Chapter 14 2025
The sheriff fidgets as he waits for Belinda Palmer.
The ME is late, and he was early, which means he’s been in the lobby of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner Facility for nearly twenty minutes.
The building is state of the art and has won dozens of architecture awards since it was finished a few years back.
Outside, the blazing sun makes waves on the parklike grounds, and he’s thankful to be inside.
“This weather’s going to stir up trouble,” Grace said this morning as he set a plate of toast and eggs in front of her.
“Eat,” he prodded when she made no move to pick up her fork.
Food is a constant struggle between them.
The drugs make it so she doesn’t want to eat, but he needs her to eat so she stays strong for the battle still to come.
She’s so frail now she’s a vestige of the hardy, vital woman he married.
Except for her eyes, which are sharp and watchful as ever, windows to her indomitable soul.
She pushed a forkful of eggs into her mouth, and he watched as she gagged before forcing herself to swallow. The last chemo treatment was five days ago, but it seems, with each round, it takes longer for her to recover.
Aggressive was how the doctor described AML, which meant they needed to be aggressive to fight it.
Each time he thinks about her cancer, he can’t breathe, like he’s being pulled beneath the surface of an ocean by a riptide impossible to kick himself free from.
It’s the worst feeling in the world to watch someone you love suffer and to not be able to do a damn thing about it.
Please, let her be one of the lucky ones, he wishes so often it’s become a mantra.
Though the prayer is weighted with guilt, knowing that, in pleading for Grace’s good fortune, he is also praying for two others to be equally unfortunate.
Twenty-nine percent survival rate, less than one in three.
He’s not even certain he believes in God, but like most people, denying his belief has never gotten in the way of relying on it, life being what it is.
Grace set the fork back on her plate and picked up her coffee. “Heat like this, people are going to be looking for distraction.”
It was true. Sweltering weather causes trouble. There are studies about it, the correlation between heat and irritability. In the same way people get strange when there’s a full moon. With each degree the temperature ticks higher, so does the nuttiness.
“And people are already talking,” Grace went on.
It’s been three days since the reverend’s body was found, and he was right in his prediction of it causing a brouhaha because of the legendary serpent.
The Moosewood Gazette, the town’s online paper, has been calling every day for updates.
And yesterday, The Star Tribune, Minneapolis’s paper, caught wind of it, and their crime reporter, a woman named Carrie Reynolds, left a message asking for a few minutes of his time.
He hasn’t called her back.
Last night, a vigil was held at the pond.
Hundreds of people from all over gathered with candles, some to pray for the reverend’s soul and others to pay homage to the serpent, hoping their prayers might dissuade her from striking again.
It’s all nonsense, and he wishes he had something concrete to prove it, to show that the reverend’s death is nothing but another run-of-the-mill case of humans doing bad things to other humans.
“Morning, handsome.”
He drops his hands from his face to see Belinda looking down at him.
“Whoa. I take it back,” she says. “You look like crap.”
He smiles at the insult. No one delivers barbs with as much charm as Belinda.
“I can’t believe I ever slept with you,” she says with a grin, then laughs when she sees the blush in his cheeks.
Thirty years ago, before the sheriff met Grace, he and Belinda had gone on a few dates and slept together twice, a fact she never lets him forget, knowing how much it makes him squirm.
Grace finds it hilarious, and she’s nearly as bad as Belinda, referring to Belinda as his “ex” or his “paramour.” The two women are great friends, which at first, made him uncomfortable, like having his dirty boxers on full display.
Now, he’s incredibly grateful for Belinda’s friendship and the rock she’s been to both of them over the past six months.
He pushes to his feet and straightens to his full height, feeling like he needs to assert himself. “You’re late.”
“Sue me,” she says with an eye roll.
He follows her into the inner sanctum of the building and down a flight of stairs to the autopsy room, a cavernous space with a dozen stainless steel tables, all of them empty except one at the far left.
“Slow week?” he says.
“Slow month. Winter we’ve got flu, pneumonia, and heart attacks. And summer is big for murders and suicides. But this time of year, early spring, it’s slow.”
Based on the size of the form beneath the sheet, the sheriff knows it’s the reverend. Beside the table, a woman in blue scrubs pecks at a laptop.
“Sheriff, this is Dr. Cho. She’s the one who did the examination.”
Dr. Cho holds out a blue-gloved fist for the sheriff to fist-bump, the post-COVID handshake. She is early thirties, Asian, and pretty in a bookish sort of way.
Now that they’re beside the body, the sheriff can smell the glutaraldehyde used to preserve it, a pungent scent that causes him to breathe sparingly through his mouth.
“You read my report?” Dr. Cho asks.
“I did.”
She pulls the cover from the body to the waist, and the sheriff does his best to conceal his wince.
Naked beneath the stark fluorescent lights, the reverend’s remains are even more gruesome than they’d been on the shore.
The man’s insides and the fleshy parts of his face are gone, nibbled away by the turtles and fish.
Bits of ligaments, muscles, and entrails cling to nicotine-brown bones, and his eyeballs are gone except for two partially hollowed-out shells that dangle by loose tendons from the orbs.
The shoulders and arms are mostly intact, but the skin that remains is sickly cyan gray.
“As I explained in the report,” Dr. Cho says, “it appears the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the heart.”
Heat rises in the sheriff’s cheeks. He can’t believe he overlooked something as obvious as a bullet hole in the coat of the victim.
“It was easy to miss,” Dr. Cho says, proving she’s as astute at analyzing the living as she is the dead. “The heavy wool and condition of the coat from being in the water made it look like a small tear. I only realized it was a bullet hole when I noticed the nicks in the ribs.”
She points, and the sheriff leans closer to see a scrape on the top of the fourth rib down no deeper than a fingernail.
“Our best guess,” Belinda says, “is that the bullet pierced the left ventricle, killing him nearly instantly. There’s no exit wound, which means the bullet was likely deflected when it hit the back rib, then lodged somewhere in the body.
Over time, the body decomposed, and the slug came loose and was lost in the water. ”
The sheriff looks closer to see a slightly larger divot on a back rib.
“The two injuries and the hole in the coat line up and are consistent with a bullet wound.”
“We put the coat back on to check,” Belinda says. “And the hole lines up.”
The sheriff scratches his chin as he thinks about him and Frank pulling the body from the water.
“Buttoned or unbuttoned?” he asks.
“Excuse me?” Dr. Cho says.
“Did the hole line up with the injuries when the coat was buttoned or unbuttoned?”
“Buttoned.”
The sheriff nods and feels a little better about things. “I didn’t see the bullet hole because, when we pulled him out, his coat was unbuttoned, and the hole wasn’t anywhere near his heart.”
Belinda looks from him to the body, then back to him. “You’re saying someone unbuttoned his coat?”
“Based on what you’re telling me, it appears so.”
“Why would someone do that?” Belinda asks. “Shoot him, then unbutton his coat?”
“To take something?” Dr. Cho suggests. “Maybe it was a robbery.”
“Strange place for a mugging,” Belinda says.
The sheriff shakes his head. The theory doesn’t add up. The reverend’s keys and wallet were in his pockets, and his rings were still on his fingers. But it’s possible they were looking for something.
“Or,” he says as the idea comes to him, “they wanted him to sink.”
The sheriff’s been fishing all his life, and he knows, if you want to keep a carcass from eventually floating to the surface, fish or otherwise, you need to gut it to release the gasses that form in the stomach after death.
Dr. Cho and Belinda nod.
“Though, he still surfaced,” the sheriff says. “Or at least his hand did.”
“Hands are relatively light,” Dr. Cho says. “And it’s possible a bacterial gas pocket found its way into the extremity as the body decomposed.”
“So the theory we have so far,” Belinda says, “is our victim was shot in the heart, then, hours later, his coat was unbuttoned, and his body was slit open so he’d sink when he was pulled into the water?”
“Hours later?” the sheriff says.
“The reason I dragged your sorry butt down here.”
Dr. Cho pulls the sheet lower and points to the reverend’s wrist. “Bruising.”
The sheriff leans closer.
“It’s faint but definitely there.”
Just above the joint, faint jaundiced lines ring the reverend’s flesh. The sheriff holds his hand over the bruises. His sausage-size fingers are nearly twice the size of the marks.
“Based on how light the bruises are, our theory is that they were made hours after his heart stopped pumping.” Belinda says. “When circulation stops and gravity kicks in, it causes the blood to pool. In this case, the body was face down for some time before it was pulled into the pond.”
The sheriff scratches his chin. The case is growing more confounding by the minute.
He imagines the reverend at the water’s edge, the blizzard hailing around him, his coat buttoned tight.
He’s shot in the heart, falls, and lands face down, then lies there for hours before being turned over and having his coat unbuttoned so he could be gutted and dragged into the pond.
“Why wait?” Belinda asks, having constructed the same riddle in her mind.
The sheriff shakes his head. He has absolutely no idea.