She puts me on hold for another thirty seconds. “Ron Colbert said he can meet you there in five if you want,” she says when she comes back on.
“I need to get Minniver’s body back to the morgue first. Can you tell him to meet me there in an hour instead?”
“Will do.”
I hang up and start filling out all the paperwork necessary for processing Minniver’s body but I’m quickly distracted. The ER is not an easy place to focus at times, and tonight proves no exception. Within minutes two ambulances pull up and the ER staff starts jockeying beds, trying to find a place to put the latest victims. As the EMTs wheel their respective patients into the main part of the ER, two things become apparent: the victims are hunters, and they are royally pissed off at one another. The first fact is obvious from their dress. Both men are wearing insulated bib overalls made out of a camouflage fabric. I’m guessing hunters wear this get-up so the deer won’t see them as easily, but over the top of the camouflage both men are wearing vests and earflap hats—standard hunting fare—done in a blaze orange so bright it’s likely visible from Mars. Despite this precaution, every year a couple of hunters are shot—supposedly by mistake—because some yahoo thinks deer have blaze-orange fur.
Here in Wisconsin we’ve learned to adapt to this idiocy because hunting is as much a rite of passage as growing pubic hair. In fact, I know a hunter or two who thinks the act of killing an innocent animal is what gives you pubic hair. During deer hunting season the air is filled with the sound of gunshots, the roads are riddled with carcasses of fleeing, frightened deer, and girlfriends and housewives everywhere are holding hunting widow parties—all-female get-togethers that often involve recipe sharing, chick-flick marathons, and frank discussions of everything from sex to what to pack in the kids’ school lunches. Deer hunting season is as much of a holiday as Thanksgiving and since the two often overlap, it’s not unusual to see people taking the entire last half of November off from their jobs, or schools that provide “teacher days” because they know many of their students will be missing from class.
That the two hunters entering the ER are pissed at one another is obvious because they are trading obscenities. The red flush in their cheeks tells me their blood pressures are reaching Mt. Vesuvius levels as torrents of their alcohol-laden breath waft through the air, quickly permeating the entire department.
The first guy, who is heavyset, bearded, and has a blood-soaked dressing wrapped around his right foot, is screaming and wagging a finger at the second man. “You shot me, you frigging asshole! You tried to kill me and don’t you deny it. I knew you were pissed about that stock tip I gave you. I just knew it.”
The second man, who is lean, tall, and has a neck like a giraffe, is grimacing in pain. His left leg is splinted from foot to hip and I can see dressings covering a large protuberance in his lower leg—an open tib-fib fracture. He glares back at the other man, and through gritted teeth says, “It was an accident, you fucking moron.”
“The hell it was,” grumbles the first guy. “You tried to kill me!” Seeing that he now has a larger, newer audience, he raises his voice several decibels, points to Giraffe Guy, and yells, “This fucker tried to kill me!”
Several state troopers have arrived with this entourage and I see one of them roll his eyes and shake his head. After a quick game of musical beds, the two hunters are finally ensconced in their separate rooms, each with a trooper close by to babysit. The eye-rolling trooper, a twenty-plus-year veteran named Hans Volger, enters the nurse’s station and drops into a chair with an exhausted sigh.
“Rough night?” I ask him.
“Ya, you betcha,” he says, tagging himself as a hardcore Norwegian. “Always is during hunting season. And these two drunken yahoos take the cake. Get this . . . the tall guy decided he didn’t want to risk scaring off the deer by climbing down from his tree stand to take a dump. So what does he do? He drops his drawers, squats over the edge of the stand with his bare ass in the breeze, and tries to squeeze one out. Except the idiot lost his balance, fell ass backward, and broke his leg. Unfortunately he grabbed at his rifle when he felt himself falling, and he accidentally fired off a shot as he went down. The bullet went through the floor of another tree stand and hit the second guy in the foot.” He shakes his head. “I’ll bet all the deer out there are still laughing.”
My funeral home transport arrives and I see that it’s the twin sisters from Johnson’s: Cassandra and Katherine, who go by the nicknames Cass and Kit. Their parents, who established the funeral home over thirty years ago, have always had a twisted sense of humor and it was never more apparent than when they named their daughters. The girls seem to have taken to their nicknames and the family business to a surprising degree. Not only are they both very involved in the day-to-day work, they both look the part with Morticia-like skin, builds, and hair.
After bidding Hans adieu, I take the twins into Minniver’s room and assist them as they wrap him up, strap him up, and load him into their transport vehicle, which looks more like a soccer mom’s minivan. I head out to my hearse and follow the funeral home car to the morgue.
Other than weighing Minniver on the huge floor scale in our take-in area, I leave all the rest of the processing for morning. After the sisters help me place Minniver’s body in the fridge for the night, I finish my paperwork and leave.
Five minutes later I am in front of Minniver’s house expecting to see a yellow-taped crime scene area, but the place looks like every other house on the street. As I pull into Minniver’s driveway to park, a squad car pulls in behind me. I watch in my rearview mirror as Ron Colbert climbs out, and then I grab my evidence kit and get out to greet him.
“How come there’s no crime scene tape here?” I ask him.
“Wasn’t aware there was a crime,” Colbert says with a shrug. “They said the guy had a heart attack.”
“They who?”
He thinks a minute, scowling. “His daughter told us he had a cardiac history. And the EMTs said it looked like a heart attack.”
“Looked like doesn’t mean it is. And in this case, it probably isn’t. The guy’s heart was given a clean bill of health recently. Don’t you guys typically preserve a scene until you know the cause of death?”
Colbert looks abashed, but then he brightens. “Well, we did lock the place up after the ambulance left so no one could get inside.”
“No one without a key,” I say, dangling the one Minniver’s daughter gave me in front of his face. “Plus he kept a spare one hidden.” I lead the way to the front porch, feeling my stomach knot when I see that the top to the porch light is open. Sure enough, there is no key there. “Interesting,” I say.
“What?” Colbert asks.
“His spare key is gone. His daughter said he kept it taped to the underside of this lid,” I explain, pointing at the light fixture. “We might need to dust that lid for fingerprints.”
Colbert frowns again and asks, “Are you saying you think there’s something fishy with this guy’s death?”
“I think he may have committed suicide,” I tell him, filling him in on what I’ve learned. “I want to take a look at his car to see if it was running. Your guys didn’t take the keys out of the ignition or anything like that, did you?”
Colbert blushes and looks guilty as hell, making my hopes sink. “I don’t know, to be honest. Let’s go take a look.”
I unlock the front door with the key Patricia gave me and step inside. It’s a tidy Cape Cod furnished with comfortable-looking, mismatched pieces. Several lamps that were left turned on lend the interior a warm glow. I see an ashtray on a table at one end of the couch and inside it is an intricately carved pipe. The air smells of apple-scented tobacco, a scent that triggers a vague memory in my mind of a tall, brown-haired, pipe-smoking, smiling man I think is my father. But since my father left my mother when I was five, I can’t be sure. My visual memories aren’t nearly as vivid as the olfactory ones and whenever I’ve asked my mother what my father looked like, her response has always been “Like the devil himself.”