Stiff Competition

Book 0: Mattie Winston Mystery

by Annelise Ryan

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths; Fantasy; General Fiction; Mystery; Romance; Thrillers

Synopsis

Every fall, hunting season in Sorenson, Wisconsin, leads to some accidental injuries. Deputy coroner Mattie Winston just hopes the hunters don’t bring any more business to her office. But somebody seems to have declared open season on land developers. One real estate developer who’s recently come to town has been found dead in the woods with an arrow through his neck. Now it’s up to Mattie to get to the bottom of the killing. That might be easier if she wasn’t also hunting for Detective Hurley’s teenage daughter, Emily, who has suddenly disappeared. With a homicidal William Tell out on the loose, Mattie is desperate to find Emily before the killer notches another arrow…

Release date: February 1, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Death is sometimes referred to as eternal sleep. It’s a nice euphemism, one that brings to mind a far more pleasant picture than the grim realities. At the moment, those grim realities are staring me in the face: waxy, lifeless, bloody, the eyes wide open. It doesn’t resemble normal sleep at all, not that I’d recognize normal sleep if it jumped up, slapped me in the face, and yelled at me. Sleep is something I haven’t seen much of lately.

My name is Mattie Winston and I work for the medical examiner’s office in my hometown of Sorenson, Wisconsin. I’m also a new mother, and for all intents and purposes, a single one. Motherhood is something I’d always planned on, but the path I took to get here has been a circuitous, twisted mess with lots of detours, hazards, and side trips along the way. Still, my son, Matthew Hurley, is my greatest accomplishment in life thus far. I adore his soft, black hair and his big blue eyes, which he gets from his dad, and his round face and chubby thighs, which he gets from me. His smile, which is slightly crooked and has the ability to melt my heart, is uniquely his. I love everything about him, but I wish he would sleep a little more.

It’s been eight weeks since he was born, and yesterday was my first official day back on the job. Fortunately it was an easy one because death took a holiday. But that guy with the scythe is a relentless pursuer, and today he came knocking again. I’m standing beside his latest victim: a man dressed in the same blaze orange accoutrements that I and the people who are with me are wearing.

It’s deer hunting season, an occasion that is as much of a holiday for many in Wisconsin as is Christmas, or Thanksgiving, which is right around the corner. Even as we stand here in a wooded copse with bright morning sunlight beaming down on us, the sounds of gunshots can be heard echoing through the air. It’s a bit unnerving knowing there are hordes of men (and the occasional woman) wandering around out here armed with tons of alcohol, a desire to kill something, and the guns to do it. Given that, it’s not hard to imagine that some of the hunters, as well as some of the hunted, end up dead as a result. Most years there is a human victim or two, and the vast majority of them have something to do with stupidity. Hunting season casualties always reinforce my belief in Darwinism.

Despite all the gunshots, the man lying on the ground at our feet wasn’t killed by a gun of any sort. His end came with much more stealth judging from the arrow sticking out both sides of his throat.

A crashing sound in the trees behind us makes everyone look that way. A doe bounds into our small clearing and then stops short to stare at us with wide, frightened eyes, steam rising from her flared nostrils. After a few seconds her hindquarters quiver and in a blink she bounds back the way she came, disappearing from view.

“These poor deer don’t know which way to run,” I say.

“Apparently our victim didn’t either,” Izzy says, and everyone’s focus shifts back to the body on the ground.

Izzy is my neighbor, my boss, and my best friend. I live in a cottage behind his house, a cottage that just happens to be right next door to the house I used to share with my ex-husband, David Winston—though technically I’ve never lived in the house that currently stands on that property. The first house burned to the ground, nearly taking David’s life in the process. He has since rebuilt and is now sharing it with his fiancée, Patty Volker, the insurance rep who at one time sold us the coverage that made the rebuild possible. I received a share of the proceeds as part of my divorce settlement, a chunk of money I considered fair at the time. But David is a surgeon at our local hospital, and he makes a lot of money. His original plan to build a more modest home to replace the mini mansion we once shared apparently fell by the wayside. The new house is as big, if not bigger, than the one we had. It makes me wonder if David was hiding some money when our divorce settlement was being sorted out.

My cottage is tiny in comparison: a one-bedroom, one-bathroom affair that is all of nine hundred square feet. Izzy had it built for his mother, Sylvie, who lived in it for a year when her health was failing, and then moved out when her recovery proved nothing short of amazing. She might have stayed in it even then if not for her son’s lifestyle, something she has made clear she doesn’t like. Izzy is gay and has been living with his partner, Dom, for nearly a decade now. Sylvie tells everyone it’s just a phase her son is going through, and that she’s sure he’ll come to his senses any day now and settle down with a nice young woman.

Standing in the woods with Izzy and me are two uniformed cops: Brenda Joiner and a new guy named Karl Young, who has already been saddled with the nickname KY, which inevitably leads to conversational segues laced with sexual innuendo. Being paired up with Brenda doesn’t help since her initials lend themselves to similar insinuations. Also present are Jonas Kriedeman, the evidence technician for the Sorenson Police Department, Charlotte “Charlie” Finnegan, the PD’s videography specialist, and Steve Hurley, a detective with the Sorenson PD, the love of my life, and the father of my child.

“Anyone know who he is?” Hurley asks, staring down at the dead man.

“Hard to say since we can’t see much of his face,” I say. Our victim is lying on the ground, face up, his sightless eyes open and staring at the sky. But aside from the fact that his eyes are blue, it’s hard to tell anything else about him because his face is covered with partially dried blood.

Izzy reaches into the man’s front pants pockets, pulls a cell phone out of one and a set of keys from the other, and hands them to Jonas. Then he goes into the back pockets, finds a wallet, and hands it to Hurley, who opens it and removes a driver’s license.

“Assuming this is his license, it seems our dead man is one Lars Sanderson,” Hurley says, looking from the license to the man on the ground and back to the license again. He then shows us the picture.

“Looks like it could be a match,” KY says.

Izzy frowns. “It does bear a resemblance, but we’ll get a better idea once we clean his face off. Let’s not jump to any conclusions yet.” Izzy is extremely cautious when it comes to identifying our victims, in part because he’s very professional and thorough when it comes to his job, but also because of an embarrassing debacle that occurred fifteen years ago, early on during his career here in Sorenson. A wallet found on a man killed in a horrific auto crash was used by the local cops to identify the victim despite caution from Izzy. The name on the driver’s license matched that on the car’s registration and it seemed pretty clear who the victim was. Hair color, size, and weight matched the driver’s license info, but the injuries were severe enough that any facial recognition was impossible. Still, the identity seemed obvious and the cops notified the man’s wife of her husband’s death.

As it turned out, her husband was alive, though barely, after being beaten by the man who stole his wallet and car. The husband, who had lain unconscious in a field for several hours, finally came to in the middle of the night and was able to stagger his way home. He didn’t have his keys, and both the front and back doors were locked, so he entered through a bedroom window that he and his wife typically left open at night. His wife, who had been amply dosed with sedatives after receiving the shocking news of her husband’s death, awoke in something of a haze to find a man standing in her bedroom. She screamed, assumed it was an intruder, and in her muddled haze she managed to open the drawer of the bedside table and take out the gun that was kept there. Then she shot her husband. The wound proved fatal, though not immediately. He lived long enough to explain what had happened and to tell his wife he forgave her. She, however, was not so magnanimous and she filed a lawsuit against the police department and the city. It ended up getting settled a year later, but not before both of the cops involved in the presumptuous death notification moved on to other cities and jobs.

“Izzy is right that we need to be careful in jumping to conclusions,” I say, mindful of the past incident, “but it does look like Lars. He has a distinctive hook nose and a mole on his left cheek.”

“You know this Lars guy?” Hurley asks, then before I can answer he says, “Dumb question. Of course you do. I swear you know everyone in Sorenson.”

“Not everyone, but I did grow up here, and Sorenson isn’t a very big town. I didn’t know Lars personally, but I met him once at a hospital function. And he’s pretty recognizable in these parts because his picture has been in the local paper a number of times.”

“Why?” Hurley asks.

“He’s a real estate developer who came to town a few years ago and made a big splash. Not everybody has been happy about getting wet. Some of his projects have been rather controversial.”

“Great,” Hurley mutters. “Why can’t we ever get victims who are mostly liked by everyone? It would make the investigations a lot easier.”

“Maybe because people don’t tend to kill people they like?” I suggest with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Hurley smiles at me and then looks over at Izzy. “Any chance this was a hunting accident?”

Izzy does a half wince as he stares down at the dead man. “Can’t say for sure until I get him back to the morgue, but I’m leaning toward no. Look at the angle of the arrow. It enters the left side of his neck just above the collar bone and comes out on the right side just below his jaw line, close to a forty-five-degree angle. If the arrow was shot from a distance away, it would have had a downward trajectory, or a level one, but not an upward one. For the arrow to have gone the direction it did, he had to have been shot by someone who was standing below him.” Izzy pauses and looks up at the trees around us. “I don’t see a tree stand anywhere nearby so I don’t think it happened that way. And these woods are dense, so I’m thinking that whoever shot him had to have been close. In fact, I’d wager they were here in this small clearing with our victim. It isn’t easy to hit a person with an arrow from any distance.”

Hurley, who is squatting beside the body, looks up at Izzy and says, “What if the shooter was kneeling, squatting, or sitting, and Lars was standing?”

Izzy contemplates this a moment. “I suppose it’s possible,” he says. “But there are problems with that scenario. It would be hard to pull sufficiently and get a decent aim with a regular bow in a squatting, sitting, or kneeling position.... Not impossible, but definitely awkward.”

Hurley looks up at me and mimes shooting at me with a bow and arrow. Then he looks back down at Lars. “Think the arrow came from a crossbow?”

Izzy shakes his head. “It’s the wrong kind of arrow. Crossbows use a bolt. This looks like it came from a compound bow, or perhaps an old-fashioned bow and arrow, though you don’t see many of those out here these days. Besides, if the arrow came from a crossbow and it was fired close by, the force behind it would have sent it clear through the victim’s neck and out the other side. The fact that it’s still embedded suggests that the arrow didn’t have that kind of momentum behind it.”

“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.

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 Hurl. . .