SIXTEEN

Palmer Knutson leaned back in his swivel leather chair and put his feet up on his desk. The office looked official enough, he thought, with the American flag and the State of Minnesota flag surrounding his new black steel desk. Behind his chair, on the wall between two windows, were a large map of Minnesota and a detailed map of Otter Tail County. On a special extension of his desk was the pride and joy of the Otter Tail County Law Enforcement Center, a new Macintosh computer. Palmer hated it. As his private comment on the machine, he had added a Disney screen saver. With his ten o’clock cup of coffee in his hand, he stared at Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck bouncing across the screen. He turned occasionally to watch the snow drift down outside the window.

“Maybe next year,” he thought, “with Trygve off to college, maybe Ellie and I could just sneak down to Mexico for a couple of weeks during January or February. It’s been so long since just the two of us went off together. Why, it hasn’t been since … We’ve never done it! Married almost thirty-six years and never had a trip to ourselves, unless you count a three-day honeymoon to Winnipeg! How did we let that happen?”

The sheriff was letting his mind wander because he was unconsciously avoiding thinking about the problem that had been bothering him all morning. “How am I going to bring this up to Martha Hofstead?” Pluto bounded across the screen. “I know what it is,” he thought. “It was seeing that Gary Swenson and his wife at the funeral yesterday. No kids. If they’re not off skiing in Montana, they’re lying on the beach in Hawaii. Makes me sick. We used to lie on the beach, Ellie and I, but we could never enjoy it because we never knew when a kid would start to drown. Besides, a lake beach isn’t quite the same as the sands off Diamond Head. But that’s something we should do. ’Course, I suppose I should go on a diet so I don’t look so flabby in a swimming suit. Maybe I should work out over the noon hour.” This resolve lasted for a few seconds and then his train of thought turned to what to have for lunch.

Palmer knew he should be doing something more constructive, but he didn’t feel like concentrating on another item of business until he found out about the snowmobile from the Otter Slide. It had been bothering him ever since he saw the photograph of the site of Hofstead’s death. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that he was viewing the scene of a crime.

Karl Lindbergh, of Lindbergh Snowmobile and Marine, had agreed to examine the Otter Slide Polaris. He had sold the machine in the first place, and was an expert mechanic. If anyone could discover how a snowmobile could travel fifty feet over deep snow after its rider had fallen off, it was Karl Lindbergh. Knutson didn’t think he could.

As the sheriff was considering whether or not it would hurt to eat just half of a Hershey bar with his coffee, Orly Peterson came in. Orly was dressed, as usual, in his uniform, affecting a sharp, pressed, and shiny appearance that made Palmer tired. From the eagerness in his step, Palmer could assume the gist of his report, but went through the routine. “Is Lindbergh done looking at that machine?”

“He sure is.”

“Well?”

“He says no way in hell could that machine get that far away all by itself.”

“No evidence that the throttle was stuck?”

“Nope.”

“No evidence that it could have momentum enough to get down to the lake?”

“Nope. He says it would be impossible.”

The sheriff pushed up his glasses and scratched his nose. “Okay. Well, that’s a whole new ball game, isn’t it? How much of this situation could Lindbergh guess?”

“Karl’s no dummy! He knew it was the machine Hofstead had been riding on when he was killed. He said the whole deal was fishy. I knew that he knew that we suspected murder. I just asked him to keep still about it, and said that if we heard any rumors about it we would know where they came from. By the way, he put in a claim for his time.”

“That was generous and public-spirited of him. Did you accept it?”

“Yah, under the circumstances, it was almost like buying his silence. Are we going to pay it?”

“I suppose. It’s probably money well spent, in that the whole presumption of non-accidental death hinges on it at this point. Sit down, Orly, we’ve got a crime to solve. By the way, have you figured out how the murder was committed yet?”

Orly grinned. “Yah. It’s really very obvious when you think about it. I’ve got two alternate explanations. First, the murderer has a helicopter. In the dead of night he times his approach over Long Lake, where to my knowledge no helicopter has ever been seen before, in order to intercept John Hofstead in a snowmobile totally imperceptible from any other snowmobile from a height of more than ten feet. Then he uses a long cable to hook onto the snowmobile, without Hofstead catching on, and steers him into the big loon. When Hofstead falls off, he uses the cable to tow the snowmobile onto the lake. Everything fits. But maybe I’ve got a better explanation …”

“Well,” Palmer acknowledged. “Your first explanation certainly fits the facts. What’s your second theory?”

“There are two people on the snowmobile. Hofstead is either already dead or is unconscious. The murderer takes him on the snowmobile, drives over to the loon, and carefully goes close enough so that it looks like Hofstead is knocked off. Maybe he even holds Hofstead up for one last crack on the head by the loon as he goes by just to make the fall look natural. He goes down to the lake, gets off on the clear ice, and walks away. There are no tracks in the snow other than the tracks left by the snowmobile and by Hofstead’s falling body. Anyone who came upon the scene would assume it had been an accident. All things considered, I guess I prefer the second alternative.”

Palmer was proud of his deputy. “Very good. It might have been possible, by the way, to have found a trace of footprints on the ice if anyone would have thought to look for them. But …,” the sheriff gestured to the snowy window, “not any more. No, I’m not blaming you for not looking for tracks on the bare ice. Nobody would have. In any event, what do we deduce from this?”

“What do you mean?” Orly asked, warily.

“Who done it?”

“How should I know? Do you mean to tell me you know who did it?”

“Of course not, but what conclusions can be made as to who, in general, may have done it?”

“Oh, I see. Well, it would probably have to be someone who had some experience with snowmobiles. Not that it takes a long time to learn how to operate one, but still, one would have to at least know how to start and stop the machine.”

“Granted. Go on.”

“It would probably have to be someone of some strength. To be sure, Hofstead was not a large man, but you would need someone who could at least haul a body aboard a snowmobile. Actually, I suppose any adult person could just about do that, but it would probably rule out children or the decrepit elderly.”

“Okay. Let’s rule them out. What else?”

“I suppose we can start talking about motives and such. The victim would almost certainly have to know the murderer. The murderer would also need to have the opportunity, of course.”

“Ah. Now you’re getting it. How does the method at least point to a rather limited circle of suspects?”

“I see. Sure. If the murderer gets off the snowmobile, where does he go? He would almost certainly have got on the sled at the Otter Slide, so he would almost certainly walk back there across the ice. There is always the possibility that an outsider came to the resort in the middle of the night and lured Hofstead away and murdered him, but it seems logical to assume that the murderer is one of the people who spent the night at the resort.”

“Excellent. And what else do we know about this murderer?”

“I was thinking about that last night,” Orly responded, with a trace of determination in his voice, “and the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that Lindbergh would find nothing wrong with that sled this morning. I reasoned that if it were murder, it was probably not done under the loon. Would this make it premeditated? Not necessarily, it could still have been a spontaneous action. But if a blow to the head were spontaneous, and if the blow did not kill him, the trip to the loon, where an unconscious man would certainly freeze to death, was a vicious act by a potentially dangerous person. Agree?”

“Yes,” Palmer nodded gravely, “I think I do.”

“Therefore,” and at this Orly rather squinted up at Palmer in an appeal for approval. “Therefore, I think we should let everyone assume as long as possible that this has been ruled an accidental death. Anybody who is capable of killing in this manner is capable of killing again. Furthermore, we may get more genuine results investigating this if we let people assume we are just looking into an accident. The murderer may become uneasy about what he would consider undue attention, but everyone else may talk more freely than if they think murder was involved.”

“My thoughts exactly. How do you think we should proceed?”

Orly was stunned. The sheriff had never been so solicitous of his opinion. Perhaps he was actually starting to gain the sheriff’s respect. He remembered uneasily how he had neatly wrapped up another murder case—means, motive, opportunity—and had proudly presented his findings to the sheriff. Knutson had professed himself to be impressed by the reasoning but had quickly proceeded to totally absolve Peterson’s suspect and reveal the true murderer. That episode had left the deputy with a desperate wish to be right when he opened his mouth. This time, he said, “I suppose the first thing to do would be to hold an autopsy. That could no doubt tell us if he was killed outright or if he died of freezing. It could also tell us whether he was killed while wearing his helmet or if that was added later. If the latter occurred he was almost certainly killed at another location. Finally, of course, it could give us a firm ground for proceeding with our investigations.”

“And then?”

“Well, obviously we have to inform the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in a case like this. Those boys don’t mind coming up from St. Paul in the summer, but I don’t know how they’ll like a winter assignment. I imagine one of the first things they will do is to re-examine the machine and test for fingerprints. There aren’t apt to be many prints on it, since everybody would be wearing mittens, but you never know. That will mean getting prints from the corpse and from everybody else who might have touched the machine—if they find any prints, that is.”

“And then?”

“We have to find out more about the victim. Who is his lawyer? What’s in his will? We have to answer the ultimate question of who benefits from the victim’s death. It looks like we have a general idea of the means, a fairly narrow list of people who might have had the opportunity, and so we need to find a motive.”

“Yup, that’s exactly it!” Palmer said as he slapped the table. “I tell you, Orly. You’ve got a future in this business. Unfortunately, it’s first things first. I have been sitting here for the last hour wondering how I should approach Mrs. Hofstead. ‘You know that husband of yours we had a funeral for yesterday? Well, me and the boys would like to cut him open and see how he bought the farm.’ There is just no good way to do this.”

Orly had been basking in the praise of the sheriff like a puppy who had just brought in the newspaper. Unfortunately, he ruined the moment by blurting out, “Are we going to have to dig him up?”

“What?”

“Hofstead. Didn’t they bury him?”

“No, they don’t do that in the middle of winter anymore. They hold the whole service and they sort of pretend they bury the body. The funeral home takes care of everything and they have a simple interment when the frost is out of the ground.”

“No kidding. How do they store them? Burrow a hole in a snowdrift?”

“You know, I don’t think I’m going to take you along when I have to go talk to Mrs. Hofstead.”

“Good.”

“No, on second thought, that’s just what I’m going to do. I spoke to her briefly at the funeral and she thanked me for the way the department had handled things. Since you did everything, she was referring to you when she mentioned tact and understanding. For reasons best known to herself, she formed a favorable impression of you. I think you should be there.”

“She said that? What a nice lady! You know, I really want to get the man who killed her husband.”

“What makes you assume it was a man?”

“Well, everything we’ve said, I mean, strong, able to drive a snowmobile, you know, it would seem to be a man, wouldn’t it.”

“Orly, Orly, Orly. You were doing so well. Think about it. Mrs. Hofstead is not much smaller than her husband. They had ridden together on snowmobiles for years. Right there you’ve got your means and opportunity. And in any marriage there are times when motive rears its ugly head.”

Orly could not help an impertinent, “Speaking from experience?”

The sheriff did not take undue offense, and merely replied with a patronizing, “Ah, you unmarried young pup. You know so little. Just wait until you are playing bridge with another couple and your wife leads with the wrong suit. Just wait until your wife leaves the garage door open and you have to go out and close it and you slip on the ice. Just wait until she has thrown away your old sweatshirt just because it had a little hole in it. It’s a wonder any of us survive.”

“But you can’t seriously think Mrs. Hofstead killed her husband!”

“No, I don’t think she did. In fact I’m reasonably sure she didn’t. But I’ve been wrong on such things before. You just can’t assume. In fact, it’s partly because I like Mrs. Hofstead that I want to find the person who killed her husband. He was a decent man who made our community a better place. Murder shouldn’t happen in our county. It happens in less blessed places. This isn’t Texas or Florida, it’s Minnesota, for Pete’s sake! Murder is just so tasteless!”

Orly found that he was increasingly able to see the less public side of Sheriff Knutson. Here was a man who deeply cared about society and worried about how crime and violence upset what he considered to be the natural order. Increasingly, he was able to see in the sheriff a concern that ran deeper than the day-to-day chores of keeping the peace. He was a reformer, an optimist who was depressed when the core of his well-behaved Minnesotans let him down and acted like other people. Otter Tail County was not paradise, but it was closer to Eden than anyplace else, and Knutson wanted to keep it that way. He found himself nodding and repeating, “tasteless!”

“So,” Palmer said, and straightened up in his chair, “I’ll call Mrs. Hofstead to see if we can talk to her. Then I’ll call the BCA and see when they can come up. Meanwhile, make sure that snowmobile is secure and call Jimmy Clark and ask him to set up an autopsy. If Mrs. Hofstead can see us this afternoon, I’d like to talk to her as soon as possible, so get a car ready and check back with me in half an hour. Oh, and start a file—names, addresses, phone numbers, and so forth—on everybody who was at the resort the night of the murder.”