The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  “You hungry?” Louis asked.

  Steele looked up. “Where’s our first stop?”

  “Negaunee. Sisu Tire and Car Repair. Owned by a Calvin Gagnon.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Another hour.”

  Steele looked at his watch. “We can wait. It’ll be past eleven when we get there, and I want to talk to him tonight. Afterward, we can grab something to eat and get a room.”

  Louis turned his attention back to the road, thinking that, despite all Steele’s years with the state, the man hadn’t spent much time in the U.P. If he had, he would know that their chances of finding a restaurant open in Negaunee at midnight were less than zero.

  He was going to make that point when the cell phone rang. Steele answered it and listened quietly for almost a mile. Then he hung up and let out a hard sigh.

  “Any news?” Louis asked.

  “We dispatched the firearm K9s to Jonas’s cottage,” Steele said. “They found his old World War II Lugar in a box in one of the closets.”

  “So it wasn’t the Lugar that Anthony took from the organ bench,” Louis said. “Maybe it was a different gun.”

  Steele shook his head. “We sent dogs to Anthony’s home. They didn’t alert on the organ bench or anywhere else. If Anthony kept any gun in that bench for years, the dogs would’ve found a scent.”

  “Maybe not. If he never shot it.”

  “He has no firearms registered to him,” Steele said, an edge to his voice. “And I don’t think a man like Prince knew any gun dealers, do you?”

  “So, what else could Anthony have kept there he didn’t want Violet to see?”

  “Money?” Steele asked.

  “No,” Louis said. “He took all of Violet’s house money and he had access to his banks.”

  “Maybe he kept something personal in the organ bench,” Steele said. “Sex videos or photos, something to do with Tuyen Lang or young boys.”

  Louis shook his head. “No, I don’t think he ever touched a real boy. And he wouldn’t have brought any part of that life into his home with Violet. It would’ve been . . . I don’t know, sacrilegious or something.”

  “Like leaving your murdered father in a locked dressing room instead of sending him off in style at the feet of Christ?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, whatever he took from the bench, he probably put it in a Vuitton duffel,” Steele said. “That’s the only thing Violet found missing from their home.”

  “The only thing?” Louis asked.

  “That and whatever was in that damn organ bench.”

  In Negaunee, Sisu Tire and Auto Repair was easy to find, and the owner, Calvin, easier yet to eliminate him as a suspect. He was an old man with a pot belly and white hair. He had no sons, no close friends downstate, and no company logo on his truck. And he didn’t recognize either Anthony Prince’s photograph or the sketch of the man who had lurked outside Jonas’s cottage.

  They came across a second possible suspect in the parking lot of a motel, a thirty-something man with shaggy brown hair driving a white pickup with a large oval decal that read GOT SISU?

  Louis had hoped that they had miraculously stumbled onto their suspect, but the guy turned out to be an off-duty forest ranger who had just gotten out the hospital.

  After the ranger pulled away, Steele stood in the parking lot, his gaze drifting to the red, blinking neon on the roof of the motel. PINE TOP INN. VACANCY.

  “I guess this is it,” Steele said. “Unless you want to backtrack to Marquette.”

  “This is fine.”

  “I’ll go check us in,” Steele said.

  Steele disappeared inside the office. Louis peered down the dark, empty street, looking for something that offered hope of food. He saw a Zephyr gas station sign a half-block down.

  When Steele returned, he was holding a key with a giant green plastic tab. “The guy said he’s still closed down for the season, but I talked him into opening one room,” he said. “We’re bunking together. Number six.”

  “I’m going to walk down to the gas station and get something to eat first. You want anything?”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  Louis zipped his jacket and they walked in silence down the side of the main road.

  Inside the store, Louis found four shriveled hot dogs rolling around on a warmer. He bought all of them, pocketed a handful of mustard and ketchup packets, and grabbed a six-pack of Strohs, two bags of chips, and some HoHos.

  As he set everything on the counter, he saw a display of souvenirs—everything from Yooper keychains to copper bangle bracelets to window decals. And sure enough, they had one for SISU.

  He picked it up, not sure why he wanted it. Maybe just something for his shelf back in the apartment or for the bunk room at St. Michaels. He also picked up some postcards and was sifting through them when Steele reappeared with a quart of milk.

  “Why are you getting postcards?” Steele asked.

  Louis looked over, surprised the man could take his mind off the case long enough to work up any curiosity about one of his officers’ personal life. And it wasn’t like he didn’t already know everything about him. Except this, maybe.

  Louis debated for a couple seconds before he answered.

  “I send them to my daughter, Lily,” he said. “It’s how we stay in touch.”

  Steele stared at him and although he said nothing, the look on his face said it all—How did I miss this?

  Steele pushed the groceries toward the clerk, paying for everything with a MSP credit card. He also left the clerk a handful of flyers and asked him to pass them around.

  They walked back to the motel in silence, stepping inside just as thunder rumbled overhead. The room was small, cold, and mildewed, with knotty pine walls, two twin beds with camouflage spreads, and ugly duck decoy lamps on the nightstands.

  “Looks like my uncle’s hunting cabin,” Steele said.

  “You’re a hunter?” Louis asked.

  Steele set his overnight bag on the bed and hesitated, as if he had gone away somewhere for a moment. “Not since college,” he said finally. “Would you get the case files from the truck?”

  Louis returned to the Explorer for the bulky saddlebag-type briefcase Steele had dragged with him from Lansing. When he got back, Steele had taken off his coat and was seated at a table near the window. He dug right into the saddlebag, pulled out a stack of papers and started reading.

  Louis set two hot dogs and a beer on the table.

  Steele looked up. “I don’t drink when I’m working on a case.”

  Louis looked around, spotted the carton of milk and set it by Steele’s elbow. He turned on the TV and plopped down on the other bed. After running through the channels a couple of times, he settled on an old Humphrey Bogart movie—he thought it might be In a Lonely Place but wasn’t positive—while he ate the hot dogs and downed a beer.

  He had just written “Dear Lily” on the first postcard when he started feeling guilty. It was well after midnight and Steele was still working.

  “What are you doing, sir?” Louis asked.

  “I’m going back over the interviews with the cathedral employees,” Steele said, without looking up. “Anthony Prince worked with these folks for years. He had to tell them something personal at some time. No one is that closed off from other human beings. We might have missed something.”

  “Give me some,” Louis said. “I’ll help.”

  “No need,” Steele said, turning a page.

  Louis turned back to the TV, not sure if Steele was being considerate or condescending. He suspected it was the latter, and it pissed him off.

  “Louis.”

  Louis looked over at him.

  “Never let what is urgent take precedence over what is important,” Steele said. “Finish your postcards. Those are important.”

  Steele went back to his reading. Louis watched him, his irritation gone, but his curiosity about the man piqued. He thought about what Emil
y had told him, that Steele liked to ski on volcanos, collected Victorian death masks, and seemed committed to only one thing in life—the job, which Louis knew from experience had included a stint in Internal Affairs. But what other experience did he have? Had he ever worked an active homicide?

  His thoughts turned to the mind game Steele was playing, the game with the cracked jugs that formed his team, setting them up to face head-on the damage done to them as children. What kind of man—what kind of leader—did something like that?

  Louis watched Steele slowly turn the pages of the reports, his hot dog and milk sitting untouched at his elbow.

  The kind of man, Louis knew, who had damage himself. Damage that he had not yet repaired. The kind of damage that still took its toll on cold, rainy nights when you would do just about anything to keep your brain busy so you didn’t have to feel your heart ache.

  What was the damage done to Steele?

  The long day was a deep ache between Louis’s shoulder blades. He set the beer aside, switched off the TV and his bedside lamp, and slumped down in the bed. He fell asleep, fully clothed, to the soft rustle of pages turning.

  They were on the road the next morning by six, following a chain of leads that started with a gun shop owner who had a personalized GET SISU license plate and ended with a wasted hour talking to a woman who had claimed the man in the sketch was her son—her long-dead, atheist son.

  Around noon, Steele took a cell phone call from someone he addressed as “Major Deforest.” It seemed pretty terse, one-sided from Louis’s vantage point, and after he hung up, Steele popped a Tic Tac into his mouth and spent the rest of the drive staring out the side window.

  Just before 1 p.m., they pulled into Watersmeet, a scrap of a town set down in the low lands of the western end of the U.P. This was the next-to-last business on their list, a place called UP NORTH NURSERY. Their advertisements claimed: Our Plants Have Sisu!

  The company had two white trucks, the slogan printed in large blue letters on the tailgates. The owner, Mike Carroll, was a beefy guy with a crew cut who met them in the gravel parking lot. He laughed when Steele explained why they were there.

  “That truck doesn’t run,” Carroll said. “And the other, that’s my truck. No one else drives it and I haven’t been under the bridge for months.”

  Steele showed Carroll the photo of Anthony, but Carroll said he didn’t recognize him. Steele then gave him the sketch.

  Carroll stared at it a long time. “This says this guy is wanted for questioning. What did he do?”

  “We just want to talk to him,” Louis said. “You know him?”

  Carroll nodded slowly. “This is a real lousy drawing, but I think maybe it might be Buddy Lampo.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We had some brews together. He used to live over the way with his folks, down Duck Lake Road. Beat up old place that sits empty now. But he hasn’t been around for a while.”

  “How long is a while?” Steele asked.

  “About five years now. His mother died maybe four years back. His dad died a year later and that’s when Buddy left.”

  “Do you know where he moved to?” Louis asked.

  “Nope, but I don’t think he’d go far. He was a Yooper to the bone. Nice guy, though he was a little on the miserable side.”

  “Miserable, as in angry?” Steele asked.

  Carroll shook his head. “Miserable as in sad, like there was something short-circuiting inside him that kept him from making a connection with other folks, ya know?”

  “What did he do for a living?” Louis asked.

  “I dunno exactly,” Carroll said. “Sold a little firewood, painted some barns, mopped some floors. He got along.”

  Steele turned to Louis. “Go check him out.”

  Louis walked back to the Explorer, slid into the passenger seat and called Camille. He asked her to run the usual checks on both Buddy Lampo and Mike Carroll. While he waited for her response, he looked around the nursery. Broken fences corralled an orchard of skeletal trees. Spiky evergreens in pots were turning brown, like they were giving up. The slap-dash greenhouse listed in the wind, propped up on one side by high stacks of mulch and crushed rock.

  Louis’s first trip to the U.P. had been back in 1985, when he was chasing a cop killer. He had been here again a few weeks ago for the boys in the box. And both times he had come to see it as a hard-scrabble kind of place, where nothing came easy. But now, he saw it as a more primitive, even militant, kind of place. A place where only certain kinds of people could survive. People, he knew now, who had sisu.

  “Louis?”

  “Go ahead, Camille.”

  “The nursery owner is clean, no record,” she said.

  “And Lampo?”

  “I have a DL for a Buddy Lampo, first issued in 1965 at the age of sixteen in Gogebic County, and still current. Last known address is 1458 Duck Lake Road, Watersmeet, Michigan.”

  Louis grabbed a pen from his pocket and opened his binder. “Vehicle registration?”

  “Brown Chevy pickup, Michigan license plate Tom-Edward-Peter 6432.”

  “Does he have a record?” Louis asked.

  “Negative,” Camille said. “Just a couple of traffic tickets. You want me to fax you a hard copy photo?”

  Louis hesitated, not sure where to tell her to fax it to. They had one more stop to make. “Not yet but keep digging around on him. Lampo’s no longer living in Watersmeet and we need to know where he is.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks.”

  Louis started to hang up, then thought of one more thing. “Camille, wait. What were the tickets for?”

  She took a moment. “Improper left turn in 1977 and driving with an unsecured load in 1986.”

  Unsecured load could be logs, fill dirt—or maybe it was furniture because he was moving. The timeline fit to when Carroll said Lampo left Watersmeet.

  “Where was he when he got the second one?”

  “Bumbletown, Michigan. It was issued by the Keweenaw County sheriff’s office.”

  Sheriff Nurmi’s county—friendly territory.

  He thanked her, hung up and grabbed the map from between the seats. It took him a few seconds to find Bumbletown, a tiny speck of a place north of Houghton, smack in the middle of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

  “Why do you have the map out?”

  Louis turned to see Steele standing next to the open door of the Explorer. “We need to head north to Keweenaw,” Louis said.

  “Got an address for Lampo?”

  “No, but I have a feeling that’s where he moved to. He got a ticket up there in ’86, five years ago for hauling an unsafe load.”

  Steele stared at him. “So . . .”

  “So maybe he was hauling his stuff to a new home.”

  Steele glanced at his watch then looked toward the trees, thinking. They had one more business to check out, a bar and grill in Ironwood, an hour’s drive west near the Wisconsin state line. Keweenaw County was two hours north. And the clock was ticking.

  Louis pressed his case. “Listen, we can split up to save time,” he said. “I’ll call for a car and head to Keweenaw and you —”

  “No,” Steele said. “We stay together. And we’re going north.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  They were just past Calumet when it occurred to Louis that he should call Camille and tell her to send the fax of Lampo’s license photo to Nurmi’s office.

  He reached for the cell phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Steele asked.

  “Sheriff Nurmi. I thought—”

  “Hang up,” Steele said.

  “Sir, once we get past Houghton we might not get a signal and it will be after five when we get there.”

  “I said hang up.”

  Louis set the cell back in its cradle and turned on the wipers. “Sir, I believe it’s professional courtesy to let another agency know that we’re coming.”

  “Not in this case,” Steele said
. “And not in this place.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want Nurmi or anyone trying to play hero by either confronting Lampo or tipping him off. We don’t need them closing ranks against us to protect one of their own.”

  The finality in Steele’s voice told Louis the subject was closed. For the next two miles, the only sound was the slap-thump-slap-thump of the wipers on the windshield. Louis glanced over at Steele. He was staring out his side window at the endless blur of asphalt lined by brown-gray trees. The Explorer was silent again for miles, until Louis spotted the sign that marked the turnoff to Eagle River.

  “Sheriff Nurmi,” Louis said. “He’s a good man.”

  “Why do you feel compelled to tell me that?” Steele asked.

  “What you said about somebody trying to be a hero. And I was remembering what you told me before I came up here last week for the boys in the box case.”

  Steele nodded slowly. “That we can’t let small town sheriffs get in our way.”

  When Steele said nothing else, Louis decided to let it go. He had no choice. Steele had come here on a slim lead and Louis’s instincts. Now Louis had to trust that Steele wouldn’t go bulling in here with Nurmi and blow any chance they had for cooperation.

  At the police station, Louis slowed to let Steele enter first. The deputy at the radio console looked up as they entered.

  Steele showed his badge. “We’re here to see Sheriff Nurmi, please.”

  The cop’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of the badge but before he could say anything, Monica stepped forward. She gave Louis a smile but offered nothing to Steele.

  “Good to see you again, Detective Kincaid,” she said.

  “Same here, Monica. This is my boss, Captain Steele.”

  “Captain,” Monica said, giving him a tight nod, but the question in her eyes was for Louis—what’s he doing here?

  Steele looked at Louis. He didn’t say a word, but Louis sensed what the man was thinking, that he wanted him to take the lead.

  “We’d like to talk to the sheriff,” Louis said.

  “Well, he’s still here,” she said. “I tried to get him to leave an hour ago but he’s working on some bills. Come on back.”