Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “How much was here?” he asked Champ.

  “Not that much,” she said. “Two sets awaiting lab reports.”

  “Who?”

  “Two elderly patients from Doc Rhine Poppo; you know, cancers he thought he’d arrested, but he was wrong. Doctors always seem surprised when they’re wrong. Have you ever noticed that? No wonder they bill themselves as practitioners,” she added, not looking at him.

  He got her point.

  “Doc Poppo wanted a post for curiosity as much as anything. Curing is a bit less exact than embalming.”

  The wreckage didn’t seem to faze her. “I assume it wasn’t like this when you last saw it.”

  “A place for everything and everything in its place. We’ve been well trained by Daddy,” she said.

  Be direct. “Did you see this damage when you came back from visiting your father?”

  “I thought I was perfectly clear on that point,” she said. “I got precisely and only as far as the open back door and departed immediately.”

  So she hadn’t seen this. “Have you had break-ins before?”

  “Two or three amateur tries last summer—jimmied doors, broken windows. They never actually got in,” she said.

  “Did you report them?”

  “ ‘Kids,’ my dad said. Why bother? He said the cops have enough real problems to cope with. He’s the mellow, understanding sort, very empathetic, believes some kids are hugely fascinated by dead bodies, the same way he was. I tried to convince him he’s wrong. Did I mention I hate dead bodies?”

  Talk about unstable and unhappy. “There were samples, right? And you have paper on them?”

  Joan Champ nodded, took him to a freestanding metal file cabinet, manipulated a built-in combination lock, pulled open a drawer, extracted folders, and held them out to him.

  “Anything unusual about the autopsies, the samples, or the patients?” Service asked.

  “Not really. Doc just wanted the organs saved for later study.”

  “Whole organs, not sections?”

  “Right. Livers, a kidney from each, the usual grisly mementos of the biz. He had permission from both families.”

  Why whole organs? Service wondered.

  They left Deputy Berghuis to watch the premises and to await Jen Maki and her techs.

  Service told Champ, “You’ll be okay. Berghuis will stay tonight. Tomorrow we’ll have a more thorough look around.”

  “Do you want a ride?” she asked.

  He gave her keys back to her. “I’ll ride with my guys.”

  “I’m never going back in there,” she said.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Dunno. I feel fragile, violated or something. I refuse to live with the dead.”

  Oh boy, he thought. “You can bunk with us tonight, but the best I can do is a mattress on the floor.”

  He took back the keys and drove her to camp. When they got there, he dug a sleeping bag out of the storage room and placed the bag and the woman in the living area on couch cushions. He’d left the cabin unfinished for years, but fixed it when he fell in love with Maridly Nantz. After her death he had reverted to his old ways, letting the place go, but when he’d met Tuesday Friday, he put the place back in order, trying to assemble a real home.

  Noonan and Treebone came in, looked at the woman, shook their heads, and went to bed.

  “Do you enjoy your work?” she asked from her sleeping bag.

  “Mostly,” he said.

  “I feel a kinship with you,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Both of us clean up other people’s messes. We both deal in the past, don’t we?”

  He’d never thought of it that way before, but she was already snoring. He left a lamp lit in case she got up during the night.

  •••

  Explosions brought Service clawing his way out of bed, his ears ringing, disoriented, heart pounding. Cordite hung in the air, bringing him to a standstill. Inside the house? He had his Sig Sauer in hand. Joan Champ was sitting splay-legged on the floor, a large-caliber revolver with a long barrel held convincingly in both hands. Service moved toward her, and she raised the weapon and pointed it at him, her eyes wide and bulging.

  “Easy,” he said quietly but firmly. “It’s me.” He hugged a wall just in case.

  She was trembling, glassy-eyed.

  “Service,” he said, “Remember?”

  “Outside,” she said, rolling her eyes toward the window, half its glass gone and snow wafting in. He knew he had to get the weapon away from her, couldn’t risk moving around while she was spooked and armed, but Noonan was suddenly beside her and talking softly, easing the weapon from her grasp. “Where’d this old hogleg come from?” he asked.

  “Two’s better’n one,” she said. She had an uncanny way of interjecting unexpected logic at odd times.

  “I’m not afraid,” she told the men.

  “I am,” Service said.

  Noonan said, “Forty-Four Maggie.”

  Joan Champ was doe-eyed and rigid. Service watched her draw her legs up into a fetal position.

  “Your shots?” he asked her. “At what?”

  “Of course. Outside.”

  Less precision than he’d hoped for. “At what outside?”

  “Something lurking on the porch, near the window.”

  Not likely. The windows were taped with plastic for insulation, and they were airtight. You could barely hear a forty-knot wind from inside during the winter. He went back into the bedroom and got a shotgun and a flashlight, slipped on his boots, went out the back door, moved around the house, saw and found nothing out of place.

  “What was it?” she asked when he came back in. “Did I hit it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But surely you found tracks?”

  Needs justification, reinforcement. “I can’t see that well in this light. The snow’s picked up some.” Lie for a good cause, mutual peace of mind. He had found squat.

  “I know I saw something,” she insisted. “I may be a coward, but I have superior senses, including my hearing.”

  “You have a permit to carry?”

  “You bet your bippy,” she said.

  Not to mention a jacked-up imagination. He went to the basement to find plywood to seal the window.

  A voice called thinly from outside, “Comin’ in. Don’t shoot no more.”

  Limpy Allerdyce came in, both hands held high. “I din’t do nuttin’, ” he yelled to Service. The old man was deathly pale, eyes like Ping-Pong balls.

  •••

  The house was cold when they awoke the next morning. The light outside was a dull gray, the kind of partial light that would serve as daylight for the remainder of the seven-month winter. A flow of air told him the window needed a lot more work and he’d better call someone competent to do it right.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Joan Champ greeted him from her sleeping bag.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Does your shower have hot water?”

  “Try the handle with the ‘H’ on it.”

  He made coffee while she was in the shower and handed her a cup when she sat at the end of the table with a towel wrapped around her head. “I got really spooked last night.”

  “Happens,” he said. He’d been terrified more times than he could remember. Fear never went away. You learned how to tamp it down so it wouldn’t destroy you or prevent you from acting. It was an ongoing struggle.

  “People who work with bodies aren’t supposed to spook,” the woman said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Last night is over.”

  “Everybody knows something is dreadfully wrong up here,” she said.

  “Do they?”

  “Murdered women and children are bad f
or tourism.”

  Lacking specificity; is she fishing for something? “You know I can’t talk about cases,” he said.

  “You think I’m pushy?”

  No good answer for that. He kept quiet.

  “Have I been pushy?”

  Nearing his limits. “Whatever. It’s fine.”

  “You should learn to say what you mean,” Joan Champ chided.

  “I do try.”

  Pause, a sour face. “You saw last night, did you not?”

  “I saw a lot of things last night.”

  “I mean my place,” she said, “the sample containers.”

  “All over the floor,” he said. “There are lots of disturbed people in the world.”

  “Granted, but eating human organs?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The samples—something took them and ate them.”

  “Your imagination is overactive,” he countered.

  “I’ve been trained to observe,” she said. “Same as you, I presume.”

  “I looked at everything.”

  “Don’t play the fool,” she said, studied him and exclaimed, “My God, you didn’t see! Those trays contained tissue samples and organs!”

  “I got that,” he said in his own defense.

  “No; there’s always residual blood and some tissue on the stainless, but all of them were spotless.”

  “There’s probably a reason,” he said.

  “No dirty towels or napkins, nothing on the floor but broken glass and stainless steel. Where did those naughty fluids go . . . Where?”

  She had already demonstrated an overactive imagination. “Crime scene specialists will look at the lab,” he said. “We were all pretty tired last night.”

  “I was beyond tired,” she shot back, “but I know what the hell I saw. You ever see a pie pan licked clean?”

  He cringed, trying to block the image, which fit, and might even have occurred to him, but in truth he’d not seen it, had missed everything. “I think we’d better keep this to ourselves,” he told her. “There’s already enough speculation.”

  •••

  Returning to the funeral home mid-morning they joined Jen Maki and her people, and Service read through Dr. Poppo’s files on the elderly dead. One had an address on North Stone Road.

  “This the Indiantown Manitu Ridge area?” he asked Maki. He still had trouble keeping road names straight out that way. He could remember landmarks like his own body parts, but not street and road names, especially when every damn county seemed to name the same road something different than the adjacent county, more evidence of the past wanting to screw up the present.

  He’d insisted Champ come along with them, pulled a chair over to her. She smelled clean and soapy. “This woman was Indian?”

  “Both were,” she said.

  49

  Monday, December 29

  GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN

  The FBI meeting kept getting moved, but now it looked like it would actually happen that day. All along the string-out there were no explanations or excuses offered. Green Bay was 160 miles south, give or take, Austin Straubel International Airport the closest major commercial air facility to Marquette.

  Senior Special Agent JoJo Pincock had called the day before, left a message that she would be at the Wingate Hotel on Airport Drive. She had been in Alaska for a week and was en route to the East Coast for New Year’s with her family, but would hop from Minneapolis down to Green Bay and spend Monday night to see that they got adequate time. Service reserved two rooms for his team.

  Friday got a confirmation on the identities of the two girls from Canada, which seemed to confirm Lupo’s reluctant help.

  On the way, Service told his guys who they were going to meet.

  “Could this be the Pincock from the Great John R shootout?” Noonan asked.

  Treebone jumped in. “She was Metro back then, on the force three years, in law school for two of them. Dispatch sent her to an office at John R and Mack, not far from Wayne State, report of a man brandishing a revolver, which turned out to be an AK-47, Chinese-made, fully auto.

  “The office belonged to a lawyer named Pollini,” Tree continued, “whom Pincock later learned had been laundering cash for an intermediary of the Micalezzi family of Rochester Hills. Mr. Micalezzi’s internal audit of Pollini showed him a few lira short. The armed men were freelance contract poppers out of Bossier City, Louisiana. By the time Pincock arrived, Mr. Pollini had been dispatched to Wop Heaven, but he had a temporary secretary from Manpower who slipped away and summoned the cavalry. The whole deal was a botch right from the start. Pincock’s partner was an old warhorse named Jethro Lally; he’d gone down in the first volley, not killed, but hit badly enough to decide to retire when he came out of the hospital. Pincock hit one shooter right away and managed to drag Lally out of the line of fire. Additonal help came pouring in, but the shooters were barricaded pretty good, and a couple of curious civilians wandered by the outside windows and got nailed. The negotiation team arrived with SWAT forces. Pincock shot a second killer, and the third man finally surrendered. Soon as she finished law school, the FBI made her an offer and she jumped ship.”

  “Cojones the size of John Deeres,” Noonan offered. “Solid cop. Should’ve recognized that name right away. Snow up here must be freezing my fucking brain cells.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Service kidded.

  “This place is hell compared to Detwat,” the old detective said.

  “Without Detroit, maybe you wouldn’t appreciate this,” Service said.

  “I don’t need to swim in the cesspool to know what’s floatin’ in it. This place up here is its own kind of scary.”

  •••

  They met Pincock at her room and Treebone opened a laptop for the briefing they’d cobbled together.

  The senior special agent took a thermos out of an orange canvas bag emblazoned with the silhouette of someone floating under a parachute. The bag was labeled life’s short. jump often! Service wondered if she practiced what her bag advertised. She was tall and stocky with big, stone-steady hands.

  Pincock was neither friendly nor unfriendly, just quiet and self-­contained. Service introduced everyone, and she looked at Noonan and said, “Bluesuit himself.”

  The detective grinned and nodded. “Yo, JoJo.”

  Tree conducted the briefing, had all the incidents on maps and charts with data for each event. Service had no idea his friend was so accomplished in such matters, but he wasn’t surprised. It had been Tree’s idea to call them events, not cases, the term making them seem connected, even if they weren’t.

  “Kick off your kicks, Senior Special Agent. This will take a while,” Tree began.

  “I’ll be the judge,” she said. “Understand, gentlemen, this is in the way of a ghost stopover. I was never here, never met any of you; this never happened—unless, of course, fate determines it should have, in which case it did, and will.”

  “Fair enough,” Service said, not understanding at all. “We’re looking for guidance from fresh eyes.”

  Tree methodically marched them through everything:

  Two dead women, no heads, hearts, or hands, only identified days ago as Jill and Dorie Moulton.

  Body number three was a Lecair twin, around age five; body recovered with head and hands, but no feet.

  Sean Nepo, all parts there except for his feet.

  The next female victim, body number five, found in a Beaver Lake cabin with all parts there (just not attached).

  Kelly Johnstone, faked suicide, reasons unknown.

  Lamb Jones, her body (number six) recovered quickly—maybe part of this, maybe not. She didn’t fit the pattern.

  Another body (number seven), skinned and hanging from a tree, hands missing—still unidentified. After disappearing, Ann
e Campau was found alive a couple of weeks later, eight or so miles from where she was taken when investigating this body. Outlier?

  Martine Lecair, legitimate suicide stimulated by what, they didn’t know for sure. Definitely related.

  The hit-and-run victim’s story: Wendell John Bellator, aka Na-bo-win-i-ke, left on roadside; no signs of mutilation like the others, but clearly a homicide. Bellator was an Indian from Minnesota, retired cop, probably connected.

  Parts of two bodies missing from a mortuary, possibly consumed.

  It took the better part of three hours to slog through the details. Pincock rarely interrupted with questions, but continuously scribbled notes.

  “That’s it?” she said, when Tree had finished.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Treebone said.

  She took out her cell phone, flipped it open, tapped in a speed-dial number. “Carol, this is JoJo. Change my flight to tomorrow afternoon, late.” The agent closed the phone, pulled off her boots, and tossed them aside, launching each one with a sharp kick.

  “Do you find murder intriguing, Detective Service?”

  “No, ma’am, not especially.”

  “I do,” she said, flashing her first smile. “It yanks my crank.”

  “You’ve got some thoughts on all this?”

  “Boys,” she said, “let’s order us some food. We’re gonna need fuel.”

  •••

  They ordered three pizzas to start and three more around midnight. Pincock ate the greater part of two of them while she tapped on her laptop, plugged into a cell phone, which was connected to an electrical outlet. Service liked how she ate, tended to judge people by this, how connected they let themselves be to food. She ate fast, but not like an automaton. He could see she liked flavor and texture and aroma, and didn’t mind sauce on her chin.