“You don’t want it?” Kota asked, showing a rare flash of emotion.
“Not yet. Tell me about the kids you were concerned about.”
“They didn’t do anything.”
“What caught your attention?”
“They were making noise about Indian land and all that treaty stuff.”
“And?”
“I heard they were gonna paint some stuff, let hunters know this is their land.”
It didn’t seem likely that kids defending their traditional hunting grounds and rights would be painting anti-meat slogans.
“Talk to them, DaWayne. Be damn certain.”
“I have talked to them. That mean you’ll take the tape?”
“Yes, but not yet.” He needed to talk to McKower, find out exactly what legal swamp he was wading into.
He wasn’t sure why he was avoiding the tape, except that the intuition thing was working again, and it was telling him there was more to this than homicides; if he accepted the tape, he might be drawn into something too big for him to handle.
Service drove back to Bay Mills, delivered Kota to his house, got on the radio, and arranged to meet Joe Ketchum, who was working with Kathy, checking hunting camps several miles west of Hulbert Lake. He wondered if someday he and Nantz would be working together. It was a nice thought.
The Ketchums met him at a crossroads COs called Dodge City. The couple looked tired.
Service brought cinnamon rolls he grabbed on the fly from a roadside Stop-and-Rob, and fresh coffee, all of which the couple attacked voraciously.
“Must be nice not catching this duty,” Kathy said.
Service shrugged and turned to Joe. “Did you get a good look at the grounds at Vermillion—inside the compound?”
“I took my sweet time. I found the three wolves near a shelter inside the fenced area. The shelters were low, two-by-fours covered with a spruce roof.”
“They weren’t inside the shelter?”
“Nope, right out in the open. Like dogs.”
“Spooky?”
“Wary but I wouldn’t say spooked. Usually a wolf takes a look and he’s outta there. But they seemed comfortable enough long as I didn’t try to get too close.”
“What else did you see?”
“Funny you should ask. It looked to me like there had been other structures that had been moved. You know, outlines in the mud and drag marks, like from a Bobcat or something. I suppose they have to do maintenance in there, or after the bomb they needed to move something.”
“You followed the tracks?”
“I was too busy looking for the animals. The fourth one was maybe a hundred yards outside, lying on a sand berm. Looked like she was waiting for the others to come out.”
“Was she spooked?”
Joe Ketchum pursed his lips and thought. “She scooted away when she saw me, but not too far. I got the feeling she didn’t want to leave the others. Pack mentality, maybe. When I got the vet we found her pretty much where I first saw her. We baited her in and got a dart in her no problem. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. It was like she’s used to people.”
“Did you notice anything else?”
“When I first went in I didn’t advertise myself. There were several trucks in the area, guys loading stuff from that main building. Nobody challenged me.”
“Markings on the trucks?”
“None.”
“But they didn’t run you off until after the wolves were captured.”
“Right.”
“They’ve moved the security gate south across the marsh,” Service said. “I was out there today and they wouldn’t let me in.”
“What’s going on, Grady?”
“I wish I knew.” Service tried to piece it all together, but couldn’t. He finished his coffee, got back in his truck, and called Kota.
“That night we met at Vermillion. How did you get in?”
“I came through the swamp east of Marsh Lake. You take the last two-track before Whitefish Point and follow it west along the shore. A few miles in, the road takes a switchback to the south. Snowbugs use the trail in winter, but you can get a truck through if you’re careful and have the clearance. I left the truck at the bend and walked in along the creek.”
“I never saw your prints.”
“Spruced my way in and out.”
Meaning he used something to obliterate his tracks. Service had done similar things. “How far from your truck to the lab area?”
“Two miles, all bad ground.”
The road was virtually impassable, but the trick in mud was to maintain your momentum. Eventually Service bumped his way to the switchback where Kota said he had left his truck and started walking with his pack and emergency gear, knowing he was not going to be back until after dark.
The ground was muskeg and it took nearly an hour to get to the area, which was illuminated by low-intensity lights. He advanced cautiously and was almost to the main building before realizing that all of the steel fencing was gone. The place was being stripped clean. There were six large trucks and a bulldozer on a flatbed trailer. He didn’t want to use a light. Trying to remember the drawing Kota had sketched, he made his way westward toward the abandoned lifesaving station. The frame of an original clapboard building stood near some new buildings being erected by the Piping Plover Pals Conservancy, which now had title to the land. There were trucks in the low marsh between the barrier dunes and the shoreline, roughly where Kota’s drawing showed federal facilities. This was a half mile from the wolf facility. As he watched, there was a sharp concussion to his right. A cloud of dust leaped into the air, and bits of stone and sand rained down fifty yards from where he was hidden. An explosive charge had been set off.
He reversed direction and walked back through where the wolf pen had been, past the empty lab building and trucks, and veered westward toward the original security gate, which was unattended. The Feebs had set their security farther south—where he and Kota had encountered them earlier that day. He carefully slid into the abandoned gate building, put the red cover on his light, and looked around. Wires and coaxial cables drooped from the wall, cut clean, some stripped out of metal conduits. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before Vermillion no longer existed.
It was after 10 p.m. when he got back to his truck. By habit, he waited nearly fifteen minutes to make sure he was alone.
He called McKower as he entered Paradise.
“McKower,” she answered.
“It’s Grady, Lis. I need help.”
“Are you hurt?” He heard concern in her voice.
“No. I’m headed for Newberry. Meet me at the office?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“It’ll take me longer,” he said, stepping on the accelerator and not caring that the onboard computer would tell watchers at Station 20 in Lansing that he was speeding without having declared an emergency.
McKower wore faded jeans and a sweatshirt that proclaimed damn near russian. The department’s most frequent critics claimed that the DNR acted like the KGB, and this had become a joke in the law enforcement division. Lis had given all District 4 personnel a shirt when she got promoted. Now similar shirts had popped up in all the twelve districts around the state, and the brass in Lansing was sending out weekly reminders that nonuniformed personnel should adhere to all departmental dress regulations.
She wore no makeup and there were bags under her eyes. She offered coffee, but he refused. He had so much in his system it would take a week to get rid of it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The feds are tearing down Vermillion and it’s off limits to us. In a few days it will be back to nature.”
McKower studied him. “You witnessed this demolition?”
“I snuck in
on foot tonight.”
“You trespassed?”
“Goddammit, it’s not trespassing. It’s my case and I belong there. The feds are really uptight about this thing, Lis. They’re not talking, not sharing. They withheld information from the captain. They have a federal judge and federal prosecutor from Marquette on the team,” he said. “The night of the bombing I ran into DaWayne Kota at Vermillion. He said he had heard about the problem out there and came out to take a look.”
“Not in his purview,” she said.
“I know. It struck me as odd and I’ve spent days trying to find him. I learned after the team meeting this morning that the crime scene team picked up footprints in the dust near the bodies in the lab building. I confronted Kota today and he said he had been inside looking around and that the two vicks had been shot. Today he and I drove out to Vermillion, but the Feebs wouldn’t let us in. Kota says the bodies were torn up by the explosion, but he insists they were also shot. There’s been no mention of this to the team, and the feds won’t talk about autopsies—you know the usual runaround about how it takes time and like that. The footprints weren’t disclosed to the team either. The wolves that Joe Ketchum found have been moved by USF&WS, and Barry Davey refuses to say where. This whole thing sucks.”
McKower looked at him. “Where are you going with this, Grady?”
He wished he knew. “I was in the lab building the night of the explosion and saw the bodies but the techs were setting up and I didn’t want to foul up their work. What I did see were mounts for two security cameras. I didn’t see cameras and I asked Kota about them. He said one was destroyed and one wasn’t.”
“And?” she asked.
“He’s got a tape.”
The lieutenant’s eyebrow lifted. “What does it show?”
“He won’t say. He wanted me to take it.”
“Did you?”
“I’m not sure what to do. If I take possession, I’m obligated to turn it in and say where it came from, right?”
The lieutenant looked dead serious. “That depends,” she said. “If you found a tape, that would take care of that. A found tape wouldn’t have anything to do with Vermillion until you saw what was on it. And while I agree that we’re obligated to turn over evidence, we don’t have to do that until we have a look at it, know that it’s evidence, and maybe make a dupe. I mean, if the tape was found, we’d look at it, right? We wouldn’t know who it belonged to until we looked at it and we’d want to know, maybe so we could return it to its rightful owner. It’s not evidence until we see it. Maybe it’s just a cartoon or a skin flick.”
Service sat back in his chair and studied his friend. She had always been so straight and by the book it was hard to believe what she was proposing.
“What do we tell the captain?”
“Let’s see the tape first. Just make sure the tape is found, are we clear on that?”
“Very.”
Service called DaWayne Kota from his truck and explained the plan. The tribal CO didn’t ask any questions, which confirmed that the tape was something he would be glad to be rid of. The question was, did Service want it?
The plan was simple. Service asked Kota to leave the tape in a paper bag in the middle of the road that crossed Naomikong Creek. It was isolated and not particularly good deer country, which meant the likelihood of bumping into hunters was remote.
Kota was to park beside the creek, face his truck west, lights out, and wait until Service approached. Service would flash his blue light a half mile from the site. As soon as Kota saw the light, he was to pull away with his lights out and not turn them on again until he could no longer see Service’s headlights. This way, Service would not have seen who dropped the tape and he could testify to this truthfully.
The pickup went as planned; Service found the bag with the tape in it. He wore latex gloves to pick it up and when he got into the truck, he wiped the plastic cover of the videotape clean. There might be prints other than Kota’s on it, but at this point that was unimportant. Whatever the tape showed would dictate what had to be done next.
Less than two hours after he saw her at the office, Service called Mc-Kower at home. “I found something.”
“You want to meet at the office?”
“Be there as quick as I can,” he said.
“You could stay with us tonight.”
“No thanks, I just want to see what we have and be done with it.”
“Take it easy,” she said.
Less than ten minutes north of Newberry, his cell phone sounded. It was Freddy Bear Lee and he sounded excited. “Better hustle your ass down to Trout Lake.”
“I’ll give you a bounce five minutes out,” Service said, hitting his blue light and mashing down the accelerator. He telephoned McKower as he flew past the district office.
“I’m headed for Trout Lake,” he said, not bothering to explain before he hung up.
18
Five minutes out of Trout Lake, a town born during the logging boom in the 1880s, Service radioed Fred Lee to get directions. When he reached the road that led to Frenchman Lake, he turned onto Woofs-R-Good Trail and, a few hundred yards farther on, saw a knot of emergency lights and police vehicles.
Freddy Bear Lee was waiting and greeted him grimly. “I thought you’d better be here for this.”
Service followed his friend down a grassy path to a cedar-log lodge with a gaudy sign in red, white, and green that read ricci’s upnorth resort. The place had been rumored for decades to be a summer camp for Mafiosi from Detroit and Cleveland, a place where mobsters brought girlfriends, not families. The building was lit by ground spots.
Signboards were strewn along the path and lawn. eating meat is immoral. hunting is murder, don’t kill bambi. hunters: be a dear & help the deer herd grow—shoot yourself. Service glanced at the signs and shook his head, thinking there was no bigger pain in the ass than an American with a cause. The two men clomped up the steps to a sprawling veranda, where three Chippewa County deputies and a state police trooper were talking quietly.
Sheriff Lee opened the door, and Service walked inside. There were nearly fifty people stuffed into the towering great room. It stank of sweat, blood, and wet clothes. The room was illuminated by a chandelier made of deer antlers. The people ranged in age from twenties to sixties and older, all of them with cuts, visible bruises, and torn clothing. No Chippewa, Service observed as Lee tugged on his arm and led him to a side room with a deputy stationed at the door. The man gave way as the sheriff pushed the door open. Service stepped inside and closed it. There sat Summer Rose Genova, one of her eyes swollen and closing, her hair fouled and tangled, her lower lip split. She had streaks of dry blood on her cheek and chin.
Freddy Bear Lee remained outside.
SuRo said wearily, “You missed all the fun, rockhead.”
“Are you all right?”
“You ought to see the other guys,” she said, wincing when she tried to smile.
“What the hell is going on, SuRo?”
“I want my attorney.” She pushed a card across the table and Service picked it up.
“I’ll call him for you.”
“The law entitles me to the call,” she said.
“You don’t want me to call for you, that’s fine. You gave me his card.” Her actions and comments seemed irrational. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She glowered at him and waved her hand, a signal of dismissal or telling him to make the call. He decided it was the latter.
Service stepped outside the room. Freddy Bear Lee shrugged. “This could’ve been a lot worse. The rainbow people moved in around midnight to set up for this morning. They were going to demonstrate to disrupt hunters, but some of the lodge’s guests found ’em before they could get organized and all hell broke loose. Joey Ricci did a helluva job stopp
ing the mayhem and called us.” Joey Ricci was forty-something. He had inherited the lodge from his late father Carlo, who founded the operation in the 1940s. Joey had grown up in the U.P. and from all reports had nothing to do with the mob other than providing them a place to play.
“Genova organized the whole deal,” Lee said.
“What charges?”
“Well,” the sheriff said, “they aren’t carrying firearms or lights so we can’t say they were hunting or shining after or before legal hours. And nobody else was hunting at the time so they weren’t harassing anyone. Best we can do for now is trespass, disturbing the peace, and maybe some assault and resisting arrest charges, though as I understand it, Ricci’s guests were the aggressors. As scraps go, this was pretty much the Peanuts gang versus Delta Force.”
“SuRo looks like she got roughed up pretty bad,” Service said.
“If so, she brought it on herself. The woman is quick with her dukes, eh? Got a punch like the Old Brown Bomber himself. It took four of my people to subdue her. One other thing,” the sheriff said. “Nevelev called me and told me that autopsies show that the victims at Vermillion were shot. They took .380 slugs out of the stiffs. The case is being classified a homicide.”
“It was already a homicide,” Service said. But bullets might point toward a different motive, he thought, and confirmed what DaWayne Kota had observed.
Service started to move away, but Lee caught him by the arm. “Nevelev says they got a search warrant, entered Genova’s compound, and found a nickel-plated .380 Walther PPK. They’re doing ballistics as we speak.”
Service went to get coffee from an urn. An older man with long gray hair and a scraggly beard glowered at him and said, “Yo, pig.”
“Get back in your time machine, Gramps. The sixties ended thirty years ago,” Service said, suppressing a grin.
Service used Ricci’s phone to call the name on the card. He had met S. Montgomery “Wiggy” Wiggins at SuRo’s. He was her attorney.
Wiggins had once been a high-profile plaintiff’s attorney out of Aspen. He had retired in his late forties to become a fishing guide on the Au Sable. Since then he had been dabbling in high-profile cases as a defense attorney. He had never lost a case on either side.
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