My mom checked the screen. “It’s Mark.”
That call I wanted to take. I snagged the phone from her.
“What have you been wishing for since this investigation started?” Mark asked.
I’d been wishing for a lot of things, but the one that would help us the most was a body. “They found Vilsack? Tell me they found Vilsack.”
“He’s on his way to me now for the autopsy. I’ll call you as soon as I have results.”
It was probably inappropriate to be so happy that they’d discovered his body, but the chances of him turning up alive had always been slim. At least now we’d have more evidence to work with to catch whoever did this to him. “Do we know yet where he was found?”
“On land belonging to Susan and Jurgen Schmitke.”
Susan—the cook at The Sunburnt Arms.
If I could go back in time, one of the things I would have told my younger self was to take and appreciate naps when she could get them. Even the coffee my mom and I picked up at The Burnt Toast on the way to the station wasn’t enough to make me feel fully awake.
The interview with the Schmitkes wasn’t much help. I talked to Susan alongside Erik, and my mom talked to Jurgen with Elise. Both of them insisted they had no idea how Vilsack’s body ended up on their property.
It turned out they lived outside of Fair Haven on fifty acres, so it wasn’t like they lived in town and he’d been buried in their back yard. The cadaver dogs found him inside their bush. Whoever left him there had pulled a bit of scrub brush over him, but hadn’t tried to bury him.
“I’d have expected them to do a better job of hiding the body,” Elise said when we all met back in the chief’s office after the Schmitkes were released. “It could be a frame-up. Whoever killed him obviously knows he worked with Susan, so they disposed of his body on their land, knowing we’d search areas with some connection to Vilsack first. He was barely covered, like whoever put him there wanted him to be found.”
Erik grunted from his seat and popped another throat lozenge into his mouth. Wrappers filled the wastebasket next to the desk.
The grunt was so generic sounding that I wasn’t sure if it was in agreement or not.
I waited for my mom to make the counterargument, but she didn’t say anything. I knew what I thought she’d argue as a defense attorney, but maybe I was wrong. “That’s what I’d propose if I were defense counsel for the Schmitkes, but if my client were someone else, I’d suggest that the Schmitkes knew they could claim a frame-up if they did a sloppy job of disposing of his body.”
“That’s what I’d argue as well,” my mom said.
Coming from her, that was almost better than a hug.
Since my mom hadn’t yet toured Sugarwood the way I’d planned, we headed back to see the grounds and wait for Mark to call with results.
By the time he did, my yawns had grown large enough that a dentist could have worked on my back molars without any issue. My mom insisted on driving us to Cavanaugh Funeral Home, saying she didn’t want to end up in a field in the middle of nowhere because I’d fallen asleep behind the wheel.
If I hadn’t crashed my car multiple times since coming to Fair Haven, I might have been insulted.
Inside the funeral home, I led the way to the door marked with a brass sign emblazoned with the words County Medical Examiner. Because our county was small, Mark’s office was at the funeral home. He liked to joke that, in his career, it was much better than working from home.
Mark let us in.
I glanced around the room. It was empty except for us. “No Erik or Elise?”
Mark’s smile was more amused than the question should have merited. “Elise ordered Erik to go home.”
I snorted.
My mom gave me a withering glance. “I thought he was the ranking officer with the chief of police out sick.”
“Normally.” Mark’s grin turned cheeky. “But happy girlfriend, happy life. Elise said she was confident that you two could handle this on your own and catch her up later. She’s reviewing the results on the evidence the lab’s been able to test so far.” He sobered as soon as he settled in behind his desk. “I collected all the usual samples from Bruce Vilsack’s body, but I’m pretty confident cause of death was blunt force trauma to his skull.”
That should speed up some of the evidence processing. Now that they knew Vilsack hadn’t been stabbed to death, none of the kitchen knives would need to be tested for blood.
“Could you determine the shape of the weapon?” my mom asked.
Mark passed her a small stack of photos. When my mom offered them to me, I shook my head. The only thing I was worse at than speaking in front of the jury was dealing with blood and bodily trauma.
Mark took the photos back. “It looks like whatever hit him was cone shaped. No flat edges.”
A tremor flashed through my legs. Mandy’s employees wouldn’t have helped a stranger, but they might have helped one of their own. Becky had swung her long-handled squeegee at me with the force of a professional baseball player. If Vilsack came up behind her unannounced, maybe she’d hit him accidentally and then panicked.
Susan Schmitke might have been the person she called afterward for help. My mom had said that the tone toward Becky from Mandy and Susan was motherly.
“How big a cone-shaped object?” I asked. “Like a broom handle?”
“That’d be too small and probably would have broken, leaving splinters in the wound.” Mark held up his hands to demonstrate the size. “We’re looking for something even larger than a rolling pin.”
Cone-shaped and larger than a rolling pin. Hadn’t there been a baseball bat on the evidence list? “Do you have a list of what the police took from the scene to test?”
“I don’t, but I can have Elise check it if you have an idea.”
I told him my theory.
He called it in to Elise, then set the phone aside. “She says there’s a bat logged in and that it had a substance that looked like blood on it. She’ll push it to the front of the list and start checking to see if any of Vilsack’s friends, relatives, or co-workers play on a team.”
