“A what? I fish, but I’m still learning the ropes up here.”
That pale hand went gimme-gimme, Cook lurching around the table. “A coaster is a brook trout that eats in Superior, like a salmon. They’re rare. Very few fishermen are good enough to find one, let alone catch one. Come on. I need that.”
She took another look and let him have the photo.
“You caught that?”
“The hell’s it look like? That’s me, isn’t it?”
“Where?”
“Near the coast. Christ. It’s a coaster.”
“Who took the picture?”
“My brother.”
Then he dropped his woozy head to his chest and began to spasm—or no, he was crying, or trying to cry. Was this odd, when they hadn’t confirmed that his brother was dead? Or, like her, did he just feel sure of it?
She was so sorry, Margarite began again. She was sorry his brother was missing and the subject of all these rumors about a body in the river, so sorry to come around asking questions at a time like this. But they had a person of interest in custody, and she was collecting information on that person’s whereabouts and activities.
“Naturally since your place is right beside the campground, I’m just wondering if you ever noticed an old RV in Site One, just by the canoe launch.”
“Piece of crap? Massachusetts? Yeah, I saw it.”
“Do you remember about when you first saw it? Who you would associate with it? And about when you noticed it was gone?”
“I’m not some old woman peeking through the curtains,” Cook huffed, offended. He slurped at his scotch. “He was here and then he was gone.”
“He was right here in your house?”
He looked startled.
“The hell. I would never let a bum like that into my house.”
“Can you describe the person you’re talking about?”
“I never met him.”
“But you saw a him. Because otherwise it might be a them. Or a her. And a guy, not a bum. What did he look like?”
Kock’s brother glowered at her from a tear-stained face, his lips working on what she figured would be some foul and juicy indignation—and she somewhat deserved it. In Milwaukee, Margarite had always felt guilty, wading into collateral damage.
“Mr. Cook, I’m truly sorry to trouble you like this. Just give me a race, an age and a size range, the kind of thing he was wearing. It’s really basic. Connecting the dots. I need to establish if the man we have in custody could be the same man you saw here.”
He tossed back his drink. “What’re ya, stupid?”
“Trying not to be,” she said.
“Caucasian, for Christ’s sake. You ever see a colored around here? Pretty good-sized sonofabitch with long hair, in a straw hat and old clothes. Patches on his waders. Smoked cigars. That’s all I can tell you.”
As Cook lurched back toward his bar, she picked one of the Royal Coachmen from the saucer and inspected it. He was lying to her. Oglivie had tied this fly.
She said, “Gotta love a Royal Coachman. My dad’s favorite.”
Cook swung around from his liquor bottles just like Margarite, as a kid, saw cattle swing their heads around in irritation when yanked by the tail. They staggered a little, thrown off balance by their own surprise.
“I’ve got nothing to do with those people.” He pointed that finger at her again. “You hear me, girly? Nothing. Crazy assholes. I never even heard of them.”
Which people, she could have asked him next. And how do you know they’re crazy assholes if you’ve never even heard of them? And do you realize, old man, you’ve got shit on your tail?
But her radio was making static on her shoulder, conveying every third or fourth word from Sheriff Lodge, so instead she said, “Thank you, Mr. Cook. That’s probably all I’m going to need. You take care of yourself.”
“The hell’s it look like?” he demanded, following her to the door. “Fifteen restaurants,” he reiterated, yelling it at her back, “in fifteen states.”
Outside, as she cut across the Reed and Green campground, the signal cleared and Deputy Margarite DuCharme heard Sheriff Lodge grunt, “I don’t know where you’re at, uh …” He was avoiding her name. “… but they’re bringing up a body.”
Two divers borrowed from the Alger County Sheriff’s Department relaxed on a root-heave, sand and rusty spruce needles stuck all over their wet suits. One smoked a cigarette. The other was telling a joke but stopped as Margarite walked by.
Heimo Kock’s body lay inside a half-zipped body bag. The ambulance guys got quiet too. Lodge did not make eye contact. He said, “Strangled.”
One thing Margarite knew from growing up around trout streams: clean and cold, they were nature’s morgue, preserving small dead wonders for her to find. Kock’s corpse was intact and firm, unbloated. His guide-wear was hardly soiled, still clearly plugging Bass Pro Shops, Scientific Angler, Mercury Boats, Evinrude Motors. It was above the shoulders that defined the death.
Margarite changed her angle. Kock’s face was swollen nearly to shapelessness. His skin was a pale shade of black. His eyeballs had popped hugely forward, as if from a fright mask, each one encrusted with tiny snails. Ten or more twists of fly line had accomplished this condition, each round sinking deeply into the flesh of Kock’s neck and cinching off his airway. Someone strong had done this. Margarite herself had recovered Oglivie’s reel out of brush by the road, where the RV had been blocked by Esofea. That reel had no line on it. So there you go. Ninety-eight percent of the time, a man who ran was guilty.
Hell, she revised, ninety-eight percent of all men were guilty, of something. Any good-looking woman, gay or straight, knew that. These divers for example. Eyes digging into her like a piece of exotic meat. And Lodge, disowning her.
“Hey, gentlemen,” she called out. “You hear the one about the fly fisherman, the worm dunker, and the tackle rep?”
This was her Milwaukee PD persona. She squatted beside the body. It gave off no smell, except faintly like mineral and wet polyester. Right here the phrase “sleeping with the fishes” came to mind—the idea of a Yooper mafia, rumors that seemed far-fetched until she began to explore the dealings of Heimo Kock. Now it fit with what Esofea had just told her about Danny Tervo wanting to start up an outfitter and Kock trying to scare him off. So it might have gone like this: Tervo hires Oglivie to do Kock for a thousand bucks. Oglivie, needing Kock in a remote place, hires him as a guide for about three hundred. Kock, believing he is with a customer, turns his back, takes a six-weight floating double-taper fly line to the neck. Oglivie retrieves his three hundred from the dead man and is on his way. Neat. Until Esofea sees smoke in a strange place and stops the bookmobile.
“See, the fly fisherman, the worm dunker, and the tackle rep are having a drink together in a bar. Suddenly the fly fisherman puts down his fly …”
Margarite fingered the trailing end of the fatal line. The monofilament leader was still on it, brownly opaque and wind-knotted all to hell. Not only those knots but the line itself reminded her of something off her dad’s reel. One old Royal Coachman on a wind-knotted leader, a twenty-year-old fly line on a creaky bamboo rod, a fresh pint of J&B for himself and a Mello Yello for Margarite, all aiming at a nap in the grass. This line trailing from Kock’s neck, pale orange and cracked, might have suited her father, but it would have been tossed into the trash by any normal fly fishermen. She figured thirty feet of it encircled Kock’s neck. Where was the rest?
“… and then the worm dunker jerks out his worm …”
She straightened up, feeling both heartburn and dizziness. This stomach problem of hers: up here, unlike Milwaukee, you couldn’t just duck into a deli or a 7-Eleven and take the edge off when you needed to eat. You had to plan ahead. Take stuff with you. Or suffer and then eat too much, too fast, too late. She had been in Newberry not an hour ago, and once again she had left town without food. Just Pepto.
“Ok,” she told Lodge, who seemed to be wai
ting for more than the punch line. “We’ll see if the ME tells us anything else. I’m heading over to Gwinn to talk to Rudvig, then up to Grand Marais to interview Kock’s wife. I’ll take her to ID the body if we’re ready. And then I think you and I should have a beer tonight, talk over my status and future in the department.”
She could almost hear the sheriff’s mind go huh? The divers were all ears.
She said, “So when the fly fisherman puts his fly down and the worm dunker jerks out his worm, the tackle rep says “Oh, shit!” and starts running. You know why? It says on the back of his jacket Master Bait and Tackle.”
Walking away, she heard the divers get the awful joke and laugh. That’s how you did it. You got out ahead of the whole male heterosexual bonding thing. You raunched it up. Showed you were just another one of the guys.
And all that. Over and over. Up here too, apparently. God, she was tired. And now Rudvig.
Margarite drove west along the big lake, then dropped south into the sandy-soiled forestland of the Hiawatha National Forest. She headed west again, alone on the roads, thinking of bears. Rudvig, the would-be Luce County Attorney, got the nickname “Donuts” because he baited black bears with five-gallon buckets of day-old bakery from Munising and Marquette coffee shops. Julia had explained it to Margarite one night while they were drinking beer on the deck. Rudvig had bait dumps all over Luce and Schoolcraft counties. He used game cameras to watch the bears binge on sugar, Julia said. Clients picked which dump to hunt from by viewing video highlights. Rudvig had six radio-collared Rhodesian ridgebacks trained to track on command, and Julia had explained that in terms of “hunting” and “guiding,” Kock’s top bear man had only to take those dogs to the chosen doughnut pile, let them pick up a scent, and turn them loose. In a half hour or so the bear would tire and tree itself above the ridgebacks, who would bay and froth and hurl themselves at the tree trunk until Rudvig and the shooter, following by radio at their leisure, would arrive … and that’s where Margarite had stopped Julia. She got how it worked. It made her sick.
In between times, Rudvig drank at the Full Throttle in Gwinn, and that’s where the deputy found him, wedged at the rail between his buddy Ron Lindgren and another man Margarite didn’t recognize. She spoke mostly to the greasy back of Rudvig’s camo-pattern Superior Outfitters cap. He didn’t know his boss’s schedule yesterday. Hadn’t seen him lately. Didn’t know where he was now. Rudvig hunkered and sneered, glancing at her once or twice in the smoke-hazed bar mirror. Why? Was there a problem?
“I’m sure you’ve heard,” Margarite said.
A headache had formed to counterweight the burning in her stomach. Her voice felt strange coming out. “But in case you haven’t, we just pulled his body from the Two-Hearted near the Reed and Green campground.”
Rudvig grunted. He looked unsurprised.
“Can I have you step outside a minute and talk to me?”
“Would but I’m kinda busy right now,” he told her.
Lindgren snickered, clinked shot glasses with Rudvig. He could be Rudvig’s admiring little brother, the way it looked. Both men were bearded. Both were dirty as little boys. Both dressed like loggers with caps tugged low over furtive, smart-ass blue eyes. Wallets on chains. Skoal bumps. Lindgren added the spooky touch of a zirconium ear stud. Donuts Rudvig, a few years older and a few inches shorter, was missing two-and-a-half fingers on his left hand, the one tossing back the shot. To Margarite, these didn’t seem like the kind of guys who would want to take over a complex outfitting operation. That was desk work, PR work, people work, all kinds of work. It would make more sense—if she forgot about Tervo for the moment—that they took out Kock because they didn’t want to go down for the Pine Stump Junction fire.
“You don’t look busy.”
“I’m in a meeting. Strategic planning.”
Lindgren bumped his shoulder into Donuts. Margarite met Rudvig’s eyes in the mirror.
“And I’m investigating the suspicious death of your employer. The office tells me you’re the man in charge now. You want to step outside, please?”
“Do I want to? No, I don’t want to.”
“Step outside,” Margarite said.
“Say please,” he answered.
“Better watch out, Rudvig.” This was the other man knocking elbows at the bar, pink-faced, big-shouldered, draining a shot. “She’ll go all bull dyke on you.”
“Can you train a dog to hunt that?” Lindgren wondered. “Bull dyke?”
Margarite hesitated, tried to calm herself. This was no time to confuse things with a bad reaction.
“Tell you what,” she said. “You come to the sheriff’s office, tomorrow morning at ten. I’ll get the paperwork started on a subpoena in case you’re unable to make it.”
She looked at the three of them, their heads atop liquor-bottle necks in the mirror. She told herself to stop right there—but here came Milwaukee again: “By the way, you boys sit any closer, you’ll get your dicks tangled.”
She walked out. She passed a jacked-up black pickup in the parking lot—nearly jumped out of her duty boots as a big snout lunged out of a steel cage in the truck bed. Teeth bared, the dog snapped as she backed away. Inside the cage, pandemonium broke out, yelps and jaws emerging from every opening.
From a safe distance, her mind settling, Margarite identified them: Rhodesian ridgebacks.
By evening, nipping Pepto all the way, Margarite had swung past Danny Tervo’s place in Deer Park—Danny not home—and then dropped in to visit Kock’s wife over in Grand Marais. Here was another U.P. element that was hard to get used to: a fifty-mile round trip just to talk to someone “in the neighborhood.”
She tried to unpack that visit afterward as she drove the last leg home. She had expressed condolences and made silent observations—and she had driven away startled and troubled and needing to replay the interview in her mind.
The dead man’s wife was the rare woman who looked ten years older than her husband. June Kock had appeared ready for a walker, some bingo, and a nice buffet, while her husband was still out slaying game, messing with girls a quarter of his age, intimidating and possibly even killing people. The pairing gave off a Barbara and George H. W. Bush vibe, Margarite decided. The husband out selling arms to the Contras and invading Kuwait while his wife worried about illiterate children.
The house was on pricey real estate, on the bluff over Grand Marais, looking out on Lake Superior. But it was bland and middle-class as a structure, a well-kept standard ranch that disappointed the expectations of all the keep out and no trespassing signs Margarite had passed along the asphalt driveway up the bluff. Rumor had it Kock spent his money on boats and parties, and parties aboard boats. Rumor also had it June Kock didn’t drink and would not set foot on a boat. Therein worked the raw mechanics of relational discord. Margarite wondered: how was the Kock couple in their first year? Like she and Julia? Could they see it coming?
“I’m so sorry to bother you with questions at a time like this.”
June Kock had inspected Margarite, up and down, like almost every woman did. She said, “So you’re Bruce’s girl?”
“Not exactly.” Margarite had tried to smile, be warm. “But I am the new full-time deputy, yes.”
“And you were sniffing around him.”
Margarite hesitated. Him? Then she got it, avoiding the name. “I was investigating your husband, Mrs. Kock. He had some unusual business practices.”
Kock’s wife had scoffed—or agreed. Her tone had not been clear. She limped away on unbalanced hips, and Margarite, guessing, had followed her into a dim living room, lit by the light of a television. June Kock had been watching Dr. Oz discuss “The Power of Infidelity.” She tipped back onto her sofa and changed the channel. Jeopardy. Changed it again. Oprah. She turned the sound down and sat back.
“Go ahead then.”
Margarite had gotten a partly familiar read, that was for sure. In Milwaukee, in the city, women with dead men often seemed bitter m
ore than anything: I told him so, he didn’t listen, and now look. Then, with an opportunity to shine a light, to facilitate justice, they usually stonewalled. No, June Kock’s husband hadn’t shown any unusual behavior lately. No, he had no business problems that she knew of. No, there had been no conflicts at home. No, she had no knowledge of a relation between her husband and someone named Theodore Oglivie. No, she had never heard of Danny Tervo. Just like those central Milwaukee women.
But those same women, Margarite found, would stick a knife into the heart of their man’s killer if he walked through the door—because they knew exactly who he was.
“Mrs. Kock,” she said, attempting to trigger that response, “your husband was strangled with a length of fly fishing line.”
“Oh, sure,” the old woman had muttered toward the TV. “Didn’t I know it.”
“What do you mean?”
No response. Margarite waited. Sometimes simple silence was all it took. But not today. “Mind if I go outside and look around?” she asked eventually.
“You do that,” June Kock told her.
There wasn’t much to see. Kock’s wife was a decent gardener, with a taste for petunias, geraniums, and ceramic baby animals. A head-high cedar fence surrounded the property, but Margarite guessed that might be to keep deer out more than anything. You could drop this house down in Brookfield, Wauwatosa, one of the Milwaukee suburbs, and no one would notice. Then she found Kock’s white Yukon in the garage. That surprised her. It scotched the highway robbery idea. It raised the possibility that Oglivie had picked his cargo up here.
With that in mind, Margarite had come back inside the house—warily—and found June Kock still on the sofa but with a reading lamp turned on and aimed into a large shadow box on her lap.
She waited. Kock’s wife looked up. “You asked what do I mean. Well, you can’t see it from over there, missy.”
Taking a seat beside her on the sofa, Margarite had looked into the shadow box—the kind of thing that often displayed stamps, or butterflies, or medals from a war—and to her surprise she had seen dry flies.
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