Steven James - The Queen

I tapped my finger against my leg. “It’s better if we don’t.” I tried not to be too stern but to also make it clear by my tone that we were done discussing the topic. “Text me when you leave and call me if anything comes up.”

“I will.”

I reserved a room for her, and as I was slipping the keycard into my pocket, Jake emerged from the doorway. After a quick “Good morning,” he filled up a coffee cup, grabbed two donuts, and we headed for the car.

It had to be close to zero outside, and the windchill made the air feel like a wire brush scraping across my face.

“Gonna be a cold one,” he said.

It already is.

“Yes,” I replied.

Though the sun was still low, the day had started shockingly bright, with the early morning sunlight splintering sharply off the snow. It didn’t look at all like a blizzard was on its way.

Looks can be deceiving.

I used the voice recognition on my phone’s GPS program to ask for directions to Tomahawk Lake, and we took off.

Snowmobile trails paralleled us on either side of the road, just beyond the snowbanks that had been shoved onto the shoulders by the plows.

If you’ve never seen a snow-covered field or forest in the North, you might imagine that the snow all looks the same, but it doesn’t. Because of the various angles of the flakes reflecting the sunlight, the woods look like they have thousands of tiny diamonds winking at you as you drive by.

Although we were a little north of Wisconsin’s prime farm country, I still saw a few cement silos resting beside barns nestled on rock or concrete foundations to help the boards weather the snow.

But most prominently, I was impressed by the sight of the forests all around us, rolling dense and thick over the hills. Birch and poplar filled in the gaps between the picturesque pines, most of which were burdened with a thick layer of postcard-worthy snow. And, from growing up in this state, I knew that beyond those trees, hidden deep in those woods, were impenetrable marshes and countless isolated lakes-Wisconsin has over fifteen thousand lakes, more than nine thousand of which still remain unnamed.

But the one we were going to was not.

We arrived at Tomahawk Lake and parked at the north shore boat landing.

No state troopers or sheriff’s deputies were there yet, and I was glad because it gave me the chance to look around uninterrupted.

Rather than police tape, yesterday’s responding officers had set up wooden blockades and orange highway cones enclosing the snowmobile tracks that led to the broken ice. Considering the locale and the likelihood that this was the scene of an accident rather than a homicide, it was about all they could do.

A twelve-foot extension ladder was chained to a sign beside the boat landing. I guessed the officers or state troopers had laid on it in order to get closer to the break in the ice when they were placing the cones.

From my research last night, I knew that the lake’s open water was caused by a series of powerful underground springs. The ribbon of water, at least a hundred meters long and a dozen meters wide, looked like a giant eel twisting along the ice, rolling over whenever the sharp wind troubled its surface.

Though we weren’t far from Highway K, the snow-laden trees lining the shore softened the sound of cars and distant snowmobiles, leaving a deep silence that only a few birdsongs tapered into.

Jake avoided the ice for the moment and walked along the shoreline. I saw that he was on the phone.

I took some time to study the lake before heading onto the ice. Tomahawk Lake was vaguely oval-shaped, a mile or so across and nearly four miles long with a series of inlets on the western shore. To the south, the water beneath the ice dispersed into a flowage that eventually fed into the Chippewa River.

Mentally overlaying the trail system against the topography of the area, I decided that the most direct route from the Pickron house to Tomahawk Lake would have been the Birch Trail, which led along the hilly northern shore stretching away from me on either side.

On a snowmobile it would probably take fifteen minutes or so to get to the lake from his house.

Although the tracks to the open water had been noted by an ice fisherman, based on the absence of ice fishing shanties, I could see that there wasn’t much interest in this side of the lake from sportsmen, probably because of the unpredictable currents that carried the warm spring-fed water from this area westward, causing invisible and deadly fault lines of thin ice to finger across the surface.

However, snowmobilers apparently weren’t scared off the ice along the other shoreline because, in the morning sun, I could make out tracks stretching across it. I imagined that if you started at one end of the lake and let loose you could hit the sled’s top speed before reaching the far shore. I wasn’t certain how fast that would be, but with the advances in the last few years, some of the newer sleds had engines as powerful as compact cars and could probably reach speeds of 110–120 mph. I figured if you could top out at those speeds anywhere, you could do it here.

The only set of snowmobile tracks leading toward the open water were the Ski-Doo 800 XL tracks the FBI Lab had been able to identify.

Somewhat tentatively, I stepped onto the frozen lake.

As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, I’d had an almost pathological fear of falling through the ice. The idea of dropping into the terrifyingly cold water was disturbing enough, but the thought of coming up beneath the ice and not being able to find the place you’d fallen through was even worse-that frantic and desperate search while your air gives out horrified me back then and, honestly, still did.

After I’d taken a few steps onto the ice, the morning stillness broke open with the harsh grind of the blades at the sawmill across the lake as they powered through logs to get them ready to be shipped to the paper mills in Neenah and Menasha. At first the sound gave me a start as I thought it might have been the ice cracking underfoot, but then I realized it was just the sawmill Donnie worked at, the one I was planning to visit later in the day.

I’d been told there were no footprints near the break in the ice when Ellory first arrived at the scene yesterday, but now I counted eight different sets of boot imprints that led toward it. All of them stopped ten to fifteen meters from the water, now writhing in the escalating wind.

Some of the impressions were undoubtably left by the law enforcement officers and first responders, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if some came from curious civilians stopping by last night to have a peek at the site after all the officers left.

I studied them closely, photographed them with my phone. We would need to confirm it, but one set of boot prints appeared to match the ones found outside the laundry room door at the Pickron home.

The high-pitched whirr of a snowmobile on the other side of the lake caught my attention, but then it was overwhelmed by the sharp whine of a blade at the sawmill ripping through another log.

Jake joined me. “How could this have been an accident, Pat? Anyone going under here would’ve had to be aiming for that stretch of open water. I’m thinking suicide.”

It certainly appeared that he was right, but I said, “I think it’s a little premature to go there, Jake.”

“I don’t think this case is as complex as you seem to want to make it.” The friction in his voice was no doubt sharpened by our past and how infrequently we agreed about the best approach to solving the cases we worked. Two investigations in particular stuck in my mind. In each, his cocksure insistence on the accuracy of his profile had detoured the investigation, wasting precious time. Three people were dead now who might have been saved had local law enforcement broadened their investigative strategies and not given two serial killers more time to abduct those final victims.