Killing a Cold One (2 page)

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Wednesday, August 6

TWENTY POINT POND, MARQUETTE COUNTY

Five miles out of his camp Service drove past a mother raccoon and five babies flattened on the road, their blood black and glistening in his headlights, death by blind obedience to an obviously flawed maternal instinct—proof that mama did not always know best. She had made a gamble and all of them had died. Did animals think of family as refuge, the way some people did? Here was proof contrary. His own family experience further attested to that. What good was something that could be taken away as soon as it gained currency in your life?

He found Friday at the turnoff to the grade, and let her swing her unmarked black Tahoe in behind his unmarked Tahoe before he put the hammer down. They flew into the labrynthian maze of gravelly mountain two-tracks, Friday glued to his six, both vehicles spitting tombstone-gray summer rock bits in their wakes, raising clouds, and skittering dust devils into the night.

It was a half-mile hike from a small parking area to the pond. Formally called Rockgap Lake, it had been known locally as Twenty Point Pond since the head and antlers of a twenty-point whitetail buck had been found near the primitive campground back in the late 1950s. A hue and cry had gone up from the locals, demanding that the DNR find and punish the guilty! Who but an asshole would kill such a magnificent beast and not even bother to take the trophy horns? A kid then, Service had asked his father about the buck, which was being talked about everywhere. His old man had been a CO before him, a famous one, and not so popular with his son.

“You going after that guy?” Grady had asked his old man.

“
What
guy?”

“The one who poached the deer.”

“What deer?” his father asked, half in the bag—as usual.

“The twenty-point.”

“Chrissakes, who the hell says it was
poached?
” his old man grumbled.

Grady Service remembered being at a total loss for words until he managed to say, “But somebody just threw away the
rack.
”

His old man shrugged. “You can't eat goddamn horns, kid. Obviously someone wanted meat and didn't give a shit about the trophy. Use your fucking head, and think before you talk.”

“That sounds crazy,” Grady mumbled weakly.

“Are you some kind of hunting-ethics guru now?” his old man challenged.

“It just seems wrong—you know, wasteful,” Grady argued, trying not to feel like he'd been written off by his father.

The old man sighed deeply and took a deep breath. “For the sake of discussion, how about we say that theoretically there's a near-starving family up on the Northwest Road, and that buck dressed out at close to three hundred pounds, meaning a good hundred and fifty pounds of meat, and said theoretical starving family can't eat no fucking horns. How about we say that, ya know, for purposes of a so-called fucking
learned
discussion?”

Grady knew then that his old man had killed the animal and given it to a family in need. He wanted to run away, but knew he couldn't back down.

“Was the deer shot at the lake?”

“Theoretically, but I'd guess it just might've been shot miles away and the head was dumped at the camp—you know, to theoretically keep assholes from swarming to the area where there actually might be other big bucks—theoretically speaking.”

“But now hunters will swarm Rockgap Lake.”

His father grinned. “There's a lot of dumb clucks running around the woods, kid. Most of the slobs don't hunt more than a hundred yards from their damn trucks on account they're afraid some bogeyman will eat their incompetent asses.”

Before his old man died, Grady learned exactly where the old man had found the monster deer, and he had gone there himself, looked, and seen other trophy animals. This information he'd kept to himself since, not even telling other COs. It wasn't the sort of place hundred-yard hunters would stumble on, so why help them?

Meanwhile, Rockgap Lake morphed inexorably into the legendary Twenty Point Pond, and over the years COs had written countless tickets to cheaters and idiots looking for phantom giant bucks there. That was the thing about hunters, Service reminded himself: You could kick them into action with no more than a half-assed rumor of a trophy of any kind. Some hunters just couldn't restrain themselves, like it was some kind of weird damn disease, this drooling over antlers and Boone and Crockett scores.

Marquette County sergeant Weasel Linsenman was standing off to the side of a small tent, which Grady Service noted had been placed by someone who knew a thing or two about camping, situating it behind a rocky ledge to help shelter the structure from prevailing winds.

“Unfuckingbelievable,” the Marquette County sergeant greeted Friday and Service.

“Where's Denninger?” Service asked.

“Tromboning her guts over in the woods, eh, and before you start trash-talking that girl, let me tell you, I had my turn hurling, too.”

Service squatted at the fire pit by the tent, touched the ashes. No embers, ashes cold. But he could smell bacon or something fat in the dregs. A fire in this weather?
Weird.

Friday turned on a flashlight, tugged on blue latex gloves, eased back the tent flap, and shone her light inside.

Service stood behind her. “Okay to lean over your shoulder?”

“Go for it,” she said.

Flies were buzzing, the fetid smell of death and decay pressing. An air mattress covered the entire floor area of the two-person shelter. Remains of two unclothed bodies were side by side on their backs, their legs and thighs pulled up and back in gross exaggeration, synchronized death, something reminiscent of a Hollywood slasher movie. Females, both of their chests open, hearts gone, heads and hands removed, upper-arm muscles ripped down to stark white bone, pinked under the flashlight beam.

Friday shone her light on a corpse, calmly said, “No buttocks, either vick. And not much blood, considering the extent and nature of the wounds.”

Her composure amazed him.

“Dump site?” Service remarked, his first thought having been that wolves or coyotes had gotten to the remains. “Wolves been here, maybe?” he said out loud to Friday. “Some kind of animal.”

“Based on?” she said.

“Guts, butts . . . that's where wolves usually start. Other muscles come last. Don't know why, just is.”

She said, “There should be hair, DNA, something left inside the tent, tracks outside. I thought wolves didn't attack humans.”

“Not saying an animal attacked, but it might have fed off the meat available,” he said.
Animals might have fed here, but no wolf did this—at least not one that fit his predator/scavenger profile or experience.

“Look around for animal evidence?” she said over her shoulder.

He stepped outside and began looking around, careful to stand in one place and let his eyes move, rather than risk ruining evidence.

“You call your homicide people?” Friday asked Linsenman as she backed out of the tent.

“I did, and I told them I was calling you, too, because it was my guess you'd prolly end up catching the case. They said to call them if you need their help, but it's your call from here on, far as they're concerned. I thought it best to keep this as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible.”

Service's friend Linsenman was a great cop, the kind of man you could always depend on, even when he didn't relish being depended on.

“Thanks for that,” Friday said. “Dani found them?”

“Yeah.”

Service went looking for the young CO, found her sitting with her back against a mossy stump, clumsily smoking a cigarette, coughing.

“They tell you about crap like this at the academy?” Service asked.

“I'm not in the mood for half-baked philosophy. There's nothing funny about this sicko shit,” she said.

“Sorry. Friday's here. She wants to talk at you.”

“Not a problem. I'll be right there,” Denninger said.

Service watched Friday and Linsenman use a roll of yellow plastic tape to cordon off the crime area.

“Call the ME?” Friday asked Linsenman.

“She's en route, I expect.”

“She?” Friday asked. “What happened to Myslewski?”

“Today's the deputy ME's first day. Myslewski announced that he'll retire in September, and she's gonna work with him until he leaves. None of this has been announced to the public.”

“Her name?”

“Dr. Kristy Tork.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Hired out of Mount Clemens or some McMansionless scum pit between Flintucky and Detwat. Word is she works great with cops, and she's swum through a bunch of hi-viz cases downstate.”

Service could see cop-think asserting itself and Friday immersing herself in professional mode. Her duty hat was snugged down tight: Preserve the site, get the medical examiner to the scene, summon the State Police crime scene team to collect forensic evidence. At this stage, you had to block out the horrifics and run your crime scene checklist. This was still early in the what-how-and-when stage. Motive wouldn't become an issue for a while—not until other essential questions were settled. He knew the missing heads and hands were problematic to the case, but Friday said nothing about them. As a good cop, she would focus on what she had, not what she didn't have. Amend that: Not just a good cop, a
great
cop.

Service had seen more than his share of dead people, but murder wasn't a DNR concern, much less his job.
Thank God.
Even so, he and other conservation officers encountered enough baffling and strange human behavior and corpses to understand that almost any and all things were possible. Nothing was too extreme or unimaginable.

The possibilities spanned human diversity. Satan whispered “Why don'tcha?” to an imaginary dog who, in turn, whispered the same thing to a nutcase, and
kabang,
psychic shit overflowed from an inner cesspool with severely negative karma for fuel. There were lots of folks in the world and woods, oddly bent and hearing voices, most just trying to hang on, but a few inevitably losing their grip. Friday was good at her job—logical, orderly, unflappable, and even-tempered. Hell, she was good even in her postcoital Jell-O mode, which was a wholly altered state of being (and which, he reminded himself, there'd not been much of recently). She'd been gone for a long week to a seminar in Lansing.

“Hey,” Linsenman said. “Loan me a ciggie.”

“Loan? You don't smoke.”

“Until tonight. You know why most rural homicides aren't solved?”

“Enlighten me,” Service said.

“No dental records, and all the DNA's identical.”

Service felt himself smiling. “Is that profiling? If it is, I remind you it is against the current laws of the land, Sergeant. And it's downright sick.”

“Hey, it's also nearly universally true. Where's that cig?”

Service handed him the pack, and Linsenman lit up. Friday walked over to them.

“We'll wait for the ME,” Friday told the two men. “When I told my mother I wanted to be a cop, she screamed ‘Why?!' I told her I liked the notion of helping people. Then, she yelled ‘People?! Most creatures you meet won't want your help, and most of them are incapable of being helped.' This was the central precept of my mother's family—that there are two distinct classes of people in the world: those few who might reasonably be defined as human, and the greater part by far who were born hopeless, and not worth thinking or caring about.”

“You're not like your mother,” Service said.

“Sometimes I wonder if she's the one who understood reality, and it's me who doesn't get it.”

“Relax,” he whispered.

“This doesn't turn your stomach?”

“I've seen a lot that has turned my stomach, and this is as bad as it gets. Everyone dies; only the timing and method are up for grabs. At least there aren't any little kids.”

She nodded solemnly. “What about guilt?” she asked.

Weasel Linsenman said, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Weird dude named Shakespeare wrote that shit, like, five hundred years ago.”

Service grinned. Weasel's depth sometimes astonished him.

Friday said, “When my mom and stepdad died, it occurred to me that somehow I was responsible—that my words, said in anger years before, had drawn death to them, like a bad-luck magnet. It's taken a long time to understand and accept that I bore no responsibility. They were killed by a Northwest L-1011 that had been improperly deiced. It lumbered off the runway from Detroit Metro into a thick, freezing mist and promptly crashed on I-94, killing everyone on board and eleven more luckless people on the ground, including my schizoid mother Eve and her latest husband, Luke. They were in her new red Mercedes.

“ ‘Drinking' Eve used to ask other drunks how they would characterize a tornado picking up an eighteen-wheeler filled with pigs and dropping it on a synagogue; when no answer came, ‘Anti-semitic' Eve would cackle and say, ‘Intelligent design.' I asked her once, what if God was last in his drafting class? That cost me a four-week grounding one summer, but it was worth it. I still wonder if it was God's intelligent design to drop an L-1011 on all those poor folks. It seems to me that God and Mother Nature together kill a helluva lot of innocent people in ice-cold blood.”