entire Krohn family. They would start with Scarth. They claimed that son of a bitch tortured and teased their kid for years.”

  “Hard not to be angry about that, but didn’t they try to do something about it then?”

  “Their kid kept quiet. He suffered in silence until the gun incident. It just kind of boiled over. They didn’t have a clue.”

  “How could they not have?”

  “They claim they didn’t. Dunsmith’s mother was apologetic in the extreme. His dad thought his kid was a lazy bum who was in with the wrong kind. He thought his kid should have gotten a job. He blamed ‘that crowd that he runs with’ for all of his problems.”

  “It’s everybody’s fault but mine,” Turner said.

  “Got that right. He didn’t seem to be as angry at J. T. Krohn as some others. That could be because, as I found out later, Mr. Dunsmith has one of the few jobs left at the mill since it closed. He’s some kind of security guard. However, Dunsmith’s father is pretty pissed at Scarth. He’s not part of the Scarth-is-a-saint chorus.”

  “Something I never want to hear,” Turner said.

  Ian said, “I talked to people at the local college. The officials were reluctant to talk about the deaths.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I finally got the story.” He drew a breath. “Which was absolutely boring. Nobody knew of any connection between all of them. No one knew all six of them. I tried to piece together connections from the bits different people said. Not a clue in sight.”

  “We’ve got what the coach said about them being on those teams, but that has neither an obvious nor obscure connection to murder that I can see.”

  Ian said, “I dug into the Krohns’ family background. Mrs. Krohn is a whack job, certifiably on her way around the bend.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “She’s married to a hard-driving, heartless gazillionaire whose money does not meet her emotional needs. According to this town, she was the sweetest kid as she was growing up. She and J.T. met in grade school. They are the only one each other ever dated. Then they got married. Supposedly, she’s been faithful. Supposedly he’s a philandering, lying sack of shit who would be happy to screw any woman in town.”

  “And did he?”

  “What?”

  “Screw them.”

  “According to my source, if he didn’t, it wasn’t for lack of trying. The dad matches the son in having multiple partners. I’ve seen pictures. He’s as good-looking as his kid in an I’m-a-pirate-and-I-may-make-you-walk-the-plank-any-minute kind of way.”

  Turner said, “He’s rich. He’s pretty. I got that.”

  “He’s a son of a bitch. He led the chorus in the-kids-drowned scenario for the first six of them. He’s invested in every big development in town. More tourists, more money. He’s an Amityville throwback. Don’t alarm the tourists that there’s a shark devouring half the town. That type. But now that it’s his own kid, the sky is falling.”

  “Do the mother and father have alibis for the time of the murder?”

  “Nobody in this town would believe that he would kill his own kid.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not from this town. I only come up here to not go fishing.”

  Ian paused in the middle of the path. He stared forward and back and then forward again.

  “What?” Turner followed his friend’s gaze.

  “Hush,” Ian whispered. “I thought I heard something.”

  Turner listened to the birds, the wind, the trees. Then he thought he heard a faint noise, which quickly grew in intensity.

  Soon they could make out panting, crying, brush being disturbed. Then a crescendo of screeches rose for several seconds then fell in a gurgling wail. Moments later a woman appeared on the path. She wore a red jogging suit. Turner had never seen her before.

  She ran up to them, stopped, and bent over. Between great gasps for breath she said, “Help! Help!”

  “Are you hurt?” Turner asked.

  “In the forest,” she gasped. “Oh help!”

  “We’ll follow you,” Turner said.

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “What is it?”

  “Someone.”

  “Are they hurt?”

  “Yes. I think so. Yes.” She knelt on the ground and began to vomit. When the heaving and sobbing stopped, and her breathing was under control, Turner said, “Please, could you help show us the way?”

  “I don’t know if I can go back.”

  “Was the person on the path? We could find them.”

  “Her, I think. On the path or off the path.”

  “Pardon?” Turner said.

  She took a deep gulp of air. “I was running along the shore path. I saw something. I went to look. It was awful. I panicked. I ran. The wrong way. There were woods all around. I heard all kinds of sounds. I ran and ran. I stumbled onto this path. Something horrible has happened.”

  Turner said, “Can you go back with us as far as you can? We can go on from there. Was it someone you know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How far back is this?” Turner asked.

  “Maybe two miles. I’ve run along the shore path for years. It’s quiet. That’s why I like it. Hunters use it in the fall. That’s why it’s pretty smooth and even.” She looked down at her feet. “It’s like this one. Pretty regular.”

  She led them back the way she had come. “I came out here. I sort of recognized this path. I mean I know there’s the shore path and then this one farther inland.” She pointed. “There’s a clearing through there about a mile. I was on the halfway point of my run. There’s a quiet little secluded beach. I like to sit there and meditate. Today, it was awful.” Tears started. She pointed. “It’s that way.�
��

  Turner said, “Why don’t you go for help? We’ll check it out.”

  She nodded and hurried off down the path. Turner and Ian plunged into the woods. At times they had to clear brush in front of themselves. Ian said, “It can’t be another dead body in the North Woods?”

  “The last one was in the lake.”

  “That’s no comfort.”

  Turner said, “Just a guess, but whatever it is, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “Are we still going in the right direction?” Ian asked. “It would be easy to get lost in here.”

  Turner said, “I checked the sun’s position when she pointed.” He looked at the sky. “If we don’t find something in the next few minutes, we can turn back. We should mark our path.” He began breaking tree branches about every ten feet. When they’d gone another fifty yards, Ian pointed. “I can’t make that out.”

  Turner followed his friend’s finger. He was looking between two larch trees. A bit of pink tinted with red reflected in the sunlight. The wind briefly touched the leaves, and the apparition was covered in shadow.

  Ian began to walk toward it.

  “Stop,” Turner said.

  “Maybe it’s just somebody in trouble.”

  Turner nodded. “Be careful.” As young cops together when they were first lovers, they’d been taught to take every precaution with a crime scene.

  The two stepped forward, barely rustling the weeds, leaves, and dead branches that lay on the forest floor. Closer they could see it was a person. By the time they were twenty feet away they knew they were at a crime scene.

  The body was that of a young woman who wore clothes two sizes two small for her. She had on a bright orange and yellow sweater that hung in shreds from her enormous chest. Turner remembered the garment as the one worn by Evon Gasple when they were accosted by the crowd of six in the parking lot. He spotted a pair of glasses with bright pink frames on top of a bush. One lens was cracked.

  Turner could see dark bruises on exposed portions of her skin. She’d been brutally beaten fairly soon before her death. He could also see tooth and claw marks.

  “Was she attacked and killed by a wild animal?” Ian asked.

  Turner said, “More likely they’ve been snacking after she died.”

  Turner tried to take in the whole scene at once. He saw that the lakeshore was only about forty feet away. The body was in a small clearing about thirty feet in from a stony beach that stretched the rest of the way to the shore. They moved off to the side to avoid disturbing the crime scene and to wait for help that they hoped the woman they’d met was sending.

  Eventually, Chief of Police Schreppel and Mavis Bednars, the commander of the Ontario Provincial Police detachment, showed up. Ian and Tuner gave their statement and were told to wait.

  Half an hour later the Canadian medical examiner was talking to Schreppel and Bednars. Turner and Ian were brought in.

  “You found the body?” Schreppel asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Finding lots of bodies.”

  “It’s a curse,” Turner said.

  “It’s not time to be cute.”

  “Is this a good time to be cop clumsy and officious?” Turner replied. He turned to the medical examiner. “How did she die?”

  “Somebody beat the hell out of her. She scratched, hit, and bit back.”

  Turner said, “Scarth’s body was pretty mangled.”

  The ME said, “He probably got himself caught in the propeller of a boat. It might be hard to distinguish which wound was inflicted by what. Could have been Scarth who attacked her, but I’m not sure you’re going to be able to prove it by the markings on his corpse.”

  “Could she have killed Scarth and then died from her wounds?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  Bednars said, “Maybe she wandered around wounded in the woods.”

  “No, she was beaten and died there. The ground was trampled. The footprints of human and animals were too blurred for them to yield any record of what had happened.”

  “Were they Scarth’s shoes?”

  “I’ll need to check. The beach is stony, but they could have walked here or come in a boat. On the grassy surface there are a lot of different tracks. You’ve also got critters who have been through here and obliterated a lot. At least one bear has been by having several meals and any number of smaller animals have had their fill.”

  Ian said, “At least she didn’t suffer.”

  “Actually, she probably did. She didn’t die right away. Critters nibbled at her. She couldn’t move. Her neck was broken. Whoever bashed her was incredibly strong. She wasn’t a small woman. Animals would have been attracted by the scent of blood. Her throat was crushed. She couldn’t have called out. She was bleeding before the critters got to her. She’s got bug bites on most of the exposed surfaces of her body. Those bites are disturbed by various things snacking on her. She was watching herself be devoured.”

  Everybody was very silent.

  “Would she have lived if someone had found her sooner?” Turner asked.

  “No,” the ME said. “If she’d had the same injuries in the middle of the most up-to-date hospital in Montreal, she’d have died. They’d have been able to save her a lot of pain, but that’s about it.”

  “She was the local slut,” Schreppel said. “She’d been shared by more guys than a whore in Amsterdam.”

  “That’s harsh,” the ME said.

  “That’s reality,” Schreppel replied.

  Bednars said, “She was Scarth’s sometime girlfriend.”

  “They were together the other night,” Turner said. He explained the parking lot encounter.

  “This is definitely murder,” Ian said.

  “Yes,” the medical examiner confirmed. “She’s got bits of flesh under her fingernails. Defense wounds on her arms. She fought her attacker.”

  “Could she have killed Scarth prior to her injuries?” Ian asked.

  The ME said, “Sure, but if she did, who injured her? Trust me, she didn’t kill anybody after she was injured.”

  Turner said, “We don’t know if they attempted to kill each other or if there was a third person here who attacked them both.” Head nods.

  Schreppel said, “We shouldn’t be talking in front of civilians.”

  The ME and Bednars gazed at him evenly. They also remained silent.

  Schreppel said, “We’d like Mr. Hume to come back to town with us.”

  “What?” the reporter demanded.

  “You’ve been around town asking questions for two days. We need to know what you know.”

  Turner said, “I was around asking questions yesterday.”

  Schreppel said, “Right now we’re interested in Mr. Hume.”

  Ian said, “Bullshit. What is this crap? You have some evidence connecting me to this crime?”

  “You’ve expressed an inordinate amount of interest in this case.”

  “Which case? This one was just discovered. Unless you’ve known all about it and haven’t reported it. I have better things to do than indulge you in whatever criminal fantasies you are choosing to have at this moment.”

  Turner normally didn’t believe in antagonizing the local police, but he sympathized with Ian. Nor did he understand the cop’s bullheadedness.

  Turner said, “We’re not planning on leaving town. Is Ian under arrest?”

  “No,” Schreppel said.

  Bednars spoke up. “We have a lot of paperwork to do and people to talk to. We know where to find him if we need him.”

  “Got that right,” Schreppel said.

  Not seeing an arrest as imminent, Turner led Ian away. Ian groused for the entire walk back to the dock. Madge and Buck Fenwick accosted them on the shoreline.

  “What the hell happened?” Fenwick asked. “A million emergency vehicles drove up and people trooped into the woods.”

  “Murder,” Ian said.

  “Without me?” Fenwick asked.

  �
��Who died?” Madge asked.

  “Evon Gasple,” Turner said, “the woman who was in the red car the other night in the parking lot. Scarth’s girlfriend.”

  “Somebody killed them both?” Madge asked.

  “Hard to tell,” Turner said. “They must have died the same night. It’s going to take the medical examiner some time to fix the time of death as precisely as possible. If Scarth killed her, then who killed Scarth, or did the third person kill them both?”

  Ian said, “They wanted to arrest me.”

  “Why?” Madge asked.

  Turner said, “They wanted to question you some more. I think the chief of police is pissed off because you’ve been sticking your nose into things around town.”

  Fenwick said, “So have we.”

  “But he’s taken a dislike to Ian. Remember when he came out here the night of the break-in? He wasn’t ready to believe much of anything. And Ian, you were your usually charming self.”

  Madge said, “Schreppel was rude.”

  “So was I,” Ian said. “Sometimes I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”

  “What do we do next?” Fenwick asked.

  “Talk to the people who knew Evon,” Ian said.

  Turner said, “Right now, I don’t think you should be talking to anybody.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  Fenwick said, “Leave it to us. At least we are currently working cops.”

  Ian said, “Start with the mother. I talked with her yesterday. She lives in a trailer park on the edge of town. She was pretty drunk and that was at one in the afternoon. She didn’t seem real happy with her daughter. Called her a slut and a whore.”

  Fenwick said, “I love dysfunctional families in murder cases.”

  Madge said, “You love anything weird and kinky—” She saw the smirk on Ian’s face. She rushed to add, “—connected with murder.”

  “We’ll go see her,” Turner said. “It’s a place to start. If she’ll talk to us.”

  Ian said, “I’ll go with.”

  Turner said, “You’ll stay here.”

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