Deputy Loushine abruptly slid into the booth across from me; somehow he had entered the café without my seeing him. Before I could even say “Good morning,” Annie was by his side.
“Coffee, Gary?”
“Thanks, Annie,” Loushine said. Apparently he and the woman were old friends.
But as Annie was pouring a steaming mug, the radio Loushine wore on his belt suddenly crackled and squawked. He responded with his personal code, and a woman’s voice told him to proceed to an old logging road off County Road T, three-quarters of a mile south of Road 34.
“What do we have?” Loushine asked the voice.
“It’s Chip Thilgen. We found him.”
Sheriff Bobby Orman was not happy. Not one damn bit. His face was bloodless, his mouth stretched downward into a long, hard frown, and his eyes fairly glistened with fury as he carefully picked his way along the logging trail toward the white Buick. Orman arrived a full forty minutes after Loushine and I did, although he had been summoned at the same time. What took him so long I couldn’t say—he certainly hadn’t stopped to shave. On the other hand, he had returned from Duluth at three that morning, which meant that he was operating on less than four hours’ sleep.
Orman joined the knot of deputies waiting for him at the open driver’s door. The deputies muttered an unenthusiastic “Good morning” but didn’t look at him—or at each other, for that matter. Instead they gazed at the thick growth that surrounded them, their boots, the sky—anywhere but inside the car, where the body of Chip Thilgen was folded neatly across the steering wheel. Orman probably didn’t want to look either, but he did as the deputies drifted away from the Buick and down the logging trail to their own vehicles to silently await orders.
In contrast, Loushine was excited and spoke rapidly. Only TV cops get a steady dose of dead bodies and high-speed heroics, and he was not a TV cop. How many shootings, how many murders, will a cop in a rural community like Kreel County catch in a career? Counting Alison’s shooting, this was Loushine’s fourth. I figured he had already exceeded his quota, and the stress was telling.
Still, he was well trained; someone had beaten discipline into him early on. Disregard the speed in which he gave it, and Loushine’s report was concise and thorough. He faltered only once. That was while informing the sheriff that Thilgen had been shot in the head at close range, as was evident by the contact burns on his temple. I was relieved when I’d noted the burned flesh earlier. It meant I hadn’t killed him when I shot out the back window of the car. It meant I didn’t have to burden my conscience with still another dead man.
“Suicide?” Orman asked hopefully. If this was Loushine’s fourth homicide, it was Orman’s first.
“We found a .38 on the seat next to him,” Loushine answered.
“Then it could have been.”
Loushine clearly didn’t think so, only he didn’t say it. Instead he told the sheriff, “The .38 still had a full load; it hadn’t been fired. But we have a bunch of these.” He held up a plastic bag filled with copper shells. “.41 AEs.”
The sheriff took the bag of shell casings and stepped away to collect himself. Loushine watched him intently. After a moment the sheriff said in a quiet voice, “He looks like he’s been dead for a long time.”
“Three days,” I told him. “I’m betting he was popped right after the shooting.”
Orman didn’t respond to me. Instead he told Loushine, “Dust the car inside and out; process the latents fast. Send copies to the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation. Also, see if you can get a quick grouping on the blood.…” We all glanced impulsively at the dark stains on the seat and floor around Thilgen’s body. “Some of it might not be his. And I want casts made of the three boot impressions outside the passenger door.”
Good eye, I thought.
“Of course,” Loushine replied, obviously miffed. I guess he didn’t like Orman telling him how to do his job.
“Something else, if I may,” I said.
Orman nodded at me.
Looking directly at Loushine, I told him, “A murder victim has no assumption of privacy; you don’t need a warrant to search his house.” Loushine’s eyes grew brighter at my words, and a smile of unexpected happiness crept over his face. You’d have thought I was sending him on a blind date with Cindy Crawford.
“I recommend that you conduct a search immediately,” I added with a wink. “Pay particular attention to Thilgen’s financial records.”
“Good idea,” Orman said. “I want to know the name of everybody associated with Thilgen—his friends, his environmentalist buddies, whoever. I want a list of everyone he spoke to in the forty-eight hours preceding his death. I want his phone records. I want a time-coded list of associate events.…” He spoke like he was reading from a manual.
“I’m on it,” Loushine told him.
“Where the hell’s the medical examiner?” the sheriff asked impatiently.
“He’s coming,” Loushine assured him and then turned back to Thilgen. “It would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” he asked no one in particular.
“What would?” I replied.
“If Bettich was shot by Thilgen because he didn’t want her spoiling the environment, harming the animals. It would make everything so … tidy.”
With Deputy Loushine occupied, I was stuck in the Wisconsin wilderness without a ride. Orman offered me one. We drove a long time toward Saginau. Not a word passed between us. The sheriff was whistling soft and low a tune that started out sounding like something from Fiddler on the Roof but ended up a meandering patchwork of disjointed notes.
I turned my attention to the trees that blurred past the window. I was not having a good time. I needed to hear a joke. I needed a stand-up comic to make me laugh at myself, take my mind off my troubles. I thought of Officer George Meade of the St. Paul Police Department, the man who had broken me in. Now, there was an entertaining guy. How long was it since we’d last worked together? Twelve years? Thirteen?
This one time we responded to a domestic, standing outside the door of a third-floor apartment listening to a husband and wife go at it over money. “You spend too much!” he’s saying. “You’re cheap!” she’s saying. Meade knocked on the door, announced that the police had arrived, and then opened the door. The man and woman were standing in the middle of the room, a kitchen table between them. In the center of the table was a kilo of cocaine and several automatic weapons. The four of us looked at the cocaine and guns. The four of us looked at each other. Then we all looked at the cocaine, again. Suddenly, we all reached for our guns and dove for cover. It was like an umpire had yelled, “Play ball!”
They started shooting first—I remember that distinctly. We returned fire. Over one hundred rounds were exchanged. The sulfur became so thick that my eyes teared up, yet miraculously no one was hit. Not by them, not by us, not by the SWAT team on the roof or the chopper in the air—we had so much backup, you’d think it was the annual meeting of the Minnesota Police Federation.
Finally Meade yelled, “Hey, buddy, nobody’s hurt yet! We can still make most of this go away!” And the husband yelled back that he doesn’t want to go to jail, but Meade told him he didn’t see how it could possibly be avoided. The husband thought about it for a few minutes and then said, okay, jail’s fine, just as long as he’s not in the same prison with his wife.
The wife heard that and started ragging the husband something fierce about being such a poor provider and how her mother had been right about him all along, and prison be damned, she didn’t even want to be in the same fucking state with him.