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  KILLING A COLD ONE

  ALSO BY JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  Fiction

  Taxi Dancer

  The Berkut

  The Domino Conspiracy

  The Snowfly

  Lute Bapcat Mysteries

  Red Jacket

  Woods Cop Mysteries

  Ice Hunter

  Blue Wolf in Green Fire

  Chasing a Blond Moon

  Running Dark

  Strike Dog

  Death Roe

  Shadow of the Wolf Tree

  Force of Blood

  Stories

  Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories

  Non-Fiction

  Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

  Joseph Heywood is the author of Covered Waters, The Snowfly, Red Jacket, and Hard Ground (all Lyons Press), as well as The Berkut, Taxi Dancer, and The Domino Conspiracy. The Woods Cop Mystery Series (Lyons Press) has earned him cult status among lovers of the outdoors, law enforcement officials, and mystery devotees. Heywood splits the year between Deer Park and Portage, Michigan. Visit him at josephheywood.com.

  KILLING A COLD ONE

  JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Heywood

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl Kober

  Layout artist: Melissa Evarts

  Project editor: Ellen Urban

  Map by Jay Emerson, Licensed Michigan Fisherman Emeritus

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9765-3

  For Shanny (2002–2012),

  Best in the Show called life.

  PART ONE

  JANE RUNNING DOES

  1

  Sunday, August 3, 2008

  DIMONDALE, EATON COUNTY

  Chief Eddie Waco stared at the stiff cloth stripes Grady Service had dropped on his home office desk. New to Michigan, Waco was the recently appointed chief of law enforcement for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Last summer he had promoted Grady Service from detective to senior master sergeant—a new rank, which had made Service top NCO for the entire state.

  Waco’s home sat on the west bank of the Grand River, three miles southeast of Dimondale, the chief’s property sitting on the borders of both Eaton and Ingham Counties.

  “Retiring?” Chief Waco asked.

  “Self-demoting,” Service said. “The Mosquito Wilderness is open, and I want it back. I started there and I want to finish there, with my boots in the dirt. I’m sure you can understand.”

  The chief dangled the stiff cloth stripes between his fingers. “Sure, I can understand. But you haven’t given the new job much of a chance—and what exactly do I do with these?”

  “Bearnard Quinn’s your man. Let him recommend his own replacement. It should have been him with the top job first time around. Not me. I’m not cut out for that committee and diplomatic crap.”

  “You haven’t exactly worn out an office chair.”

  “Committee work would kill me. I can’t stand not being in the woods.”

  “From what I’ve seen, you h’ain’t been a whole lot behind a desk. Listen, Grady, you’re the kind of man who stands up and says he’s gonna do such and such, and the dang line behind you gets so dern long, nobody can see the end of it. You’re a leader.”

  “I want my Mosquito back, Chief.”

  “It’s not your Mosquito.” The chief rubbed his eyes, looking weary. Years before, the two men had worked together on a difficult case in Missouri and had become friends. The chief had been recruited to Michigan to take the top job and infuse new thinking into the organization. Service knew Waco was a damn good man.

  “Probably do you some good to put your boots in the dirt, too,” Service said.

  “Wun’t take exception to thet,” the chief said with a tired, flat voice. He looked tired, too.

  The chief’s home office was over his two-car garage. Service was surprised by piles of books, mostly nonfiction, not yet placed in what looked to be newly built floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  The chief studied him. “You work with that author yet?”

  Months ago, the chief had gently ordered him to work with a man who wrote books about the department, but Service wanted no part of writers or journalists or anyone with anything to do with the damn media, unless they could be of use to him. “He was supposed to call me,” Service said.

  The chief sat back in his chair. “The man tried repeatedly, but apparently you don’t make call-backs.”

  Busted. Service kept his mouth shut.

  “Call the man and make it happen,” Waco said.

  “Just one day, right?”

  “Several days, a week or two—whatever he wants. He’s an ally, not a foe.”

  “I don’t like civilians,” Service said.

  Waco sighed. “Just call him, Grady.”

  An old fart with hearing aids, a stutter, a cane, the writer was alleged to be painfully slow-moving and overly nosy. “Yessir,” he said, with no intention of ever following through.

  “The man’s a vet,” Chief Waco said. “If that softens the blow.”

  “Which war? Between the States?”

  “Try to show some grace once in a while. It can work wonders.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Service said.

  The chief shook his head and tossed the stripes to him. “Put them in your scrapbook. I’ll call Quinn. And don’t be taking that writer feller on some death march through one of your dang cedar swamps. He might just have to rescue yore big butt.” Waco held a PhD, but he could talk pure and convincing backwoods when he wanted.

  Service looked at the chief. “Thanks, Eddie.”

  “Git,” Chief Waco said. “Some of us have paperwork to tend to.”

  “You could always do what I’m doing,” Service said.

  The chief glared at him. “Don’t think I h’ain’t considered it.”

  2

  Wednesday, August 6

  SLIPPERY CREEK CAMP

  Lousy humid night to sleep, sheets sticking to him. Central Dispatch called him at 0330, night calls rarely presaging anything but bad news.

  “Grady, it’s Lamb Jones.”

  “Not a social call, eh, Lamb?”

  There was none of the usual perkiness in Lamb’s voice. She was terse, all business; this was unprecedented. Jones was the most proficient dispatcher Service had ever worked with: smart, spunky, determined, optimistic, in her late thirties, and not bad on the eyes. Lamb always insisted she was looking for a better job, which never seemed to materialize. Good thing. Her departure would leave a gaping hole in a critical function of the county’s law enforcement chain.

  “Two gorks at Twenty Point Pond,” Lamb said. “CO Denninger is on-site with Sergeant Linsenman. She’s freaking out and demanding that you join them ASAP.”

  Not good. “Out my door in four minutes, on scene in forty. Tell her I’m rolling,” Service said, pulling on his pants.

  He knew he needed a shave, but gorks wouldn’t give a shit. God, listen to yourself: Gorks! Go
rks? People deserved dignity even in the ugliness of death, didn’t they? What kid of a demeaning cop word is that? It doesn’t even conjure an image, only creates a shudder of revulsion on sound alone.

  “Troops alerted, Central?”

  “Sergeant Linsenman’s there; asked me to call Detective Friday. She’ll rendezvous with you at US 41 and the old Peshekee Grade Road. Central clear.”

  Detective Tuesday Friday was his girlfriend of two years, a Troop homicide dick out of the Negaunee post. They lived (separately) together. Divorced, she had a son, Shigun, and a house in Harvey, outside Marquette. They split time between their homes. Often when he was on extended duty, Service’s 160-pound presa canario, Newf, and Cat, the cantankerous stray who had adopted him many years ago, bunked with Tuesday and her son. Service had lost the love of his life, Maridly Nantz, in 2004. His teenage son had died with her, but left a pregnant girlfriend. Service loved his toddler granddaughter, Little Maridly, named for his murdered girlfriend. He supposed he also loved Friday, and she him, but neither had so far used the word marriage.

  He started the truck, reported into service with Lansing and Lamb Jones, his mind in high gear. If it’s red, it’s dead: This was August, venison meat at its tastiest. July 4 was when serious U.P. violators began to work in earnest. Even on still nights with swarms of mosquitoes and deerflies, Service could imagine them out there in his woods—poaching the people’s animals, his animals, his granddaughter’s, and the knowing cut deep.

  He’d never wanted to be a detective in the Wildlife Services Protection Unit, and until a few days ago he’d had another job he’d not wanted, not just as a sergeant, but as the state’s top NCO. Damn joke. All he’d ever wanted was to take care of the Mosquito Wilderness and eventually to retire. But life dealt shitty hands, and you had to play the cards you caught. Choice played but a small role in real life and seemed to serve largely as an illusion for pathological optimists and overreaching mouth-breathers.

  From a selfish point of view, there was some good news in this call: Gorks and homicides were not the DNR’s responsibility. Linsenman, it seemed, already had decided to push the case over to the State, which meant his girlfriend Tuesday Friday would catch it, in which case—Dammit—it would affect both their lives. The point now was that Denninger was demanding his presence, which is why Lamb Jones had bumped him. He wondered why Dani had asked for him instead of her sergeant, Willie Celt. Denninger was a relatively new CO, a competent, spunky woman who loved her work. She didn’t rattle easily, and knowing this, he kept the accelerator to the floor.

  Friday bumped him on the cell phone.

  “You know where this place is?”

  “Just beyond the butt crack of Bumfuck, Egypt. Technically it’s just inside the Marquette border next to the Baraga County line, far northwest corner of the Hurons, south and a hair west of Mount Baldy.”

  “Sounds like Backwoods Valhalla.”

  “Definition of.”

  “Fastest route?”

  “North up the Peshekee Grade Road, just past the river mouth west of Van Riper State Park.”

  “See you at the turnoff?” she said.

  “Who’ll be on top?” he asked.

  “What a silly, shallow, and insecure man you are,” she teased. “Move, Bucko. And hold that thought.”

  3

  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.”