Ice Hunter (11 page)

Her surgical assistant pointed to a sink. “Disinfectant, then soap and water. I'll glove you and mask you when you're done.”

He did as he was instructed but stayed back from the table.

The sutures were in. “She got mixed up with a porky. I have to pull some quills from her face,” Kira said to him. “Want to hold her head?”

“I can't,” he said. “A porcupine did that to her belly?”

Kira Lehto raised an eyebrow. “She tried to run away and got hung on some sharp metal in a barn. What do you mean, ‘can't'?”

“Can we just talk about this later?”

Lehto looked at her assistant. “Did he say ‘can't'?”

“It sounded that way to me.”

After the dog was placed in a post-op cage and her assistant had gone to do something else, Lehto peeled off her gloves and dropped them in a stainless-steel can. “Why are you here, Grady?”

“Making the most of our time together.”

“Jesus, Grady. Get to the point.”

He hesitated. “I canceled your appointments for Monday.”

“You did
what?
”

He took her hands, but she resisted instinctively. “Come with me,” he said.

She cocked her head to the side. “Have you gone crazy?”

“I'm not qualified to diagnose.” This time when he pulled, she followed.

They went into the reception room. The receptionist looked at Service with annoyance.

“Did you make the cancellations?” he asked.

“Not until the doctor says so.”

“It's okay, Jean. It's . . .”

“Call it a unique personal emergency,” Service said.

The receptionist started to get up. “Are you all right, Doctor Lehto?”

“She's not good,” Service said. “She's
fantastic
.”

Lehto laughed. “I'm fantastic,” she said, smiling at her receptionist, who looked flustered.

When Lehto saw the suitcase on the front seat she said, “That looks like mine.”

“It is,” he said, moving it to the small bench behind the bucket seats.

“Where are we going?”

“Home,” he said sheepishly.

Dr. Kira Lehto crossed her legs and her arms, looked straight ahead, and smiled. “So far this is one damn interesting day.”

When they got to his place, he opened the back of the truck and began to unload.

“That looks like my bed,” she said.

“It is.”

He set it up in the main room and when it was done he got a glass of water, drank it down, went over to the bed, and began to take off his clothes. “Is this moving forward or backward?” he asked.

She began unbuttoning her blouse. “It's too early to predict ultimate direction, but the rate's rather promising.” Late in the night, after he made bacon, eggs, and toast, they sat at his tiny table across from each other.

“Well?” he said.

“You're afraid of dogs?”

“Stop laughing,” he said. “It's not funny.”

“I
can't
stop,” she said, as tears ran down her cheeks.

The telephone rang at 6:30
a.m.
and they looked at each other and Service got out of bed and went to the phone and turned the receiver upside down in the cradle.

“One good sign after another,” Kira Lehto said, patting the mattress.

10

All the next day they made love, cooked, puttered, and talked, and on Monday Grady Service asked Lehto to move in with him. It was an impulse, he knew, but he convinced himself that this was the right thing to do for both of them.

Lehto told him his house was as barren as an army barracks and it wasn't what she considered to be normal bachelor emptiness; it was something entirely different. He could tell she didn't like it.

“It's pathologically empty, Grady. It's like nothing in your life sticks to you. Even your cat doesn't have a real name.”

Service felt a twinge under her criticism but was surprised that he wasn't more offended by anything she said. She was candid and affectionate at the same time. They had dated for nearly a year, but after the past thirty-six hours together he decided that he was only meeting the real Kira for the first time. There was a rational, practical side to her and a wide-open, almost reckless side. She ranged between pensive and manic, one moment making a list of the groceries and other things they would need and an instant later pressing wildflowers in one of his books. It was as if she were two people in the same body and having thought this he laughed, because she had said more or less the same thing about him. Maybe it was the same with everyone. Certainly his ex had turned out to be someone else.

She agreed to living together on the condition that they split time between her place and his. She said she could get a telephone device that would automatically transfer their calls, which meant they could be either place and still take care of their professional responsibilities.

When he dropped her at the clinic he felt a brief tug of separation, but she patted his face and said, “Tarzan may now get after the bad guys. It was a wonderful interlude, Grady. I only wish we were leaving on a real vacation, away from everything.” They both laughed and he drove away feeling happier than he could remember feeling. Despite this, her words about vacation gnawed at him. He couldn't remember the last legitimate vacation he had taken. In his time off he found plenty of things to do. Why did you have to go somewhere else to do that?

His afternoon would be spent at the District 3 headquarters in Escanaba. He was scheduled for refresher training on PPCT, pressure point control tactics, wherein COs would go through the motions of sharpening their ability to bring troublesome violets to their knees using a minimum of physical force and some practical body mechanics.

His first call of the morning went to the fire warden, Nantz.

“Well, it's man-made,” she said. “I was pretty sure, but the lab has samples from the POO and will run mass spec to try to pinpoint the compound. Maybe that'll help, maybe not. The state forensics people got tire prints from the truck Voydanov saw. They're definitely from a full-sized SUV. Which make is anybody's guess. We caught the fire in time. I guess we should be satisfied with that.”

“I'm not,” he said.

“Neither am I,” she said. “I'll keep you in the loop and anytime you wanna have that beer talk, just say the word.”

“Thanks, Nantz.”

When he got through to Lisette McKower she asked, “Where have you been?”

“Personal time. I've got PPCT this afternoon.”

“You're supposed to keep your supervisor informed. Parker's been trying to reach you. He's in a real snit.”

Sergeant Charles Parker was McKower's counterpart and Grady's direct supervisor. Each of them oversaw half the COs in the district.

The first time Service worked with Parker was the morning after a severe thunderstorm. They had been called to a residence near Trenary. The residents had gotten up in the morning to find three dead deer under a large maple tree behind the house. Despite the rain, the grass around the animals was black, and two huge branches had broken off the maple's main trunk. Parker ruled immediately that the animals had been killed by a lightning strike, but Service had doubts, and as he walked around the scene his eyes kept returning to the garage where ATVs and snowmobiles were stored along with the longest spool of insulated electrical wire he had seen since Vietnam. He had asked the residents what the cord was for and was informed it belonged to their high school junior son, who had it for some kind of science experiment. His supervisor was antsy to resume their patrol and Service finally agreed to move on, but that night he went back and confronted the family's high-schooler, who reluctantly confessed to setting up a booby trap, baiting it with apples and corn. When the deer wandered into the grid, he tripped the juice, killing them. There had been a lightning strike into the tree early that evening and the boy decided that nobody would be the wiser if he conducted his experiment. His parents had been bowling in Escanaba when the events took place. Service cited the boy for illegally killing deer and for creating an illegal fire. He went back to the office that night and filed his report and the next day had Parker on the phone, asking him why he had gone back after he had decided the cause was lightning. Service said the ground pattern didn't look right and he just wanted to be sure. Parker had already told others about the incident and how he had proclaimed it lightning before Service could decide. He had never forgiven Service for making him look bad, but he had also pretty much left Service alone after that.

“I was with Kira. You want those details too?”

“Don't push, Grady. Allerdyce wants to talk, but he told Doolin the only one he'll talk to is you.”

“I'll head up there right now. See you this afternoon?”

“You want me to pull you out of class?”

“You're a pal.”

He heard a long pause on the other end. “Grady Service, do I detect happiness in your voice?”

“I gotta go talk to Allerdyce. Later, Sergeant.”

“Assuage Parker,” she said. “He's your supervisor.”

“I know, I know.”

Limpy was wearing baggy, patched, and faded county orange coveralls when a guard brought him into the interrogation room. He looked even smaller now, as if he were wasting away by the day.

“Your old man was a boozefish,” Allerdyce said. “Understand, I ain't tryin' to put the man down. Not at all.”

“Not a real good start to building a trusting relationship, Limpy.”

“See, I knew him good back then. I was just a snot-nosed kid and he run me in now and again, but I knew him. The way it worked, he'd haul my ass out of the woods and I'd tell him shit I heard.”

Limpy had been one of his father's informants? “My old man's gone. Are you going to start telling me shit you've heard?”

“No, I'm gonna tell you shit I
know
.”

“You know how it works. You tell me what you have and I talk to the prosecutor and then we see what it's worth.”

Allerdyce grinned. “You ever wonder why I never hit the Skeeto?”

Service thought he knew. “You knew I'd be there.”

“Shit,” Limpy said. “You fuckin' pup. It was out of respect for your late departed old man. He loved that place, so I always left it alone. And he stayed out of my neck of the woods. See, that's how your old man and me worked it; titty for tat.”

“My old man didn't cut slack for anyone.”

Limpy was perturbed. “Your old man, he give a name to every deer over there in the Skeeto. One time he caught Monkey Bill Hurley in there with a jacklight and two spikehorns and broke all his fingers with a crowbar. Your old man was a hardass sonuvabitch, boy. Them crooked fingers got Monkey his name. 'Fore that he was plain old Bill Hurley, a half-assed jacklighter on his best day, and afterward he had him a new name and was put out of business 'cause you can't shoot no piece good with monkey fingers. Your old man took his living and give him a name.”

“Get to the point.”

“Point is, I know shit you don't know you don't know.”

“That doesn't make it worth anything.”

“Yah? Well, the gov'mint don't own the whole Skeeto. You know that, smartass?”

Service had no idea what Allerdyce was talking about. “That's it?”

“Like you said, we're buildin' trust here. You start with that, see if you want more.”

“Time for you to crawl back in your cage, Limpy.”

“You think you could get me a few minutes alone with Honeypat?”

Service shook his head and signaled for the guard to fetch the prisoner.

Doke Hathoot was the superintendent of the Mosquito Wilderness Management District, which included the Tract and some adjacent properties. He'd once been a CO, but had transferred to the parks branch of the DNR and moved up. Law enforcement wasn't for everybody. He was a bit of a bootlicker, but had always proven a good man when it mattered.

Service telephoned Hathoot from the Marquette County Jail.

“Super here.”

“This is Grady Service, Doke. I heard something today that doesn't make sense. Does the state own all the property in the Tract?”

“Every square foot.”

“Why would somebody think differently?”

“Was it some academic egghead?”

“No.”

“Well, whoever it is, they're dead wrong. Somebody is mixing up ownership and leases.”

“Leases?”

“There are a few forties in the Tract that carry ninety-nine-year leases. When the state bought all the property back in the early 1900s there were some stoneheads who refused to sell. The courts could've condemned the property, but the governor back then didn't want the bad ink, so he and his people worked out a lease deal and it was ratified by the legislature. The vast majority of the contracts went kaput when the lessee died, but there are a few ninety-nines still in effect, and these are worded so that the lease passes to the lessee's survivors for the term of the lease. Technically the lessees can build on the property and use it pretty much any way they want until their time is up, but back in the forties or fifties all the lessees agreed to keep the land in its natural state. So the leases still exist, but it doesn't matter. We own the land, they aren't using it, and the legal status is more or less moot.”

“Do you know the locations and expiration dates?”

“Not off the top of my head. It's been so long since anybody asked me about this I'm going to have to dig around. I'm not sure where the information is anymore. Why do you want to know?”

“I'm not sure. A hunch, maybe. Can you get the lokes, names, and expiration dates for me?”

“I've got to be at a meeting tonight in Traverse City with some NRC members and Una's coming along and we're gonna take a few days off, so it'll be the end of the week before I can start in on it for you.” Una was Hathoot's wife. It was well known that she hated the Upper Peninsula and took every opportunity to urge her husband to get a transfer to somewhere “civilized.”

“That's fine.”

The NRC was the Natural Resources Commission, the policy-making and oversight board for the Department of Natural Resources. Since Sam Bozian had been elected governor, old-line NRC members had been replaced by the governor's well-heeled pals. There were few genuine conservationists left on the commission, and as a result it had become a subject of scorn from the state's media, the DNR, sportsmen's groups, and environmentalists as well.

“Mind if I ask what your meeting's about?” Service asked.

“It's your standard dog and pony. I figure they're trying to plan next year's meeting schedule and they're looking for a unique place to get away to for their annual planning soiree. Everybody with a wilderness property has been asked to meet with them and give them a rundown on what we are and how we do it.” Hathoot added, “This doesn't have anything to do with our fire, does it?”

“I don't think so.”

Hathoot chuckled. “If I was the one who started it, I'd sure hate having both you
and
Nantz on my butt.”

“She's a dogger?”

“As fanatic as you. That's a compliment.”

“Have a good one in TC, Doke.”

Service knew that unless they got lucky and got the vehicle and license number, or some other kind of traceable hard evidence, they'd never get the firebug. Tracking a man on foot was one thing; finding a vehicle was entirely another. He wasn't sure the lease situation had any bearing, but Limpy had been right and that made it worth a little more attention.

There were seven COs in the PPCT refresher course: Service; Candace McCants, who covered the northern half of Marquette County while Service took care of the southern part; Gordon Terry from the Porkies; Val James from Iron County; Cathy Ketchum from Newberry with her husband, Joe Ketchum, who worked up toward Grand Marais; and Leo Robelais, who worked the Les Cheneaux Islands and Drummond Island. They were all seasoned vets and he had worked with each of them at one time or another. In the old days, before Lansing started putting tracking devices into CO vehicles, all the COs in the Upper Peninsula, and some from the Lower as well, would meet each year at the end of deer season in some isolated camp somewhere in the backwoods and party for three days. They called these events Howls, and though they were officially outlawed now by edicts from Lansing, they still went on, if somewhat toned down from the old days. This year Gordie Terry would host the event somewhere in the rocky hills south of the Porcupine Mountains.