Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “But your instincts told you something was wrong,” he said. “You should definitely listen to that.”

  “That’s the thing. I’ve been wondering if maybe Raz himself had an instinct about it.”

  Leon narrowed his eyes and leaned in close, like I was finally getting to the good stuff.

  “I mean think about it,” I said. “Your son kills himself, right? It’s the worst thing that could ever happen. Obviously. But why try to find out more about it? It’s not going to fix anything.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to know. So he didn’t have to wonder anymore.”

  “That’s what he said. It made sense at the time, but ever since then, I don’t know. I’m just thinking maybe there was something else. Like maybe he himself knew that the idea just didn’t make any sense.”

  “How could it ever make sense? For anyone?”

  “Think about everyone you know,” I said. “Out of all those people, there are some that simply would not kill themselves. You know what I mean? Those people, if somebody told you … you just wouldn’t believe it. Am I right?”

  “Whereas some people…” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You might still be shocked, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t ultimately believe it.”

  “Exactly. Maybe that was part of why Raz couldn’t leave it alone.”

  “Even if it was just a half-conscious thing, you mean. Interesting.”

  “It’s just a gut feeling. I’m probably wrong.”

  “I bet you’re not. So tell me what you found out when you went out there.”

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s what happened…”

  I gave him the same rundown I’d given to Agent Long. Everything I did, from the moment I met Raz to the moment I came back to town and found him dead on the floor. Leon sat absolutely still, watching my face as I talked and absorbing every single word. Even Agent Long, who presumably interviewed people almost every day, didn’t seem to be listening with half the attention that Leon was giving me.

  When I was done, he thought about it for a while.

  “The kid was drunk. Yet somehow he was able to string up a rope just right, stand on the back of his car when it was snowing, and it was probably zero degrees at that point, then he stepped off and hanged himself.”

  “Correct.”

  “I understand why you’d have a problem with that,” he said, “but it’s probably not impossible. Not if you really wanted to do it.”

  “Not impossible, no. But it still bothers me.”

  He thought about it some more.

  “There might be something else,” he finally said. “Something you haven’t told me yet.”

  “I told you everything. Why would I leave anything out?”

  “Because you don’t think it’s important. Even though it might be exactly what you’re looking for.”

  I threw up my hands.

  “Tell me everything again,” he said. “But this time, don’t leave anything out. Tell me about every second. Everything you saw. Every word that was said, as best as you can remember.”

  I let out a long breath.

  “Okay,” I said. “Uh, let’s see. I started driving out there on Wednesday morning…”

  “No, go back. Start with the first time you met your client.”

  “That was the day before. I met him at Chief Maven’s office.”

  I told him everything I could remember. I played it all back in my mind, trying to pick up every word he said. How he asked me to do this thing for him. Then, the next day, driving out to Houghton, making my detour to Misery Bay. Even the way I asked the old man at the diner why the place had gotten that name, and how he didn’t have a good answer. When I got to the place itself, Leon made me slow down and describe every detail. Where the tree was in relation to the parking lot. Where the lake was.

  “There were no buildings in sight?” he asked. “No summer houses or anything?”

  “Not that I could see. I mean, I knew there were a few up the road.”

  “No trails leading to the parking lot? Just the road?”

  “I think there might have been a snowmobile trail in the woods, but it didn’t look like it had been used recently.”

  “You said there was fresh snowfall that day. Either way, that has nothing to do with what might have happened three months ago.”

  “Granted. Good point.”

  “Okay, so go on.”

  I continued with my conversation with the undersheriff. Everything he told me about being the one who had to climb up the ladder to cut Charlie down, and his answers to all of my questions. The length of the rope. The way the car was discovered with the driver’s side door open, the key still in the ignition. The car out of gas and the battery dead.

  I was about to move on to the interviews with the friends, but then I remembered what the undersheriff had told me about his own personal experience with suicide. When I was done with that, Leon stopped me.

  “Tell me that part again,” he said. “Slow down even more and tell me everything.”

  “He just said it seemed like a lot of suicides going on. There was this other kid who had killed himself, down in—where was it? Iron Mountain, I think he said. The son of somebody he knew, or worked with, or whatever. Then he told me about his own father-in-law, how he ran away one day and killed himself in his car.”

  “His father-in-law—that wasn’t this winter, was it?”

  “No, that was a while ago, I think. Some years ago.”

  “Okay, so put that one aside for a minute. Tell me more about this other suicide. Think hard. What exactly did he say?”

  I closed my eyes and put myself back in that office. The undersheriff sitting across from me, with that pained look on his face as he talked about young men killing themselves.

  “It was definitely Iron Mountain,” I said. “This winter. I think he said like two weeks after Charlie hanged himself. Something about going back behind his barn and shooting himself in the head. Yeah, that was it. But then he went right into talking about his father-in-law.”

  “Because that was the thing that was important in his own experience. That was the connection. But not for you, right? Not at all. For you, it’s just this one other suicide that happened to take place two weeks later. You said the kid’s father was what again?”

  “Somebody he knew down in Iron Mountain,” I said. “Somebody who … no, wait, it was a sergeant. I remember that now. He said it was a sergeant’s son.”

  “A sergeant, as in someone in the military? Or in the state police?”

  “I got the feeling he was talking about another cop. But if he’s a sergeant, yeah. He couldn’t be another county guy. He didn’t say sheriff or deputy. He said sergeant.”

  “So now you have two sons of state police officers, killing themselves within two weeks of each other.”

  “But Raz was only a state guy for like two years. A long time ago.”

  “Okay, but either way, it’s still two men in law enforcement, right? Could it just be a coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Of course. It was right there, but I just wasn’t seeing it. You’re amazing, Leon. Yet again.”

  “I think you would have worked it out. Now that you see it, what are you going to do?”

  “I guess I could try to find out more about this other suicide. Maybe give the undersheriff a call, although the FBI was pretty adamant about keeping this case to themselves. They wouldn’t even let Chief Maven anywhere near it.”

  “You said they were investigating the murder of the father. Who says that has anything to do with the son? Besides, didn’t he pay you to look into it?”

  “He never got the chance. Not that I would have taken any money from him.”

  “But even now,” Leon said, “you could theoretically send a bill to his estate.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “But you could.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  He waited patien
tly for it to come to me. The snow fell outside and the wind blew and the earth turned a few degrees and then I finally got it.

  “He hired me to look into his son’s suicide,” I said. “If I feel like there are still unanswered questions…”

  “Then you’re still on the case.”

  “No. This is crazy. Come on.”

  He leaned forward and put both hands flat on the table.

  “You know I’m right,” he said, drawing out each word. “As long as you don’t have your answers yet, you are still on this case.”

  * * *

  I felt bad leaving him there. I could see in his eyes how much he missed working on a case. Any case at all. And it was obvious to me, more than ever, that he was way better at this than I would ever be. He didn’t deserve to be standing behind a snack bar, serving popcorn to teenagers. I couldn’t help wondering if my visit had made him feel even worse.

  With that cheery thought in my head, I drove over to the other side of town and parked next to the City-County Building. I went inside and asked the receptionist if I could see the chief.

  “He’s not here right now,” she said. “Can I take a message?”

  “How about the FBI agents?” I said, remembering how well that message business worked the last time I called him. “Are they here?”

  “They left for Detroit this morning. I think they were all done with their work up here.”

  That surprised me a little bit. I mean, it’s not like I expected them to come back and fill me in on everything, but damn. Did they hit a big dead end up here? Or did they just get tired of the weather?

  “Where’s the chief right now?” I asked. “Is there any way I can reach him?”

  She looked both ways before lowering her voice. “I think he’s actually out on some kind of administrative leave. I haven’t seen him at all for two days straight.”

  “The chief? Out on leave? Are you kidding me?”

  “They just told me to take messages for him, and to refer anything important to the county. Which I’ve never done before.”

  “That is definitely strange.” I thanked her and went back outside. There was only one other place I could think of going, so that’s exactly where I want. Down Easterday Avenue, past the college, to Summit Street. To Chief Maven’s house.

  Three days had passed since the last time I had been there. The police cars were all gone now, of course. Even the crime scene tape had been taken down. You’d have no way of knowing anything unusual had happened inside the house.

  I went to the front door and knocked. I was about to knock again when the door opened and I saw Chief Maven standing there holding a paint roller.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I left you a message. You never called me back.”

  He shook his head and turned away from me. “Come on in.” He was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt speckled with paint. “Wipe your feet.”

  I went inside and did as I was told. There were plastic drop cloths everywhere, and the unventilated smell of paint was almost overwhelming. It took me back to my days right after baseball, when I kept from starving by painting houses.

  “I’m kind of busy here,” he said, his voice coming to me from the kitchen. “So make it quick.”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, turning the corner. The kitchen had been virtually taken apart. The table and chairs were gone, and everything else that wasn’t bolted down had been removed. Beneath the paint smell I caught a strong undercurrent of bleach. There was a plastic tarp on the floor and from the bare wood along the edges I could tell he had ripped up all of the tiles.

  The chief poured more cream-colored paint into his tray. It looked like he was about halfway done with his first coat.

  “How’s your wife?” I said.

  “She’s in Amsterdam.”

  “Really?”

  “My daughter’s been traveling around Europe since right after Christmas,” he said, rolling the paint on the wall. “Kind of a lifelong dream. When this happened here…”

  He paused for just a half second to look down on the floor, at the exact spot where Raz breathed his last breath.

  “When this happened, my wife took the chance to go over and spend some time with her.”

  “That sounds like a good thing.” I tried to remember what I knew about Chief Maven’s daughter and came up with only one thing. The very first time I sat in his office, I saw the picture of a young girl on his desk and asked him if it had come with the frame.

  “Do you know how much it costs to fly to Amsterdam at the last minute? Take a guess.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Soo to Detroit. Detroit to New York. New York to Amsterdam. Twenty-three-hundred dollars.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “It was worth every penny to get her out of this place. I don’t know how she’ll ever be able to live here again.”

  “What about you?” I said. “It looks like you’ve been here nonstop. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  He looked up at me as he went to put more paint on his roller.

  “Where the hell else am I going to go? They took away my badge, you know.”

  “I hear you were driving those FBI agents a little crazy.”

  “The FBI can kiss my ass. They can’t touch me. But the mayor, that little spineless weasel, he kinda suggested that maybe I’d be better off taking a personal leave of absence for a while.”

  “That doesn’t sound like taking away your badge.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. They forced me out. Like what the hell else am I supposed to do with myself? The job is all I know anymore.”

  That much was true, I thought. It was hard to imagine him doing anything else.

  I watched him paint. He accidentally got some wall paint on the white ceiling and spent the next five minutes trying to fix it. He was getting more and more aggravated and I knew he’d blow up at me if I stayed there. But for some reason I knew I couldn’t leave.

  What he was doing … it was something I knew so well myself. He had already cleaned the place within an inch of its life and now he was painting, and if I left him there he’d probably start knocking down the walls. Anything to change the one thing that couldn’t be changed.

  “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said, “but I wonder if you’d like to help me keep my promise to Raz.”

  He stopped painting. “What are you talking about?

  “I’ll tell you the whole story, but first I need to use your phone.”

  “For what? Who are you calling?”

  “The undersheriff of Houghton County.”

  * * *

  An hour later, we were making our plans. We’d be leaving early the next morning and driving all the way out to Iron Mountain. A long trip with such an unlikely passenger, but we both knew it was something we needed to do. We had to see it with our own eyes, this place behind a barn in a forgotten corner of the Upper Peninsula. One more cold and lonely place where one more young man somehow decided to end his own life.

  And we’re rolling …

  … These are the Monster’s instruments. Pan slowly here.

  … One man’s leather belt, size 38.

  … One big metal spoon.

  … One broom, minus the broom. Just the handle, I mean.

  … Then this thing. I have no idea what this is.

  … But it would probably hurt more than all the other things put together.

  … If it was real.

  … Good thing these are just movie props, eh?

  And cut.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On a cold morning in April in this part of the world, the sun doesn’t come up until seven o’clock, so it was still dark as he came walking down his driveway and got in the truck. He was wearing a green blanket-lined parka, dungarees with extra wide cuffs, and heavy-duty work boots. Like we were about to go hunting, or maybe even go w
ork on an oil rig. To complete the outfit, he was sporting an original Stormy Kromer hat, with the elastic band you can pull down over your ears if they get cold. I suppose it was exactly the kind of hat I would have imagined Roy Maven wearing, aside from his chief’s hat.

  As he got in, I saw that he was carrying an old-school silver thermos. Probably the same one he had brought with him his first day on the job. It went perfectly with the hat and the buzz cut underneath it, not to mention the silver flip-top lighter in his hip pocket along with the Marlboro Reds.

  “Good morning, Chief.” I waited until he closed the door and then I gunned it.

  “You’re gonna get us killed before we even leave the Soo?”

  “You can’t even write me a ticket. It must be killing you.”

  “I’m only on leave, McKnight. I can still run your ass right up the flagpole.”

  “Tell you what,” I said, settling down to somewhere near the speed limit. “It’s gonna be a long trip. How ’bout we try not to drive each other crazy?”

  He shook his head at that and settled in for the ride. We left the city and headed due west, the sun finally starting to come up behind us. When we hit the main highway, he opened up his thermos. The cab of the truck was filled with the aroma of strong black coffee. He filled up the cap of the thermos and then put that in the cup holder. Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a travel mug. He filled it with more coffee and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I don’t know how good it is. My wife usually makes it for me.”

  “Have you talked to her since she went over to—where was it again?”

  “Amsterdam. That’s where they’ll be this week, anyway. I think they’re going to Germany next.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “Yeah, I talked to her, to answer your question. She sounded tired. But Olivia is with her, so it’s all good.”

  “Olivia, that’s your daughter.”

  He nodded. We rode for another full minute before he spoke again.

  “She’s thirty years old now. She had kind of a rough patch for a while. Just got out of a bad marriage. Finally. So she decided to go travel around for a while.”