“Can I help you guys?”
Maven didn’t answer him. He kept looking around the room.
“Got a question for you, Trooper,” Maven finally said, without looking at him. “Have they redone this place in the past few years?”
“Redone it?”
“Yeah, you know. Redecorated? Made it look different?”
“Oh, sure,” the trooper said. “There was a big contest. The best interior designers from all over the world submitted their plans.”
Maven locked eyes on him.
“What, are you some kind of joker?”
“Just tell me what’s going on, okay?”
Then the young trooper did a double take.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re Chief Maven from Sault Ste. Marie, right?”
“Have we met before?”
“I don’t believe so. But I’ve seen your picture in the paper.”
“That’s great,” Maven said, “but here’s the thing, I was a state man, back when you were in diapers. I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever been here before. Hence the question. You want to give me the real answer now?”
“I honestly don’t know,” the trooper said. “I’m kinda new here.”
“Any old-timers around?”
“Sergeant Avery is here. He’s forty-five.”
“For God’s sake,” Maven said. “Just let me look around the place, all right?”
Maven went past the desk, down the hallway. I followed him.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
He was lost in thought, going back so many years, trying to remember if he had once walked down this same hallway as a younger man. Being this far north, for whatever reason, with his partner Razniewski. Steele and Haggerty in the building, as well. If he could start with that memory, everything else might come back to him. It had seemed like a crazy idea on the way down here, but now that he was here … yeah, it made sense. Or at least it was exactly the kind of thing I’d do myself.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “It’s a police station, you know? How different can it look from every other one?”
“The agents were going to call down here, remember? With everybody working on it, somebody’s gonna remember something.”
“It’s too many years, McKnight. Nobody will remember.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Gimme a second.” He pushed open the door to the men’s room and stepped inside. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea, with another hour to go before we were back home. So I pushed open the same door and stepped up to the urinal next to him.
He was looking up at the ceiling.
“Look how high that is, McKnight.”
I looked up. He was right. The ceiling was a good twenty feet above us, with a wide oblong skylight obscured by the snow. What a strange anomaly in a bathroom where everything else was pretty much standard issue, from the gray tile on the walls to the white porcelain sinks to the automated paper towel dispensers.
“I stood right here,” he said. “Raz stood next to me. Right where you’re standing now.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
He stepped away, washed his hands, and took a paper towel from the dispenser.
“It really did happen, McKnight. Whatever it was, it must have happened right here in St. Ignace.”
He wadded up the towel and held it tight in his fist.
“So what the hell happened here? Why can’t I remember?”
And we’re rolling …
… I think we have just enough light for this.
… Yes, with the lake in the background there. That ambient glow should work just fine.
… Okay, now cue the rope. Pull on that thing!
… Get him up there. That’s it. A little higher.
… Oh yeah. Now that’s a shot. Let’s do a walk-around here. That’s it.
… Close on the face. A few snowflakes. Perfect.
… Way to start things off, Charlie. That was wonderful. I’m crying, that was so beautiful.
… Now where’s that snowmobile? It’s cold out here!
And cut.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was after ten o’clock at night when we got back to the Soo. I dropped Maven off at the state post so he could pick up his car. He told me he’d be going over to the Ojibway to find the agents before they went to bed. He had to tell them this one small thing he had figured out, this glimpse into the past. No matter how late it was, he would not be able to sleep until he told them.
I wasn’t sure if he’d tell them the exact spot he was standing when he had his little epiphany. But what the hell, maybe he would.
I didn’t think I could sleep either. It felt like I was missing some essential part of the story, something that I should have seen already, but I couldn’t even begin to figure out what that might be.
There was only one person to talk to. So instead of heading back home, I went to the other side of town. To the movies.
* * *
The parking lot was jammed. On a frozen Friday night in Sault Ste. Marie, it was either the movies or a bar. I went inside and saw Leon scooping a tub-sized bucket of popcorn and then squirting what looked like yellow motor oil on top of it. He gave the bucket to a couple of teenagers and they gave him money in return. Then he went on to the next customer. I sat down at one of the little tables and waited. Before long, the customers all disappeared and the lobby was quiet.
“Alex!” Leon said, finally noticing me.
“You got a minute?”
“Yeah, why not?”
He came out to the table. He winced as he sat down and leaned forward to stretch out his back.
“Too much standing in this job,” he said.
“Leon, I don’t want to keep bothering you every time I get stuck on something.”
“You’re not bothering me. You know I love this stuff.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I didn’t want to go down that road again, so instead I just launched into my full update. All of the things we had learned since the last time I had spoken with him. Going out to Iron Mountain to talk to Mrs. Steele, finding her husband and his girlfriend both dead in her house in Wisconsin. Then finding out about Haggerty’s daughter and that cheerful little trip out to talk to him. The troopers watching his driveway around the clock. Then this whole new information dump from the state police records, leading right up to Maven’s almost-breakthrough that very evening.
“We just can’t find that one link,” I said. “That one person who crossed paths with all four of them.”
“I think you’re drowning in the details, Alex. You’re not the one who’s gonna find it, remember. Maven’s the one with the memories, and the FBI agents have all the raw data.”
“So I’m useless. Yeah, thanks, I feel better now.”
“You’re the neutral party here,” he said. “You’re the one who can sorta stand above everything and see it all from a thousand feet.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Think about it. Do your own little profile here.”
“That sounds like something the FBI would do.”
“It’s all common sense, Alex. Just think, okay? Think like him, whoever’s doing this. Why are you doing all this?”
“Well, let’s see…”
“Think, but don’t overthink. Just say the first thing that comes to you. Right from the gut. That’s usually pretty close to the truth. Why are you committing these crimes against these people?”
“Revenge.”
“Okay. For what?”
“For what they did to me.”
“What did they do?”
I hesitated. “They arrested me. They took me away.”
“Why are you killing their children first?”
“Because I want them to suffer before they die.”
“So you really must hate them.”
“Yes.”
“So why are
you making these deaths look like suicides?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. At first, I thought it was because that would make it worse somehow. But if I just took them away and then killed them—”
I stopped.
“What is it?” he said.
“Because it happened to me. That’s why I’m doing this, Leon. Because the exact same thing happened to me.”
His eyes lit up. “That’s good. Because you suffered the same loss. So put it all together now. What’s the whole story?”
“I was arrested and put in prison. My son killed himself. Or my daughter. While I was in prison.”
“Is that really enough of a reason?”
“They died alone, from their own hand. They killed themselves while I was rotting away in a concrete box.”
“So now you’re having your revenge,” he said. “All these years later, right? Why have you waited so long?”
“Because I just got out of prison.”
“Maybe.” I could see Leon thinking that one over. “Or there might be some other reason why now is the right time.”
“Yeah, maybe I had other reasons to wait. Other things in my life that I didn’t want to lose. But maybe now there’s nothing stopping me.”
“Exactly. So how old are you?”
“Well, if I was arrested what, like ten, eleven years ago…”
“And you already had a son or daughter at the time.”
“I’m guessing this suicide probably happened fairly close to the time of the arrest,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t necessarily connect the two in your mind.”
“Okay, so your son or daughter must be of age already. Old enough to commit suicide, anyway.”
“If you add it all up, you’re talking about somebody who’s at least in his midforties?”
“Or older, right.”
“But hold on.” I flashed back to what Maven and I had already talked about. “We’re talking about taking my revenge against the cops who arrested me. What about the judge and the DA and hell, for that matter, even the defense attorney who obviously didn’t defend me too well?”
“From everything you’ve seen, would you say this guy is smart?”
“Smart, yes. Ingenious even, if you think about what he did to Haggerty’s daughter with that bag full of helium.”
“Would you call him methodical? Is that a word you’d use?”
I thought about it. “Yes. Methodical.”
“So who’s to say those other people, the judge and the DA and the defense attorney, aren’t further down on the list?”
“What, are you saying…”
“He’s starting at the beginning. And the beginning is what?”
“The cops who arrested him.”
Leon didn’t say anything else. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
“This guy is a smart, patient killer,” I said. “And he may only be getting started. That’s what we’ve got here.”
“It would seem so.”
“But Maven can’t even remember him.”
“Doesn’t matter who remembers him. He remembers them, that’s all that matters.”
Some kid in his twenties, wearing the same uniform as Leon’s, came up to us right about then and asked him to get back to work.
“Hey, give us a break,” I told him. “This is important.”
“Not as important as changing the syrup in the Coke machine,” the kid said. “Not when he’s on the clock, anyway.”
I could have put him right through the window, but Leon put up his hand and told me to take it easy.
“We’re about done here,” he said to the kid. “I’ll go change that syrup.”
“Leon, you don’t belong here.”
“It’s only temporary. Don’t worry about it. Go help catch that guy and then come back and tell me all about it.”
“I can’t thank you enough, Leon. Yet again.”
“Just be careful, all right? My wife is right, this is no job for a middle-aged man with too much to lose.”
“Tell her hello,” I said. I thanked him again and left. As I went back out the cold air hit me in the face and I couldn’t help thinking to myself, Leon’s got something to lose, all right. A wife and two kids. Me, I’ve got nothing left. So maybe I’m the right man to go chase this killer after all.
* * *
When I got to the state police post the next day, Maven’s old friend Sergeant Coleman was waiting for me with a cup of coffee.
“I heard you guys weren’t exactly the most welcome guests yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I hope you can understand why it might have seemed that way.”
“It’s okay. I know this is a tough situation for everybody.”
“We’ve got everyone in the state on notice. We’re all trying to figure out who this guy could be.”
“You know I was a Detroit cop myself, right?”
“So I heard.”
“I had the chance to interact with a few state cops along the way, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better police force in the world.”
I was leaving out a few personality issues I might have run into, but yeah, overall it was the truth. He thanked me for the compliment and I thanked him for the coffee. Then I joined Chief Maven and the two FBI agents in the interview room.
Agent Fleury was talking to somebody on the house phone while Agent Long and Chief Maven sat on the other end of the table, going over a fresh pile of papers. Maven looked a little better today. Maybe he’d actually gotten a few hours of sleep. Agent Long gave me a quick smile.
“Good morning,” she said. I thought I heard a little extra something in the way she spoke to me today. Either that or I was just imagining things.
“Looks like you guys have already gotten started,” I said. “Did I misunderstand the schedule?”
“We wanted to get an early jump, because we’ve actually got something to work with today.”
“Oh yeah?”
I sat down next to her.
“Our team in Detroit has been looking at this overnight, and they’ve identified three men who were all arrested by Steele and Haggerty, right around the time when Chief Maven and Razniewski were still on the force. As you know, we’ve established that Chief Maven has at least a partial memory of being up at the St. Ignace post at some point. Although we still don’t see anything reflected in the official records.”
“Sometimes cops assist on arrests but don’t show up on the official reports,” Maven said. “You know how it is with paperwork. Some days you just don’t get it all done the right way.”
“I do remember that much,” I said. “I used to hate that part of the job.”
“We’re trying to cross-reference arrests that resulted in significant jail time, and beyond that we’ve got a general profile that would suggest a suicide in the family right around that same time.”
Exactly what Leon and I were talking about last night, I thought. I was going to bring that up as soon as I got here today, but it looks like Agent Long is already way ahead of me.
“It’s not easy to make those connections, because the information isn’t in one place. But we have people in the Detroit office working on it.”
“You say you have some hits already?”
“The three men arrested by Steele and Haggerty working together, yes. All in the right time frame, as I said, and in all three cases, there was a suicide in the family, within the following two years. The only sticking point will be tying in Razniewski and possibly Chief Maven.”
“It sounds like the right place to start,” I said. “So who are these guys?”
“Well, here’s what we have…”
She shuffled back through her papers.
“Candidate number one,” she said. “Andrew Parizi, age forty-five at the time of his arrest. His vehicle was stopped by Steele and Haggerty just short of the bridge. He was driving a station wagon and they could see all this stuff piled up in the back, lots of boxes a
nd a few television sets. He went racing up to the toll booth, it sounds like, but they caught him before he could go through. He became combative when they tried to cuff him, so they could already add on felony resisting to the felony eluding, to whatever they ended up finding in his car.”
“What did they find?”
“The stuff they’d already spotted. The televisions and the stereo equipment and a bunch of other stolen items. Power tools, jewelry. There’d been a string of break-ins in Cedarville and out on Drummond Island. Vacation homes, mostly. This guy was loaded up and heading downstate with it, so they were able to connect him to most of the robberies. He was already a repeat offender, so he got sent away for five years. He did three, it looks like, but about a year and a half in, his son Patrick killed himself. He jumped out a window.”
“What was his name? Andrew Parizi? Does that mean anything to you, Chief?”
“No. Agent Long and I have already been through this. The name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Neither Razniewski nor Maven were involved in the arrest,” she said. “That much we know from checking their daily logs. That was pretty early on in Razniewski’s career, actually, so he was definitely in the car with Sergeant Maven all day. From the logs, we can determine that they never went farther north than Mount Pleasant. Of course, we’re still keeping open the possibility that they may have had some form of contact with our eventual killer. On a different date, or maybe even out of uniform.”
“So it’ll be hard to eliminate anybody,” I said. “But okay, who’s next?”
“Clyde C. Wiley. You may have heard of him before.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, no.”
“He’s an actor,” Maven said. “You’ve probably seen him on TV.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even watch that much TV anymore.”
“This guy’s been around forever,” Agent Long said. “He did a lot of biker movies, right after Easy Rider came out. Did you ever see Road Hogs? That was probably his biggest.”
Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel Page 16