Death Roe (9 page)

“How do we contact you?” Service asked.

Lafleur smiled. “I have a track phone with prepaid minutes. This way nobody can bother me.” She gave him the number.

As they walked back to the truck, Miars said, “You can't make promises like that.”

“The hell I can't,” Service said. “Did you hear that
shit
?”

They rode back to Marquette in silence and Service dropped Miars at his truck. “We need to sit down and review where your internal investigation has taken you.”

Miars looked perturbed. “How about you take care of the egg mixing and I'll take care of the other stuff?”

“I think we'll both be stronger if we combine forces.”

“I'm not so sure. You haven't seen what I've seen or been through what I've been through. Your case could be open and shut—if you can pull together the evidence.”

It was an unsatisfactory conclusion, but on his way to Slippery Creek Service decided that Miars was probably right, and that his sergeant was nervous about pressing the internal investigation. Still, if there was a way to take the case back inside, he was determined to do it.

When he got to the cabin, Candace McCants was sitting outside in the cool air with a cup of coffee, smoking a small cigar. “I'm here to inform you that your animals and I are having an affair,” she said with a big grin.

Candi had been a CO for more than seven years. She was five-six, 160 pounds of muscle, afraid of nothing, and gifted with an inordinate amount of common sense. Born in Korea, she had been adopted by a family in Detroit when she was twelve and joined the DNR after finishing a police academy at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

“My dog and cat are females.”

“Don't quibble,” she said. “Take love where you find it. How's Karylanne doing?”

Take love where you find it?
What the hell was wrong with Candi?

Karylanne Pengelly had been his late son's girlfriend. He died before learning she was pregnant.

“Good, I guess. She's tired all the time.”

“Full class load at Michigan Tech, preggers, and tired. Duh, Service. You need to talk to that girl regularly.”

“I do,” he said.

“When was the last time?” McCants shot back.

He held out his hands in submission.

16

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

MARQUETTE, MARQUETTE COUNTY

Service called Rogers in New York and told him what he had learned in Anchorage from Andriaitis, and from his visit and talk with Roxanne Lafleur. He left out everything bearing on the internal situation in Michigan, even though he wasn't sure why he withheld that part. Maybe because Michigan was family and New York wasn't.

Rogers said he was still plowing through paper taken from the plant and added, “We're familiar with the Crimea Group. We had a conference with U.S. Fish and Wildlife last spring. They're investigating Crimea for unrecorded shipments of Russian sturgeon roe. Apparently poachers in Russia have killed several wildlife agents and their families, and Crimea's implicated.”

“Fish and Wildlife close to warrants?”

“That wasn't the impression they left me with, and I haven't talked to them since then. They briefed us only to alert us that the Russian and Uke authorities have been squeezing poachers pretty hard, and they expected Crimea would start looking for product alternatives.”

“Salmon eggs, for example.”

“They never said, but if your information is accurate, Crimea has been in the red roe business for a long time, well below the feds' radar.”

“This thing's layered like an onion,” Service said.

“All we can do is peel it back one layer at time,” Rogers said.

“Too many players,” Service said. “IRS, Fish and Wildlife, you guys, us.”

“Don't forget FDA, EPA, state police agencies, and the FBI. At some point it could take input and assistance from all of them.”

Grady Service kept thinking about dead Russian wildlife agents and their families. “Crimea sounds like the old mafia.”

Rogers laughed. “They're totally
new
mafia. The Eye-ties and Sicilians are pretty much
finito
. I think the feds are moving cautiously on Crimea because these new outfits are not like the old boys. The Sicilians had a lot of rules and didn't involve civilians unless they were forced to. The Russians and Ukrainians have no rules or compunctions, and they think Western cops are a bunch of pussies.”

Service said, “We've got evidence pointing to Crimea.”

Rogers said, “But what if Crimea thinks the caviar they bought is legit?”

“They're paying cash,” Service reminded the New Yorker. “
Under
the goddamn table.”

“So they can only be tagged for financial irregularities—but that doesn't mean they know they're buying and selling
contaminated
eggs, which I remind us both, we have not yet actually verified. Until we have some of Piscova's product in our hands, this is all hypothetical. When we get the caviar, the FDA's got a DNA template that will detect mirex. If there's even a trace, we're good to go, because fish out your way don't have mirex in them.”

Service said, “We need to intercept a shipment.” He was suddenly sorry he had gone along with New York's push for fast action. If Fagan was as good as Roxy and Andriaitis said, he'd lay off the illegal business until the subpoenas and what they led to were over.

“Or grab some from Crimea—at the other end.”

“Which means we have to pull in more agencies.”

“The inescapable reality of law enforcement in the twenty-first century.”

Service hung up and realized even more than before that he was in over his head. He knew how to deal with assholes breaking the laws during deer season. But this was new territory, and he didn't like any of it.

He called Tree's cell and found him at his camp in Chippewa County. They made plans to meet that night. He also called Karylanne, but her answering machine said she was in class until after four.

McCants answered her cell phone, and Service said, “I'm taking Newf and Cat with me to see Tree.”

“They'll be just fine with me.”

“I think they need some male attention.”

“Don't we all,” she said icily.

What's her problem?
he wondered. If something was bugging her, why didn't she just spit it out? Nantz would have.

17

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

NORTH OF NOWHERE CAMP, CHIPPEWA COUNTY

Newf loped down the two-track toward the cabin a quarter-mile down the road while Service undid the lock to the chain gate. He parked beside a giant red cedar at the end of the narrow road, and saw lights in the tiny cabin. He let Cat out, smelled burning charcoal, went looking for his friend, and found him in the shed south of the cabin. A small doe was hanging from a ceiling beam, its hind hoofs barely off the unpainted plywood floor. The back straps had been cut out and were in a pan on a two-by-eight shelf. Tree's arms were covered with blood and he grinned when he saw Service.

“We'll grill the straps. Mr. Weber's already going.”

Newf came into the shed and sniffed the blood pooling beneath the deer.

Tree growled, “Don't be snackin' on my deer, dog.”

Newf barked at the massive Treebone, but backed away.

“I passed on three dandy bucks,” Treebone said, picking up the pan and plastic bag with the heart and liver and heading toward the cabin with Service in tow, Newf bounding around them like a shepherd with ADD.

Service had bought the camp and given it to his friend as a gift earlier in the year. At the time the camp hadn't had power or a drinking-water source. What power it had now came from a small generator Treebone had installed. He had also sunk a well on the property.

Service watched as his friend dropped the heart and liver in the sink, ran cold water on them, trimmed off some fatty deposits, slapped them on a carving board, sliced them paper-thin, threw them in a bag with flour, pepper, and cornmeal, and vigorously shook the bag. Service grabbed an onion and a bowl of mushrooms, chopped them, and diced half a dozen garlic cloves. He put the vegetables in aluminum foil, made a tent, dashed some olive oil on them, added salt, pepper, and some butter, and pinched the tent closed.

The two men stepped onto the porch. Service put the back straps on the grill, sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and Montreal Steak Seasoning, set the foil tent beside the meat, and closed the cover. Treebone uncorked a bottle of cheap Crane Lake cabernet sauvignon and poured some into enameled tin cups.

“Define dandy,” Service said.

“Big six, small ten, and a
monster
ten.”

“Very sporting to take a doe.”

“Gotta let them genes fill the pool,” his friend said.

“Maybe you ought to let Chewy know.”

Buster Beal was a biologist in the Escanaba office, a man who loved white-tailed deer, took care of the herd as a sacred responsibility, and killed them with equal fervor during rifle and archery seasons. Beal was well over six foot, burly, hairy, and known throughout the DNR as Chewy, after the hirsute
Star Wars
character.

Treebone exhaled loudly. “So that motherfucking killing machine can whack my pets!”

“Pets?”

“My property, my animals. You got a case yet?”

“We've got an asshole mixing contaminated Lake Ontario salmon eggs with clean Michigan eggs and selling them as caviar to a New York City outfit that may or may not be Ukrainian mafia. And they're not your
pets
.”

“That ain't so much.”

“With at least one state BAO man and some DNR personnel, including the director, possibly on the take—or at least in the know—and all the egg deals are in cash and off the books.”

“Now it's getting complicated.”

“You said something about making a tree.”

“Eat first, work later.”

Service went to get Chinet plates, looked in a cooler, and found four eight-inch brook trout. He looked over at his friend. “Are you poaching during closed season?”

“Just a couple for breakfast, man. Most of 'em are gonna die over the winter anyway.”

“You
know
better.”

“Just this once,” Treebone said. “Man, you gonna stroke me?”

“The law's the law.”

“And you game wardens wonder why everyone thinks you're a bunch of chickenshit pricks.”

“We embrace the love,” Service said.

“Learn how to make your own damn tree,” his friend grumbled.

“Now
that's
chickenshit,” Grady Service said.

The meat was tender, the veggies a bit underdone. Tree mumbled with a full mouth, “I love this shit. You're not
really
stroking me.”

“Technically you're within the possession limit. The rules don't say you can't legally possess in the off-season. Of course, you took these earlier this year, right?”

“No man, first thing this morning.”

Service rolled his eyes and Tree said, “Why'd you have to go and open the damn cooler? Write the ticket, man. I deserve it.” Treebone took a sip of wine. “You got yourself hard-wired to cop-analog mode: On-off, good-bad, right-wrong. Real talk, yo, you get head-to-head with those other agencies and politicians thinking like that and you're going nowhere, man. Analog is Martian to them boys. See, you can point the weapon, but only they can pull the trigger, hear what I'm saying? These aren't your backwoods perps, bro. You start fucking with organized crime, politicians, and bureaucraps, and there will be a shitstorm with you in the middle.”

“The tree?” Service said, trying to focus his friend.

“Tree? Point is, all branches come off one trunk and a cop, he's way out on the end, trying to find light, and the rest of them behind him all suckin' the light out of him.”

“What the hell are you driving at?”

“Just this, man: When you out on the end of the branch, you can't do nothing if those further back decide to cut it off. You know a man can't attack in two directions.”

“Are you telling me to back off the internal stuff?”

Treebone sighed. “Can't
tell
you anything, but you choose to go that way, they gonna try to cut off your balls, man.”

“What happened to the notion that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing?”

Luticious Treebone put his hand on Grady Service's shoulder. “Man, don't play quote games with me. Edmund Burke was a wiggy motherfucker spoke from both sides of his mouth. He also said, ‘People act from motives relative to their interest, not on metaphysical speculations.' You got to come to grips with facts, man. You remember what The Mayor used to have on his desk?”

Service knew his friend was referring to the legendary Detroit mayor, Coleman Young. “Yeah—MFIC.”

“Well, you ain't the Motherfucker in Charge, Grady. You best keep that in mind.”

Service remembered that Young also had said, “You don't grow balls. Either you got 'em or you don't.” He decided to keep this to himself. He picked up the wine bottle and poured a little more for both of them. “Can we seriously talk about how to organize my work? I am at least the MFIC of my own time.”

The next morning Treebone walked him through the mechanics of what his friend called a “tree.”

If Fagan was as clever as everyone believed he was, he would shut down operations while the heat was on. Unfortunately the salmon runs were petering out, close to done for this year. As Service twisted, trying to get comfortable in his sleeping bag, it occurred to him that Piscova's deal with Crimea might be enough to keep Fagan running the operation. If Crimea was truly a mob-op, they might not appreciate a broken contract. Not a sure thing, but it seemed to offer some hope, and before falling asleep he decided to test his thinking.