He opened it to the copyright page. It had been published in 1967 and checked out of the St. Ignace library that same year, when Dancer would have been about sixteen. He thought of Aunt Bitty and how hard it must have been for her to raise a child she had probably not understood very well.
Louis turned to the task of gathering the skulls. The only containers he could find were the plastic bins with the dead beetles in them. He took two of them outside and rinsed them out with half-frozen water from the spigot.
Back inside he lined each bin with sheets off Dancer’s bed and started putting the animal skulls in them, starting with the large ones. When both bins were full, he began gathering up the smaller skulls. It was freezing in the cabin, and he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. He thought about leaving the smallest skulls, then realized he couldn’t.
You got to get them all.
He went through the kitchen cabinets, finally spotting a large shoe box under the sink. He dumped out the hammer and small crowbar and started back to the skulls. Halfway across the room, he stopped and looked back at the tools.
He was remembering what Pike said that day at the lodge.
Want to see his little rat hole?
The hole in the foundation that was Dancer’s secret entryway. The hole where, each time he left, he would carefully re-place the boards’ nails into the same well-worn holes.
Louis turned a slow circle. The interior wood walls already had holes cut in them from where Rafsky’s men had searched inside.
Louis looked up. Nothing but a peaked roof and rafters.
He looked down at the floorboards.
Pike had said the foundation under the cabin was concrete. Louis had a sudden memory of the movie Escape from Alcatraz and Clint Eastwood chipping away at the old concrete in his cell with a spoon.
Louis grabbed the crowbar and scanned the floorboards again, looking for uneven slats or protruding nails. He saw nothing, so he started moving the furniture.
He dropped to his hands and knees. Starting in the farthest corner from the door, he crawled along the wall, sliding his palm over the worn boards and tapping to find a hollow spot.
In a corner by the bed he found what he was looking for. A hollow sound beneath three boards, which all had holes wider than those of the abutting boards.
It was easy to use the crowbar to pull up the boards. Beneath, set down in a hole in the concrete, was a wooden box about the size of a twelve-pack of beer. He wedged his fingers down each side, lifted the box out, and opened the lid.
Fur. Brown and red fur.
An animal pelt wrapped around something else. He peeled away the top flap of fur.
Julie Chapman’s skull lay on the leathery underside of the pelt.
Rafsky had been right. Dancer had Julie’s skull all along. And it had been well cared for. It was clean and smooth and Dancer had even used fine wire to attach the jaws, giving the skull the look of a perfect laboratory specimen.
Louis gave the pelt a shake. A wad of money, a brooch, a tiny Bible, and a set of keys tumbled to the floor. He was sure the keys were for the Ford Dancer kept garaged in St. Ignace. He stuffed them and the other things in his parka pocket, pushed, to his feet, and took the skull to the window so he could get a better look at it.
There it was—a small crack in the right temple area. Now they had a cause of death.
He turned the skull around to the front.
There was something about seeing a human skull that conveyed a reality that a photograph could not. As he stared at Julie Chapman’s skull he could imagine the white bone with long black hair and brown eyes. But as his eyes moved over the curves and ridges, an uneasy feeling started to settle inside him.
It was the teeth.
There was a bottom molar missing and the two front teeth . . .
There was a gap between them.
Jesus.
Louis set the skull on the counter and reached into his parka, pulling out the photographs he had taken from Chester Grasso’s garage. He held the close-up of the smiling Rhonda Grasso next to the skull.
He let out a long breath. He was no expert, but to his eye there was no doubt that this was not Julie Chapman. It was Rhonda Grasso.
39
It took Rafsky a good five minutes to open his hotel room door. He was wearing a wrinkled T-shirt, sweatpants, and his face was lathered with shaving cream. His eyes looked like a road map, blue shot through with red, and his hand holding the razor trembled slightly.
“Kincaid, where have you been?” he asked.
“Cedarville,” Louis said.
Rafsky frowned, then nodded. “Oh yeah. Rhonda Grasso. You find her?”
“I think so.”
Rafsky stepped aside, and Louis came into the room. The drawn drapes glowed gold with the afternoon sun. The room smelled stale, and there was a pile of clothes on the floor and a scattering of case folders on the unmade bed.
Louis set the wood box on the desk near the window along with the folder holding Julie Chapman’s dental records. He had swung by the station and picked them up before coming to the hotel because he knew Rafsky would want to see hard proof.
Rafsky came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel. “Look, I know I made an ass out of myself last night,” he began.
“Forget it,” Louis said. “You need to see this.”
Louis opened the box and carefully took out the skull. Rafsky’s mouth dropped open, and he came forward. He switched on the desk lamp and stared at it.
“Where’d you find it?” he asked.
“Dancer had a hole carved in the cabin foundation. I found the loose boards.”
Rafsky took the skull and turned it around. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the fracture. “That’s what killed her.”
Louis pulled the dental X-ray from the folder and held them out to Rafsky.
“What’s that?”
“Julie Chapman’s dental records.”
Rafsky took the X-ray, holding it against the lamp. It took him a few moments, but when he looked back at Louis his face was gray and it wasn’t from the hangover.
“Jesus Christ,” Rafsky said softly. “It’s not her.”
Louis pulled the snapshot of Rhonda from his pocket and held it out to Rafsky. “I found this in Chester Grasso’s garage in a bunch of Rhonda’s stuff.”
Rafsky stared at the picture for a long time. Then he set the X-ray aside and, still holding the skull, went to the bed and sank down on the edge.
Louis had known that Rafsky would take this hard. Not just because they had spent three months, countless man-hours, and a lot of money racing down the wrong road. But also because when this got out, Rafsky would be crucified as an incompetent burnout who had tried to rebuild his reputation on the bones of a young girl.
“I should have known better,” Rafsky said.
Louis said nothing.
“I should have waited for the DNA identification on the bones,” Rafsky said.
Louis took off his parka and sat down in the chair across from the bed. Rafsky was still staring at the skull in his hands. Finally he rose slowly and set the skull down on the desk. He went to the window and moved the drape aside, looking out at the fast-gathering darkness.
“Norm,” Louis said. “What do you want to do?”
“We start over,” Rafsky said, his back still to Louis. “And this time we don’t make any fucking assumptions.”
“When’s the DNA identity test coming back?”
“I called the lab yesterday. Our test got pushed back in line by a triple homicide. They said it will be at least three more weeks.”
“Without DNA, we can’t even assume this skull is part of the skeleton found in the lodge,” Louis said. “We can’t even assume whoever died in that lodge died twenty-one years ago.” He paused. “We need to get in to see Dancer again. We need him to admit he took the skull from the lodge.”
Rafsky was quiet, just staring out the window.
“Ross is still t
he father of the baby,” Louis said. “We at least know that’s a fact. Which puts him back as our number one suspect.”
Rafsky finally turned around. “That certainly explains his behavior when we picked him up at the airport. He waited twenty-one years to take his sister home, and all he could think about was his new house in Georgetown. He knew the bones weren’t Julie’s.”
“When do we bring Chapman back here?” Louis asked.
Rafsky picked up the skull. “Not until we know beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt that this skull is part of the skeleton and that the skeleton is Rhonda Grasso.”
“I’ll go back to Cedarville tomorrow and track down Rhonda’s dental records,” Louis said. “I’ll also stop by the jail and get Dancer to confirm he took the skull from the lodge.”
“We need to know more about Rhonda. Maybe she told someone she was pregnant. Maybe she told someone she was meeting Ross. Did you talk to her family?” Rafsky asked.
Louis quickly summarized what Chester Grasso had said about Rhonda having a wild streak, working summers on the island, and leaving home sometime after graduating from high school in 1969. When Louis mentioned that Rhonda had a brother living in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, Rafsky said he’d contact an inspector he knew in Ontario.
“We still need to link Rhonda with Ross after that summer,” Rafsky said.
“Flowers said it’s common for the Bluff guys to pop and drop the local girls,” Louis said. “Ross said that after Julie rejected him, he screwed around a lot. So maybe when he got Rhonda pregnant she figured she had caught a big fish. When she demanded Ross marry her, he freaked and killed her.”
“Assumptions,” Rafsky said quietly.
“The time line fits,” Louis said. “Ross said he left the island around August 20, and we know that Rhonda was about four months pregnant when she was killed. Our time of death is still late December.”
Rafsky set the skull down on the desk. His eyes drifted to the mess of case folders on his bed. He gathered up the folders, slipped the photograph of Julie back into the Bloomfield Hills missing persons file, and set it aside.
The clanking and hissing of the radiator filled the silence.
“What are you going to tell your boss?” Louis asked.
Rafsky shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. He glanced at his watch, then picked up the phone. But before he dialed he gently put the receiver back in the cradle.
“We don’t tell anyone anything yet,” he said. “Not my boss, not the press. Not even Flowers.”
“We hauled two garbage bags of Rhonda’s stuff back, and he took it back to the station to sort through.”
“Let him. It’ll keep him busy. But don’t tell him anything we’ve talked about.”
And don’t tell Joe, Louis thought. Because he knew what Rafsky was asking him to do. He was asking him to go off the grid and try to clean this up before anyone found out how badly they had screwed up.
“I’ll understand if you want out,” Rafsky said.
Louis realized in that moment that while his head had been telling him he needed to go back to Florida, his heart was pulling for him to stay with Joe. But if he went all in with Rafsky now and this backfired, he didn’t have a prayer of working in Michigan again, not even as a security guard.
A light came on. Rafsky was standing next to the bedside table, his face drawn in the harsh upward glare of the bulb.
And Rafsky? Louis knew he wouldn’t survive.
Louis rose and went to the desk. He set the skull back in its fur-lined box and closed the lid.
“All right,” he said. “I’m in.”
40
The sun was hovering above the lake, and the wind was cutting across the water like knives. Louis hustled from the police SUV to the porch of the lodge.
He fumbled with the key in the frozen lock, yanked open the door, and stepped inside. It took him a second to catch his breath. It was just as cold inside as out.
The lodge windows were still shuttered, and the entrance hall was dark. He hit the light switch. Nothing. The power had been turned off again.
He opened the front door to let some light in and glanced at his watch. It was only four but it felt later.
First the long drive to Cedarville on icy roads to get Rhonda Grasso’s dental records. On his way back through St. Ignace he stopped at the jail and got Dancer to confirm that the skull he had hidden in his cabin had come from the lodge.
Rafsky had been working the phones since last night, trying to squeeze any results from the Marquette lab on the processing of the lodge months ago. An hour ago, Rafsky had relayed a message through Barbara the dispatcher asking Louis to meet him at the lodge.
Louis was glad Rafsky was late. It would give him time to walk through the lodge alone. And it had nothing to do with looking for evidence.
He went to the kitchen. It was the only room not shuttered, and for the first time he got a good look at it. It was large and lined with old wooden cupboards marked with smudges of black fingerprint dust. A stone fireplace dominated one corner.
What was he looking for here? He didn’t know. He never knew. He just knew he had to stand here and feel things.
It was why he had asked Maisey to see Julie’s room. Why he had asked Chester to see Rhonda’s room. Why he always asked to see the places where people had lived and maybe died.
Most times the places were silent, like it had been in Julie’s bedroom. But sometimes, like in the trash-strewn rooms of an abandoned asylum or in a crumbling root cellar on a farm south of Hell, Michigan, there was something left in the air. Something visceral and usually unsettling, but something that always took him closer to the truth.
And now that they had a new victim, he needed to find out what this old lodge could tell him about Rhonda Grasso.
Louis unzipped his parka and went to the parlor. There was nothing in the room except empty bookcases, a tattered red chair, and a stone fireplace with a deer head over the mantel.
Going down the hallway, he peered into all of the rooms, each with the same log walls, scuffed floors, shuttered windows, and silence.
Back in the entrance hall he paused. He was tempted to go down to the basement but decided to wait for Rafsky. Instead, he started up the staircase to the second floor, careful to test his footing for rotten wood.
It was colder upstairs. The rooms were like those downstairs, shuttered and dim, holding nothing but cobwebs. He was about to give up and chalk the lodge up to one of the places determined to keep its secrets when he found a room that made him pause at the doorway.
It took him a moment to understand what had stopped him here. It was the light.
There were three windows, but only two were shuttered. Louis went to the open window and looked out.
It couldn’t have been prettier if it had been a painting from one of the galleries on Main Street. A sloping bluff of snowcapped pines was silhouetted against an exploding sunset of lavender and pink. And the lake lay below, as smooth as antique milk glass.
He turned and went to the spot on the floor where he imagined someone would put a bed. There was no bed now, but he knew they hadn’t needed one.
That last summer this spot had been covered with blankets and pillows stolen from the linen closets of the Chapman cottage. There had been candles purchased from the Wick Shoppe in town. And music playing from a transistor radio—the Righteous Brothers or the Temptations, maybe.
Something on the log wall in the corner caught his eye. He went to it and knelt down. Someone had carved something in the log wall—JC+CL.
It was so small and faint it was easy to understand why the techs might have missed it during their search. But would it have made any difference if they had had this clue months ago? All it proved was that Julie and Cooper had been in this room.
Assumptions, Kincaid.
But it felt right.
His eyes drifted back to the windows, and his breath billowed in the icy air. It took him a moment to figur
e out where his melancholy was coming from.
There was a time when he would not have understood two kids creating a hideaway in such an ugly old place. Or understood the kind of love that would drive Cooper Lange to cross an ice bridge. But he did now.
He heard the door downstairs bang shut. When he went back to the parlor, he found Rafsky sorting a stack of file folders. Dancer’s wooden box sat on the red chair.
Rafsky glanced over his shoulder. “We have lights?”
“Nope.”
“Be right back.”
Rafsky left and returned with two Maglites. He tossed Louis one and stuck the other in the pocket of his coat.
“You get the final report from Marquette?” Louis asked.
Rafsky nodded, picking up two folders. “This is it, everything they found during the processing of this place.”
“I found some initials, JC plus CL, carved in the wall upstairs,” Louis said.
Rafsky arched an eyebrow. “I’d bet that’s in here somewhere. They noted all marks and graffiti. What’d you find out in Cedarville?”
“I found Rhonda’s dentist in De Tour Village,” Louis said. “The guy pressed me about a warrant or permission from her family.”
“How’d you get around that?”
“I told him we didn’t want to give the father any cause for concern until we were sure,” Louis said. “I’m not sure he believed me, but he finally handed the X-rays over, telling me he expected a warrant faxed to him as soon as possible.”
“He’s got a long wait,” Rafsky said. “Let me see them.”
Louis handed Rafsky an envelope. Rafsky took the skull from the box and set it on the fireplace mantel. He shined his flashlight first on the X-rays, then on the skull, then repeated the motion.
“Three fillings, one missing tooth, and a quarter-inch gap between the front teeth,” Rafsky said. “We have an ID for our victim now.”
Rafsky slipped the X-rays back in their envelope and tucked his flashlight back in his coat. “Did you get in to see Dancer?”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “It took a while, but he finally admitted he took the skull from the basement and left the other bones.”
Heart of Ice Page 26