The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  Louis remembered the photograph in Jonas’s study, the one of Jonas wearing the bandolier with the holstered gun. It was a World War II pistol, probably a Lugar, but just as deadly as a modern Glock.

  “Violet, listen to me,” Louis said. “I’m going to call for a police officer to sit outside your house.”

  “But why? Anthony would never—” Then she stopped.

  Hurt me. That was what she was going to say. But Louis could read her thoughts there in her eyes, that she didn’t know that for sure. She didn’t know this man anymore. Or maybe she never had.

  A single thought flashed through his brain in that moment. What would happen to this woman when this was all done?

  He opened the door, letting in a rush of cold air, and looked back at Violet.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  Louis wanted so much to believe that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The four men stood under the portico of the Beacon Light Cathedral, their backs turned against the stiff breeze that pushed in from the north. They had come outside to get some fresh air and try to wrap their heads around the day’s events, while they waited for Emily to arrive from Lansing.

  They knew now that Anthony Prince had left his home at 8:45 a.m. and had stopped by two different banks at 9:02 and 9:23 this morning. He withdrew a total of $10,000 in cash, the maximum he could get without paperwork and pre-approvals.

  No one at the church knew anything about Anthony’s life before Vandalia. No one had heard him speak of friends outside the congregation or ever mention anywhere he wanted to travel.

  A rushed search of his home had failed to turn up Jonas’s gun, now verified as a Luger pistol, and the assumption was that Anthony was now armed and dangerous. And, despite the state-wide APB, despite the conspicuous style of his Lincoln Town Car, and despite the deployment of seventy-five extra MSP patrol cars onto Michigan highways, Anthony Prince had vanished.

  Louis reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his copy of the sketch of the man seen outside Jonas’s home. In discussions this morning, Steele had been cautious in making any connections, arguing that an already nervous Anthony could have seen the trooper’s cruiser parked near the cathedral, or been tipped off by a leak from the disgruntled GRPD about Tuyen’s apartment. But Louis had disagreed, certain that the sight of this man’s face had sparked Anthony’s sudden departure.

  “I think that’s Emily coming,” Cam said.

  Louis stuck the sketch back in his pocket and looked down the road to see a blue Explorer crest the hill. Then his gaze moved around the three other men.

  Tooki, shivering in a V-neck sweater, holding a clipboard and rifling the dozens of pages he had printed out from Anthony’s office computer, still looking for that one shred of information that would tell them where he had gone. His bulky portable computer case sat at his feet.

  Cam, in his creased leather jacket, stood off to the side, chain-smoking Kools and impatiently shifting from one foot to another.

  Steele stood a few feet away, hands deep into the pockets of his black overcoat, staring grimly toward the sprawling fields that surrounded the cathedral.

  The blue Explorer wheeled to a stop near the portico. Emily bounded out of the driver’s side and hurried toward the doors, carrying a manila folder.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late,” she said. “I was waiting on one last phone call. And I know this is all stuff we should’ve had before, but nothing’s in the computers and—”

  “Just tell us what you have,” Steele said.

  Emily opened the file and slapped down a hand to keep the papers from blowing away. “When I was researching Violet’s history last night, I realized that we still didn’t have much information on the Prince family. So, I started looking using the other family name Louis gave me the other day.”

  “Prinsilä,” Louis said.

  Emily nodded. “I spent most of last night and today on the phone, and I discovered we have a major problem in the family timeline.”

  “What kind of problem?” Steele asked.

  “I found a record for a Joonas Prinsilä emigrating from Finland in 1940 and settling in Oulu, Wisconsin. I found a marriage certificate to Reeta, and birth certificates for the two boys, Antero in 1946 and Naatan in 1949.”

  “Any family left in Wisconsin?”

  “None that I could find,” Emily said. “But I talked to this woman at the Oulu town hall who remembered the family. She said Jonas was pastor of the church there and was well liked and respected. She said he was a quiet, conservative man, rigid in his faith. His wife was devoted to him, rarely seen in public on her own and the boys were clean and polite. But she said, despite the generosity of the community, Jonas chose to keep his family in almost abject poverty.”

  “What else?” Steele asked.

  Emily turned a page in her notes, still talking fast. “Even though they were poor, Jonas still took in every stray around—kids, homeless men, and animals. Reeta gave food from her own home to those she felt were in greater need and spent days on end sitting with sick parishioners and visiting hospitals.”

  “Find anything specific to Anthony?” Steele asked.

  Emily nodded. “When Anthony was about thirteen, Jonas pulled them out of public school to homeschool them. Seems he was really smart, always looking for ways to earn extra money with odd jobs. But then a few months later, some Christmas decorations caught fire and burned down the church. There was no money to rebuild, so the Prinsilä family packed up and moved away.”

  “To where?” Louis asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Emily said, closing her folder. “No one knows. The next time I found any records was three years later, in 1962, when Jonas assumed the ministry of the Vandalia church, where Violet is from. Only, by then, they were calling themselves Jonas and Anthony Prince, not Joonas and Antero Prinsilä.”

  “So we have a three-year gap in their history,” Steele said. “From early 1960 to late 1962.”

  Louis did a quick calculation in his head. If the younger brother Nathan Prince died at age twelve, that set the year of his accident in 1961, midway through the family’s missing years.

  Louis looked to Emily. “Did you pull a death certificate for the brother, Nathan?”

  “I tried,” she said. “Nothing on file in Wisconsin and I’m still waiting to hear back on Michigan, Minnesota and Canada.”

  “What are you thinking, Louis?” Steele asked.

  “This might sound crazy,” Louis said, “but what if the Princes deliberately tried to erase those years? What if they weren’t just starting over, but running from something?”

  “Like what?” Tooki asked.

  “Like maybe Nathan’s accident wasn’t an accident,” Louis said. “What if something horrible happened between the boys and Nathan ended up dead? Jonas, like most fathers, would protect his family and his ministry. So, he tells a few lies, moves away and changes his name. It would’ve been easy in 1961.”

  “And who in Vandalia would question what a minister told them about his background?” Cam offered.

  Steele turned to Tooki. “Go plug that thing in. We need a death certificate on Naatan Prinsilä and we need it now.”

  Tooki grabbed his case and disappeared back into the church. Steele turned back to Emily, but before he could say anything, his radio squawked to life.

  He grabbed it from his inside pocket. “Captain Steele. Go ahead, Camille.”

  “We found the Lincoln Town Car.”

  It was in a parking garage. And not just any garage, but one on the corner of Lyons and Monroe, in downtown Grand Rapids. Across the street from the back entrance of the Amway Grand Hotel and two blocks from the Chop House restaurant.

  Louis stood quietly, thinking, as he watched a state trooper work a Slim Jim into the window panel to unlock the car door. The Town Car was parked on the third floor of the garage, backed into a space near the elevator and locked up tight. The attendant did not recall seeing anyon
e leaving on foot. There were no cameras at the entrance and exit.

  Cam came up next to Louis and blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “Why here?” he asked. “What’s close to this place he could walk to?”

  Louis looked to the opening between the garage floors, where he could see the tops of downtown buildings and patches of blue sky. They had already checked the Amway Hotel and the Chop House, even though the restaurant wasn’t even open for business yet. No sign of Anthony. “I don’t know,” Louis said.

  “Think he took a cab somewhere? Like O’Hare or Detroit airport?”

  Louis shook his head as his eyes moved down a row of parked cars. “No, he would know we alerted the airlines.”

  “Well, we know Violet didn’t help him set up an escape plan,” Cam said. “And he doesn’t seem to have any close friends. How’d he get away?”

  Louis’s gaze stopped on a non-descript silver sedan as he remembered that they still had not found Tuyen Lang’s 1982 silver Honda Civic.

  Louis turned back to Steele. “He took her car,” he said.

  Steele looked at him. “What?”

  “He’s in Tuyen’s car,” Louis said again, now talking to the whole team. “On the Wednesday night he killed her, we know he took a cab from this corner to her apartment. I think he then used her car to take her body to Ionia and dump it. Then he drove back here, parked her Civic in this garage and took his own car home. This morning, he switched back.”

  Steele rubbed his brow, as if he couldn’t quite believe no one had thought of putting Anthony in Tuyen Lang’s car before now. And they had wasted more than five hours looking for the wrong car.

  As Steele yanked his radio from his coat to issue a new APB, Louis turned and walked away, down the line of parked cars. He was sure Anthony was long gone in Tuyen’s Civic, but still he looked for silver Hondas, just in case he was wrong.

  A pickup truck caught his attention, a small red one with the manufacturer’s name stamped across the tailgate: ISUZU. It was not the truck seen outside Jonas’s home—that had been white—but the sight of it still made him pause.

  His eyes drifted to another pickup a few spaces down, an older model, sloppily repainted in yellow that covered the word DATSUN on the tailgate, making it almost invisible. But even from this distance of thirty feet, it was impossible to miss the huge red and white BUSH-QUAYLE ‘88 bumper sticker.

  He looked back the Isuzu, a bad feeling settling in his gut as he recalled the interview with Weems. What had they missed? What had they not asked?

  I can see some letters . . . like you know, how they put F-O-R-D on the tailgates?

  So, it’s a Ford?

  No, no man, it’s one of those foreign things . . . wait, I can get it . . . Suzoo.

  I-suzu?

  Yeah, I guess . . . that’s it. Isuzu.

  A foreign-made Isuzu was not the most popular truck in Michigan, yet they had not turned up one Isuzu truck owner with any connection to Jonas Prince, the church, or the East Grand Rapids neighborhood.

  Could the reason be as simple as a witness misreading a truck’s name?

  “Hey Cam, come here for a second.”

  Cam tossed his cigarette and trotted over to Louis. “Yeah?”

  “You know that memory thing you did with Weems, how you had him close his eyes and almost force an image to come forward?”

  “Yeah.”

  Louis hesitated. He didn’t want Cam to think he was questioning his interrogation methods. “I think,” he said slowly, “I think maybe one of Weems’s recollections came more from something you suggested rather than from a real memory.”

  Cam’s brow wrinkled. “You saying I told him what to remember?”

  “No, but I think sometimes we’re so desperate for information, we start out trying to help the witness articulate what he saw and end up suggesting what he saw.”

  “What exactly are you talking about?”

  “The Isuzu truck,” Louis said. “He kept saying something like soo-sow, but you actually gave him the truck name.”

  Cam stared at him, hard.

  Louis softened his voice. “What if it was something else he saw on that white truck?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a bumper sticker.”

  Cam looked around at the cars. “That would have to be a big ass bumper sticker for Weems to see it a couple houses away.”

  “Then maybe it was a business name, painted on the tailgate,” Louis said.

  “Like what? Like Ow-Sow plumbing?”

  “Maybe.”

  Cam frowned, thinking. “Are we looking for someone from that town in Wisconsin? Oulu?” he asked.

  An Oulu, Wisconsin link made perfect sense. That’s where the family was from and maybe that’s where this mysterious man in the sketch was from as well, a shadowy figure from the Prince family past, someone who threatened them and set off this chain of events.

  But then a voice was in his ear, soft and dispirited, yet full of truth.

  It’s just a word Jonas taught me.

  Sisu.

  S-I-S-U.

  The same letters he had seen on Monica’s sweatshirt when he was in Eagle River. The same word Reverend Grascoeur had said.

  And he knew. Damn it, he knew.

  The word Weems had seen was not Isuzu or Oulu but a word that meant so much more, not only in its varied interpretations, but in its importance. Its importance to the stalwart and hard-scrabble people who a century ago adopted it as their own—the Yoopers. And when people were proud of something they displayed it everywhere—on sweatshirts, in their business names, and on bumper stickers.

  Louis went back to Steele and with a hand on his arm, led him away from the other officers.

  “I know where he’s going,” Louis said, when they were out of earshot.

  “Where?”

  “The U.P.,” Louis said.

  “Why would he do that?” Steele asked. “To cross into Canada?”

  “No, he’s going after the man in the sketch,” Louis said. “I don’t know why or what the connection is between them, but I’m sure now the sketch is what spooked Anthony and I think that man is from the U.P. and—”

  “Slow down,” Steele said.

  Louis looked down, trying to sort out his thoughts so he could explain his theory to Steele in only a few words. But only one word came.

  “Sisu,” Louis said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sisu. It means—”

  “I know what it means. Go on.”

  “I think that’s what Weems saw on the white truck,” Louis said. “A bumper sticker or a company name. They use it on lots of things up there.”

  “The U.P. is over sixteen thousand square miles,” Steele said. “Any idea on exactly where he’s going?”

  “No.”

  Steele looked back toward the Lincoln Town Car. The techs had opened the doors and the trunk, but it was clear from the defeated looks on their faces they had found nothing of interest.

  “Sir,” Louis said, “one of the reasons you hired me was my instincts. Trust me on this.”

  Steele’s gaze came back to Louis. There were a hundred questions he could have—and should have—asked about how Louis had come to this conclusion and what evidence did he have to support a major and very expensive shift in resources from Grand Rapids to an area of Michigan some folks called The End of the Earth.

  But he didn’t ask one.

  He gave Louis a tight nod. “Gather the team and meet me down on the street. We’ll take a plane to St. Ignace and spread out from there in teams of two.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Steele started to walk away, then turned back. “You’re riding with me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Some drives seemed longer than others. Sometimes it was only because you were anxious to get to where you were going. But more often, it was because of other things, like the straightness of the road or the monotonous landscape of barren trees and brown brush. />
  And sometimes it was just the lousy company in the car.

  Louis looked over at Steele in the passenger seat. Steele had files open on his lap, and a flashlight in his hand so he could read in the waning light of the oncoming dusk. He hadn’t said a word for fifty miles.

  The plane had landed in St. Ignace over two hours ago. Their team had been met by another team composed of two detectives and several state troopers on loan to Steele from their own regions. Steele held a short meeting on the tarmac and laid out the task at hand, which was to check out any businesses that had even a remote connection to the word SISU. They were also directed to stop vehicles with SISU bumper stickers or decals and log the drivers’ names for later follow-up.

  Emily and Cam were assigned to canvass the northeast section of the peninsula, near Sault Ste. Marie. The new members were to cover the vast middle and Louis and Steele were headed west.

  Steele then distributed the procedures, search grids and bundles of flyers showing a photo of Anthony and the man from the Weems sketch. He also reminded everyone to be vigilant on their search for the silver Honda Civic that an armed Anthony was assumed to be driving.

  Then he said one last thing. “Fast is good here, people. We have forty-eight hours to turn up a solid lead.”

  Louis had climbed in the Explorer with Steele knowing one thing—that the response to this expedition from the Lansing brass had been lukewarm at best. The small number of bodies allotted to it and the absurd deadline was a set-up for failure. It wasn’t that they didn’t want Anthony Prince caught. Everyone wanted him caught. But Louis had to wonder if there was someone upstairs that didn’t want to see Steele’s team get the glory for it.

  Louis glanced again at Steele. Now he was making hurried notes on a legal pad, holding the penlight in his teeth.

  Steele had to have sensed the same thing Louis did, maybe even had it said to him outright by one of the higher-ups. But the fact that Steele was still here, chasing down long-shot SISU leads, meant something. In fact, it meant a lot.