The Dead of Winter (A Piper Blackwell Mystery Book 1)

by Jean Rabe

  Oren came closer. “Don’t know whether your father had a will, Zachary, or what all is involved with it. Maybe you’ll inherit money to cover the costs. Maybe he set aside money to handle his final expenses. You need to check with an attorney who handles probate.”

  “Shit. Prorate?” Zachary stood.

  “Probate.”

  “Probate. What’s probate?”

  Oren knew better than to talk about the legalities. If Conrad Delaney had a will the attorney who’d prepared it would have a copy. No will, the estate would be divided up pursuant to statute, probably equally between the two brothers. Creditors could stake claims. It would take time, and Oren had no intention of explaining all of that to Zachary. Besides, it could be considered a misdemeanor for a sheriff’s deputy to dispense legal advice. He could give Zachary a key…but he decided that wasn’t happening today.

  Zachary reached for his coat. “Find an attorney, huh? Probate. How am I going to pay for a funeral? How am I gonna pay for an attorney? How the hell—” His hands shook and he stuffed them in his pockets. “I suppose I could poke through the Yellow Pages and—”

  “Why don’t you check with Harlan Cook?” Oren suggested. “Harlan’s got an office right across from the courthouse and next to Rudy’s Tap. Harlan handles probate.”

  “Harlan Cook.” Zachary nodded. “Thanks, I appreciate that. Harlan Cook.”

  “Harlan’s just down the street from the funeral home,” Oren continued. “He’s got a green awning over his door. You can’t miss it. Harlan Cook.”

  Zachary sighed, the sound of dead leaves scudding across a sidewalk. “Thanks, really. I appreciate it. Harlan Cook. I’ll stop in right now. Good luck catching whoever killed my old man. Harlan Cook.”

  Oren didn’t budge until after Zachary left.

  “Harlan Cook?” Randy shook his head. “Harlan Crook is the worst attorney in the county, maybe in all of Indiana.”

  “He is that, isn’t he?” Oren suppressed a smile.

  “Don’t like Zach, do you?”

  “I wanted to like him for Conrad’s murder.”

  “Be nice if it was that easy.” Randy chuckled. “Zach doesn’t have the wherewithal.”

  Oren stared at the pictures on the fireplace mantel. “No, he does not. But some evil bastard had the wherewithal, and I intend to find out who.”

  Five

  Piper hated how death looked. She hated the empty facial expression, the fishbelly white that a man’s skin turned when the blood settled. She hated the smell, especially the blood and the rot, and the piss and shit that were expelled. She’d seen a lot of death in Iraq, and over there it was often accompanied by the stench of burned and bombed buildings, sometimes with acrid chemicals thrown in for the real hurl factor. Death was messy and ugly.

  It depressed the hell out of her, but she’d learned to handle it; being stationed in Iraq with Alpha Company, a lot of downrange assignments had given her an iron resolve. She wouldn’t look away from a corpse, no matter how much of it was missing or how long it had been decomposing. She might have hated how bodies looked after life fled, but she respected enough that souls had occupied those shells, and so she would never turn away.

  Conrad Delaney was the most pristine corpse she’d had to contend with.

  She took the stairs to the hospital basement. The stairwell smelled fusty, like an old closet rather than like the bottle of antiseptic the rest of the building reeked of. She loitered outside the morgue, thinking about her father, who would be undergoing a chemo session right about now, and praying that this go-round would be effective. Forcing her father from her thoughts, she went inside.

  The morgue was so much different from a war zone, where the dead were in the domain of the living. Here a wall-sized refrigerator with stainless steel doors dominated, and the living—she and the coroner, Dr. Annie Neufeld—were in the domain of the dead.

  Piper saw a form in an open file folder on the counter, the coroner’s report partially filled in with pencil. The finished form would be ink and duplicated with computer records. Conrad Reagan Delaney. Height, weight, date of birth, all had numbers. Under cause of death, Dr. Neufeld had listed: Strangulation, C.C.K. The time of death was blank.

  Conrad lay on a stainless steel table. A half-sheet across his middle afforded the body some amount of modesty. The table was slightly tilted, and there were troughs on each side to catch fluids. She’d learned on her way over that they’d cranked up the heat in one of the basement rooms yesterday to help Conrad defrost. Maybe this room. It felt overly warm in here, and she slipped off her jacket and laid it on the counter next to the folder.

  Dr. Neufeld spoke into a microphone attached to a headset, leaving her hands free. It looked like she was finishing the autopsy rather than just starting.

  Piper checked her watch and gave the coroner a businesslike smile. “You’re almost done. I thought you told me 10:30.”

  “I started early. Had trouble sleeping. Probably should have called you, eh?”

  Piper figured the coroner was also a friend of Oren’s and would have preferred that he’d won the election, would have probably waited on the autopsy…or at least called about the early start.

  “Yeah, you should have called.”

  Dr. Neufeld was covered in scrubs head to foot. Piper could see her eyes well enough. No makeup, dark circles and age creases at the edges; gray-brown hair escaping the cap—much the way she looked yesterday, though her wrappings then had been winter clothing and a heavily-snagged long red scarf. Oren had said she’d retired as a pediatrician half a dozen years ago, citing rising malpractice insurance costs. She’d run for coroner and had held the office for four years, and had won reelection in the fall.

  “Oren said you were friends with Mr. Delaney.”

  “Always hard to do an autopsy on a friend, Sheriff Blackwell. I could’ve passed this along to someone else here, but didn’t want to give Conrad to a stranger.” A pause. “Yeah. Conrad and me, we were close. Went to grade school and high school together, lived on the same street in Rockport growing up. He was two years older, but we hung out a lot, went fishing all over in the summer, sometimes Oren tagged along. I went with Conrad to his senior prom.” Dr. Neufeld laughed. Piper thought it was a good laugh, sounding like crystal wind chimes. “That was back in the day when I tried very hard to be straight.”

  Piper had heard that Dr. Neufeld married her longtime companion in the fall of 2014 when the state’s same sex marriage ban was struck down. Racy news for Spencer County. She probably wouldn’t have been elected to coroner, as conservative as the county was, but apparently no one else wanted the job.

  “Pattern bruising on his back. So whoever killed him—man or woman—held him down with a strong knee, enough force to break two ribs, looped a belt around his neck, and strangled him. It was Conrad’s belt. The killer threaded it through the jeans afterward. Matches the pattern on the neck.” She pointed to the corpse’s throat; the marks were so deep they had broken the skin. “You wouldn’t have seen the ligature marks last night with the sweater, as high-necked as it was. My guess is Conrad’s killer dressed him after he was dead. Cleaned him up a little first, nothing to find under the fingernails. Absolutely nothing.” She shook her head, more wisps of gray-brown hair coming lose. “Damn shows like CSI; in reruns for eternity it shows you how to not leave evidence.”

  Piper pointed at Conrad. “If he was strangled, why do—”

  “—a complete autopsy? I don’t do anything half-assed, sister. Conrad can talk to us with a complete autopsy. Problem is, his core temperature was twenty-six degrees. Same as the air outside. That means he’d been dead long enough to cool all the way down. It’s going to make it tougher to give you a time of death. See, under normal circumstances, a body will lose heat a degree and a half an hour. But outside…winter…throws that out the window. Maybe a body loses three or four degrees, depends on the wind. Even Conrad’s deep organs were frozen.”

  “So you can’t gi
ve me a time of death.”

  “I can give you a range, a broader range than I like to hand out, but a helluva lot narrower than someone who didn’t know Conrad would give you. Stomach contents were ravioli and green beans and more chocolate brownie than he should have eaten, all barely digested. That smacks of supper to me. So I’d say he was killed right after an evening meal, which he sometimes took as early as four and never later than seven. Without exception, Conrad always reserved his sweets for supper, that’s helping me narrow it. Not killed the evening you found him because his core temperature wouldn’t have been this low. So the evening before that, making my best guess that Conrad was killed twenty-eight to thirty-three hours before the Hagees spotted him sitting in the sleigh.”

  Piper took a step back from the table, mulling over why a man who supposedly had no enemies would end up strangled and trussed up amid his Christmas decorations. “Sending anything to the state lab?”

  “Sure. But I’m having tox panels run here.” Dr. Neufeld removed her headset. “You said you wanted the mug. It’s bagged and in the other room.” Dr. Neufeld tugged off her cap, and a shock of curly hair spilled down to her shoulders. “I want you to get the son of a bitch that did this. Conrad Delaney was a very nice man. You and Oren, get the son of a bitch that did this very sick thing to my very good friend.”

  “It is my every intention—” Piper’s phone buzzed. She reached in her pocket, saw that it was her chief deputy, and answered it. “I’m in the middle of something, Oren, can’t—” She listened for a few minutes. “Randy’s riding over with you? Good. I’ll meet you there. I’m with the coroner now, so you don’t need to call her. I’ll tell her. What’s the address? In Grandview. Yeah, I can find it. I know where Grandview is. Yeah, Oren, I’ve got a GPS. I’ll head back now. Should take me about fifty minutes, maybe an hour. The roads are all good.” She replaced the phone. “We have another death, Dr. Neufeld.”

  The coroner’s eyebrows rose.

  “Oren says it’s an elderly woman, Abigail Thornbridge. Oren’s calling it murder, but he’s not seen the body yet and—”

  “Another murder? Thornbridge, hmmm, name’s familiar. Was she a principal? A teacher?”

  Piper shrugged.

  “We go a few years without a murder, then you’re elected sheriff and bodies drop back-to-back.” Dr. Neufeld gave Piper a half-smile, maybe an attempt at humor, then glanced at Conrad’s body. “I’m going to be a little bit here. Write down the address, will you? And before you go, let me show you something.” Dr. Neufeld strode through a swinging door, pulling off her gloves as she went.

  Piper followed, inwardly fuming at the “bodies drop back-to-back” comment. The office was cramped, the right hand wall cement block and all of it painted grade school green. There were two old metal desks—on the closest sat Conrad’s red Merry Christmas mug in a plastic bag next to a small folded laptop, on the other desk was a big tower case computer with an out-of-date boxy monitor displaying a surfing turtle screensaver. The rest of the space was filled with file cabinets, a coat rack, and a book shelf overflowing with ring binders. Dr. Neufeld went to the far cabinet and pulled a hobo-style purse from the top drawer. She rummaged inside the purse and retrieved a red envelope, addressed to her, the return address label Conrad Delaney’s.

  “I’m Jewish, but Conrad sent me a Christmas card every year.” She dangled the envelope in front of Piper and replaced the purse in the file drawer. “Open it. Go ahead, open it.”

  Piper pulled back the envelope flap and took out the card, which was an oversized picture postcard. “Oh my,” she said.

  The header read: Merry Merry Merry Christmas. The centered picture was of Conrad Delaney seated in his sleigh—wearing the same sweater, right next to St. Nick. The caption: Have a cup of cheer, Conrad. On the back was a personal handwritten message: Annie, I wish you and Bebe a warm and wonderful Hanukah, and let’s get together at the country club for breakfast sometime. Been too long since I’ve had a decent Western omelet. I’ll bring the booklet for the RC kit I bought. It’s a replica WWI fighter, a Fokker DVII, came with a decal set. Found it on sale. I think I’ll paint it red. Got some leftover red in the garage. Maybe we can all go “flying” together. Hugs, Conrad

  Except for the color of the sleigh, the Christmas card eerily matched the crime scene—the way Conrad was posed, the clothes, the Santa, but the mug was like one Piper had seen in his kitchen cabinet, not the one he’d been posed with. Whoever killed Conrad Delaney received one of these Christmas cards, or at the very least had seen it in order to arrange him so precisely.

  “Can I take this? The Christmas card?”

  “Of course. But I want it back. Last thing he sent me, you understand.”

  “I understand. I’ll be careful with it.”

  “You get the son of a bitch.” Dr. Neufeld handed Piper the bag with the mug in it. “You and Oren catch whatever sick son of a bitch would do that to my friend Conrad.” She tapped her foot. “I’ll tell Oren that myself when I go on your Thornbridge call.”

  Piper glanced again at the open file folder on the counter on her way out of the morgue. Under cause of death, Dr. Neufeld had listed: Strangulation, C.C.K. Piper figured the initials meant Christmas Card Killer.

  Six

  Oren parked to block the end of the driveway and motioned for Randy to get out first. He eased out a moment later and locked the Explorer, glanced up at a battleship gray sky.

  Oren usually didn’t mind winter, thought it made the world look like a pretty postcard, and the Explorer drove through drifts like they were nonexistent. But this year there’d been way too much of the white stuff; it was making him feel his years.

  “Let’s take a look,” he said. “Get it started. Get it over with. My wife’s slow-cooking a pot roast for tonight.”

  Abigail Thornbridge’s place was a Roosevelt Cottage, a term for the WWII-era homes that looked mostly the same—rectangular with a hipped roof and minimal eaves, a one-car attached garage, and a hood over the stoop at the front door. Hers was an olive green wood-frame, the paint so chipped in places it looked like patches of dried fish scales had been glued on. All of the houses on this street in the small town of Grandview were built in the late 30s or early 40s, likely by the same contractor, and most having only slight variations to Abigail’s. About half of them still had Christmas decorations, icicle lights strung along the eaves, bows on mailboxes, wreaths, and one had an inflatable snowman that was listing.

  Abigail’s front door had a silver and red garland bell hooked to a nail.

  “Good morning, Sheriff!” Directly across the street a woman with a broom stood in her driveway. She made a show of brushing away some snow, waved to Oren and called out again, “Something wrong at Abigail’s, Sheriff?”

  Oren didn’t correct her on the sheriff part. “Can’t talk about it right now, ma’am.”

  “I haven’t seen Abby for a few days. I was starting to worry. I hope she’s okay.”

  “Kochleffl,” Oren muttered.

  “Nosey Parker,” Randy hushed. “A busybody, but not busy enough. You’d think if she hadn’t seen her elderly neighbor that maybe she should have checked on her.”

  Grandview was on the southern edge of the county, overlooking the Ohio River, and so named because of its “grand view.” It covered a tad less than a square mile and had roughly seven hundred and fifty residents. Oren considered it one of the county’s younger towns, with only ten percent of the population sixty-five or older, and the women outnumbered the men by only a handful of percentage points. Abigail had fit into both of those categories.

  Abigail’s pastor had found “Sweet Abby T” a short while ago, dialed 9-1-1, and the dispatcher put it through to Oren. The pastor had said Abigail rotated with another woman playing the piano at the Baptist church, and that he’d stopped this morning to talk about his upcoming selection of hymns. When she didn’t answer the door, he had a bad feeling because “she was getting on in years” and let himself
in; it was unlocked.

  Oren put on gloves and nudged open the door. One glance into the living room was enough; he agreed with the pastor’s judgment that Abigail Thornbridge had been murdered. “After you, Randy.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Randy started recording with the department’s handheld video camera.

  At first Oren thought Abigail’s dog was dead, too. It was a pug, a black one with a mostly white face, suggesting it had some age to it. The dog hadn’t moved, curled between Abigail’s feet. Finally, he noticed it breathe. It was sound asleep, hadn’t heard them come in.

  Randy held his free hand over his nose and shuddered. “What’s the difference between a serial killer and spree killer?”

  Oren read all the law enforcement newsletters the department received, and the terms had been recently redefined. “Mass murderers kill four or more in one location, like Richard Speck or college shooters. Spree killers, they kill two or more, but not in the same spot. Serials, they’re the ones who ice folks more methodically, select them, plan the killings in advance, and wait a while between the victims. That’d be your Ted Bundy types.”

  Randy whistled. “So I wonder what settled into sleepy Spencer County. A spree killer, or a serial?”

  “One sick bastard,” Oren said. “That’s what settled.”

  Abigail was posed in a high-backed wooden rocking chair in front of her Christmas tree, lights still blinking and setting the silver tinsel to glimmer with motes of red, green, and yellow in a room that was otherwise dark because all the shades were drawn. Old-style ornaments—some made out of popsicle sticks, hung from the lower branches of the tree, while delicate crystal globes and frosted pears hung higher. The angel at the top was crooked and looked like it might topple at any moment; it had the head of a pug dog.