Stiff Penalty

Book 6: Mattie Winston Mystery

by Annelise Ryan

Genres: Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Deputy coroner Mattie Winston knows a thing or two about dead bodies. That's why she's on the case of Derrick Ames, a high school math teacher stabbed to death with a barbecue fork straight to the heart. Sure, she's turned up some motives and a few suspects, but nothing adds up. Especially when the evidence points to Ames's teenage son. Newly pregnant Mattie can't believe it, even as her own long-estranged father may be following her. But one thing's certain, she'd better start figuring things out fast, or a deadly perpetrator could be subtracting two more victims from the population of Sorenson, Wisconsin. . .

Release date: March 1, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 417

Sample

I find it ironic that I’m sitting across from a psychiatrist discussing the dichotomy of life and death, not only because I hate shrinks and once swore I’d never go to one, but because I came here voluntarily, at least this time. My name is Mattie Winston, and I deal with life and death on a regular basis these days: death because it’s a part of my daily job, life because there is a new one growing inside me.

I’m pregnant . . . very, very pregnant at the moment. And while being in this condition is something I had planned for at some point in my life, getting here the way I have has been as well planned as a train wreck. I’ve been imagining my future since I was twelve years old, sitting in my bedroom acting out scenes of domestic bliss with Barbie and Ken, and cutting pictures out of bridal magazines with my sister, Desi, who was ten at the time. My future was crystal clear in my mind: a loving husband, two adorable children, and a life full of comfort and fun in my Barbie Dreamhouse, with occasional family vacations in our Barbie camper.

Things appeared to be progressing according to the Big Plan when I snagged a husband who seemed to fit nicely into the Ken/Prince Charming mold I’d carved out for him. His name was David Winston, and he was a surgeon I met at the hospital where I worked. At the time I was an ER nurse, but I quickly transferred and became an OR nurse so I could be closer to him. I missed the ER like crazy, but I figured a little job unhappiness was a worthy sacrifice to be near the man I loved. After a whirlwind courtship, David and I managed a few years of marital bliss. But that starry-eyed, fairy-tale future I’d imagined as a child crashed and burned when I found David performing exploratory surgery on one of our coworkers late one night in an otherwise deserted operating room. Unfortunately, the only surgical instrument he was using at the time was his penis.

Crushed, humiliated, and hurt beyond belief, I fled my job and my marriage. My neighbor and good friend, Izzy Rybarceski, who is the medical examiner for our county, gave me a place to hide by allowing me to move into the mother-in-law cottage behind his house. It was nice to have a place to run to, but the location of the cottage meant I was only a stone’s throw away from the home I had shared with David. I know this because I’ve thrown stones at it a time or two.

Izzy let me sit and stew for a couple of months while I came to terms with the end of my marriage and the tattered remains of my childhood dream. My money ran out about the same time Izzy’s patience did, and when I emerged from my cave of self-pity, he offered me a position as his assistant. The job description entailed dissecting dead bodies and investigating any crimes involving deaths, so I felt reasonably qualified for the work, given my OR experience at the hospital, my insatiable curiosity, and my general nosiness.

It turned out to be a good fit, and it’s a job I love more than any other I’ve ever had. But it came with a curveball named Steve Hurley, a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed homicide detective who had arrived in town a few months before I started working for Izzy.

Hurley and I hit it off in a big way, and I began to consider David a mere misstep in my planned future, a fork in the road that I had to take in order to meet up with Hurley. It turned out there were many other forks in that road—like the fact that Hurley and I met over the dead body of the woman David had had his affair with, like the fact that both David and I were prime suspects in her murder, and like the fact that Hurley had a wife and child he didn’t know he had. I suspect there are many more forks to come. In fact, given that my relationship with Hurley thus far has had more ups and downs and more ins and outs than a porno movie, I expect to get thoroughly forked over in the months and years to come.

The psychiatrist sitting across from me—Maggie Baldwin, or Dr. Naggy as I like to call her—is someone I was forced to see months ago when Hurley and I experienced the latest speed bump on our road to happiness. Because of a non-fraternization rule that came up when the ME’s office and the police were tasked with oversight duties for one another, Hurley and I couldn’t be a couple and work together. After much agonizing, I decided to quit my job with Izzy and go back to work in the hospital ER. I wasn’t happy about the decision—I loved my job with Izzy— but I loved Hurley more. Plus, returning to the scene of David’s crime wasn’t something I looked forward to. Small towns like Sorenson thrive on gossip, and I’d been the primary topic more times than I liked of late. I knew everyone at the hospital would be whispering and gossiping behind my back, watching like vultures for any chance encounters David and I might have, eager to pick at the bloody remains left behind.

As it turned out, my worries were for naught. Because our town is a small one, the hospital has trouble attracting physicians at times. Many of them prefer larger city hospitals, where there are more resources, more amenities, more cohorts to share on-call hours with, and more earning potential. So when David basically blackmailed the hospital administrators by threatening to leave if I came back to work there, they decided at the last minute that I was no longer welcome. Nurses were a dime a dozen, but David was the only surgeon on staff at the time, and the hospital couldn’t afford to lose him.

My job with Izzy had already been given to someone else, but my settlement in the divorce left me with a nice cushion of money to tide me over for a while. I was fine with the career setbacks because at least I had Hurley, or so I thought. Unfortunately, there were two other women who popped into Hurley’s life at exactly the same time, and their hold on him was much stronger than mine. One was Kate, the wife Hurley thought he’d divorced years ago—a wife I never knew he’d had. The other was a teenage girl named Emily—Hurley’s daughter—a daughter that until then, Hurley never knew he had.

The forks kept coming. A bit of bad luck for my newly hired replacement turned out to be good luck for me. I was able to return to my job with Izzy and found myself once again working side-by-side with Hurley, determined to put him and his newfound family behind me. But Hurley and I are drawn to one another the way a metal oxygen tank is drawn to an MRI, explosive results included. Before long we were sneaking rolls in the hay whenever and wherever we could.

Then Hurley found out the true reason why his not-really-an-ex-wife had suddenly come back into his life, and that discovery led to him and his newfound daughter leaving town and staying gone for two months. The road truly forked me that time because shortly after Hurley left I discovered I was pregnant.

It is now mid-September, almost a year since I first met Hurley, and the road has recently forked me again. I am days away from my projected delivery date, and my huge, hormone-addled body has my brain so muddled that I can’t think straight. I am about to embark on the biggest journey ever in my life, but every time I try to focus on it and the future, my thoughts go flying off in a million different directions like a burst of fireworks. In an effort to douse this incendiary state of mind, I made the decision to come back to Dr. Naggy after a six-month break. I was hoping she’d give me a quick fix, some brilliant bit of insight that would make everything feel right. Instead, she is insisting on knowing everything that has happened to me during the six months since I last saw her, a portion of my life she has labeled “the inciting events,” as if they somehow led to a riot.

“So tell me what happened when Hurley came back to town,” she says to me.

I ponder the question for a moment, wondering how to summarize six months of chaos during an hour-long appointment.

“Well, it all began around the start of May,” I tell her. “That’s when Hurley returned to Sorenson and his job. And once again our meeting took place over a murdered body. That seems to be a recurring theme in our lives.”

“That’s not too surprising, given your line of work,” Dr. Naggy says.

“Yeah, but this time it was different because I wasn’t there to investigate the death. This time I was there because I was the killer.”

The events that led to me being tagged as a killer started on a beautiful spring evening at the start of May. Tulips and daffodils were in bloom everywhere; the landscape had shed its winter mantle of white and was once again bedecked in green, a favorite hue in Wisconsin because it signals winter’s end and it’s half of the Packers’ traditional colors.

I was entering into my fifth month of pregnancy by then, and so far I’d managed to hide my condition from my friends and family, a subterfuge aided by the fact that I’m six feet tall and a well-rounded person . . . and I mean that in terms of body habitus as opposed to experience or mental health.

Hurley had been gone for just over two months, but we had talked on the phone regularly, keeping one another updated, talking about current events, and occasionally having some mind-blowing phone sex. These phone calls were kept as secret as my pregnancy, which I hadn’t yet mentioned to anyone—including Hurley—for several reasons. One reason I hadn’t told Hurley was because he was tending to something of a very emotional and personal nature, and I didn’t want to distract him from that. Another reason was because he was still recovering from the shock of discovering he already had a child he never knew about, a bright, personable fourteen-year-old girl named Emily who would be living with him when he returned. Heaping the news on him of yet another child he hadn’t planned for seemed cruel. My third reason, perhaps the strongest one of all, was my recollection of all the things Hurley had said when he’d learned about Emily, about how he never wanted to be a father, wasn’t suited for the job, and hadn’t asked for it.

The final reason was because I wanted to have time to talk with Hurley about our relationship before the added pressure of knowing there would be another child came into play. I had some doubts about Hurley’s feelings for me, and the last thing I wanted to do was force him into a proposal simply because he felt obligated.

There was never any question in my mind about whether to keep the baby. In fact, I’d fantasized numerous times in the past about what a child of ours would look like. Certain aspects of my mental image changed from time to time—hair color, overall build, gender—but the two things that stayed consistent were height and the color of the eyes. I’m fair-haired with a fair complexion and have blue eyes, and Hurley has black hair, a somewhat ruddy complexion, and blue eyes. We’re both tall, so I felt certain the child inside me would be also, and the blue eyes were a given. But Hurley is tall and lanky, whereas my body type is the sort made for keeping one’s innards warm during the long, cold Wisconsin winters. Animal lovers call it blubber on seals, whales, and walruses, but I prefer to call it insulation. I’ve managed to trim some of my insulation over the last couple of months by working out regularly at a nearby gym and altering my diet to one that is healthier for both me and my baby. But I don’t think I’ll ever be at risk for freezing to death.

While I’m determined to keep the baby regardless of what happens between me and Hurley, I also know it means I might end up as a single mother. And that means once again being fodder for the Sorenson gossip mill.

At the start of May I was looking forward to Hurley’s return, but I was also dreading it. Despite my gym efforts, I knew I couldn’t hide my pregnancy much longer. Not only was my tummy starting to show—something I might have been able to pass off as weight gain for a little while longer—something weird was going on in my hips, and I was starting to waddle like a penguin. Plus my already large bosom was popping out of every bra and blouse I owned. Even with the best sports bra money could buy, my personal trainer, Gunther, said watching me run on the treadmill was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play while on LSD. I started to ask him if he meant the players or the watchers were on LSD, but then realized it didn’t matter.

The changes in my figure weren’t the only problem. People were starting to notice other things, too. In my third month, I was plagued with terrible bouts of morning sickness that had Izzy wondering if I was still suited for the job. It didn’t help that I was assaulted by strange and often nasty smells on a regular basis, everything from formaldehyde to body parts that were long past their expiration dates. I told Izzy it was just nerves, and that I was seeing a doctor about it. He was visibly relieved when I quit having to leave both death sites and the autopsy suite to make a mad dash for the restroom to barf, although this respite only lasted about two weeks. That’s when the child inside me decided that my bladder was a punching bag. Once again Izzy became concerned about my frequent bathroom runs, and once again I assured him I was seeing a doctor about the problem, and that it was probably nothing more than a bad bladder infection. The first part of that excuse was true: I was seeing a doctor. The last part, however, was a lie. I knew it wasn’t a bladder infection that was making me pee every half hour.

I was also much more cautious about using personal protective equipment whenever I was on-site or in the autopsy room, and Izzy hadn’t missed this change in my behavior, either. Several times I saw him eyeing me with that curious, quizzical expression he often got right before he figured out some deep dark secret of mine that I had hoped to keep hidden. I passed this one off by saying that my eyes had been opened by Jonas Kriedeman’s life-threatening allergies to the chemicals we use. This was an unfortunate situation for Jonas, the person who took my position when I turned in my ill-fated resignation, but a fortunate one for me since it enabled me to get my job back. And it had worked out okay for Jonas, too, because he was able get his old job back, working as an evidence tech for the police department.

Despite my efforts to hide things, my days of keeping my condition a secret were numbered, and I knew it. I had hoped to keep it under wraps for at least another week or two, because juicy gossip seeps through our town like the scent of manure does in the early spring when the surrounding farmers fertilize their fields. In fact, manure and gossip have many things in common. The more they reek, the better people think they are. The fouler the stench, the faster people want to spread them. And both items tend to linger long after some people wish they were gone.

Because of this, both Maggie and the OB doctor I was seeing for my pregnancy were in a neighboring town nearly a half hour away. Despite the fact that HIPAA laws are supposed to prevent people from disclosing confidential medical information about the people they care for, certain things have a way of getting around. In fact, people in small towns are masters at innuendo. There is an entire subculture built around the ability to reveal information about someone without actually saying it. Facial expressions and vocal fluctuations are easily interpreted by those familiar with small-town gossip in the same way twins who make up their own language understand one another. The big reveal would go something like this: “Hey, I saw Mattie Winston at the grocery store the other day, and she had such a glow about her.” Then the speaker would arch an eyebrow and in a suggestive tone, add, “You know what I mean?” If asked later, the person who said this could truthfully deny telling anyone I was pregnant.

I knew Izzy would likely figure things out before anyone else, although his partner, Dom, and my sister, Desi, were equally probable front-runners. My mother, on the other hand, is much too self-absorbed. I’m not sure she’d pick up on the fact that I was pregnant if I was giving birth on her dining room table, an act that would probably give her a stroke, not because I was giving birth, but because of all the germs I’d be distributing across the surface of her table. My mother has issues, and to say that she is a bit of a germophobe is like saying the Pacific Ocean has a bit of water.

Getting pregnant when I did hadn’t been intentional—no one could have been more surprised than I was—and it happened the first time Hurley and I ever slept together. I was on birth control pills, but while investigating a case with ties to a local casino, I’d gotten caught up in the gambling scene and found myself making frequent trips to the place to play some blackjack or poker. Once inside the casino, day and night became indistinguishable, and I often lost all sense of time. As a result, I didn’t take my birth control pills with the regularity I should have, and apparently that, combined with a course of antibiotics I took for a sinus infection, was the perfect cocktail for conception.

I was eager for Hurley to return because I didn’t want anyone to find out about my pregnancy before he did, and I didn’t want to tell him over the phone. In order to fully gauge his reaction to the news, I needed to see his face and body language when he heard it. Would he be angry that I hadn’t told him sooner? Would he be angry that I’d let it happen in the first place? Would he feel duped, tricked into something he didn’t want? Would he feel trapped, forced to do the “right” thing?

These questions circled through my mind constantly, and when I finally learned that Hurley would be coming home, they became a major distraction. I practiced imaginary scenarios in which I delivered the news to him in a hundred different ways. I fretted over his possible responses and agonized over what the future might hold. I obsessed over how things would go, and I think that contributed to what happened. My mind was so focused on Hurley and my situation that I didn’t pay enough attention to my surroundings. Otherwise I might have realized that I was being stalked by someone who wanted to see me dead.

All my role-playing and fretting turned out to be a giant waste of time because fate wasn’t done forking with my life’s path yet. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how the moment of revelation would actually go down.

As I try to bring Dr. Naggy up to date, I realize that my original claim about things starting at the beginning of May isn’t altogether true. I think the trouble actually began back at the beginning of March. While Izzy and I were trying to investigate the case we were on at the time, Emily’s mother, Kate, left town for what was supposed to be a few days, leaving Hurley to look after Emily. Through a series of unfortunate events, Emily ended up staying alone at my cottage one evening while Hurley and I tried to carry on with an investigation that had more suspects than the Agatha Christie section of the library. While at my place, Emily got spooked when my dog, Hoover, started barking at windows and prowling restlessly around the house. When Emily saw a strange man actually peeking in through my windows at her, she got much more than spooked.

Hurley and I hurried back to my place, but whoever had been skulking around outside—and there definitely had been someone because there were footprints in the flowerbeds, and both Emily and Dom had seen the guy—was gone. Emily is a very talented artist, and she managed to draw a sketch of the man, a sketch that seemed vaguely familiar to me. When my mother saw the picture, she identified the man as my father. This left me with a mixed bag of emotions because my father had disappeared from my life just before I started kindergarten, and I haven’t heard or seen anything of him since. I have no idea why he left, and my mother claims not to know either. I suspect her obsessive personality, chronic hypochondria, and overpowering narcissism had something to do with it. Whatever it was, it made Mom mad enough that she threw away all his pictures, tossed out any personal items he had left behind, and refused to ever discuss him with me when I was growing up.

I didn’t much care what had happened between my dad and my mother. I know she is not an easy person to live with, and given that I spent most of my life waiting for the day when I could get away from her, it was easy for me to understand how she’d managed to go through four husbands so far. The thing I did care about, the thing I struggled to understand, was why my father had left me. Had I done something to earn the same disdain he had for my mother? Or was he just an irresponsible cad who’d buckled under the pressures of fatherhood? Part of me was angry at this vague memory of a man who had abandoned me at such a young age. But another part of me was curious. I wanted to see what he looked like, hear what he sounded like, and ask him a million questions.

The idea that my father might have been spying on me intrigued me. Thoughts of him lingered in my mind after that first sighting, but they quickly took a backseat to the news of my pregnancy, the possibility of Hurley leaving me, and obsessive worries about my future.

The first phone call came two days after Hurley left town. It came on my work cell phone, which did double duty as my private phone since I didn’t have a landline in the cottage. When the phone rang, I hoped it was Hurley calling, but no caller ID came up in the window. I answered it with, “Hi, this is Mattie Winston with the ME’s office,” not knowing if the call might be work-related. All I heard on the other end was the static of an open line for a few seconds and then the quiet nothingness of what I assumed was a dropped call. Thinking the caller might try back right away, I waited a few minutes with the phone in my hand. But nothing happened.

The second call came a few days after that, and the third about a week later. This time I was at work, sitting in the library space that doubled as my office, finishing up some paperwork. Once again there was no caller ID displayed, and once again I was greeted with the hiss of an open line and another noise that sounded like someone breathing into the phone on the other end. I tried a few tentative hellos to see if anyone answered, but once again the call went dead.

I happened to mention the odd calls to our office receptionist, Cass, and she shed some light on the mystery. A few days after the spying incident, she had taken a call from a man who claimed to be a lawyer from Milwaukee. He told her he needed to talk to me right away about some testimony I was scheduled to give in a case he was trying the following week. It was a ruse because there was no case—I had yet to testify in court, though Izzy was training me for it—but Cass didn’t know that. She fell for the sound of authority and urgency in the man’s voice and gave him my cell number. When I checked the office phone log to see when the pretend lawyer had called, it turned out to have come in minutes before my first mystery call.

The calls continued, and they came more or less weekly after that third one, though there didn’t seem to be a pattern with regard to day or time. While I had no proof of the caller’s true identity, in my gut I felt certain it was my father. It was the only answer that made any sense. I pondered the question of why he would call me and then just hang up, like some pranking middle-school kid yearning to play a practical joke on someone. I told myself that it was likely because he was nervous about what he had done, and worried about the sort of reception he might get. Maybe he just needed some time to work up the courage to speak, or to work up a good story to explain his neglect and abandonment. Whatever it was, I was willing to play along for a while, content to let him have as much time as he wanted.

Things came to a head on a Saturday night at the start of May when I was on call, bored, and having a major jones for some cheesecake or ice cream from one of our local restaurants, Dairy Airs. My torturer, Gunther (I know he calls himself a personal trainer, but I’m not fooled), has made me very aware of just how much exercise is needed to burn off the calories in most of my favorite foods. Granted, most of my favorite foods aren’t on anyone’s recommended list for dieters, things like macaroni and cheese (actually, almost anything with cheese; I am from Wisconsin, after all), pies, pasta dishes, and cakes . . . especially cheesecake, which combines two of my favorite foods: cheese and cake. This leaves me constantly at war with myself, my common sense and newfound awareness of nutrition battling my cravings and my body’s constant efforts to insulate itself against a Neptunian winter.

Being pregnant has made it easier for me to be good in some ways; I’m not only eating for two, I’m behaving for two. I’ve kept my OB doctor informed on a regular basis, and both she and Gunther have been monitoring my exercise and diet program closely. I’d definitely been striving for more balance in what I ate, and my efforts had garnered me a mere four-pound weight gain by the time I reached my fourth month of pregnancy. But I was also battling some horrendous food cravings, and on this particular day, the enemy won.

My gym time meant telling Gunther the Torturer that I was pregnant, but I swore him to absolute secrecy. And the fact that he knows the actual weights of most of the women in town leads me to believe he knows how to keep a secret. You’re risking your life if you ever reveal a woman’s true weight, and if the judge hearing the case happens to be a woman, odds are it will be ruled a justifiable homicide.

Much as I hated to admit it, the gym time was working. My legs and arms were stronger and more toned, my energy levels were up, and I felt better than I had in a long time. I wasn’t losing weight, but I wasn’t gaining tons either, and my OB doc assured me I was right on target. There was one interesting consequence of this newfound body image and energy combined with the hormonal surges of pregnancy: a crazy sex drive. And Hurley, my only outlet for such things at the time, was hundreds of miles away.

It occurred to me that my food cravings might be substitutes for the carnal yearnings I had. I didn’t think that was the case with my cheesecake jones on the night in question, however, because I had just spent an hour on the phone with Hurley indulging in phone sex. I tried to wait the craving out, thinking the desire might dissipate, but it not only remained persistent, it got worse. After an hour of trying to ignore mental images of every kind of cheesecake one could imagine, I gave up, blamed it on the pregnancy, and got in the car to drive to Dairy Airs.

I suppose I might have been followed other times before this—in retrospect, I think I must have been—but this was the first time I became aware of it. I’m not sure what it was that clued me in during my six-minute drive to the restaurant. Maybe it was the fact that I had just gotten another one of those mystery phone calls with a ghost on the other end. Maybe it was some hormonal version of paranoia triggered by the headlights I saw in my rearview mirror when I turned onto the road at the bottom of my driveway. Headlights alone wouldn’t necessarily have attracted my attention, but these headlights turned onto the road from a driveway, just as I had. And the driveway they exited from was right next door, the one that led up to the house I used to live in with my ex. It was being rebuilt after a disastrous fire that basically gutted the place, and when it was done, David intended to share it with his new girlfriend, our insurance agent, Patty Volker.

Given that it was after eight in the evening on a Saturday, and the construction workers weren’t typically there on the weekends, much less this late at night, I wondered if the car behind me might have been David, Patty, or both. I kept glancing at my rearview mirror, expecting to see the car turn off at some point and give me a glimpse of its make and model, but it stayed behind me. Only when I pulled into the parking lot of Dairy Airs did it veer off, and then only after hesitating, as if the driver had considered pulling into the lot but decided against it.

I did get a glimpse of the car as it pulled away, but it was too dark to tell what make and model it was, or to even be certain of the color. All I knew for sure was that it was a basic sedan, a little boxy in shape, and dark in color. I knew it wasn’t David’s car; he had recently bought himself a new BMW in a pearly gray color to replace the one that was destroyed in the fire. And I knew it wasn’t Patty’s car since she owned an SUV. I saw it the day I discovered her helping David move out of the Sorenson Motel and into her house.

Given all my rule-outs, I deduced the car either wasn’t following me and I was just bei. . .