The Ides of Matt 2015 Read online

  Overly Blond finally delivered the pepperoni, mushroom, and onion pizza that Rikka had been smelling for far too long. When she started chit-chatting, Rikka continued to Sam over the phone, “It’s not every day that a woman’s body ends up in one part of your bedroom and her head in another.”

  Overly Blond evaporated, after turning almost as green as her outfit was blue.

  Rikka wasn’t about to waste pizza, good or not. She bit down and seared her mouth nicely. Decent sauce. Real cheese. Not New York, but not too shabby. Maybe Minnesota wasn’t as badly off as she thought.

  Sam held the line while she dragged in some cool air. Then they caught up on the miscellaneous news of the day.

  Overly Blond cleared some tables, including the awful wine that had been watching her from under its napkin, before heading back over for the “Isn’t our pizza wonderful?” question.

  “The blood,” Rikka returned to the former topic on the phone, “was pretty impressive, even if most of it went down the hole. Human body sure contains a lot, doesn’t it?”

  Rikka made a show of biting into her next piece of pizza as the waitress greened up again and about faced.

  “Wait a sec, Sam.”

  Governor Llewellyn and Senator Hamilton Waring Not-the-blender-man came in, spotted her, and stalked over to her table. Hamilton dropped a coroner’s report on her table. She’d seen plenty of these in a past life, back when she was a computer specialist for a Chinese money laundering operation, and spotted the relevant box immediately.

  “You’re going to love this,” she continued to Sam. “The coroner pumped the First Lady’s stomach. Her last meal was chowder, it had an exceptionally high ratio of pepper. Something Congressman Marvin Maxwell is known for. Yes,” she said before Sam could ask, “the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.” Sam would know plenty about both Maxwell and Waring as head of the two Congressional Armed Services committees. He was Marine Force Recon (retired). He’d made it clear early on in their acquaintance that there was no such thing as an ex-Marine.

  “Why did you track me down?” she asked the two men, as if she and Sam didn’t already know. She surreptitiously set her phone to speaker, knowing Sam would keep quiet while he listened.

  The Governor didn’t look too broken up about the unexpected murder of his wife, but whether that was reality or Minnesota stoicism, Rikka couldn’t tell.

  “We,” Hamilton seemed to be having trouble clearing his throat, “need an impartial witness when we confront Marvin Maxwell so that—” he hesitated again and Rikka finished for him.

  “—so that you have proof that there is no bias related to tomorrow’s Chowder-Off.”

  Waring and Llewellyn nodded in unison like the Dumb and Dumber twins.

  Sam may have snorted quietly, but Rikka couldn’t tell because she was busy laughing in their faces.

  They didn’t take it very well.

  3

  Rikka and Hamilton found Congressman Maxwell’s wife Marilyn in lane number four of Rasley’s Blueberry Bowl well on her way to breaking two hundred. Like the dead First Lady, she was another tall and fiercely buxom Minnesotan as proven by her particularly well-tailored bowling shirt that had “Marilyn” stitched over one prominent breast and “Maxwell” over the other.

  “Marvin’s out on the ice. Said he had wanted a couple more perch for the Chowder-Off. Didn’t even come home last night. If I find he was with Lew’s wife like you always are Hamilton, he just might find himself down an ice hole.”

  Like the savvy politician he was, Hamilton maintained a straight face as he replied, “I can promise you there’s no chance of that, Marilyn.”

  Right, not with Governor Llewellyn’s wife being decapitated and now lying in the morgue.

  Marilyn nodded, turned, and rolled her personalized, hot pink bowling ball to catch the six-ten spare, continuing her scoring streak.

  They gathered up the Governor, from where he was chatting up Overly Blond, and the rest of Rikka’s boxed pizza before climbing into Senator Waring’s blood red SUV.

  “Think we oughtta get Patrice in on this as well? Make it all legal?”

  “She said she was headed back to the ice. We’ll stop by and pick her up. She’s one of the few women on the deep ice,” Hamilton explained as they drove out into the wintry darkness.

  Police Chief Patrice Smith’s cabin was by far the least ostentatious shack in the deep-ice neighborhood. It was a quarter the size of the other behemoths and might have been a fairy tale cottage with its arched windows, sharply peaked roof, and a fake-brick chimney puffing out smoke from her woodstove.

  She climbed aboard and they drove the last several hundred yards to Congressman Marvin Maxwell’s Bavarian wonderland.

  “Odd that he didn’t come out to see all of the excitement earlier.”

  Patrice’s comment had the two men shift plans mid-step, and suddenly Patrice was shuffled to the fore and left to knock.

  There was no answer and the door was locked.

  She fished out a key ring and the third one opened the door.

  “Where did you get Marvin’s key?” the Governor asked. “Marvin doesn’t give anyone his key.”

  Patrice grimaced, “I found this key ring in your wife’s pocket, Governor.”

  “Oh.”

  They all offered a Minnesota shrug, then Patrice opened the door and went in.

  Rikka nosed in her camera close behind the Police Chief.

  The Bavarian décor was as complete inside as it was outside. A long polished-wood bar. Shelves lined with beer steins. A half dozen beer taps—which were the only real breaks to the motif as their brands were: Budweiser, Bud Lite, Old Milwaukee, Pabst Blue Ribbon…the only concession to Germany was Michelob Genuine Draft. At least it had a German name even if it was brewed in Columbus, Ohio.

  There was one other break in the overall décor.

  The headless body lying over the only open ice fishing hole.

  A quick inspection revealed no sign of the missing head, but there was little doubt as to his identity. The decapitated Congressman was wearing a t-shirt which said, “Keep Calm and Draw a Pint.”

  4

  It was a seven a.m. sunrise by the time Congressman Maxwell was all squared away and Rikka was wondering just what the purpose of having a hotel room was if she didn’t get to sleep in it.

  Patrice had moved the Congressman’s body back at her morgue to lie beside the Governor’s wife—though his head continued to remain at large. She’d done what she could with her limited facilities, like determining that Marvin had also eaten his own over-peppered chowder as a last meal. That had led to the inevitable question of what else had they shared yesterday.

  The men had gone off to bed, but Rikka had accompanied Patrice throughout her investigation, including a return to both crime scenes out on the ice, though Rikka had refused to leave the heated car the second time they went out. Patrice had used the door keys to both Maxwell’s and Waring’s that she’d found in First Lady Llewellyn’s pockets to unlock the doors.

  It was sunrise by the time that the Secret Service agent finally showed up. He was followed closely by an investigator from Camp Riley National Guard training center—clearly some poor shmuck who’d been woken from a long winter’s nap after a serious battle with a bottle of vodka—selected because he served at the closest military base in all of Minnesota. A dead Governor’s wife was a minor police matter. An equally dead Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee drew far more concern from Washington.

  Kate wasn’t due for another couple hours.

  Everyone involved had gathered together back out on the chill ice as the weak morning sun tried to do something about the minus ten degree temperature, with little success. They were standing at the center of the triangle, equidistant from Senator Waring’s Edwardian mini-mansion, Congressman Maxwell’s Bavarian b
eer hall, and Governor Llewellyn’s Grecian temple.

  Were Rikka and her poor camera the only ones freezing to death? Some of these people hadn’t even bothered to zip up their parkas.

  “We know,” Patrice started out, “that Congressman Marvin Maxwell and First Lady Lulu Llewellyn both ate similar chowder recipes shortly before dying.”

  “Before or after they fornicated like dogs in heat?” Marilyn Maxwell asked as if it was of no real surprise what her husband did.

  “I can’t tell in relation to when they dined, but we did find two condoms in the Congressman’s trash. Used ones. And I can’t tell much more without a DNA kit, but the deceased First Lady did appear to have had sex recently.”

  “Twice? More than he ever gave to me in the same week,” Marilyn huffed out a breath that instantly fogged and then, Rikka would have to check the recording later, froze and made a miniature snowfall to the ice. It was just that cold. And you people live like this?

  “Or my wife ever gave me,” the Governor didn’t look at all pleased.

  Mr. Secret Service looked worried, but hadn’t shifted from close by Senator Waring’s side. The investigator from the National Guard merely looked hung over.

  “Could we go somewhere warmer?” Rikka finally begged after all feeling had been lost below the knees.

  They all looked at her in surprise.

  “Of course,” Governor Llewellyn was the first to recover. “We’ll go to my place. At least it isn’t a crime scene.” His look at Senator Blender-man was archly smug. Didn’t any of these people understand the purpose of a television camera?

  At the Greek revival’s door, complete with little leaded glass windows, the Governor unlocked the deadbolt, held it open, and tried to usher Senator Waring in first.

  “No, Lew. It’s your place, you should lead the way.”

  The Governor waved Rikka forward, “The photographer…”

  Rikka wanted to poke him. First, she was a videographer and second, she had a name even if no one in town other than the police chief had yet used it.

  “…hasn’t seen the inside of my little ice shack yet.”

  Rikka dutifully took the lead and turned on her camera as they approached the Greek colonnade. Her legs felt like useless stumps, but at the promise of imminent warmth, they staggered her forward.

  When he pulled open the door for her, Rikka closed her eyes for a moment to enjoy the waft of heat.

  Then remembering what she’d found the last two places she’d been, she swung the camera about while watching carefully through the eyepiece before entering. Nope. No corpses in the Spartan interior. White walls, white marble floors, a glass bar that supported only gin, white rum, and vodka bottles. Even a crystal chandelier for light. Close beside the fishing holes through the floor—which had disconcerting Plexiglas covers so you could see the dark waters below—there were uncomfortable-looking lounge chairs that might have been designed to look Grecian.

  No bodies, though one of the holes was open.

  Someone tugged on the back of her coat just as she took a step forward. It made her hesitate a moment with only the camera lens across the threshold.

  Rikka heard a high-pitched zipping sound, like a knife being slipped over a sharpening steel. Then the camera was almost jerked from her hands.

  Instead, she held onto it and was stumbling ahead toward the open ice hole, relentlessly dragged by a thin piece of wire that had been looped loosely on the inside edge of the door frame. It was now tightly wrapped around her camera lens. It looked like the titanium multi-threaded fishing lead that Senator Hamilton Waring had been so proud of: “No perch will bite through that and steal my hook.”

  Five feet from the hole, she had an idea.

  Three feet, she grabbed onto the lens.

  On her knees—twelve inches from her camera being dragged down the fishing hole—she twisted the lens free from the camera body’s mount.

  With a splash of freezing water in her face, seven thousand dollars of lens disappeared down into the murky depths.

  5

  Pandemonium broke out around her, at least Rikka assumed this was what a Minnesotan version would look like.

  “Someone tried to kill me,” the Governor sounded deeply shocked.

  Everyone looked about for the criminal, some of them even wandering off to look behind the uncomfortable chairs.

  Police Chief Patrice Smith kept her head. She came over, helped Rikka back to her feet, and handed her a white bar towel to wipe her face.

  “Are you okay?”

  Now that she was dry and had ascertained that she wasn’t being dragged along in darkness beneath the ice…

  “As long as I’m warm, I’m fine.”

  Patrice patted her shoulder and returned her attention to the others who had continued their search of the room yet only discovered the bar. Most of them now had a drink despite the early hour. The National Guardsman was the last to act, decided on the hair of the dog, and knocked back a double shot of vodka with a grimace.

  Rikka shut down the camera and dug a lens cap out of her pocket to protect the camera until she could fetch another lens from her kit back at the hotel she hadn’t slept in.

  “Well, at least we now know how the murders were committed,” Patrice observed calmly.

  They all stared at her in astonishment, the Governor crossing rapidly to the bar for another tot of gin.

  “A wire lasso run under the ice from another shack,” Rikka provided for those slow on the uptake. “A trap just waiting for someone to enter their fishing shack and trigger it.”

  The reactions were galvanic and fascinating.

  Rikka wished she was still recording; it made for great theater.

  The Governor punched Senator Hamilton Waring and broke his pretty nose while screaming, “It’s because you want to be President instead of me. You had to kill off my lovely wife to hide your affairs with her. Then you killed poor old Marvin because he has a far better voting record than you. If it hadn’t been for the cameraman—”

  Camerawoman! Rikka grumbled beneath her breath.

  “—you were going to off me to clear your path to the White House. That’s why you wanted me to go through the door first.”

  “Nonsense,” Waring warmed up his rebuttal while spattering red blood from his nosebleed all over the pristine white surfaces. “I didn’t worry about either of you for a second in the run against me. You wanted to frame me for your wife’s death, because she knew what a real man was like. And you killed off poor Marvin so that you could marry Marilyn.”

  Rikka turned to Marilyn in time to catch the shifting expression of repugnance on her face. “Dumb choice, Lew. You’re even worse in bed than Hamilton is. Don’t know what the First Lady ever saw in either of you, or in Marvin for that matter. Of course, Lulu was never the sharpest thing, poor girl.”

  Both men sputtered.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Secret Service sat on one of the fake-Grecian divans to await results. Odd, he wasn’t reacting the way she’d come to expect from the Secret Service agents she’d met over the years. The military investigator made a similar choice to sit, but fell asleep almost immediately.

  Police Chief Patrice Smith watched quietly with her arms crossed.

  Finally the three of them wound down, not knowing who else to accuse.

  Senator Waring’s nosebleed was finally staunched.

  The Governor’s face was no longer red with high blood pressure.

  Marilyn Maxwell looked resigned about her only two choices for getting to the White House. Or maybe at having to find a new set of lovers. Or maybe just wishing them both dead for being such idiots and sad that they’d survived the various attacks.

  Rikka finally had a moment to consider, “How were those wires positioned under the ice, anyway? Do any of you scuba?”

  Everyone shook
their heads no except for the National Guardsman who offered a deeply adenoidal snore.

  “And where did my goddamn seven-thousand dollar lens go?”

  6

  There was a knock on the door and when it was opened almost no additional sunlight was able to make it into the room. A large man with broad shoulders filled the doorway. His hair was crew cut and he wore a faded sweatshirt that said, “USMC” across the front. His big hands had no gloves despite the bitter cold.

  Rikka threw herself at him and he caught her easily.

  “Sam!” she kissed him hard. She’d actually thrown herself at a man and kissed him…and meant it. It might not be the Rikka Albert she knew, but she could get to like this woman she was turning into. Sam certainly appeared to approve by the way he kissed her back.

  She dragged him into Grecian shack’s main room and closed out the frigid morning.

  It only took moments to fill him in on the events since her pizza call last night.

  He’d come for her. For HER! Rikka checked in with herself and about her most coherent thought was, Wow!

  He moved forward silently to the ice hole where her lens had disappeared—he was so light of foot you couldn’t even hear his boots on the faux-marble floor. Yet he moved with such determination that everyone scrambled to get out of his way.

  Kneeling, he stared at the hole for a long moment, she could see his Marine Force Recon mind working. These were the guys sent in behind enemy lines and told to “figure it out.” Sam had been one of their very best. After mere seconds he reached down into the icy water as if it was a warm bath and swirled his hand around the lower edge.