Excerpt: Dead of Winter

Spend a few years in law enforcement and you’ll come to realize there are worse things than finding a body in the woods. For example, there’s finding part of a body in the woods. Or having someone’s dog find part of a body in the woods. Or having someone’s dog find part of a body in the woods and then use it to play fetch with an eight-year-old.
I got enough of a rundown from my dispatcher to consider pulling rank and dumping the call on one of my deputies, but that isn’t why they pay me the big bucks. Well, that, and I didn’t have anyone to spare.
A couple of snowmobilers had gone missing overnight on Friday, some 30-odd hours earlier, and I had every available deputy riding the trails, trying to locate them.
The missing snowmobilers, Dean Torsten and Harold Sundvedt, had left only a tentative itinerary with Sundvedt’s wife: Thief River Falls to Bemidji on Friday night; Bemidji to Baudette, by way of Grand Rapids, on Saturday; and back to Thief River on Sunday.
Both men carried cell phones, but neither had checked in with his wife as promised on Friday night, or at any time since. Sundvedt’s wife had paged him a dozen times, also to no avail.
Or so the Thief River cops had told one of my dispatchers after a near-histrionic Gale Sundvedt succeeded in convincing them to poke around.
They’ll tell you on TV that a person has to be missing for 48 hours before the cops can do anything, but that’s not necessarily the case. Even without a firm schedule that tells us someone is well and truly unaccounted for, we’ll act if there’s a reasonable suspicion of danger. Spending the night outside in northern Minnesota in January certainly qualifies.
Jody Westin, my favorite and best-endowed dispatcher, had, God bless her, taken it upon herself to do some checking from the Dispatch office rather than tying up an officer. I’d been sheriff for less than a week and I was already short six deputies from a staff of twenty. Even though four of those six were primarily dead weight, I now lacked personnel even for many of the basics.
Jody’s first check had been our computer system, where she found a hit from early Saturday morning, a bar fight in the backwoods town of Tanner. It was my report because I’d been present for the fight and found myself in the middle of the fray just long enough to break Brian Mackenzie’s fist with my jaw.
Brian was cooling his heels, or at least resting a few weary, broken bones, in my jail, but the jokers who started the fight had taken advantage of the confusion to slip out into the night. Even so, we had first and last names for both men, courtesy of a young woman unfortunate enough to have drawn the unwanted attention, and hands, of Harold Sundvedt. We also had surveillance footage and a credit card receipt, courtesy of the Tanner Tavern’s owner, Maria Krajcek.
I had some hoops to jump through, but I’d run the names through DVS, the state driver’s license and registration database, and matched pictures for a Harold Sundvedt and Dean Torsten, each with a Thief River Falls address, to the schlubs on Maria’s videotape. I’d also slapped together an administrative subpoena, already served by fax, for the folks at Visa to provide me Sundvedt’s account information, including Social Security Number and billing address.
If it looks like a Harold Sundvedt, and walks like a Harold Sundvedt, and uses Harold Sundvedt’s credit card, it’s probably Harold Sundvedt. But that’s something the courts could decide.
I’d also taken a statement from the victim, which had formed the basis for much of my report. The gropee was of age, the groper was not in a position of authority, no weapon or other threat of force was involved in the incident, and the victim assured me that there were no physical signs of injury. It all added up to something less than a felony, which meant the county attorney, were he so inclined, could charge Sundvedt by summons.
I hadn’t planned to put any more effort into tracking Sundvedt down, at least not over the weekend, until Jody called my cell with the request from TRF. Search and rescue is a county function, and frequently an expensive one, so I called the Thief River cops myself and got contact information for Mrs. Sundvedt.
Sundvedt’s wife was kind enough to verify the Visa account for me and seemed temporarily relieved to learn that her husband had made it at least as far as Tanner, though she had no clue where that might be. The relief quickly returned to panic, however, when she learned that we couldn’t account for his whereabouts thereafter.
Nor was she particularly pleased to hear that my department was looking for her husband in the capacity of potential arrestee.
Jody, being the wonder that she is, had checked with all the lodging establishments in the county, one of those things you can do pretty quickly when you live in the middle of nowhere. Once I verified with her that none of them had hosted Mr. Sundvedt or Mr. Torsten, I had her relay requests to my counterparts in the counties of Itasca and Lake of the Woods to do the same with their local hoteliers and resort owners.
There was a possibility that Sundvedt knew we’d be looking for him and that he and Torsten had simply opted to leave the county and lay low, but their failure to respond to cell phones or pagers had me concerned. They’d consumed enough alcohol, Maria said, that they could possibly have been a little impaired at the time of their departure. Coming from a barkeep, that meant they were drunk off their asses.
Our weather had been mild for mid-January, but fifteen below was fifteen below and it would take its toll on the unprepared in a hurry.
Itasca and Lake of the Woods had called no joy and I threw together a quick search party Saturday evening to run the trails around Tanner. We’d hit the main trails before darkness forced us to wrap up for the night. We were out again at first light, re-checking the main trails and running the secondaries, when the dog call came in.

I knew Clifford Pace by reputation only, and disliked him even before he had a chance to live down to expectations. Pace taught history at Bemidji State University, holding forth on such topics as “America’s Legacy of Hatred” and “North Vietnamese Heroism in the Face of Invasion.” Most of us who’d spent a little time in BDUs and web gear wouldn’t mind seeing Pace deported to Canada. Or burned at the stake.
He emerged from his house, a tidy split level, as I steered my Durango to a stop in front of his garage.
“Mr. Pace?” I ventured, stepping down from the truck.
“You’re blocking my wife’s car,” he said by way of greeting.
“That’s OK,” I told him. “I’ll need to talk to her, too.” I wouldn’t, not really, but that’s the price you pay for marrying an asshole. “You are Clifford Pace?”
“Yes. My wife–”
“And you called us regarding what you believe to be a human hand you recovered from your dog?”
“I don’t believe anything. I know a hand when I see one.”
I’m sure he did, with that personality. My guess was his wife hadn’t let him touch her in years. “Yes, sir,” I said, reverting to Army training. You may not respect the individual, but you respect the rank, even if it’s only that of constituent. “And where is this hand?”
“It’s over here,” he said, leading me toward a collection of Rubbermaid trash containers. He lifted one of the lids and I saw something that looked very much like a severed, slightly chewed, human hand, lying in a bed of clear glass bottles: his recycling.
“You placed it inside this container?” I asked, foregoing the other question that sprang to mind: Who the hell drinks Zima?
“Berkeley was carrying it around in his mouth, trying to get Forrest to– to play fetch.”
He was working himself into a lather and I held up a hand, not the severed one, to calm him. “It’s OK. I’m just trying to determine whether I need to process the trash can.
“So where is this... Berkeley, did you say? Your dog.”
Pace whistled and the sound of crunching snow drew my attention to the side of the house. I had expected a poodle or maybe a cocker spaniel, but Berkeley was a beagle. I reached down to scratch him behind the ears but, perhaps smelling my dog, Loki, he growled and backed away. Even so, I felt confident in ruling out death by beagle.
Of course, the medical examiner would have the final call.
Turning back to Pace, I asked, “Where was your dog when you first noticed the hand?”
“Over by Forrest’s sled there.” Pace pointed. An orange plastic sled rested at the bottom of a short sledding hill. The face was laced with runs, the surrounding snow well trampled: lots of kids.
“Did you see him pick it up, or–”
“No. I assume he must have found it in the ditch or the woods somewhere. Maybe some other dog brought it over.” Like a parent defending his child: My Berkeley would never play with a severed human hand unless he saw some other dog do it first.
“I’m going to look around a little, see if I can figure out where your dog might have found the hand,” I said. “Would you mind chaining him up, or putting him inside?”
“What about my son?”
“If you chain him up, I’ll have to call Child Services.” Pace wasn’t amused and I added, more seriously, “How much exposure did your son have? Did he touch it or just get a good look at it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“The best thing would be for you and your wife to talk to him. Then, if you two think he needs it, we can get a counselor from Victims Services for him.” A new thought occurred to me. “Is there any chance your son could have found the hand first?”
“No. He hasn’t left the yard this morning.”
“What about yesterday? That hand looks like it’s pretty frozen.”
“Forrest would have said something.”
“Well, if you’re sure.” He gave me a dirty look. “Have you handled the hand at all?”
“Of course not.”
“How’d you place it in the garbage can?”
“I used the snow shovel to pick it up.” He pointed toward a cheap aluminum push shovel next to the cans.
“All right. If you and your family could just wait inside for a little bit, I’ll be in to talk to you in a few minutes. And I’d appreciate if you didn’t talk to anyone else about this for now.”

Berkeley had left tracks everywhere: Around the house, the garage and the vehicles; through the ditches and across the road; into the woods.
Just for the hell of it, I pulled up Eric Bauer’s number on my cell phone, dialed.
“Sheriff Magnusson,” Eric greeted me. “To what do I owe this pleasure.”
“I wanted to pose a hypothetical for you.”
“At nine o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
“Hear me out. Now, hair and tissue samples go to your crew at the BCA,” I began. Eric was the special agent-in-charge of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Bemidji office, which also housed one of the agency’s two forensic laboratories. “And bodies go to the medical examiner. My question for you is: How big can something be and still be considered a sample?”
“Whatta you got?”
“Severed hand.”
“Medical examiner.”
“That’s fine, but it doesn’t answer my question. Where on the continuum does it cease to be a sample?”
“It’s a sliding scale based in large part on the number of stupid questions the collecting officer has asked me. In your case, everything goes straight to the M.E.”
“Thanks, Eric.” I rang off, pulled up the county coroner’s cell. It rolled over to voicemail, but he called me back within a minute.
“Sorry about that, Thor,” Doug Lawrence said without preamble. “You caught me in church. What’s going on?”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up that we might have a body.”
“‘Might?’” he repeated.
“It’s just a hand so far. I’m looking for the rest of him.”
“How fresh is the hand?”
“Very frozen and slightly chewed.”
“No rush, then. If you find him, let me know. I can bring the van. Otherwise, if you can just bring the hand to my office, I can take a look at it there and forward it to St. Paul if need be.”

I bagged the hand and secured it in a cooler in the back of my truck, then worked my way around the yard, trying to follow Berkeley’s tracks. Nothing that looked like a body part turned up, though I found enough piles of dog crap to account for the rest of an arm, if Berkeley did indeed have a taste for people. I checked the ditch next, followed by the woods.
When I still hadn’t found anything else forty-five minutes later, I headed back to the house. If Pace was irritable, his wife was downright hostile. Apparently, I’d made her miss her Sunday morning kaffeeklatsch.
“Was that really a person’s hand?” Forrest blurted out.
“I think so.” Doug would tell me for sure. And if not him, it would fall to the Ramsey County medical examiner.
“Cool,” Forrest said, much to his parents’ horror.
“So where do you think Berkeley found it?”
Forrest shook his head, held up his hands, palms facing the ceiling.
“Did Berkeley bring it to you?”
“Yep, when I was sledding. He wanted to play.”
“Had you been outside very long?”
“Umm,” he began. “Not real long. Five minutes?”
“When did Berkeley go out?”
“He went out with me.”
Now we might be getting somewhere. “Did you see where Berkeley went?”
“To see Sammy.”
“Sammy’s the Bratvolds’ dog, across the road,” Pace supplied, anticipating my next question.
Another possibility: I hadn’t checked the other side of the road yet. I’d seen it happen before where someone got hit by a semi and their body more or less exploded, with the extremities strewn along the road or in the ditch near the site of the collision. You got the same effect with deer.
“And when Berkeley came back, did you see where he came from?”
“From Sammy’s,” Forrest said.

I spent a few more minutes with the Paces, garnering nothing of value aside from a firm belief that Forrest would be just fine, especially if he adopted a nickname to spare him the trauma of going through life with a name like Forrest. I took the Durango across the road to the Bratvold residence, in part to clear out of Mrs. Pace’s way, and in part because it was still below zero and I’d appreciate a warm truck on the way to town after I wrapped up. Despite what some of my staff might claim, laziness never entered the picture.
After meeting Berkeley the beagle, I wasn’t expecting Sammy the Bull. I had one foot on the driveway when the biggest German Shepherd I’d ever seen lunged from his doghouse and made a beeline for my truck. I slammed the door and he hit my window a second later, barking and scratching claws, trailing saliva.
I thought my dog was part horse; this one would eat him for breakfast.
Clifford Pace’s polar opposite appeared at the door a moment later: short, thick and unshaven, dressed in a bathrobe and brandishing a shotgun.
“Sammy!” the man barked, cowing the dog instantly. “You get away from there.” He leaned back inside his door, put the shotgun away. He led the dog over to a thick chain hooked to a doghouse.
I cracked the window, called out, “Any more?”
“You’re good,” he told me.
I left my truck, met him on his porch. “You are...?” I prompted.
“Gus,” he said. “Bratvold.”
“Thor Magnusson.” I offered a hand and he surprised me by shaking.
“The sheriff himself, eh?” Bratvold said. With a nod toward Pace’s house, he added, “I saw you across the road. What’s that little faggot bitching about this time?”
“There was no complaint,” I told him. “But his dog brought home what appears to be a human hand.”
“Somebody’s hand?” Bratvold repeated. “Like...?” He held up one of his own. “An actual hand?”
“Exactly. I’m just doing a preliminary search, thought I’d check with the neighbors, see if any of their dogs brought anything home.”
“Sammy’s always dragging old deer parts out of the woods. I never pay attention. But if he’d brought a hand home, I would have been on the phone to you first thing.”
“Have you looked around your yard this morning?”
“No.”
“Would you mind if I poked around a little?”
“You don’t think...?”
I shook my head. “I checked with the hospital. Nobody’s missing a hand.” I shrugged. “But we do have a couple of missing persons, snowmobilers. You don’t see a lot of traffic out here. Someone could have run off the trail and piled up on a tree without anybody noticing. It’s happened before.”
“You can go ahead and look around. I’d be careful if you go down by the creek, though. It’s frozen over, but that ice is never real safe.”
I spent a half hour poking around Bratvold’s place before moving on to the next house. It was coming up on eleven when I heard the whine of a snowmobile. It passed the driveway where I was parked, then doubled back.
“Hey, boss,” Greg Anderson said once he’d killed the engine and dropped his helmet. Greg had been my FTO when I started with the department; now he was my undersheriff.
“Greg. How goes the search?”
“Nothing, so far. What brings you out here?”
“Looking for body parts.”
Greg mulled that over for a second. “Any parts in particular you’re looking for? ‘Cause I know where you can get this great piece of ass.”
“It’s really not that great, Greg,” I told him, “even if you were my type.”
“Yeah, fuck you. No, my sister-in-law’s moving back from the Cities. Jessica?”
The name jogged something in my memory. I’d met her once, a couple years ago. Greg’s assessment was accurate. Reading my grin, he said, “That’s the one.”
“Moving home, huh?”
“She’s gonna manage that new bank that’s going up on Paul Bunyan Drive.”
“Which one? There are three of them.”
“Polaris.”
“Ah. How’d she get that?”
“She’s worked for them since college. She was assistant manager at one in Roseville.” Greg climbed off his sled. “I can introduce you if you like.”
“I’ve already got a girlfriend, remember?”
“I thought she was moving to Denver.”
“She interviewed, but there’s no guarantee she’ll even get an offer. Even if she did, she’s not sure she’d take it. Her family’s in Eau Claire; that’s a long trip from Denver.”
My girlfriend, Heather Walsh, was a TV reporter for the FOX station in the Twin Cities. We’d met three months ago, when she’d come up to Bemidji after my friend and fellow deputy, Becky Wilson, was gunned down during a traffic stop. The story was picked up nationally and coverage exploded after several members of the Bemidji city council were also murdered. Heather was a weekend reporter, but her stature had grown with the exposure. She had fielded interview offers from a half-dozen stations since then, including a weekday evening co-anchor position from a station in Denver.
It’d be a great opportunity, she’d told me, but not necessarily what she was looking for. She was more interested in reporting the news than reading it off a TelePromTer.
Heather was a great girl, but I didn’t think we were in it for the long haul. I lived 250 miles north of the Twin Cities and there was no more call for a big-city news anchor up here than there was for a small-town sheriff down there. Besides, I figured the less time spent in Minneapolis, the better.
Just to mess with Greg, I said, “Or maybe I’ll move to Denver with her and the county board will appoint you to finish out my term.”
He laughed. “Not with Gene waiting in the wings.”
Gene Johnson was the former sheriff, my boss until I unseated him. He’d held the job for 20 years and had used the time to ingratiate himself with the local politicians. I lacked his glad-handing skills, which was reflected in the board’s proposed cuts to both my department’s budget and the salary for the position of sheriff.
If I were to leave office before the expiration of my term, the board would appoint my replacement: Gene, the once and future sheriff.
“I’d demote you back to deputy before I left,” I assured Greg. Regular deputies had civil service protection, but undersheriff was an appointed position.
“And I’d shoot you if you left,” Greg countered.
“I’ll remember that on your next salary review.” Time to get back to work: “Now, what happened is somebody’s dog found a severed human hand, and dragged it back to the house to play fetch.”
“Nice. So we’ve got a body somewhere.”
“In all likelihood. The dog’s a beagle, so I figure it shouldn’t have roamed too far before it found the hand.”
“Beagles are hounds,” Greg said. “Fox hunting and all that. They love to roam.”
“When it’s twenty below?”
“There is that,” Greg allowed. “I’m not sure about their coats.”
“Kind of a short hair. I would guess that he found it pretty close to home.”
“Nobody’s missing a hand that you know of?”
“No, but we’re missing a couple of snowmobilers. They have hands that could be missing.”
“I was just on my way to run the Debs Trail. There’s a spur that connects up just down the road.”
“Do that,” I told him, “and keep me posted. If I don’t turn up anything in the next little bit, I’m going to run the hand down to Doug Lawrence and let him start that process.”

I didn’t find anything else that looked relevant and by noon I was pulling into the hospital parking lot. I’d tucked the clear plastic evidence bag into a brown paper evidence bag, the better to avoid upsetting members of the public.
Doug’s office was in the basement and I took the stairs down. His new intern, a cute if slightly chunky girl named Sara, waved to me as soon as I entered. “Hi, Thor.”
“How are you this afternoon?” She rocked forward on her elbows, showing me a little cleavage. A lot of cleavage, actually.
“Good. Did you get the plate from the truck that hit you?”
I fingered the bruise on my jaw. “Yeah. You should see the other guy. Actually, you could have Friday night if you’d wanted to.”
“Oh?”
“Four brothers. I have now personally put two of them in the hospital,” I told her. “Considering the other two, I’ll probably get the complete set someday.” I heard a flushing sound from the nearby men’s room. “Dougie?”
“Yep.” She feigned slight. “You mean you’re not here to see me?”
“It’s more fun seeing you,” I began, reaching into the paper bag. “But I need to see your boss.”
The bag had her intrigued and she leaned forward. “Anything I can help you with?”
“He asked me to swing by and give him a hand.” I held up the severed hand in the clear evidence bag and Sara screamed and kicked her chair back from her desk. “Jesus,” she muttered.
“You’ll get used to him,” Doug said from behind me, “but he’ll always be an asshole.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on back.”
He led me into the morgue itself, held his hand out for the bag o’ hand.
“If that girl’s tits were any bigger, you’d have to make her a dispatcher,” Doug remarked once his door was shut. He headed for a stainless steel exam tray.
“She a good intern?”
“Ehh.” Doug shrugged. “She’s got a couple things going for her. Just don’t sleep with her, OK?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Even if your girlfriend moves to Denver?”
“I don’t think she’s gonna go.”
Doug pulled on latex gloves, slit the bag open. “What condition was it in when you found it?”
“Still attached to the guy’s arm. I got hungry, though, and ate the rest of him. Even chewed on the hand a little, see?”
“I mean: frozen? Not frozen?”
“Frozen.”
“If it was already frozen, we won’t worry about taking a temperature reading. It’s not like a core temperature, where you’ve got some insulation. A severed hand could freeze solid in weather like this in two or three hours.” He leaned closer, peering at the fingertips. “And it’s been immersed in water. That’s really going to skew things.” He picked up the hand again, holding the severed part beneath a lighted magnifier, turning it back and forth. “Chainsaw.”
“Just like that? You’re sure?”
“I still pull an ER shift once in a while. We get enough loggers through here, I know a chainsaw cut when I see one.”
“So was the hand severed pre- or post-mortem?”
Doug turned the hand again, working his way around the cut. “Let me put it this way: He was either a zombie, or someone dismembered him after he died.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “I hate zombies.”