The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  Nurmi didn’t look up when Monica opened the door. His desk was littered with papers and he was punching at an old calculator.

  “Reuben, you got visitors,” Monica said.

  Nurmi turned his chair and squinted at them, then broke a smile when he saw Louis. “Well, hell’s bells. Look who’s back.”

  Louis motioned to Steele, one step behind. “Sheriff, this is my boss, Captain Steele.”

  Steele’s eyes locked for a moment on Nurmi’s wheelchair then he came forward, hand extended. “Sheriff, good to meet you.”

  They shook hands. Nurmi’s eyes filled with the same question that had been in Monica’s eyes. “Take a chair,” he said.

  Louis took off his windbreaker and sat down. Steele decided to assume a rigid stance near the file cabinet. He seemed uncomfortable in this homey, cramped, and very hot office.

  Nurmi looked at Monica, who was lingering at the door, obviously too curious to leave. “Monica, I was supposed to take the groceries over to Ted. You mind dropping them off? I’ll be home soon as I can.”

  “Now Reuben, you—”

  “I’ll be home soon.”

  Monica pursed her lips, picked up the brown shopping bag from the floor beside the desk, and left, shutting the door behind her.

  “Ted Jackson lives alone way out on Garden City Creek,” Nurmi said. “He busted up his leg last month, so I’ve been checking in on him to make sure he’s got what he needs.” He was looking directly at Steele as he said this, maybe with a need to impress the state police captain the only way he could—with small town values.

  “I started out working for my uncle in a small town,” Steele said, “It goes with the job.”

  Louis knew Steele’s uncle had been a sheriff in a rural county downstate. But there seemed to be no affection or pride for him in Steele’s voice.

  “So, you got something new on the boys in the box?” Nurmi asked.

  Louis sat forward in his chair. “We’re here on a different case, Sheriff. And we’d like your help.”

  “Anything I can do,” Nurmi said. “What ya got?”

  Louis laid out the basics about Jonas Prince’s murder, their investigation on Anthony and the sketchy leads on Buddy Lampo that had brought them to Eagle River.

  When Louis was done, Nurmi sat still for a moment, then stacked the papers on his desk and set them in a wooden in-box.

  “Guess the big Eagle River marijuana raid will have to wait,” Nurmi said.

  “Pardon?” Louis said.

  “I got a tip that a couple brothers out by Copper Falls were running a marijuana farm. I couldn’t get a search warrant, but I could check their power bills. Nobody up here pays $900 a month to heat an empty barn, so I—”

  “Sheriff,” Steele said. “Time is critical here.”

  Nurmi glanced at Louis, but when he leaned back in his wheelchair, he was staring at Steele. “Okay then, let’s talk about your case. Interesting theory you’ve come up with. But it seems to me that what you really got here is a house of cards.”

  Steele pushed off the wall. “Excuse me?”

  “Your case, or at least your reason for coming up here, is built on a big stack of ifs,” Nurmi said. “If that guy lurking outside Jonas’s house wasn’t Lampo, your house of cards folds. If that Weems guy didn’t remember sisu, it folds. If your man Anthony wasn’t spooked by the sketch in the newspaper, it folds. If your nursery man didn’t really recognize Lampo, it folds. If Lampo was just moving tree stumps instead of his furniture, it folds.”

  Steele took a step closer to Nurmi’s desk, not threatening, but it was an invasion of Nurmi’s space. But Nurmi smiled, almost as if he knew he had to diffuse Steele.

  “Look,” Nurmi said. “I know you gentlemen are really smart. And I have to give it to you, it takes balls to come all the way up here on nothing but your gut feeling. Hell, I’d even call it sisu.”

  It was a compliment, but Louis wasn’t sure Steele understood that.

  “You got a photo of this guy?” Nurmi asked.

  Louis reached into his briefcase and retrieved the sketch from the Weems interview. Nurmi pulled it across the desk, studied it then shook his head. “This all you got?”

  “Call Camille,” Steele said to Louis. “Have her fax Lampo’s DL here.”

  Louis used the desk phone to call Camille and asked her to fax Lampo’s driver license photo. When he asked her if she had been able to dig up any additional information on Lampo, she said she hadn’t.

  “The fax will be here in a minute,” Louis said when he hung up. “But she’s got nothing else. After Lampo moved from Watersmeet, it looks like he just dropped off the grid.”

  “And this is the perfect place to do that,” Nurmi added.

  Steele unbuttoned his coat and yanked at his tie, finally surrendering to the heat. The silence was broken by the whirr of the fax machine on the credenza behind Nurmi’s desk. Nurmi turned and pulled out the paper. After he studied it, he handed it to Louis.

  “I don’t know him,” Nurmi said.

  Louis stared at the black and white image on Lampo’s driver’s license. It was surprisingly sharp. It showed a thin-faced man with a long nose, shaggy hair and close-set eyes. The man in the license photo had a beard, the man in Weems sketch did not. And even though he knew the DL photo was five years old, and beards could come and go, disappointment started to gather in a dark cloud in his head.

  Then he saw it. The eyes, the damn eyes, as empty, gray and sad as this godforsaken place. The eyes in both the sketch and the photo were the same. And they were the same eyes, he realized, that he had looked into once before. But where? Damn it, where?

  “I’ve seen him,” Louis said.

  Steele snatched the sketch from Louis’s hand and stared at it. “Where? Up here?” he asked.

  Louis nodded. “On my first trip, but I can’t place where. But I know it was here in Keweenaw. I know it.”

  Steele thrust the sketch at Nurmi. “Look again, sheriff,” he said. “And this time take a good look.”

  Nurmi didn’t reach for the paper. His blue eyes had iced over, and Louis had the feeling that if he had been able to stand up, he would have punched Steele.

  “You think I’d circle the wagons around a wanted man just because he’s a local?” Nurmi asked.

  That’s exactly what Steele thought, Louis knew, but he’d never admit it.

  “No,” Steele said. “I just want you to be sure.”

  “I’m sure,” Nurmi said.

  Silence filled the office, the kind that makes a small place even smaller.

  “Where’s your copy machine, sheriff?” Steele asked.

  “Across the hall.”

  Steele left the office, leaving the door open. A moment later, Louis heard the steady click-clap of the copy machine.

  “Intense man, your boss,” Nurmi said.

  Louis nodded. “It’s just this case,” he said. “And like you said, we’re working on a lot of ifs.”

  “Well, when your boss gets back with Lampo’s picture, I’ll distribute it to my men and start a county-wide canvass,” Nurmi said. “Somebody up here will know where he lives.”

  Louis looked up at the mitten clock. It was just after five. What daylight they had would vanish by nine, but Louis didn’t think that would stop Steele. He’d search all night if he had to. And up here, the night could be a very dark place.

  Louis heard the squeak of a drawer opening and looked back at Nurmi. He was digging for something in his desk. Louis’s gaze moved to the folders in the in-box, and a scrawl of writing on one of the tabs. UPPCO.

  “What’s UPPCO?” Louis asked.

  “Our local power company.”

  “May I?” Louis asked, motioning toward the file.

  “Sure. Take a look.”

  Inside the folder were dozens of old electric bills for the weed farmers.

  “You said you couldn’t get a warrant for a search of the farm,” Louis said. “How’d you get these bills?”<
br />
  “I play Euchre every Thursday with the company president,” Nurmi said. “I told you, up here, when you take care of people in their time of need, they’ll take care of you.”

  “Would your friend be open to providing us an electric bill address for Buddy Lampo?”

  Nurmi smiled. “That’s a helluva idea. Though I might have to bribe him with a bottle of scotch.”

  “On me.”

  Nurmi punched at an intercom button on his phone. “Lenny, get Hank Mooreland on the phone, would ya? And if he’s not at his office, chase him down. I need him.”

  “Will do, sheriff.”

  Steele came back carrying a stack of copies. “You got a photo of Anthony Prince in your briefcase?” he asked Louis.

  Louis nodded. “Yeah, why?”

  “Get it for me.”

  Louis opened his briefcase and grabbed the headshot of Anthony he had shown around Grand Rapids. He handed it to Steele.

  Steele set it on Nurmi’s desk then added one of the copies he had just made. It was an enlargement of Lampo’s driver’s license image, bringing Lampo’s face into stark focus.

  “What do you see?” Steele asked.

  Louis stared at the two pictures, silent.

  Steele took two blank papers and positioned them to cover the upper and lower portions of each face, leaving only the two sets of eyes exposed.

  Louis saw it immediately.

  Anthony and Buddy Lampo. They had the same eyes. They could have been the same man. But since they weren’t, there was only one explanation.

  Louis looked to Steele. “Nathan Prince isn’t dead. Buddy Lampo is Anthony’s brother.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  There were a thousand questions in his head. Why had the family told everyone that Nathan Prince was dead? How did Nathan end up here, in the most remote spot in the state, while the rest of his family migrated downstate? Why was he living under the name Buddy Lampo?

  Then Louis remembered something Emily had said outside the cathedral when she was recounting the Prinsilä family history.

  We have a three-year gap in their history that spans their time in Wisconsin to their arrival in Vandalia.

  “Captain, you remember those missing years from the Prince family records that Emily told us about?” Louis said. “They had to have spent that time here, in the Upper Peninsula. This is where Nathan became separated from his father and brother.”

  Steele was looking at the two photos and nodded. “It might explain why Anthony Prince would come way up here. Lampo’s the only family he has left.”

  Louis couldn’t get the one question out of his head—the why. “Nathan Prince would have only been twelve or thirteen when Jonas went downstate,” he said. “Why would they just leave him here? Why would Jonas abandon one of his sons and tell people he was dead?”

  “We don’t know what happened to Nathan thirty years ago,” Steele said. “And at the moment, it’s not important. What is important is what happened between these two men the night Jonas Prince was murdered and in the days after.”

  Louis nodded, realizing there had been an edge in his own voice.

  “Let’s lay this out with the new information we have,” Steele said. “We know Weems saw Lampo outside Jonas’s house.”

  “Jonas was upset the night before he was killed and changed his sermon at the last minute,” Louis said. “Maybe it was because he and Lampo talked.”

  “What was the new sermon about?” Nurmi asked.

  “Forgiveness,” Steele said quickly. “Louis, pick it up from there.”

  “This is what I think happened,” Louis said. “Lampo confronted his father about something, something that upset Jonas. Then after the evening service, Jonas and Anthony met in the dressing room, probably to talk about his brother’s visit. But it didn’t go well. Jonas may have said something or was going to do something, and Anthony lost it. He killed him in a rage.”

  Louis paused. Four minutes, Emily had said, that’s about how long it took to strangle someone.

  “Then what happened?” Nurmi asked.

  “Anthony went to dinner at his usual restaurant,” Steele said. “Maybe because it was habit, maybe to establish an alibi. He later took out his guilt and rage on his hooker. Once he had composed himself, he came back to the cathedral to stage the scene at the altar.”

  “It was more than staging,” Louis said. “His OCD demanded he clean up his mess and his faith demanded an act of contrition. He accomplished both by laying his father out in full regalia at the base of the cross.”

  “Sounds more like blasphemy to me,” Nurmi said.

  Louis nodded but didn’t offer a deeper explanation. To normal men, putting a murder victim on an altar probably would be sacrilegious. But Anthony was not a normal man. He was a vessel of fragile faith with conflicting compulsions that seemed to rattle around inside him like shards of broken glass.

  A cracked jug.

  Nurmi’s intercom buzzed. “Hank Moreland on line one, sheriff.”

  Nurmi picked up his phone. Steele took out a handkerchief to wipe his face, but when he heard Nurmi mention Buddy Lampo’s name, he walked over to Louis.

  “Who’s he talking to?” Steele asked.

  “President of the local power company,” Louis said. “He’s trying to get a service address for Lampo.”

  Steele nodded. “Good thinking.”

  Nurmi hung up the phone. “Hank’s in Calumet. It’s going to take him about twenty minutes to get back to the office.”

  “Thank you,” Louis said.

  “While we’re waiting,” Nurmi said. “Can I ask you fellas another question?”

  “Feel free,” Steele said.

  “If Buddy Lampo was at the reverend’s home earlier in the day,” Nurmi said, “what makes you think he wasn’t the one at the cathedral later that night?”

  Nurmi’s implication was clear and almost insulting. Had they dismissed Lampo as the killer too soon?

  Louis answered before Steele could. “We did consider him a suspect,” he said. “But we had no ID and we couldn’t put a stranger like him at the cathedral. And at the time there was no other link to Jonas, nothing that would have indicated he had knowledge of or access to the private areas of the church.”

  “But now you have that link,” Nurmi said. “He was family. He was the man’s son. Maybe he had been there before, maybe his brother let him in. Either way, you gentlemen might just have found yourselves the real killer.”

  Louis looked down at the two photos on the desk, rethinking every decision he had made in the last few weeks. Reason told him there was no way he could have seen this brother connection coming—the evidence had just not been there until this moment. But a different part of his brain was kicking hard at his ego.

  Steele seemed unruffled. “All right,” he said. “Let’s flip everything. Lampo decides to go downstate to see a father we believed was estranged. Maybe he needed money. Maybe he wanted to make amends. But his father blows him off. Maybe even lectures him on forgiveness. So Lampo stews about it for the next eight hours and after the service, slips into the church and takes his revenge.”

  Louis shook his head. “It doesn’t work. We know Jonas’s body was dressed and moved after midnight. Lampo wouldn’t have been able to get back in the cathedral at that hour or back into the dressing room. Anthony had that key.”

  “What if they did it together?” Nurmi asked.

  Louis and Steele both looked at Nurmi. The sheriff gave a shrug, like it made perfect sense to him.

  “Maybe they all met in that dressing room to sort out some family drama,” he said. “And the younger brother gets the short end of the deal, just like he got thirty years ago. He goes off on dad. Anthony panics and tells him to high-tail out of town and that he’ll clean up the mess.”

  “No,” Steele said. “A man like Anthony Prince would not risk his reputation and prison to protect someone he hasn’t seen in years. Not even a brother.”

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p; “You must be an only child,” Nurmi said.

  Steele looked quickly at Nurmi. Louis didn’t think Nurmi meant it as insult, but clearly Steele was taking it as one.

  “He’s right, captain,” Louis said.

  Steele looked at him. “How so?”

  “We know what life was like for these kids,” Louis said. “Living hand to mouth in small towns, a moral rock of a father, a mother who gave so much away to strangers. All these two kids had was each other and that creates a powerful kind of bond. One that’s not easily broken.”

  Steele was quiet. The look on his face was not sympathetic but thoughtful.

  A deputy appeared at the door, carrying an evidence box and a pad of paper. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Sheriff, I need to you look this over. I gotta get it to the DA by six.”

  Louis stepped back to let him pass. The deputy set the box on the desk and started talking to Nurmi about an affidavit he was writing.

  Louis picked up the photos of Lampo and Anthony to get them out of Nurmi’s way and took a moment to examine them again. The resemblance was easy to see now, but Louis also noticed something else.

  Differences. Subtle differences, created not by their DNA, but by what life had done to them. Anthony Prince . . . pale and pampered. Buddy Lampo . . . bark-rough and bent by winter winds.

  “Excuse me, Louis,” Nurmi said. “I got to get something there behind you.”

  Louis looked up to see Nurmi trying to maneuver his wheelchair closer to the bookshelf. He wedged himself into the corner while Nurmi rifled through his cluttered shelves.

  “Shoot,” Nurmi said, looking down at a Fed Ex envelope in his hand. “I forgot about this. It came for you this morning, Louis. You must have put my name in the wrong blank on the form because they sent it to me by mistake.”

  Louis took the envelope. The return address was the forensic lab in Marquette. He glanced at Steele, who was standing at the window trying not to look impatient, then opened the envelope. There was one paper and a small manila envelope inside. Louis read the report, which detailed “Item submitted for examination.”

  FP1 1 One (1) package containing circular

  metal object diameter 25 mm