“Judge Fenneman’s IV needle was apparently pulled out. Isn’t there an alarm that goes off when that happens?” I asked, remembering my emergency medical training.
“Only if the flow of IV drip is interrupted,” Nurse Sheila explained.
“And it wasn’t?”
“No, it was left on the bed, still dripping.”
“Ms. Pedersen, how did the judge’s spirits seem to you tonight?” I inquired.
She nodded when she spoke. “Just fine, happy even. His daughter and her grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, visited for a while. He was really starting to rally and looking forward to going home so he could check on his garden and keep his usual Wednesday afternoon golf game.” Pedersen sniffled and dabbed at her nose.
I glanced at the sheriff. He was glum, his jaw tight, eyes fixed on his hands.
Bradshaw returned with coffee and Dr. Dahlgren. The doctor was around sixty, average height, on the slim side, with a prominent chin and cheekbones. He kept his neat little mustache trimmed just above his top lip. Dahlgren’s clear blue eyes looked world-weary, like he’d seen more over the years than he could just about stand.
I stood and shook his hand. “I’m Sergeant Aleckson. Thank you for coming in, Doctor.”
Bradshaw handed me a cup of coffee, and I took a sip. It was fresh and brewed to a perfect strength. He’d guessed correctly that I drank my coffee black, and I raised my eyes in approval.
“Thank you.”
Bradshaw blinked twice.
Dr. Dahlgren sank into a chair next to Nurse Pedersen. “I can’t believe this happened. Nels Fenneman was more than a patient to me, he was like a father. At least I idealized him as someone I’d like to have as a father.” He spoke, then took a moment for reflection.
“Doctor Dahlgren, I understand Judge Fenneman was admitted to Oak Lea Memorial on July sixth with pneumonia?” I asked and pushed the tape recorder closer to him.
“I don’t have his chart here, but I believe that’s the correct date.”
I referred to my notes. “And you ordered a sleeping aid for him this evening around eight thirty?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Is this the first time he was given this medication?” I asked.
Dahlgren nodded. “This time around. Nels was feeling better and had slept most of the day without his coughing disturbing him. He knew he couldn’t sleep tonight without help.”
“You said this time around. Had he had this medication before?”
“Yes. He was admitted just about a year ago for the same condition. He had chronic bronchitis and was prone to pneumonia. I ordered the same drug as a sleeping aid then, and he tolerated it just fine. Said he slept like a baby.”
“Doctor, it sounds like you knew Judge Fenneman pretty well.” I paused for a minute. “Is there any reason to think his drowning was intentional?”
“Are you saying suicide?” His eyes widened in surprise, and I nodded.
“I would say there is not even a remote possibility of that.” Dr. Dahlgren leaned forward, studying my face.
“So what do you think happened?” I asked and glanced around the table. Every eye was fixed on Dahlgren. Perhaps he would reveal a secret about his patient to help solve the bizarre mystery.
“The only thing I can think of is the condition called ‘sundowning’ which happens on occasion, particularly to elderly people,” he said.
“Sundowning?” I had never heard the term before.
“Yes. A person will wake up and realize he isn’t at home, in his own bed. It produces a panic-like response. He will feel a strong compulsion to get home, to the familiar. The patient is in a state of semi-consciousness. I believe that’s what happened to the judge.” Dahlgren folded his hands and stared at them.
“You mean he was sleepwalking?” I asked.
“No, not quite the same thing.” Dahlgren’s eyes blinked over and over in rapid succession to remove the gathering moisture. It was a long moment before he continued. “I went to his room and saw the IV needle ripped out and lying on the bed. Oh, the blood. Nels had no dementia. By my observations, he wasn’t depressed. I can only think that perhaps the sedative produced the confusion and panic.”
Dahlgren put his head between his hands. “Dear Lord, I wish I could have known. I never would have ordered that med.”
Nurse Sheila’s eyes watered again. She gently rubbed the doctor’s shoulders with her right hand and dabbed her eyes with the left.
Quiet sobbing filled the room.
3
I tracked Dr. Nordstrom down in the Emergency Room. He was on duty for the night shift and unable to be part of our conference questioning. Nordstrom didn’t have much to add to the account of the night’s events. The judge was found shortly before he went on duty, and he reported directly to the death scene at the pond.
I was curious about one thing. “Why didn’t you do CPR? I thought it was routine.”
“There was a DNR—do not resuscitate—order signed by the patient. The nurses knew his wishes and decided not to initiate resuscitation until he was seen by a physician. And when I got there, he was already showing dependent lividity.” Nordstrom threw the chart he was holding on the counter.
“Do you think he did it on purpose? Drowned himself?” I asked.
Dr. Nordstrom rubbed his smooth, tanned chin. I watched his long fingers work for a moment. “The thought crossed my mind, but it doesn’t make sense from what I know of Judge Fenneman. I think he probably woke up to go to the bathroom or something. He may not have known where he was and wanted to get home, so he left. It happens sometimes.” He crossed his long arms over his chest.
“Sundowning.”
Nordstrom nodded. “Yes.”
As I made my way back to B-Wing, I saw the judge’s daughter, Clarice Moy, talking with Mr. Bradshaw and a few medical personnel. She had been ageless to me before then. That night she looked at least her age, around fifty-five. Her dark brown hair usually provided a nicely shaped, shoulder-length frame for her long face. Instead, it was pulled into a tight ponytail, emphasizing an angular chin, high forehead, and wrinkles I had never noticed on the occasions we spoke, at church or around town. Her pale complexion was blotched with red.
Grief had added another face to its cruel album.
I stuck my notepad in my back pocket. Mrs. Moy spotted me and drew me into her arms, sobbing. My grandma had died a few months before, and I choked up with sorrow, for Mrs. Moy and for me. Another parent, another grandparent. I couldn’t stop the tears.
I felt a large, warm hand on my bicep, squeezing gently. I opened my eyes to see Bradshaw’s head bend toward Mrs. Moy’s face, one hand on her shoulder, the other on my arm. I pulled back as much as his firm grasp would allow and watched him tenderly kiss Mrs. Moy’s cheek. It was a bit awkward being included in the embrace, but it didn’t last long. We moved apart slightly and formed a small circle.
“Clarice, I don’t know what to say,” Bradshaw finally managed. Clarice Moy was on the board of directors at the hospital, and it appeared she and Bradshaw were on good terms.
Everyone in town seemed to know and respect Clarice Moy. She and her husband had owned a local real estate business together until six years before, when he ran off with one of their agents. Clarice had acquired the business and continued to manage it successfully on her own. She was bright, thorough, eternally professional at work, and spoke kindly to everyone, even strangers. Nobody could understand why her husband would leave her, but most had written it off as a mid-life crisis.
I knew both of the Moy children. Allan was my brother John Carl’s age, a year older than I. He was married and had a lucrative position in Madison, Wisconsin, where he lived. Heather was two years younger and the mother of Mrs. Moy’s grandchildren. She and her husband and children lived in Oak Lea. I wondered where Heather was, since her mother was caring for her children.
“I’m still trying to come to grips with what’s happened here. I just can’t underst
and it. It’s too much of a shock. I need to see his room.” Mrs. Moy looked from Bradshaw to me.
I led the way as we walked the short distance together. I un-taped the yellow “Do Not Cross” band, and Mrs. Moy stepped inside.
She gasped a sharp intake of breath and clutched my arm. “There’s so much blood. Why?”
“The IV needle is pretty large,” Bradshaw explained.
New tears spilled from her eyes. “Nick, why didn’t anyone hear the door alarm? It’s a brand new system.”
“I wish I knew. Maybe, because it is new, it malfunctioned somehow. We’ve called the alarm company, and they are sending a service representative first thing in the morning. I hope he can give us some answers.” Bradshaw’s face was pinched, his eyes bloodshot.
I looked at my watch: One thirty-three, Monday morning. The effects of the coffee were wearing off for all of us.
“Missus Moy, the nurses told me you visited your father last evening,” I steered her back into the corridor.
She brightened a bit. “Yes, I brought the grandchildren. They are the lights of both our lives.”
“And how did he seem to you?”
“He was feeling so much better. He teased the kids and promised them a trip to Dairy Queen when he got out of here—probably today.” Her shoulders drooped and her lips trembled again.
“I hate to ask you this, but I have to as a matter of formality. Did your father ever talk of wanting to die? I understand depression is common in the elderly,” I said as delicately as possible, which wasn’t possible.
Mrs. Moy drew in a sharp breath. “Corky, if you’re asking if I think he committed suicide, absolutely not. He believed only God should decide when a person died. No, he couldn’t have done this on purpose.” Bradshaw offered his arm and led her to a bench by a window, where they sat down.
I stepped back into the judge’s room and was hit with the same strange feeling I had experienced in there earlier. Something did not feel right. I knew little about medical conditions, and the doctors seemed to concur that the judge had suffered from sundowning. But how had he managed, unheard and unseen, to get around the bed rail, rip out his IV needle, walk directly from his room to the emergency exit unnoticed, and leave through a door that was equipped with an alarm that could wake the dead?
B-Wing consisted of eight private patient rooms forming a circle around a desk area in the center. In addition to Judge Fenneman, there were only two other patients listed on the B-Wing roster that evening: a twenty-two-year-old man recuperating from an automobile accident and a nine-year-old girl with a respiratory disorder.
I knew the man, Bart Rogers. Following his automobile accident three days prior, I was the deputy who had issued him two tickets. One for driving under the influence, and one for criminal damage to property. The preliminary blood test taken by the hospital had shown his blood alcohol level at .225, almost three times the legal limit for intoxication in Minnesota. A sample of his blood was sent to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the BCA, in St. Paul for precise laboratory testing. That would be the evidence the prosecution would use in court.
Bart Rogers would be equally unhappy to see me in the morning, so I decided to question him right now. When he was released from the hospital, he would be transported to the Winnebago County Jail per my arrest report and criminal complaint.
“Mister Rogers, are you awake?” I asked quietly, entering his room.
The light from the corridor brightened the space. Rogers watched me as I took a seat by his bed. “Actually, Officer Friendly, I am. A real loud blast woke me up a long time ago, and sure as shit, I haven’t been able to get back to sleep.”
Rogers had a new part in his brown hair where stitches had been sewn to close a four-inch-long gash. His left leg was in a cast to his upper thigh and propped on a mountain of pillows. The bump over his left eye was smaller than it had been three days before, but it had produced a swollen, black eye. Bart stretched his muscular arms over his head and tucked his hands under the pillow. “So, you doing hospital security now or what?”
“Something like that. You said you heard a blast earlier. Can you describe it?” I asked.
“You know, an alarm kind of blast. And too damn loud, especially when your head hurts to hell.”
Rogers touched near his stitches, in case I hadn’t noticed them. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes and nodded instead. We both knew it was the bad choice he’d made that had landed him there.
“How many times did this alarm go off?” I asked.
“Once, but the damn thing rang about five minutes.”
It only seemed that long.
“Did you hear anything before the alarm that seemed unusual to you?” I continued.
Rogers picked at his blanket. “Nah, I was out.”
“And after?”
“Yeah, people talking, walking around, sounds like women crying. I asked the nurse what was up, but she said she couldn’t talk about it.” He shrugged like he didn’t care.
“Thank you, Mister Rogers. I hope you can get back to sleep.” I jotted a few notes and rose to leave.
“Yeah, right. I guess I’ll be seeing you in court.”
Rogers had a record of driving offenses and knew the system. He was lucky his car had slowed to an estimated ten miles an hour after leaving the roadway when it hit the tree. Strangely enough, he had been wearing a seat belt. Rogers probably realized by then he could have easily become another statistic.
The little girl in B-121 was named Rebecca Eisner. I knew of her via the rumor mill. Her father and I had attended our first ten years of school together, until he dropped out. Nolan Eisner was the kind of kid you didn’t pay much attention to at first—he was quiet, hanging in the background. When we were in fourth grade, we heard he did some shoplifting. By the time we hit junior high, he was away from school as much as he was there. Oak Lea was a smaller town then, and it was common knowledge that Nolan spent his time away in juvenile detention centers.
In ninth grade, Jason Browne moved to town and Nolan finally had a cohort for his crimes. Jason didn’t seem like a bad kid, but he tagged along with Nolan and got into trouble right along with him. They bumped into the big league, the adult criminal justice system, when they robbed a Tom Thumb in a nearby town two years later. Nolan did the dirty deed and Jason drove the getaway car.
The case went unsolved for a month.
The older Tom Thumb store clerk couldn’t identify much about the perpetrator, except to say he was tall and skinny. He wore a blue ski mask, hiding his face, and kept a shotgun pointed at the clerk as he gathered money into a brown shopping bag. Too terrified to look out the window when Nolan left, the clerk did not get a vehicle description, much less a license plate number.
Increasingly troubled with the guilt of committing a real crime, Jason confessed everything to our high school principal. They took the information to the sheriff’s department together. For his cooperation, Jason was offered a plea bargain and spent only one year in the county jail.
At eighteen years of age, Nolan was prosecuted as an adult for the first time in his career as a criminal. He was tried, convicted on several felony counts, and sentenced to St. Cloud State Prison for five years. It was big news in our small town, and the newspaper covered the details of the trial.
About a week before our high school graduation, Nolan hanged himself in his cell.
His obituary listed his survivors as his wife, mother, and unborn child. It was the first any of us had heard Nolan was married. After the baby’s birth, the young mother left the infant girl on Nolan’s mother’s doorstep, literally. As far as I knew, no one had heard from her since, and the little girl was still with her grandmother.
I pushed the young Eisner girl’s door slightly ajar. She clutched a stuffed animal to her chest and appeared to be asleep. There was no reason to disturb her. I would check in on her later in the day when she was awake. I closed the door and leaned against the wall for a moment.
“Sergeant.”
I opened my eyes to see Bradshaw studying me.
“You look tired.”
I shrugged slightly.
“Chief Becker, Sheriff Twardy, and the evening staff all left a few minutes ago. The sheriff said he’d talk to you later this morning, but to call if you need anything before then,” Bradshaw conveyed.
“Thanks.”
“Clarice Moy wants to see her father, and I thought you might want to join us. He’s been cleaned up, somewhat.” I followed them to the exam room.
Judge Fenneman was more recognizable, but still far from clean. The pungent odor of swamp rose from his drying hospital gown. Dirt clung to his eyebrows and scalp and was embedded under his fingernails. Mrs. Moy tentatively touched her father’s face and hand, then rested her head on the blanket covering his chest and sobbed once more.
“Doc, we found his glasses.” A young intern dressed in scrubs joined us in the crowded room. “Oh, sorry,” he said, looking at Mrs. Moy.
I extended my hand and the intern handed me a pair of bifocals.
“They were at the edge of the pond, sort of stuck in the mud. I was lucky my flashlight hit the glass just right, so I spotted them,” he explained.
“Thank you.” I spoke for the group.
As I started to hand the glasses to Mrs. Moy, I noticed a hair caught in the hinge screw. I pulled the glasses close to my face and held my breath as more swamp smell hit my olfactory. The hair was about five inches long, gray, and coarse. I glanced at the intern. His hair was golden blond and two inches long, at best. The gray hair could belong to any number of people, but it definitely had not come from the judge, who had baby-fine, white, wavy wisps.
I retrieved a plastic tweezers and small baggie from my back pocket, picked the hair from the hinge, and sealed it in the bag. Everyone watched me, but no one questioned my actions. Mrs. Moy accepted the glasses and clutched them to her breast.
Murder in Winnebago County Page 3