Killing a Cold One (22 page)

35

Sunday, November 30

WOLVERINE JUNCTION (WOJU), MARQUETTE COUNTY

On Thursday afternoon, by the time Service had gotten to Friday's, she had decided against the Alberta trip. When he asked why, she answered with a shrug.

It had been almost a normal weekend until stand-in dispatcher Billye Fyke had called. Friday put her on speakerphone. A body had been found north of Ishpeming in the Wolverine Junction country, hanging in a tree. She told them, “Chet Saville was out on his trapline at WoJu, and he found the body, eh? Trooper Anne Campau went out to the scene to check on it. Chet called Jack Igo and his dogs, and they took off tracking. Campau stayed with the body. When Chet and Jack got back, Campau was gone, and so was the body.”

“What the hell is WoJu?” Friday shouted at the phone.

“Wolverine Junction,” Service said quietly. “East of the McCormick Wilderness, north of Ishpeming.”

“Reachable?”

“Easier on snowmobiles later in the winter, but we can probably do it. We'll bring snowshoes, though.”

Friday said into the phone, “Do you carry, Billye?”

“No, ma'am,” the dispatcher said.

“
Start,
” Friday said. “This asshole has a thing for women.”

Service could sense Friday rubbing against panic and fighting to maintain her composure.
She's right about one thing: This is an asshole—not a windigo, not a dogman, not Peter Fucking Pan.

There were two dozen people scouring the area, mostly civilians. Jack Igo had even taken his dogs down deep into some of the local drainage ravines while they seemed to be on scent, but it had petered out at one of the many small streams that crisscrossed the area north of Ishpeming and was too deep to cross safely.

A family from Gwinn called in a missing person, their daughter Sarah Root, age twenty, part-time student at Northern, last seen Tuesday morning when she'd skipped class to snowshoe in the woods near Wolverine Junction, which was no more than an old marker on the old railroad line north of Ishpeming. The parents had provided a photo, and copies had been made and given to cops and first responders all around the U.P. It turned out the Root girl was married and separated from her hubby, who worked as a detailer at a used-car dealership.

Service had gone to talk to the husband, who turned out to be a blob bound for a career of victimhood. “Who'd want to hurt your wife?” he had asked the man.

“She sorta ain't my wife no more, eh?” the man said.

“Answer the question.”

“Anybody who knows her. She's a lot like the total bee-otch, sayin'?”

The line in the report that stuck in Service's mind was that the girl was tribal, a member of the Keweenaw Bay tribe out of Baraga. Her husband wasn't. Body language said he was a dolt, severely undermotored for even the slowest of lanes, but not a liar.

Igo came back out of the woods and shrugged. “My dogs got nothing left in 'em.”

Service asked, “What were they on?” He'd heard them singing, knew they had some sort of spoor. You could always tell by dogs' voices.

“Not sure, eh. Dose damn dogs, dey keep looking up in trees,” he said. Then, to Friday, “How long youse want me keep dis up?”

“Until I say it's finished, Mr. Igo. You'll be paid.”

Service pulled Igo aside. “You're done,” he said. “Rest your dogs.”

Friday's stare was blank and unfocused.

 

•••

 

Trapper Chet Saville showed them where he had found the body twenty-four hours before. Saville, who had retired from the county road commission, spent much of his time in the woods. “Oot scoutin' for late bow, eh, an' I find tracks of big old bruiser. Follow 'im up dis country, find dat dam body, by Gott, make me sick, dat t'ing. I hike right out, call State Police. Anne Campau, she come. I know her way back. She look at body, tell me get Jack Igo and dogs and find spoor. I get feeling she t'ink t'ing comin' back ta eat on da body, and she be waitin'. ”

“Campau told you that?” Friday asked.

Saville shugged. “You know how Trooper Campau is. She don't say shit wit' mout'ful. Just feelin' I get, her being bulldog an' all.”

Service said, “You've skinned and butchered game all your life, Chet. Impressions of what you found hanging?”

“Campau, she call hit horrenderoma, and dat sound 'bout right to me. All my years, ain't never seen no human bean skinned out, and don't mind I never see again,” the man said.

“Show us where you left Campau,” Service told the trapper, who took them through the woods and showed them. The snow was badly chewed up. Service knew there had once been tracks here, but they were obliterated.
Had Campau been pacing, or was this something else? Impossible to read.

Noonan was helping a crew near where the body had been found, and Tree was back in a vehicle, changing clothes to head into the woods. Allerdyce had poked north alone, but came shuffling back and pointed. “T'ree hunnert yards.”

“Tracks?”

Allerdyce shook his head. “Look like it went oot road. Carry girlie t'ru trees, come down over dat way at road.”

Through the trees? What now—King Kong?

“Without tracks?” Service asked.

“Wass dere, been smooshed, but trail lead from where body hang out ta road.”

“Which road?”

The old man pointed.
Paved. Fuck.

“Anne Campau's an experienced cop,” Friday said to Service. “Not prone to dumb decisions.”

Noonan was up in the tree where the body had been and yelled down to them. “Thank God,” he said, “I was beginning to think we were chasing a ghost. There's ligature-like marks on a branch up here. Marks are deep,” he added.

Service was thinking: The Root girl was said to be two hundred pounds. Such weight would leave a deep mark. He had moved a lot of bodies during his life, and one man didn't move two hundred pounds of dead, limp weight, much less hoist it into a tree all by his lonesome, unless he was one very strong son of a bitch, or used a pulley to make the weight manageable.

“Look for signs of a pulley rigging,” Service called up to Noonan, who, after a few minutes, said, “You want to step up and take a look. Not sure what I'm looking for.”

Service took five minutes to climb up and discover what he wanted. A place in a Y where a rope had been connected and something metal had banged into the bark, nicking it, telltale sign of a pulley setup.
Okay, our guy whacks the Root girl and lifts her up. Then what?

Friday stood below the tree. “What's in your brain?”

“Get Chet.”

Service climbed down. Saville wore a faded red-checked Stormy Kromer hat. “Tell us exactly what you saw when you got here,” Service said.

The man rubbed his neck. “Body hangin' up dere.”

“Head?”

“Yeah, head dere, but not no hands.”

“Blood?”

“Not so much.”

“Not bled out here?”

Saville made a face. “Din't look like 'er, eh.”

“Another dump-and-display site,” Friday said, and Service nodded. “You think windigos display their kills?” she asked.

“Doubt it,” he said tersely, but reminding himself that he didn't know enough to make a reasonable conclusion.

“So what is this asshole trying to tell us?”

“He don't like In'din woman?” Allerdyce said, barging into the conversation.

“Chet, why didn't you try to stop Anne?” Friday asked.

The man grimaced. “Don't make much sense try argue with split-tail pack a forty-cal Sig, know what I mean?”

Service knew Campau. Not the kind to ask for help, thought she could do anything—a weakness and a strength for a cop, depending on the roll of the dice.

Friday talked to the sheriff's department and county SAR, and they agreed to call off the search for the night, reevaluate conditions and a plan in the morning.

The men went back to Slippery Creek, and Friday went home. Just before she left, Service noticed that she looked like she was losing weight.
Pressure's getting to her.

Noonan, Allerdyce, Treebone, and Service returned to his cabin.

Noonan said, “I seen dingers of every kind. Serial killer in Highland Park dumped carved-up bodies in abandoned houses. An Eye-ranian exchange student raped old ladies, pounded nails right through their eyeballs, left baling-wire loops through that little piece of skin separates nostrils in their noses. Janitor in RenCen raped fifty women; when Metro cornered his ass, he screamed “Superman forced me to do it!” and he jumped out a window, twenty stories up. Didn't fly for shit. But this stuff up here, man, this is something all on its own.”

“Word
windigo
mean anything to you?” Service asked them all.

Allerdyce scrinched his face. “Win-dago . . . t'ink mebbe I know dat one.”

“Know it how?”

“Finndians out dere Sidnaw say long time back, dey had one dose t'ings out dere.”

“You remember when that was?”

“During Big War Two, forty-t'ree, 'four, like dat, I t'ink.”

Service called Friday. “The Root girl lived with her parents?”

“As I understand it.”

“Who went to the home?”

“Not sure; I'll have to check. Why?”

“Allerdyce says there was some talk of a windigo around Sidnaw back in '43 or '44.”

Service heard her sigh. “What exactly are we looking for at the Root family's house.”

“Medicine bags on the doors,” Service said, and described them.

Ten minutes later Service's cell phone vibrated. Caller ID said it was Helmi Yint.

“Helmi—hi.”

“Martine Lecair,” the Yint woman said. “You di'n't hear dis from me, eh, but it bein' said aroun' dat Lecair, she went out Arizona.”

“Who's saying this?”

“Could be somebody seen some envelopes down dead-letter box, Baraga.”

“With Lecair's name on them?”

“Nope, just Tucson. You find the Root girl yet?”

The grapevine up here was like lightning. “Not yet.”

“You do, take good long look her soon-be ex, eh?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah. Holy-roller type, gon' save da soul of da world, and if you don't change, you be sorry.”

“He try to change his wife?”

“Wunt s'prise me none.”

Service called Friday again. “Helmi Yint just called, says there are letters in Kelly Johnstone's unclaimed mail from Tucson. She thinks they could be from Martine Lecair.”

“I talked to the sarge at the post. One of his Troops found medicine pouches at the Root girl's parents' place. I assume you're heading for Arizona?”

“Better idea?”

She laughed in an odd way he couldn't quite decipher.“Take company,” she said.

Tree had no interest in Arizona, but Noonan was game for the trip.

Service had first asked Allerdyce, who said only that he had “an impervious engorgement.”

“Don't tell me,” Service said, shaking his head. “Krelle?”

“Dose tall ones iss somepin', donchu know,” the old poacher said. “She up dere Ketchkan wit dat fat-ass biologist. He come back oot after youse leaved.”

“You were supposed to stay with them.”

“I go up dat way now,” the old man said, defensively.

36

Thursday, December 4

BODISON, ARIZONA

Service and Noonan flew into Tucson on Monday. Before leaving, Service made a phone call to former CO Carl “Cherry” Sisniega, who had grown up in a migrant family that settled near Buckley, outside Traverse City. Service had given him his nickname. Sisniega started out in Corrections as a guard and transferred to the DNR in law enforcement near Newberry. He'd married the daughter of a Hamtramck cop with a bushy mustache and a voice loud enough to shatter glass two blocks over. The wife's parents retired to Tucson, and Cherry's wife Miggy couldn't stand being without them, so Cherry resigned and moved west, ultimately catching on as a deputy in the Pima County Sheriff's Department, settled in, and never looked back.

Service had stayed in touch over the years.

“Big Dog, you
still
in the game back there?”

“Much as I can be. I'm headed to Tucson on a semi-cold case.”

“Must got you better budgets than in my day. I'm workin' too, made sergeant.”

“Got a partner with me, retired Detwat homicide.”

“You both stay with Miggy and me, more the merrier; Miggy be glad to see you. You need help finding somebody, I jump in witch youse. People here ain't so quick to fuck with the po-lice like back there.”

“You're sure you've got room?'

“Got oodles,” Sisniega said.

“Tucson cops say
oodles?
”

Sisniega said, “You gonna see some oodles, my frien', sunshine and lotsa smiley-face people.”

Which turned out to be an understatement. His friend's house was garish pink stucco, with two inner courtyard gardens and an ornamental rock garden outside in a desert landscape.

“What's the square footage in this palacio?” Noonan asked the man.

“Not quite four thou,” Sisniega said.

“You on the take?” a skeptical Noonan asked.

“Just how it is here. They pay us enough to live like real people. Don't need no basements. You know how much a basement add to the cost of a house? Snows out here once every five hundred years. Miggy and me, we died and got sent out here to Heaven.”

Cherry Sisniega's hair was almost all white. Miggy's was blonde, and she looked like she'd not gained two pounds in a decade.

 

•••

 

It had taken three days to develop a lead. Sisniega drove the Michigan men to a section of town he called Poco Detroit.

Service couldn't quite envision the Cass Corridor: People in Poco Detroit were out in the streets, talking and smiling, walking around with no apparent fear.

“My people aren't like blacks,” Sisniega said. “The blacks, you step on them, they go boom, like right now. Latinos, we got to simmer, get it up, boil it some more, then you get your boom. Right now for blacks, but takes a while for my people. Make it to the same destination, but different routes and speed. Don't get so much sudden shit out here.”

“No drive-bys?” Noonan asked their host.

“Not so many like you got.”

“You working on a psych degree?” Service teased his friend.

“No man, I just seen how it is. This is it,” he said, pointing to a faded building the color of bleached turquoise. “You want me along?”

“Got cavalry with me this time,” Service said.

“Don't make no paperwork for me, Grady,” Sisniega said.

“Not a problem.”

Sisniega said, “Once a shit magnet, always a shit magnet.”

 

•••

 

The apartment was on the fourth floor. Service and Noonan stepped over several dusky kids playing on the stairs and knocked on the steel door, which eventually cracked open. Service flashed his badge and palmed it before the man could take it in. “We're looking for a Wheat Kurdock.”

“Why's that?” the man asked.

Service shot back, “Who're you, Mr. Kurdock's engagement secretary?”

“He ain't here,” the suspicious greeter said sheepishly.

“But he lives here?”

“I never said 'at,” the man said, and tried to slam the door, but Noonan blocked him and shouldered it open. “Jerk,” Noonan said.

“I did not resist,” the man whined.

There were a dozen people in a large room in various stages of undress. Noonan looked them over. “Yogi Berra class?”

“This is a nonviolent gathering,” a woman said, holding out a spliff. “Hit?”

Service said, “We're looking for Martine Lecair or Wheat Kurdock.”

Somebody to Noonan's right shifted weight, and he instinctively stepped in that direction.

“We're not local heat,” Service said. “Got no warrants, no hassles intended.”

Dead silence.

A thin man from Service's left scampered for the door, but didn't get four steps before Service had him facedown. “You want to calm down, or do I have to call the local badge up here? You Kurdock?” Service asked the man on the floor.

“I guess,” the man said.

Noonan said with a snarl, “Foo', this is a yes-no question, not no damn blue book.”

“Yes, Kurdock, Wheat. That's me.”

“Let's step outside and talk,” Service said.

“I prefer to talk here in front of my friends.”

“You think you need witnesses?”

“One never knows,” Kurdock said.

“Okay,” Service said. “I'm okay with an audience.”

Noonan turned to the man who had met them at the door. “Hey, shit-for-brains, I thought Kurdock wasn't here.”

“Wasn't the last time I looked,” the man mumbled with an insipid grin.

A woman said, “Make love, not war, amigos.”

Noonan retorted. “Make silence, not sentences.”

Service felt his shirt sticking to his skin. He hated heat.
This shit in December? God.

“Where's Martine Lecair?” Service asked his subject.

“Marti moved.”

“To where, from where?”

“Over to Bodison.”

“Which is where?”

“It's a town out beyond the air base. You know, Davis-Monthan?”

“I'm anal-retentive. I need more detail.”

The man got up, went to a table, got out a notepad, wrote something, tore it out, and handed it to Service. “She's not here,” Kurdock repeated.

“If we don't find her in Bodison, we'll be back with the chili peppers,” Service said. “Do you good to remember that, sir.”

Downstairs Sisneiga said, “Took you guys a long time up there.”

“Language barriers,” Service said.

“Shoulda have tooken me along,” Sisniega said.

“We wanted information, not war,” Service said.

 

•••

 

Service had seen many peculiar places in his life, but Bodison, Arizona, was unique: The town, such as it was, sat southeast of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the southeast side of Tucson. Martine Lecair, according to Kurdock, had been hired to teach at an “Academy for Indians,” the school run by the Minnesota Ojibwe Missionary Society. What business did Minnesota have sending missionaries to Arizona? He knew Minnesota to have plenty of its own ugly, homegrown problems.

Bodison lacked trees except for a few scraggly specimens in pots. The surrounding area was desert, the dominant color, babyshit brown. It was only December and the heat was such that you could see mirages of water ahead on the pavement.

The missionary school was fenced in with double rolls of concertina wire strung across the top, and the fencing made Service wonder if the hardware was intended to keep students in or non-students out. That was the thing about fences: It was sometimes tough to measure intent. Nobody greeted or stopped them at the front gate, which suggested security was more a matter of low-grade image than reality. A sign instructed visitors to sign in, but not where.
Twenty-first-century communications deficiency disorder,
Service told himself.
It was a plague on the country.

Noonan grabbed a janitor by a building. “Martine Lecair.”

“Did you folks sign in at Admin?” the man asked.

Noonan said, “Not much sense of direction.”

“Hopi Lodge,” the man in khaki coveralls said. “Down the block beside the outdoor swimming pool. Ask there.” He pointed.

Hopi Lodge had varnished brown elk antlers over the front entrance. They went inside and found several children in a hallway tapping frantically on laptops. “Anybody here know where Ms. Lecair is?” Service asked.

A girl stood up, smoothed out her pink floral smock, and stepped over to them. “Miss Lecair? I'll show you.”

There was a woman sitting alone at a table in an outside courtyard, reading a book.

“Martine Lecair?” Service asked, looking around. There was only one escape route and Noonan was close to it. “We've come a long way to talk to you.”

Lecair was an attractive woman with large brown eyes, a round face, and a major case of instantaneous heebie-jeebies. “I don't know you,” she said tentatively.

He showed his badge. “No, ma'am, you don't, but I'm Michigan Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer Service. My partner over there is Noonan. You disappeared pretty fast from Negaunee, and that's got a lot of people worried.”

“The State sent a game warden all the way out here to tell me that? I don't understand.” The woman's head drooped and she began to tremble. She said, “I lost one, won't lose the other one.” Then, “I need to use the bathroom,” and scrambled to her feet.

“Whoa—tell us what happened,” Service said.

“Not now,” the woman said, “I have to go now; I
really
have to go.”

She looked back from the bathroom door, said, “I'm not going back. We're safe from it here in the heat.” She stepped inside and Service lost sight of her.

He yelled into the opening. “I need for you to talk to me about your daughters.”

“You're here,” the voice came back, “which tells me it's still going on.”

Women and johns.
“Don't take all day in there.”

The shot came seconds later and set all the kids in the nearby corridors and courtyards shrieking and running around in panic. Service and Noonan charged into the bathroom, saw the teacher's feet sticking out from under a stall door, got the door open, saw the blood and the wound. The woman had stuck a .32 snubbie in her mouth. Noonan said, “No cry for help, this.” Two-inch barrel, the kind some cops called a Good-bye Special. The pistol had skittered into the adjacent stall. Service looked at the wall, above the body. There was a familiar red stick figure hastily drawn. The lipstick tube had rolled out into the larger room.

“Fuck,” Service said.

A woman came into the bathroom and Noonan told her to call 911, tell them there had been a shooting.

“What about an ambulance?” the woman asked calmly.

Service felt her femoral artery. No pulse. Checked her pupils: Fixed and dilated. He shook his head.

 

•••

 

Wheat Kurdock was arrested in Nogales four days after the suicide, caught trying to go
south
across the border, which struck the Border Patrol as somewhat against the flow of the majority of border crossings, putting the event into its own special classification and priority, which is why Sisniega managed to pick up on it soon afterward.

The three men drove down and were taken to see the prisoner.

“Don't catch many going south, Wheat—like, nada, dude,” Sisniega said.

The border agent who sat with them had the neck of a bull, and Cherry asked him, “I know you, man?”

“Perez. Played linebacker for the Cards,” the man said.

“I remember you,” Cherry said. “Arizona sell you to Detwat.”

“Death sentence,” the former player said. “Thank God I couldn't pass the physical. I come back out here and got work right away. Decided it was time to do something with the rest of my life.”

“You were a good player,” Sisniega said.

Noonan added, “You passed the physical, you'd have been in the ass-end of hell.”

“Tell me about it,” Perez said.

“Once had a petition in town to change the team name from Lions to Hos,” Noonan said. “Got seventy-five thousand signatures, more than can fit in the stadium. Border Patrol's a big step up from Detroit Lion,” he added.

Perez left them with Kurdock. Service said, “Yo, Wheat, let me guess—you were rushing down to Cozumel for surfing season.”

“I heard she committed suicide,” Kurdock said.

For once, the media got a story right.
“You must have a better class of reporters than we have.”

“She was a very frightened lady,” Kurdock said.

“She say why?”

“She refused to talk about it.”

“And you weren't curious?”
How many thousands of people had he interviewed over the decades? It was like there was a set score they had to be guided to, same tune, different lyrics.