Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (9 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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“Do you think this is it?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I pushed past him and tried the driver’s side doors. They were locked. Inside, I could see the keys hanging from the ignition. I moved around the front of the vehicle, feeling the sudden sting of thorns on my face. I ducked under the branch and got around to the other side. These doors were locked, too. I could see an empty beer bottle lying on the front passenger’s seat.
I started to feel a dull sense of dread. This looked bad, and it didn’t even make sense. Why would the vehicle be here, miles off the main road? Unless—
Before I could finish the thought, I heard the sound of breaking glass. As I looked through I could see Vinnie raising the rock in his hand again, and smashing it into the driver’s side window.
“Vinnie! What the hell!”
By the time I got back over to the driver’s side, the door was open and he had climbed inside.
“Vinnie, you’ve got to get out of there!” I was already thinking ahead to the phone call we’d have to make, and what the police would think of this when they got here.
Vinnie climbed over to the second row of seats. There was a pile of wallets on the floor. He started picking them up one by one. His hand was bleeding.
I looked at the broken glass that had sprayed all over the front seat. I looked back at the road. It was still empty, still silent. When I looked back at Vinnie, he had stopped going through the wallets. He was frozen still, one wallet held tight in both hands. A drop of blood fell from his finger.
“Whose is that?” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He just opened it up and showed me the picture of himself.
A couple of constables showed up within three minutes of my call. They weren’t Reynaud and DeMers, that was for sure. They were both in their thirties, both rock hard if a few pounds overweight, the way cops get from sitting around too much. One had scar tissue laced through both eyebrows. An old boxer, I would have bet money on it. Probably a middleweight. The other guy had never been hit in the face, and he had a deep suntan, even by American standards. I was guessing a lot of time on a fishing boat.
They pulled up behind my truck, radioed in the basics—exact location, license plate of the vehicle, our names—and then stood there for a moment, looking at us. The cop with the suntan took out a first-aid box and wrapped up Vinnie’s right hand, while Boxer Face took a few steps down into the ditch. He came back up and stopped right in front of me.
“Did you break the window, sir?”
“That was me,” Vinnie said. The man turned and looked at him, then addressed me again.
“As of this morning, we’ve been trying to locate five men who didn’t make it back to America after a hunting trip.”
“I know,” I said. “We spoke to two other constables this morning.”
“So how did you end up finding this vehicle?”
“We got lucky. We were driving by and we saw it.”
“And the reason you broke into it?”
“I told you,” Vinnie said. “I did that.”
“I heard you the first time,” the cop said. “Maybe you guys shouldn’t say anything else for the moment, eh? I think we need to take you back to the detachment.”
“Are we under arrest?”
“Not at the moment,” he said.
“This man had nothing to do with this,” Vinnie said. “It was all me.”
“Vinnie, shut up,” I said. “Just cool it.”
We all stood there while my man went to the car and talked on the radio. They’d need some more men down here, to set up a crime scene and to take over while they transported us to the detachment.
Twenty minutes later, constables DeMers and Reynaud arrived. DeMers was driving. I saw his grim face through the windshield as he slammed on the brakes. He got out of the car and came over to us, probably moving faster than he had in twenty years. He looked at us without saying a word, then took a flashlight off his belt and climbed down the drainage ditch to the Suburban. After fighting his way through the brush, he shined the flashlight into the interior. He stopped short when he got to the shattered window. Constable Reynaud stayed up on the road. She looked at me and shook her head slowly.
And this time around she looked even better. It was a hell of a thing to notice under the circumstances, but damn.
As DeMers was fighting his way back, he tripped over something and ended up flat on his face. When he stood up again, both knees were soaking wet. “Son of a bitch,”
he said. When he was finally back on the road, he tried brushing himself off. It didn’t do much good.
He came and stood in front of me. “The window,” he said.
“That was me,” Vinnie said. I wanted very badly to smack him in the face.
“Yeah, I sorta figured that,” he said, eyeing Vinnie. “The bandage on your hand was my first clue. You wanna tell me why you broke in?”
“I wanted to see if Tom’s stuff was in there.”
“And was it?”
“Yes.”
“I saw some wallets on the backseat. Did one of those belong to your brother?”
“Yes. I mean, it was actually my wallet.”
“Your wallet was in the vehicle.”
“The wallet I let Tom use.”
“Naturally,” DeMers said. “Because he was supposed to be you.”
“Yes.”
“I trust you left the wallet in there. You didn’t remove it, did you?”
“No.”
DeMers nodded his head, then came back to me. “How about you, Alex? Did you compromise the crime scene, as well?”
“No,” I said.
“I suppose you know better, being an ex-cop and all.”
“That plus the fact it wasn’t my brother’s stuff in there.”
He narrowed his eyes. He was about to say something but stopped. “I’ll take these men,” he finally said to the other cops. “You guys stay here.”
DeMers opened up the back of his car and motioned us inside. He didn’t look me in the eye as I walked by
him. He looked down at the ground and it sounded like he was trying very hard to measure his breathing.
As soon as we were set, he flipped the car into gear and turned it around. He drove through Calstock, back to the main highway, and took a left, pushing eighty-five as he hit the highway. Reynaud was frowning as she watched him drive. She looked back at us, catching Vinnie’s eye for a quick second before settling on me. “Claude, please take it easy,” she said, turning away from me. “You wanna get in a wreck three months away from retirement?”
“These guys,” he said. “God damn it all.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. Just take it easy.”
About a half hour later, we hit a small town. He pulled into a parking lot, next to a long single-story building. The sign read ONTARIO PROVINCIAL POLICE, HEARST DETACHMENT.
DeMers opened the car door and let us out. “This way,” he said. He led us through the front door, past the reception area, down a hallway, into an interview room. It looked like most every other interview room I had ever seen. A table and four chairs, gray walls, a big mirror on one of them. Before he could close the door, another officer stuck his head in and gave us all a quick once-over. He had white hair and the kind of face I’d often seen on desk cops—the kind that could register ten levels of irritation, and today it looked like he had turned it up to seven or eight. The man called DeMers out into the hallway, while Reynaud stayed with us. She sat down on the opposite side of the table.
“Is that his superior?” I said.
“The detachment commander, yes. Staff Sergeant Moreland.”
“He doesn’t look happy.”
“I don’t think he is.”
“You said DeMers is three months away from retirement?”
“Yes.”
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
“How long have you been a constable?” I said. I couldn’t help thinking, if I were twenty years younger, or even ten years, and I was still on the force, and this woman was my partner—how would I handle it? In eight years as a cop in Detroit, I never had a female partner.
“Five years,” she said. “Do we really need to talk about this?”
“Okay,” I said. “I just have one more question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“I know how tough it can be for women cops. I don’t imagine it’s changed much.”
“And your question is?”
“Getting stuck way up here, miles from anywhere, is it a test or a punishment?”
She looked at me. If she was going to answer, she didn’t get the chance. The door swung open and DeMers came back into the room. His knees were still wet.
“All right,” he said as he sat down. “All right.” He took off his glasses and went into his whole cleaning routine again. If he were my partner, he’d get to do that about three or four times before I grabbed the damned glasses and broke them in two. “Here’s where we are. We were already searching for some trace of those missing men. The Mounties were helping us out. Now that we have the vehicle, we’ll take it over to the main detachment in Timmins, see what they can come up with. Of course, we already know a couple of things they’re gonna find, don’t we?”
He paused and looked at both of us.
“They’ll find a lot of shattered glass,” he said. “Some blood. They’ll find the wallets, which might be the most
important piece of evidence. But, of course, they’ll all be moved and they’ll have a new set of fingerprints on them. That’s gonna make their job a hell of a lot harder.”
He stopped again. The lights buzzed above our heads. I wondered if anyone was watching us through the two-way mirror.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I asked you to go back to Michigan. Instead of doing that, you guys headed right over to the Constance Lake Reserve. You wanna start by explaining that one?”
“I thought I saw a young Indian at the lodge,” I said. “I thought he might know something that could help us. Constance Lake is the nearest reserve, so I figured that’s where we’d find him.”
“Did you?”
“No, he wasn’t there.”
“Have you ever been on the reserve before today?”
“No, of course not.”
“You have no connection to anyone there.”
“No,” I said. “How could I?”
“And you, Mr. LeBlanc? You haven’t said anything yet. Do you have any connection to anyone on the Constance Lake Reserve?”
“No,” Vinnie said. He sat there with arms folded across his chest.
“You live on a reservation in Michigan, don’t you?”
“No.”
DeMers looked a little surprised. “Even so, you felt comfortable trying to contact this young Indian Mr. McKnight said he saw at the lodge.”
“I saw him, too.”
“So you went to find him, but he wasn’t there. Then you left.”
“Yes.”
“Who spotted the vehicle?”
“I did,” Vinnie said.
“That’s pretty amazing. The vehicle was deep in the woods.”
“Maybe thirty or forty feet,” Vinnie said. “I happened to be looking out the window.”
DeMers turned to his partner. “I still think it’s amazing,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She thought about it for a moment, or at least pretended to. “I think it’s safe to say it was amazing, yes.”
“I know I wouldn’t have spotted that vehicle,” DeMers said. “Not in a million years. Now, if I knew to look for it, that would be a different story.”
“We didn’t know it was there,” I said. “You don’t even have to take our word for it. Just think about it.”
“The fact that you broke into the vehicle makes me wonder,” he said. “Maybe you were trying to retrieve something important.”
“And then we called you,” I said. “Instead of just leaving.”
“You knew it would be found eventually. Why not just call it in and get it over with?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That you either had a very good reason to find that vehicle and break into it. Or else you were so lucky you just happened to stumble over it, and so stupid that you’d intentionally compromise a crime scene. Which is it?”
“I don’t know about lucky,” I said, “but we’ll cop a plea on stupid.”
Vinnie gave me a quick look. He kept his arms folded.
“Those men left the lodge five days ago,” DeMers said. “Instead of going home, they did God knows what, and their empty van ends up ditched in the woods, just outside the reserve. Which, as you know, is most definitely
not
on the way to anywhere. Certainly not on the way home. So you tell me. What do you think happened?”
“One of those men is my brother,” Vinnie said.
I recognized the tone of voice. Please no, I thought. This would be a bad time to run out of fuse again.
“You got the Mounties helping you now?” Vinnie went on. “It’s about time. Why don’t you get out there, too? Instead of asking us all these stupid questions.”
“Vinnie, knock it off.”
“Why don’t you go change your pants,” he said. “And then get out there and look for them.”
That was enough for DeMers. He stood up and told us to do the same. Then he led us out of the conference room and deep into the back of the building. There were three holding cells there, all of them empty. The doors were open. He showed us into the first of the cells and slammed the door shut behind us.
“Are we officially charged?” I said.
“How does obstruction of justice sound?” he said.
“You didn’t Mirandize us yet. You should have done that before asking us all those questions.”
He came back to the bars and put his face six inches from mine. I could see my reflection in his glasses. I could smell his aftershave. “First of all,” he said, “we’re in Canada. They call it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Second of all—”
“What is it?”
He put his hands on the bars. Once again, just when I expected him to explode, he surprised me. “You guys are making this really hard,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”
I didn’t say anything.
“We’re trying to find these guys, eh? We’re trying to do our jobs. Why can’t you just let us do that?”
I was about to answer him, but he cut me off.
“You think that helps us? Breaking into the van and messing everything up? For God’s sake, guys. Didn’t I tell you to go home?”
“Constable—”

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