Shadow of the Wolf Tree

by Joseph Heywood

  “Twenty Five Fourteen, affirmative.”

  Kragie pulled alongside him, nose to tail, and passed across a dented thermos. “You waiting on Pinky?”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “Won’t be home tonight. His wife left with a guy who owns a trucking company in Kremlin, Nebraska. Pinky’s girlfriend is Sulla Kakabeeke. She’s a Troop sergeant out of Baraga, lives out on Skanee Road. Pinky’s at her place on Saturdays nights if she’s not on duty.”

  “Kakabeeke got an address?”

  “Old farmhouse painted lilac.” Kragie gave him the address and directions.

  “You ever creep the Art Lake perimeter?” Service asked.

  “Coupla times.”

  “Any breaks in the wire?”

  “Fixed quick if there are. The folks there seem to take maintenance seriously.”

  “Do their own work?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Service said, “Seems to me somebody around here knows their way around Art Lake. People up here hate fences. If they don’t cut them, they climb them. Somebody around here knows something, or this is the most secure facility in the entire U.P.”

  “Nobody comes to mind,” Junco Kragie said. “But I’ll noodle on it some.”

  Service found the lilac farmhouse on Skanee Road, as Kragie described it, and the sheriff’s SUV parked in the loop driveway.

  He was greeted at the door by a short-haired woman in shorts with a square jaw, huge eyes, and the muscled legs of a power jock. “You lookin’ for Pinky?” she asked, and pointed at a room. She didn’t introduce herself.

  Barbeaux was stretched out on a couch and made no effort to sit up. “You’re won-drin’ ’boot your fax. Figured I’d be seein’ youse,” the retired DNR lieutenant said.

  “I was expecting plate numbers.”

  “Well, I did some thinkin’ on that. That day I was out there, I wrote ’em down with the intent of running them, but it occurred to me I had no reason to do that, eh. If I did, it would be invasion of privacy or me misusing my power as an elected public official. Seems to me abuse of power would apply to you too. Don’t blame you for wantin’ the numbers, but get me somethin’ convincin’ on ’em and you’ll get the numbers. I intended to call and talk to youse about this. Sorry.”

  “You want me to get something on people I don’t even know?”

  “See da problem?”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he told Sgt. Kakabeeke as he was leaving. He heard her following close behind him.

  “Pinky’s a great guy, but he’s got this overpowering need to be liked, ya know? And, he wants especially to be liked by a certain individual, maybe?”

  Gut-thought: Gorsline had warned him off.

  “But me,” Kakabeeke said, “I don’t know nothing from nobody. Give me some time and I’ll get the numbers you’re looking for.”

  “You know what I want?”

  “Part of wanting to be liked means the need to talk to someone. Right now, that’s me. He told me about the numbers. He tells me everything.”

  “Thanks,” Service said.

  “That officer of yours—Denninger? Is she okay?”

  “Pins in her ankle, but the docs say she’ll recover.”

  “She gets back, have her look me up. Girl cops up here gotta stick together.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Barbeaux had been a great game warden and leader of game wardens. What had changed? Holding elected office? Little government financial support for his operation? Probably a little of everything. People changed, conditions changed—even change changed, the rate, the kind, everything. You spend your life in green and gray, you stay green and gray. It’s like once a marine, always a marine. He found Barbeaux’s behavior both shameful and disconcerting.

  Service tried to call his granddaughter, but there was no answer from Karylanne, and as he cruised past the entrance to Art Lake, he turned around and did a second drive-by, looking for something, something not there, something that wasn’t, anything, but nothing suggested itself, and his belly continued to insist this place was a key.

  There are numerous ways to get inside a facility, some questionable but all technically legal. Heard shots. Saw a moving light inside the fence at night, thought I smelled smoke. First you get inside, then you come up with a rationale. The risk of backlash from such entry was not insignificant, but he’d done it before, stretched the rules plenty of times, and made solid cases because of it. Not this time. Use your brain, pick everything apart, piece by piece. Go home, get your animals and bearings, regroup. What’s the opposite of technically legal? he wondered on his way to Lehto’s clinic to pick up his dog and cat, who hissed and growled at each other all the way to Slippery Creek.

  Art Lake takes maintenance seriously, he kept thinking, not sure why.

  McCants came by as he sat on the porch with a glass of inexpensive but good Crane Lake merlot.

  “Bottle’s open on the counter,” he said.

  She came out with a glass and sat beside him while Newf prodded her with her nose and wouldn’t relent until she scratched under the dog’s chin.

  Service raised his glass. “Sarn’t.”

  McCants touched her glass to his and grinned. “Feels weird.”

  “Wait until you’ve got eight officers and all of them whining about their problems.”

  “I’m actually looking forward to that.”

  “That’s what every new sergeant thinks.”

  “You pissed or disappointed?”

  “About what? You’ll do a great job.”

  “What about the Mosquito?”

  “It’s bigger than you or me. It’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll miss it.”

  “Once you cross that bridge, forget the U.P. and the past. Keep your mind on there, now, and what’s next. We like to make out how special we are up here, but every county in this state has more than enough assholes, and some of them have a lot more assholes per capita than we do.”

  “Seen the kiddo recently?”

  “Last month, but we talk on the phone.”

  “Those’re conversations I’d love to hear,” McCants said sarcastically, resting her head against a wall. “Grady, you need to make this place a real home. It’s like a damn outpost on Hadrian’s Wall.”

  “Feels like home to me.”

  “Whatever,” she said, not bothering to hide her disapproval.

  44

  Slippery Creek Camp

  SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 2006

  Friday called late Saturday afternoon. “You want guests?”

  “Plural?”

  “Shigun and me. I’m giving my sis the day and night off. I’ll drop him off tomorrow night on my way to Iron River.”

  “There’s not much here in the way of creature comforts,” he warned her.

  “Me, I don’t need much, and Shigun’s a baby, so what does he know? I finished my reading,” she added.

  “And?”

  “I don’t know for sure. We can talk.”

  His refrigerator was empty and his freezer full of things he had no interest in. He drove down to Rapid River to Viau’s Northland, got a bottle of Chianti, makings for a salad, some frozen salmon steaks that cost a small fortune, fresh asparagus to grill, and some of Viau’s freshly made horseradish.

  He and Newf fished for a couple of hours mid-afternoon, but no bugs were hatching and no fish rising, and he hated dredging bottom with nymphs under a strike indicator. “Skunked,” he told the dog, who looked unsympathetic.

  Friday arrived with her car packed with baby stuff, and the baby tucked in a car seat like a worm in a cocoon. She wore shorts and a skimpy halter and had her hair pulled back and tied off with a short ponytail. She had two bags with diapers, marke
d arrivals and departures, and a bag of miscellaneous items about whose function he was largely clueless. There was also a box with cans of Enfamil Lipil baby formula. Another bag contained bath materials, including soft towels and wash rags. Finally, a small bag with Tuesday’s clothes.

  By the time he got things transferred to the house, Shigun was making a ruckus. “Like his mommy,” Friday said with a smile. “When it’s time to eat, it’s time to eat, no arguments, no compromises, just get me my food, dammit!” She stared at the footlockers with the mattresses on them and raised an eyebrow.

  Service held the baby and rocked him while Friday prepared the formula. She did everything with no wasted effort. The baby alternated squawking with staring up at him with wide eyes.

  “I’ll feed him, get him down for his nap, and then it will be just-us time.”

  Cat watched the intruding baby from a distance. Newf followed wherever the baby went, sniffing at the infant. In the feline world there were two kinds of creatures: those you could kill and eat, and those who could kill and eat you.

  “I was going to breast-feed,” Friday said, “but it’s just not practical.”

  “Better for the baby?”

  “Some say. Were you a tit baby?”

  He shrugged. “No.”

  When the baby was finally down, she sat on the porch with him and exhaled. “Okay, our turn.”

  “For what?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “What about dinner?”

  “Shigun will be up in about two hours. I’ll give him a snack then. I’ll give him his dinner after we eat.”

  “Before you head back?”

  She looked at him and laughed. “Head back where, ya big dope? The whole idea is to spend the night here—with you.”

  “Did you see a bed?”

  “I didn’t have to. Elza warned me about your barbaric lifestyle. There’s an inflatable mattress in the trunk. I didn’t drive all the way out here to the sticks just to turn around, go back, and sleep alone . . . buster.”

  “Sleep, as in the euphemism?”

  “Sleep, as in the all-inclusive word for night activity.”

  She threw her arms around him and held tight, and they both laughed.

  “You said you read Thigpen’s book.”

  “Books—three of them. In the first one she talks about a crazy old man from town having a secret place thirty miles north of Crystal Falls and east of Norway Lake. In her story the man has a grove of burl maple trees he carves into beautiful things, from which he makes a lot of money from Chicago and Minneapolis art dealers. The thing is, he refuses to say where his place is, and nobody in town ever sees one of his carvings, so there’s a lot of suspicion and speculation. The little girls spy on him and watch him come and go. He rarely comes back in less than ten days, and always leaves early in the mornings.”

  “Washington Lincoln as model?”

  “Possibly, but that location she’s talking about is sort of near Art Lake, right?”

  He grabbed a DeLorme and looked. “Yep.”

  “Could you make it from Elmwood to there on foot?”

  “In the old days, that was pretty much the only way people traveled: Foot or canoe, snowshoes in winter, boots in summer. People walked hundreds of miles to do things they needed to do, and twenty- to thirty-mile trips weren’t even remarkable enough to mention.”

  “You get the license plate numbers?” she asked.

  “The sheriff’s had a sudden onset of legality and morality. Bottom line: no probable cause, no plate numbers.” He omitted Kakabeeke’s promise.

  “Assuming Art Lake’s what she’s alluding to in her books, we’re thinking gold, not burl maple, right?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “What options do we have?”

  “Not many. One thing I’m going to have to do is go back to where I found sample six and take a more thorough look around. You want to go? Might be out there three days, maybe more.”

  “Excluding the morning fire show, one night wasn’t all that bad, and if we’re comfortably prepared, why not? We are going to be prepared, right?”

  “Define comfortable.”

  “Let’s get something straight. Until I met you, my idea of roughing it meant a four-star hotel with Jacuzzi and room service.”

  “All our stars will be overhead,” he said sheepishly.

  “Okay, plan B . . . promise me one thing: no porcupine livers, or, failing that, something more to go with them.”

  “How about fresh brook trout?”

  “Never tasted brook trout.”

  He rolled the asparagus in sea salt and olive oil, grilling it until it had singe marks. He grilled the salmon filets and served them with mustard-horseradish sauce, topped with thin slices of unseeded Thai peppers. They drank the Chianti, which he’d opened an hour before dinner.

  The first time she tasted the wine she closed her eyes and said, “Oh my. Definitely not your Chateau Traileur Parc from Wal-Mart.”

  He laughed out loud.

  They put the baby in a porta-crib not far from the inflated mattress and Newf immediately curled up near the crib.

  When Friday took off her clothes and slid under the sheets with him, it felt like she was laminating him, and it felt wonderful.

  After making love, she whispered, “Sooner or later we have to talk about what all this means.”

  “All this?”

  “Right—what it means to us. I don’t jump in and out of bed with men.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  She poked him in the ribs. “I’m serious, and I’m nervous.”

  “Me too.” Flippant and dismissive, but he understood what she meant. This felt like something more than he had anticipated, and whatever it was, it felt pretty good—her companionship, the sex, shared work, her smarts, even Jell-O mode, which was unlike anything he’d ever encountered before. As he fell asleep he wondered what condition she’d be in tomorrow. “No pooping,” he whispered to the baby.

  45

  Baragastan

  MONDAY, JUNE 12, 2006

  Tuesday Friday was at the post with Mike Millitor and Service was headed in their direction when Junco Kragie called on the cell phone. “The name Tahti ring any bells for youse?”

  Helveticus “Hell” Tahti had been one of the kings of U.P. violators before Allerdyce and his clan had ascended to the top of the rubbish heap. “Long dead,” Service said.

  “Got a grandson named Rigel.”

  “One of your regulars?”

  “No. He served in Iraq and was discharged by the marines last fall. Technically he lives on the family homestead on Sidnaw Creek, near the old German POW camp.”

  German prisoners of war had been lodged at the camp near Sidnaw, and at other former Civilian Conservation Corps camps around the U.P. Some of the German soldiers actually came back to the U.S. and became citizens after repatriation as POWs. “Technically?”

  “Yeah—he owns the property, but he may have gone OTG.”

  OTG—off the grid—meant living in the bush. In the wake of Vietnam there had been several pockets of bush-vets in the U.P., men who couldn’t or didn’t want to find a way back into society. They were all gone now, dead, assimilated, or moved on. “What about it?”

  “I started thinking about Art Lake and remembered I’ve seen young Tahti out that general way a couple times, and I’ve heard from others that they’ve seen him skulking around out there too.”

  “Out what way?”

  “I seen him near Bog Lake, south of Forest Highway 2108. That’s only a couple of crow-fly miles from the general Art Lake area. Others have seen him out there.”

  “Where’s his homestead property?”

  “Caliper Lane, Sidnaw, not sur
e of the number. It’s just west of town. Twenty can probably run an address for you.”

  “Thanks, Junco. I’ll follow up.”

  “It’s a long shot, but the best I can do,” Kragie said. “Just not many people out that way.”

  Service knew that Lansing—Station Twenty—didn’t like working from incomplete data, but depending on the dispatcher on duty, he’d probably get some help. Some Lansing dispatchers would do back flips to help officers in the field. Others treated radio calls like impositions and unwanted intrusions into their lives. If he were chief, he would order every dispatcher to spend a week a year in the field with conservation officers to get a feeling for why their jobs existed in Lansing.

  “Station Twenty, Twenty Five Fourteen.”

  “Station Twenty,” a female dispatcher responded.

  “Run a name for an address and check RSS and CCH.”

  “Go ahead, Twenty Five Fourteen.”

  “Name is Rigel Tahti. First name, Robert-Ida-George-Edward-Lincoln, Rigel. Last name, Tahti, Tom-Adam-Henry-Tom-Ida, Rigel Tahti. Twenty Five Fourteen.”

  “Our computer’s a little cranky today,” the dispatcher complained mildly.

  Service understood. If any other device so critical to human endeavors operated with the reliability of computers, those devices would be recalled by government as shams and scams. Computer companies were allowed a different level of reliability than just about anything else he knew.

  Several minutes passed before Lansing radioed back. “Twenty Five Fourteen, Rigel Tahti, eleven-six-eighty, six-five, two-thirty, brown and brown. We have a plate for an ’05 Silverado, silver in color, nil, null, and valid.”

  Nil meant no hits on LEIN, the Law Enforcement Information Network; null meant no outstanding warrants in the system; and valid meant the man’s vehicle was properly and legally registered. Everything about the man seemed legal. “Twenty, CCH negative?”

  “Affirmative, Twenty Five Fourteen. RSS coming up. Stand by one.”

  Another few minutes passed before the dispatcher came back on the radio. “RSS shows clear, Twenty Five Fourteen.”

  Which meant Tahti had no licenses this year for fishing, small game, trapping, deer, nothing, which made it pretty tough to legally live OTG. “Twenty, can you look back?”