Fishing for a Killer Read online

  “I know you want to make a splash,” Al said. “But think of the poor bastard who’d get wet. What if it was somebody who couldn’t swim?”

  “Even a greater shot as somebody dives in to rescue him,” Trish said. “Where’s your sense of breaking news?”

  “You have no heart, Ms. Valentine,” I said.

  She giggled at the pun and took a cell phone out of her bag. “Time to alert the newsroom that we’ll be having breaking news,” she said.

  While we were talking, two men had clambered aboard one of the resort’s motor boats, cast off and started toward the circling craft, which was a small silhouette about two hundred yards away. The man who’d reported seeing it empty must have checked it out with binoculars because the naked eye could not discern for certain whether or not it was occupied.

  Taking a cue from Trish, I punched my cell phone keys for our newsroom and for Don O’Rourke’s extension. Al had already begun shooting pictures of the crowd on the dock and the departing boat.

  “What the hell are you doing up at this hour?” asked Don, who started his shift at 5:30 a.m. every Monday through Friday.

  “Watching a boat go ’round in circles,” I said.

  “For that you got up at sunrise?”

  “It looks like there’s nobody in the boat. And the governor’s press secretary seems to be missing this morning.”

  “Is there a connection?”

  “That’s what the entire Minnesota press corps is waiting by the water to find out.”

  “Keep us posted. We can update our website as soon as you know something worth posting.”

  “Al’s shooting pix of the rescue boat and the mob scene on the dock,” I said. “He’ll send you a couple in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll be watching for them,” Don said. “Oh, hey, what’s the missing man’s name?”

  “Alex Gordon. There’s background on him in the files.”

  “Isn’t he the smartass with the Boston accent who bragged about going to some big shot college when the governor hired him?”

  “That’s the one. Alex went to Hahv’d and he’s not shy about telling that to people.”

  “Did Hahv’d teach him to swim?”

  “Maybe we’re going to find out this morning,” I said.

  Don broke the connection and I turned my attention back to the action on the water. The two-man rescue crew brought their boat alongside the seemingly empty, circling boat. As one of the rescuers held his hand up to his face, Trish’s cameraman, peering through a long telephoto lens, said, “He’s talking on his cell. Must be calling somebody back here to say if there’s anybody laying in the bottom of the boat.”

  “Who’s he calling, I wonder?” Trish said.

  “Don’t know,” I said as I turned and looked around behind us. I saw Martin Johansen, manager of the resort, standing on the front steps talking on a cell phone. I began trotting toward him, and my action caused another mass movement as the herd that was now behind me started to follow.

  I reached Johansen as he was ending the call. “What’s the word?” I asked.

  “Nobody in the boat,” he said. “Now we have to find out who checked it out.”

  “Could it have been Alex Gordon?”

  “Could have been the Easter Bunny for all I know,” Johansen said. He turned and headed for the boat checkout desk with the crowd in hot pursuit. Al and I, and of course Trish Valentine, were in the lead again.

  “Think the Easter Bunny really stays here?” Trish asked.

  “Too expensive,” I said. “He holes up in a briar patch down the beach a ways.”

  “He’d be hopping mad if he ever fell out of a boat,” Al said.

  When we caught up to Johansen, he was holding a clipboard. Trish, who had sprinted past me, yelled, “Was it Alex?”

  Johansen nodded and pulled out his cell phone again. “I’m calling the sheriff for a dive team,” he said.

  Three

  The Search Begins

  The smell of cigar smoke heralded the arrival of Lieutenant Governor Aaron Ross. He was a tall, gangly man who had played forward on the University of Minnesota basketball team twenty-five years in the past. Now he was constantly puffing on a cigar and I was sure that running the length of a basketball court would send him into cardiac arrest.

  Ross was wearing a black-and-red plaid bathrobe that concealed the incongruous pot belly he’d developed through plush living as a corporate lawyer and a tax-slashing Republican politician. He was in the final year of his second term as lieutenant governor, and looked like a shoo-in to be his party’s gubernatorial candidate in the November election because Governor Anders A. (for Andrew) Anderson would not be running again.

  Ross scuffled toward the front of the crowd in leather bedroom slippers, moving with all the authority and purpose of a man walking in his sleep. No doubt he’d been one of the last to leave the Thursday night booze bout.

  Smoke curled upward from the ever-present cigar, which was dangling from Ross’s lips at an angle that reminded me of a partially-expended erection. He walked up to Martin Johansen and removed the drooping stogie long enough to ask, “What the hell’s going on out here?”

  “Man overboard,” Al yelled, leading a chorus of replies that meshed into an indiscernible jumble of sound.

  “Will all of you shut up and let Marty talk?” Ross yelled. He drew in a long drag of cigar smoke while waiting for the yammering to cease.

  “One of our men spotted an empty boat going in circles out in the bay,” Johansen said. “It was signed out by the governor’s press secretary.”

  “Good god, is Alex okay?” This was the deep bass voice of Governor Anderson, who was a couple of steps behind Ross. The governor had taken time to put on khaki cargo pants, a dark blue wool shirt and white, fresh-out-of-the-box boat shoes, but he was dragging his feet as wearily as Aaron Ross.

  “I’m afraid Alex is missing, Governor,” Johansen said. “He went out in the boat sometime before sunrise and one of our men saw it going around in circles with nobody in it when it got light at a little after six. No telling when he went into the water. The sheriff’s dive team is coming to look for him.”

  “You’re sure he went into the water?” Anderson asked.

  “I don’t know where else he could have gone,” Johansen said.

  “Maybe an eagle swooped down and carried him off,” Al whispered.

  “I’ve often thought he was for the birds,” I said.

  “Couldn’t he have swum to shore somewhere?” the governor asked.

  “I suppose that’s possible if he was real strong swimmer,” Johansen said. “But the water is awful cold to survive in for very long and the boat was a good two hundred yards out when our guys spotted it.”

  “Shouldn’t we start searching the shoreline in case he made it?” Ross said through teeth clenched around the cigar.

  “Ah, that’s showing the kind of leadership that will make him our next governor,” I whispered.

  “Oh, don’t say that,” Trish Valentine said. “He’s the biggest jerk I’ve ever dealt with. Always trying to cop a feel when he thinks nobody’s looking. And he always stinks like the worst kind of cigar smoke.”

  Johansen told the governor that he would put together two groups of resort employees to search the shoreline in both directions from the dock. He hustled off to round up a crew, the governor and lieutenant governor retreated toward the lodge and the rest of us got busy calling our respective news desks as we straggled along behind.

  Minutes later the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Jeep Cherokee arrived with lights flashing and skidded to a stop in the parking lot in front of the lodge. The sheriff, a rugged-looking man of about sixty, got out, slapped a Smokey Bear hat on his bald head, scanned the multitude carrying notebooks, cameras and micr
ophones, and said, “Who’s in charge here?”

  Since I was closest to the sheriff, I answered. “The manager, Mr. Johansen, is inside rounding up a crew to search the beach. The boat’s out there.” I pointed to the empty boat. Motor off, it had been secured to the rescue vessel and they were holding a position near the spot of interception, which I assumed was by orders from Johansen.

  Two minutes later the Crow Wing County dive team rolled into the parking lot nearest the marina towing a boat full of underwater swimming gear. It was now a few minutes after 7:00 a.m., which meant that unless Alex Gordon had miraculously reached shore, he had been in the near-freezing water for at least an hour, possibly two. This definitely would be a search assignment, not a rescue mission.

  The three dive team members crawled into their insulated black rubber suits, launched their boat and headed toward their target. While watching the boat’s progress, several of us tried to question the sheriff. All we got out of him was his name, Val Holmberg, and the fact that he had been sheriff for eighteen years. Martin Johansen soon rejoined the group, followed first by Governor Anderson and then by the lieutenant governor, who had replaced his bathrobe with a green-and-black plaid wool shirt and faded blue jeans. However, he was still wearing the slippers and gnawing on the two-inch remains of the smoldering cigar. The trio surrounded the sheriff and they all drifted away from the reporters and the cameras, leaving a trail of cigar smoke in their wake.

  I turned and looked out at the lake, where the dive team boat had joined the other two. Standing still, with no adrenalin pumping, it occurred to me that I was cold. The sheriff was wearing a leather jacket and everyone else seemed to be in long sleeves of some sort, but I had been late for the six o’clock meeting so I’d just pulled on a pair of khaki pants and a beige T-shirt with Keep Calm and Catch Walleyes in red block letters across the front.

  “Why don’t we go back to our cabin where it’s warm and file our stuff?” I said. “There’s nothing to see out here until they find the body. I assume the morning’s schedule of fun and games is pretty much down the toilet.” That schedule included a daylong golf tournament beginning at 8:00 a.m. and a kids’ fishing event for those who had brought their families, set to run from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

  Al agreed and we returned to our cabin, which stood on a hill facing the main lodge with a tree-blocked view of the lake in the distance. Apparently the Daily Dispatch had rented the resort’s equivalent of affordable housing. As we passed a large circular thermometer attached to a tree beside the cabin I noted that the red needle was pointing at forty-two. Fortunately it was cozy inside as Al e-mailed his pix and I tapped out a brief account of the morning’s events and sent it to Don O’Rourke.

  “Keep us posted,” was Don’s reply. So what else was I going to do?

  We’d been surprised to find that our cabin had two bedrooms, separated by a small living room and a kitchenette with a coffee maker and a microwave oven. When we’d seen this layout upon arrival Thursday afternoon, we’d talked about calling home and inviting Martha Todd and Al’s wife, Carol, to join us on Saturday for the latter part of the weekend fun. The accommodations wouldn’t cost any more if they joined us, and anyway the Daily Dispatch was paying the tab. Because Martha is a lawyer in a very busy firm and Carol is a teacher in a public school, they could not have come for the Friday program. Now it appeared that the Saturday festivities would be much less festive, if they continued at all. We decided not to make the call.

  “What do you think the six o’clock meeting was supposed to be about?” Al asked. He was sitting in one overstuffed chair and I was occupying the other.

  “I’ve got no idea,” I said. “All Alex said last night was that he wanted everybody in the room at six.”

  “Think Annie would know?”

  “She might. Should I call her?”

  “Why not?

  “Why do you answer everything with a question?”

  “Do I really?”

  I gave up, went over to my bed and punched “0” on the phone on the bedside table. The desk clerk answered on the second buzz. He rang Ann Rogers’s room at my request and reported that there was no answer. I said I would try again later and hung up.

  “Nobody home?” Al asked.

  “No. Probably out watching the dive team,” I said.

  “Should we be out watching the dive team?”

  Desperate to break Al’s string of questions, I said, “Give me one reason for us to go out there in the cold.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be covering the news?” he said.

  Again I gave up. “You can go out and cover the news if you want to, but I’m going to stay in here and take a nap,” I said.

  “Are you really that tired?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I’m going to lie down.”

  “Should I wake you for lunch?” Al asked.

  I threw a spare pillow at him and stretched out on the bed. Soon I was dreaming of Martha Todd—her silky coffee-with-cream Cape Verde complexion, her dazzling smile, her out-of-this-world, perfectly sculpted ass. We were in a boat, circling in a broad expanse of water, when we heard alarm bells. The bells persisted until I opened my eyes and realized that the phone on the nightstand was ringing. As I reached for the receiver, I noticed that the digital alarm clock beside the phone was registering ll:43.

  “Who could that be?” Al asked from the chair in which he’d been dozing. The pillow I’d thrown at him was tucked behind his head.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I picked up the phone and said, “Daily Dispatch headquarters, all the news that fits in print, Mitch Mitchell at your service.”

  “This is Ann Rogers. Please come to the boat docks ASAP.” She was gone before I could say “okay,” “no” or “what the hell’s going on.”

  I put down the phone and said, “Sounds like we might be covering some news.”

  “What do you know about that?” Al said.

  Four

  Quick Work

  Al grabbed his camera, I picked up my notebook and mini tape recorder, and we joined a stream of people flowing to the marina. The media mob had grown, as additional news services had sent reporters and photographers when they learned of the search going on for Alex Gordon’s body. Al left my side and sprinted for the dock so he would be up front where the action was.

  We were halted ten yards from the foot of the dock by a strip of yellow plastic police tape and a row of sheriff’s deputies and local police officers. While Al and I had been sleeping, the authorities had been taking charge of the accident scene. The only people on the dock side of the tape were Sheriff Val Holmberg, Governor Anders A. Anderson and Lieutenant Governor Aaron Ross, the latter equipped with a fresh cigar. Ann Rogers stood in front of the tape, helping the officers stop the charge of the media brigade.

  “Please wait here,” Ann was saying over and over again. “Please be patient. You’ll all have a chance to get the story.” Ann was always coiffed and made up like an actress walking onstage, but now her seemingly molded light brown curls were straggling like a pitchfork full of hay, a black line of dripping mascara was smudging her right cheek and the ruby red lipstick she’d been wearing at six o’clock was gone.

  The dive team boat and the original rescue boat with the empty boat in tow were in a line approaching the dock where the governor, lieutenant governor and sheriff stood waiting. The dive team was about ten yards out when my cell phone rang. It was Martha Todd.

  “What the heck is going on up there?” she said. “Are you guys okay? The TV is on in the break room and Trish Valentine is reporting live about bringing in a drowning victim.” Good old Trish.

  “It’s the governor’s press secretary,” I said. “Apparently he went out fishing before dawn and fell out of the boat
into water cold enough to form icicles on your butt. They’re bringing him in to the dock as we speak.”

  “What kind of nut goes out fishing before dawn?” Martha said.

  “I’m told that it’s not unusual for this particular nut,” I said. “Except in this case, he’d called us all to a meeting at six o’clock and went fishing a little after five. Doesn’t seem like he’d have much time to fish.”

  “Maybe he wanted to bring in a walleye so he could show the press what they look like.”

  “I think most Minnesotans know that. I’ve got to go. Looks like the governor is about to say something.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “I’m keeping Don O’Rourke posted. Look on the Daily Dispatch website.”

  “I’ll just keep watching Trish Valentine reporting live,” Martha said. That was a below-the-belt shot at my ego. She knows I hate being one-upped on a story by anyone reporting live on TV.

  The sheriff spoke before the governor had a chance to talk. He asked us to move out of the way so the ambulance crew that had just arrived could make its way to the dock. The multitude parted like the Red Sea at the command of Moses and a couple of deputies lowered the yellow plastic tape as the ambulance beeped its way backwards across the lawn and stopped ten feet from the dock. Two men in blue EMT jackets opened the rear doors, dragged out a gurney, and carried it over the ten-foot strip of grass and sand to the dock.

  Once on the dock, the men raised the gurney to waist level and wheeled it out to the end where the boats were tied up. The EMTs lowered the gurney to its lowest level and we all watched in silence as the dive team members hauled a loaded black body bag out of their boat and placed it on the waiting platform. Shutters snapped and TV cameras rolled as the gurney was raised, wheeled back to the beach, carried across the strip of sand and grass to the ambulance and loaded aboard. The babble of voices resumed, but at a lower decibel level, as the ambulance doors clanged shut.

  I looked around for Al and saw that he had slipped through the opening in the yellow tape and was out at the end of the dock shooting pictures of the boats. He was leaning over the dead man’s empty boat and taking some shots of the interior when a deputy clamped a hand on his shoulder and invited him to leave the dock. Al did not resist—he had collected all the photos he needed.