A Death in Lionel's Woods

by Christine Husom

  House doors began to open twelve minutes later, and by 7:26, seven middle-school-age kids were at the stop. The boy I was watching for was not among them. The Hueber’s garage door opened, and a woman I identified from her driver’s license photo as Anita Hueber, walked out, holding the hand of a girl who appeared to be about ten years old. They walked to the corner then the woman waited as the young girl safely crossed the street, and joined the group at the end of the short block. Mrs. Hueber nodded and waved, and the little girl lifted her hand a tad in response.

  Normal event, except for one thing. The young boy who worked nights in the home had not been with the woman I presumed was his mother, and the girl I presumed was his sister. After seeing the young girl, I’d bet money she was the boy’s sister. They looked like blood siblings. But neither looked much like either parent. That didn’t mean they weren’t their biological children, but it seemed doubtful. I watched the school bus stop, and the children pile on. Then the Hueber garage door closed. The mysterious boy had not gotten on the bus, en route to its next stop.

  I sat in Sara’s car for ten more minutes, thinking perhaps the Hueber boy attended a different school than the girl, and got a ride from one of his parents. But there was no more visible activity from their house. I didn’t have an official reason to be there without a formal complaint, or evidence of wrongdoing. But something was obviously off in the Hueber household and Sara wanted to find out what it was. So did I.

  Smoke was in his cubicle when I stopped by at 9:10. He looked up from the complaint he was perusing, and slid his reading glasses to the top of his head. “The cigarette butts didn’t reappear, did they?”

  “It was still dark when I left home this morning, so if they did I probably ran over them.”

  “That would take care of it then. Squashed evidence.”

  Bob Edberg, longtime deputy, and top-notch detective— but who didn’t want to officially serve in that capacity—poked his head around the area divider. “Good morning, folks.”

  “Hey, Bob, pull in a chair from Conley’s cubicle,” Smoke said.

  “You said you’ve got an assignment for me?” Bob said as grabbed the chair and sat down.

  “Yeah.” Smoke looked at me. “I’m bringing Bob in to help with our case. I’m too far behind.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Smoke moved his readers back in place, and thumbed through some papers. He found the one he was looking for and handed it to Bob. “Driver’s license printout on Kevin Lionel. I wrote his phone number on the bottom.”

  Bob read for a moment. “Isn’t this the guy who owns the woods where you found that woman’s body?”

  Smoke nodded. “One and the same.”

  “At this point, Kevin Lionel is not a suspect in the case. In fact, we have no evidence of specific wrongdoing by anyone, including him. But we think he knows more than he’s telling us,” I said.

  Bob’s eyebrows came together then lifted. “Okay, I’m a little confused here.”

  Smoke and I filled him in on our conversations with Lionel, and how he’d reacted when we showed him the picture of Maisa, Sese, and Lela. We also highlighted other things we were looking into following the autopsy results, and the meeting with Martin Geiger.

  “Whoa. A missing kidney? Human trafficking, human smuggling?”

  “Kinda out there, I know. But they’re all things that have come up during the investigation. Things we’ve got to check out,” Smoke said.

  “Sure. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  Smoke tapped his pen. “Back to Kevin Lionel. I’ve already run a criminal history check, and he’s clear there. We’re interested in finding out if he’s involved in something he’s trying to keep secret. And some basic background info. Activities. What he does besides farm and hunt. Who are his friends, that sort of thing.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Bob, Kevin’s got four brothers, but I wouldn’t set off any alarms by talking to them yet,” I said, and Smoke agreed by nodding.

  “Gotcha.”

  “On the other deal, I’ll also be sending an email to all our deputies to see if anyone has heard of those two guys Martin Geiger talked about. Fletch and Champ. See if we can locate them, find out what they’re up to.”

  Bob rose and gave the paper he held a shake. “Sounds to me like they’re up to no good.”

  “That it does,” Smoke said.

  I was going through my phone messages in the squad room when Sheriff Twardy paged me over the loudspeaker system. “Sergeant Aleckson, report to the sheriff’s office.”

  Every time he did that, I felt like I was back in school. And more times than not, Twardy used it because he was upset about something, and pushed the code for the loudspeaker, instead of trying my phone, or pager. I grabbed my memo pad and hustled to his office.

  The sheriff was pacing and Smoke was standing by his desk.

  “This is a helluva development with who knows what kind of ramifications,” the sheriff muttered.

  Smoke glanced at me as I stepped into the room. “Just telling our sheriff what Martin Geiger shared with us on Friday night.”

  “There is a black market for just about everything, isn’t there?” I said.

  “If you don’t want to follow normal legal requirements, there is,” Smoke said.

  Twardy shook his head. “An old buddy of mine went through an international marriage agency to find a wife about ten years ago. That whole process was on the up-and-up; everything was by the book. It took a year, or more, but he found a great little gal from Thailand. His name’s Leonard Sanger. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in a few years now. He lived over in Westside Township, and I’m guessing he still does.”

  Smoke pulled out his memo pad and jotted a note. “Hmm, well we may end up talking to him before this whole thing is over.”

  The sheriff’s administrative assistant knocked on the doorjamb. Twardy stopped pacing. “Yes, Dina?”

  She walked in and handed the sheriff a pink phone message paper. “This woman just called in to say she saw Jane Doe’s picture in the newspaper, and recognized her.”

  “Really?” I said. Smoke and I moved in next to the sheriff to see what was written on the paper.

  “Cynthia Drayberg,” Smoke read out loud. “Saw Jane Doe walking on County Thirty-seven around six a.m., about two months ago when she drove by.”

  “In September, huh?” I said, mostly to myself.

  “It was still dark out at that time of the morning. Drayberg said she basically never sees anyone walking before dawn. She didn’t recognize her as anyone she’d seen before.”

  “I’ll give her a call to see how much more she can tell us.” I held out my hand for the paper, and the sheriff passed it off.

  Dina lifted her hand in a quick wave. “I’ll be at my desk if you need me.”

  We all told her, “thanks,” as she left.

  Smoke nudged my arm with his elbow. “One more lead.” His cell phone rang, and after a look at the display, he answered it. “Detective Dawes. . . . Go ahead with it.” He laid his memo pad on the sheriff’s desk and bent over to write. “But he said he didn’t know who she was? . . . Got it. Thanks, Randy.” Smoke closed his phone and straightened. “Make that two more leads. That was Communications. A guy by the name of Richard Alford just called in. He just got the Allandale Weekly and saw the image of our victim, read her description. Said he’s pretty sure he saw her last May, on the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “In the county park by Lionel’s woods.”

  “Okay. That puts her in three different locations, but in the same general area, on three separate occasions,” I said.

  “You want this one too?” Smoke held the paper up.

  “Yes, thanks.” I took the note and read the information Smoke had shared with us.

  “How many bags of money were inside that larger bag, again?” Twardy asked.

  “Nine bags o
f money, and then the one with the picture,” I said.

  Twardy punched his right fist into his left palm. “That could mean she made nine trips to the woods. Or it may have been four, or ten, for all we know.”

  “What we need is for someone to come forward to identify her, provide us with some answers,” I said.

  “Six days without an identity is six days too many,” Smoke said.

  “Amen.” And that’s how Sheriff Twardy ended the discussion.

  I phoned all the witnesses, and in the end spoke with six people. Cynthia Drayberg, Richard Alford, and four others who’d called in after seeing the image published in one of two county newspapers. Either the Allandale Weekly Gazette, or the Western Winnebago, published in Wellspring, the city closest to Lionel’s woods. Five of the men and women had seen a woman matching Maisa Doe’s description walking on roads within three miles of where her body was found. One had had a closer encounter. I pulled a county map from my briefcase, and marked the places where she had been spotted.

  Richard Alford had met her face to face in Jeremiah Madison County Park the previous May. He said she’d startled him when he was searching for morel mushrooms. “I guess you could say we surprised each other. It was early in the morning, about six o’clock. I was in the park hunting for morels. I’d been on the ground, on my hands and knees by a dead elm tree where I’d found a bunch of ’shrooms.

  “And when I stood up, this woman seemed to come out of nowhere, and was walking pretty fast toward me. I think we both jumped a little. She sort of sidestepped, so she wouldn’t have to walk too close when she passed me. You know, like it was only a couple of feet away. I said ‘hi’ to her, but she didn’t say ‘hi’ back. Or anything. And then, all of the sudden, she slowed down like she was going to stop. She looked at me like she wanted to say something, but took off running instead.”

  “Which way was she heading?”

  “North. Ah, more like northwest.”

  “Did you see where she went?”

  “No, I stayed in the park for a while after that.”

  “You identified the woman from the image in the paper. Can you tell me some details you may have noticed about her?” I said.

  “She didn’t look like she was from around here. She was wearing a dress that was long. Or maybe it was a skirt. But it wasn’t all the way to the ground because when she started running, I noticed she was barefooted. She had long hair that was in a kind of ponytail. It was dark brown. And she was really thin. Skinny. But the thing that struck me the most was her eyes.”

  “Why was that?”

  “You’ve heard that expression, ‘haunted look?’”

  “I have.” And I’d seen it many times.

  “Well, that’s what I’d say she had. Unhappy-like. Lost. Like she could use a friend. I thought maybe she was having some problems, and that’s why she was out walking in the woods so early in the morning. She needed to sort things out.”

  “I appreciate you calling in, Mr. Alford.”

  “Oh, and one last thing I almost forgot. She was carrying a small tool. I didn’t get a good look at it, but I think it was a garden trowel.”

  “Okay. Did she have anything else with her? A purse, backpack, that kind of thing?”

  “Not that I saw. I’d say not likely. I’d have noticed a backpack for sure.”

  I added what he said to my notes. “Well, thank you, Mr. Alford. You’ve been very helpful. And if anything else comes to mind, don’t hesitate to call.”

  “I’ll do that. And you have a good one, Sergeant.”

  “You too.”

  I was alone in the small sergeant’s office and pushed my feet forward until I was in a near-reclining position, with my arms across my chest. My shoulders rested against the back of the chair, and my bottom was half on, half off, the edge of the seat. I closed my eyes and tried to envision Maisa Doe and her haunted eyes. They weren’t that way in the photo taken in Georgia. And the computer image portrayed them as nearly expressionless, but they were not really her eyes in the first place. I sat up and pulled both the photo, and generated image, from my breast pocket and compared them once again. When sadness swept over me and tears threatened to spill, I put them back in my pocket next to my heart.

  Why was Maisa making early morning treks to the woods to bury bags of money? Was it possible she was homeless, camping in the area? If that was the case, where did the money come from? Or was it the other way around? Did she have a large stash buried in the first place and returned to get money as needed?

  I stood up, stretched, and studied the large Winnebago County map hanging on the wall. It was three or four times bigger than my copy.

  “Looking for something special?” It was Vince Weber’s voice.

  I turned toward the door where he was standing. “Hi Vince. I’m trying to figure out where Maisa Doe may have lived.”

  “Huh. It’s ‘Maisa’ now, is it? You found out her name?”

  I lifted my shoulders up and down. “Going by what was on the back of the photo.”

  “Yeah well, it’s good to give her a name, no matter what.”

  “I’ve talked to six different people today who saw her, three miles or less, from the woods where we found her.” I pointed to the spots on the roads they had identified. “One guy saw her in Jeremiah Madison last May. With a garden trowel.”

  “So she was planting money as far back as last spring, huh?”

  “Looks like it. Unless she was taking money from her stash, not adding to it.”

  “Huh. Well, you raise a good question there, Sergeant. Was she adding, or subtracting, bags of money?”

  “I’m even wondering if she was camping somewhere in the area. She might have been mentally ill. Schizophrenic, or depressed. That could be the reason she wasn’t caring very well for herself.”

  “It’s getting pretty cold out there for camping, unless you got the right gear,” he said.

  “There are a number of old, abandoned farm houses around. If she was a squatter in one of them, she’d have shelter. If she was alone in the world, and didn’t have neighbors who knew she was there, that’d explain why no one has come forward to identify her.”

  “Yeah well, it makes you wonder all right. That Swiss reverend didn’t get back to you with any more info, like someone over in that closed community really did know her, after all?”

  “No, but the guy who was cleaning up leaves on the grounds did. You know, the one who escorted us to the reverend’s office? His name’s Martin Geiger.”

  “As in Geiger counter?”

  I smiled. “I guess so. Same spelling anyway.”

  Weber nodded. “Go on.”

  I relayed what had transpired during our meeting with Martin, and the chain of events that followed.

  “So you were thinkin’ Ms. Doe was a mail-order bride, but now you’re thinkin’ she was a homeless person with a mental illness. But either way, she lost a kidney.”

  I turned my palms toward the ceiling. “That’s the trouble when you don’t have many facts in a case. You use your imagination to try to fill in the blanks.”

  “And that can be a scary thing. For me, for sure.”

  Amanda Zubinski stopped in the doorway, placed her hands on both sides of the doorframe like she was going to start a pushups routine, and popped her head partway into the room. “I was wondering where you’d disappeared to, Vince. Good afternoon, Corky.”

  “Hey, Mandy.”

  Weber scratched his bare head. “The sergeant here was bringing me up to speed on the woods-victim case.”

  “I’ve heard some of what’s been happening.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” Weber said, which saved me from repeating myself.

  “We’re going to try to get a bite to eat if you want to join us,” she offered.

  I glanced up at the clock, surprised it was almost five o’clock. “Thanks, but, no. I have some things to finish up here.”

  “Not much going on out there in t
he county today, so we thought we’d take our supper break early. We figure that’s one way to have all hell break loose. About the time I’m ready to sink my teeth into a thick, juicy burger is when I’ll get a call,” he said.

  Mandy dropped her hold on the doorframe and stood up straight. “Ready?”

  “Yeah. I just made myself very hungry thinking about that burger. Toodles, Sergeant, and let me know what I can do to help you out.” Vince gave his head a quick nod.

  “Will do, thanks.”

  “Same here,” Mandy said, and I smiled as an answer.

  When they left, I took another look at the clock. I had planned to visit Kevin Lionel, but then Smoke asked Bob Edberg to do a check on him, and I decided to see how that played out first. It would determine what the next step might be.

  I gathered my things, and as I opened the door to leave the building, a blast of chilling wind hit me. An unfriendly reminder that winter was around the corner. It was a little past five o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun had already set for the day. With the winter solstice less than six weeks away, we were losing two minutes of light every day. The sun was rising a minute later, and setting a minute earlier, giving us ten hours of daily sunlight. By December twentieth, we’d be at less than nine.

  I drove home thinking how my day had started, sitting in Sara’s car, waiting to see if a young boy who worked late at night would be getting on the school bus. The rest of the day, most of my time and energy was spent on Maisa Doe’s case.

  When I pulled into my driveway, and hit the garage door opener on the visor in my squad car, I remembered my third goal for the day—to find and install a surveillance camera on my garage. I eased into my parking spot, and then Queenie came running and barking into the garage, before my car door was fully opened. She was as excited to be running loose as I was upset about the fact that she was. I petted her and reassured her I’d be right back, as I let her into the house.