by P J Parrish
“Hey, Louis,” Nurmi said. “You watch your butt up there. Men around here have more guns than sense.”
“I hear you,” Louis said.
Louis closed the door and hustled to catch up with Steele, who was already fifteen feet up the road. They crept along the sloppy edge of the trail, hoping to stay camouflaged by the forest, but in the still smoky air, every snap of every stick sounded like the racking of a shotgun.
They followed the smell of the chimney smoke for twenty yards before a green cabin came into view. It was small, with a sagging planked porch that ran the length of the cabin. The door was closed. There was maybe eight feet of cleared ground between the cabin and the platoon of trees that circled it. Just enough room left for a stack of firewood and a rusted-out Trailmaker snowmobile. There was no white truck and no Honda Civic. And the ground was too rutted and messy to define any fresh tracks.
Louis brought the binoculars to his eyes and focused on the small front window. There was a dim light on inside. He watched for a long time, but he saw nothing moving beyond the dirty glass of the cabin windows.
“Looks empty,” Louis said. “But I can’t be sure.”
“We’re going in,” Steele said.
Louis lowered the binoculars and looked at Steele. As a PI, he had gone in guns blazing plenty of times, but now things were different. Now he was bound by rules and procedures. It surprised him that Steele wasn’t being more cautious.
“We’re not waiting for back-up?” Louis asked.
Steele glanced up to the smoky, silent sky. “You see any coming?”
“No, sir.”
Steele pushed to his feet and drew his gun. “Okay then. You want the front or the back?”
“I’ll take the front.”
“On my go,” Steele said.
Steele moved back into the trees to work his way around to the rear of the cabin. Louis drew his Glock and stepped quietly through the brush, getting as close as he could before slipping from the cover of the trees to the porch.
He looked through the filthy window and could make out the outlines of furniture but no people. He dipped under the window to the door. It had a rusty deadbolt. He dreaded the idea of having to kick it in. It wasn’t as easy as Hollywood made it look. When he turned the knob, he was surprised to find it was unlocked.
Steele appeared on the opposite end of the porch and flattened himself against the cabin.
“No back door,” he whispered.
Louis pushed open the door so hard that it slammed against the wall.
“Police!” he shouted.
He slipped inside, gun drawn, sweeping the interior in one glance. A black pot-bellied stove. Sofa heaped with blankets. End table with one small lamp, beer bottles, and ashtrays. A dusty wood floor covered in newspapers, magazines, socks and fast food bags. A gun rack on the wall—four empty slots.
Steele flashed by on his left, moving quickly toward an open bathroom door. To his right, Louis had full view of a kitchenette—empty but with the counters heaped with dirty dishes and more beer bottles.
“Clear!” Steele yelled from behind him.
“Police!” Louis shouted again, moving toward the only other doorway, a back bedroom. “If you’re in here, show yourself!”
The bedroom was tiny, maybe ten feet square, just enough room for a narrow bed and a small dresser. There was no door on the closet and Louis could see sweatshirts, flannel shirts, and a camouflage jacket hanging from the pole. A pile of blue jeans lay in a heap on the floor.
“Clear!” Louis shouted.
He turned to leave, then noticed the bed. It was neatly made up with a smooth white pillow and blue and white quilt. The diamonds in the quilt’s pattern were in perfect alignment to the edge of the mattress, and the hem was positioned exactly parallel to the dusty floor. Louis focused in on the few other things in the room—a spotlessly clean dresser and a swept floor. Except for the jeans at the bottom of the closet, the bedroom was neat and orderly, in sharp contrast to the mess of the rest of the cabin.
“Captain, come look at this,” Louis called.
Steele appeared behind him. “What?”
“Look at this room compared to the rest of the place.”
Steele entered the bedroom. “What are you thinking?”
“Anthony would do this. He was here.”
“Maybe, but it’s not enough,” Steele said, walking away. “We need to find something solid. We don’t even know for sure this is Lampo’s place.”
Louis started in the bedroom, rifling the dresser drawers and shuffling the clothes on the hangars, but except for the perfectly made bed, nothing looked odd or out of place. No expensive shirts. No gin bottles. No Vuitton duffel.
He went back to the main room and sifted through the yellowed newspapers and old gun magazines. He tossed the sofa cushions and blankets then dropped to his knees to check under the sofa. Just dirt, coins, and a dead mouse.
Steele was searching the kitchen and Louis could tell by the loud rattle of pans and slamming of cupboard doors that he was getting frustrated.
Louis moved to the dinette table, an old aluminum thing with a scratched yellow Formica top. On top was a bottle of Miller beer and a paper plate with a half-eaten cheese sandwich next to a messy pile of papers.
Louis began to sift through the papers and finally got a hit—a receipt from an auto repair shop in Ahmeek with Buddy Lampo’s name on it.
“Captain!” Louis called.
Steele looked out from the kitchen.
Louis held up the receipt. “It has Lampo’s name on it.”
Steele nodded tightly and wiped his sweating brow. The pot-bellied stove had made the cabin stifling.
Louis looked down at the beer bottle on the table. It was sweating, and when he touched the bottle it was cold. And the bread on the sandwich was soft.
“Sir, they must’ve had a view of the road below and saw us coming,” Louis said. “They bailed.”
“You mean Buddy Lampo bailed.”
“No, I mean they. Both of them.”
Steele was still holding the plastic trash can he had been digging through. He tossed it to the floor. “Buddy Lampo is not our fugitive,” he said. “Anthony Prince is. And he’s not here. And maybe he never was.”
“We don’t know that,” Louis said. “Keep searching.”
Steele yanked open a drawer, pulled out a shoebox and threw the lid aside. Louis watched as he angrily sorted through a mess of papers and pictures, scattering them to the floor. Louis was about to say something when Steele stopped. He was staring at a yellowed paper.
He looked up at the ceiling and let out a hard breath.
“What is it?” Louis asked.
Steele held out the paper and Louis took it. It was a baptismal certificate.
This is to certify that Buddy S. Lampo, infant son of George and Doris Lampo, was baptized in the name of our Lord, the Father and the Holy Ghost on June 22, 1955 in Watersmeet, Michigan.
Louis looked back at Steele. “Shit.”
Steele reared back and kicked the trash can across the room.
Louis stared at the certificate, not wanting to believe what he was seeing. But the math didn’t lie. The certificate was issued in 1955. Nathan Prince was living in Oulu in 1955 with his family.
Louis lowered the certificate and wiped his sweating face. They were wrong. Wrong about everything. Wrong about Nathan Prince living as Buddy Lampo. Wrong about Anthony having any reason to come here. And wrong to have chased this crazy theory, all on Louis’s hunch.
“Nurmi was right,” Steele said. “We had a fucking house of cards, a shit-pile of ifs and maybes that we convinced ourselves didn’t stink.”
“Sir,” Louis said. “This certificate is just a new puzzle piece. It doesn’t mean—”
“Work it backwards!” Steele snapped. “Anthony Prince never came up here to the U.P. because he had no reason to come here because Lampo is not his brother. And if Lampo is not his brother, then he�
�s probably not the guy Weems—”
“All right!” Louis said. “I get it.”
Steele raked his hair, walking now, almost pacing. “Two days,” he said. “Two wasted days up here in this Godforsaken place chasing our asses. And we don’t have a damn thing to show for it.”
“With all due respect, captain,” Louis said, “I think we’ve conducted a helluva investigation. Downstate and up here. We not only have an arrest warrant out for Anthony Prince, we solved two other cases. What the hell more do you want?”
“Don’t you fucking get it?” Steele shouted.
“Get what?”
“Nobody cares! Nobody fucking cares about a dead hooker and couple of Johnny Does left in a candle box thirty years ago.”
Louis stared at Steele. Nothing had changed. It was like they were right back in Loon Lake again, and Steele was the same ambitious bastard who saw the badge only as a mirror to reflect his own glory.
Fuck this man. Fuck this job.
“So we’re back to that?” Louis asked. “Putting price tags on victims? Is that what this is about?”
Steele threw up a hand and turned away, but Louis wasn’t going to let him off that easy. He didn’t care what it cost him.
“I asked you a question, captain,” Louis said.
Steele just stood there, drawing quick breaths, staring at nothing.
“Is that what this team is about?” Louis demanded. “You just adding another line to your resume?”
Steele spun toward him, shouting. “No! It’s not about me. It’s about—”
“About what?”
Silence.
“About what, captain?” Louis yelled.
“It’s about her!”
What? Had he heard him right?
“Her? Who’s her?” Louis asked.
Steele was staring at him in a weird kind of disbelief, then he slowly turned away and moved toward the open front door, silhouetting himself in the silver ribbons of rain pouring off the roof.
“Who is her?” Louis asked again.
“Nobody,” Steele said softly. “I . . . I misspoke. Let it go.”
Louis looked down at the baptismal certificate in his hand then set it on the table. He had a decision to make. And he knew exactly what it might cost him—his home, his lover, his daughter and his badge. But he couldn’t work for this man.
“I need some air,” Louis said. “I’ll meet you back down at the Explorer.”
Steele closed the front door, then stepped in front of it, blocking Louis’s way.
“Give me five minutes,” he said.
Louis hesitated, then gave him a tight nod. “All right, talk.”
It was clear from the pained look on Steele’s face that any sort of confession was going to come hard.
“About a year ago,” Steele said, “when I started hearing about other cities setting up cold case squads, I decided that the state needed to get on board with a team of its own and that I wanted to command it.”
That didn’t surprise Louis. The first cold case squad in Miami was making news by the mid-eighties. The new one in Dallas, too.
“I put my plan together, secured some grants and political backing and presented it to the brass,” Steele said. “But it turned out that I wasn’t the only one with the idea. By the time it got to the final approval stage, I had competition.”
Steele paused.
“To eliminate that competition, I used knowledge I had gained in the OPR to force my opposition to withdraw. It wasn’t anything on his record, but things he knew I knew. You could say I blackmailed him.”
The OPR—internal affairs for the MSP.
“Major Deforest,” Louis said.
“Yes. They gave the unit to me on a probationary basis,” Steele said, “But they put Deforest on a special teams oversight board. He’s one of ‘the living’ I told you we now answer to.”
“How did we go from cold cases to Jonas Prince?”
Steele raked back his hair. “The minute Grand Rapids PD saw the scene in the cathedral they knew they needed help. When I heard about it, I went over Deforest’s head and asked for the case.”
“Why?”
Steele rubbed his jaw. “We were an experiment, and a very expensive one. And I knew that Deforest, and others, were going to undermine us every step of the way. I thought if we could notch our belts with a high-profile arrest right out of the gate, the team would be bulletproof.”
Steele fell silent, exhaustion and humility shadowing his face. In a strange way, it humanized him. Enough so that Louis decided to spare him some anguish and finish his story for him.
“So they gave you a chance,” Louis said. “But I’m guessing they also gave you a warning. If you screwed up the Prince case, there might not be any more, hot or cold. Am I right?”
“Yes,” Steele said. “But you have to know this. This team was never about me or my career. It was always about the work that needed to be done.”
Louis almost scoffed. “That rings pretty hollow coming from a man who just said no one cares about two little boys in a box.”
Steele’s eyes closed for a second. “I apologize for that,” he said. “And I meant them—the desk jockeys and bureaucrats and politicians. And like it or not, it’s not their job to care. It’s ours. And I do care.”
Louis was quiet. He still wondered who “her” was, but now was the not time to push for more. Steele had given him enough answers for now. In fact, he had given him more than just answers. He had revealed himself as a boss Louis could start to understand.
“What do we do now?” Louis asked.
Steele ran a hand through his hair again and looked absently around the cabin. Louis could see Steele was having trouble getting his cop brain turned back on. Louis understood. A suit of armor was a damn heavy thing to pick up and put back on after someone knocked it off.
“Sir?” Louis said.
Steele looked at him, then his eyes went to the certificate on the table next to Louis. It was a visible recovery, a straightening of the shoulders and a clarity in his eyes.
“What are we going to do now?” Louis asked again.
Steele opened the door and looked out for a long moment before he turned back to Louis. He didn’t seem to have an answer. Or maybe he did but couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“What does your gut tell you?” Louis asked.
Steele held Louis’s eyes for a second and Louis was sure Steele was going to tell him again that the team didn’t operate on instinct. But he didn’t.
“My gut tells me that this Lampo guy still left here in a hurry, and we need to find out why.”
“Well, we know he didn’t go downhill.”
Steele nodded. “That leaves us one direction. We’re going up.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It was a bone-jarring, slip-sliding grind through thick pines. If there was any road left, Louis couldn’t see it through the mud-caked windshield. He had to rely on Steele hanging out the window to guide him.
Finally, the ground flattened and the trees broke just enough to suggest they were still on a trail. When Louis steered the Explorer left around a bend, the fog lifted for a moment and he had his first good look of what was ahead.
He slammed on the brakes.
In front of them, maybe four feet ahead, was a narrow bridge. Its sides were made of old, gray planks. The bottom was composed of the same rotted wood overlaid with mud and gravel. Through the dissipating fog, Louis could just make out the other end—maybe thirty feet across. What he couldn’t see was what the bridge crossed.
The Explorer was quiet, then from the backseat came a sound of a huge exhale.
“Jesus,” Nurmi said hoarsely.
“What is this?” Louis said.
“It’s Split Mountain Gorge,” Nurmi said.
Louis felt his heart thumping in his chest. If fog hadn’t broken when it did, they probably would have driven right across—and down.
“Back up, slowly,” Ste
ele said.
Louis looked in the rearview mirror but couldn’t see any place to turn around. They were fenced in by the pines and brush. He put the Explorer in reverse, eased it back ten feet and slammed it in park.
They were all silent again. Louis realized he was gripping the steering wheel and let go, flexing his fingers.
“How deep is this gorge?” he asked.
“About a hundred feet,” Nurmi said.
Louis looked over at Steele. He was eyeing the surrounding trees and brush. “Any place they could have turned off before here?” Steele asked over his shoulder to Nurmi.
“None,” Nurmi said. “This used to be a railroad line that ran thirty miles across the peninsula. After they took the tracks out no one used it.” He sat forward to stare out the windshield. “Doesn’t look like that bridge will support a vehicle and I don’t know these woods good enough to say if there’s another way out on foot.”
“Shit,” Steele said under his breath.
“Let’s get out and look around,” Louis said.
Louis climbed out and shoved the door closed. It looked like they were as high up this mountain as they could go. The sky was bruised with grays and blues, except for a slash of red in the east, where a setting sun was peeking through.
Steele walked toward the railroad trestle. Louis followed, moving slowly and keeping his eye on the forest, looking for crushed brush, something that would tell him someone had driven off the trail into the cover of the trees. But given the terrain, any escape would more likely be on foot.
“Come look at this,” Steele called out.
Steele stood at the entrance to the bridge, rigid against winds that ripped at his nylon jacket. Louis came up next to him.
The wind coming up over the gorge had dissipated the fog and across the long bridge, Louis could see another mountain, higher and tufted with pines.
Louis took a few steps to the weathered wood railing and looked down.
Holy shit . . .
Nurmi had said it was a hundred feet, but it looked more like five hundred. Steep and deep, the gorge looked as if it had been cut into the earth by a giant meat cleaver. At the very bottom, he could see a copper river that trickled through the V-shaped gorge like a stream of blood.