Frozen Stiff

different than having surgery at the hospital,” I say, knowing it’s a lie. While an autopsy is a professional and scientific process, there is nothing even remotely dignified about flaying someone open, removing all their organs, and turning their face inside out so you can saw part of their skull off and pop their brain out.

She shudders and hugs herself. “I suppose if you have to, you have to,” she says. “Is this going to delay the funeral arrangements?”

“It shouldn’t. We’ll do the autopsy tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have some answers by the afternoon. Most likely his body will be released the next day. Have you contacted a funeral home yet?”

She shakes her head. “No, but I think Dad had some kind of preburial plan with the Johnson Funeral Home. They did my mom when she died.”

I jot down the name of the funeral home and then say, “There’s one other thing I’d like to ask you. I want to go by your dad’s house and take a look at the car and the garage. I’d like to do that tonight, if it’s okay with you.”

She shrugs, blows her nose in what’s left of her tissue, and then digs in her purse. She hands me a single key on its own key ring and says, “There’s a carriage-style light mounted next to the front door and the top of it opens so you can change the bulb. Dad usually kept a key taped to the inside of the lid. But take this one in case it’s not there. The house was still open when I left and I don’t know if the cops locked the place up when they were done. I don’t want to go back there tonight.”

“I’ll make sure it’s locked,” I tell her. “How can I reach you later?”

She gives me her home address and her cell phone number, which I write down. In exchange, I hand her a card for the ME’s office and tell her we’ll be in touch, but that she can call anytime she wants to.

I leave her in the chapel and head back down to the ER, calling Izzy on my cell phone as I go. When he answers I fill him in on what I’ve discovered so far.

“So I’m thinking this might be a suicide and the cause of death could be carbon monoxide poisoning,” I conclude. “I’m going to go by his house and check out the scene tonight but I’m thinking we’re going to have to post him.”

“I agree,” Izzy says. “That’s an excellent catch. Do you need me to come in and help you with anything tonight?”

“No, I think I’ll be fine. I’ll call Johnson Funeral Home and have them transport the body, then I’ll check out Minniver’s house.”

“Holler at me if you need any help.”

“Thanks, Izzy.” I disconnect the call and make another one to the funeral home. They give me an ETA of twenty minutes, so I settle back in at the ER desk and look at Mr. Minniver’s chart again so I can get his home address.

That’s when I get my second big shock of the day.

Chapter 8

I’m stunned to discover that Mr. Minniver’s house is right behind Hurley’s. When I look at the times on Minniver’s chart, I realize that he was found and brought to the hospital just before I arrived at Hurley’s place for dinner.

I make a call to the police station and it’s answered by Heidi Cronen, the dispatcher on duty. “Hey, Mattie, what’s up?” she asks.

“I need to take a look inside the house of Harold Minniver, the man who was found dead in his car earlier this evening. Are any of the officers still there?”

“Hold on, let me check.” She puts me on hold for half a minute, then comes back on and says, “They’ve already locked the place up.”

“I have a key,” I tell her. “But I’d like to have one of the officers who was on scene meet me there and go through the place with me.”

She puts me on hold for another thirty seconds. “Ron Colbert said he can meet you there in five if you want,” she says when she comes back on.

“I need to get Minniver’s body back to the morgue first. Can you tell him to meet me there in an hour instead?”

“Will do.”

I hang up and start filling out all the paperwork necessary for processing Minniver’s body but I’m quickly distracted. The ER is not an easy place to focus at times, and tonight proves no exception. Within minutes two ambulances pull up and the ER staff starts jockeying beds, trying to find a place to put the latest victims. As the EMTs wheel their respective patients into the main part of the ER, two things become apparent: the victims are hunters, and they are royally pissed off at one another. The first fact is obvious from their dress. Both men are wearing insulated bib overalls made out of a camouflage fabric. I’m guessing hunters wear this get-up so the deer won’t see them as easily, but over the top of the camouflage both men are wearing vests and earflap hats— standard hunting fare—done in a blaze orange so bright it’s likely visible from Mars. Despite this precaution, every year a couple of hunters are shot—supposedly by mistake—because some yahoo thinks deer have blaze-orange fur.

Here in Wisconsin we’ve learned to adapt to this idiocy because hunting is as much a rite of passage as growing pubic hair. In fact, I know a hunter or two who thinks the act of killing an innocent animal is what gives you pubic hair. During deer hunting season the air is filled with the sound of gunshots, the roads are riddled with carcasses of fleeing, frightened deer, and girlfriends and housewives everywhere are holding hunting widow parties—all-female get-togethers that often involve recipe sharing, chick-flick marathons, and frank discussions of everything from sex to what to pack in the kids’ school lunches. Deer hunting season is as much of a holiday as Thanksgiving and since the two often overlap, it’s not unusual to see people taking the entire last half of November off from their jobs, or schools that provide “teacher days” because they know many of their students will be missing from class.

That the two hunters entering the ER are pissed at one another is obvious because they are trading obscenities. The red flush in their cheeks tells me their blood pressures are reaching Mt. Vesuvius levels as torrents of their alcohol-laden breath waft through the air, quickly permeating the entire department.

The first guy, who is heavyset, bearded, and has a blood-soaked dressing wrapped around his right foot, is screaming and wagging a finger at the second man. “You shot me, you frigging asshole! You tried to kill me and don’t you deny it. I knew you were pissed about that stock tip I gave you. I just knew it.”

The second man, who is lean, tall, and has a neck like a giraffe, is grimacing in pain. His left leg is splinted from foot to hip and I can see dressings covering a large protuberance in his lower leg—an open tib-fib fracture. He glares back at the other man, and through gritted teeth says, “It was an accident, you fucking moron.”

“The hell it was,” grumbles the first guy. “You tried to kill me!” Seeing that he now has a larger, newer audience, he raises his voice several decibels, points to Giraffe Guy, and yells, “This fucker tried to kill me!”

Several state troopers have arrived with this entourage and I see one of them roll his eyes and shake his head. After a quick game of musical beds, the two hunters are finally ensconced in their separate rooms, each with a trooper close by to babysit. The eye-rolling trooper, a twenty-plus-year veteran named Hans Volger, enters the nurse’s station and drops into a chair with an exhausted sigh.

“Rough night?” I ask him.

“Ya, you betcha,” he says, tagging himself as a hardcore Norwegian. “Always is during hunting season. And these two drunken yahoos take the cake. Get this . . . the tall guy decided he didn’t want to risk scaring off the deer by climbing down from his tree stand to take a dump. So what does he do? He drops his drawers, squats over the edge of the stand with his bare ass in the breeze, and tries to squeeze one out. Except the idiot lost his balance, fell ass backward, and broke his leg. Unfortunately he grabbed at his rifle when he felt himself falling, and he accidentally fired off a shot as he went down. The bullet went through the floor of another tree stand and hit the second guy in the foot.” He shakes his head. “I’ll bet all the deer out there are still laughing.”

My funeral home transport arrives and I see that it’s the twin sisters from Johnson’s: Cassandra and Katherine, who go by the nicknames Cass and Kit. Their parents, who established the funeral home over thirty years