Shadow of the Wolf Tree Read online

  “Superman,” Elza Grinda said, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Knock off that shit.”

  “I’m not talking about your night vision,” she said. “Where are you and Tree headed?”

  “We planned to yank the yaks at the second Gold Mine Road bridge.”

  “Good float,” she said. “Some real good holes down around the old Uno Dam. It was a nineteenth-century logging structure built to hold logs for branding. Most of it’s gone now, but there are some old pilings and ruins in the river,” she said, and switched subjects. “You and Candi still scromp-mates?”

  “Subject off limits,” he said.

  “Nothing’s off limits among the green and gray. There’re no secrets among woods cops. How’s your granddaughter?”

  “Too young to tell.”

  “Have we got us the crankies tonight?”

  “I don’t get cranky.”

  “Right—and your dog doesn’t scromp with wolves. What’s with the shit rolling around Lansing?”

  Under ordinary circumstances this was a rhetorical question, but not nowadays. Leadership in Lansing was in turmoil.

  “You going to promote up?” she asked, out of the blue.

  “No,” he said, quickly and firmly.

  “A lot of us would like to see that.”

  “Am I that big a pain in the ass?”

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “Me too.” He had no desire to talk about his career; in fact, he was rarely comfortable talking about himself. He immediately changed the subject: “Is this state land?”

  “Probably. Want me to check? The plat books are in my four-wheeler.” Officers rarely worked a single county and carried plat books for their own turf and all surrounding counties—just in case.

  Service uprooted a hunk of reindeer moss from the ground, poured water on it, and handed it to her. “Put that on your head.”

  “Magic poultice?”

  “Something like that.”

  Grinda came back several minutes later with del Olmo in tow and an Iron County plat book in hand. She set the book on the ground and lit it with her flashlight. “Art Lake,” she said. “Huh.”

  “Why the huh?”

  “You’ve heard of Art Lake?”

  “Local guy?”

  “Not a person. It’s a small lake in Baragastan, west of Ned Lake. A foundation owns a couple of sections and has the whole thing fenced shut. No uninviteds get in, and I mean nobody.”

  “Supposed to be some sort of big-shot artist retreat, by invite only,” Simon del Olmo interjected. “We’ve never met anyone from this county, who has been inside. It’s close to the headwaters of the Perch River, the epicenter of Baragastan.”

  Baragastan was what Upper Peninsula COs called the southern reaches of Baraga County, a sparsely populated area that over time had become the site of some nasty confrontations between conservation officers and various violators. “Hazzard hasn’t been inside?”

  “Never asked Speedboy about it,” Grinda said.

  Speedboy was CO Nick Hazzard, who had grown up in Bessemer, about ninety miles east of Iron River. He had been an Upper Peninsula sprint champion in high school and was now the CO responsible for Baragastan.

  “Speedboy’s transferring south,” del Olmo said. “Kalamazoo County, I think. Maybe Calhoun. Not sure which. His wife just got a job at a hospital down there.”

  “Replacement named?”

  “Just rumors,” del Olmo said as a man approached, his flashlight dancing in the darkness. “We’d better move out of the way.”

  Each state police post in the state had at least one officer trained as a forensics investigator, and the F-Trooper was often called out before the local ME or the Troop lab team out of Marquette. The Iron County F-Trooper was Cory “No Sweat” Smalt, an almost serene man in his late forties. Smalt arrived with two Iron County deputies who began setting up lights while other deps began cordoning off the site.

  Service studied the rock outcrop. If it had been a cave-in, what exactly had caved in, and how? Not your problem, he cautioned himself.

  Treebone fetched coffee. “We gone fish tomorrow?”

  “Don’t see why not,” Service said.

  Two deputies remained at the site during the night, and Treebone kept them supplied with coffee while Grady Service sat by the fire and tried to focus his thoughts. Art Lake? Why the hell had he never heard of it? Eventually F-Trooper Smalt announced that he had summoned lab people from Marquette, and the county ME.

  At one point after the Marquette personnel arrived, Service walked up to the site and watched them set up a screen to sift bones from dirt. He’d found the bodies, but dead bodies weren’t the DNR’s business unless there was a clear and compelling natural resource angle. Tree was probably right; the victims had been caught in a collapse and suffocated. Such things happened, especially in the old days.

  When he finally dozed off, his mind was focused on the white bones and the white rocks they protruded from. It seemed to him there was something significant he was missing, but it was not his problem. He tried to turn his mind to something more pleasant, like his granddaughter Maridly. At sixteen months she was already a live wire, and whenever he and Newf showed up, the kid went ballistic with glee. Thinking of his granddaughter made him warm. Life is good, he told himself.

  2

  South Branch, Paint River, West Iron County

  SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2006

  Grady Service had gotten less than three hours’ sleep, and was glad to be back on the river and thinking about brook trout instead of human bones. Grinda and del Olmo had gone home before first light to catch some sleep before today’s patrols. The state forensics team from Marquette had done its work and departed. Trooper Smalt, the forensics specialist from the Iron River post, made a point of telling him the skeletons were old, and therefore came under a different set of regs and procedures for forensics than more recent remains. Not my problem, he told himself.

  They inhaled instant oatmeal from foil packets, hurriedly had coffee, and pushed their canoes into the river just as the day’s first light began to top the eastern trees. It was still dark on the river, the water purple-black. Larger trout would feed until more light began to touch the water, which meant the fishing from now until then could be pretty good.

  Always in a hurry, Treebone was floating just ahead of him when Grady Service thought he detected a tiny flash in the middle of the river. It was at eye level and just ahead of his friend. He yelled for Treebone to stop and the big man immediately curled a hard 180 to wait for him.

  “S’up?” his friend asked. “You see a fish risin’?”

  “Not sure. You see lightning bugs?”

  “Man, no fireflies in April. What’s your problem?”

  “I saw a flash downstream.”

  “Mornin’ sun comin’ up—there’s always flashes.”

  “This was different,” Service said.

  Treebone shrugged and shook his head. “You lead. I know how you get when the paranoia starts crawlin’ up your butt.”

  Newf was sitting on a rock at the edge of the river, watching the discussion. “Stay, girl,” Service told his dog, and began inching the kayak downstream, his eyes up and locked at head level. When he saw it he first thought it might be the single strand of a river spiderweb, but as he stopped the kayak and gingerly reached up, he felt wire.

  “What you got?” Treebone asked from behind him.

  “There’s a damn wire strung across the river.”

  Service dug in his pack for his Leatherman tool and cut the wire, which snapped with a twang. Not just any wire, but a twist of razor wire, cured black. Razor wire was designed to be as much of a deterrent as anything else and was made of stainless steel so it would reflect light. Bu
t this wire was black and of a design he’d never seen before. He scratched at the metal with his fingernail and some of the black came off. Dyed, he told himself. Black wire wasn’t just a deterrent. It was a potential killer, and he knew they were lucky he’d seen it.

  Treebone pulled up beside him and wedged his kayak between a couple of small boulders. “Wicked-lookin’ shit,” Tree said.

  “You ever see this type before?” Service asked.

  “Sure didn’t come off no power line,” his friend said, shaking his head.

  “Somebody put it here.”

  “Lop off somebody’s head,” Treebone said. “Or take out an eye.”

  “You got any strike indicators?” Service asked. Some fly fishermen used small pieces of yarn to fish nymphs and help them see gentle strikes, which were difficult to feel or see without help. The yarn amounted to a bobber, a term that made purist fly fishermen cringe.

  “Somewhere.”

  Service said, “I’m gonna curl up the wire on shore. Let’s mark the spot.”

  “Drop a marker on your GPS while I get this out of the way.”

  Treebone handed Service a plastic bag filled with orange yarn indicators, got out his GPS unit, and electronically marked the spot.

  “There’s a ford just downstream of us,” Treebone announced, reading his GPS unit.

  Service crossed the river, snipped the other end of the wire, and brought it all to the north shore where he carefully curled it into a coil in the tag alders and tied yarn on the riverside to mark the location. At the time he was thinking that whoever strung the wire had done it with evil intent, and might well have a background as a trapper because the stainless steel was dyed black the way trappers blackened their traps by boiling them in red oak bark or sumac berries. He scraped the wire again with his fingernail. Definitely and deliberately blackened to make it hard to see, designed to injure, not to warn people away.

  “Eyes in the game,” Service said tersely. “Let’s walk our kayaks downriver.”

  Treebone grunted, got out, and took hold of the bow handle.

  Less than one hundred yards downriver Service saw something else strung over the river, and small wakes in the current below. The thing above had other things dangling from it, and as he reached up to it, he saw that the line across the river was braided fishing line with large black treble hooks suspended a foot apart all the way across the river. A weight had been tied below each hook so that they hung straight down into the water, the weights holding them in position, the hooks set at different heights. Like the wire before, this rig was designed to injure, not to warn.

  “What’s with this shit?” Treebone asked, looking at the treacherous assembly.

  Service undid the rig, put it on the bank in tag alders, and marked the spot with orange yarn while Treebone turned on his GPS and marked the location.

  There were two more obstacles before they got to the ford—another strand of wire, and another clothesline of hooks. As before, they took down the obstacles, put them on shore, and used the GPS to mark locations.

  The knee-deep ford had a four-wheeler trail down to the river on both sides. The two men stood west of the crossing in a rocky riffle, studying the water ahead.

  “See anything?” Service asked. The sun was over the trees now and directly in their eyes.

  “Can’t see shit,” Treebone grumbled. “Let’s park the yaks on shore, grab a smoke, wait for the sun to get up some.”

  Service watched as his friend slid over to the north bank, and just as he pulled his kayak toward the opening made by four-wheelers, Treebone yelped a startled “Fuck!” and dropped straight down into the water as a loud thump and blast shredded the tag alders beside him. Service also dropped down into the water, the cold not taking his breath because his adrenaline was pumping.

  “You okay?” he yelled at his friend.

  “Fuckin’ eh!” Tree said. “I felt the trip wire against my shin.”

  The blast had shredded the tag alders and bank bushes behind his friend.

  “Eyes on a swivel,” Service said, looking around. Trip wire? Jesus. What the hell is going on?

  “Damn, this water’s freezing,” Tree carped.

  “Hang tough.”

  Service had a snub-nosed .38 in his gear, as did all off-duty COs, but he didn’t dare reach into the kayak and raise his profile until they could assess the situation.

  “Sure it was a trip wire?” he asked his friend.

  “I guess we saw enough of them back in the shit.”

  “The blast came from the south?”

  “Yep, from our right.”

  With the pressure of the river, up with runoff and pressing against his waders, it was a miracle his friend had felt the wire that allowed him to duck the blast. “I’m gonna slide right, see what we’ve got.”

  Treebone was in combat mode, suddenly still and quiet.

  Service eased over to the south bank and pressed slowly along the tag alders until he saw an opening. Making his way to the bank through the rocks and easing along the damp ground on his belly, he worked his way east toward the four-wheeler trail. The blast had to have come from that general vicinity.

  He found the 12-gauge shotgun rigged to a tree with the wire still attached. It was an ancient single-shot, what he and other officers called a spring gun, a weapon that could be tripped by game when poachers were far away.

  “Spring gun,” he announced as he got to his feet beside the weapon and looked at it. “Single-shot, sawed-off, rigged to a tree.” The barrel was about twenty inches long. He looked across the river and saw where an entire swath of trees had been stripped away by the pellets. Tree had been damn lucky.

  He checked to make sure the weapon was unloaded, left it in place, and waded into the river. Treebone was on his feet and Service saw blood dripping down the top of his friend’s fist into the water. “You hit?”

  “Maybe barked my knuckles on the rocks.”

  Service looked at his friend’s jacket and saw that it was torn. “You’re hit,” he said. “Let’s get out of the water and take a look.”

  His friend had been hit twice. “Double-ought buck,” Treebone announced without emotion as his friend looked at his beefy arm and blotted the blood with a sterile gauze pad from the first aid supplies in his ruck.

  “Need to get you to an emergency room, get the pellets out of there,” Service said.

  “Told you our fishin’ was fucked.”

  If his friend had not felt the wire he probably would have been done fishing forever. A full load of buckshot at that angle and range would have cut him to ribbons.

  Service dug his 800-megahertz radio out of the kayak and called CO Elza Grinda. “Three One Twenty, Twenty Five Fourteen. Where are you?”

  “USFS 3470 at the first bridge crossing. Where are you?”

  “Section Twenty, T 44 North, R 36 West.”

  “The ford to the old county quarry,” she said. “You guys catching fish?”

  “No, we’ve got a situation here. Can you break loose?” Professional radio protocol. Not a problem—a situation.

  “Negative. I’m waiting for EMS, but Three One Twenty Three is here. He’ll be at your location in about twenty minutes. Three One Twenty clear.”

  Three One Twenty Three was del Olmo, and he arrived in less than twenty minutes. Service and Treebone had by then walked up the four-wheeler trail, over the berm to a two-track that paralleled the river. They could hear del Olmo’s truck tires crunching gravel before they saw it fishtail around a bend into sight.

  Simon looked at Treebone and narrowed his eyes. “Booby trap?”

  “Why’d you say booby trap?” Service shot back. “It was a single-shot, sawed-off, trip-wired,” Service added. “How’d you know?”

  “Elza’s got the same
thing downriver. Couple of Chicago guys parked their truck by the bridge. One guy cut east through the woods to get around the rapids. The other guy went in at the bridge to go wade upstream. He went through the shallows, and as he cut around a boulder, boom. Blew out his crotch and belly. His partner heard the shot, came back to see what had happened, found the guy in the water. He’d floated down about thirty feet, jammed into a sweeper on the bank, right above the bridge. Shotgun, sawed-off single-shot, double-ought buck, spring gun. Troops and deps are there with the ME.”

  “Dead?” Service asked. A spring gun was usually discardable, a lethal favorite of the worst poachers.

  “Still alive when his partner found him, bled out by the time Elza got there, and she’s feeling bad. I was ten minutes behind her.”

  “There’s more,” Service said. “We found razor wire strung across the river upstream in two locations, and then some braided line with suspended treble hooks, also two locations. We took them down and marked the locations with orange yarn. Did Elza or you look upstream or down from where her vic got hit? Tree’s got all our lokes on GPS.”

  “She was too busy squaring away the vick and the shooting site.”

  “I’m guessing there’s more stuff,” Service said. “How the hell do we close a river?”

  “Gotta check with our sarge.” Del Olmo looked at Treebone. “You okay?”

  “It don’t mean nothin’,” the retired Detroit cop said with a wince.

  “EMS is at the bridge by now. Let’s load your kayaks, get Tree to the EMS people so they can look at his arm.”

  Service and del Olmo loaded the two kayaks.