Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (7 page)

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Authors: Steve Hamilton

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult

BOOK: Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery
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“Isn’t this cozy?” he said, looking right at me. I was
still holding my mug. “Did you bake them a cake, too?”
“The police told them to come back up,” she said.
“Yeah, no kidding. It sounds like they’ve got some real good questions to ask them.”
A woman stepped out next. This had to be Constable Natalie Reynaud, wearing the distinctive blue uniform of the Ontario Provincial Police. She had dark hair pinned up under her hat, and I would have put her age around thirty-five if I had to guess. She hopped off the last step of the ladder like it was nothing.
The man who followed her took a lot longer to get down that ladder, and he sure as hell didn’t jump off the last step. He was wearing the same uniform, but aside from that he was everything his partner wasn’t. He looked like he was in decent shape for a man in his sixties, but I knew that was old for a man on active duty.
“That was a bumpy ride,” he said. “Feels good to be on the ground again.”
“Did you find anything?” Helen said.
“Just a big mess,” the old cop said. “Those boys don’t know how to clean up after themselves.”
“I tried to clean it up a little bit,” Hank said. “Sorry we took so long.” He looked at me again, and then at Vinnie. “We shouldn’t have left you here, Helen.”
“One of the windows was knocked in,” the older constable said. “Looks like a black bear did it. Probably smelled the garbage.”
Constable Reynaud came up to me and looked me in the eye. “You must be Mr. McKnight,” she said. “And this must be Mr. LeBlanc.” She had a nice face, and green eyes. But you could tell in a second she was all business. “This is my partner, Senior Constable Claude DeMers.”
He shook out the kinks as he came over to us, and he shook my hand. “Thanks for coming up,” he said. “I hope
you don’t mind if we ask you a few questions.” All of a sudden, he didn’t look so old anymore.
“Yeah,” Gannon said from behind them, “start by asking them why they didn’t give us their real names.”
DeMers turned and gave him a look. “Hank, I told you. Let us handle this. I’m sure there’s a good explanation.”
Gannon just turned away and gave him a wave of his hand. He climbed back into his plane, grabbed a big trash bag from inside, and threw it down onto the dock. It landed with a heavy thud.
“Helen,” the cop said, “is there someplace we can have a chat with these gentlemen?”
“Use the office,” she said.
“You should send Hank back out to fix that window,” he said. “You don’t want any more bears in that cabin.”
“Doesn’t matter much now,” she said. “They can move in for all I care.”
DeMers shook his head at that. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “I hope we find those boys soon so we can put an end to this.”
“Where are you looking?” Vinnie said. “They’ve been missing for five days. Are you covering all the roads back to Detroit?”
DeMers looked at him. For one long moment the only sounds were the wind and the waves. “My partner tells me your name is Vinnie,” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“Not Tom.”
“No, Tom is my brother.”
“Well, Vinnie, like we said, we need to ask a few questions. What do you say we start with you? I mean, now that we’ve established your real name—”
“Vinnie,” I said, “you don’t have to say anything right now. I think maybe we should talk to a lawyer first.”
“I’ll tell them what they need to know,” Vinnie said. “I’ll tell them the truth.”
The whole thing went downhill from there. They took Vinnie into Helen’s office for questioning. I sat by myself in the main room, trying not to look up at the moose head.
An hour passed. It felt like a day. I got up and went to the window, watched Gannon cleaning out his plane. The other man appeared on the dock, the silent one. What was his name? Ron, that was it. He took the big bag of garbage away, then he came back with a broom and swept the dock. The man’s wife appeared. Millie. She went to the end of the dock and looked out at the lake. Ron stopped sweeping and went out to stand next to her. He put his arm around her. She put her head on his shoulder.
I heard a noise behind me. The door to the office was closed. I heard the noise again—it sounded like … like a low wailing. Like somebody moaning. I stood still, holding my breath, listening.
There’s nobody here, I told myself. Nobody but—
The moose, for God’s sake. It sounds like it’s coming from the moose. That would make this day complete. A haunted moose head.
I went over and stood below it. The sound came again, this time a lot louder. But not from above me. I bent down and looked in the fireplace. The moaning sound was the wind passing over the chimney. The updraft was so strong I could feel the air rushing past me.
Helen came in through the front door. “Are they still in there talking to your friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m next.”
She stood by the door, looking uncertain. “I wanted to start packing up the office. I was hoping we could get out of here by tomorrow morning.”
“This is quite a fireplace you’ve got here,” I said.
“Oh, that. Yeah, we don’t use it anymore. Hank says it doesn’t draw well.”
“Are you kidding? It’s practically sucking me up the chimney.”
“I think there was a nest up there,” she said. “Raccoons or something. Maybe they’re gone now. God, what a horrible thought. All those animals crawling around up there.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. Listen to me. Now that I know we’re leaving for good, I just can’t stand being here another minute. I hate it like a sickness. I think we all feel that way now, all four of us.”
“You said you’re all gonna move back to Sudbury?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have family back there?”
“We have each other,” she said. “We
are
a family.”
“No children?”
“No,” she said. “We sort of all have that in common.”
I looked outside the window again. Ron was still standing at the end of the dock, his wife’s head still on his shoulder. Her back was shaking now, like she was crying. Ron put his head on her head and pulled her closer.
Gannon had picked the broom up. He was holding it in both hands, his eyes closed. He kept tapping the dock with it, again and again.
A thought hit me. “The Indian you use as a guide,” I said. “He was here yesterday, too. I saw him on the dock as we were leaving.”
“Guy? No, I doubt it,” she said. “I think he left as soon as he got back from the hunt.”
“Those men who were hanging around, he was out on a moose hunt with them?”
“Yes, his last one of the year. The last one he’ll ever do here, I guess. He left without even saying goodbye.”
“I suppose if I was out in the woods for a week, I’d be anxious to get home, too.”
“No, that was a four-day hunt, over on a different lake,” she said. “Thank God. If it was a seven-day hunt, we’d still be stuck here waiting for them to get back.”
“Well, either way, I’m sure I saw him.”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe he was still here. He’s such an odd young man, I have to say. I never could figure out what made him tick.”
The office door opened and DeMers stuck his head out. “What’s going on out here?”
“We’re just talking,” I said. “If you’re about done in there, Helen would like her office back.”
“We’re done with Mr. LeBlanc,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
This will be loads of fun, I thought. I gave Helen a little smile and stepped up to the plate. As Vinnie came out of the office, he looked cool and unruffled, like he’d spent the last hour just having a nice chat. But that was something Vinnie had in his blood, going back a thousand years. I didn’t have that. Not one drop.
“Right in here, Mr. McKnight,” DeMers said. “Make yourself comfortable.” As he closed the door I thought I heard the moose wailing again.
“Let’s talk about you first,” the senior constable said. He was sitting in Helen’s office chair. Constable Reynaud was sitting next to him in another chair. A real chair. I got the rickety folding chair.
“Those men apparently told Gannon they were gonna have some fun before heading home,” I said. “So they might not have gone straight home. Are you looking for them in Toronto? Windsor, maybe?”
“Constable Reynaud, did you say something?” he said. “I must be hearing things, because I know you and I are the only ones asking questions here.”
“I didn’t say a thing,” she said.
“It’s all part of getting old,” he said. “Half of what you do hear is only in your head.”
“Okay,” I said. “I get the point.”
“Alex McKnight of Paradise, Michigan,” he said, smoothing out a wrinkle in his pants. I was starting to get a little better picture of the man. I was sure all of his socks were neatly folded and organized by color. “Constable Reynaud did some checking up on you. Turns out you were a police officer.”
“Eight years in Detroit,” she said, looking at her notepad. She was another type of cop entirely. The old line
about a woman having to be twice as smart as a man to get half the credit was never more true than in a police station. I was sure her partner would do most of the talking, but she would be the one who really knew how to listen.
“More recently,” she said, “you were granted a private investigator’s license.”
“I understand that’s a pretty easy ticket in Michigan,” DeMers said. “As long as you’ve got the years in law enforcement, it’s pretty much automatic. Just fill in a form and you’re in business, no matter what kind of person you are.”
“I’m not practicing,” I said. “That has nothing to do with why we’re up here.”
“In Ontario, it’s a whole different ball game,” he said. “You’ve got to be interviewed by the deputy registrar, provide a list of references. Then they do a thorough investigation, really turn you inside out. If anything looks fishy, you don’t get that license.”
“Yeah, good thing I didn’t apply up here,” I said. “I would have missed out on so much fun.” I was trying very hard to keep cool. It was starting to make my stomach hurt. “Look, I’m not working as a private investigator. I came up here with Vinnie to help him out, because he’s my friend.”
And this is what I get for my trouble, I thought. I help out a friend and I end up getting grilled by another hard-ass cop. It was pretty much automatic. Come to think of it, maybe this senior constable was the only hard-ass cop left in the entire OPP. They wouldn’t let him retire yet, just in case I ever decided to come to Ontario.
“Yes, about that friend,” he said. “About Mr. LeBlanc. He told us quite a tale about his brother Tom, and why he felt it necessary to have him misrepresent his identity. Would you care to tell us your version?”
“He knows better than I do,” I said. “I’m sure he gave you the whole story.”
“Yes, but you know, it was such a compelling story, I think I need to hear it again.”
“I know it looks bad,” I said. “But this business with Tom is really a separate issue, okay?”
“Give me your version,” he said. “And then we’ll talk about how bad it looks, and how it may or may not be related to our situation.”
Our situation, he calls it. I was about to say something cute, but restrained myself. No sense making it any worse. Instead I took a deep breath and gave them a quick rundown, beginning with Tom’s release from prison, continuing through Vinnie’s brilliant plan to let his wayward brother use his identification because it was just the thing to get his head on straight, and ending with our attempt to find out what the hell happened up here. Constable DeMers made an elaborate show of cleaning his glasses while I talked, while his partner hung on my every word and wrote notes on her pad. It may have been a new twist on the old good cop, bad cop thing. Or maybe he just liked clean glasses.
Either way, he put his glasses back on just as I finished. He took a moment to adjust them on his ears, gave his partner a quick glance, and then looked back at me. “Thank you,” he said. “That was illuminating. Although I think you may have left out a couple of details.”
“Such as?”
“Well, number one, where you fit into this whole thing. Surely you must have had some part in it from the beginning.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “If I had any idea what they were trying to do, I would have stopped them.”
“Being a former police officer and all.”
“Former police officer or not, I would have known it was a bad idea.”
“You didn’t know anything about it until he went missing. At which point you dropped everything to come all the way up here to look for him.”
“Vinnie’s my friend,” I said. “Tom’s his brother.”
DeMers sneaked another quick look at his partner. “The LeBlancs are very lucky,” he said. “Most friends wouldn’t go to such extremes.”
“It was no big deal,” I said. “We drove up, we asked some questions, we left.”
“And the other two men? The ones who were up here the day before you?”
“We don’t know anything about them. Gannon told us they were looking for Albright.”
“Two men come all the way up here looking for Albright, and the very next day, two other men come looking for Tom LeBlanc.”
“They were all due back,” I said. “They didn’t show. It’s not so unusual people would come looking for them.”
“And yet, according to Hank, you knew that one of them had a rather large nose.”
“What?”
“You asked him that,” he said. “You asked him if one of the men had a big nose.”
“That’s just because—” I stopped myself and counted to three. “Constable, what are you getting at? Is there some point to this?”
“You were a cop once,” he said. “Put yourself in my place. Four men leave Detroit on a hunting trip. You want to tell me about those men, by the way?”
“I don’t know anything about them.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No. How could I?”
“You know where they live?”
“Detroit. You just said that.”
“Their actual home addresses were all in Grosse Pointe. Does that tell you anything?”
“It tells me they had some money.”
“Four seriously wealthy, well-connected men go on a hunting trip, and they never make it back home. The wives file missing-person reports. We get contacted to look into this end of things, because this lodge is the last place they were seen. We soon find out there was a fifth man on the team. Just enough for a hockey line.”
“That would be six,” his partner said.
He turned and looked at her. “Constable?”
“You need six men for hockey,” she said. “You forgot the goalie.”
“The goalie stays on the ice. That’s why I said ‘line.’”
“If you really meant a line,” she said, “then that’s only three. The defensemen come out separately.”
He gave me a little smile and a shrug. “How about basketball, then. That’s five.”
“The fifth man was the guide,” I said. “They picked him up in the Soo.”
“So you say, and yet the good people here at the lodge know nothing about it. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just another one of this gentleman’s business partners.”
“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I don’t imagine these people would have appreciated it if Albright had brought his own guide. They have their own man here.”
“You mean to say it’s either use their guide or none at all.”
“He was taking a job away from a Canadian,” I said. “I know you guys can get a little sensitive about that.” It was my turn to give him a smile.
“Okay, well, assuming that was the case, don’t you think it looks kind of funny when this mysterious fifth man turns out to be a felon on parole who isn’t even
supposed to be in the country in the first place?”
“We’re back to where we started,” I said. “I already told you, I know it doesn’t look good.”
“So we agree,” he said. He leaned forward in his chair. His face was two feet from mine. “Four rich American men, one American felon. All missing. Two mystery men drive all the way up here looking for them, without even giving their names. The next day, two more men drive all the way up here. One of them happens to be the man who loaned the felon his identification, and the other is a nonpracticing private investigator who’s supposedly just along for the ride. And neither one of them can spend twenty-four hours in our country without getting into trouble.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I was afraid I already knew.
Constable Reynaud flipped through her pad. “Big Tony’s Lounge in Wawa,” she said. “Does that ring a bell?”
“That’s the name of the place? Big Tony’s Lounge?”
“Let me guess,” she said. “The other guys started it.”
“How did you know?”
DeMers stood up and opened the door. “What’ll it take you, about nine hours to get home?”
“Eight if I break the speed limit.” I stood up and stretched.
“That’s not funny, Mr. McKnight. I hope you realize, we could have done this over at the detachment. Right now, I suggest you head directly home at a reasonable speed, and please make a point of not stopping at any bars, okay? We wouldn’t want anyone else to drag you into a fight.”
“We’ll go right home,” I said. “Believe me, it’ll be my pleasure.”
“As soon as you get there, you need to contact the
Michigan State Police in Sault Ste. Marie. They’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
“I got it.”
He leaned forward again. I was waiting for another zinger. I didn’t get it.
“McKnight,” he said. From one second to the next, his voice had lost its edge. “Can I call you Alex?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Now that I’ve read you the riot act like I’m supposed to do, can I talk to you like a human being?”
“Yes,” I said. I looked at Reynaud. She kept watching me.
“I understand why you came up here,” he said. “I really do. Your friend did something really stupid, and you were just trying to help him out.”
“That’s right.”
“But you know why we had to ask you these questions.”
I looked at Reynaud again. Dark green eyes. “Yes.”
“Okay, so now that it’s out in the open, you’ve got to go back home and let us do our job. Right?”
I nodded.
“Okay then,” he said. “Let’s get you on your way.”
He opened the door and led me back into the front room. Vinnie was standing alone at the front window, looking out at the dock, just as I had been. “That was quick,” he said.
“Alex is an old cop himself,” DeMers said. “He knows the drill.”
I followed Vinnie onto the front porch. DeMers was right behind me, until Reynaud took him by the arm. They had their little conference while Vinnie and I went down the steps. Hank Gannon was waiting for us, his arms folded across his chest. When we were two steps from the bottom, he still hadn’t moved.
“I’m surprised you’re not wearing handcuffs,” he said.
“Gannon, we’ve already had enough for one day,” I said. “Step aside.”
“Did you explain to the constables why you lied to us?”
“Yeah, we explained it. Now get out of the way.”
“You feel like explaining it to me?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
He shifted his eyes to Vinnie. “How about you?”
“Where’s Helen?” Vinnie said.
“She went for a walk. She couldn’t stand to be around here anymore.”
“I owe her an apology,” Vinnie said. “I hope you’ll give it to her for me.”
He shook his head. “You just don’t get it. She’s been working so hard to keep this place going.”
“That’s got nothing to do with us,” I said. I stepped down to put myself between them. “This place was in trouble long before those men went missing. You said so yourself.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” he said. “And this was just what we needed for a send-off—a bunch of drunken assholes from Detroit and a drunken Indian who didn’t even know his own name.”
The constables came out the door. A few seconds later and Vinnie might have found the end of his fuse again.
“Let them go, Hank,” DeMers said. “They’ve got to get back home.”
Gannon looked up at them, then at Vinnie, and then at me. After a long moment he stepped back. We walked up to the truck. Ron came out of his butcher’s shed and stopped dead in his tracks. He watched us walk by. He didn’t have to say anything to us. The look on his face was enough.
We got in the truck and I fired it up. Only then did Millie come out of the shed. She walked up toward us,
moving quickly, like she wanted very much to tell us something. Ron caught her from behind and led her away, casting one last look over his shoulder at us, like even this sudden impulse on his wife’s part was somehow our fault.

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