MURDER IN WINNEBAGO COUNTY
First in the Winnebago County Mystery Series
Christine Husom
Copyright © 2008 by Christine Husom
Smashwords Edition
All rights to this book are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in printed or electronic form without permission. Please purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in, or encourage, piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locale is coincidental.
Also by Christine Husom
Winnebago County Mystery Series:
Buried in Wolf Lake, 2009
An Altar by the River, 2010
The Noding Field Mystery, 2012
A Death in Lionel’s Woods, 2013
Secret in Whitetail Lake, 2015
Firesetter in Blackwood Township, 2017
Snow Globe Shop Mystery Series:
Snow Way Out, 2015
The Iced Princess, 2015
Frosty the Dead Man, 2016
Written for my father, Judge Carroll E. Larson, with love.
Acknowledgement
A very heartfelt thank you to my family and friends for continued love, guidance and support. I am very blessed.
1: Alvie
Alvie’s need to watch was unexpected and gripped her middle with an intensity that pushed the air right out of her lungs. A middle-aged woman guided Judge Nels Fenneman to a chair at the hospital admitting desk. Alvie forgot about leaving, forgot why she was there in the first place, and dropped onto a burgundy, faux-leather seat in the adjoining waiting room. She shifted so she had a clear view of the judge between the spiky fronds of a silk plant.
The booming voice the judge had used to command the courtroom was gone, replaced by hushed murmurs as he quietly answered the necessary questions. Alvie strained to hear, but his words didn’t travel the distance to her ears. Judge Fenneman’s wrinkled face was flushed, harsh under the fluorescent lighting, his color deepening to a purplish-crimson with each coughing spasm that interrupted most of his answers.
Alvie had spent much of the past ten years consumed with thoughts of the man. Fenneman was one of the people responsible for her son’s death. When Alvie wasn’t actively despising him, her hatred seethed just beneath the surface of her consciousness—a living, growing thing with fingers that gripped her throat in the dark of night and lit fires in her head and chest.
The cycle had been the same for years: obsess about what the judge and others had done to Nolan, push it away for a while, obsess, push away, obsess.
The woman with the judge looked vaguely familiar. Alvie studied her a moment and was hit with the realization she was a younger, prettier version of Fenneman. The woman must be his daughter. She had to be. Fenneman was not only still alive, but part of a family. Alvie had never thought of Judge Fenneman as a person before—not really. He was the monster who sat on his elevated bench and ruined people’s lives.
Her world had collapsed ten years before when her son died in prison, and no one cared. Had the judge even given it a second thought? She sincerely doubted it. So much for justice.
The judge’s daughter wrapped her arm around his shoulders and squeezed gently. Alvie felt ill. Her son would not be there to offer his comforting touch when she was old and sick. The one redemption, the thing that gave her purpose for going on, was the granddaughter Nolan had left for her. Rebecca was Alvie’s own little love.
A small brunette nurse approached the admitting desk and assisted the judge into a wheelchair, fussing over him and gently patting his shoulders. She cheerfully told him they would send him home in a few days, as good as new. Alvie grabbed a magazine and bent to hide her face as the trio headed toward her. When they passed, she rose and watched them turn into B-wing. Her granddaughter had a room on the same wing.
Alvie left the hospital quietly, as usual. The mere thought of making small talk and smiling at strangers made her squeamish. At five-foot-nine, size eighteen, she was a fairly large woman who favored brown or black clothing, even in the heat of summer. Her dull, steel-colored hair, lifeless eyes the same shade, and flat features—devoid of expression—rarely warranted a second look. Alvie moved through life mostly unnoticed. It was her choice and suited her just fine.
She needed a breath of fresh air to fill her depleted lungs, but had to make do with hot and muggy instead. Her clothes, heavy with perspiration, clung to her by the time she reached her car. Days like that, when humidity hung in the air like fog, Alvie longed for the crisp, dry cold of a Minnesota winter day. She cranked the air conditioning to full blast in her ten-year-old, blue Chevy Impala and headed down the curving drive to the main road. It was after nine o’clock—later than she had planned to stay.
Dusk was settling, and as the streetlight came on, Alvie’s gaze was drawn to its reflection spanning across the water of a pond. Funny, she had never even noticed the large drainage area before. Alvie immediately knew there was a reason she had seen the pond that night. She had visited her granddaughter once or twice a day for a week and hadn’t spotted the pond, not once. Until now.
The five miles to her home south of town passed in a blur. Alvie locked herself in and let out a small yelp. She paced and paced, excitement mounting with each step. Ideas bounced to a staccato rhythm in her brain as her heart pounded out its own beat. She walked back and forth late into the night. Eventually, she won control of her thoughts and gathered them into a neat little plan that had logical meaning.
Perhaps the judge would not be going home after all.
Ever.
2
I sat back in the black office swivel chair, stretched my arms and legs as far as possible, and glanced around the Spartan room. Cartoons and jokes tacked on the bulletin board offered insights into the personalities of the people I worked with. Most of the cartoons were sick, the sicker the better. How long had some of them been up there, and how many times had I read them? One night shifter posted a joke of the day, and the day’s little ditty was, “What do you get when you cross a parrot with a centipede? A walkie-talkie, of course.” One I could tell my Gramps.
A long row of file-size dividers held every blank form a deputy needed and then some, and took up half the length of one wall. The rest of the wall was dedicated to cubbyhole mailboxes, one for every employee in the sheriff’s department. Mine was in the far left corner, second one down.
A custodian would appear sometime during the night to empty the overflowing wastebaskets by the four computer terminals, collect the abandoned foam coffee cups, and vacuum up the bits and pieces that had settled on the earth-tone commercial carpet.
I smiled at the hands of the standard clock hanging high on the no-color squad room wall. Ten thirty-five p.m. Only twenty-five minutes to go to the end of my shift. Every other deputy on the evening shift was either patrolling the county, or on an assigned call, so I had the room to myself, a nice change.
The night shifters would start rolling in any minute.
It had been a long stretch, working seven evenings in a row. Murphy’s Law usually made me put in at least two hours overtime on my last night, trying to play catch up, so I was glad I had finished all my reports and would be done on time for once. My mind left the white walls, laminate-topped tables, and dusty computers, and drifted to plans of how to spend my three days off.
“Winnebago County to Six oh eight.” The voice on my communication radio brought me back to the sheriff’s department.
“Six
oh eight, county, go ahead,” I answered.
“We have a report of an elderly man missing from Oak Lea Memorial Hospital. They are requesting assistance,” dispatcher Robin explained.
“Ten-four.” I quickly stuffed my copies of the reports in my briefcase and hustled to the sheriff’s communication control room, commonly referred to as the “cockpit.”
If I was ever assigned duty in the cockpit, I would be in big trouble. The radio panels looked like they belonged in a high tech aircraft. I was in awe that the communication officers kept all the buttons, lights, phones, and computer screens separate. The officers wore headsets, so unless they were talking, it wasn’t immediately obvious if they were on the radio or telephone. I had learned to wait until I was acknowledged before speaking. Robin’s fingers were flying at high speed across her computer keyboard, listing all pertinent data on a complaint.
Jerry, a longtime employee and seasoned for any emergency, was talking into the mouthpiece on his headset to a woman who had found her husband on the bathroom floor, unconscious and not breathing. Jerry had an ambulance en route and was calmly, slowly reading from his manual, step by step, of what she should do to initiate cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. He adjusted the earphones away from his head for necessary comfort, and I could hear the distressed woman’s voice all the way across the room, squealing into the phone. When the ambulance arrived, Jerry was able to leave the poor woman in their capable hands and exhaled a relieved, audible burst of air.
I walked around to the front of the panel and plopped my elbow on the counter. Jerry and Robin both looked up at me, mildly surprised I had entered their closed Communications domain. Sheriff’s personnel usually stay clear of the cockpit—it was often too busy a place to socialize.
“An elderly patient lost in the hospital and they called nine-one-one for that? They can’t be that short staffed?” I said, sounding crabby about the assignment.
Robin shrugged, her bony shoulders touching her jaw. “No clue, but the nurse that phoned sounded pretty frantic, Corky.” She continued typing.
I glanced at my watch. “Can you assign it to Brad? He’ll be ten-eight any time now.” Sergeant Brad Hughes was my area replacement for the night shift.
Jerry looked at his computer screen and shook his head. “We’ve got another call pending for him. In fact, two, if you count the barking dog complaint.” Every officer’s favorite call. Suddenly a trip to the hospital didn’t seem so bad—I’d take missing patient over barking dog any day.
Momentarily mesmerized by the blinking buttons on the cockpit panel, I sighed in resignation. “Any particulars on the hospital call?”
“Only that Judge Fenneman wasn’t in his room on the ten thirty round and they’ve been turning the place upside down looking for him for the last fifteen minutes. Maybe they think we’re better at finding people than they are,” Robin said with another shrug.
“Okay. Put me en route to Oak Lea Memorial.” I half-smiled a goodbye, and the two nodded at me in response.
When I reached the south corridor of the sheriff’s department office in the Winnebago County Courthouse, I saw rain was still pelting the glass doors. We had gotten over four inches the past week, way above average for the month of July.
The courthouse complex overlooked Bison Lake in the city of Oak Lea, the seat of Winnebago County in central Minnesota. My ancestors had settled there when the town was little more than a trading post cut out of the Big Woods in the mid-1800s. The last census had listed Oak Lea with a population of 10,502, but four years later, it was closer to 14,000. “Getting kinda crowded for us old timers,” my Gramps Brandt had told me, sitting in his house in the middle of his 1,600 acres, three miles west of town.
Picturesque downtown Oak Lea was tucked into rolling green hills on the banks of Bison Lake, which was used for fishing and any water recreation you could name. There were three other lakes within the city limits, and every night was a magnified light show when the muted pink tones of the street lamps and the hundred variations of white, blue, green, red, amber, and other colored lights glowed from homes and shops, throwing reflections on the lakes.
As businesses in Oak Lea expanded and moved from downtown to along the state highway, the old brick and stucco buildings of the eight main blocks in the city proper had filled with delis, antique shops, and professional services—pieces of the past re-created for use in the future.
Winnebago County, located forty miles northwest of Minneapolis, was a pleasant mix of small towns, rolling farmland, lakes, and parks. The population of 82,403 spanned every age and economic group. Although predominately divided between German and Scandinavian, most ethnic backgrounds were represented by at least one family. Catholic and Lutheran congregations were the largest, followed by Covenant, Methodist, Presbyterian, Evangelical Free, and Baptist.
In my six years of patrolling Winnebago County roads, I had become thoroughly familiar with the acres of pastures, the fields of corn, wheat, alfalfa, oats, and soybeans. There were two rivers, three hundred lakes, numerous creeks, ponds, marshes, bridges, and seven county parks. I could drive most county roads and list from memory the names on the mailboxes. If I was bored, I even worked to memorize their fire numbers.
I jogged to my squad car, jotted the time in my log book, and drove the two miles to the hospital. With any luck, by the time I got there, the nurses would be tucking the good judge back into bed. I could radio county that no report was needed and be at home in time to catch the last fifteen minutes of “Eric Clapton Unplugged” on MTV. Murphy’s Law deserved to be broken.
Oak Lea Memorial Hospital sprawled both inside and outside the city limits, so law enforcement service was shared by the Oak Lea Police Department and the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department. Calls for assistance were assigned to whichever department was available, and jurisdiction was considered equal.
As I steered my squad car along the hospital drive, I noticed a group of people huddled together at the bottom of a hill about one hundred yards from the south side of the hospital. They were standing at the edge of a drainage-collection pool. I guessed they were hospital personnel, but it was difficult to see much in the black of night through the rain.
I radioed Communications I was “ten-six,” slipped on my rain gear, and grabbed my umbrella. I was about to close the car door, but instead reached in to grab the thirty-five millimeter camera in case my instincts were correct.
Quiet pandemonium was the best way to describe the scene by the pond. People were moving, but no one uttered a word. Like a colony of ants, intent, knowing what to do without being told.
A nearby street lamp was an angel’s halo glowing inside the rain, offering little light. Scanning the group, I counted three women in medical scrubs; Dr. Nordstrom, whom I recognized from the emergency room; and another man in jeans and a rain slicker. One of the nurses and the street-clothes guy were shining flashlights onto a figure on the ground. I pulled the magnum light from my duty belt and directed it to the ground for better illumination.
An elderly man stared up at heaven, seeing nothing.
“The judge?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Judge Fenneman for several years and didn’t immediately recognize him in that condition. The group looked at me collectively. Two of the nurses were crying and the third was shaking almost uncontrollably. Everyone was a muddy mess, especially the poor judge, who had presumably been pulled, lifeless, from the mucky water.
Doc Nordstrom’s solemn, dripping-wet face nodded at me.
“Anyone know what happened?” I asked.
I opened my large umbrella and handed it to one of the nurse. The three of them gathered under it in a group hug.
“He wasn’t in his bed—he must have ripped out his IV and gotten out the back emergency exit door in B-Wing . . . I suppose he got locked out, and probably couldn’t find his way in the rain, and ended up going down the hill. . . . We found him . . . floating . . . face down in the water.” The small brunette was the one to spea
k.
I flashed the water, my light dancing between raindrops across the surface. “How deep is it?”
“Umm.” The brunette touched the top of her thigh. “Maybe two and a half, three feet.”
“Okay. Let me take some photos, and we’ll talk more inside. If you could hold the umbrella over me,” I directed the brunette nurse. “Doc, will you hold my light?”
Water had collected in the natural lowland, covering an area of perhaps ten feet by twenty feet. Normally half that size, the pond had swelled with all the recent rain. Cattails lined the opposite side. Where we stood, the grass of the hospital lawn disappeared into the water.
We moved as one while I snapped pictures of the corpse, the pond, and the mess of footprints along the edge. Any prints on the wet grass of the hospital grounds had been erased by the downpour. The judge’s bare footprints could never be separated from what had become a mass stomping ground in the mud around the pond. So much for preservation of the scene.
As I took the last photo, I caught sight of a large male bulk barreling toward us. Behind him were two paramedics carrying a stretcher. I tried to stretch my five-foot-five-inch height as The Bulk looked down at me from his at least six-foot-four-inch vantage point.
I often admired how easily, almost gracefully, the man carried his three hundred pounds, but also wondered why he didn’t take the time to comb his short gray curls or smooth his rumpled clothes. Whether in uniform or not, his disheveled appearance left the impression he didn’t care, and I knew that wasn’t true. I spotted brown polyester pants where his yellow rain slicker ended just short of his knees. Fashion and preening were not on his list of priorities—not even close.
Murder in Winnebago County Page 1