Books by Annelise Ryan
SCARED STIFF
WORKING STIFF
FROZEN STIFF
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
Frozen Stiff
Annelise Ryan
Acknowledgments
As always, a hearty thanks to my editor, Peter Senftleben, and my agent, Jamie Brenner, for your continued support and faith in me. I’m truly grateful to have you on my team. And hugs to my family and friends . . . I couldn’t do it without your love and support.
Finally, a warm thanks to all the readers who have gotten to know Mattie and the other denizens of Sorenson, particularly those of you who have taken the time to write to me. Know that you are appreciated.
Chapter 1
Death is never pretty and this one is no exception. But the victim, whose face is largely untouched by the violence that killed her, is exceptionally beautiful: a tiny, well-shaped nose, huge blue eyes, auburn hair, pouty lips, and porcelain skin with nary a blemish. She falls short of perfection however, because her lips have a deep bluish tinge to them and much of that pale coloring comes from a lack of circulation. People tend to change colors once they’re dead, especially when they’re lying on top of snow like this woman is.
I hang around dead people a lot these days. My name is Mattie Winston and I work as a deputy coroner here in the small Wisconsin town of Sorenson. I’ve lived here all my life and before my current job I worked in the local hospital: five years as an ER nurse and seven in the OR. As a result, I know a goodly portion of the people who live in town, but this woman’s face is unfamiliar to me. I’m certain I’d remember her if I’d ever seen her before because she is striking, even in death. This makes me suspect she’s an out-of-towner, and the fact that Junior Feller—one of the two uniformed cops standing beside me and a Sorenson lifer like me—doesn’t recognize her affirms this belief. I suppose it’s possible our victim is simply new to the area, but I doubt it. If a woman this beautiful had moved to town it would have hit the gossip mill in record time and worried wives would be out in force with their husbands, keeping a watchful eye. Plus the victim isn’t dressed like the average Sorensonian. Her tiny, petite frame is covered with knit black slacks, a form-fitting, lime-green jacket, and high-heeled leather boots. The clothes look like impractical, expensive, designer duds, whereas most of the locals tend to favor clodhopper boots, down-filled coats, furry trapper hats with earflaps, and layers of long underwear that make it look like the town is populated by descendants of the Michelin Man.
“I’d venture to say the cause of death is obvious,” says Ron Colbert, the second uniformed cop. He makes this pronouncement with great authority, as if it’s some brilliant investigative deduction despite the fact that we can all see a knife buried in the left side of the victim’s chest. Colbert is new on the force—I met him for the first time a few weeks ago at the scene of another homicide—and like most rookies, he seems both eager and naive, though my assumption of naivete may be due to the fact that he looks like he’s twelve years old thanks to his small stature and a zit in the middle of his forehead that looks like a third eye. It was Colbert who discovered the body as he was driving along the road: the bright splash of green on top of the fresh, white snow caught his attention. No doubt it was a bit of a rush for him since the most exciting calls our cops typically get are for teenaged marauders who are out cow tipping and snipe hunting, or an illegally parked tractor at one of the town’s bars.
Deaths of any sort aren’t all that common here in Sorenson—Wisconsinites tend to be a hardy bunch as our winters weaned out the weak gene pool decades ago. Homicides are even rarer, and as such they are often the highlight of a cop’s career. Colbert must feel as if he hit the jackpot by running across two of them in a matter of weeks, so his eagerness is easy to understand.
I shift my focus from the corpse to take in my surroundings. The body is lying on the edge of a large, harvested cornfield blanketed with six inches of fresh snow that fell during the night. The morning sun glistens on the snow’s surface, making it sparkle like a bed of diamonds. It’s an isolated spot; there are fields all around us, the nearest house is half a mile away, and the road beside the body is hardly a main thoroughfare though the plows have already been through. All in all it combines to make for a picturesque setting. Given that it’s the Friday before Thanksgiving, this slice of pastoral serenity triggers thoughts of traveling o’er the fields to Grandmother’s house . . . until I remember the corpsicle.
I look back at the body site and note how clumps of snow cast aside by the plow have rolled down the shoulder’s edge and into the bordering field, settling atop the small drifts like little snowman turds. The clumps are all around us, but there are none on the body. That, along with the blood-smeared path punched through the snowbank piled up on the shoulder, tells me our victim was dumped here after the plow came through.
I say so and Izzy, who is busy taking pictures of the scene, nods his agreement.
Izzy, whose full name is Izthak Rybarceski, is the county Medical Examiner as well as my boss, my friend, my neighbor, my landlord, and the anti-me. He is barely five feet tall with dark skin and hair—most of which circles his balding head like a friar fringe—whereas I clock in at six feet, and my fair skin, blond hair, and size twelve feet earned me the nickname Yeti in high school. Our only commonalities are a shared fondness for men, our tendency to grow insulation all year long like bears readying for hibernation, and our knowledge of internal anatomy.
I’ve only been at this job since early October. Izzy offered it to me a couple of months after I caught one of my hospital coworkers in an OR having a face-to-face meeting with a surgeon’s one-eyed trouser snake. Unfortunately that surgeon was my husband, David Winston. In order to escape the painful reminders and curious stares, I fled both my job and my marriage. Izzy was kind enough to let me stay in the small cottage he has behind his house and it provided me with somewhere to hide while I licked my wounds. My new home is charming and cozy, and I’m forever grateful to Izzy for allowing me to move into it. But because Izzy has been my neighbor for several years, the cottage does have one major drawback: it’s a stone’s throw away from my marital home.
After a couple of months of isolation and self-pity, I emerged in need of money and a job. Given that the next nearest hospital is over an hour away and my main talent is my ability to look at blood and guts without puking or fainting, I feared I’d end up dressed in a trash-bag overcoat living under a bridge, or worse . . . with my mother. But Izzy rescued me once again by offering me a job as his assistant and nowadays I’m in the business of dissecting lives in every sense of the word.
I find my new career highly interesting on many levels, not the least of which is Steve Hurley, the primary homicide detective with the Sorenson Police Department. Unfortunately, I can’t help but notice that he’s the one
