As Ellory approached, he followed my gaze. “Here comes the storm.”
It made me think of Tessa again.
A slight tickle of concern.
“Listen, we need to get some divers down here as soon as possible.”
“I told you yesterday, there’s no one around here who dives.”
“What about Ashland? That’s less than an hour and a half away. With all the shipwrecks in Lake Superior there’ll be plenty of cold-water divers up there.”
A question rolled through my mind: If the Navy is so interested in this, why haven’t they sent a SEAL team over to the area for body recovery?
I had no answers.
He was quiet.
I waited. “Right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s get a couple of them down here before the storm hits, see if we can recover the snowmobile or the body of the driver.”
My phone wobbled in my pocket and I checked the screen. A text from Amber-she and Sean would be able to meet at the Northwoods Supper Club just down the road from Tomahawk Lake. “11?” she’d typed.
While Ellory assigned one of the officers beside him to radio the sheriff’s department in Ashland, I texted Amber that later-noon or 1:00-would be better.
Jake and the remaining officers went to shore to look over the Ski-Doo’s tracks before they reached the ice. I walked beside the ones leading toward the open water, Ellory beside me.
I made sure neither of us disturbed the boot sole impressions paralleling the snowmobile tracks.
“Sheriff still down with the flu?” I asked him.
“Yup.”
The uniformity of the snow clods kicked up by the snowmobile’s treads told me that whoever drove the snowmobile had done so at a steady speed. No accelerating or decelerating. No swerving.
If this were an accident, he would’ve swerved to avoid it.
But if it were suicide, wouldn’t he have accelerated toward the water?
When someone commits suicide by cutting her wrists she’ll often slice her skin several times, trying to get up enough nerve to drive the blade deep enough to kill herself. Law enforcement and medical personnel refer to those wounds as hesitation marks.
Conversely, when the decision has been made, she’ll draw the blade quickly, deeply, often in an uncontrolled manner.
Despite the low number of nerve endings in the flexor surface of the wrist, almost no one draws the blade steadily and slowly across the skin. If it appears she has, it’s a good indication that it wasn’t a suicide.
When people see pain or death coming, they either swerve to avoid it or despairingly accelerate into it. In a sense, almost no one drives uniformly toward the open water.
It was yet another indication that this wasn’t a suicide.
Or a haphazard accid “You’re famous,” Ellory said, jarring me from my thoughts.
“What?”
“I looked you up. Consulted all over the world. Two books. Articles in more than a dozen professional journals.”
He looked me up?
I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Thank you,” I said awkwardly.
“I’m impressed.” But he sounded faintly sarcastic rather than dazzled. “I didn’t know who you were.”
I ignored his comment. “The only thing we need to do right now is make some headway on this case before that storm hits.”
We’d made it only a few more steps when he said, “So, geospatial. What is that exactly?”
Though I wasn’t really excited about giving a briefing at the moment, I guessed that this was as good a time as any to talk him through it. “Basically, I study the temporal and spatial patterns of serial offenses and then work backward to find the most likely location of the offender’s home base.”
He stared at me blankly. “Okay.”
I paused and he stopped beside me. We were twenty meters from the water.
“We take everything we know about a crime-time of the offense, location of the bodies, likely offender characteristics and patterns of behavior, add in geographic factors such as urban zoning, population distribution, roadways, topographic features, and traffic patterns as well as weather conditions at the time of the crime, and then compare that data to the way human beings spatially understand their surroundings and form mental maps of their area of familiarity. Then, by applying what we call journey-to-crime models, I’m able to narrow down the region from which the offender most likely left when he initiated the crimes.”
“So you need a bunch of crimes, then; I mean, to make this work.”
Very astute. “That’s true,” I said. “The more locations I have to work with, the more accurate I can be.”
We started for the water again.
“But here you only have the house and the lake. Two locations.” I sensed more than a slight challenge in his words.
“Two locations, yes. That we know of,” I agreed, but I was no longer concerned about his understanding of geospatial investigation because I saw a glimmer of something round wavering in the water. Then it disappeared. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
It reappeared in the waves again. A black, shining circle about the size of a basketball. I jogged toward the break in the ice. Five meters from the water I realized that getting any closer could be a bad idea and Yes.
I stopped. It was a snowmobile helmet bobbing in the waves.
“Ellory, get that ladder out here. Now.”
“But-”
“Go.”
He finally saw the helmet, hesitated for a moment, then hurried toward shore.
I tried to reassure myself that laying the ladder on the ice would distribute my weight over a larger surface area, just as it does in mountaineering when you’re crossing crevasses. The weight distribution would reduce the chances of the ice cracking.
But it still might.
I shook the thought.
It seemed odd that the helmet should resurface today.
Of course, it might have been planted there earlier this morning, but regardless of when the helmet entered the water, the waves might still overwhelm it and take it under.
I watched it for a moment, weighing the implications, then Ellory, the officers, and Jake arrived with the ladder.
“Lay it down,” I said. “I’m going for the helmet.”
18
“Pat,” Jake said, “I think we should wait for a diver.”
“We need to see whose helmet that is, and you know as well as I do that it could-”
“Go under. Yes, I get that.”
“It wasn’t there yesterday?” I asked Ellory.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“I think so.”
“But,” Jake interjected, “divers from Ashland can be down here in a couple hours.”
