Shadow of the Wolf Tree
Page 28
“How far back, Twenty Five Fourteen?”
“Far as you can go.”
“Not quite to Noah and the flood,” Lansing said with uncharacteristic humor. Dispatchers and officers were expected to keep radio transactions professional—defined as formal and brief, not chatty and collegial.
Twenty finally came back. “Took him back to ’98, Twenty Five Fourteen,” the dispatcher said. “Nothing there.”
Odd. What the heck was Kragie thinking? “Twenty Five Fourteen clear.”
Tahti had not bought DNR licenses in the past eight years—and he would have been eighteen in 1998. Did he go straight into the marines and spend seven years on active duty? The media was reporting that marines, airmen, soldiers, and sailors were being stop-lossed, held involuntarily past their enlistments because of manpower shortages and recruiting shortfalls. How had Tahti gotten out?
Grady Service called Kragie on the cell phone, hoping he’d have a signal, and when the other officer answered, he asked, “Where’d Tahti go to high school?”
“L’Anse. Lived with an aunt named Pechtola. His old man died while he was in grade school, and he moved to his aunt’s, his mum’s sister. His mum cut out years before with another man.”
“You seem to know a lot about him. RSS shows nothing, and he’s clean on CCH.”
“He was famous around here, a minor celebrity, the all-everything jock. All-state football three years. Tech, Northern, St. Norbert, Lake State, and Grand Valley all wanted him, but he enlisted instead.”
“Word is that the military is holding everyone past their enlistment date. How’d he get out?”
“He’s a Tahti.”
Implying what? Kragie’s attitude puzzled him. “You ever bust him?”
“We’re paid to be professional not suicidal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The kid was scary.”
Scary? “Did he hunt and fish?”
“Word was. Consider his genes.”
“But you never had contact with him.”
“Happily.”
“Theres no RSS record of licenses going back to ’98.”
“Does that sound like a Tahti or what?” Kragie shot back.
“Did the kid have any problems with local law enforcement?”
“Grady, Tahti’s the size of a front door and tough as they come. When he played, L’Anse won, a man among boys, a warrior amont pissant wannabes.”
Translation: Local deps and Troops had overlooked some of the star athlete’s transgressions? High school sports in the U.P. were important—sort of a proxy war between towns for bragging rights. Probably Pinky Barbeaux or his undersheriff would know more about the young man, but that avenue of inquiry is dry for the moment.
“You gonna look for Tahti?” Kragie asked.
“Maybe.”
“You do, be real careful,” his colleague said. “Tahti’s Finndian.”
Meaning a blend of Finn and Native American. “He favor one side or the other?”
“Double dose of both, I think.”
“On tribal rolls?”
“Probably qualifies, but Keweenaw Bay blackballed the hull family back in Hell’s time.”
No surprise there. Hell Tahti had been a violent man, stabbed to death outside a Covington tavern, the circumstances never fully established, and no arrests ever made. Hell’s late son was an unknown, and the grandson seemed to have inherited the family’s rep, short on facts, which was not unusual in the U.P. Gossip here sometimes created reputations not supported by facts or reality. Probably that way everywhere, Service told himself. “Thanks, Junco.”
“I’m serious, Grady. That kid scared hell out of me, and I don’t mind saying so. Didn’t talk much. Just struck.”
Service rubbed his eyes. “Struck who?”
“You understand what I’m saying,” Kragie said conspiratorially.
He didn’t understand and didn’t feel like hearing more. “Later, Junco.”
He had several choices. Start at the Tahti property in Sidnaw, or in the area where the former marine had been seen. He delayed a decision and called Iron River to talk to Friday. “I’ve got a possible lead on someone who might know something about Art Lake. It’s a long shot.” He gave her the name. “Can you call Baraga County and the L’Anse Troop post and see what their history is with the kid?”
“Is this one of those see-ya-sometime calls?”
“Not exactly. I just don’t know how long I’m going to be tied up here.”
She laughed. “I talked to the wire company in Milwaukee this morning. They say the wire sample we got off the river matches a stolen lot. I’m not sure where the heck that leaves us, but now we know. Maybe you ought to grab a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning,” she suggested.
“I’m here, I’ve got everything I need in the Tahoe. Besides, it’s a work night.”
“Did we ever discuss exceptions to the work-night rule?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Okay then. That goes to the top of my to-do list. Who is it you want me to do the background check on?”
“A young man named Rigel Tahti.”
“Rigel, like the star?’
There’s a star called Rigel? “I guess.” He filled her in on the boy and his family and Kragie’s peculiar reactions.
“That OTG business doesn’t sound like normal behavior,” Friday said.
“That’s true for most people.”
“See you around?”
“Bet on it, and tell Mike where I am, okay?”
“He and I are driving out to Golden Lake campground to see if we can find out if Timbo Magee was there before the killing. The progress in all this is really slow,” she added.
“We just have to keep on plugging,” he told her. In his experience cases up here were rarely solved easily or quickly.
Grady Service kept two rucks in his Tahoe—a small one for his regular police work, and a much larger version for longtime pursuits and survival in the woods. It had been a while since he’d been in a sustained stalk, and he went through the pack to make sure he had everything he needed. What the pack kit didn’t include was luck, and he knew he’d need this more than anything else. If he couldn’t find Tahti, or if he did and the man knew nothing, he’d have to hope that a Troop sergeant named Kakabeeke would come through for him.
46
West Iron County
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2006
None of the cases were coming together, but Grady Service could feel in his gut that they were winnowing possibilities, and often this was all the progress you could hope for until a new piece of evidence or new meaning for something old suddenly lit the day and pointed you to an inescapable conclusion.
The Rigel Tahti lead was one he wanted to follow up. Before doing so, his gut nagged him to get back to the woods to the area where they had encountered the Willie Pete. He thought about going alone, but he had already asked Friday.
“You sure about this?” he said to her.
“Hell no, but you promised no porcupine entrails.”
“Did you talk to Baraga County about Rigel Tahti?”
“Had problems with his grandfather, not young Tahti. I talked to the Troops and tribal cops—all the same story.”
Why’s Junco Kragie so negative about the Tahti boy?
“Are we headed for the same place?” Friday asked.
“Plan to start where we stopped. This time we’ll drop your vehicle ahead of us and hike to it.”
“Properly outfitted, right?”
“Define properly,” Service said.
“I’m not joking.”
“Me either.”
She rolled her eyes and snorted.
Friday looked though the woods over ferns nearly as tall as her. “I doubt I’d ever get used to working out here,” she said.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he said.
“I bet.”
He aimed them in a general direction that continued the route of march from the previous rocky abutment on the crazy woman’s property, which meant a long uphill slog. It was hot, and mosquitoes swarmed in the shade of the overhead canopy. Friday slapped at the insects but never complained, and she kept pace easily.
Moving along a gentle slope, Service slowed down and tried to work along the southern edge.
“Looking for rocks?” Friday asked.
“Yeah.”
“Pet rocks?”
“With quartz veins. They should be visible.”
“White?”
“Could be pinkish too.”
“Game wardens are trained in geology?”
“Not one lick.”
“What are you trained in?”
“Optimism,” he said. “And determination.”
“That’s a curriculum?”
“Shut up and look for rocks, Tuesday.”
• • •
They walked up to Friday’s vehicle after 10:30 p.m. Service had found two more rocky protuberances. Both showed veins that seemed to have been removed, and in both locations he broke off samples from the small rock channels, put them in evidence bags, marked them, and stuffed them in his pack. The gap at the second site was sixteen inches wide in places, and he found some shards of white quartz, which he bagged.
“We’re not going to spend the night in the woods?” Friday said. “No brook trout dinner?”
“Another time,” he said.
“You spending the night with me?”
“No time. I’m going to drive over to Marquette, leave the evidence for assays. I want to be there when they open in the morning.”
“Your sleep habits need serious attention,” Friday said, taking off her pack.
“I’ve heard that.”
“You’ll be hearing it again,” she said.
• • •
Personnel began to trickle into the state police lab at 0700. Service went with them and found most with eyes that were still slits.
A woman said, “You’d be?”
“Grady Service.”
“And you’ve got more samples for assay, and you need the results ASAP, right?”
“You’re psychic?”
“No, I’m Roxy, and I’m experienced in working with cops. A rush job on this will be a week to ten days. We have to farm out this sort of thing.”
“Perfect,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said with a groan. “Peachy, too.”
The woman seemed tired and, he guessed, overworked. Everyone who worked for the state carried a bigger workload nowadays, and he wondered if this had a negative effect on his own cases. State budgets had been cut to the bone. When you went past bone, you killed the patient. He wondered how close the state was to such an outcome and shuddered to guess.
47
Baragastan
THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2006
Grady Service got the names of others who had seen Rigel Tahti and drove to the Bog Lake area to talk to two individuals.
According to Kragie, Asdis Henriksdottir worked at the casino in Baraga. She was forty-something, and Service immediately recognized the name as Icelandic. The short-haired woman was dressed in shorts and Birkenstock sandals, her toenails painted bright blue; she wore a halter top that didn’t hide much, and lived in a year-round house on a forty-acre parcel off Norway Lake Road, where it intersected Forest Highway 2460.
“Officer Kragie told me you’ve seen Rigel Tahti out this way.”
“I din’t tell ’im dat so he’d go blabbin’ it around, eh,” she answered. “Youse know what people say about dem Tahtis: Get on dere wrong side and youse got youse a problem, hey.”
“Ms. Henriksdotter.”
“I ain’t no Mizz. Youse can call me Asdis. The name means goddess in the old Norse language, or so my folks told me. I’m a Miss. I was married onct, but the hubby was a lazy bugger, so I sent ’im packin’.”
“Rigel Tahti?” Service said, trying to get her back on track.
“Yeah, I seen him, okay? Fact is, I seen ’im coupla times a week, always in same place, ’boot quarter-mile below where da Norway Lake Road joins da Forest Highway. Dere’s big bunch a hemlocks on west side of road. Seen him right dere. You want a drink, some coffee, somepin’?”
“No thanks.”
“I work up casino. Youse gamble?”
“No.”
She grinned. “No problem. You come see me sometime, won’t be no gamble, eh?” She winked at him and he hurried to get away from her.
The second witness was also a woman, this one elderly, slow-moving and cautious.
“Mabel Tiles? I’m Detective Grady Service of the DNR. Officer Kragie told me you’ve seen Rigel Tahti around here.”
The Tiles’s place was south of where Henriksdottir had seen the man. It was small and didn’t look like it was insulated for year-round occupancy. The woman had her hair bunched under a white kerchief, and wore a red plaid jacket and hiking boots that looked well used.
“Yes, I’ve seen him just north of here, by the hemlocks,” she said. “He’s stopped in here a couple of times, and made wood for me. Nice, polite young man.”
“You’re not afraid of the Tahtis?”
“You listen to gossip up here, you’d never meet anyone.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday he stopped by. Walks all the way from his place in Sidnaw.”
“Does he say where he’s going?”
“Nossir, he’s not real talkative. I get the feeling he’s a troubled young man.”
“He was here. Did you see which way he walked when he left?”
“I walked out to the road with him.”
Service asked him to show her, and she did. The condition of the tracks told him that her story of timing was accurate. Rather than start at the hemlock grove, he decided to start here and asked permission to leave his truck, and the woman had agreed.
The going was slow at first, and it took him four hours to cut fresh tracks, which moved steadily southeast from Bog Lake across low rises and ridges and kept a more or less steady course, veering only to avoid escarpments and the hazards of endless muskeg bogs. Mostly the trail stayed with contours, sometimes crossing open, rocky areas. But Grady Service was always able to locate traces again on softer ground or in weeds and grasses, and as he hiked he felt certain that the person ahead of him was neither trying to obscure his track, nor throw off followers. The boot print was the same here as at Tiles’s place. Has to be him.
He wouldn’t call it an easy trail to follow, but neither was it difficult. Overall it showed the tracks of someone who seemed to know where they wanted to go and was not paranoid about being followed, all of which didn’t add up to OTG behavior.
Six hours after leaving his Tahoe, Grady Service saw a man sitting on a boulder, rendered orange and pale green by lichen patches. The man was staring out at an expanse of muskeg, black spruce, and wild cranberries. Using his binoculars Service saw that the man was clean-shaven, with long legs, a thick neck, and big black boots.
The man walked another two hours, the route finally ending at a cabin cut into the side of a hill and overlooking a beaver pond
with black water. The cabin was made of blackened logs, its yellow chinking showing a dire need of serious attention. The metal roof was rusted orange-brown, but there was a shiny new metal chimney poking up.
Service estimated the cabin at twelve by eighteen feet. The man went inside, came back out, lit a cigarette, swatted at insects, and went back inside. Smoke soon began to snake from the metal chimney.
He had left the Tiles’s place at 0900, and it was now going on 6 p.m. If Tahti had been at the Tiles’s place yesterday, what had taken him so long to get here—if this was his intended destination, and not an intermediate stop? No way to know until you talk to the man. He found himself thinking about Tuesday and told himself to stop. It had been a long time since a woman had actually intruded into his thoughts, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about this development.
Grady Service found a place above the cabin in some ground-hugging junipers and slept against a cedar snag until first light, ignoring the insects trying to devour him. With light hinting in the east he eased down to the cabin and found a place to the left of the door, which finally eased open a few seconds after 5 a.m. The man stepped outside in his underwear, stretching and yawning.
Service said, “DNR. Good morning.” He held his badge out so the man could see. You Rigel Tahti?”
The man had short hair, military style, just starting to grow out and looking raggedy. “Morning,” the man said with a smile and nod. “Yah, I’m Rigel. You lost?”
Unstartled, no apparent nervousness—a simple question and greeting.
“Philosophically or geographically?”
The young man grinned. “Let me take a leak and then we can talk.”
Business complete, Tahti said, “You’re a long way from somewhere.”
“How far is Art Lake?” Service asked.
The man cocked an eyebrow, his first sign of concern. “They sic you on me?”
“They?” Service asked. “I’ve got some tea bags in my ruck if you can supply the water.”
“Water, fire, evaporated milk, even some sugar. Come on in, but watch your head. This place wasn’t built for people our size.”