Lake Death

Steve Martorana punched in the combination to the door at the police station—362. He entered the confines of the inner sanctum of Lac du Mort’s finest, but Steve wasn’t a police officer. Steve was a reporter at the city’s daily newspaper, the Tribune Examiner. He had the police beat—the cop shop—as he called it. It was the job of the police reporter to call the police department Public Affairs Officer every morning at 6:30 to see if there was any “hot” police item that should be included in the daily news. Like most mornings, Captain “Lou” Luzinski (his real first name was Stanislaus) had told Steve it had been a quiet Sunday and that nothing of any interest had occurred during the night that was worthy of publication in Monday afternoon’s paper. Steve walked down the corridor to Capt. Lou’s office. He said “good morning” or “how ya doing” to everyone he saw. He got along pretty well with the police. Perhaps, he fit well into their “old boy” network because he had served as a military police officer with the 18th Airborne Corps in Afghanistan. Often, they spoke the same “language.” The women reporters were always complaining about the way the police withheld information from them or made it difficult to obtain. Steve hadn’t encountered that problem so far. “Good morning, Lou, anything interesting in the police reports?” “It was a real quiet night.” Martorana sat down at the small desk that the police captain had set up in his office for the newspaper and the radio reporters to come in and read the police reports. It was a tiny thing, almost like a school desk. He started reading the reports left in the gray metal inbox. Not another domestic disturbance, he thought to himself as he read the first report. He hated reading those things. Two people living together would get drunk, accuse each other of cheating, and then start beating the shit out of each other. He never wrote those up for the paper unless someone was hospitalized. You never knew who was at fault, but the guy was normally arrested. The next one was a runaway, never reported on those either. Juveniles ran away all the time. By law, you couldn’t use their name, and they probably would come home after they cooled down and stopped being angry at their parents. Another domestic disturbance, there were always a number of those on the weekend, especially after the couple had been out bar hopping. A suspicious person, a broken windshield, a found bicycle—Lou had been right; nothing really happened that early spring Sunday. Then down at the bottom of the pile, the very last police report was something interesting. “Geez, why didn’t you tell me about this when I called this morning? You found a body in the lake? That’s big news!”