Death Casts a Shadow, page 9
Ringing the bell for Apartment 312 was like calling her number: no answer. Tracey’s physical mailbox was stuffed as well. A half-dozen catalogs lay in disarray on the floor beneath it. The inner door was propped open. Cubiak slipped through and started up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, he stopped and massaged his left hip. He wished he could blame the cold for the discomfort, but this was a different kind of pain, one he had been experiencing for several months.
The previous fall, when Evelyn Bathard had shown him the X-ray results and suggested that he was a candidate for a hip replacement, Cubiak had waved off the notion. If it came to surgery, surely it wouldn’t be for years, he insisted. His doctor friend had smiled. “There is no predicting,” he said.
On the third floor, the sheriff rubbed his hip again. After he caught his breath, he started down the long gray hall to Tracey’s apartment. The door of 312 was decorated with a Welcome plaque and a green plastic wreath. He knocked, but again there was no response. Save for the soft murmur of a distant television, the building was quiet. He leaned into the door, hoping to catch a hint of movement inside, but all he heard was the whine of a truck accelerating on the highway. He called her number again, and again there was no answer and no way to leave a message.
He needed to get inside the apartment.
The building manager was at his desk unwrapping a piece of apple pie when Cubiak stepped in from the hall. He glanced at the visitor’s shabby jacket. “No vacancies,” he said, despite the sign to the contrary on the front door.
Cubiak flashed his badge and asked him to unlock the door to the missing woman’s apartment.
“Now? It’s my break time.” The manager eyed the pastry sitting in front of him on a piece of wrinkled waxed paper.
“Yes, now.” Cubiak read the name plate on the desk: L. Abels.
“You got a warrant?” Abels said, running a hand through his thinning hair.
“Mr. Abels, I got an emergency. Tracey Fells’s brother was killed this morning, and I have reason to believe her life may be in danger. Do you want that on your hands?”
“Jesus, no.” The pie forgotten, Abels scrambled to his feet.
The manager was a complainer. Trudging up the stairwell, he grumbled about the job, his boss, and the tenants—not Tracey, never a peep from her. When they reached the door to 312, he grew serious and rubbed his hands vigorously.
“First time I ever had to do this,” Abels said as he inserted the key into the lock.
Before the manager could turn the key, the sheriff grabbed his arm and motioned him away from the door. “I’ll go first,” he said.
“Why?” Abels looked puzzled and disappointed to have his grand adventure aborted.
“Because I said so.”
Because this morning her brother’s shack exploded on the bay. Because there’s no way to know what will happen when I open the door to her apartment . . .
The sheriff stood at arm’s length and grabbed the knob.
“What’s wrong?” The manager pressed his face forward as far as he dared.
“Nothing.”
“Why aren’t you going in?”
“I will.”
Cubiak held his breath and twisted the knob.
The moment passed and he exhaled.
“Wait here,” he said to Abels as he stepped into the cramped entrance.
The apartment was hot and filled with the kind of quiet that an empty space envelops. When he was sure it was safe to proceed, he moved past the jumble of shoes and boots that littered the floor.
Three steps took him to an oblong, sparsely furnished living room. It had a crumpled, forgotten look. A row of droopy plants lined a plastic wall shelf. Dust motes danced in an errant ray of sunlight that poured through uncurtained windows. A red sweater and black bra hung over the arm of a torn leather sofa. Jeans and leggings draped the back of the only chair in the room. Dirty dishes and piles of magazines and discarded mail littered the chipped coffee table. There was a similar mess in the kitchen. In the bathroom a worn toothbrush lay on the sink, and a ridge of black mold rimmed the edge of the tub.
The bedroom stood in contrast to the rest of the apartment. The bed was made. Polka-dotted curtains covered the window. A rainbow of scarves hung from a rack of wooden pegs.
Prints of waterfalls and sunsets decorated one wall. Framed photographs filled another. The largest showed a freckle-faced young woman and two small children sitting on a beach. Tracey and her brother, most likely, with their mother or perhaps an aunt. There were graduation and prom pictures of Tracey and of a gangly teenage boy he assumed was her brother. He snapped pictures of the images with his phone.
“Well?” the manager asked when the sheriff reappeared. His parka was still zipped.
“There’s no one here and it looks like she’s been gone for a few days,” he said.
Abels grunted. “Doesn’t surprise me none. Who knows what these kids are up to these days. Half the time they’re not even here.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I count the cars in the lot before I turn in for the night.”
“You live here?”
“I got a studio downstairs; it comes with the job.”
“When’s the last time you saw Tracey Fells?”
The manager shrugged. “Can’t say, Sheriff. I only know the people by what they drive. Her car comes and goes a lot, but it’s usually here at night.” He scratched his chin. “Though now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I saw it. Only thing I can tell you is that it’s not here now.”
From the apartment complex, it was a short drive to the justice center. Lights twinkled on the faux Douglas fir in the lobby, and silver streamers looped the hall, but the usual cheerful chatter had given way to silence. Even the phones had stopped ringing. In the break room, a trio of deputies sat at the table and stared into cups of coffee. They looked up as the sheriff walked past and then dropped their gaze.
In the radio room, Cubiak issued an APB for Tracey Fells. Then in his office, he buzzed Lisa and asked her to come in.
As soon as he saw his assistant, he knew that she had heard the news about the explosion and fire.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded and slipped into one of the two chairs that faced his desk.
“You look tired,” she said.
Cubiak smiled. Lisa was young enough to be his daughter, but she spoke with motherly concern. “Just cold,” he said, and flexed his fingers. “I only hope to hell it was an accident.”
Lisa blanched. “What else . . . ?” She stopped.
“Just me being paranoid,” he said.
“Right.”
“I need everything you can get on Bobby Fells. Current address, his mother’s name and address or that of the nearest living relatives. Friends, coworkers. You know the drill.”
“Doesn’t he have a sister?”
“Yeah, Tracey. I went to her apartment to tell her about the fire, but she wasn’t there. She hasn’t answered my texts either.”
“She must know about Bobby by now.”
“You’d think so.”
“If I was her, I’d go straight to the emergency room, hoping he was there, hurt but alive.”
Cubiak gave Lisa a long, steady look. “You’re wise beyond your years,” he said as he reached for the phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“The hospital.”
But Tracey hadn’t been there either.
It was dark by the time the sheriff left for home.
Cate waited at the door.
“I heard what happened,” she said as he came in. She reached for his parka. “What are you wearing?”
Cubiak held his arms out. His parka was blue but the one he had on was black. Then he remembered. “One of the fishermen loaned it to me. I left mine at the yacht club.”
He stood under the hot shower for so long that he worried the steam might melt the paint off the walls.
When Cate ladled out bowls of barley soup for supper, he figured that his wife had previously undisclosed telepathic abilities.
She told him that she had been working all day and apologized for the light meal.
“It’s perfect, exactly what I need. This and a hot toddy,” he said.
10
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
On Saturday, the day after the explosion and fire that killed Bobby Fells, Cubiak headed back to the morgue. Two days earlier, he had been in the ice room listening to Emma Pardy’s report on the death of Lydia Malcaster. He had dreaded that visit, and he dreaded this one more. He arrived to find the medical examiner standing over the charred body that had been found in the burned shack.
“You’re here, good,” she said. Pardy’s manner was more clipped than usual, but under the circumstances the sheriff didn’t take umbrage. He averted his eyes from the corpse and tried not to imagine the horror of having to work on it.
Pardy made a quick note in a chart. Then she dropped it on the counter and turned a grim face toward the sheriff. He always thought of her as young and was surprised by the wisp of gray hair along her temple. The morgue’s bright light playing tricks, he thought.
“I’ll give you all the particulars later,” the medical examiner said. “But for now, the most important fact is that this not the body of Robert Fells.”
Cubiak started. “What?” His gaze automatically shifted to the table. He winced and then looked back to her.
“What do you mean it’s not Bobby Fells?”
“The body was burned beyond recognition, and I had to rely on dental records to make a positive identification,” Pardy said as she pulled off her gloves. “I’ve had cases where it took weeks to track down the information but, in this instance, I was lucky. Bobby’s dentist was a local practitioner, and her office forwarded the records immediately.”
The medical examiner tossed the gloves in the trash. “There’s no match, Dave. This isn’t Bobby.”
“You’re sure of that?” Cubiak gave her an apologetic nod. “No offense meant.”
“None taken. I know you have to ask. And under the circumstances I’m as surprised as you. Poor man, whoever he is,” she said.
Pardy picked up the chart. She had barely glanced at it before she put it down again and looked back at him. “There are times it gets to me. So much unnecessary death.”
She retrieved the chart one more time and then picked up three plastic evidence bags from the counter. “Would you mind if we continued this discussion somewhere else?”
The medical examiner was at the double doors when she spoke. Cubiak followed, grateful to be out of the cold and away from the disfigured corpse.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” the sheriff said as they walked down the hall.
Pardy glanced back and rolled her eyes. “I don’t smoke.”
“I know. Neither do I. Not anymore. But at times like this . . .”
“There are always times like this,” she said.
The exchange ended and they were silent until they reached a small, vacant room at the end of the corridor.
“This’ll do,” Pardy said as she settled behind a chipped table.
She scanned her notes and returned to the business at hand.
“The deceased presents as a healthy adult male. Five feet, eleven inches. Approximately one hundred seventy-five pounds. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. No sign of underlying diseases. Blood alcohol level point two four. Cause of death, asphyxiation as evidenced by the presence of soot in his lungs. Time of death . . .” She faltered and looked at the sheriff. “You’d know that better than I.”
Cubiak rested his elbows on the table. “The shed exploded and burned at nine a.m. I guess that makes it the approximate time of death.”
Pardy made a quick notation.
“No signs of foul play?”
“Not as far as I can determine.”
“And he was alive when the fire broke out?”
“Alive, yes, but judging from the amount of liquor he’d consumed, I’d guess that he was passed out cold. He probably died without ever regaining consciousness.”
The sheriff exhaled sharply. “Still a lousy way to go.”
Pardy brushed a strand of hair off her face. The lock of gray was real. “What’s wrong with these guys? Why do they have to drink so much? What the hell are they trying to prove?”
“Their manliness?”
“More like their stupidity.” She sighed. “I have a son. I worry . . .”
Cubiak’s phone chirped but he ignored it. “What else?” he said.
Pardy indicated the plastic bags in front of them. “Here are the victim’s keys, wallet, and cell, or what’s left of them. I don’t know if you can get anything off the phone, but the case is singed, as are the wallet and the contents, so no legible IDs either,” she said as she slid the evidence bags to the sheriff.
“We won’t get any prints, but the state tech team might be able to pull something off the phone, and we can use the keys to try to find the victim’s vehicle. All the cars and trucks at the bay that morning were accounted for, so it’s got to be somewhere else.”
Pardy nodded. “There is one more thing,” she said. “His footwear.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people who spend time out on the ice dress for the cold. They’re especially careful about keeping their feet warm. Most of them prefer insulated boots, the kind you’d use for snowmobiling. The victim was wearing steel-toed shoes.”
“Work shoes?” the sheriff said.
“That’d be my guess.”
“Maybe that’s all he owned or maybe he wasn’t planning on being out on the ice. It could also mean that he worked construction or had a job at the shipyards, anywhere really, maybe at one of the factories around here or in Green Bay. We’ll start asking around to see if anyone didn’t show up for work yesterday. It’s not much by itself, but it’s a start.”
11
THE TRAILER IN THE WOODS
Pardy’s discovery added new urgency to the situation. Cubiak needed to recruit extra hands. As soon as the medical examiner returned to the morgue, he started calling his staff to see who was available to work that Saturday afternoon. Lisa and Rowe and several other deputies all signed on.
“I’ll meet you in an hour,” he said.
As Cubiak headed back to the justice center, a towering ridge of dark clouds stretched along the western horizon like a mountain range. For a moment the sheriff imagined that he was driving toward the Rockies. The snow would start soon, and he wondered if the people out west were skiing in the same snow that was heading toward Door County. Maybe some day he would go skiing.
In the incident room, he told the skeleton crew what he had learned from Pardy. The reaction was a mix of relief and shock. Those who knew Bobby Fells were relieved that he wasn’t the man killed in the explosion and fire, but they were all stunned by the news that they were dealing with a John Doe.
“We need to find out who died in the fire and how he was linked to Bobby Fells,” Cubiak said.
He tasked a junior deputy with combing through recent missing persons files and another with tracking Tracey Fells’s movements since Wednesday, when the sheriff had talked to her at Lydia Malcaster’s house.
Rowe was assigned to help the Sturgeon Bay Police search for the vehicle that belonged to the man who died in the fire.
“It’s possible, but unlikely, that the victim drove there himself and someone else drove away in his vehicle using a second set of keys. But an eyewitness is pretty sure he saw Bobby Fells at the shack last night, so the most likely scenario is that the two men drove to the fishing shack together. For whatever reason, Bobby left and the John Doe stayed. If we can find his vehicle, we’ll be able to identify him. Knowing who he was may help us locate Bobby as well. If they were hanging out together, someone would have seen them.”
Rowe asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Why wouldn’t Bobby come forward on his own?”
“If the two of them argued about something, Bobby might think he’ll be blamed for the man’s death. Even if the explosion was accidental, he could feel guilty about what happened.” Cubiak paused. “Or Bobby’s got another reason to hide from us, in which case, we need to find out what it is.”
At a few minutes after two, Lisa texted Fells’s address to the sheriff.
The location was southeast of town, far from the glittery world of festivals and fish boils that attracted two million visitors annually to the area. He entered the address into the jeep’s GPS and pulled out of the lot. He was barely half a mile away when the snow started to come down.
In a normal winter, the department would be dealing with traffic accidents caused by the bad weather, a scattering of domestic abuse cases, a half-dozen drug deals gone bad, and a few reports of petty theft or burglaries.
This was not a normal winter. This was the January of a body found at the base of a staircase, an unidentified corpse pulled from a charred fishing shack, and two missing siblings.
Less than nine days after New Year’s Eve, when the three-hundred-pound cherry dropped in Sister Bay to celebrate the holiday, Lydia Malcaster tumbled to her death. Her fatal fall appeared to be accidental, but for Cubiak there were too many unsettling circumstances.
Most suspicious was Lydia’s internet relationship with the person pretending to be James Dura, a man who had been dead for a decade. The sheriff registered other irregularities as well: the unlocked front door and the open downstairs door the morning the body was discovered, the Remington bronze clutched to her breast, and the bruises on her arms. Separately each could be explained away, but taken together they formed a puzzling web of circumstances that became more tangled when the recent events involving the brother and sister duo of Bobby and Tracey Fells were added to the mix.
He had to take the siblings into consideration because both had worked for Lydia. There was no connection between her death and the death of the unidentified man found in a burned-out ice-fishing hut—except that the hut belonged to Bobby Fells. There was no way to link Lydia’s fall with the fire or with Tracey’s apparent disappearance, but that didn’t mean the incidents weren’t intertwined. It only meant that he hadn’t uncovered the link yet.
