Death by the Bay

by Patricia Skalka

  Finally, the wall was bare.

  The mystery intruders high-fived each other. Then they quickly gathered the documents and stuffed them into two large brown envelopes.

  When they were finished, Cubiak stepped out from behind the barricade and advanced toward them.

  “Party’s over,” he said, as he grabbed the unsuspecting intruders by an arm.

  The two were surprisingly strong and tried to yank free but he kept his grip tight.

  Startled, they both yelled at the same time. “What the fuck!” and “Shit, who are you?”

  They spoke in the voices of young men. Cubiak spun them around and looked at their stunned faces. Teenage punks.

  “I’m the sheriff and you’re trespassing.”

  The one on the right sniggered. “The fuck we are, we got permission to be here.”

  “From who?”

  “The owner.”

  The other teen kicked at his partner. “Shut up.”

  “And who would that be?” Cubiak said, ignoring the interruption.

  The boys grew sullen. One was pimply faced; the other sported a scraggly soul patch under a thin lower lip.

  “Okay, then, let’s try another question. Who sent you here?” the sheriff said.

  “We ain’t doing nothing wrong.” The one with the patch snarled the response.

  “Besides trespassing? How about breaking and entering and burglary? I gather that the material you were removing from the wall doesn’t belong to either of you,” Cubiak said and glanced toward the brown envelopes they were holding.

  They looked away.

  He nudged the boys against the wall and frisked them with one hand. They were trembling. “Sit down.”

  They slid to the floor.

  “You can make this easier on yourself and tell me the whole story now. Or you can spend a night in jail and wait until the morning to talk.”

  The teens exchanged furtive glances.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes to decide how you want to proceed.”

  He walked backward to the door. “It’s the only way out,” he reminded them and turned so that both his badge and his gun were caught in the glare of their headlamps. Wouldn’t hurt to scare them a little, he thought.

  While the two whispered back and forth, he texted Rowe: Come now. Then to Bathard: Bring jeep.

  The soul patch kid spoke first. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with who you are. You got any ID on you?”

  “Yeah, but we need to reach into our pockets, and we don’t want to get shot.”

  Cubiak almost laughed. These two had been watching too many TV cop shows. “Fine. One at a time. Then toss your credentials to me,” he said.

  They were from De Pere, both of them barely seventeen.

  “Who sent you?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Someone hired you for a job or called in a favor. You’re not out here for your health. Who was it?”

  “We’re getting paid, but we don’t know by who,” the second boy said.

  “It was on Craigslist. Somebody needed someone to come out to the farm and get this shit off the wall. We got fifty dollars on PayPal upfront and another fifty when we’re done.”

  “There was a name on the account?”

  “A company name, something LLC. It sounded legit.”

  The stupidity of it infuriated Cubiak. “You came all the way out here in the middle of the night not knowing what the hell you were getting into?”

  “I guess, something like that,” the second boy said.

  “There could have been a lunatic killer waiting for you. Didn’t that ever occur to you?”

  The boys’ bravado melted away.

  “We needed the money.” They spoke in unison, nearly choking on the words.

  “Yeah, well, next time ask yourselves what’s more valuable, your lives or a few bucks.”

  The intruders stared at the floor.

  Cubiak shook his head. “Try thinking first,” he said. When he went on, his tone softened, and he became more conciliatory.

  “So what comes next?”

  The boy with the patch took over again. “We’re supposed to put the envelopes in a black garbage bag and leave it in the trash barrel at the tourist center outside Sturgeon Bay.”

  “When?”

  “Anytime between three and four.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. That gives us plenty of time to get ready.”

  The rain had stopped, and the house was dark by the time Rowe and Bathard reached the barn. Cubiak gave them a quick rundown on what had happened and told them his plan for the rest of the night. There wasn’t time to drive Bathard home, so the sheriff called Cate and asked if the coroner could sleep over.

  “Of course. I’ll get the guest room ready,” she said before he was half-finished explaining the situation.

  “I owe you,” he said.

  “Nonsense. Joey will be thrilled.”

  It was true, the retired doctor was the closest to a grandfather that the boy had. He would be delighted to see him at the breakfast table.

  “I feel bad keeping you up so late. Are you okay?” Cubiak said to Bathard as they sped toward Jacksonport.

  By the time the sheriff had left his friend and the jeep with Cate and was back on the road in his wife’s car, the Big Dipper was high in the northern sky. He raced to catch up with Rowe and the teens. The three had headed out together from the Fadim farm, following the plan that Cubiak had hatched in the barn. They were driving toward the justice center outside Sturgeon Bay in the rusty VW the kids had driven from De Pere. The boys sat up front, and Rowe squeezed into the back, holding a black garbage bag stuffed with old newspapers from Mrs. Fadim’s back porch. The material that the intruders had removed from the wall was safely tucked into a red canvas bag on the floor behind the driver’s seat in Cate’s car. The sheriff was taking no chances on being recognized.

  At twenty minutes past three, Cubiak pulled into the parking lot behind his office. The others were waiting.

  “What were your exact instructions about tonight?” he asked the boys.

  “We already told you.”

  “I want to hear it again.”

  “Like we said, we were told to get to the farm after midnight and take the stuff off the barn wall. When we were done we were supposed to put everything into a black plastic bag and head toward town and dump it in the trash barrel at the tourist center.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it. After that, we were supposed to head back to De Pere.”

  “How were you supposed to be paid for finishing the job?”

  “The directions said that the rest of the money would be in a plastic bucket by the sign for the turnoff to the airport.”

  Trusting souls, Cubiak thought. “What if it wasn’t there? What would you do then?”

  The boys exchanged anxious glances.

  “Go ahead, show him,” the one with the patch of chin hair said.

  The second boy pulled a folded piece of white paper from the front pocket of his jeans. “I kept this. It looked important and I figured we’d hold onto it. You know, like for insurance.”

  Like so many of the pages in the collage, the sheet was covered with numbers arranged in neat columns, probably another record of test results. The faded initials L.M. were barely visible in the bottom left corner. Cubiak regarded the boys. Out of all the documents on the wall, they had had the dumb luck to hold back one of the most incriminating pieces.

  “I’ll keep this,” he said. “Otherwise you stick to the plan exactly.”

  “You’re letting us go?” the first kid asked. His eyes opened wide with surprise.

  “Not quite. Deputy Rowe will be waiting for you at the airport road.”

  “You mean that you’re arresting us? We didn’t . . .”

  Cubiak cut him off. “For now, you’re not under
arrest. Let’s just say I’m playing it safe. We don’t have a lot of time now, and I’ll probably need to talk to you again, so the closer you are the better.” He didn’t want to tell them that he was making sure they weren’t followed on their way to De Pere and that he didn’t want them to meet with an accident on the drive back home.

  The bearded boy looked at Rowe. “Why doesn’t he just come with us?”

  “Because if there’s a chase, he wouldn’t catch anything in that car of yours.”

  “Oh.” The teen sounded insulted.

  “When you get to the tourist center, I’ll be waiting at the gas station across the highway. There’s always a row of cars parked along the west edge of the lot, and I’ll blend right in.”

  Cubiak turned to Rowe. “Mike, you go on ahead now, using back roads only.”

  “Got it.”

  After the deputy left, the sheriff regarded the two adolescents again.

  “Don’t even think about skipping out after you’ve made the drop. Right now I could arrest you for trespassing. But try to get away and I’ll charge you both as accomplices in what may well be a murder case.”

  The color drained from the teens’ faces. The sheriff gave them a moment to come to terms with what he had said before he spoke again.

  “Well, what’s it going to be?”

  Without hesitating, they blurted out their answer together.

  “We follow orders.”

  “We do as you say.”

  “You got that right.”

  Cubiak checked his watch. “It’s three fifty-four. I’m leaving now. You wait another twenty minutes and then follow.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

  The sheriff held out his hand. Uncertain how to respond, the boys hesitated. Finally, they realized it was gesture of goodwill. First one and then the other shook Cubiak’s hand.

  19

  THE PICKUP

  At four o’clock on Saturday morning, Sturgeon Bay was deserted. The die-hard fishermen were already at the harbors prepping their boats, and anyone working the third shift at the hospital or shipyards was on the job. Everyone else was either home in bed or half-asleep in front of a television or computer screen. Despite the empty roads, the sheriff followed a roundabout route to the gas station. When he was half a block away, he turned off the headlights and bumped across the uneven terrain to the station’s paved surface, where he wedged Cate’s orange hybrid into the row of parked cars and cut the engine. The station was in dark shadow. Across the road, a solitary streetlight lit the entrance to the tourist center. The building was set back, with a small lot in front. There were two barrels on each side, one for trash and one for recyclables.

  Fifteen minutes after Cubiak settled into place, the roar of a car engine rattled the predawn silence. The sheriff recognized the sound. It was the boys’ old auto, in need of a new muffler. The teens pulled into the center, and with the engine running, one of them jumped out and tossed the black garbage bag into the trash barrel. He wore his hood up, and from where Cubiak sat, it was impossible to know which boy was behind the wheel and which was in charge of the bag. Don’t stop. Don’t look this way, the sheriff thought.

  As if he had heard the directive, the hooded figure dove back into the car, and the driver peeled away. Within moments, the taillights disappeared into the darkness, dragging the roar behind until the obnoxious noise faded away. Silence again. Five minutes later, Rowe send a two-word text: They’re here.

  Cate’s compact car did not accommodate Cubiak’s six-foot frame well. He had pushed the driver’s seat back as far as possible and still felt cramped. To keep limber, he rubbed his knees and tried flexing his arms toward the steering column. He wished for a cup of coffee and settled for a sip of warm, stale water from the bottle his wife kept in the console. He opened the window and then closed it against the mosquitoes that buzzed his face and neck. He trained his eyes on the tourist center and waited.

  He had been fooled earlier that night when the two boys showed up at the barn to retrieve the material on the wall. This time he was confident that Linda Kiel would come to claim her prize. Would she drive, or sneak in by foot from behind the center? For all he knew, she might ride up on a bicycle or even on horseback.

  One hour went by. No one. Nothing.

  Cubiak jolted awake. Damn. He’d dozed off. Judging by his watch, twenty minutes had passed since he had last looked across the road. Had he missed Kiel? He scrubbed his face and rocked his head from side to side. His neck was stiff. His left shoulder had knotted tight.

  He had two options: he could either maintain the vigil and hope he hadn’t slept through the pickup, or he could check the trash barrel for the bag and risk being seen and ruining the setup. Rock and hard place.

  He decided to stay put for another hour. By then it would be light and unlikely that Kiel would show. Still, he felt uneasy. Had he botched the job or was there a reason for the delay? Perhaps it was part of her plan. Or something had gone wrong on her end.

  At 5:38, a dusty red car pulled up near the tourist center. Cubiak sat up, ready to spring from his seat. The car stopped and a woman got out from the driver’s side. She wore jeans, a red sweatshirt, and a yellow cap that was pulled down to her ears. She was too short to be Kiel, but something about her was vaguely familiar. He waited for her to approach the trash barrel. Instead, she walked to the center, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  That’s it, Cubiak thought. One of the employees had come in early, probably needed to catch up on paperwork. He was about to leave when the woman stepped back onto the small porch. She carried a broom and made a few perfunctory swipes across the floor. Her attention was focused on the pickup truck that approached from the direction of town. As soon as it passed, she propped the broom against the building and stepped down into the driveway.

  Head up and eyes on the highway, she hurried toward the trash barrel. Cubiak opened the car door and slipped out. She pulled the bag from the metal can and carried it to the car. As soon as she turned her back, he bolted across the road. By the time he reached her, the trunk was open and she was about to toss the bag in.

  “I’ll take that,” the sheriff said.

  The woman uttered a cry of dismay and turned around.

  It was Francisca Delgado.

  You!” Cubiak said, unable to suppress his surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “I clean,” she said and glanced back at the building.

  “No, I mean what are you doing with this?” He pointed to the bag. “You need to tell me. Everything!” he said, nearly shouting.

  Francisca pressed her mouth shut. She was trembling.

  “I can’t help you unless you talk to me.” He tried to keep his voice calm and steady. “Do you understand?”

  She shivered. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  Another car approached from town. They were too conspicuous standing behind the car with the trunk open. “What time does everyone show up for work?”

  “I don’t know—I think ten. I am not here when they come.”

  “Can we go inside?” he asked.

  She hesitated and then closed the trunk and led him up the porch steps and into the center. Except for a corner office, the interior was one large room. A counter divided the space in half. Three desks were crowded together on one side, and on the other side two white plastic molded chairs stood along a wall, amid racks of colorful brochures and tourist literature.

  Cubiak shifted the chairs so they faced each other. He waited for Francisca to sit and then he followed suit.

  The sheriff knew he shouldn’t have been surprised to find her working at the center. Many Door County residents put in long hours and took on more than one job during the summer season. The old adage about making hay while the sun shines didn’t apply just to farmers. Francisca was young enough to handle a heavy workload for several months of the year. People like her—like his mother, who had cleaned office buildings in the Loop for decades—were invisibl
e to their employers. They sometimes saw and heard more than their bosses realized.

  “You work here part time?” he asked.

  “Sí. Yes. For two years. It is an easy job.”

  “You work other places, too, besides the Green Arbor Lodge?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a stab in the dark. “Perhaps at the Institute for Progressive Medicine?”

  Francisca shook her head. “Not there. It is too big. They have a regular crew. No part-time help.”

  “Where are these other places? Tell me.”

  She looked puzzled. Why did this matter? “I clean here and for people at their homes. Some, one day a week. Some, every two weeks. Usually on Saturdays and one place on Sunday. One very big house, I help my friend at the beginning of summer and again at the end. We ‘open’ and ‘close,’” she said, with a singsong lilt.

  “Do you clean for any of the doctors who work at the institute? At their homes, not at their offices?”

  “I clean for three of them.” She mentioned their names; the first two meant nothing to Cubiak, but the third stopped him. Harlan Sage.

  “How long have you been working for Doctor Sage?”

  “Three years, maybe a little longer.”

  “You have the code to his house.”

  She frowned. “Of course. Usually he isn’t home when I come, and I must get inside.”

  “When was the last time you were there?”

  A touch of pink tinged her cheeks. “Yesterday.” She balled her hands into fists. “I did not clean after—” She hesitated. “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is more than a person like me can do. There are people trained to do that.”

  “I know. But why were you there yesterday?”

  “The real estate agent called and asked me to come in. She said she wanted the house ‘polished’ before she put it on the market.”

  That’s awfully quick, Cubiak thought. Too quick.

  “Do you remember the name of the woman who called you?”

  Francisca shook her head. “No. I forgot to ask. I didn’t want to go in there. I was nervous.”

  “Was she at the house when you got there?”

  “No.” Francisca avoided his glance.