Chasing a Blond Moon Page 3

  “The roller coaster is king in the land of the merry-go-rounds,” Nantz said.

  1

  The sight of condominiums flanking Navy Street along the boulder-lined Portage Shipping Canal made Grady Service wince. The Upper Peninsula was Michigan’s last remaining wilderness, and as more downstaters and out-of-staters discovered it and decided to retire here, they were moving north and bringing their flatlander lifestyles and values with them. Condos in the U.P., he grumbled in the late August darkness.

  The entrance to the primitive two-track, which led to the place many locals simply called “the fish house,” was hidden at the end of a low concrete wall behind some condo garages. Gus Turnage had told him it was a little less than a half-mile to the fish house and that the road was often used by kids and miscreants seeking privacy. Above him he could see the blurred lights of the town of Hancock, the so-called Gateway to the Keeweenaw, but the surroundings along the two-track remained wild and untamed. Hancock had once been the epicenter of copper mining in the Upper Peninsula, but the ore had petered out and the mining companies had moved west, leaving ruins and descendants of Finnish miners to fend for themselves. The area had never recovered.

  This should be Gus’s case, Service reminded himself, but Gus Turnage was home in Houghton recovering from gallbladder surgery. Service, Nantz, and Walter Commando had come to Houghton for Walter’s orientation at Michigan Tech. The boy had been accepted, but had not yet decided to enroll. They had been visiting Gus when the call for assistance had come in from the Houghton County dispatcher. Walter had lived with them for nearly a month, and had come to the campus at the invitation of the varsity hockey coach. As an unknown and because of his age, Walter would not have an athletic scholarship, but he had been asked to camp as an invited walk-on. Service had expected his newly found son to reject the invite because a scholarship had not been offered, but Walter had accepted ­graciously, ­leaving Service scratching his head.

  Service and Nantz had picked Walter up from campus last night for an evening with Gus, who had regaled Walter with outlandish and embellished stories of his father’s exploits. He had wished Gus had shut up or stuck to the facts because his friend was making him seem larger than life. As a boy his own father had been a legend, and he knew how hard it was to grow up in such a large shadow. At fifty, he was still hearing comparisons to his old man.

  If law enforcement staffing had been normal, another CO would have filled in for Gus, but Governor Sam Bozian’s ham-handed budget cutting had left DNR law enforcement short and, in some large counties where four officers should be covering, there was only one.

  Easing his way down the two-track in his unmarked green Yukon, Service shut off his interior and exterior lights. When you were in the dirt at night, you came upon more things running dark than by advertising your presence. With less than a year as a detective in the DNR’s Wildlife Resources Protection Unit, he welcomed any chance to operate the way he had for nearly twenty years as a conservation officer. At night, that meant all lights out except the sneak light that let him see the ground but could be seen only from inside the vehicle.

  After a while the pitted, rocky road ascended a steep hummock and dropped down the west face. To his left he could faintly discern the outline of an old boathouse, one of the landmarks Gus had told him to watch for. The boat garage held three dilapidated 36-foot wooden boats once used for fishing in the area. Like many things in the U.P., whose economy had been in a steady slide for decades, stuff that couldn’t be used or sold quickly usually got left to the whims and ravages of nature.The people of the U.P. didn’t get much better treatment, but you rarely heard them complain. People up here might be trapped by circumstances, but they were stoical and endured what had to be endured, including a crapped-out economy, a three-month growing season for agriculture, and seven-month-long winters.

  Eventually the undulating narrow road led into an open area and Service left his lights off, stopping to peer ahead. It was a fairly large parking lot of dirt and gravel, something clearly not graded or taken care of in years. Puddles of water stood in low areas and the steady rain danced on the surfaces, prickling the water.

  To the left there was a large dark building, perhaps a hundred feet long. This would be the place the locals called the fish house. It had once housed the Superior Coastal Fishery Company, a typical Yooper brainstorm. The owners had been determined to market Lake Superior fish throughout the Midwest—lake trout, whitefish, pickled herring, whitefish roe—but the owners found the actual marketing more difficult than the idea and the business had gone belly-up. Now the building housed the fishing boats and gear of Native Americans who carried tribal IDs and could fish both on commercial and subsistence fishing licenses. COs referred to them most of the time as tribals.

  Beyond the structure, Gus had briefed him, there was an old stone wharf and a series of decaying hundred-year-old pilings that the tribal tugboat tied up to in order to offload catches. It was not clear anymore, Gus said, who actually owned the building—perhaps the tribals, perhaps the state—but the business was called Lake Superior Fisheries, and despite operating from such a pathetic site, seemed to be making it. It periodically fell to Gus to work with a tribal commercial fisheries officer to perform various inspections on the fishing tug and facilities. There had once been fifty commercial fishermen spread from Baraga to the tip of the Keeweenaw. Now there was one Native American commercial fisherman operating out of Hancock, and the waters in the area had been so severely depleted by overfishing and lampreys that tribal netters from Baraga didn’t waste their time or fuel coming up this way anymore.

  Away from the building he saw the flickering gumball of a police vehicle. Beyond the squad car there was another vehicle. Off to the other side there was the silhouette of a pickup truck.

  Service waited until he was less than fifty yards from the police car to announce himself by toggling his blue lights. He was met by an officer wearing a drenched dark slicker, with houghton county sheriff’s department airbrushed in yellow block letters.

  “You guys always seem to pop up outta nowhere,” the officer said as he got out of his Yukon. “There’s a better road down from the hospital,” she added.

  “We prefer the scenic routes,” Service said. It always pleased him to take people by surprise, especially other cops.

  “Limey Pyykkonen,” the officer said, extending her hand.

  “Grady Service.”

  “How’s Gus?”

  “Recovering.”

  “You one of the replacements?” she asked. The state legislature had put the kibosh on the governor’s plan to not authorize replacements for officers who took an early retirement package designed to reduce the state government payroll. As a result, a small number of replacements were in the pipeline, but it would be a year to eighteen months before some areas had coverage again, and even then the force would not be at full strength.

  “I’m out of Marquette. I was visiting Gus.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “What do we have?”

  “Stiff,” Pyykkonen answered, turning on her flashlight, lifting the yellow tape she had strung around the area, and leading him to the vehicle.

  Grady Service stared at the bloated corpse in the blue Saturn. It had been raining off and on for days and the car was mud-spattered. Under the red beam of his MAG-LITE , the corpse looked larger through the windows. The dead man’s arms were raised in front of him, like he had died reaching for something. “Why the DNR?” Service asked. “We don’t investigate dead bodies.”

  “The body’s mine, but it looks to me like an animal took a dump in the backseat,” Detective Limey Pyykkonen said, adjusting the hood of her rain jacket. “The shit’s yours,” she said with a smile.

  Service shone his light and saw the dark pile. “Got an ID on the vick?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “They found him,” she added, noddi
ng at a couple in rain gear standing in front of a Ford pickup away from the Saturn. “The M.E.’s on the way. I got the door open, checked for a pulse, took one sniff, and called for help. I don’t want to soil the scene.”

  Service grunted. She had already cordoned off the dead man’s vehicle and immediate area.

  “No signs of violence,” Pyykkonen said. “Natural causes maybe. Or a suicide. The doors were locked.”

  “Arms in the air,” Service said. “That mean anything?”

  “Possibly,” she said. “He could have died somewhere else and been placed in the vehicle, but let’s not let our imaginations fly until we see what we have.”

  Service stared at the stiff’s distorted features. Native American or Asian—it was hard to tell with the body so swollen. “I guess we wait. You new?” Pyykkonen was a strapping, angular woman with a small round face, close-cropped hair, and worm-thin lips.

  “Larry DeNover retired and I got his job. I was doing school liaison before this.”

  Service knew DeNover. He was Houghton County’s longtime homicide detective, a slow-thinking, deliberate man whose workload fit his style. The county had few homicides. “School liaison?”

  “D.A.R.E., listening to kids caught in hormone hurricanes, that sort of thing. The kids refer to me as Saint Narc.”

  “Good job?” he said, passing time and trying to decide if Saint Narc was positive or negative. He also considered asking her for insight into the mind of a sixteen-year-old, but said nothing. Walter and he were still trying to work things out, which meant they were polite and answered when spoken to. It was uncomfortable for him, but Nantz seemed to have fared better and Walter yacked away with her. The first night the boy was in Gladstone, Nantz had given Service signals that she wanted to fool around, and he had told her they couldn’t with Walter in the next room. She had only laughed and pressed the issue, whispering, “He’d better get used to it.”

  “The job sucked,” Pyykkonen said, “but I liked the kids. If you take the time to really listen to them, they have a lot to offer,” she added. “I was a patrol officer before the school job, but I kept dinging vehicles. The sheriff put me in the schools to keep me off the roads.”

  “Why’d they send Homicide?”

  “The department didn’t. The kids called me when they found the body. I knew them from my liaison work.”

  “You trained for homicide?”

  “Three years as a Lansing cop, and three years in homicide. I blew it in a case involving the daughter of a city councilman and got the gate.”

  “And you came here?”

  “Followed a boyfriend. He moved on. I stayed.”

  “Must be the weather,” Service said.

  “You bet,” she said, cracking a weak smile. “Especially the driving.”

  “Anybody else around?” he asked, tired of small talk.

  “What we see is what we get,” she said.

  “You talk to the kids?”

  “Yeah, they came down here for a little backseat aerobics. The stiff was already here. They waited for him to leave, but when they saw he wasn’t moving they figured he was a drunk sleeping it off and decided to wake him up. They knocked on the windows and when he didn’t respond, they called me. The boy is Jesse Renard. The girl is Jeannie Miltey.”

  “As in Miltey Boat Company?” The company was located in Chassell, and when fishing was in its heyday, M.B.C. had built many of the tugs used by commercial fishermen. Now the company built a line of aluminum sportfishing boats and some custom wooden jobs. Joe Miltey, who ran the boat company, had been busted more than once for fish and game law violations and was a vocal critic of the DNR.

  “That’s her father, but her parents are split and she lives with her mom. Mother and daughter are both pips, eh.”

  “Pips?”

  “They don’t walk on the wild side, they sprint it. Enthusiastic pole vaulters.”

  Service looked around. There were no lights nearby. A few twinkled dimly on the Houghton side of the canal, two hundred to three hundred yards across from them. The fish house was isolated, yet no more than ten minutes from downtown Hancock or Houghton. Service walked to the brick building and used his light. The construction was shoddy and a not-so-professional light-colored facade had been affixed to the front of the building; in back and on the ends, the bricks were mottled black and white and falling apart. Brick shards littered the ground. He went to the old wharf and stared down at the pilings in black water. There was a stench of fish. He didn’t know the area and he wasn’t much interested in getting involved. He would do what he could, pass what he had on to Gus, and let him deal with it when he was back on duty. One thing seemed certain. If you wanted privacy, this place had it.

  He wondered if Tech students knew about the place and decided that college kids always knew about such places. He was curious about Walter’s first day of orientation but had not had a chance to get any feedback. Their relationship was forming slowly, but was still difficult to describe. The boy didn’t seem to bear grudges and when Nantz needed something done, he couldn’t do it fast enough. When Service asked, there was always a negotiation. His own old man had issued orders and expected them to be obeyed, but his father had died just after his sixteenth birthday. If the old man had lived, maybe their relationship would have changed. The irony of the situation didn’t escape him: He had unexpectedly lost his father at sixteen, and now all these years later had gained a son who had just turned sixteen. Had he been philosophical or religious he might have tried to make something out of this, but he was neither; mostly, he was concerned about doing things right for the boy. His son. The thought still made him dizzy and the word stuck in his throat. Why the hell had Bathsheba not told him about Walter? There had been no angry outburst when she pulled out; she had seemed more disappointed and tired than pissed, another example of how badly he had misread her.

  “Your name?” Service said. “Limey. That’s a new one.”

  “Finn all the way, eh? I grew up near Jacobsville where the limestone was quarried. That’s where the Limey come from.”

  “I thought they quarried red sandstone there.”

  “The limestone operation wasn’t as well known.”

  Service grunted acknowledgment. A local girl who had been a cop in Lansing, now back in the U.P. Service made the observation, didn’t pursue it.

  The medical examiner arrived in a muddy black Suburban. He looked harried. A vehicle with three technicians followed close behind him.

  “What we got?” The doctor was young, short, and plump, with a slicked-back mullet. A tiny snowflake of toilet paper clung to a razor cut on his left jawline.

  “Oriental male, forty-five to fifty-five, five-six or -seven. Been dead at least twenty-four hours, judging by the smell,” Pyykkonen reported.

  The doctor packed Vicks just below his nostrils, pulled on latex gloves with a snapping sound, and carefully opened the door. “Ripe,” he said without emotion. It struck Service that people who handled human remains handled them with the same detachment that conservation officers handled animals, proof that death leveled all living things. The doctor’s deliberate, efficient movements told Service he was experienced.

  “We need the air temp and humidity both inside and outside the vehicle,” the M.E. said to one of his techs, sniffing. “You smell that?”

  Service had no idea what the man was talking about. The gasses from the body made it impossible for him to smell anything else except the pervading stench of dead fish. “Just the body,” the tech said.

  “I thought I caught a whiff of ammonia,” Pyykkonen interjected. “But I could have been mistaken. This is starting to be a real stinker.”

  “Bitter almonds,” the examiner said.

  “Cyanide?” Pyykkonen said, perking up.

  The doctor leaned into the Saturn and used a Popsicle stick to open the dead ma
n’s mouth, illuminating it with a penlight clamped between his teeth. “I’m guessing HCN or KCN,” the doctor muttered over his shoulder. “Want to take a look here?” he added.

  Pyykkonen leaned forward.

  “Corroded,” the doctor mumbled, holding the mouth open. “See the blistering?”

  The detective nodded.

  The M.E. stepped back and widened the beam of his flashlight. “Skin’s red as cherries,” he said. “Consistent with cyanide and this temperature, but we’ll do the slab-and-lab and let science keep us off Wild-Ass-Guess Boulevard.”

  Service shined his light on the scat pile in the backseat but made no attempt to collect it until Pyykkonen gave him the go-ahead. The site was hers and his job was subsidiary. Over the last year, he had encountered too many stiffs in the course of duty. His boss, U.P. law boss Captain Ware Grant, was constantly reminding him to stay focused on fish and game law—which was what he wanted, too—but sometimes you ended up far afield.

  The homicide detective stood with her hands on her hips, studying the car. “We’ll call this a crime scene until we determine otherwise,” she said. “Death under suspicious circumstances. Rigor is present,” she added. “Which probably means death twelve to thirty-six hours ago. And his arms defying gravity suggest he died somewhere else.”

  The M.E. grunted.

  Service was impressed at the detective’s pragmatism and wondered what had gone wrong in Lansing for her to lose her job there.

  Pyykkonen fetched her camera from her vehicle and began to take photographs of the scene, starting first at the corners of the area she had taped off with long-range shots, and working her way up to mid-range, then close-up shots. She worked silently and methodically, her camera clicking in the dark, the flash illuminating the surrounding area.

  “Don’t forget the shit,” Service said over her shoulder.