Chasing a Blond Moon

by Joseph Heywood

  Dozens of empty yellow plastic ice bags were on the floor, and more were piled in the corner by a closet. There was water on the floor and muddy footprints.

  The shower unit was a modular model, the type builders and do-it-yourselfers could pop into place and attach to the plumbing. Pyykkonen pulled open the shower door. There was a plastic board across the inside of the door, up about three feet. She nodded for him to look.

  The body inside was naked, curled in the fetal position inside plastic. Bags of ice were piled around it. Some of them had melted. The body’s skin was blue.

  “Don’t inhale too deeply,” Pyykkonen said. She slipped a small jar of Vicks from her pocket, dabbed some under her nostrils, offered the jar to him.

  Service tried to memorize what he was seeing. The body was male, Asian. Eyes closed, no overt signs of violence. Pyykkonen had put on rubber gloves and was pushing down on his skin. She said, “Long past rigor.”

  He didn’t ask what all the kids were doing in the house with a body that had been dead long before tonight. In due course, they would find out. His job was to stand clear and let the cops do their work. He remembered a case in downstate Newaygo County where some teens had found the body of an old man in a trailer and charged friends admission to see the corpse. The U.P. was not exclusive domain to antisocial and macabre behaviors. He’d thought then it was a once-in-a-lifetime case. It was disturbing that he couldn’t remember where his keys were from one minute to the next, but he could recall the details of years-old cases he’d had nothing to do with. Gus called it “cop mop”—a cop’s brain absorbing all sorts of dirty water and letting it float around inside the brain for years.

  “I’m gonna get out of your way,” he told Pyykkonen.

  He went outside and lit up. There was a dark pickup near the porch.

  It had two stickers in the back window: i play hookie for nookie, and thugs drink blood. He rarely worried about people with such stickers. It was the ones without decals he worried about: The bad ones didn’t have to advertise.

  Sheriff Macofome was fifteen minutes behind the others and stopped like he wanted to confront Service, who just pointed through the door. “She’s in there.”

  EMS arrived along with a van with the same crime lab techs he’d worked with in Hancock when all this started. The same medical examiner arrived after the techs.

  Flashbulbs popped inside. At one point Pyykkonen came outside, took a cigarette, smoked silently, and went back inside.

  Adults began arriving in vehicles. Parents, Service assumed. Cops brought out kids, handed them over to the adults, told them to go to the station in Houghton. Just after eleven, Pyykkonen came out, nodded for him to come in.

  A boy and a girl were sitting at a table. They both looked shaken.

  “Daran Cencek and Sally Grice,” Pyykkonen whispered. “He’s a junior at Houghton High School and she’s an eighth-grader.”

  “You know them?” he said. The girl was well developed, and looked at least twenty. Her mascara and eye makeup had run and left her with the mask of a raccoon. The boy had acne, his hair spiked and dyed purple and green. He had a gold post in his left nostril, another in his right eyebrow. If he spoke, Service expected he’d hear another one in his tongue, clicking against his teeth.

  She nodded. “Daran claims he was buying dope from a Tech student here all summer. He brought the girl here because she wanted to fish for salmon.”

  “Salmon here?” This was news to him.

  “No,” she said. “He just told her that. Thought they’d do some weed and beer, get it on. The night he brought her there was an aluminum boat tied up to the dock and a bigger boat, a twenty-five- or thirty-footer with a cabin. Daran went up to the house and bought a couple of dime bags just like he says he always did. The college kid came out afterward, took the aluminum boat out to the bigger boat, hitched the aluminum to it, and headed south down the lake.”

  “The guy in the shower?”

  “I’m getting to that. Daran and Sally smoked and fished and drank, then came up to the house. It was locked, but Daran jimmied the lock and got in. They used the bed. The bathroom was empty. Afterward he took the girl home and came back alone. He wanted to snag a salmon.”

  “But there aren’t any salmon.”

  “He was high. He claims he was flinging a spider and it got hung up by the buoy. It felt like it was draped over the line, and he didn’t want to bury the hook because he had only the one spider with him. So he swam out to retrieve it, but the spider wasn’t hung on the line. It was way over the line and hooked down below. He swam down to pull it loose and felt something. He panicked when he realized what it was. He went back to get a couple of friends and the three of them pulled the body up. It was in plastic and weighted in about ten feet of water. They took the body inside and put it in the shower until they could decide what to do. Then they started worrying about the cops blaming them. One of them got the bright idea that this was an opportunity. They went out and bought ice, put the barrier inside the shower door, and packed the body. They’ve been re-icing it a couple of times a day since then. The next day at school Daran told a couple of kids he had a dead body. He charged them each thirty-two bucks a look and provided beer. Daran fancies himself a real entrepreneur.”

  “Thirty-two bucks?”

  “It’s his lucky number. He’s a hockey player. They’ve been running their little sideshow since then. He says he’s cleared almost four grand.”

  “And no rumors got out?”

  “You know how kids can be when they want to.”

  “When did they find the body?”

  “August twenty-sixth,” she said solemnly.

  “The night we found Harry Pung,” Service said.

  “Right.”

  “So who’s the dead kid?”

  “They don’t know, but it’s not the guy who sold the drugs.”

  “Did you get a description of the other kid?”

  “Asian,” she said, “about five-ten, maybe six-foot, heavy build. The big boat had a blue hull.”

  Parents took their kids to the station for processing. Police took Daran and Sally. The ones over eighteen were being held at the county all night; the others were taken to Juvie. They would all be arraigned in the morning on charges of unlawful entry, failure to report a dead person, possession and distribution of illegal substances. There were so many potential charges and so many statements to sort out that the prosecutor would work all night getting everything ready for court in the morning.

  Service and Pyykkonen got to the hospital after 2 a.m. They were both tired. The medical examiner showed them into a room. “We’ve done the gross and prelim tonight,” he told them. “Labs tomorrow.”

  “What do we know so far?” she asked.

  “Not a helluva lot. The body’s in good shape, considering how long it’s been, but we’ll need the labs to point us. No signs of violence and no defensive marks or anything like that. Could be natural.” The M.E. saw Pyykkonen’s look and amended his statement. “That’s just theoretical.”

  “You mean CYA,” she said.

  The M.E. grinned. “They’re synonyms.”

  Service and Pyykkonen went outside for a smoke. “We got all sorts of prints from the house. It’s gonna take time to sort it all out. We tried to take prints off the stiff, but I don’t know how good they are. The skin was beginning to come apart. We’ll put them into AFIS later today.” The FBI maintained AFIS—Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems.

  “I hate waiting,” she said. “I’m thinking about getting Maggie Soper down here. You think that friend of your son’s could look at the body for us?”

  “Let’s set it up for seven in the morning,” he said.

  He went to Walter’s dorm and knocked on the door. His son opened the door with sleep in his eyes. “Got a place for me to bunk for the night?” />
  The boy opened the door and let his father in. “You’re bleeding.”

  Service said, “We need Enrica to come to the hospital tomorrow.”

  “Why?” The boy tossed a hand towel to his father.

  “There’s another body.”

  “She’s pretty delicate right now.”

  “We need her to do this.”

  “I’ll call Karylanne.”

  “Six,” Service said. “We’ll pick her up.”

  “Karylanne and I better go with her.”

  Service wondered if the boy could handle it, but didn’t challenge him. He needed this to go as smoothly as possible. Walter took his cell phone into the hall. Service curled up on the floor and went to sleep. When he awoke there was a blanket over him and a pillow under his head. He found a bloodstain on the pillow case. Damn stitches.

  Maggie Soper took one look at the body and said, “That’s him—Terry Tunhow.”

  “You’re sure?” Pyykkonen asked.

  “I don’t forget people who pay me,” she said.

  Enrica came in next. She was shaky and teary. Karylanne and Walter helped her into the viewing room.

  She stared at the body and began to sob.

  “You recognize him?” Service asked.

  “It’s the guy from my class,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Terry Pung?” Pyykkonen asked. “Not the Terry Pung from the lake?”

  The girl nodded, shook her head, and began to faint. Walter caught her before she hit the floor and carried her into the hallway.

  Service and Pyykkonen got coffee out of vending machines and went outside to light up.

  “Harry Pung’s dead,” Service began, trying to focus his mind. “Bear hair in the car, and at the camp. Dead at a boat ramp on the same body of water where we found this last guy.”

  “Terry Tunhow, which is an alias, and not Pung’s son.”

  “Presumably,” he said. “Is there a police artist here?”

  “Get real,” she said. “There’s a Troop in Negaunee, if we can get her.”

  “We need to get something on paper we can start working with. So here’s how it looks to me. Somebody had a bear in the cabin at Lac La Belle, brought it down to the canal by the fish house.”

  “Harry Pung,” she said.

  Service nodded. “As far as Hancock. He loaded the bear in a boat to motor down here.”

  “But Harry missed the boat,” she said.

  “Right, and then Terry gets in the big boat here and disappears, leaving his stand-in to a nap with the fish.”

  “You think it all fits?”

  “It never all fits until you have somebody in custody and can work it through,” he said. “I’m too tired to think. My brain is fried.”

  “You gonna hang around town?”

  “I’ve got to get back to Marquette.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as we have something,” she said. “Thanks for the help. Remember, I’ve never lost a killer.”

  There’s always a first time, he thought.

  16

  He was just across the Marquette County line when a Troop came up on the county radio. “Shot fired, in pursuit, officer needs assistance, westbound US Forty One, two miles east of Champion.” It was a female voice, calm, almost detached. In the U.P. cops were few; even so, all officers in the various police jurisdictions had discretion in responding to calls of other agencies, based on location and other factors. But shots fired was one you went to, no matter what you were doing. You went because the day might come when you’d be making the call. He toggled his mike and told the Marquette County dispatcher. “DNR Twenty-Five Fourteen responding.”

  “Where are you, Twenty-Five Fourteen?”

  “Forty One, eastbound, just passing the county line.”

  Another voice chimed in and Service recognized Marquette County Deputy Sheriff Linsenman. Almost a year ago, in the same area, the two of them had responded to a moose–vehicle collision. Linsenman had dispatched the animal, which was at the bottom of a ditch on top of the driver, who had been thrown out of his pickup.

  “Suspect in green Ford pickup running eighty-plus,” the female Troop reported, her voice up only slightly. “Westbound on Forty One, approaching Van Riper.”

  Van Riper was a state park, six miles ahead in his twelve o’clock position. Suspect in what? It would help to know. His adrenaline began to spike. Shot fired and pursuit. Next to domestic disputes, it was the worst call of all.

  “Suspect is turning north on the Pesheke Grade Road,” the Troop radioed. “Following,” she added, her voice beginning to betray the strain of the chase.

  There’d be no eighty-miles-per-hour pursuit on that road, Service told himself. It was steep, washboarded, studded with large rocks, narrow and winding as it snaked over the southwestern slabs of the Huron Mountains. At the first summit there was a deep gouge in the road between two huge stone abutments, a precarious squeeze even when you were going slow and had the vehicle under control.

  Linsenman reported turning up the grade.

  Service began to slow for his turn to the north, searching his memory for a shortcut to an intercept, but there wasn’t one. He’d have to go all the way around by Skanee and come back south and it was at least a hundred miles around, which is why the Pesheke grade was a popular cut-through for locals.

  The washboarded road pounded his undercarriage, making the vehicle lurch and fishtail. The vehicles ahead of him were kicking up heavy dust, which hung in the air like a cloud of cocoa powder. He switched on his headlights, but they made no difference, and his blue lights seemed to bounce off the dust and make visibility worse.

  The Troop came back on the radio. “Suspect out of vehicle,” she said, her words clipped.

  Linsenman radioed, “Vehicles in sight.”

  Service kept his eyes on the road, both hands firmly on the steering wheel.

  Loose gear in back of the Yukon was flying all over the place, bouncing off the windows and roof. For weeks he’d been telling himself to put things away, tie it all down, but he’d never gotten around to it.

  Service bounced out of a severe left turn and saw emergency lights ahead on a long, rising straightaway. Two police vehicles were on the road, their doors open. Dust lingered in the air. He saw Linsenman behind the open driver’s door of his squad, looking ahead. A blue state police cruiser was ahead of Linsenman, but Service couldn’t see the driver. The Pesheke River was on their left, just over the lip of a steep, boulder-strewn berm that looked like it had sprouted teeth. It was good defensive cover for a shooter.

  “Shot fired,” the Troop reported on the radio.

  Service braked, got out, opened his door, and used it as a shield while he studied the situation. He had heard no gunshot.

  What he heard was Linsenman yelling at the Troop, “Where is he?”

  He, Service thought, evil’s gender always assumed to be male and usually true. The recent fourteen-year-old shooter had been an anomaly, though his experience said the gap was narrowing between males and females in the arena of violence.

  “Left side,” she yelled back. “Above the river.”

  Service tried to will the two of them to get on their radios. Yelling only helped the suspect know where they were. He started to call out to Linsenman to tell him to get on the radio, but stopped. What was Linsenman’s first name? All these years and he’d never known. He’d always been Linsenman. Service reached into the backseat and uncased his rifle. It was new, issued to all officers in midsummer. He’d shot about twenty rounds through it. The sights were true, but the weapon would be too heavy to lug around. It was intended officially for dispatching large animals, but every officer knew that handguns or shotguns were not matches for perps with rifles.

  He bolted a round into the chamber and checked the safety on. A sho
t sounded while he was hunched over with the rifle.

  He popped up to see Linsenman aiming his sidearm toward the berm.

  Two more shots popped. Handgun, Service thought. Big bore.

  A third shot answered from the Troop’s position.

  Linsenman was holding tight, the pistol in his right hand, his left palm under the butt, his left thumb flat against the barrel for stability, exactly as it was supposed to be.

  Sirens were bleating behind them on the grade. The radio was alive with voices and static.

  Linsenman remained still.

  Service found himself mesmerized.

  The next shot was blended with another—two shots merged as one. Linsenman’s windshield exploded and Service saw the deputy’s arm jerk in recoil. His mind did the replay: windshield, then the arm. A fire-back, a response. Nobody moved. Sirens drew closer. What sick dickhead invented modern sirens?

  Linsenman stayed by his door, his weapon still pointed across the road. Smoke snaked out of the barrel and blended with lingering dust particles. The Troop from the car ahead of him hustled low in the ditch on Linsenman’s right, reached his vehicle, pulled open his passenger door. Linsenman never looked at her. Service could hear her trying to talk to him, but couldn’t make out her words.

  Focused, Service told himself, watching Linsenman.

  Two Troops, including a sergeant, came up behind Service.

  Nobody spoke.

  A gentle breeze lifted and rattled through the tamaracks to Service’s right. Soon their needles would yellow and fall. Beyond the trees there was a small pond. He hadn’t noticed it when he pulled up. See it all, he chided himself. Be here, nowhere else.

  A ragged formation of geese started to descend toward the pond, looked at the situation and scrambled to climb back out, making a lot of noise. Service admired their good sense. There were lots of times when he wanted to fly away from the shit. Like now.

  A white-tail doe and her fawn had crept to the far edge of the pond. The fawn was small for this time of year, late birth probably. It would die this winter. The mother watched across the pond while the little one stood in the water drinking delicately, its little tail flicking nervously. A raven in a dead tree beyond the pond yawped forlornly. Its call went unanswered.