Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “Alex,” she said, going with the first name thing now, “do you really think there’s some kind of connection between Razniewski and his son’s death, and Sergeant Steele and his son’s death?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we were trying to find out.”

  “I understand how you could look at the close timing and think it was kind of suspicious, but take a step back. You’ve got one young man who has a conflict with his father over his future. He ends up taking his own life. A tragic thing that happens all the time. Every single day. His father is a U.S. marshal, who’s actively hunting down some of the worst criminals in the country. He ends up getting murdered in cold blood. Again, it’s tragic. Of course. That goes without saying.”

  I looked over at Maven. He was listening carefully. Once again, I could only marvel at his newfound calm demeanor, and wonder where the hell he had found it.

  “In an entirely separate branch of law enforcement, you have Sergeant Donald Steele of the Michigan State Police. His son, as we’ve learned today, was a bit of a loner. Liked to go back behind his barn and fire his guns. Pretty much every afternoon he did this.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “We’ve been in contact with the officers out there. They’ve been very helpful. I hope this shows you how seriously we’re taking this.”

  “And let me just point out one more time,” Agent Fleury cut in, “that if you had simply come to us instead of going out there yourself—”

  “They get it,” Agent Long said, snapping a quick icy look at her partner. It was the first break I had seen between them. “Anyway, the bottom line is we have another young man with some troubles, who takes his own life. But again, as we all know, it happens.”

  I was about to speak up on that one. The fact that neither kid had left a note, percentages be damned, and the fact that both suicide scenes gave me the same gut feeling that things just weren’t adding up. But then what? They’d ask for some piece of hard evidence that something was amiss in either case, and what would I give them?

  “Finally,” she said, “in the case of Sergeant Steele himself, and the murder of both him and Ms. Donna Krimer, I assume you were aware that the two of them were involved in a long-term extramarital relationship?”

  “We got that impression, yes.”

  “Were you aware that Ms. Krimer was still legally married to a man with a history of domestic violence?”

  “No, we didn’t know anything about her.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Agent Fleury said. He obviously couldn’t resist jumping back in with that one. “Were you aware that Mr. Krimer has been missing ever since the two bodies were discovered?”

  “The police mentioned that they hadn’t been able to contact him yet.”

  “Yes, well, they still haven’t tracked him down as of this morning. Without presuming any guilt on his part, can we at least try to imagine a likely scenario here? If he were to come back to the house unannounced, say, and find his still lawfully wedded wife in bed with another man?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I see where you’re going. It makes sense.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad we’re all on the same page now. So in the meantime, if anything new does come up, I can assure you we’ll be right on top of it.”

  “It sounds like you’ve already decided that there’s no connections between any of these events,” Maven said. “You can just go back to Detroit and forget all about it, eh?”

  “Is that what you just heard me say?”

  It was Maven’s turn to get the hard stare now. He returned it without blinking.

  “If any further information is developed,” Agent Fleury said, slowly, “we’ll follow up on it. At this point, if there is any connection, not only does it involve the original case with a U.S. marshal, but it also crosses state lines now. In which case, it should be even more abundantly clear to you, if it wasn’t already, that this falls under our jurisdiction. Are we clear on that point?”

  Maven took a few beats to answer him. “Yes, we’re clear.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You didn’t come all the way back up here just for this.”

  “We’re still pursuing leads in the Razniewski case,” Agent Long said. “Seeing you gentlemen again was just a bonus.”

  “We’ll be at the Ojibway again,” Agent Fleury said. “If you think about chasing down any more leads, maybe you should give us a call instead?”

  On that note, they said their good-byes and left us sitting in the interview room. Maven was staring off into space, just like the last time we found ourselves here together. He was the kind of man whose actions I was sure I could predict, a man with clearly marked buttons that you pressed at your own risk. Apparently some kind of alien life force had taken over his mind and body now. There was no other way I could explain his behavior.

  “You know why they’re back up here,” he finally said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re not getting anywhere in Detroit. It’s a marshal so there’s a lot of pressure to solve the case. But they’ve got nothing, so they’re back up here to start from scratch. They probably have orders not to come back empty-handed this time.”

  “The case is getting cold,” I said. “I don’t like their chances.”

  “Neither do I.”

  A minute of silence passed. Neither of us moved.

  “What do you think?” I said. “Are they right?”

  “About what?”

  “About all these deaths not having anything to do with each other.”

  “I don’t know, McKnight. If we think differently, I’m not even sure what we can do about it now. They made that pretty clear.”

  “Well, if you think of something else and you want to run it by me…”

  He nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I got up and grabbed my coat.

  “It seems like we sort of ended up on the same team the past couple of days,” he said as I went to the door. “That’s a little different from our usual arrangement.”

  “You’re right. It is.”

  He didn’t say anything else, so I left. A half hour later, I was driving home in my truck, making that last turn around Whitefish Bay, heading toward Paradise. That’s when a thought came to me out of God knows where.

  I turned around and gunned it all the way back to the Soo.

  * * *

  Half hour out, half hour back, so I’d only been gone an hour. I didn’t know where Chief Maven would be, and I didn’t have his cell phone number. Hell, I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure he’d carry a cell phone out of uniform. But either way, I didn’t figure there were too many places he could be.

  I tried the City-County Building first. The receptionist told me he had left just after I did. She didn’t know where he was going, and no, she didn’t have his cell phone number.

  Okay, so he’s at his house, I thought. Doing more painting or God knows what else. Or maybe just sleeping it off. We’d both had a pretty rough couple of days.

  I drove over there and pulled into his driveway. I didn’t see his car. I peeked through the window on the garage door and saw an immaculate set of tools hanging from a set of pegs on the wall, a snowblower, and three snow shovels, and one car that I’m sure belonged to Mrs. Maven. Left there when he took her to the airport, no doubt. But Maven’s car was gone.

  “Where the hell are you?” I said. I tried to picture him buying groceries or renting a movie at the video store or maybe sitting in a dentist’s office. Normal things that everyone does, but I just couldn’t see Chief Roy Maven doing any of them. Especially not today. Not with all of this still bouncing around in his head, just like in mine.

  I got back in the truck and sat there for a while. Half-waiting for him to show up. Half-trying to figure out where else he could be. It finally dawned on me that there was one place that would make sense. If he was there, it would mean that he had had the same thought that I had, at right around the same ti
me. Meaning we were long-lost twins or something strange and mystical like that.

  Only one way to find out, I thought. I put the truck in drive and headed for the other side of town.

  * * *

  The Michigan State Police had something like sixty posts back when I was in Detroit, located all over the state and certainly one in every town as big as the Soo. The post in Sault Ste. Marie is over on the business spur, a few blocks away from the main highway. It’s another charmless brick shoe box, but still probably a little bit nicer than the City-County Building, and I’m sure every single office in the place puts Chief Maven’s to shame. I recognized a few of the troopers and sergeants, but as far as I could remember I’d never set foot in their building. That was about to change.

  I pulled into the lot and parked between two squad cars. These were the old-style “Blue Goose” cars with the single red light on top. I couldn’t help wondering if they gave you a less comfortable ride than the new-style squad cars, and how that would set off the inevitable battles over who got assigned to them. All the usual political games that come in any station with more than one cop in it.

  As I went around to the front I saw Maven’s car taking up the last visitor’s spot.

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” I said. “After all we’ve been through together.”

  I went inside and asked the trooper sitting at the desk where Chief Maven was. He was young and he had the typical state-issue haircut, cut so close he might as well be a Marine. I was expecting to get a little bit of runaround from him, asking me who I was, what business I had there. That whole show. I mean, every single trooper I’d ever met in my life was top shelf, but sometimes they can come across as knowing they’re top shelf just a little too well. God bless them for the job they do, but if I had to deal with troopers every day I’d probably snap.

  “Chief Maven’s back with Sergeant Coleman,” he said. “If you give me your name, I’ll let him know you’re looking for him.”

  “Alex McKnight,” I said, a little surprised. “Thank you.”

  “No problem, sir. Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

  He was back in half a minute.

  “Right this way, sir.”

  I followed him to the back of the building, where Chief Maven and a state man were sitting side by side in front of a computer screen.

  “What are you doing here?” Maven said, looking up at me.

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “This is Sergeant Reed Coleman,” he said, indicating the other man. “We go way back.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the sergeant said, shaking my hand. He was an old-timer, probably close to retirement. “I think I’ve seen you around town.”

  “Seriously,” I said to Maven, “if you’re chasing something down over here, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You heard those FBI agents. They don’t want us anywhere near this thing.”

  “Since when would that stop either of us?”

  “Look,” he said, “it’s bad enough if I screw up my own career here.”

  “I rent cabins for a living. What can they do to me?”

  “They can do plenty, believe me. I didn’t want to drag you into this any deeper.”

  “That’s a load of crap, Chief, but we’ll talk about it later. Tell me what you guys are working on.”

  He let out a long breath and rubbed his eyes. “It was just a thought. I mean, I was just thinking…”

  “You were looking for a link between Raz and Steele,” I said. “You figured the only thing they ever had in common was being a state cop.”

  “Right, and this is the place to come to find out.”

  “Even though it was a long time ago, and even if you were his only regular partner…”

  “I was thinking, still, if they came in around the same time…”

  “Because they’re about the same age. So you’re wondering if maybe they went to the academy together. There’s just one for the whole state, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So even though they never worked together, they might have run into each other there.”

  Sergeant Coleman looked between us and couldn’t help smiling. “Sounds like the two of you are on the same wavelength,” he said.

  “Most days I’d take offense to that,” I said. “But yes.”

  Another trooper came by, carrying a cup of coffee. He was looking at us with great curiosity, until Coleman told him to keep on walking.

  “The chief has had a problematic relationship with most of the men in this building,” Coleman said to me. “I’m not sure any of them can believe he’s voluntarily sitting here. Or hell, that I’d even let him through the door.”

  “All right, knock it off,” Maven said. “Everybody here hates me. I got it.”

  “So what did you find?” I said. “Did Raz and Steele train together?”

  “No, that’s a dead end,” Maven said. “Steele went right in after a couple years of community college. Raz was in the military first, didn’t join the police until he was twenty-five. They missed each other by a good five years.”

  “We can’t find any connection at all,” Coleman said. “All of Steele’s posts were in the UP. Raz did his two years down in Lansing with Roy here. There weren’t any special assignments or anything else that would ever bring them together, as far as I can see.”

  “I take it the chief has explained our general situation,” I said.

  “He has,” the sergeant said. I could see him hesitating about what to say next.

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “Well, we all heard about Sergeant Steele this morning. I didn’t know the man very well. I think I only met him once. But it’s never easy to hear about one of your fellow officers going down.”

  I waited him out. He was doing a good job of not answering the question.

  “As far as this other man goes, I obviously know nothing about him at all. But the two suicides … hell, I don’t know, guys. It seems like a big coincidence, but I’ve seen bigger. That’s all I’ll say. If you have something else that’s concrete, that’s a different matter.”

  “You’d make a good FBI agent,” Maven said.

  “That’s a low blow, Roy.”

  Maven took a long sip of coffee while another trooper wandered by to gawk at us.

  “It’s true,” the trooper said, “Chief Maven is really here. Did somebody arrest you?”

  “Sergeant Fusilli,” Maven said. “Always a pleasure. Alex, meet the biggest pain in the ass in Sault Ste. Marie.”

  “We’re just kidding around,” the man said, shaking my hand. “We all have the utmost respect for the chief. What are you guys working on, anyway?”

  “It’s nothing,” Coleman said. “Just a little legwork.”

  Fusilli leaned over and peered at the computer screen.

  “Nothing to see here,” Maven said. “Go do something useful.”

  “Sergeant Steele,” Fusilli said. “What a shame, huh? He was Iron Mountain, right?”

  “Right,” Coleman said.

  “Didn’t his son kill himself, too?”

  “A couple of months ago, yeah. Actually, if you’ll excuse us—”

  “Been a tough winter for old state men in the UP, eh?”

  Fusilli said it as he walked away. It took a few seconds for the coin to drop, then Maven and I looked at each other.

  “What was that?” Maven said. “What did he just say?”

  “Hey, Jim!” Coleman said. “Get back here.”

  “No, no, you heard the chief. I’m gonna do something useful.”

  “Get your ass back here,” Maven said. “Repeat what you just said.”

  “Hey,” Fusilli said, coming back to us with his hands up, “I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just saying, with Sergeant Steele in Iron Mountain, and Haggerty in Marquette…”

  “Haggerty?” Coleman said. “What do you mean?”

  “What about him?” Maven said. “Who is
he? What happened?”

  “Well, he’s been retired for a while now…”

  “But he was a state cop at one time?”

  “He was a forensics guy, up at the lab in Marquette.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Not to him,” Coleman said. “To his daughter. She just died recently. But it was in her sleep, right? A heart attack or something?”

  “She was twenty-seven years old,” Fusilli said. “You really believed that story about the heart attack?”

  “I don’t know,” Coleman said. “It can happen.”

  He waved that one off and was about to walk away again.

  “Stop,” Maven said. “Tell us what happened.”

  “It’s none of your business, Chief. He was a state man and some things stay in the family.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up,” Maven said. “Now start talking.”

  “Jim,” Coleman said, putting up both hands to calm everybody down. “This might be important. Please tell us what you heard about Haggerty’s daughter.”

  He worked it over for a moment, then he started talking.

  “All right, if you really need to know. This was like two weeks ago now. Up at Northern, in the university housing. Haggerty’s daughter was like an associate professor or something. She didn’t come to class and when they finally opened up her apartment, she was dead. Apparently, there were some … unusual circumstances in terms of the way she died.”

  “Unusual how?” Maven said.

  “I didn’t get the details. I just heard it wasn’t as simple as a young woman dying of a heart attack. Whatever happened, it may have been self-inflicted, that’s all I know. I think the guys at the Marquette post have been so tight-lipped about it in deference to Lieutenant Haggerty. Just out of respect, I mean. He was a very popular guy up there.”

  “You say this happened two weeks ago?”

  “Yes,” Fusilli said. “And that’s all I know. You want anything else, you’re gonna have to talk to the guys in Marquette.”

  He walked away from us. Maven sat there looking like somebody had just slapped him in the face.