Buried in Wolf Lake

by Christine Husom

  “Yeah, I’d say a thousand, give or take, is about right,” Smoke agreed. “Sheriff?”

  The sheriff considered and nodded.

  Smoke rubbed his jaw. “What do you suppose that leg weighs? What, fifteen, twenty pounds?”

  I shrugged and said, “Maybe.” I discreetly lifted my right leg slightly and tried to guess its weight, something that had never occurred to me to consider until that very minute. No one else commented, but they appeared deep in thought.

  “Twenty pounds wouldn’t add much weight, but, say one hundred thirty, forty, fifty pounds would be enough to explain the deeper depressions.” Smoke squatted for another close check. “We’ll send the impressions to the BCA for their expert opinion, but that’d be mine, if I had to give it.”

  He stood up and stuck his reading glasses in his pocket. “Mason, Carlson, finish marking off the scene and get it photographed. Aleckson, we’ll follow these hoof prints, see where they lead to.”

  “You want underwater recovery started?” Mason asked.

  “You’re part of that, right?” Smoke said.

  “Yup. So’s Carlson.”

  “You got your gear with you?”

  Mason nodded. “We threw it in the unit when we heard ‘lake.’”

  “Good. Yeah, give Warner a holler. Tell him to load up the boat and assemble the rest of his team. We should have this much processed before the whole place is crawling with deputies. Corky, let’s take that walk. Why don’t you grab your camera?”

  Carlson picked up the crime scene tape and stakes and handed the tape to Mason. He helped Carlson finish the job I had started, continuing to the south side of the lake where the shoreline turned east and the road continued south. The sheriff moved to the outside of the marked area.

  I found a camera in its case in my trunk, pulled the attached strap around my neck, and caught up with Smoke.

  A newer gray Toyota made its way toward us at a fairly fast clip, then slowed when it got closer. The man in the vehicle raised and lowered his hand in a quick wave of acknowledgement and pulled into the Engens’ driveway. He got out of the car and Tara was in his arms a second later.

  “Good.” Smoke gave me a relieved nod. “Let’s move.”

  We walked south on Abbott Avenue to Eighty-fifth Street and started to turn left. I glanced back to see Mason taking pictures of the horse hoof prints and Carlson writing in a pocket notebook. The sheriff had his arms crossed on his chest, watching them work.

  “Wait a minute.” Smoke stopped and pointed. “The prints are coming and going both directions. Let’s head west first.” We walked about one hundred yards to the edge of a small swamp where the horse and rider had been.

  “I sure hope this doesn’t mean there’s another body part in this swamp,” I said.

  “Doesn’t look good, does it? Better snap some photos of these, just in case.”

  “The prints look like they came from the direction of the park—rode to the swamp here—turned around and headed up Abbott to Wolf,” I narrated as I took the pictures.

  “I guess we’ll find out if that means anything when underwater goes into Wolf. If we don’t find the rest of her in there, this is going to turn into an even bigger nightmare than it already is. We got about four hours of daylight left—a little less. Let’s head east.” Smoke pointed to where the road ended and the grassy area began. “Looks like he stayed on the road for a while, then headed into the park here.”

  “Smoke, a horse could have traveled for miles,” I protested, snapping more shots.

  “Yeah, I basically wanted to see if he came from the park. I’ll have boat and water load up the four wheeler—”

  I interrupted. “Maybe a mounted patrol would be better—could go where the other horse did. It’d be easier for the rider to see than from a four wheeler.”

  Smoke smiled and tapped me on the back. “Now you’re thinkin’. We’ll head back and I’ll call in the reinforcements.” He opened his phone and hit two digits on speed dial.

  “Robin? . . . Yes, it is a real leg . . . Young, twenties, thirties . . . Horrible is one word for it . . . Underwater’s already been called and you should hear them rolling any minute. What I need is one mounted. Who’s on call? . . . Called in sick? Okay, well who’s next on the list? . . . Good. Get him out here, a-sap.”

  By the time Smoke clapped his phone shut, we were back on Abbott.

  “What would possess someone to cut somebody up?” I asked, hypothetically. I had some knowledge on the psychology of why.

  “Very, very sick people are possessed in the most bizarre ways. Has to be the first dismemberment case in the county’s history—that I know of anyway. The sheriff said it’s the first in his thirty-one years.”

  “Makes Alvie Eisner look a little less crazy,” I thought out loud.

  “Yeah, right.” Sarcasm oozed through his words. “Don’t go down that road, or you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the motivations of society’s sickos.

  “‘Vice is a monster of frightful mien

  As to be hated needs but to be seen

  Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face

  We first endure, then pity, then embrace.’”

  I stopped to watch Smoke during his recitation. “Okay. Where did that come from?”

  “‘An Essay on Man,’ by Alexander Pope, English poet, late 1700s. We read him in a college English class I took about a hundred years ago. For some reason, those lines stuck with me.”

  “Alexander Pope? The name is familiar, but—”

  “You’ve heard him quoted a lot. He’s the guy who wrote ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ ‘to err is human, to forgive, divine,’ ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ ‘hope springs eternal.’”

  I smiled and nodded. “Oh, he’s the guy? Well, thank you, Professor Dawes.”

  Smoke bent over slightly in a mock bow. “Anytime. Change of subject: since you brought up our least favorite inmate, let me reiterate—I do not want you seeing Eisner. Period. She had her chance to spill her guts. You are not at her beck and call, little lady.” Smoke hit the palm of his hand with the opposite fist. “My insides turn over every time I remember how you looked after your fight with that monster.”

  “All right, Detective. We both know we’re not going to settle this today. Let’s talk about it later.”

  “Yeah.” Smoke studied the lake, obviously thinking about the secrets it might be holding. “What we got going here is priority one.”

  On that we could wholeheartedly agree.

  5: Langley

  Driving to his apartment after a long day at the lab, Langley longed to relive his latest conquest. Instead, life at his grandparents’ farm sprang unbidden from his memory. Every weekend, from his earliest recollection until he was sixteen, his mother had left him there so she could spend her time as she pleased, unburdened by the responsibilities of motherhood. Langley’s mouth turned down in disgust.

  At age seven, he was about to enter the kitchen when he heard his grandparents talking about him. He had hung back in the doorway to watch and listen.

  “What do you expect? What was his mother thinking when she named him ‘Langley’? How can the poor boy grow up normal with a name like that?” Grandmother asked Grandfather.

  “Mother, Naomi just has some high-falutin’ ideas, is all. She likes fancy things, and Langley is kind of a fancy name.”

  “All those years of you spoiling Naomi, putting big ideas in her head. First she marries a doctor, then the CEO of a big company. She thinks she can just run off and play every weekend and leave her son with us. We’re too old to be raising the boy. That should be up to his mother.” Grandmother wrung her kitchen towel. “And, if that’s not bad enough, she needs to tell the boy about his father and baby sister. He deserves to know they’re waiting for him in heaven.”

  “Everyone grieves in their own way. Naomi just couldn’t come to grips after the accident like other folks can.” Grandfather folde
d his hands and clicked his thumbs.

  “Well, the Lord spared her and the boy for a reason. It was a terrible thing losing Ken and little Arielle, but she still had the boy. To up and marry Ken’s best friend, not one year later, just didn’t leave her time to grieve proper-like.”

  He must have moved enough to get Grandmother’s attention

  “Langley! What are you doing standing in the doorway? You eavesdropping?”

  He didn’t know what eavesdropping was, but the way Grandmother said it, it didn’t sound like a good thing to do. He had no answer.

  His grandmother leaned her face close to his. “Were you listening to what me and your grandfather were saying?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you understand what we were talking about?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He had a father and sister waiting for him in heaven.

  His mother had high-falutin’ ideas.

  His grandparents were too old to raise him.

  The man he called “Daddy” was not his father.

  His grandmother didn’t think his name was “normal.” What was normal?

  Grandmother threw the dishtowel on the counter and crossed her arms. “All right, then. We won’t speak of it again, but you tell your mother what you heard and ask her to tell you more about it. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s get some food into that stomach of yours.”

  True to her word, his grandmother had never spoken of his father and sister again. Not true to his, Langley never asked his mother about them. Instead, he’d torn a sheet of paper from his grandmother’s tablet and wrote down the name Ken and a seven-year-old’s spelling of Arielle. He set about snooping through his mother’s things whenever possible. There was nothing under her bed or in her closet. He finally uncovered two boxes in a spare bedroom. One box was filled with baby girl clothes, a pink knitted blanket, a silver cup engraved with “Arielle,” a framed picture of a blue-eyed baby girl under a year old, and a few small toys.

  In the second box, the first thing he found was a man’s wallet. Langley opened it and pulled out a driver’s license with the name Kenneth Peter Dietz. Brown hair and green eyes, same as Langley’s.

  A folded newspaper article tucked under the wallet had revealed details of the crash. “Dr. Kenneth Dietz, age 29, of Hamel and his infant daughter, Arielle, died in a motor vehicle accident Saturday. Dr. Dietz pulled onto Highway 55 and was struck by a pickup truck driven by Sherman Crawley. Other passengers in the Dietz vehicle, Naomi Dietz, age 24, and Langley, age 3, were taken to the hospital, treated, and released. Crawley was not injured. All the adults were wearing seatbelts, and the children were in child restraint seats.”

  Langley had put everything back in the boxes. Dietz. His real name was Dietz. Why would his mother take that away from him, along with any memories of the man who had given it to him?

  His sister? She was probably better off. His mother didn’t have much time for kids.

  He’d carried the surname Dietz as his own secret. When he got older and rode his Arabian, he found he needed a first name to match the power and might he had gained. That’s when he discovered the name Gideon. He would become the warrior, the one who cut down. Gideon Dietz.

  Work was the one thing his grandparents understood, and they thrived on it. Langley had learned early on how to feed the chickens and gather eggs and slop the pigs and spread hay in the barn. He hated the smell of chickens, sheep, pigs, and cows. He hated the smell of every farm animal except horses—he found their strangely sour smell pleasant.

  He would sneak into the horse barn with his grandfather’s Belgians to inhale their scent. Langley associated their distinctive odor with strength, might, forcefulness. They were certainly more powerful than his aging grandparents; even more powerful than his mother and the man he had believed was his father.

  The sheer strength of the horses encouraged Langley, gave him mettle. After spending time with them, Langley felt brave enough to tell his grandfather “no” to certain chores. His grandfather would turn him over to his grandmother for discipline.

  “Mother, Langley refuses to slop the pigs.” Or, “Mother, Langley will not help me clean the chicken coop.” Or, “Mother, the boy says he won’t milk the cows.”

  Each infraction had necessitated Grandmother’s own special brand of discipline. She made Langley sit in a corner of the living room and read the Bible so he could reflect on the error of his ways. Langley couldn’t fake it, either. His grandmother would quiz him on what he had read and what it meant. Some of the stories were interesting, but he didn’t really understand their meaning.

  When Langley was thirteen, he found an unforgettable story in the Old Testament Book of Judges, Chapter Nineteen. He read it three times. When his grandmother asked about his reading, Langley recited one he had read some weeks earlier. He did not want to share the story of the concubine with his grandmother, or anyone else.

  He kept it to himself, pondered it, savored it.

  It became his personal obsession.

  6

  Carlson poured plaster of Paris in the four best hoof prints, one for each separate hoof. On and off duty deputies arrived, either ready for assignment or to satisfy their natural, albeit morbid, curiosities. Most everyone paraded over to gaze at the tent-protected leg as the first order of business.

  Smoke waved at the incoming vehicles to park on the west side of Abbott Avenue. Deputies gathered close along the band of crime scene tape.

  “Listen up! Before we completely implode here, the first thing I want everyone to do is sign in. Sergeant Aleckson, start a sheet.”

  I left to grab a crime scene sign-in form from my squad car. Every officer there could be required to write a report, if need be. I listened to Smoke’s instructions all the way to my car and back again.

  I don’t have to tell you how to conduct yourselves at this scene. We’ve got a lot of ground—and water—to cover in a few short hours. How many divers we got here?”

  Each one sounded off.

  “Weber.”

  “Carlson.”

  “Roth.”

  “Mason.”

  “Okay. Weber, Carlson, and Mason, suit up. Sergeant Roth, I want you to help with some interviews. If we need you in the water later, we’ll pull you then.”

  I returned with the form secured to a clipboard, jotted the date and location, then handed it to the sheriff, who passed it to the next guy, who passed it on until it came back to me.

  Warner pulled up with the boat trailer in tow, stuck his head out his open window, and pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Where do you want me?”

  Smoke tilted his head to the right. “Park in the driveway, for now. If you go in, it’ll be on the north side there. Any idea how deep this lake is?”

  “I got a rough idea—not deep. I’ll grab my county lake book. The depths are detailed in it.”

  Smoke’s lips turned up in a smirk. “So Wolf’s big enough to qualify as a lake?”

  “Yeah, not much bigger than a pond, is it?” Warner smiled and scratched his arm.

  “Our guys will be more like walkers than divers.” Smoke raised his eyebrows.

  Warner nodded. “Just as well. The water’s a little on the murky side.”

  Weber was the stockiest of the divers and the last to emerge from the crime lab that had served as a dressing room. Three wet suits with face masks, head lamps, fins, and breathing apparatus were ready. Other deputies hovered nearby, waiting for assignments. Smoke pulled out his notepad and pen. His readers rested on the end of his nose, and he peered over them to pick out deputies.

  “Norwood and Ortiz, it’ll be up to you to keep the scene secure. There’s not a load of traffic on this road, but this time of the day, with people coming home from work, could be more than we’d figure. And no civilian goes near that leg.

  “Roth, Holman, Levasseur, Pickering, you’ll canvass the area. Interview all the neighbors
within a two-mile radius. Doesn’t have to be real in-depth. Did they see or hear anything suspicious—a guy on horseback, someone going through with a horse trailer—the last couple of days? There’re more houses to the west, so you can divide those up.

  “Aleckson and Zubinski, interview the Engens, separately. Maybe something unusual they saw or heard will shake loose from their brains.”

  Warner handed his lake book to Smoke.

  “Divers, let’s take a look at this map. It’s only about two feet deep at the shore; deepest part is more toward the south end—twenty-four feet there. Otherwise, straight out from here, it’s about eighteen feet in the middle. Go in on your stomachs, arm’s length apart, out from the hoof prints. All right, everybody, let’s do it.” Smoke clapped his hands.

  “Aleckson, Zubinski. The A to Z team, huh?” Carlson teased when we met on the way to our assignments.

  I rolled my eyes. “Not funny.” Those closest to me in the department knew Mandy Zubinski was my least favorite deputy. She had started a rumor about Smoke and me having an affair the previous year. Most of my colleagues thought it was because she was interested in Smoke and jealous of the easy relationship I shared with him. I tried not to be bothered by gossip, but sometimes I had trouble letting it slide off my back.

  The divers stirred up the layers of silt that had settled on the bottom of the small lake from years of soil runoff. Particles of dirt rose to the surface and covered them as they crawled into the lake on their bellies.

  Zubinski caught up to me halfway up the Engens’ driveway. “Who do you want me to interview, Sergeant?”

  “You take Missus. I’ll take Mister.”

  7: Langley

  Langley had fought his urges for years. Riding Sheik had soothed him until the day he saw her on Hennepin Avenue, inviting him. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Inviting him. So easy. It was his first time with a woman, and he knew just what he wanted to do. He had fantasized far too long. It had been building in him forever, and it was time to act. He was ready and had prepared well.