Chapter 1
Eau Claire, Wisconsin—May 5, 1959
It all started with a dead Boy Scout.
Detective Lieutenant Joe Stroud had just melted into his well-worn brown leather easy chair in his living room, killing time before heading to bed. He was flipping through retirement magazines imagining how he was going to walk away from the force next month after thirty years on the job. He could almost feel the warm Florida beach sand filtering between his toes and a frozen coconut piña colada chilling his right hand, when his wife, Bette, burst into his daydream.
“Somebody spotted a body up at McDonough Park on the north side. Gordon says it looks like a murder.”
“Murder? What the hell? There hasn’t been a murder in Eau Claire for thirty years. And that was a bunch of bootleggers fighting over territory during prohibition—my very first case.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Bette said. “Ya better get a move on it. Gordon sounds about ready to explode.”
“Well, you know Gordon,” Stroud added. “He tends to be a bit of an alarmist.”
If it really was murder, Gordon had reason to be alarmed. This would be trouble, trouble that could derail Stroud’s retirement.
He and Gordon were the only full-time detectives on a police department of thirty-nine sworn officers. A politically motivated city council president had appointed their figurehead chief on the merits of his healthy election contributions rather than anything resembling police training. Most of the force had served less than five years, and their training largely involved walking the beat and riding around in one of the department’s eight overused squad cars. Parking tickets were major crimes. However, just about every cop had real battlefield experience coming out of World War II. While that didn’t offer a lot of investigative skills, it meant they weren’t shocked by much—before today.
Stroud didn’t bother changing into his semiofficial dark-blue detective suit. His red-and-black-plaid wool lumberjack shirt and tattered blue jeans would suffice for rutting in the mud. He climbed into his personal car—a rusted, coffee-brown 1950 Ford Country Squire station wagon and drove eight miles to the park planted high atop the bank overlooking the south shore of Dells Pond. He traveled quicker than the posted twenty-five miles per hour speed limit.
Dells Pond was not a small rain basin in some backyard. It was an enormous lake created in 1880 when lumber barons diverted the Chippewa River and flooded a lush green farm valley, inundating fields, barns, and homes. The massive pond was where they stockpiled floating white pine logs before sending them cascading downriver. For more than fifty years, Eau Claire was the lumberjack mecca for Wisconsin’s thriving timber industry, and Dells Pond was the bank where millions of logs were deposited to wait their turn at nearby sawmills. The pond was so deep and treacherous with submerged buildings and waterlogged trees that even experienced divers dared not venture far below the permanently murky surface.
In early spring, adventurous—make that foolhardy—kids danced across the “rubber ice,” so named because as the giant expanse of pond ice softened under warming temperatures, it flexed under foot and ice-cold water squirted to the surface in steaming fountains. Those who ran quickly would get very wet.
Generally the ice held. Except for the day in March 1953 when Danny White skipped Sunday school at Saint Luke, ventured to the pond alone, and was never seen again. His body was never found.
Danny’s death terrified parents. But for the young, it only seemed to heighten the fascination and the electricity they tasted jogging across the rubber ice. However, they did tend to stay a tad closer to shore.
Stroud approached the playground and picnic area overlooking the densely wooded banks of Dells Pond. Lumberjacks once toiled through the harshest winter weather in this spot. Most days now, it was usually filled with youngsters. But not now. It was a crime scene—an eerie, dark scene illuminated by the light of a half moon and bobbing beams from half a dozen police flashlights.
“Hey, Gordon,” he said. “What we got here?”
Detective Sergeant Gordon Richardson still looked like the Marine who stormed Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day. He stood a tall five-ten without an ounce of anything but muscle and bone. He brandished the strong face befitting a Greek statue that never betrayed emotion.
In the war, he had witnessed guys being blown apart alongside him. While standing next to Gordon one dark night, his best friend took a sniper shot mid-sentence, right through the forehead. The compulsion to light up a cigarette proved fatal. There were still nights when Gordon would awaken sweating like a hog headed to slaughter. He wondered why he survived.
Despite all his grim experience, Gordon’s face was now pasty white. The man who had witnessed violence beyond comprehension sloshing through the muddy fields of Europe appeared ready to gag on his words.
“There—under the table.”
Stroud followed Gordon’s eyes.
“Oh shit. It’s just a kid. A Boy Scout,” Stroud murmured aloud more to himself than Gordon.
Stashed beneath a severely weathered wooden picnic table that was etched with time and hundreds of hand-carved names, many in pairs surrounded by crudely scratched hearts, was a young boy clad only in a mud-smeared khaki Boy Scout shirt emblazoned with a proudly earned Life Scout badge.
“Gordon, this boy looks younger than he actually is. My son was in Scouts, and it takes quite a while to become a Life Scout. That’s just one step before Eagle. He’s got to be sixteen or seventeen—just a really small kid for his age.”
“I found this billfold in the pants,” Gordon said, “and it looks like his name is Roy Pettit. Shit, I wonder if he’s Bart Pettit’s kid. That worthless piece of shit is serving time for murder.”
“That’s right. He murdered Johnny Anson at the Sinclair station in Chippewa Falls.”
Gordon shook his head. “Looks like the kid was trying to rescue the family name by joining the Scouts, then this happens. Some days it seems like there is no justice.”
Stroud imagined the kid full of life and hope only hours earlier. Now the lifeless shape was more department store mannequin than human. His pants, underwear, and shoes were tossed in a haphazard pile a few feet away, barely concealed amidst remnants of tall brown milkweed plants left over from the previous season, waiting to be pushed aside by new growth.
“The lame attempt to hide his body and clothing tells me our suspect may have been interrupted. I bet there’s a witness out there, but they may not even realize that what they saw is important. Who found the body?”
“Miss Anonymous,” Gordon said. “Some gal, sounded kinda young, called the station. She said there’s a body in McDonough Park, then hung up.”
“We need to find out if she or anyone else saw somebody around here this evening. Somebody spooked our guy, and just maybe they saw him run. Get some guys going door-to-door,” Stroud said.
Gordon nodded.
“And Gordon, keep two guys here, and don’t let anyone get within a hundred yards. I mean not one person gets in here without my approval. Not even the chief. Well, except Doc Mobley. He should be here any second to take a look. This kid was attacked by some sexual deviate. Look at those purple marks on his neck. He was choked, but we need Doc to confirm it. Stand by—I’ll be right back. Gotta get some bags from my car for evidence.”
Stroud scooped up a pile of rumpled napkins, waxed paper, candy bar wrappers, and paper cups. Probably tossed by kids on end-of-the-year school parties, he thought. He also grabbed three large white feathers. Maybe they floated down from one of the birds flashing overhead, trying to make sense of the senseless scene. The only promising lead was a large fingerprint, too big to belong to the dead boy, planted on the kid’s shiny brass Boy Scout belt buckle.
“Hey, boss,” Gordon interrupted. “Just got a shout-out on the radio. Paul grabbed a nut who escaped from the insane asylum across town last night. Milbrandt says he’s the killer, and he wants you on it right now.”
Since 1949, the City of Eau Claire had been organized under a manager-council format. Percy Milbrandt, who previously served as mayor, had been elected council president, a position equivalent to mayor. Most folks still called him “mayor” anyway.
“We have to finish up here first. Milbrandt’s gearing up for election, so ya know he’s gonna be all over this one. He wants to pop his buttons to the newspapers about how fast he solved the kid’s murder. But we gotta do this right, no matter what anybody says, especially that guy. How the hell did he get his nose in here so fast?”
“Dunno. If I had to guess, though, I’d say he got a call from his buddy Chief Schimdts.”
“No doubt.”
It was well after midnight when Stroud returned home and collapsed into his easy chair. There were no more thoughts of sandy beaches or cool drinks. A dead boy haunted him. He wanted to set it aside and hit the hay, but there was no way to erase the image of that dead boy tossed under a table like some unwanted picnic scraps.
This was one of those nights when diving into a giant bottle of booze to drown your monsters felt like a good idea—an idea that led down a rat hole where the only drowning victim was the drinker. Stroud had realized that at a very early age. He loved a glass of beer, though, which was another good reason not to wash away your troubles with it. Not much joy in the taste of that beer.
So he settled for a tall water, straight. He sipped mindlessly as he tried to get a handle on what came next. Only one thing was certain—retirement would have to wait.
He slowly turned his head from side to side, scanning the room like a searchlight throwing its gaze across a troubled sea, reaching out to lost sailors. His search was for answers: Who would murder a Scout, a boy who just wanted to be a better person?
Stroud’s gaze fell on the oil painting his father, Herman, had sat for on a Paris street at the end of World War I. Stroud loved that painting. Not because it was a great piece of artwork; it was not. He constantly fought off Bette’s demands to take it to the basement. He loved it because it reminded him of what his dad had looked like, as memories tended to fade.
Any problem Stroud encountered, his dad always had the answer. Stroud desperately wanted to talk with him tonight. Old Herman Stroud had been a cop for more than forty years, often the only one in town during the insanity of Eau Claire’s lumberjack days, when law and order were more words than reality.
Stroud wondered if his dad had ever seen anything like a sexually assaulted, dead boy. How would he have dealt with it?
As he stared at the painting of his dad, Stroud could almost feel his father offering advice. You can do this son, he heard as plain as if the painting were alive. Just talk to the people. It was somebody he knew and trusted. You can do it.
Stroud leaned back and slept. Bette tapped him on the shoulder shortly after five in the morning.
“Sorry to wake you, honey, but you said you wanted to get to the office early.”
