Dead Boogie (3 page)

But while Pecore’s position was secure due to the fact his brother-in-law was the mayor, Lew had been able to cite enough violations of the chain of custody on evidence that she was able to gain control over a significant portion of his budget.

That made it possible for her to limit his involvement in criminal investigations and allot the monies to bring in the Wausau Crime Lab or professionals like Osborne. With her appointment to Chief of the Loon Lake Police Department, the dogs were banned, the evidence storage improved, and Pecore put on notice that he was likely to be terminated with the next mayoral election: no kin, no job.

“If I hoist this about four feet,” said Robbie, pointing to the back end of the car, “you should be able to remove the victims. Won’t take long after that.”

“Oh boy,” said Osborne, checking his watch for the tenth time, “I hate this waiting. Hold on a minute.” He walked over to where Brian and Bob were standing. “Bob, you wouldn’t happen to have a camera in your car, would you?”

“Sorry, Doc.”

“Mind if I use that radio of yours again?” The forester gave him a nod.

“Marlene,” said Osborne, “it’s me again. Robbie’s here with the tow truck and still no sign of Pecore or an ambulance. We really need to get a move on getting these victims out of the wreck. Could you check with Chief Ferris and see what she thinks about getting Ray out here with his camera? This time of day he’s usually home.

“Oh—and let her know one of the deceased, the driver, is Peg Garmin. Robbie’s pretty sure of the other two victims, too,” said Osborne. “Donna Federer and Pat Kuzynski, but that’s not official yet. Thank you, Marlene.”

“Dr. Osborne,” said Brian, as Osborne got out of Bob’s vehicle, “how long do you need me to stay?”

“Poor guy’s trying to leave on his vacation,” said Bob.

His back to the wreck, Osborne looked over at the two men. “This is going to take a while. I see no need for either of you to hang around. Brian, since you were the first on the scene of the accident, can you give me a phone number in case Chief Ferris has any questions?”

As he spoke, he heard a grinding from the tow truck and turned to see the convertible shifting upward. “No!” shouted Osborne. “Not yet!”

“Just testing,” hollered Robbie from his cab. It was obvious he couldn’t hear Osborne over the sound of the winch. Osborne watched helpless as the car was lifted far enough off the ground that the two women in the front seat, strapped in with seat belts, now looked like riders on a macabre roller coaster. The body of the third woman rolled onto the ground. She lay on her back, face up.

“Oh, jeez,” said Bob. Brian turned away. Osborne hurried over to kneel near the body. He tipped the head to one side.

“Oh my God,” he said, his voice soft. He didn’t need dental forensics to tell him he was looking at the effects of a bullet fired at close range, a bullet that entered the left temple.

“Sorry, Doc, I wasn’t thinking,” said Robbie, rushing up from behind. Osborne motioned for him to stay back. He checked the two bodies in the front seat.

Three women, three bullets, three victims all right. No accident.

five

You can’t say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it’s just what the deadbeat ordered.

—Thomas McGuane,
Silent Seasons

“He-e-y
, you Jack Pine savage,” said Robbie, his voice booming as he sauntered over to where Ray had just jammed his pickup into reverse. Following a wave of Robbie’s hand, Ray backed up to park twenty feet from the front of the tow truck.

He had arrived just as Brian and Bob were leaving, making it necessary for Robbie to direct him to the opposite side of the road. The cloud of dust thrown up by the departing Forest Service trucks coupled with his own tires’ skidding in reverse made it difficult to see beyond the tow truck. With the help of the tag alder along the side of the road, the overturned vehicle was completely obscured.

As the pickup came to a stop, Robbie walked over. He leaned into the open window. “What the hell was that I heard on the police scanner this morning?” he said, thrusting his face at Ray. “You assaulted some poor woman with a dead fish?”

“I … did not …
assault
… anyone,” said Ray, offended. “It was a ri-
dic
-u-lous sit-u-a-tion… . B-i-i-g … mis … understanding.” His habit of mixing pauses with elongated syllables had been known to drive more than one listener away. But Robbie was wise to his tricks. He wasn’t going anywhere until he got the whole story.

“All right, all right,” said Ray, raising a hand in defeat. “All that happened was I was down at the post office minding my own business and some goofy state cop tried to put me in the hoosegow for smelling walleyes with one of the nuns I know. And that’s the whole story.”

As the clouds of dust settled, he caught sight of Osborne coming around from the front of the tow truck. He craned his neck past Robbie to shout: “Hey, Doc! I phoned Channel Twelve and told ‘em to send a news crew out here.”

“Jeez, Ray. Why the hell did you do
that?”
said Osborne, not a little annoyed. The last thing Lew Ferris needed right now was a TV crew tramping over evidence. He kicked at a chunk of gravel on the road, then planted his feet, crossed his arms, and glared at Ray still sitting in the cab of the battered red pickup.

“For what it’s worth, I suggest you get the photos taken care of
now.
The sun is good and high and we’ve got a shot at some definition if we find any tracks near the crash site—before your TV people mess it up.”

He knew he was wasting energy. Three years of living next door to the guy coupled with three years of fishing in the same boat had taught Paul Osborne the reality of life with Ray. He could be guaranteed to move with speed on only two occasions: one was to set a hook, the other to save a life.

Otherwise, as every member of the morning McDonald’s coffee crowd would swear, based on personal experience, you were held hostage to “Ray time”: The more he was needed, the slower he was likely to move.

Proving the point, Ray unfolded his six feet five inches from the cramped interior of the pickup section by section. Watching him reminded Osborne of the aluminum wading staff Lew had given him for his birthday: its nine-inch links, separated and folded in on themselves, needed only a shake to lengthen and lock in.

Ray paused to adjust his belt and pluck at the folds of his shirt. That’s when it dawned on Osborne. No wonder it had taken the guy forty-five minutes to get there: That razzbonya was dressed for a photo op!

In a challenge to the heat and humidity of the afternoon, he was decked out in pressed khakis, an equally well-ironed khaki fishing shirt (sleeves rolled with care to just above the elbows), and a deerskin vest, fringed below the shoulders. A sterling silver walleye, pinned above the fringe on the left shoulder, glinted in the sunlight.

Ray’s auburn curls glistened, fresh from a shampoo and tousled with care to hang rakishly over his forehead. Even his beard, the auburn flecked with gray, had been tamed. Add to that a deep summer tan and dark eyes that sparkled with anticipation, and you had a fishing guide the ladies would love. Osborne groaned: Only Ray could turn a homicide into an audition.

“Hey, you haven’t answered me yet—what do you mean,
smelling walleyes?”
said Robbie, his voice insistent as he stepped back to let Ray pass. Ray frowned. Osborne was curious himself by now. Robbie was on to something—maybe Ray
had
spent the morning in jail.

“Marlene said you got a triple murder out here—that’s
big,”
said Ray, determined to change the subject. “Could make
network
news—network
evening
news—you never know.”

Osborne shook his head. The guy was a hound for attention when it came to the media.

Ray was convinced that talent scouts would someday realize he was a natural to replace David Letterman: “Think about it, Doc,” he would say, twisting a lock of his beard as he ruminated over a grilled cheese sandwich in Osborne’s kitchen. “What does ol’ Dave have that I don’t? I’m good-looking, I’m different, and
I’m
funny.”

Not that he wasn’t willing to compromise: host of the Outdoors Channel would work. In the meantime, aware that a number of television professionals out of Chicago vacationed in the northwoods, Ray never missed an opportunity to—as he put it—“catch air time.”

Yep, Ray never lost hope that some lucky day a producer would drive up to that lurid muskie-green house trailer of his, barge through the doorway outlined with the raked teeth of the ferocious “shark of the north,” and slam a multiyear contract down on his kitchen table.

Until that happened, he trained for fame by inflicting his humor on clients. Some got a kick out of the bad jokes, caught big fish, tipped well, and came back for more. Others winced, caught big fish, tipped modestly, and were never seen again. But Ray had faith in his credentials, and Osborne, along with his McDonald’s buddies, agreed: Ray was indeed
different.

Given that the economics of life as a fishing guide were as chancy as the weather in the northwoods, he shored up his fluctuating income by digging graves in the summer, plowing snow in the winter, and selling a few photos—more and more each season. The latter not by accident as the photography mirrored Ray’s passions.

He might be a man of modest means but he lived a life rich with the outdoors: days packed with opportunities to capture eagles, foxes, loons, otters—even wolves—in the lens of the camera he carried in his tackle box. Each autumn a few of those photos would find their way to a local printer, who paid him ten bucks each for use on the calendars given away by local insurance agencies.

His sister, a wealthy trial lawyer in Chicago, had tried to convince him that he had such a good eye, he might make it as a professional photographer. But that sounded too much like a day job to Ray. Only when Chief Lewellyn Ferris needed him would Ray—as he put it—“go pro.” The work for the Loon Lake Police Department was short term, paid well, and rarely interfered with his fishing.

And if he was happy, Lew was more so. Deputizing Ray to photograph a crime scene allowed her to circumvent Pecore’s sloppiness—with minimal damage to the department budget. Better yet, it allowed her to tap into Ray’s talent for tracking.

His instinct for light and dark and all the shades between made him an expert tracker. That, plus the hours he’d spent on water and in the woods since he was a kid. Unlike the boys from the Wausau Crime Lab, who worked best indoors (when she was able to twist their arms to drive sixty-seven miles north), Ray excelled in the forests, along the shorelines, down country roads and logging lanes. That’s where he could see what was missing, what was disturbed, what lay beyond the obvious.

But it was never easy to persuade him to take the job. He was too accustomed to being on the receiving end of law enforcement. “Hey,” he would argue, “if I keep this up, my buddies’ll think I’m undercover—no one’ll fish with me.”

“I need you, Ray,” Lew would counter, “you think like a criminal. Who else can fish private water and never get caught?”

“Okay, okay, here’s what happened and it’s
not
what you heard on the police scanner,” said Ray, convinced at last that Robbie had no intention of letting him off the hook.

“I was minding my own business and driving by the post office when I saw Sister Rita. As Doc here knows, every Friday I drop a string of bluegills and a couple walleyes off at the convent. The nuns love ‘em. And every Friday I try to explain how good those fish smell right after they’re caught. Which is true—right?”

“Right,” said Robbie. Osborne nodded. That is true of fresh-caught walleye.

“So happens this morning I had a couple walleyes that I’d just caught when I see Sister Rita in the parking lot of the post office. Right away I pull over, drop the gate on my truck, and just as I’m holding up a twenty-inch beauty for Sister Rita to smell, the damn state cop drives up—”

“I don’t suppose you were wearing that stuffed trout on your head, were ya?” said Robbie, interrupting.

“Yes, I was—but what would that have to do with anything?” said Ray, sounding hurt.

“Well—the cop mighta thought you were full of baloney.”

“You’d think he’d believe a nun! Sister Rita tried to tell him all we were doing was smelling fish.”

“Ray—don’t ever change, man,” said Robbie, wide shoulders heaving as he chuckled. “I gotta tell ‘ya, listening to the scanner this morning made my day. Sure did. Oh, jeez.” He wiped a tear from his eye.

“More fun for you than for me,” said Ray.

“Ray—got the camera?” said Osborne. Enough time had been wasted.

“Yep, right here.” He reached through the open window for his camera and the hat in question. “I was embarrassed, Sister Rita was embarrassed. The guy just didn’t get it.
And
he made an unkind remark about my hat.”

Holding it with both hands as if afraid it might break, Ray set the stuffed trout on his head, then bent to check the angle in the truck’s side mirror. He tipped the fish slightly to the right then stooped to lean in for a closer look.

“Drats …” He lifted it off, huffed on the silver lure that was draped across the trout’s neck, and with a gentle touch, rubbed the lure on his sleeve until it shone. Again he set the hat on his head, giving it a tip to the right. He winked at Robbie: “Just in case
that
story hits the networks.”

“Ray, I really wish you hadn’t notified the TV station,” said Osborne, beckoning for Ray to follow him down the road past the tow truck. “Lew put a call in to the Wausau boys but I have no idea when they’ll get here. We can’t have anyone getting close to the victims and the wreck until they’re finished.”

“I hear ya, Doc, and I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.” Ray slung the camera strap around his neck.

“You and I have to be careful, too. You’ll see an entry path that I set up so we disturb as little of the site as possible.”