Page 3 of A Death in Door County (Monster Hunter Mysteries #1)

After informing Rita that I wouldn’t be in the store the next morning, I called Devon Thibodeaux, my other employee, and made sure he’d be able to work the full open hours with Rita.

Devon, a Louisiana Creole with an interest in voodoo, has been with the store for four years, ever since he graduated with a degree in computer science and realized that jobs in IT were so boring, they made him feel like one of the zombies that so fascinated him.

I’d inherited both Devon and Rita along with the store upon the deaths of my parents two years earlier.

Rita has been there for nearly six years.

She and her husband had owned a rare-books store in Milwaukee for thirty-four years, and when her husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Rita discovered his accounting skills had been a bit sketchy.

The store was heavily in debt and Rita had been forced to sell it—or, more accurately, give it away. My parents had snatched up some of her inventory and offered her a job, knowing her book knowledge would be invaluable.

The following morning, confident the store would be in good hands, I put Newt’s flotation vest on him and we set out at seven thirty, driving twenty minutes to a boat launch in Baileys Harbor, where Flanders had said he would meet me.

It was a beautiful morning, with clear blue skies as far as the eye could see and only a light breeze to provide a reprieve from the heat that would come later.

That also meant the waters of Death’s Door would be relatively calm for the day, though I knew that could change in the blink of an eye.

Flanders was dressed more like a tourist today, in shorts and a polo shirt, and after greeting me and handing me an envelope, he gave Newt a nervous pat on the head.

“Thanks for doing this,” he said.

“No need to thank me.”

I peered inside the envelope at ten one-hundred-dollar bills, thinking, Cash.

Interesting.

He doesn’t want a paper trail.

“You’re paying me well,”

I added as I stuffed the envelope into my pocket.

Flanders checked his watch and looked out at the harbor.

“The boat should be here soon.”

The two of us stood there quietly gazing out at the water.

I was content to maintain the silence, but Flanders appeared nervous, rocking back and forth on his feet and glancing over at me every few seconds.

“Morgan is an interesting name,”

he said after a minute of nervous rocking.

“Are you named after King Arthur’s half sister, the sorceress?”

“Nothing so mystical, I’m afraid,”

I told him, mildly impressed that he knew the reference.

He shrugged and said, “She’s often depicted with long, wavy dark hair like yours.

And with all that stuff you have in your store, I thought maybe . . .”

His words drifted off, and he fidgeted with his shirt.

“You thought I might be whipping up an elixir made from toe of frog and eye of newt in my spare time?”

Newt whined beside me, and I gave him a reassuring pat on the head, adding, “Not that kind of Newt.”

Flanders flushed and looked embarrassed.

“No, of course not.”

His voice was convincing; his expression was not.

I felt sorry for him and decided to ease the tension a little.

“In the Welsh language, ‘Morgan’ means ‘sea-born.’ I was born aboard a boat in the middle of Loch Ness when my parents were on a search mission for Nessie.”

“Really?”

Flanders said, looking skeptical.

“Really.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment, and then said, “Did they find anything?”

I found it interesting that this was his next question, rather than anything about the circumstances surrounding my birth.

Maybe Flanders wasn’t as straight an arrow as I’d originally thought.

“No, they didn’t,”

I told him.

“But that didn’t stop them from looking.

I went on several other expeditions to Loch Ness with them when I was a kid.

None of those trips panned out either, but my parents passed down their love of the hunt to me.

It’s what attracted me to cryptozoology.”

“Interesting.”

I studied his expression for a few seconds, trying to tell if he really did find this interesting, but for the moment, his face was placid, giving away nothing.

We were back to awkward silence and staring out at the water.

I think we both breathed a sigh of relief when we finally saw the boat approaching.

The pilot docked the vessel neatly and Flanders surprised me with his handling of the mooring lines.

Then again, he worked and presumably lived on an island, a fact of life that often requires some level of boating knowledge.

This boat was a thirty-eight-foot aluminum patrol craft rigged with three outboard motors, sonar, radar, Wi-Fi, floodlights, a winch, a small dinghy, and the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted.

Our pilot was a thin, wiry fellow whose face looked like old tanned leather.

Flanders introduced him as Haggerty—that was all I was given, just Haggerty—and the fellow acknowledged me with a nod.

Flanders waved a manila folder at me.

“Before we head out, there are some things I want to show you.

Let’s sit.”

We settled in at a small table inside the pilothouse while Haggerty leaned against a side window and watched us, sipping the crap he called coffee.

Newt walked over and sniffed Haggerty’s free hand, sat down beside him, and stared up at his face.

Haggerty stared back for a second, smiled to reveal several missing teeth, and then reached down and scratched behind Newt’s ears like he’d been doing it for years.

No hesitation.

Newt chuffed his approval, and just like that, Haggerty made it onto my good-guy list.

Flanders, who was still giving Newt the occasional side-eye, slid his folder across the table toward me, but when I went to grab it, he flattened his hand on it and said, “This contains some written reports, but it also includes autopsy photos.

They’re quite graphic.”

“I’ll be fine,”

I assured him.

He lifted his hand, and I pulled the folder to me.

The first thing in it was information on a twenty-nine-year-old man from Green Bay by the name of Oliver Sykes, who had been reported missing by his friends back in mid-June.

There was a photo of Oliver clipped to the inside of the front of the folder—probably a driver’s license picture—and I stared at it for a moment, thinking the fellow looked vaguely familiar.

I couldn’t place him, however, and he had the generic blond-haired, blue-eyed look of thousands of other men in this part of the country, so I moved on to the next thing: a narrative report.

Oliver Sykes had been part of a group of six guys who had rented a house on Washington Island for a week.

All of them were avid kayakers.

According to the report, Oliver had told his friends he was going to kayak out from Schoolhouse Beach and run along the northern coast of Washington Island, after declining to head toward the peninsula with the others, who had some sightseeing planned.

Oliver was a far more experienced kayaker than the other guys, so none of them worried about him going out on his own.

Oliver Sykes was never seen alive again.

His kayak was spotted the following morning floating upside down half a mile out on the western bay side of Washington Island.

A search was initiated, and Oliver’s body was found the next day, still in his wet suit, on a small bit of beach on the bay side of Boyer Bluff, a jutting tower of tree-topped cliff on the northwest corner of Washington Island that rises seven hundred feet from the water.

He wasn’t wearing any type of flotation device, like a life jacket, and one never turned up.

Behind the report summary were some autopsy photos.

It was easy to spot the bite mark once the wet suit had been removed, because discoloration on the flesh made the outline of the teeth stand out on the pale skin of the chest and abdomen.

The autopsy report said Sykes had died by drowning, but that his organs had been crushed at or around the time of death by an unknown force.

Next in the folder was another report, that one for the second, more recent victim, a thirty-two-year-old man named Will Stokstad.

Like Oliver, there was a headshot of him included—brown hair and eyes, all in all rather nondescript.

Unlike Oliver, Will had come there on his own.

An avid fisherman, he would come up to Door County from Madison whenever he could for a few days of fishing, while his wife, Janelle, who apparently didn’t share his passion for the sport, stayed at home with their two kids.

That most recent trip had been a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment thing that Will, who was a self-employed electrician, had decided on when a job canceled at the last moment.

Janelle had reported Will missing after trying to call him numerous times during the last day of his scheduled stay without ever getting an answer or a call back.

There was some confusion as to where Stokstad had gone in his boat.

The shop he rented it from was located on the northeast corner of Washington Island, not far from Rock Island, and he’d indicated to the shop owner that he planned to head east toward a spot known as Fisherman Shoal.

But then he was told about the salmon that had been caught in the Rock Island Passage a couple weeks back and he seemed interested in that.

Stokstad’s body had also turned up on a narrow strip of beach, this time on the eastern side of Boyer Bluff, though his boat was found floating in Death’s Door, near Hedgehog Harbor on the north coast of the peninsula.

Like Oliver, Will wasn’t wearing a life vest or other flotation device when his body was found though, unlike Oliver, he’d been wearing clothes: jeans, shirt, and one purple-and-orange sneaker, the colors bright fluorescent shades that looked like they could have glowed in the dark.

Both men, according to their friends and family, were strong swimmers.

So what had happened?

Will’s autopsy photos resembled Oliver’s, though he also had a gash on the knuckle of a finger on his right hand and what appeared to be a tooth impression on his right arm.

According to the ME’s notes, Will, like Oliver, had drowned and had crush injuries to his chest and abdomen that were inflicted at or around the time of death.

Unlike Oliver, Will also had a crush injury to his right arm.

There were more pictures at the back of the folder, and I pulled them out to examine them.

Two were shots of the bodies of the men exactly where and how they’d been found: Will fully clothed with that purple-and-orange sneaker on his left foot acting like a beacon; and Oliver, barefoot and dressed in his wet suit.

The wet suit made sense; many kayakers wore them, particularly if they were going to paddle in the lake waters as opposed to Green Bay.

Even when the air temperatures were as warm as they had been back in mid-June, when Oliver Sykes had disappeared, the lake would have been chilly.

Rarely did the temperature get above seventy, and that early in the season, it would have been closer to the high fifties or low sixties.

The lack of shoes bothered me, but I shoved that thought aside for now.

Will had drowned in late July, when the water temperature would have been closer to seventy, maybe even a few degrees above.

It had been a hot summer so far.

It was now mid-August and I’d heard a report the other day that said the water temperature in Lake Michigan had hit a balmy seventy-five.

The last two photographs in the folder puzzled me at first, but when I looked closer, I saw why they’d been included.

I closed the folder, looked at Flanders, and said, “You and these people you’re working with think there’s some kind of Loch Ness Monster in the waters here, don’t you?”

Flanders appeared flustered and he stuttered for a few seconds before spitting out, “I don’t.

They don’t exist.”

Then he squeamishly added, “Do they?”

I smiled at him.

“Let’s go and find out, shall we?”