She said, “Why are you being so mean to me?”
“Ma’am, you are getting off light.”
People like this disgusted him nearly as much as Limpy. People like this spouted Christian doctrine, went to church, ran PTAs and school boards, and all the while killed innocent things because in their twisted minds the only things that mattered were those they wanted to matter.
He left the woman in tears and didn’t care.
When he got home, Kira wasn’t yet there. He put the bagged cat in the freezer and left the bag of poison dirt in the truck. He’d have to take care of that tomorrow. He locked the back of the truck to be sure nothing got in. Newf hopped onto the porch and Cat hissed at her. Service said, “Knock it off, you two.”
He made corn bread with diced habanero peppers and Vidalia onions and a pot of Texas chili, which came out differently every time he made it.
Kira came in, shed her coat, kissed him, and changed into shorts and a halter. “It’s hot,” she said. She went to the fridge for ice water, but while she was there she opened the freezer. He saw her jump back.
“What the hell is that?”
He laughed. “Evidence. A woman poisoned a cat with rat poison. I was going to ask you to do the necropsy.”
“In our freezer?”
“It was too far to the office or your clinic. I thought we’d just keep it overnight.”
She turned and looked at him. “I suppose our freezer will be used for evidence other times?”
“Yep.”
“God,” she said.
“Hungry?”
“Yep.”
Kira wolfed down two bowls of chili and they each had a beer.
“Do you know Cece Dirkmaat?” she asked after dinner. They were sitting on the porch, looking out at the creek.
“I don’t think so.”
“She teaches art at Northern and makes the most incredible jewelry. I gave her the pebbles to polish and see if she could make a bracelet or necklace for me.”
He made a face. “Those ugly pebbles?”
“Leave it to a woman to find beauty in the mundane,” she said. “I like it that you gave them to me, and Cece thinks they’ll polish up nicely.”
“You drove up to Marquette?” He didn’t think she had time.
“Cece lives at Little Moose Lake with Glynnis Fayard, a librarian at Northern. Cece brought their cat in this morning. The poor thing has a sour tummy.”
“She and this Glynnis are roommates?”
Kira looked over at them. “Yeah, and they also sleep together. Is that a problem for you?”
“Nope,” he said. “Might be a problem for them, but not for me.”
“Cece and Glynnis are university people.”
“Little Moose Lake is not liberal territory.”
Kira smiled. “True.”
Cat jumped onto the porch with a headless chipmunk and purred loudly. Kira complimented the cat and scratched her chin.
Newf came up from wading the edge of the creek and curled up at Service’s feet.
“How was your day?” Kira asked.
“You know about the cat. That kind of shit makes me sick.”
“I’m a vet. I see it all the time.”
“I’m still on that fire thing,” he said. He hadn’t told her about Jerry Allerdyce. Once again, he wasn’t sure why he was holding back on her. “Radar painted a chopper over the Tract two days before the fire, but they don’t know who it was or where it came from. ATC has radar tapes.”
“Well, it’s not an alien,” she said. She took off her sandals, turned her chair, and put her feet in his lap. “Rub?”
He began rubbing her feet. “What’s that mean, not an alien?”
“If the chopper exists, it has to be somewhere. You’re the tracker. So track.”
How did you track a chopper? In Vietnam they either came to extract you or they didn’t and you humped out on foot. How many hours had he and Tree spent in the belly of a Huey? A heap of trips, but not that many hours. Why? Limited range. The more people, cargo, and weapons the bird carried, the shorter the distance it could fly. Range, he thought.
“Grady?”
“I’m just thinking.”
“Rub the foot, honey. Don’t squeeze it to a pulp.”
He looked at her foot and saw that it was red. “Sorry.”
What was the range of a Huey? Three hundred miles, give or take? At a speed of 120 to 130, slower if it was lower. If you flew somewhere and didn’t refuel en route, it was an out-and-back and your range was limited by the fuel you carried. Some choppers, he knew, carried extra fuel in internal and external tanks, but how much? How much fuel was their reserve? The three-hundred-mile-range figure stuck in his mind. He had heard it during the war probably. Without refueling or extra tanks, your distance was halved. Not to mention wind and other variables that could affect range. Half to go out, half to come back. One hundred and fifty miles one way. Add in two hours of hovering and take away twenty percent for reserve fuel for emergencies and that reduced theoretical range to 120.
“Earth to Grady,” Kira said.
“One hundred and twenty miles,” he said.
“What?”
“This chopper probably didn’t refuel en route. The pilot wouldn’t want people to know, so he flew from its base to destination and back. That limits it to a distance of about 120. That means we can draw a circle around the place where it was seen and its base has to be inside that circle, more or less. This gives us a pretty good search area.”
“Pi r squared,” she said. “With a radius of 120, that makes for an area of about eleven thousand square miles.”
“No,” he said, his excitement growing. “Remember, we’re on a peninsula. Lake Superior is north, Lake Michigan is south.” Service closed his eyes to visualize the map. “Let’s say that thirty percent of the area is water, maybe more. The 120 radius reaches to Canada, and we can be pretty sure the chopper didn’t come from there. You can’t just bop across the border in an aircraft, free-trade agreements or not. It also stretches down to about Traverse City but there’s only a small arc of land, sweeping northeast to the straits, and the chopper isn’t likely to have come across Lake Michigan because radar would have an easier time painting it over water, even if it was wave-hopping. To the west, the area stretches down as far as Green Bay, and out into the western U.P.”
“Grady, it’s still the whole U.P.”
“No, the glass is half full. Listen to me. The bird surely didn’t come from Canada because of the border, or from the Lower Peninsula because radar would have painted it over Lake Michigan. So it had to fly east or west. East of the Tract, the land is as flat as a stamp and easier to see on radar. To the west there are hills and ridges a chopper can use to hide itself from radar until it gets here. By coming from the west, the radar can’t easily track its route in; from the east it can. We used to do this in Vietnam, use the hills to avoid detection. We know the pilot was low. He knows what he’s doing. So he had to come from the west, which means we can draw the arc in that direction and now we have really reduced the search area.”
“You’re guessing,” she said, wiggling her toes.
“You said I should track. What do you think tracking is? It always involves a lot of educated guesswork.”
She took his hand and slid it under her halter. “Track this for a while.”
He began to caress her, but suddenly jumped up and her feet banged the porch.
“I’m so stupid,” he said.
He went into the house and picked up the telephone.
“Mister Voydanov, this is Grady Service. Fine, thanks. I need for you to concentrate. Exactly how long was that chopper in view?”
Lehto walked inside and ran her fingernails along Service’s stomach.
“You told me an hour, are you sure?”
He hung up and looked at Kira. “He said the chopper hovered for forty-five minutes to an hour, not an hour or two, which is what he told me when I first ta
lked to him. The radar paint was around forty-five minutes, so now we have two observations that corroborate. A stripped-down Huey can run about two and a half hours, a heavily loaded one a lot less. So we subtract one hour from the two and a half—to give ourselves a margin. That leaves ninety minutes, meaning he could fly forty-five minutes each direction. But this guy is not going to pop up where he can get max speed, so he’s on the deck and probably doing 100, not 120 or 130. This means our chopper could cover about seventy miles on the outbound leg. There’s no way he came from the east because of the flatness, so he came from an arc within seventy miles to the west. He has to be in the west, Kira. That’s where the hills are!”
Service hugged her and swung her around and she laughed.
But as soon as he put her down, he was on the telephone again.
Joe Flap sounded half asleep.
“Pranger, this is Service.”
“I ain’t seen that beer yet. You’re not a welsher, are ya? Your old man never welshed on anything.”
“You want to shoot for a case?”
“Hell yes.”
“How many choppers are based in the U.P., say, west of Escanaba within a hundred miles?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Not many, I’d hafta guess.”
“Who uses them?”
“Rich pricks. Seems like they always got the best toys. Loggers. Miners. Construction companies. The USFS. State police. Aerial survey people. Maybe some flight instructors. Hell, I don’t know. I heard a guy from Hurley used one to haul hookers up from Milwaukee to service the red jackets in November.”
Hurley was a town in Wisconsin once famous for prostitutes, drugs, and booze during the November deer hunting season in Michigan. In Wisconsin you could drink at eighteen, but not till twenty-one in Michigan, so they got thousands of crossovers.
“Can you find out?”
“Will sure give ’er a try. When do I get that case?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Pranger is on it.”
Service then called Nantz and gave her Flap’s address. He asked her to take the man a case of beer in the morning.
“This will cost you,” she said.
“I’ll pay you back when I see you,” he said.
“Is this guy hot?”
What the hell was she talking about? “He’s sixty-seven.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said before hanging up.
Service and Lehto went back to the porch with fresh beers and halfway through hers, Kira set her bottle on the deck floor and stood up.
“What?” Service asked.
“I’m going to unplug that Goddamn phone,” she said, walking into the house, shedding her clothes.
Service left his beer unfinished.
It was early morning and still dark. Newf sat at Service’s feet, patiently waiting to be let out while he talked on the telephone.
“Seton Knipe now lives near Crystal Falls,” Gustus Turnage said. “He moved down there sometime in the early eighties. He owns a company called Wildcat, Inc. Land speculation is what I hear. Knipe is in his eighties and semi-retired. His son Ike runs the show, day to day. The son would be about sixty, I think.”
“What kind of land speculation?”
“Nothing big. Forty acres here, forty acres there. Bits and pieces. Parcels, mostly. I guess it pays, but I don’t see how. Call Simon del Olmo in Crystal Falls. He’s a real bird dog.”
CO del Olmo had been with the DNR about four years. He had been born near Traverse City to Mexican parents, migrant workers who spent summers in Michigan and winters in Texas. Simon had a degree from the University of Michigan and had been in combat with the air cavalry during the Gulf War in Iraq.
“Thanks, Gus.”
Knipe, mining, Crystal Falls. Scaffidi’s contract with a mining company in Crystal Falls. He hoped del Olmo could tell him.
He let Newf out. She quickly took care of business, tried to cover the spot with weeds, and raced back to the porch. She followed him inside and curled up on the floor beside the bed. She was okay for a dog, he decided.
“You knew that dog wasn’t going anywhere,” he said to Kira. “Don’t pretend you’re asleep.”
She giggled and pulled him toward her. Kira was still always in a hurry. Living together hadn’t changed that.
After making love, Service made breakfast while Kira took a shower. He was buttering Dutch whole-wheat toast when he realized there was someone at the screen door in front. He went instinctively toward the door before it dawned on him that he was nude. Suddenly he felt himself blushing. He grabbed for something, anything, to cover himself, but all he could find was a sock. Then he heard the woman at the front door laughing, and he began to laugh and just dropped the sock. He walked back to the bed and grabbed his trousers, which were draped over a chair. He tugged them on as he went to the door.
“That sock just didn’t cut it,” the woman said with a smile. “I’m Cece Dirkmaat,” she added. “I’m sorry to startle you. I thought you’d hear my car door close.”
Service looked at Newf. “Great watchdog,” he complained to the animal.
“Come in,” he told the woman. “Coffee?”
“You bet. Black.”
The woman sat at the small kitchen table. She had short silver hair and several silver earrings in each ear.
“Where’s Kira?”
“Bathroom,” Service said. At that instant Kira padded naked out of the bath area, wrapping a towel around her head.
Cece said, “You two aren’t big on clothes.”
Kira squealed and retreated.
Cece laughed. “Maybe I ought to strip. That way we can all say we really know each other.”
Service said, “Let’s leave it at this.”
Kira came back in a bathrobe. She was blushing. “What are you doing here, Cece?”
“I know it’s early and I’m sorry to intrude, but at least I waited until sunrise. I wanted to come over in the middle of the night, but Glynnis wouldn’t let me.”
Kira glanced at Service, who gave her a look of bewilderment.
Dirkmaat dumped pebbles on the table. Service saw that they had been polished. All but one of the stones were reddish purple. The one was sort of opaque with a yellowish tint and a greasy appearance. Cece picked up the odd stone.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Glass,” Service said. “The moving water rounds it off.”
Cece Dirkmaat smiled and held the stone out to Service.
“Not glass, but a glass cutter.”
Kira grinned. “What?”
“It’s a diamond,” the art professor said. “An honest-to-God diamond.”
Lehto and Service stared, their mouths agape.
“Where in the world did you find these?” their visitor asked.
“Newf found them,” Service said.
“Come again?”
Service nodded at the dog. “Newf,” he said. She dutifully wagged her tail.
14
Service waited for Simon del Olmo at Alpo’s, a run-down coffee shop in the village of Sagola, ten miles west of Crystal Falls. Sagola dated to the nineteenth century, when some Chicago investors formed a lumber company to capture the local white pine. All the yellow deer crossing signs on the road into town were shredded by bullet holes from high-caliber slugs, a definite indication that you were in the U.P.
The younger officer arrived in khaki shorts, sandals, and a green body shirt that said castro sucks. Del Olmo was tall and thin with jet-black hair and a neatly trimmed black mustache. He grinned and nodded when he saw Service, who was also out of uniform.
“Thanks for coming,” Service said.
“A chance to work with the great Grady Service.”
Service cringed. They ordered coffee and cinnamon rolls. In the U.P. there was intense competition among towns to see who could make the best rolls, with size more than flavor the deciding factor. These rolls were not as large as the one-pounders in the central part o
f the peninsula.
“Do you know Seton and Ike Knipe?”
“I don’t think anybody really knows them,” del Olmo said. “They’ve been here since before my time, but they don’t mix much with the people from town. Sort of do their own thing. Rich people are like that.”
“What about their company?”
“I know they have one. Wildcat, Inc. They have an office downtown.”
“Can you show me?”
“Sure. You want to tell me what this is about?”
“I would if I knew. It may be nothing, but you know how it goes. You have to move like a snail. Can you find out what land they own around here?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, jeffe. Them or their company?”
“Cut the jeffe crap. Both them and the company. If they have land near anything else, I want to know that too.”
“Like houses?”
“Not necessarily. Businesses, factories, other property investments, big lodges, summer camps, resorts, unusual stuff. Also, I want you to look at Wixon Inc. They have a contract with a mining company. Is it Wildcat?”
When they drove into Crystal Falls in del Olmo’s vintage Volkswagen bus, Service saw that the offices of Wildcat, Inc., were directly behind an office front with a small sign in the window that said laboratory.
“What’s that?” Service asked as they eased by slowly.
“You don’t know?” Del Olmo seemed surprised. “There were supposed to be diamonds around here, I shit you not. Hell, maybe there are. Dow Chemical got involved back in the eighties, then sold majority rights to some sort of subsidiary of an Australian mining outfit, called Crystal Exploration, I think. This was in the early nineties. Crystal has a Colorado-based subsidiary and they have some people here now, but the word is out that they’re closing shop. The lab, I think, was set up by another company to serve all the needs of the diamond searchers.”
“Diamonds, huh?” Service’s heart was racing. “Many people?”
“Actually there were several outfits in the diamond race and God knows how many wildcatters.” Wildcatters. Interesting word choice, thought Grady. Did Wildcat, Inc., connect to this in some way?
Ice Hunter (Woods Cop Mystery 1) Page 17