The Equalizer (2 page)

Chapter 2

A
utumn is my favorite season
and today, the first Friday in October, the drive south on County 51 was a sight to behold. The sun shone on the fall foliage, making the ambers, oranges, and reds even more brilliant.

After six miles I turned left on South Lake Road, and three-fourths of a mile later, I parked on the side of the road behind three department SUVs and the sheriff’s new cruiser. I gathered up my evidence kit and made my way to the two deputies guarding the park entrance. We made small talk as I signed the login sheet, then stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and headed in to the scene.

Most of the southern half of the square mile was part of Lake Emmaline County Park. The Ronson family donated the land years ago. A public access to Lake Emmaline was built and hiking trails were established through the forested area to the west. As a patrol officer, I always felt this park was a real pain in the ass. Kids thought it was a great place to party, and we had umpteen noise disturbance calls every year from the four families who lived in the small neighborhood directly east.

Leaves were already gracefully drifting to the ground as if performing a waltz. I could picture the scene as a painting or photo on a calendar for October—minus the dead body, of course. A few yards in, several crows startled me as they screeched and flapped skyward.
Whoa, settle down, Cal.

I walked the quarter mile on the narrow paved road leading into a large parking lot where two squads, a county parks’ department pickup truck, and the Birch County Crime Scene Lab van were parked. Also, parked along the east edge of the parking lot next to the large white storage building was a late model dark-blue SuperCrew Ford F150 with a Shorland’r trailer.

Five people hovered near Sheriff Jack Whitman: Sergeant Ralph Martinson; Betty Abbott, one of our lab specialists; Deputies John Odell, Greg Woods, and Shannon Benson. Shannon flashed a smile as I approached. I winked back.

I moved in next to Ralph. He wore his department brown stocking cap over his salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and this morning a green parka, gray sweatshirt and jeans had replaced the ill-fitting warehouse suits he usually wore. He was one of my favorite people. He smiled and laughed easy, was a team player, and had a calm, disarming demeanor.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, but the Civic’s totaled.”

He shrugged. “Just be thankful
you
’re not totaled.”

“Well, true. So who’s our vic?”

“Turns out we have
two
. Both died from multiple gunshot wounds.”

“Whoa,
two? That changes things. Who are they?”

“Ted Kohler and Ronny Peterson.”

I made a face. Our vics were polar opposites. Kohler ran a successful accounting business. Peterson worked for the Birch County Parks Department. He was young, single, with a big mouth that got him into his share of bar fights.

“Why were they out here so early in the morning?” I said.

“For different reasons. Ronny Peterson’s boss, Naomi Moberg, said he was here to pull in the dock. He was found farther in the woods. Ted was found in his boat. I would guess he was trying to get in his last fishing trip.”

“Yeah, well, he succeeded.”

I followed Ralph the short distance to the black sixteen-foot Lund fishing boat bobbing up against the dock. Kohler’s body, clad in tan coveralls, was sprawled face up on the rear bench seat of the boat. He was shot twice: once through an eye and also in the chest. His remaining eye was blue and still clear—he hadn’t been here long.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Not well, but he seemed like a friendly guy. Hope we can find a bullet because if not, it could be way the heck out in the lake,” Ralph said.

“And probably unrecoverable,” I said, glancing out over the lake. This morning the view was remarkable: fingers of mist drifted up from the dark-blue lake waters, framed by the vibrant autumn colors. “Ironic to see the beauty of Mother Nature side by side with ugliness of violence.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s real pretty out this morning,” Ralph said.

“So, where’s Peterson?”

“Follow me,” he said.

Ronny Peterson lay face down about a hundred yards west into the wooded area, a good fifty yards from the trail. He was a brick: short and broad. He wore a green county jacket and blue jeans—his white cap with the county logo lay a foot forward from his head. Two small bloodstains were located within two inches of each other in the center of his back.

“Shot twice,” I said.

“Hopefully, we can find these bullets,” Ralph said.

I noticed Ronny’s wallet bulge in his back pocket. I leaned down and pulled it out and looked through it.

“ID says he’s twenty-two. Has thirty-two dollars and two credit cards on him—not a robbery.”

“Might as well bag the wallet now,” he said.

Ralph rolled Peterson slightly. “Hey, one bullet didn’t exit.”

“That’s very good.”

He searched his front left pocket, then the right, but came up with nothing. “No phone. The truck keys are in the ignition.” He looked back at the landing, then back at me. “Why would anyone do this?”

“Maybe these two saw something they shouldn’t, or maybe one was a primary target and the other just unlucky—wrong place at the wrong time.”

The sheriff approached. Not a particularly handsome man with his beak of a nose and ruddy complexion, an extra forty in his belly, but Jack was a commanding figure who tended to dichotomize the staff. People either loved or hated him.

“Jack, any idea when BRO will be here?” Ralph asked, referring to the Bemidji Regional Office of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).

Jack looked at his watch. “Should be any minute.”

“Naomi said she’d notify Ronny’s folks. Want me to send someone to Kohlers’ to notify Eleanor?” Ralph asked.

“No! I’ll tell her myself,” Jack snapped.

“It’s probably best to have someone tell her before she finds out . . .”

Jack enunciated each word as he said, “She isn’t going to find out
until
I tell her. Period.”

Ralph and I exchanged glances.
Okay then.
Two BCA Vans rolled in breaking the uncomfortable moment, and we all made our way back to the parking lot. Ralph introduced Leslie Rouch, an investigator with the BCA, and she in turn introduced three technicians who all looked fortyish: Helen, Christopher, and John. Leslie, also in the same age range, was a blue-eyed blond, five-foot-seven, average weight. She wore a heavy, navy-blue Columbia jacket and stocking cap. Smart. Over night the temps had dropped into the upper thirties and my ears were getting cold. I pulled out my orange hunting stocking cap I’d stuffed in my pocket this morning—the only one I could find in a hurry.

The sheriff gathered the group together back at the landing. “Okay, just to recap for the new arrivals. At 7:56 a.m. the 911 came in. Bob Brutlag, who lives out here on the peninsula, found Ted Kohler in his Lund. Ted’s a CPA in town—father-in-law is Hamilton Fairchild, a county commissioner and president of Prairie Falls First National Bank. We thought we just had the one victim until the deputies found Ronald Peterson, a park maintenance employee, when sealing off the crime scene.”

Ralph jumped in. “According to Naomi Moberg, the Parks Department director, Ronny was scheduled to roll the dock in. Stan Haney, manager of the maintenance garage, said Ronny checked out the county truck unusually early, 7:15. If he drove right to Emmaline, he could’ve been here as early as 7:25 a.m.”

“I didn’t think maintenance started that early,” I said. “And pulling a dock in can’t be a one man job.”

Ralph nodded. “You’re right on both. Naomi didn’t know why he checked in so early. In fact, she thought he was going to be late. Naomi said Gus Taylor was going to meet him out here, but got turned away by a deputy.”

“What time was that?” I asked.

Ralph looked at his notes. “Eight-twenty.”

“What time did the first responder arrive on scene?” Leslie asked.

Shannon’s strawberry blonde ponytail hanging out of the back end of her cap bounced as she stepped forward. “At 8:04, ma’am. The caller reported a body with a gunshot wound in a boat at the park. When I arrived on scene, there were two vehicles in the parking lot, the Ford pickup with a boat trailer and the county truck #13. I waited for backup before I rushed out into the open. Deputy Woods arrived followed by Deputy Odell and the EMTs. We secured the area before we allowed the paramedics to check out the victim in the boat. At the same time we looked for the driver of the county vehicle and that’s when we found Peterson.”

“So if Gus Taylor and Ronny Peterson were supposed to work together, why didn’t they ride out together?” I asked.

“I wondered the same thing—save the taxpayers gas money,” Ralph said.

“Park workers don’t give a crap about saving the county money,” Jack said.

“Kohler must have been here first. Ronny would have told Ted he couldn’t put his boat in because they were pulling out the dock,” I said.

Ralph nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Did the 911 caller enter the boat?” Leslie asked.

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to speak with him. Leslie, we’ve got acres of county land to the west and residential property on the east. Do you need my deputies to help search?”

“Normally, we like as few people as possible tramping through the crime scene, but considering the scope of the area, we can use them. We’ll assign teams of two to specific areas. But first, John’ll videotape the area and draw up a sketch.”

The waiting around was getting to me, but there was nothing I could do to make this thing move any faster. As crows and jays argued off in the distance and squirrels dashed about in the leaves, it struck me the wildlife was totally unaffected by death’s hand. I stepped back and took in the area surrounding the scene, trying to picture what went down.

Shannon Benson approached me. “Penny for your thoughts.”

“I was just trying to imagine what occurred. It’s possible one or both were part of some illegal activity or they interrupted something. Could be more than one shooter. If Ronny was shot first, Kohler wouldn’t have seen the body. He pulls up and puts his boat in. Shooter’s still here and Kohler sees him. Boom. Shooter takes out his witness. Or two, the shooter kills Kohler first, Ronny drives up and finds Kohler dead, sees the shooter and when he realizes the situation he’s in, he panics and takes off running, and is shot in the back.”

She bobbed her head from side to side, “So, which makes more sense?”

“Sometimes sense has nothing to do with it. I want to ask Jack something.”

He was with Deputies Odell and Woods by the BCA van.

“Have the neighbors been interviewed?” I asked as I approached him.

Jack looked up, said “Not yet.”

“Want me to—”

He looked annoyed. “No, I don’t. Just hold your damn rookie horses.”

I know he snapped at Ralph earlier, but it embarrassed me to have him speak to me with a tone he’d use on a kid, especially in front of my colleagues. Asshole. Odell, who had no love for Jack, looked my way and rolled his eyes. I walked back over to Shannon.

“What’s his problem?” she whispered.

I shrugged. “This case is a huge deal for Jack. But the inefficiency really gets to me. I’d have deputies out interviewing the neighbors.”

“They’re probably all at work anyway. Doesn’t Jack’s son, Ben, live out here?”

“Yep, second lot over from the park.”

I returned to the dock where Leslie stood with our lead county lab technician, Betty Abbott—fifty something, heavy in the hips and thighs. This morning she wore a white wool beret over her stick straight, brown hair, and an olive-green parka over her white lab coveralls. She was photographing the blood spray on the motor, boat
,
and Igloo cooler. I overheard her talking to Benson once about why she didn’t wear makeup. She’d said, “No make-up of any kind has ever touched my epidermis. I don’t want to clog my pores with chemicals.” Makes a whole lot of sense to me.

“Too bad they got Kohler in the face. He was a looker,” Betty said.

Leslie ’s head bobbed in agreement. “I’ll say.”

I looked at the two women and shook my head. “No one looks too good dead, especially with an eye shot out.”

Leslie’s mouth turned up in a smile. “Did you know the victims?”

Betty spoke up. “Everybody liked Ted. He must have at least five kids.”

“What about Ronald Peterson?” Leslie asked.

I took this one. “Single guy. Twenty-two, but he still lived with his parents. Hung out in Buzzo’s Bar. I first encountered him when I worked patrol. He liked a fight.”

“He had enemies then,” Leslie said.

I shrugged. “You could say that. One of the bullets didn’t exit his body, but Ralph worries Kohler’s went through,” I said. I went to check the back of the boat for dings or bullet holes.

“We’ll get a better look when the body is removed,” Leslie said.

A metal bait bucket sloshed its contents as the boat rocked with the waves lapping the rocky shoreline. The sandy bottom started about five feet out. I noticed an indentation in a post at the end of the dock. I walked over and said, “Lookie here. I think we have a bullet.”

Leslie came over to examine it. “Well, my, my. It’s unlikely to be it our fatal bullet, though.”

After she flagged it with an evidence number and snapped several photos, she tried to wedge the bullet out of the wood.

“It’s not budging and I don’t want to take a chance and drop it in the lake. We’ll have to saw off the top of the post,” Leslie said, and directed me to get the saw out of the van. I also brought a large evidence bag to place it in.

As I was entering the post on the log, Doc Swank, the county medical examiner, pulled up in his vehicle. After he shook hands with the sheriff he proceeded to the boat. Doc was known for his professional, efficient, and respectful approach to the living and the dead. He has a full head of white hair, and I’d guess him to be nearing sixty. After Doc and the crime lab team finished with the bodies they’d be transported to Bemidji to BRO for autopsy.