Stiff Competition Page 2

  “Look at this,” I say, pointing to a disturbance in the dirt on my side of the body, not far from the arrow point. “Could Lars have been on the ground when he was shot? There’s a depression in the ground and it looks like there’s dirt on the arrow tip. Couldn’t that suggest that Lars was on the ground, perhaps on his side when he was shot, and then he rolled onto his back?”

  Everyone contemplates the question until Izzy responds. “Mattie’s scenario is definitely a possibility. In fact, to me it makes the most sense. Even with a regular bow, the arrow could easily go clear through the neck musculature. If he was on the ground, the impact of hitting the dirt would have stopped it.”

  Hurley says, “What if Lars fell from a standing or kneeling position after he was shot and landed on the side where the arrow point is protruding? Wouldn’t that leave the same sort of evidence?”

  Izzy looks thoughtful. “It could, yes. I won’t be able to determine that until I open him up. If he fell and landed on the side where the arrow head is protruding, I should be able to see reciprocal damage, reverse sheering to the internal musculature of the neck that shows a force counter to the direction of the arrow. If he was shot while lying in the side position and then rolled onto his back, I would anticipate finding only forward motion of the arrow shaft and one directional tissue damage. It’s possible to stab someone in the neck with an arrow and have it go all the way through, too, but I don’t see that as a possibility because of the upward angle. If someone was stabbing”—Izzy pauses and mimes the motion—“the trajectory would be downward. So I’m leaning more toward Mattie’s theory. It fits better with the angles of the arrow, the trajectory, and the final lie.”

  Hurley asks, “Why would he have been on the ground when he was shot?”

  Izzy wraps his gloved hands around the victim’s head and begins to palpate. “Ah, yes,” he says as he feels the back of the scalp. “We have a significant wound back here that indicates trauma of some sort from a blunt object. It doesn’t feel like anything that would have been fatal, but it definitely could have stunned him.” He sets the head down gently and looks around. “I’d check out some of these rocks around here.”

  Everyone looks around the small clearing. There are a handful of stones on the ground and KY, Brenda, Jonas, Hurley, and I each go after one of them. It’s KY who strikes gold.

  “Here we go,” he says, showing us a long, thick, craggy rock a little bit bigger than a hardcover book. There is a dark brown stain on one, sharp edge of it.

  “Bag it and tag it,” Hurley says as Charlie aims her camera at the rock and zooms in on the stained portion before KY places it in a paper evidence bag.

  “Can you give me a time of death?” Hurley asks.

  Izzy frowns. “I can give you a window, but there are too many variables here to be specific.”

  “Give me what you can.”

  “Mattie, can you get a temp for me?”

  “How do you want me to do it?”

  Izzy looks at the body for a few seconds, pulling at his chin. “Let’s go with a liver temp. It won’t disturb his position and it will require less clothing movement than a rectal.”

  I nod, and carefully lift the bottom of Lars’s jacket. Then I pull the tail of his shirt from the waist of his pants, exposing an insulated undershirt. I lift that, too, taking care to look for any trace evidence that might be clinging to the clothing. I don’t see anything, and once I have Lars’s belly exposed I take a scalpel from my scene kit and make a small incision under the rib cage. Then I take out my thermometer and push it through the incision and into the liver. As I’m doing this, Izzy glances at the thermometer he keeps clipped to the side of his kit, and then he starts tapping on his smart phone. “The temperature out here now is forty-two degrees,” he says, “and the low this morning was thirty-eight, which would have been just before sunrise at 6:48.” He jots this info down on a notepad.

  “The body temp is ninety-five,” I announce, removing my thermometer and putting Lars’s clothing back the way it was. I had photographed the body and the surrounding area when we first arrived, before anything was disturbed, but Izzy likes to keep things as close to the original state as possible when we’re in the field.

  Izzy starts to reach for Lars’s jaw but he pauses and stares at the man’s neck. He points to a spot just above the entry point for the arrow and says, “Look at this. What does it look like?”

  Hurley and I both lean in and look closely at the spot Izzy has indicated. There is a plaster of dried blood on Lars’s neck and the surface of it in one spot is disturbed, lacking the general smoothness of the other areas.

  “Looks like a fingerprint,” Hurley says.

  I don’t see it at first, but when I turn my head at a slight angle, the sun hits the area differently and I notice the faint ridges.

  “Sure does,” Izzy agrees.

  I use my camera to get some close-up shots of the area from several different angles and then Charlie films it with her video camera, panning in and out a few times.

  “I’ll shoot these pics over to the office and see if Arnie can get a good enough picture to run it through AFIS,” I say. Then I proceed to e-mail the pictures directly from my camera to Arnie Toffer, our lab tech, who should be working in the office.

  Izzy says, “In the meantime, let’s try to preserve this spot as best we can.” With his gloved hand he prods parts of Lars’s face, and then moves Lars’s jaw, taking care to avoid the area of the neck where we found the print. “There’s no sign of rigor yet,” he says. “Given that and the temperatures, I’d say he’s been dead for two to four hours.”

  Hurley glances at his watch. “It’s almost nine now, so that means he was shot between five this morning and seven fifty-four when we got the call.”

  “Who called it in?” I ask.

  KY answers. “An employee at the Quik-E-Mart gas station on the edge of town. According to him, a man in a pickup truck pulled in to fuel up and came inside the store for some soda. He overheard two guys talking in the next aisle over, and one of the guys was telling the other about a body he saw in Cooper’s Woods. The guy in the pickup mentioned the conversation to the cashier, and the cashier called us.”

  “Have you talked to him, or any of the others involved?” Izzy asks Hurley.

  “I haven’t, but I sent Junior Feller over to talk to the cashier and see if there is any security footage. Hopefully that will help us ID the customers involved.” Hurley looks over at me. “Mattie, you said Lars did some projects that were controversial. Can you elaborate on that?”

  “Sure. He builds stuff nobody wants, like cookie cutter housing developments, strip malls, and cheap condos. At one point he was working with a big box store that wanted to come into town, and he tried to sneak it past the city council members. They stopped him that time, but he’s had other slightly shady deals that he’s managed to pull off. He’s forced a lot of struggling farmers into selling off land for less than it’s worth, promising them he will use it for only certain types of developments. Then he changes the plan once he gets his hands on the property. Based on what I’ve heard through the gripe vine, he promises one thing verbally and then changes it in the written contract, which he then bamboozles people into signing.”

  “Has anybody sued him?” Hurley asks.

  “I’ve heard Lucien talk about a couple of cases that were filed, but I don’t know if any of them ever went to court. He said Lars always hired expensive lawyers from out of town, so most of the people he screwed over couldn’t afford to fight him.”

  Lucien is my brother-in-law and a defense lawyer, though he occasionally dabbles in some other basic legal services, like writing up wills and powers of attorney, or the occasional civil suit. He has a reputation in town, too, one that probably rivals Lars’s. The mere mention of his name makes many people shudder, and the sight of him tends to make people cringe, though this latter part is more about what Lucien looks like than it is about his reputation. He wears cheap
suits that are often adorned with remnants from his last meal, he greases his strawberry blond hair back with some oily pomade that makes him look like a fuzzy red dipstick, and he has a leering look he’s honed to perfection. Accompanying that lecherous look is a politically incorrect, unfiltered mouth that has caused more gasps than the ALS ice bucket challenge.

  Lucien fell on some hard times recently. It’s not easy to make a living from defending the kinds of crimes that typically occur in a town the size of Sorenson. The police blotter in the local paper often lists such heinous things as cow tipping, illegal tractor parking, and indecent exposure, the latter typically committed by what my sister, Desi, calls the Free Willy Club—drunks who opt to pee outside for some reason and forget to put the animal back in the barn. Ninety percent of the crimes in town involve some level of intoxication, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider that there are more bars in town than there are churches. In an effort to pad his bank account, Lucien tried to back up his regular income with some investment strategies using both his own money and some of his clients’. It went well for a short time, but then it all crashed and burned. Lucien struggled to put out the fires but the situation only worsened. He’s no longer investing anything, and he’s slowly paying back the people whose money he lost. But the debacle nearly cost him his marriage, his livelihood, and his reputation.

  Anyone who has met or gone up against Lucien wouldn’t think his reputation could sink any lower. But the attitude, appearance, and crass articulation is all a façade—an effective one. People tend to underestimate Lucien because of his appearance and behavior, and that’s a big mistake. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though I have to admit that his recent setbacks have mellowed him out some. What I won’t admit to anyone is that I kind of miss the older, less refined Lucien. He was always entertaining.

  Hurley rises to his feet and lets out a perturbed sigh. “It sounds like we’ll have no shortage of suspects for this one. I hate cases like this.” He turns to Charlie and says, “Make sure we get a close-up of that arrow in case there’s anything about it that might help us determine who or where it came from.”

  Charlie smiles at him and says, “Of course.” Then she steps in front of him and squats beside the body, giving Hurley a bird’s-eye view of her lovely backside, a view I notice both Hurley and KY take in.

  Desperate to distract Hurley’s attention, I move away from the body off to Hurley’s right and stare into the trees. “How did Lars get out here?” I ask no one in particular.

  “Good question,” Hurley says, peering through the trees toward the moraine we hiked through to get here. “Are there any other roads that provide access to these woods?”

  KY, Brenda, and I all shake our heads.

  “These woods go back a good mile or two,” Brenda says. “There’s a drumlin that runs along the back edge, and on the other side of the drumlin are more woods. There are some roads leading to that section of woods, but nothing for this area. Where we parked on the county road is the closest access, across that moraine.”

  The wooded area we are standing in is privately owned property that belongs to the Coopers, a family descended from a long line of farmers who once owned half the county. The modern-day Coopers ran into some financial troubles back in the seventies and they started selling off parcels of land to help pay the bills. But the bills kept coming and the income kept dwindling and over the years the property has been whittled away in chunks like the legs of a diabetic patient with severe vascular disease. Eventually the bulk of the land was either seized or sold off to pay taxes and debts, and today all the family has left is a rambling old farmhouse that sits on a five-acre parcel of land, and this wooded area, which covers over twelve hundred acres. The wooded parcel isn’t good for much other than hunting unless someone wanted to go through the work of clearing out all the trees. Apparently no one did because the Coopers never sold it. The patriarch of the family issues land use permits to hunters during deer season because the deer love the woods. But it isn’t easy to get to. The county road we parked on is the closest access and then one has to hike a half mile or so across a boulder-strewn field left behind by some Ice Age glacier.

  Brenda adds, “I’m guessing one of those cars out there along the road where we parked belongs to our victim.”

  Hurley nods, takes out his cell phone—diversion accomplished—and punches in a number. Then we all listen in as he talks to Heidi, the day dispatcher at the police station. He instructs her to send an officer out to check the cars parked alongside the road and compare the plates to Sanderson’s DMV info. Assuming one of the dozen or so cars that were parked there when we arrived belongs to Lars, it will be towed into the police garage as evidence. The owners of the others will need to be tracked down and questioned.

  My reprieve is short-lived because once Hurley has disconnected his call he turns his attention back to Charlie. “The ground is too frozen to leave any footprints, but there are a few patches of snow left here among the trees. Why don’t you and Jonas scout around this area and see if you can find any prints in the snow?”

  “Sure,” Charlie says with a smile. Then, much to my relief, she and Jonas—who looks like he just won the lottery—take off into the woods.

  I have to confess there’s a tiny part of me that hopes they’ll get lost . . . just for a little while.

  Chapter 2

  Charlie is a relatively new member of our investigative team, thanks to a grant our police chief got in order to tighten up our evidentiary processes and make them more transparent. So far, the most transparent part of this new system is how gaga all the men are over Charlie. She’s in her mid- to late twenties, built like a pinup model, and drop-dead gorgeous. On top of that she’s a redhead, and not the weird orange kind, but a deep, fiery red with copper and honey highlights. Red-haired women make many men crazy. I don’t know of a single guy who hasn’t drooled over Charlie other than the gay ones, and even some of them have eyed her with envy.

  While Charlie isn’t lacking for male attention, the only man she seems interested in is Hurley. She confided as much to the evening dispatcher, Stephanie, who then told me. I also know it because of the way she hangs on Hurley’s every word, bats her eyelashes at him, and uses any excuse she can find to touch him.

  Charlie is a mixed blessing for me. Clearly I’m not happy about her interest in Hurley, or her stunning good looks, particularly since she’s been working side by side with Hurley for the past two months while I’ve been in postpartum limbo. I tried not to worry about it too much at first because the original grant had Charlie on loan to us for a six-month period, so her time with Hurley was limited. But then her position was made permanent and now she’s with us all the time. On the upside, her presence and the grant that came with her made it okay for Hurley and me to have a personal relationship while continuing to work together.

  That sounds ideal, but the truth is, lately I’ve had a more personal relationship with my breast pump than I’ve had with Hurley. Our time together comes in stolen bits, minutes we manage to cobble together between the demands of our very hungry son, who I swear puts out more than he takes in, and Hurley’s daughter, Emily, a fifteen-year-old mess of crazy hormones and teenaged angst. Emily lost her mother, Kate, earlier this year, and it happened only months after she met Hurley for the first time. Up until then, Kate had told Emily her father was dead. So the poor kid is now forced to live with a man who knows nothing about her or about raising a child, and who is on the brink of starting a new family with me. As a result, she has been acting out and doing everything she can to sabotage my relationship with Hurley, a relationship that has already had more bumps than a roll of bubble wrap.

  When you add the demands of a newborn to Emily’s shenanigans, you get two frustrated, tired, confused people who are desperate to sneak in a little quality time between crises. So far, that quality time has been limited to some snuggling on my couch, a half-eaten lunch interrupted by Matthew’s wails, and
one attempt at a dinner out that was done in by one of Emily’s tantrums. Sex has been off the table while I recovered from my delivery, and I’m worried that Hurley will grow tired of waiting and start looking elsewhere, namely at Charlie. Though to be honest, the sexiest thing Hurley could do for me right now is take care of Matthew for a few hours so I can take a nap.

  I’ve always considered myself a fairly neat and organized person, but the addition of Matthew into my life has changed that. If it wasn’t for Dom coming by to help me clean up the cottage and do some laundry, Matthew and I would both be dressed in filthy rags. My dog Hoover hasn’t helped the situation. Not only does he need to be walked on a regular basis, he has developed an affinity for chewing up Matthew’s dirty diapers. The little genius figured out how to raise the lid of the garbage can I put them in by stepping on the pedal. He then snatches a diaper and ten minutes later there are shredded bits of poopy plastic and padding strewn all over the place. In an effort to not sound like a Debbie Downer all the time, I will admit that the glass is half full on occasion. Thanks to the ready availability of diapers, Hoover has quit chewing the crotches out of my underwear.

  Even something as simple as grocery shopping—the only form of shopping I’ve ever enjoyed—has now become a major ordeal. I not only have to dress myself, I have to dress Matthew and bundle him up against the cold. Then I have to get him into his car seat, an activity that makes my back scream, and when we get to the store I get to remove him and the car seat. Once inside I get to place him in a shopping cart that then has no room left for groceries, not to mention those gigantic packages of disposable diapers that I swear I’ve bought a thousand of already, so I have to grab a second cart to pull behind me. I also have to undress Matthew enough to keep him from overheating while I shop, and rebundle him before we leave. The prep time alone is longer than it used to take me to make the whole shopping trip.