What The Ice Holds

Roy Cutler fished Harmon Lake every February for thirty-one years. He knew that ice the way a man knows a road he's driven every day of his working life - not consciously, in his body.

His son found the truck at the access road on a Sunday morning. Engine cold. Door not fully latched. Thermos full. Fishing gear in the bed, untouched. Forty yards out on the main ice, Roy's hole was drilled and his line was set and Roy was eleven feet down in the sediment.

The coroner ruled it accidental.

Roy's daughter, Diane, came to Detective Sergeant Garrett Hale's desk with thirty-one years of fishing logs and a single observation: her father never drilled a hole without setting a line. The hole the coroner identified was fifteen feet from Roy's established spot. The thermos was still full. And Roy, she said, did not make mistakes on ice he had been reading for three decades.

What Garr finds beneath the surface of Harmon Lake is more than one man's death. It's the evidence of a carefully concealed transit operation using the lake's winter ice as cover, connected to a network whose reach extends well beyond Millford County - and whose operators knew exactly where Roy Cutler fished every February morning.

The second installment in the Millford County Files series.