Fishing for a Killer

by Glenn Ickler

  “What if we don’t?” asked Trish.

  “Then we will have a very quick minimal briefing with only the most general information provided, and you will all go away wondering what in the hell really happened.”

  That was slick. Holmberg was playing on our inborn curiosity, hoping the TV reporters would be willing to trade a live spectacular for the full story. There was chatter among the TV crews and then agreement not to go live until Holmberg had finished his background statement. I had my mini-recorder going in my shirt pocket as a backup to my written notes.

  “As I said, what we have here is a very touchy situation,” Holmberg said. “Here’s what I believe occurred last Thursday night and early last Friday morning. The female person who was seen walking toward the marina with the victim had gone to the victim’s cabin with him after the Thursday night party ended at something like two o’clock Friday morning. She spent the night there, or what was left of the night, and when the victim got up at quarter to five to go fishing, she walked with him to the dock, which was what the witness observed. There the victim and the woman separated, with him going to the boat and her going to her cabin, which was a few steps beyond the marina.

  “So, ladies and gentlemen, you can see the problem. Do you choose to publicly humiliate the woman, her innocent husband and the victim’s innocent widowed wife by having me repeat this story on live TV, or do you wish to spare them from further suffering by having me give a very much watered-down explan­ation that embarrasses nobody? And if the TV reporters accept the watered-down version, will the newspaper reporters follow their example? Maybe you’d like to talk it over amongst yourselves.”

  There was a chorus of “we will,” and we all started talking at once. Eventually a semblance of order was created and people took turns expressing their opinions. Knowing I would soon be creating havoc and humiliation in the life of one cheated-upon wife, I favored sparing the other one by accepting the expurgated version. I think it was the sheriff’s reference to humiliating the victim’s “innocent widowed wife” that swung the rest of the crowd in the direction of mercy. Mari Gordon had lost a husband in the most awful way imaginable, and those of us who had interviewed her liked and felt sorry for her.

  And so it came about that Trish Valentine and all her rivals reported live with this statement from Sheriff Val Holmberg: “After further investigation, it is clear that the person we interrogated yesterday was in no way connected with or responsible for the death of Alex Gordon. Our investigation of this sad tragedy is continuing.” All the newspapers printed this statement without any embellishment. Even the most blood-hungry reporters occasionally have hearts.

  I wrote and e-mailed my story while Al drove us back to Gull Lake. “Looks like you’re back to square one. Come on home,” was Don’s reply. With Al in agonized agreement, I sent back a note telling Don what we had learned about Aaron Ross and volunteered to stay until dark if necessary to get a picture and a statement.

  “Go get the bastard,” Don replied. “But don’t leave your bride standing at the altar.”

  I promised him I wouldn’t. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

  * * *

  We returned to Crabtree’s and re-established our little hunting blind under the handy pine tree. This time we brought blankets to cover the pine needles and we were as comfortable as possible under the circumstances while we waited for our targets to appear. We had agreed to wait as long as there was daylight, if necessary. If nothing happened before dark, we would skedaddle for home and hope for a later chance to expose Aaron Ross and his mysterious blonde.

  If there had been a lunch delivery to the cabin, as Roxie and Angie had described, we had missed seeing it. As for our own lunch, we had candy bars and bottled water from a machine in the lobby of Crabtree’s main lounge. The candy bars obviously were leftovers from the previous season.

  Apparently Ross and his companion were deeply absorbed in some indoor activity because the hours dragged by without the cabin door opening.

  “Why don’t they come out?” Al whispered. “They can’t be doing it all this time. They’re missing a beautiful day.” They were, indeed, missing a beautiful day—the best we’d seen all week. The sun was producing tiny sparkles of light that danced on the gentle ripples of the lake and the temperature had risen into the lower seventies, according to the readout on my cell phone.

  At a few minutes after three, that cell phone vibrated. With my sore ribs complaining, I crawled on my hands and knees to a more distant tree to take a call from Martha Todd. “Where the heck are you?” she asked without even her usual “hi, sweetie.”

  “We’ve encountered another complication,” I said. “But I guarantee you that we’ll be on the road by sundown. I’ll tell you all about this one when we get home. You’ll love it.”

  “I’d love having you on the road right now even more.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart, but a great new story has been dropped into our laps. Such is the life of a reporter.”

  “Right now I’m asking myself: why am I marrying a reporter?”

  “Because he’s cute and cuddly and loves you like crazy?”

  “I can’t see his cuteness and he’s been too far away to cuddle for a whole darn week. How do I know he still loves me?”

  “He will show you in the most demonstrative manner you can imagine tonight,” I said.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Maybe I should spend the rest of the day imagining.”

  “Maybe I should, too. Maybe one of us will imagine something new.”

  “And if we don’t, there’s nothing wrong with the old somethings. Bye, sweetie.” We made kissy sounds and hung up.

  Aaron Ross and a fabulous-looking woman with waves of long golden hair were standing on the cabin deck when I crept back to our tree. The blonde was a large woman, almost as tall as the lieutenant governor, who was a couple of inches over six feet. She wore a sleeveless pink blouse that left bare her broad, square shoulders, and a pair of form-fitting khaki shorts that emphasized the width of her hips. Roxie’s description of her as a big-ass blonde had been right on the money.

  Al’s face was glued to the camera and he was taking shot after shot of the couple as they stood facing the lake with their arms around each other’s waist. I almost let out a triumphant shout when they turned toward each other, embraced and kissed. Then they sat down together on a loveseat and, incredibly, Aaron Ross pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket, bit off the tip and lit the damn thing. Even more incredibly, the woman stayed seated beside him as the blue smoke swirled around his head. Either she believed Ross’s cigar smoking made him devastatingly macho and attractive or her olfactory nerves were paralyzed.

  Al turned his face toward me and gave a thumbs-up. I returned the gesture and we quietly gathered our gear and broke camp. When we were out of Ross’s possible sightline, we stood up and broke into a trot. Before getting into the car we did a high-five accompanied by whoops of triumph.

  Now we needed a printer. Our plan was to make some damning prints and return to Crabtree’s to confront Aaron Ross and get his reaction. Our expectation was for a verbal explosion, possibly followed by a plea for mercy. Having expended our day’s supply of mercy on Mari Gordon, poor Ross would be, as they say, SOL.

  We had seen a couple of printers in the office at Madrigal’s during our sessions with the sheriff. If either of them had a port for a camera memory card, we were in business. As it turned out, both of them did and we returned to our cabin with a set of prints showing four poses—the arms around the waist, the hug, the kiss and the loveseat. They weren’t on glossy photo paper but were more than adequate for our purpose.

  “This is going to be fun,” Al said.

  “I can’t wait to see Aaron Ross’s face,” I said.

  “He’s going to swallow his damn cigar.”

  “I hope you ge
t a shot of that.”

  We decided to pack up our stuff and put it in the car so we could leave for home immediately after our visit with Aaron Ross. When Al had only his laptop left to pack, he remembered that he hadn’t downloaded the new pix from his camera to the computer. When he finished the download, he said, “Give me a few minutes to cull these things while I’ve got the computer open.”

  I really wanted to get to the lieutenant governor and then get on the road immediately, but I agreed to a brief delay. I picked up my novel and was starting to read when he said, “While I’m at it, I’m going to zip through the whole week and delete the useless crap like I always do at the end of an assignment.”

  “You sure this is the end?” I said.

  “We’re going home in about an hour, aren’t we?”

  “We are unless Ross and his bimbo tie us up and torture us until we agree to destroy all of those pix.”

  I went back to my novel. A few minutes later Al said, “Hey, come here a minute.”

  He was looking at an image of the inside of Alex Gordon’s boat, taken a few minutes after the boat had been tied up at the dock last Friday morning. “What do you think that thing laying in the bottom up near the bow is?” he asked.

  It was a dark-colored cylindrical shape about the size of something seen all too often on city sidewalks.

  “Looks to me like a dog turd,” I said.

  “Why would there be dog crap in a fishing boat?”

  “Did Alex have a dog with him?”

  “Nobody mentioned a dog. And a dog probably would have swam to shore and been under everybody’s feet.”

  “Can you zoom in on it?” I asked.

  “I can try,” Al said. He moved the cursor and clicked on the image. The dark brown object in the bottom of the boat grew larger and the details became more defined.

  We looked at the screen and then at each other.

  “Holy shit,” Al said. “That’s no dog turd.”

  “It sure as hell isn’t,” I said.

  We were looking at a half-smoked cigar.

  Thirty-Four

  Bearding the Lion

  Alex Rogers probably never smoked a cigar in his life,” I said.

  “Only one person up here for the weekend smokes cigars,” Al said.

  “We should make a print of this,” I said.

  “Then we should call the sheriff,” Al said.

  “And then we should go have our visit with Lieutenant Governor Aaron Ross,” I said. “This is way better than your pix of him kissing the blonde.”

  “Let’s get started.” Al was out the door with the laptop in his hands, trotting toward the lodge. He made three prints each of an overall shot of the cigar in the boat and a close-up of the cigar. One set was for Ross, one was for the sheriff and one was for us to keep as a souvenir of our week at Gull Lake.

  My next move was to call the sheriff’s office and ask for Sheriff Holmberg. “He ain’t here just now,” Shirley said. “Him and most of the crew are workin’ a crash that’s got Highway 10 blocked just south of town. Three cars and a semi. Traffic’s backed up for miles. I figured you guys would all be there with your cameras.”

  “We’ve got a different walleye to fry,” I said. “I need to talk to the sheriff. I need to have him come to the farthest north cabin at Crabtree’s Resort as soon as he can get there. Tell him we’ve got the person who killed Alex Gordon.”

  “You bet,” Shirley said. “Soon as he calls in I’ll tell him.”

  “Maybe you could call out and tell him,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Maybe I could.”

  “As soon as pos-si-ble,” I said, enunciating each syllable with the utmost precision.

  “Right. Have a good day,” Shirley said.

  The bottom of the sun was touching the western horizon when we arrived at Crabtree’s Resort and parked as close to Aaron Ross’s cabin as we could get. Al started to get out, but stopped and said, “Do you think this is a good idea, going after Ross with these pictures without being sure when we’ll get backup from the sheriff?”

  “The sheriff will be on his way at top speed the second he hears we have the killer,” I said. “Besides, what’s Ross going to do, tie us up and drown us? There’s two of us to one of him if it comes down anything physical.”

  “Okay. Let’s go beard the lion in his den.”

  With a fresh tape in my mini-recorder, Al’s camera slung around his neck and the pictures of the boat and cigar clutched in my left hand, we walked up the steps to Ross’s front door and knocked.

  “Who is it?” Ross yelled. I gave him our names and place of employment.

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  “Bet you anything he’s hiding the bimbo,” Al said.

  “He’s crazy if he isn’t,” I said.

  There was no bimbo in sight when the door opened and Aaron Ross beckoned us in. This cabin was much larger than the one Al and I were occupying at Madrigal’s, and the smell of cigar smoke filled every cubic foot. We were in a spacious sitting room furnished with a sofa, a coffee table and two overstuffed armchairs flanked by end tables and lamps. Through one opening I could see into a kitchen and through another I could see down a hallway lined with the doors of multiple bedrooms. To my right was a fireplace and to my left was a closed door that I assumed was a bathroom. I wondered which door the lady was behind.

  “Nice to see my favorite reporter and photographer team,” he said. “Have a seat. What can I do for you boys?”

  Neither of us sat down. “You could start by telling us what you’re doing here at Crabtree’s after telling everybody you were going on a pre-campaign swing through northern Minnesota,” I said.

  “Simple. I needed to get away by myself for a few days, so I made up the story about a campaign trip,” he said. “First of all, I was shook up by Alex Gordon’s murder. He and I worked together for the same governor for almost seven years, so his death was a real shock to me. Second, I wanted to think about my campaign strategy without a bunch of would-be experts giving me advice I didn’t need.”

  “So the person we saw you with this afternoon isn’t an adviser?” I said.

  A tinge of red rose in Ross’s face. “Who did you see me with this afternoon?”

  “Tall blonde. Female, from the looks of her. Very pretty hair.”

  “You were spying on me?”

  “Just doing our job covering all the events of the fishing opener.”

  “You were sneaking around . . . how did you know I was here?”

  “A reporter never reveals his sources,” I said.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said.

  “You might be,” I said. “We have something to show you.” I stretched out my hand with the photos and he took them.

  Ross looked first at the overall interior boat shot and then at the cigar. His face was turning a brighter crimson. He looked at both photos again. “What the hell are these?” he said.

  “They show the interior of Alex Gordon’s boat a few minutes after the deputies brought it in last Friday morning,” Al said. “We thought you might want to see what happened to the stogie you dropped.”

  “What are you saying?” Ross said. “Do you think that’s my cigar?”

  “Do you know anybody else who was here last weekend who smokes cigars?” I said. “Alex Gordon sure as hell didn’t.”

  “Lots of people smoke cigars. That cigar could have been dropped by the guy who used the boat before Alex.”

  “Friday morning was the first time that boat was out of storage since last fall,” I said. “You think Madrigal’s left a cigar butt in their boat all winter?”

  “They could have,” Ross said. “For god’s sake, are you thinking I had something to do with Alex Gordon’s murder?”

>   “That’s what we’re going to tell the sheriff when he gets here,” I said.

  “No. You can’t. You cannot do that,” Ross said. The decibels increased with each word.

  “You can listen in while we show him the pictures and tell him what we think.” Al said. “I’m sure he’ll ask you for a statement.”

  Ross’s face was glowing like a cast-iron stove on a below-zero night in January. “No,” he shouted “This can’t go any further. Sheila!”

  I heard a noise behind me and was starting to turn in that direction when I felt a sharp pain in my head and everything went black.

  Thirty-Five

  Hows and the Whys

  Someone was pounding on a drum inside my head and something tough but slightly pliable was holding my wrists together behind my back. I tried to open my mouth but something immovable was keeping it shut. I opened my eyes and saw Al in one of the armchairs. His hands were behind his back and his mouth was covered with a slash of silver duct tape. I was in the other armchair and I assumed I was a mirror image of Al. I had no idea whether I had been unconscious for minutes or for hours.

  Standing in front of us were Aaron Ross and the blonde. In his right hand, Ross held a revolver with a barrel that looked as big as a cannon from my perspective. I was glad he was pointing it toward the floor and not at me. A child’s wooden stepstool dangled from the woman’s right hand. They were both looking at me.

  “About time you woke up,” Ross said. “I was beginning to think Sheila made the same mistake I did with Alex and hit you too hard.”

  I stared at him and wanted to speak. All I could do was go, “Mmmm.”

  “If you promise not to go nuts and start yelling I’ll take the tape off your mouths,” Ross said. Both Al and I nodded vigor­ously. An additional shot of pain through my head made me wish I had been less vigorous. Sheila ripped the tape from my mouth, giving me a new area of pain as dozens of hairs from my moustache went with it. Al suffered a similar jolt when Ross tore the tape off his face, costing him portions of both moustache and beard.