Killing a Cold One (18 page)

27

Sunday, November 16

HANCOCK, HOUGHTON COUNTY

Grady Service telephoned his retired CO friend Gus Turnage to run down an address for him; it took about fifteen minutes. He didn't call ahead to the house. The man would be there or not.

The strange pouches were never far from Service's thoughts. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't help wondering about the pouches surrounding the red effigy at the campground. Indians being snatched and killed and butchered. The other word he couldn't shed:
windigo.
Jesus.

Allerdyce had come back, and Service sent the poacher and Noonan home and took Treebone with him. Father Bill Eyes had mentioned the pouches and said he'd get a contact number for this Grant Lupo, but so far, no dice. Service kept the radio tunes blasting loudly the whole way, as if decibel level alone would crush the awful things they had seen, but he knew deep down it wouldn't work. Monsters, real or imagined, had to be confronted individually and face-to-face. There was no option in this. He also knew the word
monster
really translated to
human,
not to other species. Man was the only true monster in this universe.

They found the house, overlooking Mont Ripley Ski Resort. The old Quincy mine smelter and brick stack were almost directly below them on the shore of the Portage Lake Ship Canal; south, they could see the buildings of Michigan Tech. There was a Jeep in the yard, and Service parked behind it. It had patches of salmon-colored Bondo mixed with splotches of pea-green primer, ugly beyond description and only partially covered by fresh snow.

The man who came to the door was remarkably tall—six-eight, at least, Service thought—muscular, lean but strong, late thirties, with long blond hair that stuck out in all directions, a well-trimmed Vandyke with an orange tint. He wore a T-shirt proclaiming
remedial calculus don't add up
, faded jeans with holes in the knees, and unlaced logging boots reaching almost to his knees. Reading cheaters hung around his neck on a faded purple shoestring.

“We would have called,” Service said, “but we ran out of time. We're looking for Grant Lupo?”

“That's me,” the man said, stepping back to let them in. His handsome face had a used quality to it, leathery and shiny, as if it would soon crack like an unoiled baseball glove. His eyes, on the other hand, were almost animal-like.
Oddest eyes I've ever seen,
Service thought, pale green with the sparkle of peridot.

“Father Bill Eyes call you?” Service asked, showing his badge.

“Yeah, sure; I think I saw a message from Bill somewhere in my call-back pile.”

“You didn't call back.”

The man smiled. “See, the way it is, I get maybe fifty phone calls a day, and a hundred to two hundred e-mails. I figure if people seriously want to talk, they'll find a way. That saves my time, which is what matters most to me. It's not a perfect system, but it seems to work. You found me, right?”

Tree laughed out loud.

Lupo asked, “You guys want to do lunch? I did graduate work in NYC at Columbia, and I love how two-one-twos talk to each other.
Do lunch
. . . Is that a hoot or what? Happy horseshitisms from Great Gobshites of Gotham. I've got fresh venison stew. My recipe. I like wild game, about all I eat. Can't handle factory meat drowned in antibiotics.”

Service knew Tree had never met a meal he didn't like and said, “Sounds good.”

They followed the man down a long hall lined with dozens of rifles on racks, or slung on wooden pegs. The rooms they passed were stacked with books, or wooden crates filled with tents and sleeping bags and sundry outdoor equipment, cardboard boxes, steamer trunks with
lupo
stenciled on the sides in white. The house looked like a pass-through for a small transient army, and the kitchen looked like it had been decades since its last cleaning. When he saw it, Service mumbled, “Not hungry.”

Lupo grinned. “This only looks like the Ptomaine Palace. I cook great. What I don't do so great is clean up.”

The professor ladled rich, dark brown stew with floating cranberries into a red Styrofoam bowl and gave it to Tree, who sniffed it approvingly. Lupo looked at Service, who grudgingly nodded.
Damn stuff does smell good.

They ate with black plastic spoons embossed with
huskies
in yellow script. Lupo got a bowl of white onions and thin-sliced red peppers from the fridge and set it in front of them. “Recipe's got jalapenos, but you can't see 'em because I grind 'em fine to spread the seeds. I like things hot.”

The concoction was thick and surprisingly savory, with a robust bite. The professor grabbed a paper bag from the floor, pulled out a flaky baguette, and tore it apart. “Fresh,” he said. “Bakery in town's run by a psychotic Estonian who claims to have once been persecuted by the KGB. Could even be true, but nobody cares. His bakery is outstanding, and the world's not as neat or categorized as it once seemed. Beer or wine?”

“Neither,” the officers said in chorus.

“On duty,” Service explained.

“Beer with everything for me,” Lupo said. “It's hard to spoil beer.”

The man wrenched a top off a Labatt Blue long-necker and tossed the cap in the sink. “So what's the yank?” he asked, taking a swig. “People aren't usually in much of a hurry to see people in my line of work.”

Service thought the professor seemed unusually energized, unorthodox, and earthy, and not at all what he had anticipated. His relative youth was most surprising, and for some reason disconcerting. He'd thought of expert academics as in their sixties or seventies—at least closer to his own age.

The conservation officer opened his briefcase and handed an envelope to Lupo. “We'd like for you to take a look at these; if you want to wait until after we eat, we'll understand, but we're interested in knowing your impressions.”

Lupo put the photos on the table, raised an eyebrow, and took another heaping spoonful of stew.

“We think they're tribals,” Service said. “DNA.”

Lupo said nothing until he had gotten through all the photographs. He spent considerable time looking at each one. “Interesting,” he said, returning the photos. “Where'd you get those?”

“Marquette County,” he said.

Just “interesting”?
Service thought.

“Recent?” the professor asked.

Service said, “The two older females in August, the child at Halloween, the other female about a week ago, and the effigy, just a few days ago, in Baraga County.”

Lupo scooped another spoonful of stew. “They've been buried properly, I assume.”

“No, the bodies are being retained as evidence in the investigations. There're no legal reasons to hurry. We've got them secured.”

Lupo went through the photos again and pulled out one of the little girl from the trailer on the Little Huron River. “Where's this one?”

“With the others.”

“I wouldn't mind seeing all of them.”

“Why?” Service asked.

“I assume you want me to gauge whether or not you've got a windigo on the loose,” the professor said. “There's no other reason I can think of for you to be here. I've heard about the murders and wondered, based on the dogman rumors floating around. You do know what
windigo
translates to, right?” Lupo didn't wait for an answer. “It translates into English as ‘evil spirit that devours humans,' but this has been shortened to ‘cannibal' over the years. I'd like to see the bodies. Every tribe in the north has its own version of, and word for, windigo.”

“Sounds like a lot of hooey to me,” Service said, adding, “We'll have to see about you taking a look at the bodies.”

“People always need to believe in something,” Lupo argued. “Consider transubstantiation. For Roman Catholics, communion is partaking in the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. Literally, not figuratively. Is that not cannibalism?” Lupo grinned. “May I ask why the DNR is involved in this?”

“All agencies are short on manpower,” Service said. “We're assisting the State Police.”

“Now would be good for me,” Lupo said, taking a last mouthful of stew and jumping to his feet. “But you can call after you talk to your handlers,” he said dismissively.

Service and Treebone were outside when Denninger called on the cell phone, laughing. “Unreal. Forty tickets in all, and we took eight deer. All the blinds were big-time overbaited, all permanent structures just onto State land. My wrist aches from paperwork. One guy copped to three bears, including a cub. Another pal owned up to four wolves. And get this: Half the guys in camp didn't buy licenses, and never have. Yet not one of these assholes has a DNR prior. Makes you wonder how long this shit has been going on.”

“No drugs?”

“Two pounds of weed, and sixty-one cartons of Indiana cigarettes to peddle. Three locals stopped to buy smokes
while
we were there. I called ATF and they're geeked.”

“How much stuff did you seize?”

“Everything—wheels, rifles, all of it. You'll love the photos of the flatbeds and wreckers hauling away their trucks.”

Grady Service felt a twinge.
I should be in the Mosquito right now, not chasing fucking bogeymen.
The thought that the Mosquito Wilderness was unprotected made his heart skip and blood pressure go up.

“Great job,” he told Denninger.

“Fucking eh!” she said happily. “This feels like a big one for all the good guys.”

28

Monday, November 17

MARQUETTE

Friday okayed Lupo viewing the remains, and Service was mildly surprised to discover they were being stored at the unofficial satellite morgue in Marquette, a facility he'd never heard of, which made him wonder how many other things he didn't know. The building had once housed iron-mining shipping operations. It was a sturdy brick structure covered with ivy, now dusted with snow. There were other buildings nearby, all of them with flagpoles and Green Bay and Northern Michigan University flags snapping in the wind.

Service and Tree came in the Tahoe, Lupo in his own Jeep. Friday wasn't there yet when the men went to the door and knocked.

The facility technician was an older man named Pellosio, who shaved his head and wore ankle-high duck boots and a black wool overcoat over a sharply creased charcoal-gray suit. “Chemicals get all over everything down here and destroy shoe leather,” he explained, catching Service's questioning eye. “Rubber seems to last longer. But it won't be a problem for you folks. Gotta work in this crud for it to eat your kicks.”

Pellosio unlocked a massive gray steel door by punching a long sequence into a keypad and jerking the door aside when the light flashed green. He stepped inside, turned on the lights, and waved them in.

Service saw drawers lining the walls of several long rooms. The place reeked of breath-catching chemicals, disinfectants, and God knows what else. There was a faded hand-painted sign by the front door that read
dahmer's diner
. There were three pinwheel stars under the words, the stars fashioned from severed fingers.

“This work turns us all nutters,” the technician said.

Friday told the man what they wanted to see and he shook his head. “The little girl is god-awful,” the man said. “Horrific.”

Service didn't need to be reminded.

The bodies were on gray metal mortuary trays in a locked room way in the back, and set aside under a sign—
active criminal investigation under way.

“Instructions from the ME are to not disturb the remains,” Pellosio explained. “Ain't done nothing but keep our guests nice and frosty.”

Friday arrived just as the technician pulled one of the trays out of its refrigerated compartment. Lupo bent over and reached down. Service handed him latex gloves and said, “I'm going outside for a smoke.”

“No need; go ahead and smoke in here,” Pellosio said with a sly grin. “We all do. Who's gonna tell?”

“I need to be outside,” Service said. He hated shit with dead bodies, always had.

Lupo, Treebone, and Friday came out after nearly an hour, all of them rubbing their hands. “I'm starved,” the professor said.

“After
that?
” Service asked.

“They're just remains. I guess I'm used to them. I'd think cops would be inured to all that as well.”

Service guessed the man was testing them, and he couldn't figure out why. “It's not the remains; it's the fact that they've been murdered, and we don't have a single viable lead.”

Lupo grunted sympathetically. “We academics hate unanswered questions, too.”

 

•••

 

The restaurant was called Autres Temps (Other Times) and advertised its specialty as molten BBQ Louisiana-style baby back ribs. Lupo asked for a double order and extra hot sauce, which he then doctored with a green bottle that materialized from this pocket. “Hmm,” he said after one bite. “C-plus tops, even with the major saucing intervention.”

“You wanted to see the bodies,” Friday reminded the man. “Now you've seen them. What can you tell us ?”

“Can't say,” he said, through a mouthful.

Friday said, “
You can't say?
You drive all the way over here and you
can't say?
”

Service could sense her thermometer rising.

“Life's a gamble,” Lupo said. “A cop once told me that, and he wasn't half as good-looking as you,” he added with a wink.

Service had to force away the urge to bitch-slap the smug asshole.

“That's it? That's all you've got for us?” Friday asked incredulously, her voice rising.

Lupo said, “Did you have extraneous DNA in any of these cases?”

Friday said, “No.”

“Then you don't have a windigo. The thing is, baseline, we're talking psychosis, a possession, if you will—to put it in the vernacular. Technology aside, a windigo eats his victims uncooked. Logically and syllogistically, get a windigo, you'll also have his DNA. It's as simple as that.”

“It looks like someone chewed on the remains,” Service pointed out.

“Maybe,” Lupo said. “But are we talking human teeth, or something else?”

“No endogenous DNA from any other species,” Friday said.

“Are you telling us there's no possibility of a windigo?” Service asked.

“I neither said nor meant to imply that. Windigo is certainly
possible,
but not in any traditional sense. The cases I'm aware of all involve aboriginals, virtually all males, and they eat the victims with their own teeth. It is possible, theoretically and hypothetically, that someone fabricated a device to rip at flesh and simulate the human bite plate, but this might be a bittuva long-ass reach, eh?”

“
These
bodies?” Friday asked.

“Hypothetically, but you'd have to test flesh for metal fragments.”

“High-quality steel doesn't leave fragments,” Service pointed out.

Lupo said, “I assume that's true, but I thought investigators wanted to rule out all things that can be ruled out in order to keep focusing more tightly on what
can't
be ruled out.”

Service could almost hear Friday's mind churning.

“If it were me, I'd employ a high-end metal detector to sweep the bodies and see what turns up. No ping, I'd surgically liberate tissue samples, put them under an electron microscope, and see what's there to see. I'd keep pushing until I'd exhausted all possibilities.”

Out on the street after lunch, Friday said to Lupo, “Next time we call, I hope you'll have the courtesy of calling back.”

“If I can,” the professor said, with no hint of commitment.

Treebone coughed to disguise the word
asshole.

Service looked at Friday. “Pompous jerk.”