A Death in Lionel's Woods

by Christine Husom

  The sheriff lifted a shoulder slightly. “As long as there’s one still out there, we can hope. Rita got that woman’s image off to the area papers, so that might shake something loose.”

  I crossed my fingers. “We’re hoping and praying.”

  “Sheriff, change of subject. I had to pick up our sergeant here this morning. She was stranded by the side of the road.”

  “Corky?” The sheriff turned to me.

  Smoke went on, “It looks like some yahoo put a couple of nails in her tires.”

  “Oh, for godsakes. What next, I’d like to know.”

  “Seems to me that someone has been working pretty hard to get Corky’s attention.”

  Over the years, Smoke had grown almost as protective of me as my mother was. I had to downplay for Mom much of what I was involved with at work. It wasn’t as easy to do that with Smoke, but I continued to try. “A couple of nuisance incidents—”

  “On the very day you start on a new case. The same day you get an accusing phone call,” Smoke reminded the sheriff and me.

  I returned the sheriff’s stare with one of my own. “I’d just as soon that my mother doesn’t know about all of this, Sheriff.”

  “I can’t lie to her, Corky.”

  “Of course not. I’m not asking you to lie, just don’t say anything about it yet.”

  He swiped at an invisible object on his desk. “I guess we can consider it an open investigation for now. But I think you should talk to her about it. Your mother is very bright, and she knows you keep her in the dark half the time.”

  “You know I can’t tell her everything that goes on around here or she would never sleep. But, I will talk to her about some of these incidents. Eventually.”

  My work cell phone rang, saving me from further dispute. I pulled it out of its holder and looked at the display. The Swiss Apostolic Church. “Sorry, but I better take this.” I pushed the talk button. “Sergeant Aleckson.”

  “Sergeant, this is Martin Geiger from the Swiss Apostolic Church in Kadoka. I saw you the other day when you came to meet with Reverend Joos. I was the one doing maintenance on the grounds. The one who showed you to the reverend’s office.”

  Leaf man. “Oh, sure. How can I help you, Martin?”

  “I’m hoping I can help you. But I need to know you will keep my name private.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what this is about, and we’ll take it from there?”

  “I do not like to speak of important matters over the phone. Is there somewhere we can meet?”

  “Would you like to come to the sheriff’s office?”

  “I do not think that I would be able to do that.” Many people were reluctant to meet there for any number of reasons.

  “How about at a restaurant, or your home?” I said.

  “I work at the hardware store in Kadoka. Could you stop by after hours? Anytime that is convenient for you after six o’clock. You can park behind the store, and I will leave the back door unlocked.”

  “How about tonight? Will that work for you?”

  “Yes, it will. That will be fine.”

  So I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have social plans on a Friday night. I had no reason to think anything was amiss with Martin’s request to meet, but I could always drive by the store later in the day, sometime before six, to see if anything seemed hinky.

  “And is there a number I can reach you at? Your cell phone, maybe?”

  “I do not have a cell, or home, phone, but I’ll give you the one at the store. I am leaving the church here in a few minutes, and that is where I will be the rest of the day.” He rattled off the number two times, and I wrote it on my memo pad. And then we said our goodbyes.

  Smoke and Denny Twardy were all ears as I summarized the conversation. “No idea what it’s about?” Twardy asked.

  “I’m hoping he knows something about Jane Doe. But it could be there is some other hanky-panky activity he needs to report that has nothing to do with the case. I’m frankly a little surprised he called me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’m a gun-toting female who wears pants.”

  The sheriff raised his eyebrows, but didn’t ask me to explain.

  “It was either you, or Weber, I guess.” Smoke stood up, ready to leave. “Well, I gotta get to work. First off, I’m going to track Edberg down to see what progress he’s made on organ donations.”

  “Good. And I’m going to write an addendum that includes my last conversation with Kevin Lionel to add to my main report,” I said.

  But the first thing I did when I got to a computer was print a full-page copy of the generated image from the medical examiner’s office. Then I reduced the size to three inches by four inches and printed that. After studying Maisa’s face for some time, I consulted the notes on my memo pad, and set to work.

  Sara phoned my work cell a little before ten o’clock. “Hey, Cork, checking in to see if you had time to do a check on the Huebers? If you found out anything yet?”

  “Gosh, Sara, I kind of forgot about it. Sorry.”

  “I understand. I know you’ve had your hands full. It’s just that I saw the boy again last night around eleven, working in the kitchen, so it got me wondering all over again exactly what is up with him.”

  “How much cleaning can he possibly find to do?”

  “It looked like maybe he was cooking. It was hard to tell for sure through that small window. The strange thing that happened is when I was watching he reached up—and it seemed abrupt—and closed the blinds.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No, I didn’t have the lights on. And he wasn’t looking out the window before that anyway. It was like he suddenly stopped what he was doing to close the blinds.”

  “Okay, this kid is up late at night cleaning and cooking. If he didn’t want to be seen you’d think he’d keep the blinds closed the whole time,” I said.

  “That’s what occurred to me when he shut them. Something is not right over there.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Thanks.”

  Smoke walked into the small sergeant’s office as I was finishing my report, and filled up the tiny bit of remaining space. “Edberg hasn’t been able to get anything conclusive on the organ donor aspect yet. No one matches our victim.”

  “Sorry to say, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Nah, nor I.”

  “When Doctor Patrick questioned where the surgery had been done, like it probably didn’t happen in a larger medical facility, it made me question if she’d be in the donor database at all.”

  “I’m with you on that one. But we still have to track down every possible lead.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Smoke tapped his fingers lightly on the desk. “Switching gears here, I’d like to go with you when you meet with the church guy tonight.”

  “No reason to.”

  “I know, but I’m curious, and what else is there to do on a Friday night that’d be more fun for an old detective like me? How about I pick you up at your house at five thirty?”

  “You don’t have a hot date?” I said.

  “Outside of you and a Swiss man named Martin? No.”

  “I was thinking maybe you’d be seeing our psychologist friend, Doctor Fischer.”

  “Marcella? Not tonight. She has about as busy of a schedule as I do. But she does have me over for dinner at her house once in a while. Man, can she ever cook.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant that in the literal, or figurative, sense. “I’ll take your word for it, Detective.”

  “Grrr. I guess you have the right to feel a little crabby.”

  “Because I can’t cook?”

  Smoke chuckled. “No, I was not referring to domestic skills. I meant because your water got turned on and flooded your basement, and then your squad car got vandalized. Speaking of which, let’s go rescue it from Maurie’s.”

  I finally sat down to find out what I could on the Huebers abou
t three thirty that afternoon. Running their address gave me their first and middle names in short order, which I used to locate their driver’s licenses, which gave me their dates of birth. Curtis Peter Hueber was forty-two, and Anita Rae Hueber was forty-one. I printed copies of their DLs and studied each of their photos. Curtis was five ten, weighed one eighty, had blue eyes, and curly grayish-brown hair. Average looking, with rosy cheeks and a bulbous nose. Anita was almost as tall at five nine, weighed one fifty-two, and had blue eyes, and brown hair. She was above average in looks, with high cheekbones and a thin, straight nose.

  I did both a basic search, and a criminal history check, but found nothing that raised red flags on any of the sites I viewed.

  Curtis Hueber was listed on a professional connection site as a project manager for an area construction company. His prior employment had been in Utah, four years earlier. So when they’d moved into Sara’s neighborhood, they were likely either returning to, or new to, Minnesota.

  Anita Hueber was not listed on any social, or professional, network sites that I could find. Other than the phone number and address listing, there were no other references linked to her name. I searched both their names adding Utah, and found them listed as survivors in a teenage boy’s obituary. It was their son’s. I printed the obituary, which was more of a death notice, and then carefully read through it to ensure I had missed nothing. “Laban Curtis Hueber, age 13, of Salt Lake City died February 9th following a long illness. He is survived by his parents, Curtis and Anita Hueber.”

  No grandparents, no aunts, uncles, or cousins listed. Not even friends were listed. Often when a young person died, his or her, best friends were recognized. More importantly, no siblings were mentioned. So who were the children who lived with Curtis and Anita Hueber now, four years after their son Laban died?

  I phoned Sara with the update, and she was as puzzled as I was. “So they had a son who died four years ago in Utah, but there was no mention of other children. I told you how private they are. Maybe they didn’t think it was anyone’s business to list them.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Their daughter is about ten by now, so she would have been six when her brother died.”

  “If I had access to birth and adoption records, we could put some of these puzzle pieces together.”

  “We’ll find a way. Hey, we never talked about getting together this weekend. Want to come over for movie night tomorrow night?” Sara said.

  “Sure.”

  “Corky, I gotta go. A client is on the other line. Thanks for checking on the Huebers.”

  “Glad to do it. See you tomorrow.”

  Smoke pulled into my driveway at 5:25 p.m., and gave the car horn a quick tap to let me know. But Queenie had already alerted me by barking and jumping. I gave her a hug and told her to be good while I was gone. She rarely had an accident in the house anymore, and we were working on her staying alone in the house for relatively short periods of time. I jogged out to Crown Vic, and found my seat on the passenger side.

  “Your squad car is safely tucked away in your garage?” Smoke asked.

  “Actually, no. It was the last day in the rotation so I passed it on to Ortiz.”

  “So you have the weekend off, huh?”

  “Just like last weekend, and about six months of weekends before that. I’ve gotten pretty spoiled.”

  “One of these days, when you make detective, you’ll only have to pull an on-call weekend every six weeks.”

  “And, if being detective truly was a nine-to-five job, Monday through Friday, being on-call every sixth weekend would be a real perk.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  We didn’t talk much more on the ride to Kadoka. I was processing a myriad of thoughts, reviewing what Dr. Patrick had discovered about our woods victim, and wondering why no one had stepped forward to identify her.

  Smoke found the parking area behind the hardware store and parked at 5:50. “The store is open another ten minutes,” I noted.

  “We can hang out here a while.”

  “On the other hand, when we drove by the front window, I didn’t see any customers in there. And there are no cars around. With the high school basketball games and wrestling matches going on, I bet half the town is on their way to the gymnasiums by now,” I said.

  “Let’s head on in then.”

  Martin was waiting at the door, and opened it before we had reached it. “Please come in. You have brought another officer, Sergeant Aleckson?”

  “Yes, this is Detective Elton Dawes. We’re working on a case together.”

  “So I tagged along,” Smoke added.

  Martin offered his hand. The two of them greeted each other then shook on it. I noticed they were nearly the same height, and had similar lean, muscular builds. But they had no other looks in common. Martin was a blue-eyed blond with a light complexion, and his nose had a slight upturn compared to Smoke’s straight one. Smoke had sky-blue eyes, and his hair had been dark brown before it started getting sprinkled with gray. I knew from his state ID that Martin would be turning forty in December.

  “No one has been in the store for thirty minutes, so I think it is safe to talk now. We have a small break room where we can sit down.” We followed Martin to a store room that had shelves with merchandise stacked to the ceiling. There was a table for two in the corner. Martin told us to sit down while he grabbed a folding chair that rested against a shelf, and set it next to me.

  He spoke as he settled in. “Thank you for meeting me here. I don’t drive, so you saved me finding a ride with someone and answering their questions of why I needed to go to the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department.”

  I’d discovered that he had a Minnesota identification only card—not a driver’s license—when I looked up his information earlier that day.

  “You not driving, is that by choice?” Smoke asked.

  “Yes. I have chosen to live as simply and conservatively as possible.”

  “Pastor Joos said when I visited with him the other day that the people in your congregation strive to be ‘in the world but not of the world,’” I quoted.

  Martin nodded.

  Smoke raised his eyebrows slightly at me, and then turned to Martin. “Do you have a family?” One of his ice-breaker questions.

  “I am alone. Widowed. We sadly had no children.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Martin nodded then paused for a second before speaking. “That is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I couldn’t imagine where Martin was going with that. “Please go on,” I said, and pulled the memo pad and pen from my breast pocket.

  “You see, a man I did not know was in the store here, perhaps a year ago, and decided to make my business his business. Perhaps you know the type. One of those people who likes to talk a lot. He asked me personal questions, like was I married? When I said I was not, he asked if I liked women. I was offended by his questions, but since I am an employee here, I felt as though I should be polite and answer him. The owner insists on keeping our customers happy. And rightly so, of course.”

  Smoke was a patient investigator and adept at pulling information out of peoples’ mouths. “So you answered his questions.”

  Martin folded his hands and did circles with his thumbs. “Yes, I did. I told him I had been widowed and missed my wife very much. He surprised me by saying that he’d thought I looked lonely and wondered if I wanted a wife who would be grateful to come to Minnesota. He said he knew someone I should talk to about that.”

  I felt my stomach tighten. “Grateful to come to Minnesota? Did he say where she would be coming from?”

  “He said it could be Armenia, or Russia, or Georgia.”

  “Georgia?” Smoke and I said the word together, and shot quick glances back and forth. My heart doubled its beating pace.

  “As in the former USSR country? That Georgia?” Smoke asked.

  “Yes, and so is Armenia, as well. I found that out wh
en I looked the countries up at the library. I knew of Russia, of course, but only had a general idea of where the other two countries were. I had forgotten they had been in the Soviet Republic.”

  “So did you ask him more about that? What he meant, exactly?” I asked.

  “No, I was rather shocked when it dawned on me what he was suggesting.”

  Smoke jotted some notes on his memo pad. “What happened next?”

  “The man said he knew, in his words, ‘the guy to talk to, the one who could set me up if I changed my mind.’ He wrote a single name and phone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. And then he said, ‘It is surprisingly not an expensive way at all to get a wife. And if I did make that phone call I should say that Fletch told me to call.’”

  I leaned closer to Martin. “So this Fletch was suggesting that you could buy a wife?”

  “I did not ask him that, but that is what occurred to me after he left.”

  “Where is that scrap of paper?” Smoke said.

  “I crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. As I said, I found the entire conversation and his suggestions offensive.”

  If Martin had called the authorities at the time, we may have been able to stop whatever illegal, or at least, unethical business Fletch was engaged in.

  “I don’t blame you one bit. I would have been offended myself,” Smoke said, and I knew it was to keep Martin as relaxed as possible. He paused for a moment, and then leveled his eyes on Martin again. “You said there was a name on that scrap of paper. Do you remember what it was?”

  “Champ.”

  “Champ?”

  “Yes, I presumed it was a nickname.”

  “And the phone number. Do you remember any of it? Area code? Prefix?”

  “I do remember six one two as the area code, and recognized that as being a metro code, but did not read beyond that.”

  “You said this incident happened about a year ago?” Smoke said.

  “Yes. I know it was in the autumn time of the year.”

  “Can you describe the man?” I asked, my pen poised to jot down the information.