Death in Cold Water (14 page)

Sneider was a big man, with the flab of age evident in his arms and chest. His flaccid skin, pale like the stones on the floor, was speckled with black dots.

Pardy gripped Cubiak's shoulder. “Dave, the dots are moving.”

“Enlarge it,” Rowe said.

Cubiak hit a button and the image of Sneider blew up across the screen. Pardy gasped and sank into the chair alongside the sheriff.

“You see?” Rowe said.

The specks of deranged confetti sprinkled on Sneider's bare skin were spiders.

“Yes, I see,” Cubiak replied.

In Ellison Bay, the deputy was still battling to be heard. “You better get up here,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Andrew is going out of his head.”

T
here were more reporters outside the estate this time. The sheriff flashed a phony smile but he didn't slow down as he steered toward the gate. Inside, Rowe waited in front of Andrew's bungalow.

“How is he?” Cubiak said.

“I've got him calmed down a bit, but he's still in a state.”

“Tell me how this all came about.”

“We were in the kitchen having coffee and talking football when Andrew's cell rang. I tried to answer but he got to it first. The call only lasted a second or two. After he hung up, he ran to his laptop. ‘What was it?' I asked him but he didn't answer. ‘It's here,' he said and opened his e-mail. We both saw the video at the same time. Andrew went white and spit up his coffee. I thought he was going to pass out or have a heart attack. I tried to get the laptop from him but he kept shoving me away.”

“Where is he now?”

“He's still in there, probably still watching it. He won't stop,” Rowe said, motioning toward the door.

Cubiak hadn't been in the guest cottage before. It was really a house, larger and better furnished than his—Crate and Barrel versus vintage—and more of a mess than the sheriff would have imagined possible after only two days.

“I tried to clean up,” Rowe said as they waded through the discarded papers and food wrappers that covered the floor.

“Don't bother. It's his problem,” Cubiak said.

Andrew Sneider sat at the island, facing the doorway. His chin was covered with gristle, his hair a greasy mop on his head, and his eyes red and sunken. Food stains dribbled down the front of his sweatshirt.

“Andrew?” Cubiak said.

Andrew stared at the monitor. Had he even heard the sheriff?

Cubiak stepped up and pulled the laptop away.

“No!” Andrew lunged for the computer.

Cubiak snapped the lid shut. “We'll look at it later if we need to. For now we have to talk.”

Andrew glared at him. “They're killing him,” he said and wiped a line of spittle from his jaw.

“Your father is obviously distressed. But he doesn't appear to be in danger of dying.”

Andrew jumped to his feet and leaned over the marble counter. “They're killing him! Can't you see?”

The sheriff sat on a stool, hoping Andrew would follow his lead. “Why don't you tell me what this is all about.”

Andrew stalked to the window and faced the glass for several minutes. Finally, he turned back into the room, straightened his shoulders, and breathed noisily, the air rattling to the surface as if it had been trapped deep inside. When he was firmly in control again, he spoke. “As much as it is possible to be terrified of something, my father is terrified of spiders. Even one in a room is enough to force him out the door. Two or three and he goes into a panic. This . . .”—Andrew motioned toward the counter where the laptop sat like a compact bomb—“this is enough to kill him.”

“They won't let it go that far. Whoever snatched your father wants him alive,” Cubiak said.

“You believe that?”

“Yes.”

At the sink, Andrew guzzled a glass of water. His cheeks had gained some of their normal color and his breath had quieted. “The damn thing is, my father can face down just about anything. Spiders are his only phobia.”

Andrew dropped onto the seat opposite Cubiak. “I told you how he believed in individual will power. All the business with my mother, how he thought she could heal herself if she was just strong enough, and if she couldn't, then he'd do it for her. That's all I heard growing up. You can do whatever you will yourself to do. He used the same logic to overcome fear. He always preached to me about how we had to face our fears. And he tried, too, I'll give him that. Sometimes at home, he'd make me catch spiders for him, the bigger the better. He kept them in jars and then would take them out one by one and let them crawl over his hand. He'd sit there, sweating like a pig, and watch. Made me and my mother watch with him. We both hated it but he insisted. ‘This is how you get strong, son. You face up to the things that make you afraid.' He really believed that.”

Andrew glanced at the laptop. “But this. This is different.”

“Did your father hate snakes as well?”

“What do you mean?” Andrew got up so quickly, he knocked the stool into the wall.

“The message that came yesterday: ‘You know what this is about.'” Andrew looked away. “I told you, that was about money. Besides, snakes don't bother my father a bit.”

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you afraid of snakes?”

Andrew hesitated. “Not any more than most.”

Cubiak wasn't so sure about that.

The sheriff went outside and called Moore, but the agent didn't pick up. Same for Harrison. Cubiak phoned the station and Lisa answered.

“You shouldn't be there,” he said.

“I'm fine.”

The feds had all left, she told him. Moore, Harrison, and the rest of the entourage.

“If they get back before I do, tell them I called. Then go home,” he said and hung up.

Cubiak inspected the gazebo and the dock but they were both empty, all trace of the snakes erased. From the deck he watched a freighter glide down the shipping lanes. It rode low in the water, probably carrying crates of rivets and sheets of iron and metal to the shipyards. He was about to walk back to the house when he noticed a spider spinning a web under the railing. First snakes and then spiders. What was going on?

When the relief deputy arrived, Cubiak and Rowe left. Southbound traffic was still being detoured. Coming into Baileys Harbor, Cubiak once again found himself making the turn toward the beach at the north edge of town.

The sheriff was unsure why that stretch of sand beckoned him back. Even if he found more human bones in the dunes, what did that prove? Was he acting out of petty spite? Resentful of Moore muscling in on the headline-grabbing Gerald Sneider case and looking to attract a little attention by shedding light on a local mystery that nobody cared about?

Rowe had followed his boss. As they walked the shore, Cubiak told him about the bone Butch had found.

“I checked around but didn't find anything,” he said.

“We're here now, so we may as well take another look. I'll start up there,” Rowe said. He pointed toward a cluster of spindly trees and took off before Cubiak could say anything.

Within twenty minutes, Rowe came back carrying two additional bones. They were considerably smaller than the one Butch had first uncovered but the deputy had found them in the same general area.

Cubiak looked out to the water. The cove and lake beyond were calm but the winds had been up the day before, blowing from the east.

“You ever do any diving around here?” the sheriff asked.

“Some. There are a couple of old wrecks there in the lake, but the water around here isn't always clear. Still, if you want me to take another shot at it, I'm game. And I've got a friend who dives. He'd be willing to go down with me.”

“It's not too cold?”

“Not yet. And it's only going to get colder.”

“Let me think about it some more,” Cubiak said.

E
mma Pardy was on the phone when Cubiak arrived. “Yes, yes, good. Love you, too,” she said into the receiver. “Kids! Another party! Oh, Lordy.” Her easy smile vanished when he laid the two bones on her desk.

Pardy studied them carefully before she spoke. “These are metatarsal, two of the long bones in the foot. You're going to tell me you found them in the same spot as the first, aren't you?”

He nodded. “Any chance they're from the same victim?”

“Could be, but it's hard to know for sure. DNA testing might tell us, but size and circumstances of recovery both indicate a possible match.”

From outside a bell clanged and Pardy swiveled her chair toward the small window at the far end of the room. Her office faced the old bascule bridge and together they watched as the twin spans of the structure were raised and two sailboats motored through.

“They're probably heading to dry dock. It's that time of year again,” she said.

On the other side of the harbor, three large tankers and a gaudy, golden yacht were moored to the shipyard docks. The tankers were the first of the big ships coming in for seasonal repairs. But Cubiak didn't remember seeing the yacht before and figured it was probably the one he'd overheard the shipyard workers talking about the previous evening.

When the double leafs of the steel bridge dropped back into place, Pardy looked at the bones again. “If a ship did go down it seems unlikely there was only one person aboard, doesn't it?”

“So there might be more remains out there somewhere.”

“Oh, I'm sure you can count on that, Dave. So much water surrounding us. We sail on it, swim in it, ship lumber and Christmas trees over it, but can only guess at the horrors that lie at the bottom under the waves.”

B
y midafternoon every available surface in the conference room was lined with FBI phones and computers or covered with files and stacks of reports, and the whole lot was interposed with empty coffee cups.

On the incident board, Gerald Sneider's photo formed the center of a web of red, green, and blue lines that radiated out like spokes and led to circles and squares of scribbled codes and blurred photos of unidentified men that Cubiak didn't recognize.

“What's all this?” Cubiak asked, pointing to the mishmash of leads.

“Sorry. Classified information. But here's something you need to see,” Moore said as he opened his laptop and the image of a naked, kneeling Sneider filled the screen.

“This is the video that was sent to Andrew. And this”—Moore hit another key—“is the one sent to the Packers.”

Cubiak watched as two men in black hoods and clothing shoved the handcuffed Sneider to his knees on the stones and then dangled spiders in front of his face. As much as he could, Sneider lurched and ducked but the men took turns pushing him upward, laughing over his screams and protests as they dropped more and more spiders onto his skin.

“It goes on for about five minutes before they have him sufficiently covered for their purposes and get to the point where they edited the episode for the son.” Moore spoke dryly but Cubiak heard the hard edge to his voice.

“Andrew says his father hates spiders.”

“We already heard the same from the Packers office manager. Seems the office had to be fumigated on Sneider's orders during the time when he was a regular at the meetings.”

“How would the kidnappers know about Sneider's spider phobia?”

Moore didn't blink. “They wouldn't, unless someone at the Packers let it slip. Or Andrew is in on it. Or the exterminator picked up on it and blabbed the news around town, which could easily have happened. I have an agent looking into that. But even without that, it's not a bad guess. Arachnophobia is one of the most common fears in Western civilization. In fact, it may top the list. I don't suspect either of us would take kindly to being covered with spiders.”

Cubiak turned back to the monitor. Threatening figures of men dressed in black were becoming all too commonplace. How difficult would it be to set up a camera and mimic that kind of antagonistic behavior?

“You think it could be two guys pretending to be terrorists to throw you off their trail?”

“Anything's possible, but it's really pretty unlikely. We're going on the assumption that these are the real deal. What we don't know is whether they're linked to an international organization or some kind of homegrown variety.” Moore pointed to a tall stack of computer printouts. “These are the phone records of suspicious calls made in the U.S. during the past
week.
Most can be traced to foreign sites but there are all kinds of people with wacko agendas walking around. Wisconsin, unfortunately, is not immune to nutcases.

“We've got one team of computer nerds analyzing the phone data and another working on the video. The crime lab passed along the ransom note as well. And our tech team is on that. Plus we're continuing to comb through Andrew's bank records.”

“And you think somewhere in that haystack of data, you're going to find the compass needle that points you to Sneider.”

“It's how we do things, Sheriff. Data analysis and good police work following down the leads. Science puts us ahead of the game. We've got technology working for us and that's where I put my faith.”

Cubiak started to protest. Then he recovered. He had heard that kind of testimonial before, when he worked for the Chicago police, from officers who insisted that hard facts alone solved crimes: everything was black and white.

The sheriff considered telling Moore about the two bones that Rowe had found on the beach earlier that day but decided not to say anything yet. The bones belonged to the sphere of gray that he valued. And there was no room for gray in Moore's world.

L
ater, Cubiak called Cate. Listening to the phone ring, he grew increasingly impatient. Wouldn't she get in touch with him if she wanted to talk? Was calling a sign of strength or of weakness? When she didn't answer, he felt relieved. Then just as he was about to disconnect, he blurted out a message: “Can we talk?” Ball in your court, he thought, and was immediately appalled by his juvenile smugness.