Killing a Cold One (5 page)

8

Wednesday, October 22

TWENTY POINT POND

“Your girlfriend got an amended report,” Denninger said out of the blue. Service had asked her to meet him at the crime site again.

“When?”

“She called me this morning, asked me to ask you to call her.”

“I guess you took your own damn time about telling me,” he said.

She batted her eyes and vamped. “Yeah, I guess I kinda, sorta did.”

“What about the report?”

“Only two DNAs.”

He shrugged, thought.
Shit.

“Remember what Sherlock Holmes said.”

“I'd guess whatever the guy with the pen put in his yap,” Service replied. “Holmes wasn't real. What's the point of tying up your vicks if you're not going to play hide-the-sausage?”

“Uh, you may be so advanced in age that you've forgotten condoms?” she quipped.

“Bullshit. Two DNAs: This case is going nowhere.”

“The two DNAs are Native Americans, eighteen to twenty-two.”

This caught his attention. “Doc Tork was right.”

“Going nowhere is going somewhere,” Denninger said.

“What the hell does
that
mean?”

“I don't see locals for this,” she said.

“Like
that
narrows the field.”

“It's a start, and we know from history that granks don't stop. There will be more bodies. We can count on it.”

“Not us; Friday. This is
her
case. We don't want a damn thing to do with it.” Service touched the tip of his forefinger to his forehead. “
Septum pellucidum,
” he said.

He'd read a book called
Ecstasy of Joy Touch: Fixing the Self.
This had been right after Maridly and Walter were murdered. He couldn't sleep then, needed something to help him face reality, and not booze, his old man's choice for comfort. He'd played with the Joy Touch technique, and it had helped him when his stress levels went up. It had been a while since he'd felt the need.

“Pudendum
what?
What the hell does that mean?” Denninger asked.

Service explained how the brain had pleasure centers, and how you had to imagine petting them.

“If you say so,” Denninger said, smiling.

“The report—that's all Friday had for me?”

“Oh, I think she also said something about going to Grand Rapids.”

“When?”

“Today, I think. I don't think she gave me an ETA.”

“Did she say she wants me to go along?” he asked.

“Not sure,” Denninger said, still smiling.

Service touched his forehead again, said, “Repairing damage.”

Denninger quickly added, “She said something about how there's a substantial population of Indians in GR, including some of the former Ridge crowd.”

He kept his finger on his head, pressing gently, a neuronal solderer run amok.

“You ever worry about short-circuiting that thing?” Denninger asked him.

“Happens regularly,” he said. “It's part of the ritual.”

Denninger's face lit up at the same time the thought struck Service.

“Did you say
ritual?
” she asked.

He nodded.

“Not trying to hide their identities,” she yelped. “He took their heads, hearts, and hands . . . It's got to be some kind of ritual shit.”

“Religious or psycho?” he countered, thinking about what they were saying and seeing no way to connect it to
any
kind of reality.

“That must be one hell of a channel you tune into,” she said.

“It used to have great cartoons, old-timeys, not the goody-two-shoes kids' crap on TV nowadays. Or, the killer wants us to
think
it's ritual,” he said.

“Times change, Rainman.”

“Price is right, though. Keep your knees together and your mind on Jesus, my girl.”

“Thank you for your advice, Sergeant.”

“Not sergeant anymore,” he said. “Just officer, same as you. I'm back in the Mosquito.”

“Since when?”

“Late August.”

“No fake? Nothing was announced.”

“Bearnard Quinn moved to my old job, and Wildlife Resource Protection doesn't want dinosaurs, so here I am.”

“Wow,” Denninger said. “Welcome back to the working world.”

 

•••

 

He was headed back to Marquette and about to call Friday when Gunny Prince bumped him on his cell phone. “Got a lead, but it's thin as rabbit skin. Still, might could be something. Fella in Wayland, Michigan, claims he sold two M40s to a man name of Bird in Grand Rapids. I called Bird. He claimed the weapons were stolen last June.”

“He file a police report?”

“Don't sound like it. The guy in Wayland is named Dog. You want his and Bird's addresses, phones?”

“Shoot.”

Service pulled over and wrote the information in his notebook. “Thanks, Gunny; I owe you.”

“Wayland near you?”

“Just south of Grand Rapids,” Service said, “a long way from here.”

He punched in Friday's speed-dial number. “You want company?”

“It's not your case,” she said.

He explained about the guns and Gunny Prince's call.

“Dog and Bird,” Friday said. “Too weird. I'll meet you up at Slippery Creek. Can you be there in an hour? I'll have my sis fetch Newf and Cat tonight and take them to her place with Shigun.”

He was home in fifty-one minutes flat and found Friday playing with Newf, while the foul-tempered cat hissed disapproval from a distance.

“Denninger tell you the revised lab results?” Friday asked.

“She did. Could the explanation for all this be some sort of ritual?”

Friday stared at him. “I thought the same thing from the start. But what?”

“Point is,” Service said, “maybe this guy's ignoring cops, doing his own thing, whatever the hell that means. It doesn't feel religious or psycho. Not quite.”

“Maybe that makes some sense,” she said. “Go pack and let's roll. We can talk on the way.”

9

Thursday, October 23

GRAND RAPIDS, KENT COUNTY

Service knew Friday was having trouble getting the Indian connection out of her mind. There was no known connection between the dead women and Martine Lecair, the missing woman who wasn't even officially missing. She still had no clue who the Jane Running Does were, the term a joke courtesy of Kristy Tork. Granks, gorks, and Jane Running Does. Cops and MEs were subject to jaundiced views of life and humanity, and talked their own pidgin—a lingo that blended all sorts of odd connections, making it the ultimate hybrid, with virtually no sensitivity.

Why had Lecair boogied so suddenly, and does it even matter?
The question remained, its relevance not at all clear to either of them.

They had driven to Gaylord the night before and stayed over in the Alpine Inn, and this morning, when her mind was briefly off business, they had made love like a normal couple. Breakfast was two Sausage McMuffins on the fly south. Back to normal.

“The guns you and Denninger found. What caliber?”

“Three oh eight.”

“Is that good?”

He looked over at her. “What the hell do you mean,
good?
”

She rolled her eyes. “You know.”

“Calibers aren't good or bad.”

“Well, I'm sure not gonna
guess,
” Friday said.

“Tuesday,” he said sharply.

“
What?
”

“You're in that zone you get into.”

“I am?”

“You asked if the caliber was
good.
”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“What's the answer?”

“There isn't one.”

She threw up her hands. “There ya go!”

There was no point trying to wedge her out of this. It would just take time for her to drift back to some semblance of physiological and intellectual reality. Not that this jaunt would give them any answers about the cases, but if they were lucky, they might start homing in on better questions.

Indians had their own word-of-mouth and cell-phone communications network, the modern version of smoke signals, and they used this to track comings and goings of relatives and friends who might be hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Tribals might not talk about what they knew to outsiders, especially cops, but they
would
know. Of that he was pretty damn certain.
The arrogant little twerp who invented Facebook could have used Indian commo as his damn model.

The Grand Rapids Inter-Tribal Council Center was in the hilly northwest part of the city, a depressed zone with boarded storefronts, iron bars over blacked-out windows, and broken streetlights. The center was in a block-long brick building that appeared in another life to have been a school. There were no pedestrians on the street and no traffic. Cold air, but no snow. The last ground snow had been in Gaylord. A couple hundred miles made a dramatic difference in weather and weather patterns, he knew. It made an even greater difference culturally.

A half-dozen pickups and beat-up vans were parked in a narrow strip of unpaved lot between the street and the building. Everything in sight needed paint. With the economy the way it was, nationally and in the state, he doubted anybody would be slinging paint anytime soon. They stopped at a reception desk to receive directions from an old woman with an enormous head and stringy gray hair that looked like it had never been brushed.

Early evening and the door was closed and it was dark inside. Friday leaned against a wall to wait. Service, being impatient and nosy, followed sound up to a second-floor gym where several men were gathered in the middle of the floor whacking huge drums with padded paddles. Now and then they chanted and sang a cappella. If there were words here, he couldn't make them out, but the sound made him think of a line from a song: “Sing a boop boop aboopa lopa lum bam boom!” He loved Sheb Wooley and “Purple People Eater,” and the drums for some reason made him think of it. Though there were no words, the beat of the drums and the starkness of the voices gave him a chill.

Friday waggled a finger from the gym door and he followed her.

Downstairs she said to the big-headed woman, “Rose Monroe's not in her office.”

“I coulda told you that,” the woman said.

“But you didn't.”

“What you asked was, ‘Where's Rose Monroe's office?' and I told you. You never asked if she was in it.”

Service fought a grin. One of the first rules for copdom: ATRFQ. Ask the Right Fucking Question. This could be even more important in dealing with tribals, with whom the road tended toward strict cultural constructionism of the passive-aggressive school.

“Is Ms. Monroe available?” Friday asked.

“No, she ain't.”

“Will she be available later today?”

“She don't leave no schedule for nobody, her being honcho, and all.” After a pause the woman said, “I'm Rose Monroe.”

Friday and Service sighed and gave her their cards.

Service guessed she had played dumb to buy some time in order to find out about Friday. The issue was why, especially with no apology forthcoming for anything that had gone on earlier that day.

She led them to her office and opened the door. “You two are a long way from home,” Monroe began.

Friday said, “I'm not even sure you can help us. You're very much of a long shot, or a blind stab.”

Monroe said, “Sometimes we find ourselves doing things without knowing the reasons why. That doesn't make them wrong.”

“We had two murders in August,” Friday said. “Two young women in their late teens. We haven't been able to identify them, and we still have the remains. DNA confirms they're Native American. I asked around up there, but got no leads. Nobody seems to know anything, but I'm thinking your organization has a lot of extended kin to our local folks, and I heard there were some Ridge people down here, so here we are, asking for help. One of the dead girls has a tattoo on the back of her calf—a bear or a dog. Our medical examiner thinks it's a bear, but I don't know. I have a picture.”

She dug in her purse, handed the photo to Monroe, who looked at it without expression. “You got pictures of the dead girls' faces?”

“No,” Friday said.

“Woulda been a lot cheaper to call me,” the woman said.

“The truth is, we're desperate,” Friday said. “I really want to get closure for two families.”

Monroe looked skeptical. “Just what is it you think I can do?”

“Help us identify the girls, get them to their families.”

“They're not from here.”

Service thought:
Way too fast an answer.

Friday was on top of it. “How can you know that?”

“I make it my job to keep track of our people,” Monroe said.

Service guessed the woman was buying more time, trying to think about what she would say next, and he was trying to figure out why.

Monroe said, “Now that there's legalized gambling, most tribes see each other as competitors at best, enemies at worst. The truth is, there's not that much contact anymore, at least not like in the old days. We're going backwards in inter- and intratribal relations.”

Friday said nothing, and Service knew she was letting silence work for her.

Monroe said, “What you're asking for isn't easy. Like I said, things are changin' in our community.”

Use of the word
community
made Service grumpy. Nowadays everyone had a community, even men born with single testicles who loved grape-stomping on surfboards while shooting water pistols at rubber duckies in a three-foot surf.
Crap.

Tuesday Friday asked, “What would
you
do? I don't want to leave those girls unburied.”

“There're worse things,” Monroe said.

“Do you want to hear where we are in our investigation?”

“If you like.”

Service thought:
Weird response,
but he wasn't in second-guessing mode. Friday needed to play this thing out, and he listened as she gave her report, omitting only a few details.

Report done, Monroe asked, “No other problems?”

“What sort?”

“You'd know,” Monroe said mysteriously, and quickly added, “I'll do what I can for you.”

“Not expecting miracles. I just can't get those kids out of my mind. I feel like it's my obligation to close the case and find out what happened.”

“How far are you willing to go?” Rose Monroe asked.

“We're here.”

 

•••

 

Service left the meeting with Friday feeling unsettled.

Before leaving, Rose Monroe had said, deadpan, “Some of life's hardest journeys aren't measured in miles.”