Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “C’mon,” she said, striding off to the south across a field of basalt, the smoothest he had ever seen. Strange geography: Basalt was rarely exposed to this extent, at least in this area.

  “Laurentian Plateau, Canadian Shield, whatever,” she said. “We’re on the very eastern edge of it here. Keweenaw’s part of it, too. The animal crossed this rock field, stayed on the hard surface maybe to hide its tracks,” she said, and started moving down the sloping rock until she got to a gigantic white pine that had blown over, exposing its massive root-ball. Denninger pointed. “More tracks.”

  Service looked. Geez. What does she want? Wolves are stealthy and cautious but don’t hide their tracks. “Okay, you found tracks; what about them?”

  “They’re the sideshow,” the CO said, and lit the bottom of the root-ball with her light. Service saw something smooth and shiny, reflecting light. “Plastic?” he said.

  “Look closer,” she said. “I think they’re gun cases.”

  He looked at her. “Did you look?”

  “Didn’t want to until I got you here to witness it, so we can keep the chain of custody untainted.”

  Serviced asked, “What’s this got to do with the gorks? Anything?”

  Denninger said, “Something, nothing—who the hell knows? Crime scene techs found an empty box of .308 ammo down by the parking lot—presumably the victims’ or the perp’s, or maybe it fell out of a vehicle. I don’t know. Boot tracks from the parking lot led me to the cache. Let’s see what we have before we jaw more.”

  “Fair enough,” said Service.

  Denninger handed him her digital camera and snapped on latex gloves. “I’ll be the talent, which in TV lingo means the body in front of a camera.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He couldn’t help liking the live-wire Denninger, who had nearly lost a leg to a deadly wolf trap early in her career.

  She pulled the package out from under the root-ball and undid the shiny cloth, revealing a hardback weapon case, locked, of course. It took her less than ten seconds to spring it with a tool from her pocket.

  Grady Service stared at the two weapons. “Serial numbers?” he asked.

  She gave the rifles a thorough examination. “Erased,” she said. “Acid.”

  “That ain’t good,” he said.

  “More here,” she added, pulling out another package, smaller, unwrapping it and quickly picking another lock.

  Service stared and lit a cigarette. “Night scopes. You know what we’ve got here?”

  “Trouble?” she said.

  “Those rifles used to be called M40s by the Marine Corps. Remington manufactured them only for gyrene snipers. They made fewer than twenty-five hundred of them, and outside military custody, you’d have an easier time getting rough sex from the Virgin Mary than laying your mitts on one of those jobbies.”

  “Scopes come with them?”

  He looked and declared, “I’m not familiar with these optics. We’ll check into it.”

  “You ever seen one of these in the hands of a violator?”

  “These are relics, but they’re the real deal, and I’m betting they’re worth a small fortune to collectors.” He failed to mention that he had on occasion been a sniper in Vietnam and had used the same weapon.

  “If the rifles belong to the victims?”

  He had no answer for her. Just shook his head.

  She said, “Maybe it pulls us into it as well. Could be they were making a delivery or something?”

  “Don’t speculate,” he said. “Not our business.”

  “Or someone came to get the rifles, and the deal turned bad?”

  “You don’t know that, and absent prints, you can’t link the weapons to the vicks.”

  “Grady,” she said, “that wolf approached the camp, circled, came to this spot, and moved on. Curious how the animal’s trail mirrors our route to this spot. Maybe the victims stashed the weapons. It sure wasn’t the wolf. This is freshly disturbed soil.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll get Friday out here. This is not our business. More likely it’ll be ATF or FBI—if the weapons are involved.”

  Denninger stared at him. “What if I told you there’s some talk of a dogman being seen in far western Baraga County. Bar talk says there’s even a bar bounty out on the damn thing.”

  Dogman? This was the Michigan version of what the French called a loup garou—a werewolf. From what he remembered, the dogman was the fictional creation of some downstate radio disc jockey. “We don’t need this kind of shit,” he told her. “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  “No joke, Grady.”

  “Shit.”

  By training, conservation officers could deal with just about anything, but if you really wanted to get them talking, all you had to do was ask about UFOs and other semimystical supernatural phenomena they’d encountered in the woods. Real or not, the dogman was one of those things that made some COs cringe while fascinating them at the same time. Service was certain all such fantasies were just so much crap.

  “Do we take the weapons to Friday?” Denninger asked.

  “We don’t do homicides. If the weapons belong to her vicks, and her case, she can take them, and if not, she can pass them to whoever catches the weapons case.”

  “My gut says this is all in the same stewpot,” Denninger said.

  Grady Service shuddered. “You don’t have a gut,” he told her.

  In fact, Denninger was a hard body who slaved to maintain it. His own scarred gut was suggesting the same connected mess. It was not something he cared to think about. Not that he believed such junk, but a lot of nut-job civilians would, and if this became public, all hell would break loose as every self-appointed monster-hunter in the state (and the country) would probably arrive in Michigan, trying to bag the alleged beast. Especially if there was a bounty on it.

  “You need to find out for sure about that bounty: who, how much, when, why, everything.”

  “You?”

  “I’ll call Tuesday and wait here for her.”

  •••

  An hour later he was feeling dozy when he sensed he was being watched. Instinctively he remained perfectly still and began to scan the surrounding areas with his eyes, but nothing looked suspicious. After fifteen minutes, the strange feeling passed. Not a wolf.

  Shakespearean lines filled his mind: “Or in the night / imagining some fear / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”

  The lines made him laugh. Yeah, probably a bear prowling around.

  Where the heck was Friday? He stepped past the root-ball to urinate, looked down, and saw more of the giant wolf tracks. “Geez,” he said out loud.

  Friday arrived, took photographs of the weapons cache, and they carried and loaded the rifles and scopes into the patrol unit.

  “Any theories to share?” she asked.

  “Nothing supported by evidence,” Service said. He decided to tell her nothing about the wolf man until Denninger got more information on the so-called bounty.

  Friday wore latex gloves and hefted one of the rifles. “This thing’s heavy, and would be even heavier with one of these scopes. Our vicks don’t look strong enough to handle them.”

  “Could be irrelevant,” he said. “May have nothing to do with Twenty Point Pond.”

  “Then what?”

  He held out his hands and rolled his eyes. “It’s the U.P., eh?”

  Friday looked at him. “I bet you’re glad you’re not on this case.”

  “Like, totally,” Grady Service said, grinning.

  6

  Saturday, October 18

  NEGAUNEE, MARQUETTE COUNTY

  Yint’s Eat Healthy Eh-Café was poorly named, the emporium’s fare so fattening you could clog arteries just by reading the menu. Service ordered a cinnamon roll and Friday curled a lip i
n revulsion.

  “At my age sugar goes straight to my hips,” she complained.

  The waitress, a part-time college student at Northern, and a granddaughter of the owner, Helmi Yint, said, “Try the pan kaka. They’re, like, Swedish, hey? You put your maple syrup on top of her.”

  Service and Friday both laughed. “Just coffee,” Friday said.

  Service loved his fellow Yoopers. “Put your syrup on top of her?” he mimicked.

  “Good plan. File that for future consideration,” Friday said in a low voice.

  There had not been much closeness lately, and it sometimes felt like they were slowly drifting apart, largely because they were both so busy—Service reestablishing his presence in the Mosquito, and Friday with the two-gork case. COs were reporting an influx of road hunters, and there was a major jump in tickets for loaded weapons in vehicles, but most of the dopes so far were locals. Dogman-related? He hoped not.

  The two Marine sniper weapons had landed back on his desk after being turned down by the FBI, ATF, and the US Marine Corps, all of whom said they had more important things to deal with. With no serial numbers, there wasn’t much he could do, although he had called an old Marine buddy by the name of Prince.

  Prince had been his platoon sergeant in Vietnam, a straight-backed, foul-mouthed, born leader out of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northeast Georgia. Prince was calm and patient, a born teacher with unerring judgment of men and situations. The Gunny had given Service’s black platoon mate, Treebone, the nickname “Chocolate Bunny,” and the first time Service heard this, he had expected a fight, but Tree had only laughed. Service respected and trusted Prince, the kind of NCO who was the bedrock of the Marine Corps, and all uniformed services.

  Service and Treebone left Vietnam and the Corps, but Prince had stayed in and retired at an exalted super-senior gunnery sergeant rank. He now lived in southern California, not far from Camp Pendleton.

  “Gunny Prince,” said Service.

  “Bet you never thought you’d be addressing me that way,” Prince shot back.

  “Standards slide; Semper fi.”

  “Semper fi. What the hell do you want?”

  Service explained the situation—the rifles and scopes, ammo, all of it, along with the lack of leads.

  “Well,” Prince said after listening, “them’s some real primo weps y’all’s got, and in the long-gun market, you might could trade a brace for a heap of pussy, money, or both.”

  “There’s a market for such?”

  “There’s a market for everything, Service. What the hell kind of a cop are you?”

  “The serial numbers are gone. How do you trace something like this?”

  “Rumor mill, old jarhead under-radar bullshit streams, and such, and like that, and so forth, and like that.You know the Suck.”

  “Pig in a poke?”

  “The polar opposite of the odds of contracting the black clap in Saigon. You want me to make some inquiries?”

  “Affirmative. I’m sort of at a dead end here.”

  “No promises.”

  “Anything might help.”

  He had already related this to Friday, and she had just shaken her head and said, “I think you invented networking, Service.” She had asked for the meeting at Yint’s this afternoon, and he had no idea why. Tomorrow he intended to drive to Houghton to see his granddaughter and her mom, whom he considered his daughter-in-law, even though she and his son Walter had never married. It had been sleeting for three days and this morning had turned to a heavy, slippery wet snow. He hoped roads would be drivable the next day.

  Friday seemed pensive.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes and no,” she said, lost in thought. “Almost three months, Grady, and we have bupkis for evidence, nothing on the vicks. The DNA finally came back: maybe Indians, maybe not. Tork’s taking another look, new samples. There’s not a damn thing we can use to point us now or later, assuming there is a later.”

  “There’s always a later,” he told her.

  “My boss told me with state budgets as they are, MSP may be cutting some detective positions, and I’m low dick on the totem pole. I talked to my union rep, who said I should just suck it up and be glad I have a job. Let’s hear it for moral support and brotherly love,” she said bitterly.

  “You’re too good to chop.”

  “Seniority isn’t about performance,” she said. “There’s no semen in the vaginas and stomachs of the vicks. That’s not good for down-the-road use. No evidence of a struggle, no traces of intoxicants or drugs. Makes me wonder if they weren’t willingly tied together. This one is weird.”

  She’s venting, rhetorical mutterings. Service knew to keep his mouth shut while Tuesday tried to shape her thoughts. She liked to think out loud. He didn’t.

  “Outrage is waning,” she went on. “Newspapers are folding left and right, and nobody gives enough of a shit to track something like this and keep the anger alive.” Service knew that an intense emotional response often kept public interest high in certain crimes, and sometimes brought leads that led to case breaks, but the same so-called outrage could also interfere with cases, depending on how circumstances manifested themselves.

  “Maybe details should be released to renew public interest?” she asked.

  “It’s only been three months,” he said, trying to reassure her.

  “It feels like three years,” Friday grumbled, rubbing her eyes with the back of her right hand.

  “Ask me, releasing details is a mistake,” Service said. “Details can make people flip out. It’s a small miracle we’ve held all this so tight this long.”

  Helmi Yint stood before them, interrupting their conversation. “Sixty-seven was the worst,” she said. “My brother drove snowplow for the county. Snow up to the bloody eaves by mid-December. We had to tunnel out to the bloody roads just to put the kiddies on the school bus. Stayed like that ’til well after April Fool’s. Sixty-seven, she was a beast, eh.”

  Service looked up. Yint was sixty, a stout matron who had buried three husbands, all loggers, and, through it all, had somehow kept the small restaurant alive and raised seven children, all good kids.

  “You hear ’bout Martine Lecair?” Helmi Yint casually asked Friday.

  Friday shook her head.

  “She just packed it in last week, took her twins out of school and skedaddled. Nobody knows where she went off to, or why. Good job like that—in the U.P.’s best school system, too. Makes no bloody sense. Why would she call her principal and tell him she was resigning for personal reasons? Just like that, done deal. I can’t even imagine it. Had it too good, maybe, too easy—state insurance, union protecting your butt, summers off, all that good guv’mint candy. Not hard living like the rest of us up here, that’s for sure.”

  White prejudice against tribals was a given, and Service knew there also was a certain degree of envy and jealousy for teachers in parts of the U.P., and statewide. The same held true for state employees, who some citizens considered overpaid, underworked, and unduly pampered. Citizen assholes.

  Service vaguely knew Martine Lecair—a pretty, vivacious woman about Friday’s age.

  “Guess that’s how Indians are,” Yint said. “State paid for her education with our tax money, and this is how she repays us?”

  “I doubt it’s personal,” Friday said, her voice edged.

  “Well, I take it personal,” the restaurant owner said.

  When they got up to leave the owner added, “Better put youse’s chains on. When she gets this deep and wet early, youse’ll need chains to move around. That’s how it was in ’67. Youse could hear chains on the roads in the middle of the day—like bloody ghosts in some cheap movie. It got spooky, I can tell youse. And here it is snowing again, and it ain’t yet Halloween.”

  In the entryway they bumped into Trooper Harry Y
awkey, a longtime road patrol officer.

  “Road conditions?” Friday asked him.

  “Salt and sand down, and not too bad yet, but getting there, eh. She’s been pretty quiet. Last night there was a helluva fight at Tooley’s, no permanent damage, human or property, but Kline had to taze and gas some jerkbait from Traverse City.”

  Felton Kline was a Negaunee city cop in his early sixties, an amiable man who could usually small-talk troublemakers out of bad intentions.

  “Guy was playing grab-ass with one of the local ladies and her old man took exception and the scrap was on. I backed him up,” Yawkey said with a laugh. “Hey, who knew the human head could hold that much snot.”

  “Sunny days and cloudy days,” Friday said, “and they’ve each got their points.”

  “True that.You hearing they might cut some Troop detective positions?” Yawkey asked bluntly.

  “Nah, they’ll go for road cops first, especially in low-crime areas, Harry. Like here.”

  It was sometimes argued privately in Lansing and around Michigan that state troopers in the U.P. had much smaller workloads than their counterparts below the bridge in major population areas.

  The Troop started to say something, but Friday stopped him. “Go home, Harry. You old road toads need all the sleep you can get.”

  “You develop anything yet on them girls you found skinned?” he asked.

  “Nobody got skinned,” Friday said forcefully.

  “You know how rumor runs,” the Troop said, unsympathetically. “Hell, given that Halloween’s coming, I figured you’d do something to try to preempt the annual shitstorm.”

  Outside in the snow Friday looked at Grady Service. “Annual shitstorm? Do you know what he’s alluding to?”

  “Probably nothing,” Service said. So far the dogman thing had not crept into the public light, and Denninger had gotten nowhere in her investigation of the bounty rumor. He still had not mentioned any of that stuff to Friday, or anything except the large wolf tracks near the crime scene.

  “The transverse of ‘probably nothing’ is, inferentially, ‘possibly something,’ ” she said. “You want to spill?”