Death by the Bay Read online

  “What happened to change your mind?”

  “Florence, my grandmother, got this dementia thing. She’d forget stuff that happened last week, but she started remembering things from the past. That’s when the story about Margaret became more real.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before, the story was pretty general, but slowly more details came out. Like the business about the man calling her Peggy and offering her candy. It was creepy and made everything seem more real. Then one day she told us to go up to the attic and look for Margaret’s crutches. That was the first time anything tangible was connected to the story. I didn’t think we’d find anything but we did.”

  “Margaret’s crutches?”

  “Somebody’s crutches. Plus a box with a pair of shoes and a couple of old dresses. I remember it really weirded us out.”

  “There’s no record of her birth.”

  “There wouldn’t be.” The chair protested again as Fadim pulled forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “From what I finally pieced together, Margaret was born at home. Nothing unusual about that, is there? But she was sickly and weak from the start. The midwife said she wouldn’t live more than a day and told my great-grandparents not to bother with calling a doctor or with registering the birth. Maybe the midwife was right, or maybe she didn’t want a dead baby associated with her name. At any rate, she was dealing with immigrant farmers who spoke little English and didn’t know any better than to listen to this woman who to them was a figure of authority. Somehow Margaret survived, and by the time my great-grandparents realized their mistake, they were afraid to do anything to try to correct it. As the story goes—or at least one version of it—when Margaret was four months old, she got polio. Again, they thought she would die, only she lived. Except now she was left crippled up pretty bad. They must have been embarrassed to have a deformed child. Worse, they probably thought they were being punished. They kept her in a back room and never sent her to school or took her to church. Whenever anyone visited, which wasn’t often, she was kept out of sight. Florence once told me that she was forbidden to mention Margaret’s name to any of her friends. She was supposed to pretend she didn’t have a sister. And then one day, Margaret was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah, you know, sent off with this doctor to be cured. Only she never came back. I’m figuring that at some point she must have died.”

  “There’s no record of her death either,” Cubiak said.

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything more than what I just told you.”

  Fadim looked at the sheriff. “You’re asking an awful lot of questions about someone who may or who may not have existed. What’s this all about?”

  “Curious. A little old lady tells me that someone is missing, and I figure it’s my job to look into the situation. No harm done, is there?”

  The CPA grunted and glanced at the clock.

  “Just one more thing.” Cubiak showed him the picture that Mrs. Fadim had given him. “She told me this was Margaret.”

  Fadim laughed. “Oh, geez. That’s a picture of my daughter, actually my adopted daughter! It’s one of her old school photos, you know, the kind the kids have taken every year. This one’s probably from the second or third grade. It’s kind of funny, but she does look like my sister Lorene at that age. Lorene was her birth mother—and yeah, the kid knows the whole story. We have pictures at home of the two of them, and if it wasn’t for the clothes and different hairstyles, you’d think they were twins. Doesn’t this sort of thing happen in families?”

  The sheriff nodded. One of the few times he would ever see his mother genuinely amused was the day he brought home his third-grade school pictures. Laughing so hard she could barely talk, she had hurried to her bedroom, leaving her confused son standing at the kitchen table. A few minutes later she came back with a shoebox full of photos. “Wait, wait,” she said as she rummaged through the collection. Finally, she pulled out a gray-tinged snapshot of a boy with straight, heavy bangs across the middle of his forehead and set it down next to Cubiak’s picture. The clothes and haircuts were different but the faces were identical. “My son. My cousin Mateusz,” she said, pointing first to one image and then to the other. Two boys, separated by a generation and an ocean but linked by genes.

  “It does,” Cubiak said. Then he added, “You said your daughter lived in the area.”

  “The prodigal child returns. Linda Fadim, now known as Linda Kiel. She took her mother’s name after our divorce. Nasty business. You know how that goes.”

  He didn’t. “I’ve met your daughter, but she introduced herself as Cody Longe,” he said.

  Fadim laughed again. “Oh, that. Her nom de plume!” he said with obvious sarcasm. “Cody Longe: intrepid journalist. Something else, ain’t she? These kids, you send them off to college, and they come back all revved up and ready to save the world. She was going to do her part by writing exposés about the evils of corporate America. All idealistic and such. I didn’t pay much attention, just let her be, figured that one day she’d wake up and realize that her idealism wasn’t going to pay the bills.”

  Nothing wrong with a little idealism, Cubiak thought. In fact, the world could probably use more of it. “You probably wanted her to follow in your footsteps,” he said.

  “Now you’re talking.” The accountant grinned. “It wouldn’t have hurt none either. What with the way things are going in this crazy business, there’s no question that having a female name on the door would attract more clients. People seem to like that now, and I would have been happy to have her. I’d have set her up right over there,” he said, pointing across the room. “Plenty of space in here for another desk.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as a numbers person.”

  “No? Well, she’s counting them now. Do you have any idea what those folks over at IPM are paying her to write that nice book about them?”

  He paused, waiting for Cubiak to respond. “No, I don’t.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars.” There was triumph in his voice. “Can’t argue with that, now can you?”

  Cubiak didn’t bother to try.

  The sheriff finally escaped after listening to a fishing story. In the jeep he texted Lisa: Get me everything written by Linda Kiel aka Cody Longe.

  He was still holding the phone when it rang.

  “Sir!” It was Lisa, sounding panicked. “Someone broke into Doctor Pardy’s office.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Yeah, she thinks it must have happened last night, but she’s there now and says she’s fine, just a little upset.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  A week prior, there had been a break-in at the drugstore in Sister Bay, but the alarm scared off the intruders before they breached the barrier to the pharmacy. Wisconsin wasn’t immune to the opioid crisis that plagued the country. The rate of opioid use had more than tripled in fifteen years to the point where overdoses killed more people than auto accidents. Addicts desperate for a fix would rob—even kill—for the next dosage. Emma Pardy was a fit and athletic woman in her late thirties, but she’d be no match for a crazed druggie. Should he have done more to warn her?

  “I’m just around the corner. Tell Doctor Pardy not to touch anything. Tell her I’m on my way.”

  9

  BREAK-IN

  Pardy paced the sidewalk outside her office. With one hand on her hip and a cell phone in the other, she walked back and forth, talking into the device and watching the cars come around the corner. When the white jeep made the turn, she ended the call and stepped to the curb.

  “I touched stuff,” she said as soon as the sheriff slid from the vehicle. “I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I just forgot. Did I mess up everything for you?”

  Cubiak slammed the door and handed her a pair of latex gloves. “I’m sure it’s fine. Don’t worry about anything. It’s human nature, wanting to protect our turf. Put these on,” he said.

  For a moment they wer
e preoccupied with the gloves.

  “How’d they get in?” he asked finally.

  “Through the front door.”

  From the parkway, the door looked untouched, but close up the sheriff saw the panel that the intruder had kicked in. The door was light blue, but several different layers of paint were visible on the edge of the dislodged piece.

  “Looks like a pretty old door,” he said as he crouched down for a better look. “Whoever did this reached in and undid the lock from the inside and then tried to maneuver the panel back into place.”

  Pardy peered over his shoulder. “Well, they did a pretty damn good job. I was on my phone when I got here, and I didn’t notice that anything was wrong until I put my key in the lock and realized the door was open,” she said.

  “What about inside?”

  “See for yourself,” she said.

  Under normal conditions, Pardy maintained a casual approach to office keeping, not too dissimilar from the sheriff’s, which meant that the room was generally on the far side of untidy. Her books were piled on the floor as well as the bookcase. Her papers were distributed between the desk and the visitor’s chair. A stack of medical journals nestled on the window ledge, next to a row of bright purple African violets. Desk drawers were rarely completely closed, and the same was true of the drawers in her three-tiered file cabinet. The scene that greeted the sheriff this day was chaotic in a different way. Papers were tossed around the room. Every drawer was open and the contents strewn about. Books were knocked off shelves and the floor piles dislodged. Under the window, clots of dirt dotted the floor where the flowerpots had been knocked off the sill.

  Cubiak waded into the mess. “Is anything missing?”

  Pardy picked up one of her daughter’s preschool paintings from the floor and glanced around. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like it, but I can’t say for sure.” She hung the painting back in position. “I don’t get it. There isn’t anything here worth stealing.”

  “Drugs?”

  She shook her head. “You mean opioids, don’t you?”

  “That and speed or antidepressants.”

  “I don’t keep pharmaceuticals here. Nothing other than aspirin and a few antacid samples from the company reps.”

  “What about equipment?”

  Pardy smirked. “My old stethoscope?”

  “I mean your laptop or camera. If someone needed money for a quick fix, they’d grab anything they thought they could sell.”

  “I had my laptop with me.” She checked the bottom drawer of her desk. “And the camera’s still here.”

  Cubiak approached the window. The steel bridge was up, and a long line of cars idled on either side of the bay. A dozen people had abandoned their vehicles and stood along the rails watching the giant red-and-black tanker that was gliding into the shipyards. Normally the big ships came in for repairs during the winter months, so the arrival of the vessel was an unusual sight this time of year. When the tanker cleared the bridge, he turned back to the room.

  “How about medical records? Someone could be trying to hide a diagnosis or get information they can use to blackmail someone else.”

  “Blackmail?” Pardy was startled by the suggestion.

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Well, it won’t happen here. All my records are online and secured.”

  “Could a hacker get into them?”

  “From what I’ve read, a good hacker can get into anything, even the Pentagon files. But if that’s the case, they wouldn’t need to do all this.” She waved a hand around the room.

  And take the chance of getting caught, Cubiak thought.

  “Whoever did this was looking for something they thought they’d find here. The questions are who and what.”

  He bent to the floor and picked up a photo.

  “I’ll have the room dusted for prints. It’s just routine and I don’t expect we’ll find much. Offhand, I’d say this was the job of an amateur or someone who wanted to make it look like that.”

  The sheriff turned over the picture. It was the photo that usually stood on the corner of the medical examiner’s desk. She kept it angled toward her chair, out of the view of her visitors. Every time the sheriff sat down, he had glimpsed an edge of the frame and the shoulder of someone in a dark blue jacket. This was his first time seeing the entire photo. It showed Pardy with her family, four smiling faces caught in a moment of sheer joy and permanently sealed behind glass. Pardy, the athletic mom, on one side and the quiet lawyer-husband with the wire-rimmed glasses and the blue jacket on the other. Caught in a bear hug between the parents were the two children, a girl with an uncanny resemblance to her dad and a boy who had his mother’s eyes and mouth. It was the kind of candid shot that captured a perfect moment in the life of a happy family. The moment when it seems nothing can ever go wrong, that every hope and dream will come true. The moment every parent retreated into at the first sign of a dark shadow. There would be one—there always was—and when it descended the plan would go awry, perhaps skittering a degree or two off base or erupting entirely in flames. Cubiak hoped that Pardy would be one of the lucky ones, that her path forward would remain more or less straight, that the detours wouldn’t amount to more than a few blips. Nothing that would completely rewrite her life.

  “You okay?” Pardy asked as she settled the photo back on her desk.

  “Yeah, just thinking.” He pulled out his phone. “Take another look around while I get someone to secure the premises.”

  Out in the hall, he called Rowe and filled him in on the few details he had.

  “You know what to do,” he said when the deputy arrived.

  Then he steered Pardy to the door. “Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  Their drinks came in tall white mugs, which they carried out to the brick patio. Pardy headed to a table in the sun where they sat facing the bay half a block away. She wound a scarf around her neck against the breeze.

  “Would you rather sit inside?” Cubiak said.

  She shook her head. “It’s nice here. I like looking at the water,” she said as she circled her hands around the warm cup.

  Cubiak poured a packet of sugar into his latte. Then another. He usually drank his coffee black, and on the rare occasions he ordered a dressed-up version he figured it may as well pass as dessert.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Pardy said as the sheriff stirred the foam into submission.

  “I’m thinking.” He laughed. “It’s the part of the job no one sees.”

  She let him be and turned her attention to the trio of sparrows that had alighted on the otherwise deserted terrace. One by one the birds edged toward their table.

  “Why break into your office now? What’s different?” Cubiak said after a few minutes.

  Pardy brushed an errant crumb toward the sparrows. “I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary for at least a month. Except the autopsy on Doctor Melk. I mean, I do them, but not that often.”

  “And the findings?”

  “Sorry, I was going to call you when all this happened. The results were well within the normal range on all counts. Melk was a fairly robust man for someone his age.”

  “That’s what Sage said.”

  “He had cardiac issues but again nothing extraordinary. And a defibrillator, or ICD, but even that’s not uncommon.”

  “Sage mentioned that as well.”

  Pardy took a small box from her canvas tote bag, opened it, and placed it on the table.

  “Did you ever see one? Nothing to it, is there?”

  “It’s no bigger than a pocket watch,” the sheriff said.

  “That’s the idea. The early models were huge and not very practical. Now they’re small enough to implant under the skin. Usually, they go just below the collarbone in the left shoulder area.” Pardy pressed a hand to her shoulder to illustrate what she meant. “There’s a lithium battery inside that powers a tiny computerized generator, which monitors the heart’s natur
al rhythm. The ICD can act either like a pacemaker, delivering low-power electrical signals to the heart, or like a defibrillator, sending stronger signals to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm. The electrical impulse travels through one of the wires, or leads, that are placed inside the heart.” She looked at the sheriff. “That’s the layman’s explanation. It’s actually a very sophisticated mechanism, an example of the very best that modern medicine has to offer.”

  Cubiak reached for the device. “Do you always walk around with one of these in your bag, in case of an emergency?”

  “Hardly. I wouldn’t know how to install one if I had to. This particular ICD is the one I removed from Doctor Melk.”

  Cubiak pulled his hand back. He had lost his squeamishness about dead bodies with his sixth autopsy, but the thought of touching the device seemed different. Intimate in a way that made him feel uncomfortable.

  “You can hold it. It’s okay.”

  “I know,” the sheriff said, but he left the device on the table.

  Pardy returned the ICD to the box and replaced the lid.

  “Why did you take it out? Shouldn’t it be left in the body?” Cubiak said.

  “Legally, I had to remove it to prevent the lithium battery from exploding in case the body is cremated.”

  “Really? Is the defibrillator worth anything?”

  “A few bucks maybe. You don’t think someone was trying to steal it?”

  “An addict can be pretty desperate.”

  “But no one knew that Doctor Melk had a cardiac device except his close colleagues. And I can’t imagine that anyone at the institute is hard up for cash. I was there yesterday dressed like this and felt like Raggedy Ann amid all the suits.”

  Cubiak nodded. “I know what you mean. What were you doing there?”

  “I was in Green Bay and thought I’d stop in to see Sage as a matter of professional courtesy, but he wasn’t in. Lots of patients, though.”