Dearly Departed Read online

  Gretchen sucked in her breath and started talking with the exhale, talking so low that Loushine and I had to move to the foot of the bed to hear her. From where I stood, everything she told him was the truth—except maybe why Alison had left the Twin Cities in the first place. She seemed as unsure about that as I was.

  Gretchen told us that Alison simply appeared on her doorstep late one night eight months ago with a battered suitcase and a fascinating if not altogether heroic tale. She was seeking asylum and anonymity, and Gretchen agreed to provide both. The deputy was delighted that her friend had come to her, and if Alison now insisted on being known as Michael Bettich, that was just swell as far as Gretchen was concerned—although she did confess that her police-officer mentality had compelled her to take a keen interest in the goings-on in Dakota County, Minnesota, until she was satisfied that her friend was not fleeing criminal charges.

  Michael soon settled in and began building a new life for herself. Her brilliant mind impressed King Koehn so much that he gave her a job overseeing his investments after their first meeting; the fact that she was also pretty probably didn’t hurt, either—King liked pretty. And after dating around for several months, Michael settled on Sheriff Bobby Orman, moving in with him two months ago.

  When Gretchen had finished, Loushine shook his head. “Nobody tells me anything,” he muttered.

  “It didn’t bother you that Alison had left so many people in the Twin Cities holding the dirty end of the stick?” I asked Gretchen.

  “The way Alison explained it to me, they all deserved it.”

  “Probably did,” I agreed. Gretchen responded to my remark with a weak smile—she wasn’t sure about her friend, I concluded. After all this time helping to protect Alison, she still wasn’t sure. Hell, neither was I.

  I smiled myself and removed a small notebook from my pocket and flipped it open. I read the names that I had written there the night before while sitting at Phyllis Bernelle’s kitchen table. “Who in Kreel County had motive to kill Michael?”

  “You ask that like she’s dead,” Gretchen protested. “Michael is not dead. Stop talking like she is.”

  Gretchen was right. From the beginning, I had been treating the case like a homicide investigation, when in fact there had not been a homicide—and saying so was like putting Alison’s photograph on the cover of Sports Illustrated: It was a jinx and lessened her chances for survival.

  I rephrased the question. “Who wanted to hurt her?”

  “Nobody,” Gretchen insisted.

  “Nobody?!” I shouted, then checked myself. “Nobody,” I repeated in a softer voice, waving my notebook. “I’ve been in town for only a couple of hours, and I can name at least six suspects. How ’bout you?” I asked, turning toward Loushine.

  “I only have one. Thilgen.”

  Chip Thilgen looked good, I admitted; his was the first name on my list. But it bothered me that the car used in the shooting had been stolen out of town the day before Alison was shot. If the crime had been premeditated—as the theft would seem to indicate—it seemed damned unlikely that Thilgen would have announced his hatred for Michael one hour before shooting her. And if it wasn’t premeditated, why did he steal the car?

  “Sure, there’s Thilgen,” I said. “But how ’bout Ingrid?”

  Loushine demonstrated his lack of experience when he shook his head at the suggestion, eliminating the owner of The Height out of hand.

  “She stands to lose business if The Harbor is a success,” I explained. “How many gourmet restaurants can this region support?”

  Loushine still shook his head.

  “How ’bout Charlie Otterness?” I asked.

  Gretchen cringed at the sound of his name.

  “Betrayed?” I continued. “Humiliated by the woman he loved?”

  “That was before Michael became involved with Bobby Orman,” Gretchen interjected, as if that made all the difference in the world.

  Loushine shook his head some more. “Charlie wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he said.

  Unbelievable. According to these two, nobody in Kreel County was capable of murder.

  “King Koehn,” I suggested.

  Loushine held out his hand, wobbled it. “I suppose he’s worth looking into,” he agreed, bending just so slightly to the possibility.

  Man, I thought. If they didn’t like those suggestions, they’re going to hate the final two names.

  “Sheriff Orman?”

  “Bullshit!” Loushine spit the word quickly and loudly.

  “What motive would he have?” Gretchen queried.

  “Did he know about Michael; that she was Alison?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t tell him.”

  “Maybe he found out. Maybe he didn’t like it.”

  “Bullshit,” Loushine repeated.

  “He’s sure gone out of his way to botch the investigation, hasn’t he?” I reminded them.

  The two deputies stared at me without speaking, but I could tell I’d struck a nerve. They looked at each other and then away.

  “He just doesn’t understand how things work, that’s all,” Loushine said. But his words didn’t echo with the same vehemence as before.

  “Who else?” Gretchen asked. “That’s five suspects on your silly little list. Who’s the sixth?”

  I stepped next to the bed and showed her the name I had written last.

  She read the name, blinking several times while reading it as if she feared her eyes were deceiving her. She was looking at Loushine, expecting him to say something, but he remained silent. He hadn’t seen my list and didn’t know the sixth name. Gretchen shook her head and closed her eyes more tightly than natural, then opened them quickly as if she expected me to disappear. I didn’t.

  “Fuck you,” she said at last.

  She was breathing hard through her nose; her mouth was clamped shut but only for a moment. When it opened again, she shouted, “How dare you?! Who do you think you are?”

  She threw Nevada Barr’s book at me, but fortunately it was a paperback and easy to dodge.

  “What?” a confused Loushine asked.

  “It’s me!” Gretchen shouted. “I’m the sixth name!” Then to me: “Get outta here! Get outta my sight!”

  I moved away from the hospital bed, ending up in the corner as far from her as I could get and still be in the same room. I studied her from my vantage point, my arms folded over my chest, pretending I could determine her guilt or innocence just by looking at her.

  “What the hell, Taylor?” Loushine asked.

  “Michael Bettich has no family, as you well know,” I reminded Gretchen. “So if she dies, what happens to The Harbor? Who collects the little gold mine she was building for herself? Her best friend, I bet.”

  “You think I hired someone to shoot her so I could get her resort?” Gretchen demanded.

  “People have been killed for less,” I told her.

  “I’m a deputy!” she shouted at me. When that had no effect, she added, “I was shot!”

  “How convenient,” I told her.

  “You sonuvabitch,” she hissed at me. She flung the covers off and attempted to swing her legs over the edge of the bed to come after me. But Loushine stopped her and rolled her back in bed—he seemed excited to have physical contact with his fellow deputy.

  “Get out!” Gretchen barked at me after she was safely tucked in.

  “We’ll talk again,” I told her and left the hospital room. Loushine followed me out.

  “Is this how things are done in the big city,” he asked when we were in the corridor, Gretchen’s door closed behind us. “Is this how trained homicide cops conduct investigations?”

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I led Loushine to the hospital switchboard. “No calls in or out of Gretchen Rovick’s room until we tell you,” I instructed the operator. “By order of the sheriff’s department.”

  The operator looked at Loushine, and he nodded. I took him by the arm and half pulled him
toward the hospital door.

  “Put a tap on her phone,” I told him. “Then you can release her calls. I want to know who she talks to.”

  “Why?” Loushine asked.

  “Because in the unlikely event that she actually was involved in the shooting, she might contact her two partners.”

  “Oh,” Loushine replied with an expression that was as cheerful as three days of hard rain.

  We were climbing into Loushine’s 4X4 after he made the necessary calls.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” he said as he slid behind the steering wheel. “I did what you asked because the sheriff ordered me to give full cooperation. But you’re wrong.”

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  “No, I mean it,” Loushine said. “I remember this time, it was about six months after we hired her. Gretchen and I were called to a simple burglary; I was riding with her from time to time back then, doing the supervising-officer routine. It was a trifle—fishing equipment taken from a victim’s shed—and I acted like it, veteran cop telling the rookie not to get excited. The victim didn’t see it that way and became pretty upset at my indifference.

  “After we took the complaint, we went back to the car. I was about to open the passenger door, when Gretchen suddenly drew her revolver, aimed across the roof of the squad, and yelled, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ She was aiming at someone standing right behind me. ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ she yelled again. I didn’t move an inch. Then Gretchen started counting, real slow but loud. ‘One, two, three …’ I’m standing there, praying to hear something hit the ground. Then I heard a muffled thud, and Gretchen yelled, ‘Step back!’

  “I turn around, and there’s the owner of the shed with his hands in the air. On the ground is a crossbow. The man was going to shoot me in the back with an arrow because I didn’t take the theft of his fishing equipment seriously. Later, I asked Gretchen how high she was willing to count before she pulled the trigger. She told me she knew at three the guy would drop the bow.”

  “And if he didn’t?” I asked.

  “She would have killed him at four.”

  “What has that got to do with this?” I asked him.

  “Gretchen is cool enough,” he answered. “If she wanted Michael dead, she would have done it herself. Clean. And simple. No way she would have been as sloppy as the shooters at The Harbor.”

  “Now there’s an endorsement,” I said smugly.

  “She’s one of us,” Deputy Loushine snapped back.

  “Hell, Gary,” I told him. “According to TV, according to the movies, cops go bad all the time.”

  I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t come off that way.

  twenty

  I loved reading Jack London as a kid, loved learning the language of nature, listening to “the voices of wind and storm.” Even now I’m impressed by his violence, the violence of the unconquered wilderness, of the men and animals who call it home. Kreel County is a far cry from London’s forest primordial, of course. Honeycombed with highways, roads, and logging trails, it’s nearly impossible to escape man’s presence. Hike in a straight line long enough and you’re sure to trip upon some vestige of civilization: a snowmobile track, a power line, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. There are no packs of starving wolves to contend with, no rampaging grizzlies. Only hunters who can’t shoot straight. It’s much the same in northern Minnesota where my family kept a hunting and fishing cabin—at least it was a hunting and fishing cabin before electricity, before TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens turned it into something else. Still, it’s infinitely superior to existence in the concrete jungles of big-city America, where a man can live a lifetime without ever setting a foot to untrampled earth.

  At my insistence Deputy Gary Loushine drove to Chip Thilgen’s cabin, even though he insisted Thilgen was not at home; he’d had people watching the place for nearly two days now. The cabin was located on a small lake at the base of a heavily wooded hill and virtually surrounded by poplar, fir, and birch trees. It was difficult to see from the narrow, seldom-used gravel road that cut through the forest between the cabin and the hill. We drove past it twice. An abandoned logging trail branched off from the gravel road well above the cabin and wound its way up the hill. After our third pass we took the trail as far as we could, eventually parking the 4X4 behind another Kreel County Sheriff’s Department vehicle that was hidden well out of sight. We worked the rest of the way up the steep hill on foot. At the top of the hill I paused to look at my watch. I really didn’t care what time it was. But it gave me an excuse to rest and regain my lost breath.

  “Coming?” Loushine asked. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Right behind you,” I told him, a false smile on my face, as I reminded myself that I was in shape, that I worked out, that I know karate and jujitsu and aikido. I just don’t make a habit of climbing steep hills in the forest, is all.

  We resumed pushing ourselves through the trees and underbrush until we found a small clearing with good sight lines to Thilgen’s cabin. Hunkered down at the edge of the clearing was a sheriff’s deputy—the one who had driven my car when I was escorted to the county line. He was watching the cabin with a pair of binoculars. He must have known we were coming because he didn’t even acknowledge our presence until we knelt next to him.

  “Tell me you’re here to relieve me,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Loushine said, promising that another deputy would be along shortly. “Anything?”

  “Nope.”

  Thilgen’s cabin was about three hundred yards below us. It was tiny, one of those one-story, prefabricated jobs built on cinder blocks—from that distance the entire structure looked like it could fit inside my living room. A short flight of stairs led to a narrow deck and the cabin’s only door. Like the cabin, the deck was stained red. A fire pit surrounded by a circle of large stones had been dug in back of the cabin, about fifty feet from what looked like a crumbling outhouse. Beyond the cabin I could see a small patch of lake peeking through the trees.

  We sat and watched for a long time without speaking.

  In the forest, first you hear nothing. Then you hear everything: birds chirping, crickets singing, wind whipping through tree branches and sounding just like running water. If you’re not familiar with it, the racket can be downright disconcerting. Sitting, not moving, concentrating completely on the cabin below me, my imagination began to amuse itself at the expense of my nerves. Several times I heard voices and laughter and footsteps yet saw nothing. I convinced myself that I was being watched, stalked; convinced myself that there was a psychotic killer hiding behind every bush—the same guy who escaped from the lunatic asylum in the stories we told ourselves as children … the one with the hook.

  A hand gripped my shoulder. I knocked it away impulsively and pivoted on my heels, my hand deep in my jacket pocket digging for the Walther PPK.

  Startled, Loushine pulled away from me. Then he smiled knowingly.

  “Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again,” I warned him.

  Loushine chuckled. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Let’s go down there,” I said confidently—or at least with a voice that sounded confident. Man, I was starting to behave like the Woody Allen of private investigators, much too paranoid for this line of work.

  I stood and stretched. My thought was to work our way back to the 4X4 and drive to the cabin. But Loushine was already moving down the hill. The show-off. I followed, moving gingerly, picking up the pace when Loushine did. In my haste, I tripped over a root and fell headlong into a blueberry bush. I looked up. Loushine hadn’t even slowed. He was waiting for me on the gravel road at the base of the steep hill when I broke through the last wall of brush. He shook his head at me like he pitied me.

  “Poor little lamb lost in the woods,” he muttered.

  Yeah? I’d like to see how he’d manage the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis on a Saturday night!

  We went to the cabin and climbed the redwood steps leadi
ng to the deck. I peered through the windows while Loushine leaned against the railing. The cabin appeared empty.

  “See anything?” he asked sarcastically.

  I knocked on the door; its lock and frame were cheaply made and flimsy. I doubted they could withstand a strong wind.

  “I told you, no one is home,” Loushine added.

  “Shhhh!” I hushed him. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “It sounds like a call for help.”

  “Excuse me?”

  BAM!

  I kicked the door in.

  “Jesus Christ, Taylor!” Loushine protested. “We don’t have a warrant.”

  “Oops.”

  “This is breaking and entering.”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “Since the door is already open …”

  “This is a felony!” Loushine insisted.

  The cabin consisted of three rooms, including the bathroom. The first room, a combination kitchen/dining room/living room was papered from floor to ceiling with pages that had been carefully cut from Penthouse and Playboy magazines and Victoria’s Secret catalogs (personally I preferred the lingerie models over the nudes, but that’s just me). The room also contained several bookcases filled with paperbacks with titles like Country Club Wife, Fraternity Initiation, The Girl Next Door, The Naughty Lady, and Curious Cathy. Another bookcase next to the TV and VCR contained adult videos with similar titles. I recognized one: Debbie Does Dallas, an oldie but a goodie. Nowhere did I see a publication dealing with the environment.

  “Wow!” Loushine said from where he stood just inside the doorway.

  “Man doesn’t get out much, does he?” I said.

  “Guess not.”

  “Take this room,” I told him.

  “And do what?”

  “Look.”

  “For what?”

  “Incriminating evidence.”

  “What exactly does incriminating evidence look like?”

  “It’s like pornography,” I told him. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “Yeah, but even if we find some, then what? Without a warrant, a judge would never allow us to admit it into evidence.”