Force of Blood (4 page)

At that moment Service heard a poorly muffled ATV coming down the beach toward them. Katsu’s painted and feathered people immediately charged eastward, screaming.

Sedge surged after the group and Service followed. She somehow got past the lead Ojibwa and charged into a man who was getting off the four-wheeler, hitting him with a violent head-on tackle that put him on his back on the ground with a loud thump.

She grabbed the individual’s arms, twisted them behind him, cuffed him, and yelled at Service, “Secure the driver!”

Service grabbed the driver as he tried to restart the machine and knocked him off the seat, jerked him to his feet, and only then discovered he had just rough-dusted a woman, skinny as a rail, loose hair, wild eyes, shaking like a leaf.

That’s when the infernal shrieking began anew, screams so penetrating they shot a chill down Service’s spine, the sort of screams he had once heard from fanatical North Vietnamese troops charging to their deaths through the jungle at night.

But this morning there was no crackle of gunfire or grenades popping, and all he could hear was a voice shouting angrily. Soon Sedge appeared, escorting a small red-haired man with a goatee and long hair. The man was struggling vigorously and hopelessly against Sedge until he saw Service.

The woman Service held was about the man’s age, skinny and mean-eyed.

“You white?” the cuffed man asked. “Or one of
them?
So damn much mixed blood in the tribes nowadays, can’t hardly tell who’s real anymore.”

“I’m Detective Service, Department of Natural Resources, and I’m real.”

“Sedge, conservation officer,” his partner of the moment announced.

“
Detective?
Game wardens? Where the hell are the real cops? Listen, tell these bloody Shinob cretins to leave us alone.”

“Who are
you?
” Service asked.

“We call him Cool Ghoul,” one of Katsu’s people called out.

“
Professor
Delmure Arcton Toliver,” the man said. “
Dr.
Toliver to these troublemakers.”

“You a doctor who treats patients, Del?” Service asked.

“My doctorate is in history, my thesis on the Anishinaabeg migration.”

“Up here you’ve gotta treat patients to be called ‘Doctor.’ ”

“You don’t mean up here … you mean
out
here. This place is on the edge of the Earth.”

“He’s desecrating our ancestors,” Katsu said with a hiss.

Toliver took a deep breath and said measuredly, “We’ve been through this before, Katsu. This land is
not
a burial ground. There are no bodies here. This was a fishing village and a safety refuge from bad weather. There were never more than twenty or thirty people living here at any given moment, and there were
no
burials.”

“There are hundreds of remains here,” Katsu replied. “
Na-do-we
-
se
bodies.”

Toliver snorted. “Jesus, man. The oral traditions of your own people say the battles between Ojibwa and
Na-do-we-se
took place at least forty miles southeast of here.
Remember
—Iroquois Point?”

Katsu examined the small man. “And the Menominee claim they killed a thousand enemies on Green Bay, but the Menominee are liars. The real battle was
here,
and my people were in it.”

“Whatever,” Toliver said dismissively. He shook his head and looked to Service like he had more he wanted to say, but couldn’t summon the words.

“The professor wants to dig for artifacts,” Katsu said. “If I wanted to go and dig for pots in Arlington National Cemetery, you think your
wabish
government would allow that?”

“Arlington
is
a cemetery,” Toliver said.

“This place is no less,” Katsu said with a steely voice.

Toliver sighed. “I have been issued the requisite state permits to sink-test cores.”

“Permits issued by whom?” Service asked.

“The Office of the State Archaeologist,” Toliver said righteously.

“Toliver and the State both deny the truth,” Katsu said.

Toliver keened, “Your own state authorities agree that there are no bodies here. I have
permits
. Everything is legal and in order. Katsu is obstructing a legally sanctioned archaeological dig and academic field program.”

“There will not be digging here,” Katsu said. “None.”

“I’ll be back with
real
cops,” Toliver said.

“
We’re
both real cops, dipstick,” Sedge said angrily, nodding toward Service, “and, more to the point, the DNR grants the right to dig,
not
the state archaeologist.”

“I’m not going to stand here and argue pointlessly or be insulted anymore,” Toliver said. “These people assaulted us. I want to file charges.”

“Do what you feel you have to do,” Katsu said flatly.

Toliver said, “We want our machine back.”

Service’s eyes narrowed. “You illegally used that thing, so we’ll just hang on to it for now. The walk out will probably do you good.”

“Illegally?”

“Riding double, no helmets, nearly plowed into a group of people, riding on the beach, which is against the law—we could keep going with the list, but we’ll leave it at careless operation and just warn you on the other things.”

He looked at the driver. “Who’re you?”

“Jane,” she said in a quavering voice.

Toliver said, “Good God, man—do you realize how far we are from our vehicle?”

Service said, “More to the point, do
you?
”

When Toliver and the woman turned and began to trudge east, several Ojibwa blocked their way. Service intervened, separating Toliver and the woman from Katsu’s people. “Okay, fun’s over. Let these people pass.” He nodded at Sedge, who gave the woman named Jane a nudge toward Toliver.

The four of them walked down the beach.

“You saw everything,” Toliver said. “The assaults.”

“I’m not sure what I saw,” Service said. “How long has this pissing match been going on?”

“We had the first encounter with Katsu last summer. Flin Yardley, the state archaeologist, had already given permission, but we went back and asked again if he was certain there were no remains here, and he told us we
were clear to sink-test holes. Now, every time we show up, Katsu and his thugs are here blocking us. I don’t understand how they always know we’re coming.”

“A professor where?”

“Hibernian College near Cleveland.”

Service had never heard of it. “You teach there?”

“Twenty years, and I’m curator of the campus museum.”

“So, if there are bodies here, you can’t legally dig?”

“If there are bodies, we can dig, but the dig would then have to satisfy federal regs in addition to state regs, and because of NAGPRA, the feds would formally bring Native Americans into the process.”

“NAGPRA?”

Sedge blurted out, “That’s the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which says nothing can be done to bones without direction by and from the Indians.” Her voice betrayed extreme frustration.

“Tribals do tend to complicate some things,” Service said, speaking from experience.

“You’ve dealt with them?” the professor said.

“The thing is, mostly they just want people to think about what they’re doing.”

“Bloody hell, man, I
study
them and think about them and their past all the time.”

“And you’re certain this was no more than a fishing village?”

“Right—a distinctly minor one, more a safe refuge from inclement weather than a serious, established fishing settlement.”

“How can you
know
that?”

“Various European accounts, including the
Jesuit Relations
, all of which formalize the Native oral traditions.”

Sedge said, “Katsu says you’re wrong.”

“What does
he
know? These people didn’t even have a written language until Europeans came along, and even that took a couple of centuries. This group of Katsu’s isn’t a federally recognized tribe. They call themselves the Five-Pack Creek Band of aboriginals under the Grand Island Ojibwa but it’s all made up, with absolutely no historical basis. I know; I’ve made a career of studying these people.”

“Did you two have helmets?” Service asked.

“No need. We’re on sand, and I drive carefully.”

Service stopped walking, took out his ticket book, opened it, and started writing.

“What do you think you’re
doing?
” Toliver asked.

“Giving you a ticket for riding your machine on the beach. That’s against the law. But I’ll just issue warnings on the helmets.”

Toliver said. “You think this is a joke?”

“A joke? Professor, there’s about two dozen tribals back there, decked out in war paint and carrying some very nasty-looking weapons. The last thing I think is that this is funny. You stir a hornet’s nest, you’ve got to expect to get your sad butt stung.”

Dr. Toliver set his jaw. “That knife cuts two ways, buddy boy.”

Katsu was alone by the time Service and Sedge got back to him.

“Toliver seems pretty insistent about his permits.”

Katsu said, “I’m telling you, the Office of the State Archaeologist
can’t
permit him legally because there
are
remains here. It would be a violation, a desecration—not that such things ever stopped
wabishi
in the past.”

“Have you talked to this archaeology office?”

“They only talk to other archaeologists. Seems to us the State
wants
Toliver to dig here, only we can’t figure out exactly why.”

“Historical reasons?”

“Or black-market artifacts,” Sedge interjected.

Service stared at her. “
Artifacts
… here?”

Sedge walked over to the four-wheeler and opened a storage case mounted on the handlebars. “If Toliver’s honorable, why’s he carrying a shovel? Archaeologists don’t dig in the dark.”

“Emergency kit for the four-wheeler?” Service countered.

Sedge extracted a trowel, a whisk broom, and a small bucket with wire mesh across the bottom. “This stuff look to you like four-wheeler emergency equipment?”

She had a point, and Service felt a rumble in his stomach, a sure sign that he had rolled into the middle of something he sensed he was totally unprepared to deal with. They chained the four-wheeler to a tree, told Katsu to keep his people away from the machine, and headed out.

Sedge said nothing during the long hike back to their trucks. Hers was
parked next to his. Suddenly she pivoted sharply and raised a fist. “Who in the
hell
do you think you are, horning in on
my
case!”

Holy shit. She’s a damn wildcat
. “Whoa,” he said, raising his hands. “I’m not horning in on anything.”

“I’ve been working this goddamn case for months. I just got an assistant attorney general up to speed, and
that
asshole jumped ship to another job without a goddamn word. Now I have to start all over.”

Once some of her fire had been tamped down, Service said, “Look, you don’t want me in this, I’m outta here; color me gone. It’s that simple.”

She looked up at him and gnawed the inside of her cheek. “No, you’d better come to my place after we patrol and let me bring you up to speed.”

“That mean you want me in?”

“Take my word,” she said strangely. “You’d like that.”

He had a feeling she wasn’t talking about the case. Talking to her was like running through an unmarked minefield.
Keep your mouth shut
, he advised himself. It was Friday, and he was tired.

They did not get to her place until well after midnight. Service felt vaguely sore from hiking, and he was famished.

As McKower had told him, the old gas station was right on M-123, just before the Middle Branch of Linton Creek. A large and rusty metal Mobil Oil sign squeaked as the morning wind pushed against it. “That thing looks like it’s gonna come down someday and cause some damage,” Service said, trying to look at the woman without being obnoxious. She stood no more than five-foot-five, had her hair stuffed under her law enforcement baseball cap, and looked like she was borderline anorexic. “You follow my tracks in last night?” he asked her.

“By the Five-Pack,” she said, adding, “I’m Donna Sedge, but call me Jingo.” She did not stick out her hand. “Saw your truck on the AVL.”

“Jingo’s a different kind of name,” he said.

“I’m a different kind of person,” she muttered.

Service sensed that the anger that had surfaced earlier was still there, but now she was holding it back.
Measuring me?
he wondered.
Regretting inviting me back here?

“You want me to rustle up some coffee?” she asked.

They were still outside, between their two trucks. “That’d be good,” he said.

She made no move to open the door to her place. “Toliver was in Paradise yesterday. Someone I know heard him say he was headed to the beach again.”

“Were you following Toliver?” Service asked.

“I don’t have to follow him. Katsu has a plant at the motel where Toliver stays. The informant calls Katsu, then me. Until I saw your truck pop up on the computer and cut your trail,” she said, “I had everything under control. Been up to me I’d never have let Toliver get that close to Katsu’s people, but I
saw your call on the AVL and figured I’d already had this out with Katsu; he knows he can’t be messing with Toliver or anyone else who comes out there. It’s public land, and moral right isn’t synonymous with legal right.”

She seemed on the verge of boiling. “I didn’t intend to interfere. I’ve looked into Toliver’s background. He’s not some scribble-school chump, Detective. He’s highly respected and damn powerful in academic circles.”

It dawned on Service that Sedge was deeply involved in all this, whatever it was, and that maybe she had neglected to inform her lieutenant. “Have you talked to the state archaeologist?” he asked her, intentionally switching directions to see how she would react.

She made a growling sound. “Those clowns don’t talk to mere cops. We’re the equivalent of dog turds under their flip-flops.”

“You know, we have good senior people in Lansing to run interference for such things.”

“Yeah, and we all know what a big fan of Lansing
you
are,” she said sarcastically.

“Does McKower know what’s going on?”

“Know
what?
”

“About Katsu, Toliver, any of this.”

“Don’t you
get
it? Eight weeks ago
I
didn’t know anything. All I heard was that a bunch of tribals were harassing four-wheeler types out here, and I came out to investigate. Katsu and his people had erected a fence with signs asking all non-Indians to stay away out of respect for his ancestors’ remains.”

She added, “The old village was in a bit of a sandy bowl, eh. Ass-bags on four-wheelers like to rip up and down the dunes, and they were obliterating everything. If you look around in daylight you can see for yourself.” She continued, “I asked Katsu to take down the barriers and to explain to me what the heck was going on, and since then I’ve been meeting with him and learning. I don’t know enough yet to officially talk to anyone downstate, but my instinct was to first go to the attorney general’s office and find out what they knew about this sort of situation. This couldn’t be the first time this sort of thing has happened.”

“The state archaeologist won’t talk?”

“
Hell-ooo!
They talk, but what they say is that cops do
not
have a right or a need to know where historic sites are, or to know what’s in them,
unless
a crime is committed on such ground, and if we detect a suspected crime,
we’re to report it to them. Only then will the SAO verify a site’s existence.
Maybe
.”

What the hell was she telling him?
“That makes no sense,” Service said. “How the hell do we patrol something if we don’t even know it’s there?”

“They’re afraid we’ll reveal secrets the public isn’t entitled to know. Or steal the artifacts ourselves.”

“We patrol and take care of underwater preserves,” he said.

“The ones we know about,” she countered. “There’s a whole lot out there we don’t know anything about.”

Santinaw had propelled him into something that smelled like it could carry him down to Lansing and create a nasty bureaucratic food fight. The thought made Service weary. His every interaction with Lansing was less than satisfying. Last year he had worked a case involving possible graft among personnel in the DNR itself, and he was still disappointed and bitter about the outcome. He had put civilians in jail, but insiders had retired and escaped unscathed.

“You said you talked to the AG’s office?”

“I did, and they didn’t know shit, but they handed me off to a deputy and I did a whole bunch of research and got the assistant AG up to speed. Last week, absolutely out of the blue, the sonuvabitch retired and joined an association of archaeologists as its executive director.” She sighed. “My problem is that according to the records Toliver cites, this place was pre-Ojibwa, and abandoned
before
the Ojibwa even migrated to this area.”

Service asked, “What about the Iroquois remains he talked about?”

“As far as I know, nobody’s ever looked for them at that location,” Sedge said. “Only Katsu claims there was a battle here, and even he doesn’t know exactly where. The stories say the Iroquois camped in this region, dragged their canoes onto the sand, and got drunk. They were headed west on the war road. Katsu claims his people first spotted them to the east, closer to Bay Mills, and followed them west, maintaining a safe distance. The enemy force was nearly three hundred strong, plus some captives they’d collected along the way. The Ojibwa had help from their Odawa brothers and some others, and fell on the
Na-do-we-se
before sunrise. It was over almost before it began. According to the legend, the attackers killed all but three of the enemy, cut the heads off the dead, lined up the severed heads on the beach, and told the survivors to go back to their homeland and tell their people that
if they ever again came onto Ojibwa land, the Ojibwa would build a road of skulls all the way back to their land.”

“Very dramatic. Did they come again?”

“Apparently not,” Sedge said.

“Santinaw says humans can’t own land.”

“There’s so much damn Native American crap to sort from fact,” she said.

Service said, “Katsu claims occupying is temporary ownership even by old tribal standards, occupation and stewardship being synonymous in some cases for some people.”

She nodded. “I listened to the same story and told him it’s
public
land, and he can’t legally block the public from using it. Katsu said to me, ‘Even if they are tearing up our heritage? Every time they shoot through here on their machines, they destroy remains.’ ”

“I corrected him. ‘Artifacts,
not
human remains.’ ”

“ ‘Don’t quibble,’ he told me. He insists there are bodies out there.”

“Corroboration?” Service asked.

This earned him another sour face. “Not exactly, but I learned that about ten years ago a professor from Whitewater State in Wisconsin conducted a dig there. No bodies were found, but months later—the next spring—she reported finding remains that the winter storms and sand-shifts had uncovered. More likely she was back digging again, the second time without authorization, but, having found a body, was afraid someone would find out, so she reported it as being found on the surface. She said she reburied it, but refused to say where.”

“Who’d she tell this to?” Service asked.

“State archaeologist’s office, in writing, and the SAO wrote its own report, in effect declaring, ‘No harm, no foul.’ I had to get the damn thing through FOIA—on my own dime. The department’s lawyers in Lansing were too busy to help me.”

“But you figure she was digging without proper clearance.”

“I wasn’t there, but it smells that way to me. There were some known artifact caches that disappeared at that time. The DNR even knew where they were—we’d cataloged them ourselves—then word got out about the remains and the artifacts went missing.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense to locate the
Na-do-we-se
burials and push the State to reclassify the ground?”

“Katsu insists the remains are there and that it’s wrong to disturb them.”

“You could’ve called me on the 800 last night, let me know you were in the area,” he chastised her.

“Back at you!
Listen to you!
Yeah, sure,” she said, “I
could
have done, but I saw your number and I thought, Holy shit—why’s the Big Dog lifting his leg in
my
backyard?”

Big Dog?
“Katsu’s father is an old friend. He asked me to look into this.”

“Katsu’s
father?
”

“His name’s St. Andrew, but he’s known as Santinaw.”

“You should have checked in with me,” she said. “You know, professional courtesy, trust, teamwork, all that other good shit?”

“Don’t be so territorial,” he said. “I called McKower. She doesn’t know anything’s going on out here, and she asked me to give you a bump, but I wanted to see what I was dealing with first.”

Sedge, clearly exasperated, stared at him. “I think you’d better come inside.”

“The Bomb Shelter?” he said to her.

“Intelligent people usually have good reasons for what they do,” she countered, “even if others are too thick to understand them.”

“No doubt,” he said, as Sedge opened the door to the cinder-block building and flipped on tracklights.

Service stepped inside and tried to keep his mouth from hanging open. The walls were covered with brightly colored paintings of exceedingly hirsute pudenda.
What the hell is this!

“Cat gotcher tongue?” Sedge asked with a shit-eating grin.

“Unique,” he managed to mutter.
What the …?

“All self-portraits, studies in light.”

“Uh, I guess I’m not much of an art aficionado.”

“Do tell,” she said sarcastically. “The el-tee tell you anything about my background?”

Service tried to not stare at the paintings, but he couldn’t help himself.

“My old man’s a tribal cop at Isabella. I grew up in Mount Pleasant, went to college at MSU on an academic scholarship, did a stint in the army, got discharged, and went back to East Lansing where I majored in fine art and went all the way through to my MFA, when it dawned on me that I needed a paying job to support my art, so I took a master’s in law enforcement, applied for the academy, and here I am.”

“That doesn’t explain
everything
,” he said, nodding at the paintings.

“Ah,” she said with a grin. “A big-time gallery in Indianapolis wants them, and so does another in Minneapolis, so I’m going to take some days off and personally deliver the stuff. Meanwhile, I don’t want my colleagues all coming in here to gawk at my pussy.”

Service was dumbfounded.

“You ought to know that Katsu and his bunch hate my ass,” she said.

“It didn’t show.”

“They aren’t going to let some white badge know there’s a rift, but they resent the hell out of a woman with a white man’s badge walking into their deal and maybe controlling their fate. Behind my back they call me
no-jemik bishi-gwadj-ik-we
.”

“Like I said earlier tonight, my Shinob vocabulary isn’t all that current.”

“Female Beaver Whore,” she said with an ironic grin. “Is that totally sophomoric and lame, or what? Someone broke into my place and saw the paintings. I wasn’t surprised, and I still resent you going at me over my el-tee. But you might as well call me Pocahunkus.”

Service stepped back, his mind reeling. “I didn’t go
at
you or over you. Pocahunkus … You mean Pocahontas?”

“I mean what I say, Service. My mother use to call a woman’s privates her hunkus. That’s the title of my collection: ‘Hunkusland.’ ”

“Are you nuts?”

“No, but I can draw a pair if you like. Listen, I may be new by your dinosaur standards, but I
know
what I’m doing, and I especially know how to deal with my
own
turf.”

He couldn’t believe she had once again ignited like a match.
How the hell had she gotten through the academy and field training with that temper?
“Really,” he said, trying to placate her. “I was just asking obvious questions.”

“Don’t patronize me with small talk!” she shot back at him. “I say what I mean and mean what I say. You do the same.”

“That so?”

“Yeah, and I heard you were similar, which is obviously bogus information.”

He was too hungry to listen and tired of her anger, and it was nearing daylight. “Knock it off, Sedge. If you want to paint pictures of your twat and call it art, that’s okay by me, but I’m done being polite. This thing with Katsu and the artifacts doesn’t have anything to do with
your
people or
my
people.
It has to do with a dispute between a state agency and Toliver, and Katsu—who I can’t sympathize with—has no official role or rights in any of this.”

“Figures,” she said.

“
What
figures?”
Calm down
, he told himself.

“You write a guy off because he’s done time.”

“
Katsu
did time?”

“Vehicular homicide—five years in a state lockup in Minnesota.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I until recently, and he didn’t tell me. It was a friend who put me on to it, and then I checked. When I confronted Katsu, he went ballistic.”