The Ides of Matt 2015

Iced Chef!-3

“Could we go somewhere warmer?” Rikka finally begged after all feeling had been lost below the knees.

They all looked at her in surprise.

“Of course,” Governor Llewellyn was the first to recover. “We’ll go to my place. At least it isn’t a crime scene.” His look at Senator Blender-man was archly smug. Didn’t any of these people understand the purpose of a television camera?

At the Greek revival’s door, complete with little leaded glass windows, the Governor unlocked the deadbolt, held it open, and tried to usher Senator Waring in first.

“No, Lew. It’s your place, you should lead the way.”

The Governor waved Rikka forward, “The photographer…”

Rikka wanted to poke him. First, she was a videographer and second, she had a name even if no one in town other than the police chief had yet used it.

“…hasn’t seen the inside of my little ice shack yet.”

Rikka dutifully took the lead and turned on her camera as they approached the Greek colonnade. Her legs felt like useless stumps, but at the promise of imminent warmth, they staggered her forward.

When he pulled open the door for her, Rikka closed her eyes for a moment to enjoy the waft of heat.

Then remembering what she’d found the last two places she’d been, she swung the camera about while watching carefully through the eyepiece before entering. Nope. No corpses in the Spartan interior. White walls, white marble floors, a glass bar that supported only gin, white rum, and vodka bottles. Even a crystal chandelier for light. Close beside the fishing holes through the floor—which had disconcerting Plexiglas covers so you could see the dark waters below—there were uncomfortable-looking lounge chairs that might have been designed to look Grecian.

No bodies, though one of the holes was open.

Someone tugged on the back of her coat just as she took a step forward. It made her hesitate a moment with only the camera lens across the threshold.

Rikka heard a high-pitched zipping sound, like a knife being slipped over a sharpening steel. Then the camera was almost jerked from her hands.

Instead, she held onto it and was stumbling ahead toward the open ice hole, relentlessly dragged by a thin piece of wire that had been looped loosely on the inside edge of the door frame. It was now tightly wrapped around her camera lens. It looked like the titanium multi-threaded fishing lead that Senator Hamilton Waring had been so proud of: “No perch will bite through that and steal my hook.”

Five feet from the hole, she had an idea.

Three feet, she grabbed onto the lens.

On her knees—twelve inches from her camera being dragged down the fishing hole—she twisted the lens free from the camera body’s mount.

With a splash of freezing water in her face, seven thousand dollars of lens disappeared down into the murky depths.

5

Pandemonium broke out around her, at least Rikka assumed this was what a Minnesotan version would look like.

“Someone tried to kill me,” the Governor sounded deeply shocked.

Everyone looked about for the criminal, some of them even wandering off to look behind the uncomfortable chairs.

Police Chief Patrice Smith kept her head. She came over, helped Rikka back to her feet, and handed her a white bar towel to wipe her face.

“Are you okay?”

Now that she was dry and had ascertained that she wasn’t being dragged along in darkness beneath the ice…

“As long as I’m warm, I’m fine.”

Patrice patted her shoulder and returned her attention to the others who had continued their search of the room yet only discovered the bar. Most of them now had a drink despite the early hour. The National Guardsman was the last to act, decided on the hair of the dog, and knocked back a double shot of vodka with a grimace.

Rikka shut down the camera and dug a lens cap out of her pocket to protect the camera until she could fetch another lens from her kit back at the hotel she hadn’t slept in.

“Well, at least we now know how the murders were committed,” Patrice observed calmly.

They all stared at her in astonishment, the Governor crossing rapidly to the bar for another tot of gin.

“A wire lasso run under the ice from another shack,” Rikka provided for those slow on the uptake. “A trap just waiting for someone to enter their fishing shack and trigger it.”

The reactions were galvanic and fascinating.

Rikka wished she was still recording; it made for great theater.

The Governor punched Senator Hamilton Waring and broke his pretty nose while screaming, “It’s because you want to be President instead of me. You had to kill off my lovely wife to hide your affairs with her. Then you killed poor old Marvin because he has a far better voting record than you. If it hadn’t been for the cameraman—”

Camerawoman! Rikka grumbled beneath her breath.

“—you were going to off me to clear your path to the White House. That’s why you wanted me to go through the door first.”

“Nonsense,” Waring warmed up his rebuttal while spattering red blood from his nosebleed all over the pristine white surfaces. “I didn’t worry about either of you for a second in the run against me. You wanted to frame me for your wife’s death, because she knew what a real man was like. And you killed off poor Marvin so that you could marry Marilyn.”

Rikka turned to Marilyn in time to catch the shifting expression of repugnance on her face. “Dumb choice, Lew. You’re even worse in bed than Hamilton is. Don’t know what the First Lady ever saw in either of you, or in Marvin for that matter. Of course, Lulu was never the sharpest thing, poor girl.”

Both men sputtered.

Meanwhile, Mr. Secret Service sat on one of the fake-Grecian divans to await results. Odd, he wasn’t reacting the way she’d come to expect from the Secret Service agents she’d met over the years. The military investigator made a similar choice to sit, but fell asleep almost immediately.

Police Chief Patrice Smith watched quietly with her arms crossed.

Finally the three of them wound down, not knowing who else to accuse.

Senator Waring’s nosebleed was finally staunched.

The Governor’s face was no longer red with high blood pressure.

Marilyn Maxwell looked resigned about her only two choices for getting to the White House. Or maybe at having to find a new set of lovers. Or maybe just wishing them both dead for being such idiots and sad that they’d survived the various attacks.

Rikka finally had a moment to consider, “How were those wires positioned under the ice, anyway? Do any of you scuba?”

Everyone shook their heads no except for the National Guardsman who offered a deeply adenoidal snore.

“And where did my goddamn seven-thousand dollar lens go?”

6

There was a knock on the door and when it was opened almost no additional sunlight was able to make it into the room. A large man with broad shoulders filled the doorway. His hair was crew cut and he wore a faded sweatshirt that said, “USMC” across the front. His big hands had no gloves despite the bitter cold.

Rikka threw herself at him and he caught her easily.

“Sam!” she kissed him hard. She’d actually thrown herself at a man and kissed him…and meant it. It might not be the Rikka Albert she knew, but she could get to like this woman she was turning into. Sam certainly appeared to approve by the way he kissed her back.

She dragged him into Grecian shack’s main room and closed out the frigid morning.

It only took moments to fill him in on the events since her pizza call last night.

He’d come for her. For HER! Rikka checked in with herself and about her most coherent thought was, Wow!

He moved forward silently to the ice hole where her lens had disappeared—he was so light of foot you couldn’t even hear his boots on the faux-marble floor. Yet he moved with such determination that everyone scrambled to get out of his way.

Kneeling, he stared at the hole for a long moment, she could see his Marine Force Recon mind working. These were the guys sent in behind enemy lines and told to “figure it out.” Sam had been one of their very best. After mere seconds he reached down into the icy water as if it was a warm bath and swirled his hand around the lower edge.

“Of course!” Rikka then explained to the others over her shoulder, knowing they wouldn’t get it. “There would be a groove cut in the bottom lip of the ice by the wire running in the direction it was being pulled from.”

Sam pointed in the direction her lens had gone.

Rikka latched onto Sam’s arm as he led the way. She was so glad to see him she was feeling all bubbly and chirpy and…and…girly, she decided. Maybe it was okay to feel that around him, but just him.

Sam led them directly to Senator Waring’s Edwardian mini-palace of a fish shack. Patrice unlocked the heavy deadbolt for them.

There, in the middle of the living room, was an open fishing hole cover. Beside it, a heavy-duty fishing reel with a motorized winding spool was attached to a small stand. Her lens dangled in its evil clutches.

“Where did that come from?” Waring protested but no one believed him. It certainly hadn’t been there last night when she and Patrice had returned to the scene or they would have noticed it.

Rikka retrieved her lens and tested it. It seemed none the worse for its dunking after she’d dried it off with a plush maroon towel that matched the leather furniture.

There was a sharp snap of handcuffs. Patrice had latched Senator Waring to the circular staircase leading up to his eagle’s aerie lounge, “I hereby arrest you for the attempted murder of Governor Llewellyn.”

He sputtered and protested as she read him his rights.

Meanwhile, Rikka led Sam to the hole where the Governor’s wife had been decapitated.

The wire-notch goose chase then led them to Congressman Marvin Maxwell’s cabin. That meant that Marvin had set the trap in Senator Waring’s bedroom that had killed the Governor’s wife shortly after he’d slept with her.

It didn’t take much digging around among the beer kegs behind the bar to unearth another powered spool.

“The Congressman,” Patrice inspected it carefully, “must have hidden this away after he killed First Lady Llewellyn, but before he was in turn killed. Yes,” she held up the end of the wire. “There are several long blond hairs still wound around the wire. No one on the deep ice but the First Lady has hair this long.”

Marilyn Maxwell’s was shoulder-length and Patrice’s was even shorter.

Rikka also found a fancy looking remote control with two tiny joysticks, “It’s like those things to radio-control those toy drones.”

Sam had continued his search. Behind a keg of Bud Lite, he unearthed a small submarine as long as Rikka’s forearm.

“I,” everyone turned to look at Marilyn—except for the military security guy they’d left asleep in the Governor’s shack and Senator Hamilton Waring who was still shackled to the staircase of his own fish shack for safe keeping. “I gave each of the boys one of those last summer. Three remote-controlled submarines that they could have mock battles with out on the lake.”

“I remember that,” Patrice was nodding.

“They must have used them to carry a lead under the ice and each set up a trap,” Rikka tried to think it through. “First, Congressman Maxwell must have tried to murder Senator Waring. But he killed poor First Lady Lulu Llewellyn instead when she entered the Senator’s bedroom.”

“Then someone decapitated poor Marvin,” Marilyn shook her head though she didn’t appear too sad about the loss.

“And just now,” Patrice picked up the line of logic, “Senator Waring tried to kill Governor Llewellyn but by pure chance caught your camera lens instead.”

Sam didn’t even need to point to the hole where Congressman Marvin Maxwell had died for Rikka to know the next question.

“Now, let’s find out where Marvin’s head has gone.”

One last time her Sam…her Sam, she kind of liked the way that sounded…plunged his hand into the icy depths. She found him a Bavarian-brown towel to dry his hand with as he rose to his feet and slowly turned to face Governor Llewellyn.

They left Maxwell’s Bavarian beer hall and crossed the ice once more to Llewellyn’s Greek temple completing the sides of the triangle. Back in the Governor’s palace of white, in an open fishing hole close beside the claw-foot bathtub—white of course—dangled Marvin Maxwell’s head caught in a loop of wire.

“It seems,” Chief Patrice Smith noted in a dry voice, “that the Governor didn’t want any competition for his run at the White House either. After all, he’d know that only forty percent of our Presidents were governors first. His chances against both Maxwell and Waring would have been poor. He had to level the playing field.”