Short Story - The Case of the Hot Emotions and Cold Temperatures
A short story about murder. But who is the victim?
To get through these darker winter months, I would like to share with you a murder mystery story that I have written last year. Since this newsletter usually stays in the realm of non-fiction, please let me know whether you would like to see content like this more often in future.
I want to tell you about the time I was called in to the station to investigate the now infamous death of Rexxon Shellson, whose mysterious disappearance would be making news headlines for weeks thereafter. You’ve undoubtedly seen the sensational newspaper stories, as everyone was speculating about what might have happened to him. Maybe you even had a few theories of your own, that you desperately used to appear vaguely interesting at the dinner table. I didn’t care in the slightest about all the jibber jabber floating around. I do not deal in conjured-up conjectures, nor do I speculate about matters which I know nothing about. I deal in cold, hard facts, and the fact of the matter is that I had no idea when I started working on this case that it would be my last.
As a police investigator with over twenty-five years of experience I was of course no stranger to the media circus that tends to travel into town when someone famous goes missing or turns up dead, performing endless trapeze tricks around the actual facts in order to satisfy the insatiable hunger of their audience. Yet even I was taken aback by the fervor that accompanied Rexxon’s disappearance. Not that I would ever let those clowns stop me. I pushed aside the many reporters standing in front of the garden gate, the only opening in the ten-foot-high wall that enclosed his property. They’d swarmed to Rexxon’s ostentatious villa like locusts to a field of crops. “Imagine making a living like that.” I remarked sarcastically to Ed Harding, the county’s chief of police and my long-time friend. “Ah well, whaddya gonna do.” he responded in his idiosyncratic manner. “A man’s gotta put food on the table.” While I was making my way to the villa’s porch, something caught my eye. It was a single set of footprints in the mud. They were a size ten, and they were no more than six feet from the house. I remember being puzzled by their location, so far from the gate and without any other prints anywhere in sight. I was feeling somewhat claustrophobic, though, standing in the at most four-foot-wide patch of grass that separated this castle of a house from its outer wall, so I made my way inside without thinking too much of them.
Rexxon’s old lady Barbara was in quite a state. I could barely get a word out of her, and when she finally did speak it was unfortunately largely incoherent. I chalked it up to the trauma of losing her husband at the time. She was sweating profusely, as was I. In fact, the longer I was standing in that room the more I started to regret my decision to keep on my winter coat inside. Regardless, I was determined to get more out of her, at least until Ed motioned me to let her be for the time-being. I hadn’t even gotten around to asking her about Rexxon’s will, of which she was the sole inheritor. I resolved to continue questioning her at some later moment. How was I to know that that was the last time I would see her alive?
I decided to pay a visit to Rexxon’s neighbor, who lived right across from him and who would have had a clear view of most of the villa. His name was Marvin Bradley, and he was wearing an orange jumpsuit with a blue streak running across it lengthwise, with size ten runner shoes sticking out from under his trousers. I learned very little from Marvin, who was anything but little himself, until I started putting the squeeze on him, exposing his soft underbelly. Figuratively this time. My pressuring caused him to suddenly get very nervous, and mention seeing someone jump on the villa’s roof from its outer wall, after having used the adjacent linden tree to climb it. When I asked him why he didn’t tell me earlier, he answered that he only just remembered. I wasn’t sure whether I believed him, but knew that I had nothing on him yet, so I headed back to the station with the information that I’d gathered.
After hours of pointless scouring through a police computer, I decided to take a break and happened to pick up the two-day-old newspaper that lay on the coffee table. Astonishingly, my eye happened to fall on an article about a group of radical environmental activists that went to the houses of politicians and executives to commit acts of sabotage. One of their tactics was to mess up their house’s central heating system, in order to literally turn up the heat on them to act to stave of the imminent climate crisis. It was only at that moment that it occurred to me how abnormally hot it had been inside Rexxon’s house. It could of course have been a coincidence, but I had been in this line of work for far too long to still believe that there was such a thing.
I managed to track down one of the group’s members through a trail of social media posts, which gave the impression that she spent all of her time taking part in demonstrations – and making amazingly intricate ice sculptures. A few days later I confronted her at her favorite coffee shop. Her attitude was obtuse, obstinate and obstructive. “You cops are all the same.” she said dismissively, “Always coming after us, asking all these questions, never realizing that they are the wrong ones to ask. You’re nothing but a sheep in pig’s clothing. Why don’t you go after the real criminals, huh? The ones polluting our air and killing our planet.” I arrested her on the spot. Not for any emotional reason mind you, but for getting access to her cellphone. Unfortunately, it turned out that she had been nowhere near Rexxon’s house. As far as I could see she had been to three different places: her house, an ice manufactory, and Waterport Lake, which was located just outside of town. The first one seemed pretty straightforward, and the giant freezers filled with half-finished swans and ducks inside her house’s basement as well as the receipt I found for an order of four-thousand pounds of ice made sense of the purpose of the trips to the second one. It was the third one that puzzled me. What had she been doing at that lake?
I got my answer soon enough. We drove up to the location near the lake that we’d traced the woman’s cellphone to, a decrepit stone house right next to the lake. The small lake was completely frozen over in spite of the mild winter. As we were waiting for the house’s inhabitants to come home, my colleague Tommy took a bet that he could walk across the ice without falling through. He got pretty far, until he reached the northern end of the lake, that is. When we pulled him out, the poor boy was shivering all over, so amid hysterical laughter he was sent home.
A midnight raid on the lake house delivered us three out of the groups’ four remaining members. We almost peed our pants laughing when we found out that they were actually using code names. Apparently we’d not only arrested the mighty Queen of Spades the day before, but now we’d gotten hold of Hades, Snowball, and Golden Eagle. “The only mastermind still eluding us is someone who calls himself Big M.’’ I remarked sardonically to Ed through my police radio. These three had told me all I needed to know, or so I thought at least. They had admitted to using the house as their hideout, were smoking marijuana when we entered the premises, and I had noticed a pair of mud-stained size tens hanging on a coat rack. We arrested the lot of them on possession charges, and were planning to hold them until we had enough evidence to charge them with first-degree murder. Whoever this Big M was, I was confident we’d find him soon enough. On their cellphones I found scores of text messages detailing how they were about to declare to the world that they had murdered Rexxon in name of Mother Earth. Days of forceful interrogations later I still hadn’t been able to get a confession out of them, however.
The real breakthrough only came when one of the officers brought in a map of the Waterport Lake. As Ed and I were studying the map, something suddenly dawned on me. The lake was actually the shallowest at the northern end, the place where Tommy had fallen through. “How the hell did he not fall through immediately at the place where the lake was actually fifteen feet deep?” I wondered. I began starting at the ceiling, deeply puzzled until I looked at the air conditioning vent. “Unless something is making the lake colder! Like thousands of pounds of ice!” How had I not seen the connection before? Ed suddenly sprang up. “Then that is where they must have hid the body!” “Indeed. Let’s go. Oh, and Ed? Get an arrest warrant for Marvin Bradley.”
When our divers submerged into the lake they indeed stumbled upon large blocks of ice lying on the bottom of it. With a small crane we managed to retrieve the largest and together with my colleagues I carefully hacked at the ice for hours, fully expecting to find Rexxon’s body at the center of it. Imagine my astonishment when all we found was a clump of earth. I was devastated. No body. “Where had we gone wrong?” I wondered as we all disappointedly drove back to the station. The shame did not stop there, regrettably, as it was upon our return that I learned that Marvin was not Big M after all. During the night that we’d held him in captivity, the poor sod had broken down crying in his cell, yammering all night about his mother, praying she forgive him for peeping out his window in order to get a glimpse of Mrs. Shellson undressing. The real Big M simply turned out to be some scrawny kid with a love for Happy Meals, and had during our absence been picked up while sitting in a McDonald's, puffy-eyed and over halfway through with eating seven of them.
Only after a fisherman found the body of Rexxon floating out in the sea, did we finally get to the truth of the matter. From her bedroom, Mrs. Shellson had apparently seen Marvin peeking at her with binoculars, shortly before seeing the activists jump on her roof, reasoning that they were all involved in her husband’s disappearance and had come to kidnap her. Unfortunately, the shock had been too much for her already frayed nerves, and she died from an overdose of pain-medication before I got to tell her any of it. The text messages we found turned out to merely be the activists planning to hold up the pretense of murdering Rexxon in order to further their cause.
Now I hear you wondering, what about the earth we found in the ice? I was getting to that. Turns out, the Queen of Spades had been right. The activists had not murdered Rexxon, nor kidnapped him. But that does not mean that there was no murder. The real murder had been taking place right under my nose the entire time, namely that of the Earth, which is getting killed every day. The activists had wanted to show this by literally submerging this figurative murder victim in a block of ice. The fact that I had cared more about the murder of a billionaire showed me that I was on the wrong side of history. That is why I’m a wildlife ranger now, so that I can utilize my investigative skills for catching poachers and smugglers. What you should do with your life is not my place to say. All I can say to you is, you better be dead sure that you are asking the right questions.