Force of Blood (6 page)

Newf, his 130-pound Presa Canario, a Canary Island mastiff, stared at him with a look that said, “Where have
you
been, jerkwad?” Even misanthropic Cat hissed spitefully, which she did, happy or angry. She had only one mood: bad. The dog had been a gift from a former girlfriend who thought it might help him get past his fear of dogs, and he’d thought it was working until the pit bull the other day.

On the way home he’d stopped at Econofoods in Marquette and bought boneless chicken breasts. Since Nantz’s death he tended to cook in multiple batches, freezing what he didn’t eat for road chow. Friday enjoyed cooking, but where he and Nantz had been wild and sexual in the kitchen, Friday was more restrained, measured, orderly, and she was also always on time.

He would have shopped closer to his camp, but the Upper Peninsula’s independent grocery stores in small towns and villages were dying fast because of the competition of big chains and the crush of the state’s failed economy.

Service whipped up a salad of lettuce, English cukes, grape tomatoes, slivers of Spanish onion, California golden raisins, dried apricots, chopped dates, ground pecans, fresh avocado and clementines, and scallions. He set the salad aside and began assembling the meat. He would microwave sweet potatoes for them. He got a dozen Thai red peppers out of the freezer and chopped them finely. He mixed hot curry powder, salt, and pepper and rubbed the mixture into the chicken breasts. He set a nonstick frying pan on the stove while he grated lemon zest. Finally, he poured two glasses of Barolo and looked out the front window.

With Friday’s entry into his life he had once again put away the footlockers he’d slept on for years, replacing them with a king-size bed in the upstairs bedroom (which he had finally gotten around to finishing).

When Friday pulled into his road he went outside to help her and the baby, who clung to him as he bounced him happily. Newf jumped and whimpered, wanting her own share of kid time.

“Gotta feed His Majesty,” Friday said, after giving Service a lingering kiss. She carried a bag with bottles and baby food. Service packed more formula into the fridge.

The solidly built Shigun was a placid, happy eighteen-month-old toddler until he was hungry or needed a diaper change.

“You want me to start cooking?”

“Go ahead, the kid eats like you—fast. What’s on the menu?”

“Something new.”

“I don’t need fancy,” she said, meaning it.

“It’s basic,” he told her.

“I bet,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Shigun can sit with us while we eat.”

He handed her a glass of wine. “Trying to ply me?” she asked.

“I don’t know that exact word, but if it means making reckless boomboom, yeah.”

He put four chicken breasts in the pan and cooked them six minutes a side, cooking until three batches were done. He spooned two small breasts on each plate and left the rest of the meat to cool on the counter. He’d put the remaining eight breasts in plastic freezer bags after dinner.
Which reminds me—I need to pull some meals out of the freezer for Sedge and me
.

Service combined lemon juice, water, and sugar-free apricot jam in a saucepan and heated and whisked until the mixture was smooth. Then he spooned the sauce onto the plated breasts and sprinkled them with lemon zest and finely minced Thai red peppers.

“Jesus, Grady. That smells unbelievable. What’s it called?”

“Curried apricot-lemon chicken.”

“You call this
basic?
”

“Have I ever led you astray?”

“Kehh!” she said with a snigger. “Every chance you get.”

“I meant gastronomically,” he said, correcting himself.

“No.”

“Eat.”

He watched her sample the chicken and close her eyes.

“Damn,” she whispered.

They ate in earnest for a while, quiet, no talking. When Friday had the hungries, conversation went bye-bye.

After a while she said, “This Sedge kid, what’s she like?”

He told her about the paintings and got her laughing so hard she nearly choked. “Jesus! Her
hunkus?
” Friday punched his chest with the heel of her hand and laughed out loud. “You’re making that up!”

“It’s true, and let me say at the outset—and for the record—that I cannot testify to the veracity of her work.”

No laugh this time. “Better keep it that way, buster.” Then, “I noticed you left the little detail of pussy paintings for our second night together.”

He shrugged.

“Our case last year involved eighty-year-old remains; now this. Has it ever struck you as odd, the range of your responsibilities?”

“This archaeology thing is entirely new to me, and probably it’s the same for most officers on the force.”

“Sedge up to the challenge?”

“She seems to have a lot of gears. I talked to Etta Trevillyan today.”

“Can you believe that woman is seventy-five? She dates a forty-five-year-old emergency-room physician from Munising.”

“No
way
she’s seventy-five,” he countered.

“Way, dude. Was she helpful?”

“Yes and no.”

“The old ‘academic balance’ deal?”

“More or less.”

“Heading east tomorrow?”

“Early. Sunrise at Sedge’s place.”

“Conservation officers keep shitaceous hours,” she said.

“No argument from me. Is that a real word?”

“It is now. You gonna call Little Maridly tonight?”

“After dinner and the dishes.”

“Sure you’re up to it?”

His granddaughter, who would be three in December was precocious and already exercising the vocabulary of a balls-to-the-wall ten-year-old.

“She’s gonna be a load when she’s a teeneager,” Friday said.

“Shigun isn’t?”

“Boys are way easier to raise than us girls, dude.”

They loaded the dishwasher and Friday took Shigun for his nightly bath while he picked up the phone and dialed Houghton.

A tiny voice answered, “Pengelly residence, this is Maridly.”

Don’t tear up, he told himself. “This the rugrat who eats dirt?” he challenged her.

He heard her giggle and inhale. “I only
eated
it once and I
did not
like it, and I am
a pretty little girl
—
not
a rugrat.”

“Better a rugrat than a rat on a rope.”

The little girl squealed with delight. “
Bampy!
” she screamed into the phone. “When are you coming to see me?”

“Soon baby. Where’s your mom?”

“Mum’s right here.”

“Can I talk to her?”

Pause. “She says she guesses. I love you, Bampy.”

“Shigun’s here.”

“We
like
Shigun,” the girl said. “He’s cute!”

“I know we do, hon.”

Maridly’s mother had been his son’s girlfriend. Karylanne had been pregnant when Walter was killed, and he had taken the girl and her baby into his life as if they were his own, which, in his mind, they were.

Karylanne Pengelly was trying to finish a master’s degree at Michigan Tech, and when that was done she’d begin looking for a job. The thought of her moving away with his granddaughter made his stomach roll.

Friday met him upstairs, wearing nothing but a backwards baseball hat.

“Shigun’s asleep already,” she said, smiling. “How’s the kiddo?”

“Steering the planet through space,” he said. “What’s with the hat? You calling balls and strikes tonight?”

She lowered an eyebrow and said, “Just balls.”

Sedge looked half-asleep, but as promised had a thermos of fresh coffee sitting on the tailgate of her work truck. “Big Dog,” she greeted him.

“Pocahunkus,” he replied.

“You ready to roll?” she said, eyeing the trailer with his Polaris RZR. “Holy shit!” she said with a yelp. “Eight hundred XP, Bimini roof, winch, spare tire, full windshield, steel deer guard—that bitch is totally tricked out. Lemme guess: This is
not
department-issue.”

“Mizz Einstein. Grab your brain bucket.”

“Don’t need one in the RZR.”

“You haven’t ridden with me.”

“Point taken.” She went into the Bomb Shelter and came out carrying her helmet bag. “Take off from here?”

“Let’s take the truck and trailer north, unload up there. Toss your gear in my truck. No point taking two.”

Sedge said, “Let’s cruise up CR 500, head into the area from Crisp Point.”

“Rationale?”

“Luce County is a magnet for every ATV outlaw and moron for five hundred miles. Good PR to be seen, and let them see us with the RZR, which will get them to thinking.”

“Head-bending is good,” he said. “The endless psyops between good and evil.”

Despite early snowmelt and no spring rain, back roads were in terrible shape, county graders not yet deployed. Service drove slowly over the endless washboarding, preferring to be off on two-tracks, but Sedge wanted to fly the department flag, and as her partner he was all for it.

“Ever hear of
Jesuit Relations
?” he asked.

“I thought those dudes were celibate,” she quipped. Then, “No.”

He explained what they were and ended with, “The super-sensitive Dr. Ladania Wingel—you know where she lives?”

“Jefferson, Wisconsin.”

He stared at her. “Are you kidding?”

“Hardly. What’s the big deal?”

Jefferson was home to the late Wayno Ficorelli’s ferocious aunt, Marge Ciucci. Wisconsin Warden Wayno, who had worked with him on a case, and had been murdered by the same person or persons who killed Nantz and his son. Ficorelli had been a hard-charging Wisconsin game warden. Ciucci had wanted vengeance against her nephew’s murderer, and had not danced around it with delicate language.

“Might be good to visit Dr. Wingel, give her the up-close eyeball.”

Sedge said, “There’s no budget, and that sounds like a nasty trip to me.”

“I know someone I can stay with for free in Jefferson.”

“What about
me?
”

“You’d probably want to paint your hunkus—or something.”

She smiled. “I might just.”

“I’ll call my contact over there, see if she knows Wingel, can fill us in on the professor’s local reputation.”

“
She?
You keep a ‘she’ in Wisconsin?”

“No, my
she
is in Marquette,” he said, thinking,
And not kept
. “Aunt Marge Ciucci is in Jefferson. Last time I saw her she told me in Italian not to break her balls and nobody fucks her in the ass.”
My ‘she.’ I wonder how Tuesday would like that description
.

“Sweet,” Sedge said. “My kinda gal.”

“Did you ask Wingel about the body?”

“She never gave me a chance. She said the wind uncovered it and she reburied it, end of story.”

“That makes you racist?”

“I might have mentioned something about empathy. That’s when she went off.”

“Follow-up?”

“No point then, but she’s on my list. What is it we want from her?”

“Not sure. How’d the body look, what position it was in, anything with it, was it just bones, wrapped? You know … stuff?”

“She’ll just default to weather.”

“How people deny things is often a statement and a clue.”

“Sometimes deniers are telling the truth. Maybe winter did uncover the remains. Katsu says it brings new artifacts to the surface every spring.”

“Maybe,” he said. “What’re those handmade signs I keep seeing?”

“LOL?” she said. “Laughing Out Loud.”

“Really?”

She grinned. “Only in the computer world. Out here it means Lands of the Lord—a religious camp,” she told him. “Catholic wilderness retreat over toward Bear Lake, a few miles south of where we’ll be. What religion are you?”

“Earthling … mostly.”

“I was raised Baptist-Fundamentalist-Agape-Evangelical—you know, no sex standing up ’cause it just might could lead to dancing.”

He laughed.

“My church is out here,” she said, with a wave at the woods.

“Mine too,” he said.

• • •

They left his truck parked off a faint two-track about two miles west of the old Crisp Point lighthouse, unloaded the RZR, and headed east, keeping south of Lake Superior in the woods beyond the barrier dunes. Service carried his handheld GPS to capture the route and final destinations for future use. He’d dump all the data into his truck computer when he got time. He parked the RZR precisely 3.6 miles east of Crisp Point, dismounted, and looked around, stretching his stiff muscles. The four-wheeler pounded your back, even if you were taking it easy.

“I think I came up from the south last Thursday—east of this hill we’re on.”

“You did,” she confirmed.

“You spend a lot of time out here?” he asked her.

“Some, not a lot. But I figure whenever I’m up this way it makes sense to poke around to see what I can see and learn rather than waste gas going back south just because.”

“How far is Katsu’s spot from here?” Service asked.

“Half-mile, max,” Sedge said, “mostly downhill.”

“Let’s leave the RZR and hump it on foot,” he said, grabbing his ruck.

At the top of the hill he stopped and squatted.

“Problem?” she asked.

“No. You know standard military hand signals?”

“I think so.” They reviewed them quickly and he nodded. “Delay like this is an old fly fisherman’s habit. You never wade right into the river. It’s better to stand back, watch, and see if you can figure out what’s happening before you jump into action.”

“Sounds applicable to a lot of things,” Jingo Sedge said.

“It is. Show me our target from here.”

“Eleven o’clock, to the right of that scrub oak stand.”

“What’s over at one o’clock?” he asked.

“Sand. That’s where the ATVs have been tearing up shit.”

“Beyond that, see the outline?”

“Sort of.”

“What’s it look like to you?” he asked.

“Amoeba?” she ventured.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “That’s as good as anything I can think of.”
But there’s something swimming in the back of my mind, just out of reach
, the voice in his head said,
something crucial and not so obvious
.

An hour later they were in the sandy area and she was pointing out artifacts, flint chips, pottery shards—some decorated with impressions. “There’s stuff
everywhere,
” Sedge said.

“The copper point was
here?
”

She pointed. “Over there, right on the surface, Katsu said. See all those little bunches of vertical twigs?”

“I see them.”

“They’re Katsu’s idea: two means tools, three means pottery, four means weapons—stone points, hammers, stuff like that. There’s a lot more pottery than anything else.”

“What’s a one?”

“Put there by chance and wind.”

The things she’s showing me are certainly interesting, but are they valuable?
“Why would people steal this stuff?” he asked her.

“Because they can?”

“Is there a market?”

“Katsu says there is, but I haven’t really looked into that yet. The thing that sticks in my mind is that if all this little stuff is on the surface, what sort of big stuff is there, and how much is still below the sand?”

“I hear you,” Service said.

“You’re sure we want to sit on this place?” she asked.

“I think we need to mark some things, come back every couple of days, see what happens. If stuff gets scarfed up, then we’ll sit on the place.”

“That’s closing the barn door too late,” she said.

“Most people aren’t smart enough to limit exposure. If they score early, they’ll come back again. Greed usually blinds: A thief is a thief. Trail cameras,” he added.

“The district’s only got three,” she said.

“Lucky for us, I’ve got six in my vehicle,” he said. “Starmites.”

Sedge’s mouth hung open. “From where?”

“My dime.”

“At seven big a pop?”

“Hey, they work, high-res, day-night range to sixty feet.”

“Wildlife Resources Unit?”

“My own,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to the truck and fetch them. With six I think we can ambush any bad boys.”

“Let’s go,” Sedge said.

Returning, they put everything in place. With the cameras set, there would be no need for close on-site surveillance. The cameras had built-in motion-detection triggers. Some cameras they set for still photographs, a couple for motion clips. And then they left.

“You going to stick around?” Sedge asked.

“No, I’m thinking I’ll use my pass days to talk to Aunt Marge, find out if she knows Wingel. And spend some time in the libes in Marquette.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“The library in Marquette has English translations of the
Jesuit Relations
.”

“Is detective work satisfying?” Sedge asked.

“Mostly it’s scut work, dotting i’s, crossing t’s, all that regular police detail work. But once in a while all the sour notes fit together and you get some very cool music.”

“I like solving puzzles,” she volunteered.

“You’ve found a good one here—which reminds me, you need to brief your el-tee, and I also need to brief mine. Never know; somebody somewhere may know more about this crap than we do.”

“What do I tell McKower?”

“The same things you told me—the truth.”

“She intimidates me.”

“She’ll be your biggest booster if you trust her; she’s so smart it’s scary.”

“I heard you two were close.”

“You heard right,” he admitted. “Tell her what’s going down.”

“It’s still my case, right?”

“Absolutely. Yours all the way.”

“No sneaking back here without me.”

“Paranoia is unprofessional.”

“What do you expect from someone who paints her you-know-what?”

“I hear what you’re saying. What’s the fastest way back to this place?”

“There isn’t a fast one, but there are clearer routes. I’ll show you on the AVL when we get back to the truck. Why?”

“I don’t believe in approaching a place from the same direction or route every time.”

“That also sounds applicable to a lot of things,” she said.

Service tried to ignore her. Her youth, candor, and ways of thinking were unnerving, and he needed to adjust to her.
Keep your mind out of the gutter
, he told himself.