Ice Hunter (Woods Cop Mystery 1)

by Heywood, Joseph

  “You know Jerry Allerdyce?”

  “Yah, sure. So what?”

  Of course he knew him. Birdman ran with a bad crowd and he was known as a loose-lipped gossip.

  “He’s been logging with someone. I want you to ask around, get me a name, and we’ll leave this deal with you returning the magazines to your brother.”

  “If Jerry hears I’m asking around, he’ll kick my ass.”

  “Would you rather have this in the papers? It’s your choice.”

  “No, man. I’ll do it.”

  “You’d better come through for me, Bird. Either I get a name from you and it checks out, or we take you to court and everybody will know about this.”

  “You’ll get a name, I swear.”

  “It has to check out.”

  “I know, man. It will.”

  Service said, “Bird, Jerry was murdered a couple of nights ago, so you’re going to have to be real careful.”

  Digna grabbed the edge of a metal table to steady himself up.

  “I’ll be in touch, Bird.”

  Afterward, Service returned to patrolling the back roads. Birdman was too stupid to be a professional violator. Limpy was bad, but he wasn’t stupid.

  When he called in to dispatch he learned that Nantz had called.

  He reached her at HQ on his cellular. His, not the DNR’s.

  “I got the pix,” she announced. “You want to take a look?”

  They met at a roadside park between Marquette and Escanaba.

  They used a picnic table to spread out the photographs, anchoring them with sticks and stones. Newf kept prodding Nantz’s hand with her nose, wanting attention.

  “You can’t quite see the upriver outcrop,” she said to Service as she tapped one of the eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. “All you can see is the area around the log slide where the fire cleared it out.”

  Service took his time. “It forms a sort of a rocky circle in the burn area.”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “You’d think that rocks in a shape like that might mean something.”

  “Could be,” she said. “I took geology, but it was boring.” She rolled her eyes.

  “You make a lousy grade?”

  “Nah, I aced it. I aced everything in college. Four-point start to finish.”

  “Really?” he said with a laugh. Somehow he wasn’t surprised. “I guess we need to get these to an expert on geology.”

  “No, what you want is a petrologist. They study the history of rocks.”

  “It’s that specialized?”

  “How many angels can do the horizontal dance on the head of a pin? Science advances in stages. Experts think they know all there is to know and some upstart sees things differently and this changes the whole shebang. It’s always been this way. When Columbus sailed to America, navigators had known for a hundred years that the earth wasn’t flat. But the crowns of Europe financed voyages and they wouldn’t finance anything the church didn’t approve as being theologically sound, so the navigators knew the truth and ate shit from the church so that they could do their jobs. Sometimes science knows the truth, but politics and religion complicate things.”

  Service suddenly wondered how long chasing fires would satisfy Nantz. “Quackademics are a pain to deal with. Where do I find one of these petrologists?”

  “Try Tech.”

  Michigan Technological University was in Houghton. It was one of the top engineering schools in the country, its specialty mining in its various forms. The college had grown up out of the prosperity that followed iron and copper discoveries in the central and western U.P. in the last century.

  “Just call the geology department, tell them you’re with the DNR and you want photo identification help.”

  It irked him to have her telling him how to do his job.

  “If you tell them you need a petrologist, they might even think you know what you’re doing.”

  Service grinned. “That would fool them.”

  “Do you and Newf want to get a beer and stuff?” she asked.

  “No time now,” he said.

  “Well, I’m gonna keep asking,” she said. “I don’t quit easy.”

  Was she coming on to him? Since his wife had left him, he had gone through long spells without women and other times when he was seeing several at the same time. When he was a boy, sex had seemed a mysterious and sacred thing, but as an adult it seemed as if the act was no different than eating; when you were hungry, you got yourself a meal. But now that he and Kira were growing closer, he had this old feeling coming back, one that told him he needed to be true to her. Even so, he had not told Nantz about Kira. Keeping his options open was an old habit he wasn’t proud of.

  Lonnie Green was at his office at the Delta County Airport. “This is Service. Any luck?”

  Green coughed to clear his throat. “Well, the good news is that we had a radar paint all right, right where you said it would be, and when you said it would be there. The return is intermittent, but we estimate that the chopper was there more or less for forty-five minutes. That’s the time between the first paint and the last one.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “We can’t find a blue Huey, which doesn’t surprise me, but we did make an effort. There’s no call sign, of course, and no flight plan. But I sent a bulletin to airports in the Yoop, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and downstate Michigan. Nobody can tell us about a blue Huey. The thing is that there are lots of small airports and no towers and one hell of a lot of VMC fliers. Hell, there are farmers who fly small fixed-wings off grass strips built in their hay fields, and businesses that have their own birds for local stuff. Unfortunately, ATC is primarily concerned with commercial traffic, so that’s where we focus. The rest, well, they’re just out there, and as long as they’re not low-flying, buzzing, causing trouble, or about to bust the Canadian border, we don’t pay much attention to them. Like you guys, we’ve got limited resources and we can do only so much.”

  “Meaning that’s it?”

  “Not entirely. We could still get lucky. Other stations are on alert. If this bird flies again, somebody will eventually see it and report it.”

  “You think we should take this thing to the media?”

  “If your bird is involved in something illegal, the bad guys will also hear the report and repaint the chopper, stop flying, or take it apart, crate it up, and ship it somewhere else in the country.”

  Service felt consternation. The chopper painted on radar, which meant it existed, but not officially. It made him wonder how safe air traffic and passengers really were and how much ATC boiled down to window dressing. Why was it that the stuff he got involved in was never easy?

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Listen, instead of the media, why don’t you alert the Coast Guard, state police, hospitals with choppers, and your own people and ask all of them to watch for your bird?”

  “Good advice. Thanks for the help.”

  Service tried to call Lisette McKower but was told by the district office that she was “not available,” a standard answer designed not to pin down an officer’s location when the officer didn’t want to be disturbed. Before he could get off the line, his call was passed to Sergeant Charlie Parker. This he didn’t need.

  “Officer Service?” Parker said officiously. “Geez, I used to have a Service who worked for me, but he disappeared.”

  “Lay off,” Service said.

  “You’re not the Long Fucking Ranger, Service. You’re part of an organization and I’m sick of your bullshit. Check your spelling: There’s no i in team.”

  “It’s ‘Lone,’ ” Service said. “Not Long.”

  “What was that? Are you correcting a superior officer?”

  “How am I not doing my job?”

  “You’re not keeping me informed, that’s how you’re doing. I hear all sorts of shit second and third hand.”

  “You’re getting all my reports on time, right?”

  �
��Don’t give me that passive aggressive junk. I had my way, you’d be out. We need team players, Officer Service, not dinosaurs like you.”

  Which all boiled down to Parker wanting information from his subordinates in order to horn in on the credit for what his people did. As a CO, Parker had been a loner and not overly effective, doing only the easiest jobs and avoiding any sort of dangerous work. How he had gained rank was one of the DNR’s great mysteries. And now that he was a sergeant he wanted total control over everyone under him. It wasn’t that Parker was a bad guy; it was just that he wasn’t up to the standard that Service felt should define the CO force.

  “I’m doing something wrong,” Service said, “you know what you can do.”

  “What I know is that stunt you pulled with Limpy.”

  Service said nothing.

  “I’ve also heard that you’ve been interfering in a murder investigation and carrying around an unauthorized animal. You’ve gone too far this time.”

  Somebody must’ve complained about Newf. “Charlie, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Don’t hang up on me, Officer Service. I’m warning you.”

  Service hung up and took a deep breath. What a doofus. He looked at Newf and said, “Don’t sweat Parker.”

  A call came in from a man who had found a dead cat near Carlshend. Sometimes cats and dogs mixed it up with rabid wild animals, so Service went to see him. Normally the county animal control people handled this kind of thing, but he was close and it didn’t hurt to monitor these things. It was early in summer for a rabies outbreak, but you never knew.

  The man lived in one of a cluster of houses on a dirt road near an area where there was an abundance of skunks, which were sometime rabies carriers.

  “You called?” Service said, when the man came to the door.

  “Damn right. You wanna see the animal?”

  The man had it on a shovel beside the house.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “On the front porch across the street. The old bitch over there poisons cats because she doesn’t like them. She works mornings. I saw this poor thing just before noon and went over and got it. I also saw a tuna can under her carport. She laces tuna with rat poison or antifreeze, the cats eat, then they die. They hemorrhage to death. The bitch has a dog. How would she like somebody to poison that foo-foo piece of hers?”

  “This isn’t your cat?”

  “I don’t keep pets. What’s next, are people going to poison coons and deer and coyotes just because they roam around?”

  “Have you talked to the woman?”

  “No. I might punch her lights out.”

  “Where’s the tuna can?”

  “Still under her carport. She must’ve been in a hurry this morning. She usually hides the evidence. You going to do something about this?”

  Service nodded. “Put the cat in a trash bag, leave it by my truck, okay?”

  “You going to bury it?”

  “First I’m going to have a necropsy done, then we’ll cremate it.”

  “This is real good of you.”

  Service walked across the street and knocked on the front door of a neat white house with black shutters and flower boxes with bright red geraniums. There was a gaudy plywood bend-over stuck in the lawn by the porch—a cutout of a fat woman bending over, from the rear. On the porch there were two cement geese dressed in identical red gingham dresses.

  The woman was seventyish with thinning blue-white hair and alabaster skin. She looked like the archetypal grandmother with a gentle smile and soft mannerisms.

  “Ma’am, I’m Officer Service.”

  “You’re with the DNR, right?” She clasped her hands over her heart. “You people do such a wonderful job.”

  “Yes ma’am, thank you. There was a dead cat found on your porch this morning.”

  “Oh my,” she said. “Who found the poor thing?”

  “I have it,” he said. He saw sweat pop out on her forehead. “It’s pretty rare for a cat to die a natural death in a public place. When they get sick, they usually go off alone to die.”

  “I don’t understand,” the woman said, her facade cracking.

  “Well, when they die in the open like this, we assume there’s been an accident or foul play and we investigate.” He was stretching the truth a bit, but he did this all the time in order to encourage people in one direction or another. There was no law that forbade telling lies to uphold the law.

  “I didn’t see a cat,” she said.

  “Do you have a cat?”

  “Well, no. I have a dog. I just love dogs, don’t you?”

  “Not especially,” he said. “I prefer cats. In fact the one on your porch looks like one of mine.”

  The woman said, “Oh my.”

  “Do you mind if I look around outside?”

  “Look around for what?” she asked defensively.

  “It’s just our common practice to look around in cases like this.”

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe I should call my husband.”

  “You do that and ask him if I can look inside too. Meanwhile, I’ll look around out here.”

  He didn’t wait for her to respond, heading immediately for the carport. Beside the side door he saw a tuna can that still had bits of tuna in it.

  The white-haired woman appeared at the door as he put on a latex glove, picked up the can, and stuck it in a clear plastic evidence bag.

  “What are you doing?” she asked through the screen. Her eyes had turned hard.

  “I saw this can,” the conservation officer said. “Cats love tuna. They can’t resist it. It might have spoiled and made the cat sick.”

  “I ate some of that tuna myself and it didn’t hurt me.”

  “So this is yours?”

  “Yes, and I want it back.”

  “Why was it here?”

  “It probably fell when I took out the trash this morning.”

  He walked to the trash can. It was galvanized steel and the interior was immaculate. She obviously didn’t put trash in the can unless it was in a bag.

  “Ma’am, there’s no trash in here.”

  “Well, it must’ve been picked up.”

  “When did you eat the tuna?”

  “I had some this morning. Yes, I remember eating tuna this morning.”

  She was lying. “Is today your regular trash pickup?”

  Her face went blank and her color drained away.

  “Ma’am, did you put this can here by your step?”

  She plastered a new smile on. “Yes, now I remember. I was going to put it in the trash, but I was in a hurry and there was no trash bag, so I just set it down.”

  “So you put it here this morning?”

  “Yes, but now I have trash bags and if you’ll just hand it to me, I’ll throw it away. It won’t do to have trash lying around. I’m not a litterer.”

  “Ma’am, I’m going to keep this can.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Yes ma’am, I can. Do you have rat poison or antifreeze in your house or storage shed?”

  The smile was gone now. “No.”

  “May I look?”

  “No. I’m going to call my husband.”

  “Please do. I’m going to take this can and we are going to put it under scientific analysis. If there’s rat poison or antifreeze, I’ll be back.”

  “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  Service placed the bag with the tuna can in the back of the truck with the dead cat, drove around the first bend in the road, pulled down a two-track, got his binoculars, and walked through the woods to the field behind the woman’s house. He left Newf in the truck with the windows partly down. The woman would either put the rat poison or antifreeze in a trash bag and throw it out, or bring it back in the field and try to bury it, which would then put other animals in jeopardy. It was amazing how many people could kill or torture animals without guilt. Technically animal control would be called in to handle a poisoning, but if she
put the rat poison or antifreeze into the environment, he could make the pinch.

  He perspired heavily in the midday sun, but after an hour the woman came out of the back door, carrying a trash bag and wearing pink rubber gloves that reached up to her elbows. She had a small shovel and walked into the field about a hundred yards, stopped, and looked around nervously.

  Service advanced through high grass toward her as she dug. When she had a small hole, she took another look around and dumped out a bag with the poison and then sprinkled the poison into the hole.

  “Ma’am,” he announced. “You’re violating the dumping ordinances and you are putting poison into the environment.”

  She squawked and stood shaking as she glared at him, her mask of innocence gone.

  “Ma’am, I want you to use your shovel to dig up all that poison and put the dirt in the bag you brought.”

  “I’m not wasting a trash bag,” she said angrily. “They cost money and my husband and I are on a fixed income.”

  “Do you want me to call for backup and have a bunch of people out here digging up this field? I suspect there are other cats buried back here.”

  She was shaking badly now and looked ready to cry.

  “Dig,” he said.

  “I have arthritis,” she whined. “This isn’t my fault. My husband makes me do this. I’m a good Christian woman and I do what my husband tells me to do.”

  “Lady, if you put that tuna out and a dog or kid got it, they could die. You want to be responsible for killing a kid?”

  She sobbed and dug, showing no evidence of arthritis. He couldn’t stand to look at the woman. He had seen people like this so many times before. Appearances told you nothing about a person’s substance.

  When the bag was filled, he made her shovel other dirt over the hole, then escorted her back to the house where he wrote a ticket for obstruction of an investigation, illegal dumping, poisoning the environment, improper use of a dangerous substance, and poisoning a cat. He couldn’t think of other charges or he would have dropped those on her too.

  He told her she had to appear at court within a certain period and plead guilty or not guilty. “If you plead not guilty, I am going to get a warrant and we are going to come out here and go through your house and we are going to dig up the entire back area and then we are going to throw the book at you. Do you understand?”