The Ides of Matt 2015

Iced Chef!-2

She’d be Rikka’s closest friend, if Rikka believed in friends. The woman was everything Rikka wasn’t and she tried not to let it piss her off too often, but at the moment it most certainly did. Kate was tall with brunette hair brushing her shoulders, had a figure to make men weep, and was the billionaire owner of Cooks Network. She also could out-cook most of the people on her shows, which Rikka totally respected her for, and had a wardrobe to die for…none of which would fit Rikka’s tiny frame. Yet another reason for a grudge.

“The worst thing Kate is doing to me right now is not being here until tomorrow, and I’m starting to take it personally.” Since when did she care about getting someone else’s help? Which didn’t sound like her either. She checked the lymph nodes under her jaw but they weren’t swollen. Yet oddly, she was coming to rely on Kate, her twin brother Paul, and Sam…especially Sam.

Sam, being a wise man, didn’t say anything.

“Well, the situation here is even dumber than I first thought now that Minnesota’s first lady has turned up a foot shorter than usual.” Rikka really shouldn’t be whining, especially not to someone in a whole different time zone, but he was the only one handy; and the one she’d found she could turn to time and again.

Besides, Kate would be in the middle of the Eric Ripert interview right now, a total fan moment for Kate, and no way was Rikka interrupting that. Gods! And now she was being considerate. Shoot her now and put her out of her misery. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough when Kate was due in the Gopher State as a principal judge for the Northland Chowder-Off, so Rikka was on her own until then.

“The Governor came right on out,” she told Sam, then sipped her glass of Rasley’s house red. Major mistake! She edged it as far away across the table as she could. Then she thought better of allowing it to remain so close by and carried the glass over to a table that hadn’t been cleared yet. She covered it with a napkin so that it couldn’t see her anymore before retreating to the safety of her own table and continuing.

Thankfully Sam was one of those great guys who was comfortable with silence in a conversation. Or had grown used to Rikka’s peripatetic conversational style.

“Governor Llewellyn beat the coroner-police chief—they’re the same person here which tells you how far off the map this place really is—to Waring’s Edwardian mini-palace by ramming his car into the Chief’s bumper and almost skidding her into the front door of his own Greek Palace fishing shack—I’ll send you pictures. First they were all being too damn polite about, ‘I just don’t understand how she got here, Lew,’ and ‘This isn’t going to look good to the voters, Ham,’ that they never thought about what was right in the room with them.”

Sam allowed her to let the suspense build.

“I had my camera running the whole time,” Rikka patted it on the recording head, where it perched on the table beside her, because it had been such a good girl. She was sitting quite alone; Rasley’s restaurant had emptied when the bowling league games had begun.

“If Kate wants to break into the news business, I have every moment in hi-def video. They’re keeping it hush-hush, so we’ve got the scoop if we want it. I know. I’m jumping the g*n, but it’s good, Sam. Governor Llewellyn, Police Chief Patrice Smith, Senator Hamilton Waring Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a headless woman; three of them doing a polite two-step like they just ate a whole bushel of green apples and there’s only one pot to go in. First Lady Lulu Llewellyn didn’t do much, part of her just lay there and the other part sort of watched them.”

Overly Blond finally delivered the pepperoni, mushroom, and onion pizza that Rikka had been smelling for far too long. When she started chit-chatting, Rikka continued to Sam over the phone, “It’s not every day that a woman’s body ends up in one part of your bedroom and her head in another.”

Overly Blond evaporated, after turning almost as green as her outfit was blue.

Rikka wasn’t about to waste pizza, good or not. She bit down and seared her mouth nicely. Decent sauce. Real cheese. Not New York, but not too shabby. Maybe Minnesota wasn’t as badly off as she thought.

Sam held the line while she dragged in some cool air. Then they caught up on the miscellaneous news of the day.

Overly Blond cleared some tables, including the awful wine that had been watching her from under its napkin, before heading back over for the “Isn’t our pizza wonderful?” question.

“The blood,” Rikka returned to the former topic on the phone, “was pretty impressive, even if most of it went down the hole. Human body sure contains a lot, doesn’t it?”

Rikka made a show of biting into her next piece of pizza as the waitress greened up again and about faced.

“Wait a sec, Sam.”

Governor Llewellyn and Senator Hamilton Waring Not-the-blender-man came in, spotted her, and stalked over to her table. Hamilton dropped a coroner’s report on her table. She’d seen plenty of these in a past life, back when she was a computer specialist for a Chinese money laundering operation, and spotted the relevant box immediately.

“You’re going to love this,” she continued to Sam. “The coroner pumped the First Lady’s stomach. Her last meal was chowder, it had an exceptionally high ratio of pepper. Something Congressman Marvin Maxwell is known for. Yes,” she said before Sam could ask, “the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.” Sam would know plenty about both Maxwell and Waring as head of the two Congressional Armed Services committees. He was Marine Force Recon (retired). He’d made it clear early on in their acquaintance that there was no such thing as an ex-Marine.

“Why did you track me down?” she asked the two men, as if she and Sam didn’t already know. She surreptitiously set her phone to speaker, knowing Sam would keep quiet while he listened.

The Governor didn’t look too broken up about the unexpected murder of his wife, but whether that was reality or Minnesota stoicism, Rikka couldn’t tell.

“We,” Hamilton seemed to be having trouble clearing his throat, “need an impartial witness when we confront Marvin Maxwell so that—” he hesitated again and Rikka finished for him.

“—so that you have proof that there is no bias related to tomorrow’s Chowder-Off.”

Waring and Llewellyn nodded in unison like the Dumb and Dumber twins.

Sam may have snorted quietly, but Rikka couldn’t tell because she was busy laughing in their faces.

They didn’t take it very well.

3

Rikka and Hamilton found Congressman Maxwell’s wife Marilyn in lane number four of Rasley’s Blueberry Bowl well on her way to breaking two hundred. Like the dead First Lady, she was another tall and fiercely buxom Minnesotan as proven by her particularly well-tailored bowling shirt that had “Marilyn” stitched over one prominent breast and “Maxwell” over the other.

“Marvin’s out on the ice. Said he had wanted a couple more perch for the Chowder-Off. Didn’t even come home last night. If I find he was with Lew’s wife like you always are Hamilton, he just might find himself down an ice hole.”

Like the savvy politician he was, Hamilton maintained a straight face as he replied, “I can promise you there’s no chance of that, Marilyn.”

Right, not with Governor Llewellyn’s wife being decapitated and now lying in the morgue.

Marilyn nodded, turned, and rolled her personalized, hot pink bowling ball to catch the six-ten spare, continuing her scoring streak.

They gathered up the Governor, from where he was chatting up Overly Blond, and the rest of Rikka’s boxed pizza before climbing into Senator Waring’s blood red SUV.

“Think we oughtta get Patrice in on this as well? Make it all legal?”

“She said she was headed back to the ice. We’ll stop by and pick her up. She’s one of the few women on the deep ice,” Hamilton explained as they drove out into the wintry darkness.

Police Chief Patrice Smith’s cabin was by far the least ostentatious shack in the deep-ice neighborhood. It was a quarter the size of the other behemoths and might have been a fairy tale cottage with its arched windows, sharply peaked roof, and a fake-brick chimney puffing out smoke from her woodstove.

She climbed aboard and they drove the last several hundred yards to Congressman Marvin Maxwell’s Bavarian wonderland.

“Odd that he didn’t come out to see all of the excitement earlier.”

Patrice’s comment had the two men shift plans mid-step, and suddenly Patrice was shuffled to the fore and left to knock.

There was no answer and the door was locked.

She fished out a key ring and the third one opened the door.

“Where did you get Marvin’s key?” the Governor asked. “Marvin doesn’t give anyone his key.”

Patrice grimaced, “I found this key ring in your wife’s pocket, Governor.”

“Oh.”

They all offered a Minnesota shrug, then Patrice opened the door and went in.

Rikka nosed in her camera close behind the Police Chief.

The Bavarian décor was as complete inside as it was outside. A long polished-wood bar. Shelves lined with beer steins. A half dozen beer taps—which were the only real breaks to the motif as their brands were: Budweiser, Bud Lite, Old Milwaukee, Pabst Blue Ribbon…the only concession to Germany was Michelob Genuine Draft. At least it had a German name even if it was brewed in Columbus, Ohio.

There was one other break in the overall décor.

The headless body lying over the only open ice fishing hole.

A quick inspection revealed no sign of the missing head, but there was little doubt as to his identity. The decapitated Congressman was wearing a t-shirt which said, “Keep Calm and Draw a Pint.”

4

It was a seven a.m. sunrise by the time Congressman Maxwell was all squared away and Rikka was wondering just what the purpose of having a hotel room was if she didn’t get to sleep in it.

Patrice had moved the Congressman’s body back at her morgue to lie beside the Governor’s wife—though his head continued to remain at large. She’d done what she could with her limited facilities, like determining that Marvin had also eaten his own over-peppered chowder as a last meal. That had led to the inevitable question of what else had they shared yesterday.

The men had gone off to bed, but Rikka had accompanied Patrice throughout her investigation, including a return to both crime scenes out on the ice, though Rikka had refused to leave the heated car the second time they went out. Patrice had used the door keys to both Maxwell’s and Waring’s that she’d found in First Lady Llewellyn’s pockets to unlock the doors.

It was sunrise by the time that the Secret Service agent finally showed up. He was followed closely by an investigator from Camp Riley National Guard training center—clearly some poor shmuck who’d been woken from a long winter’s nap after a serious battle with a bottle of vodka—selected because he served at the closest military base in all of Minnesota. A dead Governor’s wife was a minor police matter. An equally dead Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee drew far more concern from Washington.

Kate wasn’t due for another couple hours.

Everyone involved had gathered together back out on the chill ice as the weak morning sun tried to do something about the minus ten degree temperature, with little success. They were standing at the center of the triangle, equidistant from Senator Waring’s Edwardian mini-mansion, Congressman Maxwell’s Bavarian beer hall, and Governor Llewellyn’s Grecian temple.

Were Rikka and her poor camera the only ones freezing to death? Some of these people hadn’t even bothered to zip up their parkas.

“We know,” Patrice started out, “that Congressman Marvin Maxwell and First Lady Lulu Llewellyn both ate similar chowder recipes shortly before dying.”

“Before or after they fornicated like dogs in heat?” Marilyn Maxwell asked as if it was of no real surprise what her husband did.

“I can’t tell in relation to when they dined, but we did find two condoms in the Congressman’s trash. Used ones. And I can’t tell much more without a DNA kit, but the deceased First Lady did appear to have had s*x recently.”

“Twice? More than he ever gave to me in the same week,” Marilyn huffed out a breath that instantly fogged and then, Rikka would have to check the recording later, froze and made a miniature snowfall to the ice. It was just that cold. And you people live like this?

“Or my wife ever gave me,” the Governor didn’t look at all pleased.

Mr. Secret Service looked worried, but hadn’t shifted from close by Senator Waring’s side. The investigator from the National Guard merely looked hung over.