The forest green SUV had been pushed into the ditch. Purposely. It hadn’t slid off the icy gravel road while traveling. Though, certainly, the roads were treacherous this bright, sunny morning. Ice glinted like a bejeweled crust under the cruel sunshine. Last night’s blizzard conditions had kept every smart person inside and safe in their homes. Save this one. But the vehicle couldn’t have been in the ditch for long. The tire tracks leading into the ditch were crisp, only lightly covered with a dusting of snow blown by the wind.
Jason stretched his gaze along the road and spied another set of tracks. Faint, but again, snow had drifted slightly to emboss the tire treads. And they were different than those of the ditched vehicle.
“You see that?” he said to Alex, who stood waiting for Jason outside the patrol car.
“Yep. Another vehicle either forced this one in the ditch, or someone stopped to help but left.”
“I’m ruling out help,” Jason decided. If it had been anyone from the town, they would have called dispatch to alert him to the situation. “You run a plate check?”
“Yes. Vehicle belongs to Carol Bradley. She reported it missing from her garage—door open, keys hanging on the key holder inside the garage—forty-five minutes ago.”
“Oh, Carol,” Jason muttered. “You were just asking for that one. So the perp stole a vehicle that was virtually handed to him in the first place.”
Stepping carefully on the icy tarmac, Jason inspected the exterior of the vehicle. Grayish-white dust from the salted roads shaded the green paint. Because of the angle the truck sat at, the passenger’s side hugging the ditch was buried up to the bottom of the side windows. The engine had been running when Alex had arrived on the scene, and he’d shut it off. And...the back right wheel of the car had sunk into the ditch, allowing snow to cover the exhaust pipe.
“Not good,” he muttered. The exhaust had nowhere to go but inside the vehicle.
“Carbon monoxide?” Alex asked from where he was walking to determine that the only footprints were boot marks from him and Jason.
“Looks like it,” Jason called.
“Someone could have run him off the road. Guy got knocked out. The other car backed up and drove off. This guy never woke up,” Alex conjectured.
“We’ll see.”
With a lunge, Jason stepped up onto the running board edging the driver’s side of the truck. He peered inside and found exactly as expected. The driver, Herve Charley, was immobile, buckled in, his jaw slack. Alex reported that he’d initially opened the door and shaken the man but had quickly realized he was dead, so then he’d stepped back so as not to contaminate the scene.
Jason stepped down and opened the door, having to push it with some strength to fight against the angle at which the vehicle was tilted. Sliding between the door and the car frame, he leaned in and inspected the guy’s face. He didn’t notice any bruising on the forehead or temple areas where a sudden slam of the brakes might have sent him flying forward into the windshield. And to know if his chest had hit the steering wheel hard would require the medical examiner.
Charley’s eyes were closed. His skin was still pink, but his lips were bluing. Carbon-monoxide poisoning did not tend to blue the skin, and, if Jason recalled a few previous experiences with the like, the lips turned bright red. Certainly, the cold could be a factor in the odd skin color. A heater didn’t do a person much good when the wind whipped the icy air through and about the steel vehicle.
He wouldn’t touch the body without gloves. The medical examiner would chastise him for that. No visible weapons. No pistol, no knife. He couldn’t have purposely parked at such a strange angle, and halfway in the ditch. Maybe he had slid a ways and Jason had read the tracks incorrectly. Because why would someone run him into the ditch? Who knew this man was in Frost Falls? Had he started a fight with someone?
Didn’t make sense. He’d escaped from jail. Charley should have been lying low or long gone from the town by now.
He scanned the truck’s interior. On the passenger seat sat a plastic grocery bag. When Jason lifted the edge, he spied inside a half-full plastic bottle of a bright blue energy drink and an opened pack of salted beef sticks.
Turning the key in the ignition to get power but not spin the engine, Jason listened to the radio station. It was the Duluth top hits channel that played current songs all the way back to the ’60s and the ’70s. He checked the gas gauge. Half-full. No other warning lights.
Had Charley been staking out Yvette? He was parked a mile out on the east road, which led to the Birch Bower cabin. Nothing else out this way, save the rental cabin. But what had stopped him from proceeding to the cabin? The road, while slick, was not drifted over. Easily drivable at a slow speed. Had he seen Jason head out this way on the snowmobile earlier in the day? Waiting for him to leave? Possible.
But the additional set of tire tracks bothered Jason. They had stopped right behind the SUV. No boot tracks, though. Whoever had driven the other car had not gotten out. Alex’s guess about another vehicle pushing this one into the ditch, then taking off, could be right on.
Switching off the ignition, Jason stepped out of the truck as Elaine pulled up in the medical examiner’s van. Must be her turn to drive the vehicle. The county shared one van between the four offices in the Boundary Waters area.
“The victim did not get out of the vehicle,” Alex reported. With a gesture toward the SUV, he added, “He’s wearing those cowboy boots. I checked. No tracks outside to match. Just our boots. Although, with the ice and drifting, even if he had gotten out, those tracks would have been dusted away.”
“Thanks, Alex.” Jason tugged at his skullcap to cover the tops of his ears. He wandered to the rear of the vehicle and inspected the chrome bumper. Sure enough, a sharp dent crimped the end. “Someone pushed him into the ditch. But I feel like he might have been parked here.”
“We got a vigilante going after the bad guy?” Alex asked.
“No one knows about our resident bad guy,” Jason said.
Except Yvette. But he’d been with her all night. And while Bay and Marjorie knew to keep a tight lid on police business, he could assume the three women he’d questioned about Yvette Pearson’s death had already released that information into the gossip grapevine.
He waved as the medical examiner approached. “Elaine! You made it.”
Already snapping on black latex gloves, Elaine executed careful steps over the icy road. “I’m a hardy sort, you know that, Cash. Icy roads don’t intimidate me.” With a nod to Alex, she stomped across the snowpack to peek inside the cab. “Sitting here overnight?”
“Alex found him on morning rounds. He always checks on the Enerson couple down the road.”
“That couple must be pushing a hundred, the both of them,” Elaine said.
“Einer turned a hundred and one last week,” Alex called as he wandered back to the patrol car, most likely to retrieve a thermos of coffee.
Jason wished he’d consumed some coffee before coming here. He’d even suffer the bitter, dark stuff Alex tilted down like an addict. He’d pulled up to his house on the snowmobile, Yvette behind him. Handing Yvette the key to the front door, he’d told her to make herself at home. The last time he’d given a woman free rein in his home, she’d put pink pillows on his couch and had suggested he get a juicer. All he could do was shiver at that memory.
Elaine put up a boot on the SUV’s side runner, and Jason grabbed her elbow to steady her while also holding the car door open with his shoulder.
“Thanks, Cash. You think it was carbon monoxide?”
“I do. But there’s damage to the back bumper and additional tire treads. Someone nudged the vehicle into the ditch.”
“Interesting,” she muttered out from inside the cab.
While waiting for Elaine’s initial inspection of the deceased, Jason watched Alex tilt back the thermos. The one thing Jason never missed was his morning coffee. But this morning had been unusual in that he’d woken snuggled beside a beautiful woman. Both of them fully clothed.
Something wrong with that picture.
On the other hand, he never expected anything from a woman unless they had communicated clear signals to those expectations. It had been sweet to find Yvette’s warm body curled up against him this morning. Shared body heat on a stormy winter night. Nothing at all wrong with that.
But what did it mean for their future? Why was he even thinking future about the woman? Was it because she was the first woman he’d met in a long time who hit all his this feels right buttons? Or was he desperate and lucky to find a beautiful woman, about his age, in the same vicinity as he was?
No, it wasn’t that. She was smart, courageous and in need of his protection. And the courageous part appealed to him. A woman who wasn’t afraid to defend herself and could take his garbage? Could he get more, please?
A future would be great. Even if that only entailed the two of them getting to know one another better and doing more than sharing a snuggle. An official date would be a great start.
Elaine jumped down and tugged off her gloves then stuffed them in her left pocket. From her right pocket, she pulled out thermal gloves and slid them on. “No telltale cyanosis. Which means it wasn’t carbon monoxide. Though it may have lulled the deceased a bit.”
“What’s cyanosis?”
“Skin turning blue.”
“Right. I noticed that, but, well...” Jason peered inside the cab. The body sure looked as if it had suffered from inhalation of a poisonous substance. He adjusted his stance, pressing back the door with his shoulder, but also fighting the whipping wind that suddenly decided to sweep the snow up and into their faces. “What did you see, Elaine?”
“Did you notice the fine crystal on his collar? And the smell of his breath?”
“I didn’t get that cozy with the guy.”
She smirked. “That’s why I get paid the medium bucks. Cyanide poisoning is my initial assessment. I can only confirm with lab tests. But I don’t think he took his own life. Which may coincide with the dented bumper and extra vehicle tracks. Someone might have wanted to ensure he was dead.”
“I’ll call Ryan Bay and have him come out to help us process the scene,” Jason said. “Things will go much faster. Then we can all get back to a warm office.”
“Bay didn’t stay in Frost Falls? Didn’t you offer him a cell to camp out in?”
“I’m not exactly sure where he stayed last night. He’s been cozying up to Marjorie’s husband for dumplings a few nights now. Might have earned himself a bed there.” Jason tugged out his cell phone.
“Oh, those dumplings.” Elaine nodded her head appreciatively.
Jason stepped aside and let the door close with a good push from the wind. He scanned the ground again. His own boot tracks were barely visible for the icy surface, and he followed Elaine’s smaller tracks to the back of the vehicle where she stood. The drifting snow covered them quickly.
The BCA agent’s phone carried over to messages, so Jason told him where to meet him, then tucked away the phone in a pocket.
He stepped up beside Elaine, who had turned her back to the wind. She looked out over the snow-packed field, which gleamed with sunshine. “So now we’ve got a hit man’s killer running around town?”
“This case is starting to get very interesting,” Elaine said. “Mystery. Thrills. Murder. I gotta say it does add some excitement to the usual natural-causes pickups. These parts, the elderly tend to drop like flies. But you see one death because of age or cancer...” She shrugged. “You’ve seen them all.”
“Not sure I should be glad to oblige your need for excitement, Elaine.”
She smirked at him. “You love it, too, Cash. I can see that glint in your eye.”
He crooked a brow and looked down at her. “My eyes don’t glint.”
“Yeah? Tell that to your Frenchwoman.”
“My French—what?”
She chuckled softly. “Marjorie told me.”
Jason shook his head. “The gossip in this town.”
“The whole county, Cash. The whole county. When’s Bay going to arrive?”
“His phone went to message.”
“Could be a while. I’ll get the gurney. You guys help me bag and load up the body.”
“Will do.” Jason headed toward the back of Elaine’s vehicle to get out the equipment they’d need.
If the man in the green SUV had been sent to kill Yvette, then why would someone take him out? Had a cleanup been dispatched to take out the inept hit man? Possible. And probable. Anything goes when the mafia was involved. And, very possibly, Interpol.
Uff da. This was getting deeper than the snow.