The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming murder mystery set in Minnesota and Montana, Laman’s River.

(c) 2011 , Mark Munger

CHAPTER THREE

The tires of a white Chevrolet Tahoe, “Cook County Sheriff” stenciled on the squad’s steel flanks, bounded over the pitching blacktop of the Gunflint Trail. Slater’s hair dripped water onto the leather of the driver’s seat. Her khaki uniform was moist under her arms and across her broad back from residual shower she’d missed when she toweled off quickly. Her rouge and eyeliner had been applied haphazardly.

At least I took the time to dab on some perfume, some Secret, and brush my teeth!

Slater’s eyes searched the ditches and nether regions of the brush lining the roadway for white tail deer. She’d hit three deer in the past year, two of which died, the third, a big buck, his eight point rack magnificent against the headlights of her squad, had bounced off the Tahoe’s hood, causing serious damage to SUV in the process, before crashing onto the pockmarked asphalt of the Gunflint. She’d stopped the Tahoe and exited the vehicle to deliver the coup de grace from her forty caliber Smith and Wesson M&P, certain the deer was history, only to find the buck standing in a shallow ditch, shaking his antler-weary head from side to side as if dealing with the after affects of a sucker punch. She’d watched the deer sway unsteadily for a few moments before he snorted his indignation and disappeared into undergrowth.

The sheriff encountered no deer as she approached the piedmont of the Sawtooth Mountains rolling towards Lake Superior. Deb Slater relaxed her grip on the steering wheel as the big V-8 adjusted its power to account for gravity. Then, as quick as a bat flitting at dusk, he was in front of her.

She dynamited the brakes on the big rig, spewing coffee from the sipping and air holes of the stainless steel travel mug she’d placed in the console between the SUV’s front seats. The boar was enormous. Four to five hundred pounds. He loped from early morning darkness into the beam of the Tahoe’s headlights, his agility and speed at odds with common assumptions of how black bears move.

“Shit,” Slater muttered, though there was no one else in the vehicle. “He came outta nowhere.”

The boar’s haunches equaled the height of the Tahoe’s hood as the animal straddled the centerline of the roadway. The animal’s black fur undulated in the SUV’s headlights. His massive hind quarters propelled him with lumbering grace. The bear veered off the road and crashed through a thicket of maple trees before vanishing in pre-dawn forest.

“That was cool.”

Deb Slater had left her home on Devil’s Track Lake without saying goodbye to Rick. It was Saturday. Annie would be home with her father until he was dressed, fed, and up and about for the day. Annie, unlike virtually every teenager Debra Slater had ever run across, was a consistent early riser; a young woman who slept only seven hours a night no matter how exhausted she was from her sports regimen. The girl would be there to make Rick his breakfast; a bowl of slow-cooked oatmeal with brown sugar, two slices of whole wheat toast with butter and honey, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of hot coffee. Annie would disconnect the stationary oxygen tank from her father and help him out of bed. Rick would negotiate the hallway leading to the guest bath to do his business. He’d carry a portable oxygen tank with him on his journey, the plastic tubing connecting the tank to his nose, his respirations shallow, his gait agonizingly deliberate; his refusal to rely on a walker or a cane witness to his fierce independence and fight.

The diagnosis had been nearly as slow and agonizing as the progress of the disease. Rick Slater was on the cusp of fifty. Debra Slater was forty-seven. Rick had been diagnosed five years earlier, after a lengthy period of deterioration. The symptoms started innocently enough; fatigue, an overall feeling of malaise. Trips to the Duluth Clinic followed by journeys to Rochester, to the vaunted Mayo Clinic, where Rick underwent days upon days of testing, consultations, EEGs, EKGs, blood draws, x-rays, and scans, none of which revealed an answer or explained why Deb Slater’s high octane husband, a man who hunted, fished, canoed, skied, ran, and hiked with abandon, was having trouble getting out of bed in the morning, stilled by an innate, creeping lethargy that had robbed him of his essence.

There were suppositions and guesses; leukemia, MS, MD, lupus, ALS (that one really scared the shit out of Deb when a young neurologist at the Mayo postulated it as a possibility) and similar auto-immune disorders. All were launched at the Slaters by well-meaning men and women in white lab coats; all of them proved false. It wasn’t until Bob Thompson, their local family doc at the Cook County Family Medical Clinic in Grand Marais, spent a few hours on the Internet gleaning wisdom that anyone thought to order a muscle biopsy of Rick’s thigh. Debra Slater thought about the moment their guessing game had ended. It was an instant, an event, in her life, she’d never forget.

Before their visit with Dr. Bob that fateful afternoon, Deb and Rick had never heard of mitochondria disorder. In retrospect, the diagnosis made perfect sense: Rick’s mother, the person who’d passed on the genetic defect to her son through her maternal DNA, had died a painful and mysterious death in her late thirties. Betty Slater had apparently carried the cellular defect, a genetic mutation in her DNA, which had eventually stricken Rick.

Mitochondria disorder, Dr. Bob explained that terrible day under the extreme light of an exam room at the clinic, affects the mitochondria of the cells, sometimes at birth, often over time, as in Rick’s case, when more and more cells are impacted by the defect, rendering the cells unable to deliver energy to propel the basic functions of the body. A build-up of lactic acid takes place because the mitochondria no longer efficiently turn food into energy. Over time, excess lactic acid causes muscle pain akin to what runners experience after completing a marathon.

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Bob had said, removing bifocals curiously required for a healer in his late thirties, “there isn’t a cure. We can use steroids for the worst flare-ups; modify your diet to reduce your digestive symptoms; prescribe oxygen for your shortness of breath. But that’s about it. There’s no cure.”

“Will it progress?”

Rick had asked the question as his right hand massaged the site of the biopsy. A jagged line of knitted flesh had created a permanent scar on Rick’s right thigh; though the wound had, over time, lost the color of indignity. He had been sitting on the edge of an examination table, his thick thighs, his muscular calves propped against the paper-covered curvature of the table, his torso rigid, his left hand clasped tightly, desperately to his wife’s right hand. There had been a lapse in the conversation as the young doctor tried to find the words, words he didn’t want to reveal to his friend and patient.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

The doctor sighed.

“Hard to say. Years, for sure. How many, that’s a tough nut to crack. There’s a chance, as in cancer cases where chemo and radiation slow or stop the growth of a tumor, for a temporary remission. But there is no cure.”

As the Tahoe rounded the last corner in the road before the Gunflint Trail merges with the city streets of Grand Marais, the vision of Rick’s face, his rugged good looks, his innate handsomeness framed by neatly trimmed blond hair, his mouth held in a tight, unnatural grimace, his head nodding in appreciation for his newly-disclosed mortality, occupied all of Deb Slater’s mind.

The sheriff had completely forgotten about the dead girl until she pulled the SUV into the parking lot of the Cook County Medical Center and turned off the engine. Debra Slater sat in silence. She watched the vehicle’s headlights automatically dim, leaving her alone, in the dark, visions of the past her only companion.