Read Online Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner - Free Book Online

go on for many years.
    “So it can’t be tonight,” said Jonathan. “No matter what.”
    Fielder gave Jonathan his solemn promise that it couldn’t be that night, or any night soon. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he could detect a visible difference in Jonathan. All of the tension seemed to go out of his body. It was as though he was truly incapable of contemplating the indefinite future: His horizons stretched no farther than morning and night.
    During the twenty-five minutes that Fielder was speaking with Jonathan, the courtroom had gradually filled up, and when Fielder returned he found it packed with spectators, reporters, sketch artists, and the just plain curious. As he made his way across the room, he picked up the tail end of a hushed conversation. A tall, silver-haired man was telling a huddle of listeners, “. . . and they’re sending some Jew lawyer up here to represent him.”
    A few moments later, Dot Whipple tapped Fielder on the shoulder. “How ‘bout I acquaint you with your adversary?” she said with a wink, leading the way to where the very same silver-haired man stood still holding court. As Dot introduced them, the man smiled broadly at Fielder and extended his hand.
    “Gil Cavanaugh,” he said. “District Attorney.”
    Fielder looked him in the eye and returned the smile, but let the hand hang there in midair.
    “Matt Fielder,” he said. “Jew lawyer.”
    EVEN AS FIELDER and Cavanaugh were getting acquainted in the Ottawa County Courthouse in Cedar Falls, some fifty miles to the north, in the town of Malone, the Franklin County Medical Examiner was beginning her postmortem examination of the bodies of Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton.
    Dr. Frances Chu was no stranger to autopsies, having either officiated or assisted at nearly 2,000 of them in her eight years as an assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. When she’d seen a listing for the Franklin County position, offering escape from the city at a salary only slightly lower than the one she’d been making, while permitting her to maintain a part-time private practice of her own, she’d quickly sent off her resume. They’d called her three days later and asked her one question: When could she start? Five weeks later, she was wrestling the steering wheel of a Ryder rental truck, her two daughters asleep beside her, her Ford Fiesta in tow, asking herself why she’d never thought to look at a map before accepting the job.
    Malone, New York, is about as far north as you can go before you have to start speaking French to be understood. It is farther north than almost all of Vermont and New Hampshire, and much of Maine. It is farther north than Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is 100 miles farther north than Toronto. Local folk are fond of saying that there are two seasons in Malone: July and winter. And as Frances Chu and her assistant began work that Tuesday morning, the temperature in the unheated autopsy room was 53 degrees. July was clearly over.
    Dr. Chu was hardly the squeamish type. She’d seen just about everything there was to see during her New York City tour. Multiple-gunshot-wound victims, machete slashings, ritual mutilations, jumpers, floaters, and even a “space case” or two - where the victim had slipped and become pinned in the tiny space between a subway car and the station platform, fully conscious and in virtually no pain, until the train had to be moved - at which time it took about sixty seconds for every internal organ and drop of blood to drain from the body. Since her arrival in Malone, almost all of the violent cases Dr. Chu had seen were hunting accidents or MVAs (motor-vehicle accidents) of one sort or another: head-ons, roll-overs, windshield divers, tree-climbers, and moose-stoppers.
    But none of her previous cases had readied Frances Chu for her autopsy of the Hamilton bodies. After getting over her initial shock and completing the examinations, she confided