Shadow of the Wolf Tree Read online

  “That’s great news.”

  “Only nine prisons in the U.P., and only Alger and Baraga are maxies. Do cases ever stop feeling like they’re all uphill?”

  “Only when you feel like you’ve stepped off a cliff. When that happens, you can’t wait to hit the ground, chute or not.”

  “Well, it’s something, right?”

  “Something,” he said, not wanting to discourage her. He filled her in on all he had learned about Penny Provo.

  When he had finished, she said, “I see why you wanted to talk to Box.”

  “Your friend with the art gallery. You’d better cancel her visit.”

  “She was here yesterday afternoon,” Friday said. “She called me afterwards on her cell phone, said there was too much value to calculate without spending more time. She took photos of everything to use for the appraisals.”

  “What time did you talk to her?”

  “Six-ish.”

  “Obviously Box was still alive then.”

  “Makes you wonder what’s going on,” she said wistfully.

  “It always feels like this,” he said, lighting another cigarette, “especially when you get blind alley after blind alley after roadblock. We can try to talk to the army about Provo, but she’s a deserter, or at least AWOL, and they don’t like to talk about such glitches when national recruiting is under such pressure.”

  “Do we have anything positive?”

  “Your kid still loves you,” he said.

  “Only because I feed him.”

  “Same for my dog.”

  She smiled. “What do you do when you hit the wall?”

  “Get blind drunk,” he said. “It makes me think I can break through.”

  “And that works?”

  “Nope, but there’s always hope.”

  “I guess hope’s better than nothing. Drinks are on me tonight. No work talk.”

  Allerdyce called ten minutes before the deadline. Service walked up the road to talk privately to the old violator. “Was last year, I seen dat Provo piece one night,” the poacher said.

  “Where?”

  “Motel over Gwinn.”

  “Name?”

  “Starry Inn.”

  Service knew it. A real hole in the wall, a sometime hangout for Sawyer and Modeltowner crank freaks. “Who paid?”

  “Her.”

  “How?”

  “Cash.”

  “She tell you about her situation?”

  “Din’t meet ta chew fat, eh.”

  “If you didn’t know her, why’d she call you?”

  “Din’t call. Sent message.”

  “Why?”

  “Heard I was good at tings.”

  Service growled. “I’m not buying your shit tonight, Limpy. Truth, or I drop a dime.”

  “Wanted ta talk traps.”

  Service felt his heart race. “What kind of traps?”

  “Big traps.”

  “Why you?”

  “Coulda been mebbe I come into some ’boot den.”

  “Legal traps?”

  “When I had ’em.”

  “Your ass is in deep trouble.”

  “I give you address, change tings?”

  “Depends on the address and what we find.”

  “Mead Road, Iron County fire number 9122.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Little bird said.”

  “Her place?”

  “Belong friend, I tink.”

  Service hung up and played with his AVL until he found the Mead Road in northeast Iron County. No idea where the fire number was located, and no way to tell from the rolling map. He glanced at Friday as he started the engine and pulled around to leave the camp. “Have to take a rain check on drinks. We’ve got a lead on Provo.”

  “Solid?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Friday said, “You want company?”

  “Yah, we’ll pick up your wheels later. Get in.”

  He had heard what seemed like genuine conviction in Limpy’s voice. This was as solid as it got.

  He knew several state COs who had served or were on active duty with the National Guard, but didn’t know who was where at the moment. A lot of COs were military vets, but rarely had official police business with the military, and he was at a loss for a name.

  He finally decided to call Lieutenant Lisette McKower, his former sergeant, one-time lover, and old friend. She answered, “Lieutenant McKower, District Four.”

  “It’s Grady.”

  “How’s that granddaughter?”

  “No time to make social, Lis. I’m brain-farting. Who do we have in the Army Guard?”

  “Jimmy Cleary, District Ten, Monroe County. He’s just back from Iraq, returns to duty June first.”

  Cleary had been a CO for a decade, made sergeant a couple of years back. “Got his home phone number?”

  He could hear her fingers clicking keys on the computer. She came back, read the number to him, and said, “I’ll put it in an e-mail too.”

  “Much grass,” he said.

  “Nice talking to you too,” she said with a chuckle, and hung up.

  Service stopped the truck and dialed Cleary’s number.

  “Sarn’t Cleary, Grady Service.”

  “How goes the battle above the bridge?”

  “Hooah! I’ve got a tip on an Army Guard deserter. I think it’s solid, and she may be part of a case I’m working. If I pinch her, how do I play it?”

  “She do a runner from a military prison?”

  “From her unit.”

  “Not a deserter then. You have to be convicted to be a deserter. Army regs require the individual to be listed as AWOL for thirty-one days, then reclassified as DFR, Dropped from Rolls.”

  Cleary had always been a deliberate, by-the-regs officer, and would be no less as a sergeant. Patience, he told himself. “Who do I call if I grab her?”

  “What unit is she with?”

  “MP company out of Kingsford, I forget the unit designation.”

  “When did she go missing?”

  “Summer ’02, I think.”

  “Okay, give me a few minutes. The way the process works is that USADIP feeds accumulated DFR data to the NCIC Wanted File.”

  “USADIP?

  “United States Army Deserter Information Point—single source for all related data. NCIC—”

  Service cut him off. “I know. The FBI’s National Crime Information Center.” Two years ago he’d been in a case involving the FBI and found that some federal databases had some critical and mostly unpublicized flaws.

  “Right,” Cleary said, unfazed. “What’s the soldier’s name?”

  “Penny Provo.”

  “Rank.”

  “No idea.”

  “Let me query USADIP and give you a call back.”

  Service gave the sergeant his cell number and e-mail address, and lit a cigarette.

  Cleary called back fifteen minutes later. “Okay, she’s in USADIP and NCIC, warrant outstanding, all civilian law enforcement agencies requested to apprehend and hold until custody can be transferred. Specialist Penance Provo, age thirty, has been gone since July 2002. The person you should call is Major Joseph Sutschek, CID out of Lansing. I gave him a heads-up and your number. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Can I get her photo?”

  “Sutschek is sending it.”

  “Thanks. How was it over there?”

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you know. Hooah!”

  Friday looked at him. “Do you always operate at this pace?”

  “We’re
just warming up,” he said and mashed the accelerator. It was nearly midnight and they had a long drive to get where they needed to be, and there were no shortcuts.

  17

  Near Hermit Lake, Northeast Iron County

  THURSDAY, MAY 25, 2006

  Mead Road was a misnomer, more a minefield of loose, sharp rocks than a seriously graded route. The army man called on the cell phone just as Service and Friday turned southeast on the road.

  “Major Sutschek, CID.”

  “Grady Service.”

  “A photo is in your e-mail; also a copy of the warrant, though our people will bring real paper after you apprehend.”

  “You wanted to talk to me? We’re in the area now, close to where she’s alleged to be.”

  “Specialist Provo has been on the run almost four years, Detective. She doesn’t use cell phones, the Internet, or credit cards. She knows how to stay under the radar. Most of our runners are caught, or turn themselves in within a year.”

  “Why’d she run?”

  “We don’t know. She was a good soldier, excellent skills, bit of a loner. Her comrades called her Nympha.”

  “What’s that mean—she sex-crazy or something?”

  “No, it’s just what they called her.”

  “Spell it.”

  “Roger—nora-young-mary-paul-henry-adam.”

  Service wrote the word in his notebook. “Did she do Iraq?”

  “No, her unit’s just in the pipeline now, in California.”

  “Did she join up in Kingsford?”

  “No, she was a transfer from a Colorado unit.”

  “MP out there?”

  “Yessir, since 1987.”

  “Is it hard to get transfers these days? In my day it wasn’t easy.”

  “Manpower’s down in a lot of units. Recruiters are struggling to reach goals, and standards are quietly being lowered, which means soldiers can move around a lot easier than in a normal peacetime,” said Sutschek.

  “Why’d she move?”

  “Finished her degree at Adams State College, in Alamosa, Colorado, got a job in Michigan.”

  “She has a college degree and the rank of specialist?” Not to mention a decade and a half of service. Odd shit, all this. When Lars dealt with her, she didn’t yet have a job, or was it a place to live? Getting old, he told himself.

  “Not uncommon in the all-voluntary military.”

  “What’s her degree?”

  “Secondary education major with minors in history and environmental science. She told her commanding officer she came here because she wanted to teach in Michigan.”

  “Colorado girl originally?” asked Service.

  “Nossir. Army brat, born in Germany and moved around. Her old man was Special Forces in Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm. He retired as a senior master sergeant in 1995 with twenty-eight years of distinguished service. Took sick after he retired, and was part of a large class-action Gulf War Syndrome lawsuit. He died of cancer, January ’02.”

  “His health—or his death—have anything to do with her behavior?”

  “We don’t really analyze such things, Detective. Just like civilian law enforcement, we just get the warrants and go get ’em. The Judge Advocate takes care of it after that.”

  “Why Michigan?” Service asked, thinking out loud. “The economy’s in the crapper here.”

  “You should ask her if you find her. We’ve been close to her a couple of times, but she’s got almost a sixth sense about incoming heat. The last sighting was in Colorado. If you grab her, we’ll come get her. Thanks for checking with us.”

  “Sighted where in Colorado?”

  “Let me check my file . . . okay, town called Penrose,” said Sutschek. “That’s south-central. She was training there when she bugged out.”

  “What sort of training?”

  “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, SERE Course D-2G-0014, part one. Not Special Ops SERE, but tough in its own right: Five days of classroom and field training in physically hostile terrain, especially mountains and desert. Her company commander sent her, planned to use her to augment training for the rest of his people. Part two was to be winter survival, six months later.”

  “Where was the training?”

  “A closed section of Great Sand Dunes National Park, north of Alamosa.”

  “So the Michigan Guard sent her back to Colorado to train, near where she went to college, and she bugged out?” SERE had been called Escape and Evasion in Service’s day. E & E—Jesus!

  “Pretty much,” Sutschek said.

  “I’ll get back to you, Major.”

  “Good hunting, son.”

  Service shut the phone. Son? He guessed he was older than the CID man.

  “Do we have a plan?” Friday asked.

  “You stay with the truck while I creep the place.”

  She said, gesturing left, “Fire number 9122.”

  He kept driving southeast, found a place to pull off the road, made sure he had his spare keys in his coat, and got out.

  “Two is better than one,” Friday said.

  “You ever work the woods at night?”

  “I can learn.”

  “I’m sure you can, but not tonight. I need you here in case she comes out in a vehicle. I’m going to call for backup.”

  He gave her a quick overview of his AVL, which was slightly different than that used by the state police. He saw that Kragie was about ten miles north of their position just into Baraga County and called him on the 800.

  “Three Two Twenty, Twenty Five Fourteen. Your AVL up?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  “Think you could start moving in my direction? I’ll be on foot. Check in with my partner when you get here. Twenty Five Fourteen clear.”

  “Moving your way. Thirty Two Twenty clear,” Kragie replied.

  “A CO named Kragie is coming,” Service told Friday. He grabbed a bottle of water, stuffed it in his pack, and headed cross-country toward the camp road that he’d seen running north from the red fire number.

  Light was fading slowly, creating smudges of shadow he used to cover his movement. Day birds were silent and night birds seemed not to have found their voices in the cumbrous air.

  The modest cabin looked relatively new, one story, a screened porch on three sides, huge windows. There was a lone outbuilding near the woods. He moved to the smaller building and saw that it was nearly all windows, roof to floor, with a steep, peaked roof. He looked inside, saw a large object . . . the silhouette of a tepee in the center of the open room. No, not a tepee. Easel, like artists use, he corrected himself.

  He had an overpowering urge for a cigarette but fought it off. He stood near the tree line to observe, let it get darker, and began to feel a nip in the air. High forties tonight, but damp and dewy already. No light in the cabin, no music, no sign of life. Easy does it, he reminded himself.

  He had installed his ear mike as he’d made his way from the truck. The transmitter was beneath his coat. He tapped it, whispered, “Dark, no movement inside. Click once if you copy.”

  He heard one click. Attagirl. Friday was on the ball.

  He saw three doors into the cabin, all of them up on the veranda. From his vantage near the woods he could see two of the three. He waited until the dark was nearly complete and started slowly across the grass toward the cabin. Three sets of steps led up to the porch. He went to a set of stairs, got on his knees, and looked for motion detectors, any kind of sensors. Stairs clear. No cameras on the roof corners. Maybe out in the trees? Damn things were ubiquitous nowadays. Too late and too dark to check for them.

  He crossed the porch slowly, looking around, until he was next to a storm door, the outer glass etched opaque by wind and weather.
Difficult to see inside. No flashlight, he reminded himself. He stared through the storm door, saw that the inner door was open about a foot. Somebody in a hurry getting out, or someone losing their short-term memory? That last one describes you, pal.

  He moved on, checked all three doors, found the same thing at each of them. Don’t believe in coincidence. Neither someone in a hurry, nor with a forgetful mind. All three doors left open suggests purpose, intent, a plan. Why? Bad vibrations.

  Back at the wood line he took a position so he could see two of the three doors, and weighed his options: Obviously nobody here. He had a grab-and-hold warrant for Provo, but not a search warrant for the camp. That had to be issued locally. Can’t go in without supporting paper.

  He hit the transmit button. “Three Two Twenty, you close?”

  Click.

  “I want you to run the entry road dark. When you break into the open yard, hit your blue lights and music. My partner will follow you in, pull to your right. Copy?”

  “Copy. When?”

  “Now works for me.”

  He could hear the tires whoosh on the grass before he could see the trucks. When the lights came on, the camp area was flooded with steady and rotating blue and white lights. No one tried to bolt or skulk from the cabin. Fuck. So much for Plan B.

  He walked over to Kragie’s truck. “I had a report of a military deserter here.”

  “It’s always something,” Kragie said. “Figured you were trying to flush someone.”

  “Nobody home.”

  “What now?”

  “Pull your truck forward toward the south door and put a spot on it.”

  Kragie did as instructed. Service went onto the porch, backlit by the spot, turned on his own SureFire, and looked at the open door inside. The wire was dark but visible.

  He went back to Kragie and lit a cigarette. Kragie held out a thermos of coffee.

  Friday joined them. “We’ve got a trip wire inside the door and I’m thinking there could be wires on all three. We need a search warrant and we need to get inside. You know this place?”

  “Think so. Let me check my plat book. I don’t get down this far too often. It’s Simon’s turf, but sometimes we work it together.”