Killing a Cold One (23 page)

“Of course I was curious. I asked her and asked her, but she was wrapped so tight she wouldn't say nothing.
Muckwa,
” he added with obvious disgust.

“You tribal, Wheat?”

“Saginaw Chippewa. Former.”

“Mugwop?” Noonan said.

The man curled a lip. “
Muckwa—
Bear Clan. Stubborn as hell, born trouble, especially their women.”

“Where are her kids?” Service asked.

“I don't know, man. She never said nothing about no kids.”

“So you ran?”

“Little time in Mexico can't hurt the soul,” the man said.

“She had two kids, Kurdock.”

“No, just one,” the man said.

“You just told us she never said nothing about kids.”

“She didn't say nothing. I seen her with a kid one time, figured it was hers. You can tell, right?”

Service felt like the man was telling the truth, or his version of it. There were sometimes several versions and multiple follow-up adjustments.

Service showed the man a photograph of the dead woman and the red stick figure from the bathroom stall. “Any bells ringing?”

Kurdock stared at the floor, shrugged. “Windigo sign . . . about all I know. Supposed to keep the cold one away.”

“Cold one?” Noonan asked, and Service let him.

“Right. Like a monster.”

“She used lipstsick to keep away a monster?”

“
Muckwa,
” Kurdock said. “They believe all that shit.”

“But you don't?” Service said.

“I'm Catfish Clan,
Manumaig,
on my father's side. My mother was
Udekumaig,
Whitefish.”

“I'm a fricking Scorpio,” Noonan said. “And everybody hates my ass. Catfish, whitefish, bat shit, bear shit, monsters: All this shit is ozone, like foreign zoo duty.”

Service told the man, “Go back to Tucson and keep your ears on for anything about her kid, or kids. You hear something, you call me right away. Fuck time zones and all that shit, hear me?”

“Am I under arrest?” Kurdock asked

Noonan said, “Is English like your fifth language, asshole? You leave Tucson without telling Sergeant Sisniega, or hear something you fail to pass along, and we'll be back. Then you'll get to see a real monster.”

“Yessir,” Kurdock said.

 

•••

 

Heading north Service looked at his friend. “Jesus, Cherry, can't you drive any faster?”

“Hey, this ain't like Detroit—like, we've got real speed limits.”

“You know anything about monsters?” he asked his friend.

“Like Creeper from Black Lagoon and all dat shit?”

“Like the windigo.”

“No, man, I don't know no monster like that.”

Service telephoned Friday while they were in transit.

“Thought you fell off the edge of the earth,” she said, teasing.

“Lecair committed suicide, and I was ten feet away, pistol in her mouth. We can't find her kids. She drew a lipstick figure where she died, red stick figure.”

“Windigo?”

“Looked like it to me,” Service said. “I didn't really get to talk to her. She went hinky right away, said something about losing one and not losing another.”

Both of them went silent until Friday said, “Gut?”

“Only one kid made it out here.”

“Grady, get her DNA to me ASAP.”

Service said, “Damn, that fits. I'm thinking maybe she lost one kid there and ran out here to hide the other one.”

“We have an unidentified child in the morgue,” Friday said. “Maternal mitochondrial DNA is the genetic link to mom.”

“I'll bring the results myself,” Service said.

“I especially like the myself part,” his girlfriend grumped. “It's about damn time.”

37

Monday, December 15

KETCHKAN LAKE, BARAGA COUNTY

Grady Service was beginning to regret how he had tied up Noonan and Treebone by dragging them into a fool's errand. Part of him wanted to cut them loose and send them home subject to recall, but all of this had broken so fast and erratically that another part kept insisting he keep his reserves close and on the ready. This was the sort of lesson you learned hard in the military, and as a cop. Out-of-reach backup wasn't backup at all. His gut told him to keep the two men near, even if they weren't busy.

It was just after dark when he slogged through the snow into the camp between Ketchkan and High Lakes. There had been more snow as there always was higher up, but no major new dumping, and there was a nice fire going and a couple of lanterns hung on the tent.

Nobody greeted him as he stepped to the fire and shed his pack. No sign of Cale Pilkington. Krelle had dark bags under her eyes, and Allerdyce looked the way he always did: untouched by reality. Service lit a cigarette.

Krelle said, “You didn't get the memo? The whole world quit those things.”

Pretty playful for as disjointed as she looks,
Service thought. Krelle ran her fingers through her hair, looked at him with a crooked smile, her pupils growing, suggesting she was glad he was back. He immediately wondered if Allerdyce had been hitting on her, or if her eyes were simply reacting to fire.

He took two large thermoses out of his pack and set them down. “Dinty Moore beef stew. Heated it in a microwave at a Shell station on the way up here.” He shoved his ruck into the tent, noticed Allerdyce sitting beside Krelle like an adoring dog. He nodded in their direction. “Have I missed something?”

Krelle took a digital camera out of her pocket, hit some buttons, and handed the camera to him. Three wolves in the first frame, all large, one of the three looking like it was inflated by steroids. He looked up at Krelle and raised an eyebrow.

“Keep going,” she said, “Film at eleven.”

He flicked through more stills until he came to a movie segment which he watched for almost a full minute. The three animals were running perpendicular to the camera, or sort of running. It was more like . . .
Jesus! It was just like that hand motion Donte DeJean showed us!
Hand straight up, up and over to fingertips, pull hand heel in, repeat. At the start of the movie when the animals moved, it looked like they were on two legs, but this was just an optical illusion, a snapshot from a sequence that made you see what wasn't.

Was this the source of the dogman crap?
True, some disc jockey had created the whole deal as a prank, but the thing had persisted since the eighties. Had people been seeing these animals all along?

“What are they?” he calmly asked Krelle, who held her arms and hands out to her sides.

“The beefiest one has short legs,” she said. “The other two are large, although their proportions seem more normal. Until we get some actual DNA samples, we're not going to know anything.”

“Where'd you get these?”

Allerdyce said, “Sout' a High Lake, mile mebbe, place call High Crick, jess little piss crick is all, but lots beaver in meadow, some willow, moose sign.”

“Any more moose carcasses?”

Allerdyce shook his head. “No time look, eh. Girlie dere, she want wolfie movies.”

Krelle said, “Mr. Allerdyce's ways in the woods border on the supernatural.”

Service didn't ask for an explanation. He already knew. “Eat some stew. There's fresh bread in my pack from the Huron Mountain Bakery. Who shot the movies?”

Allerdyce nodded almost imperceptibly as he dumped stew from a thermos into a pan and stirred it with his ballpoint pen.

“How close?” Service asked.

Limpy said, “Forty paces, mebbe.”

“What are they?” Service asked.

“Wolfies, t'ink, but not like I seen 'fore.”

“Behavior suggest anything?” he asked Krelle.

But Allerdyce answered. “Pack for sure, family mebbe; sure di'n't like my smell.”

Service asked, “Can you find them again?”

“T'ink so,” Allerdyce said. “You want me pop one?”

“No,” Krelle squawked.

“I take one kittle from pack, old man an' old lady can make more kittles replace one dey lose.”

“No,” Service said.

The poacher rolled his eyes.

Krelle said, “Scientists do this sort of thing in the name of science.”

“Yeah, I remember a bunch of black guys down south that science types let carry syphilis to the end,” Service said.

“This is
not
like that,” Krelle snapped.

“Wolves are still protected here,” Service said. “All wolves.”

“You're assuming
Canis lupus,
and we don't know that.”

“It's a subspecies?” Service asked. He'd never really had a good grasp of species classification systems.

“In fact,” Krelle said, “there are forty subspecies of
Canis.
”

“In my business, when we don't know what something is, we assume it should be protected,” Service said.

“That's to be expected,” the woman said, “even commended, but it is totally inflexible.”

“How it has to be,” he said.

Allerdyce intervened. “Want me track scat, hair?”

Service nodded, looked at the woman. “Where's Cale?”

“Home. He's not well suited to tent life in the snow.”

Service liked Pilkington, thought he was a good man and did a good job with the moose herd. “We all work differently,” he said in the biologist's defense, knowing full well that over recent years experienced state biologists had been forced out of the field and into their offices by too-small budgets.

“You don't have to live out here,” Service said. “There are places you can stay and come and go up here.”

“Mr. Allerdyce already kindly offered the same, but no thanks; I prefer to remain right where we are.”

Service looked at Allerdyce. “No firearms.”

Allerdyce cackled happily. “Don't need gun for dem wolfies. Dey won't bodder no pipples.”

“I'll spend the night, head out in the morning,” Service said. “Call if you get lucky,” he added, immediately regretting his choice of words, especially when Krelle's face turned scarlet and Allerdyce's eyes twinkled.
Good God, it's already happened!

38

Wednesday, December 17

ISHPEMING, MARQUETTE COUNTY

Champ's Funeral Home was just south of the infamous Yooper Tourist Trap on US 41 / M-28. It was a brick building, darkened by soot and smoke, and close to some ancient iron-mine structures.

Joan Champ had called just as Service was getting into his Tahoe that morning. There was also a text message that Allerdyce and Krelle had hiked north to High Creek just before first light. Tree and Noonan were at Friday's office and heading to Baraga County to check birth records at the hospital, and at local church birth registries. They were still trying to find information on Martine Lecair's twins. Service suggested they might have been born elsewhere, maybe in another state, and Friday said she was working that angle through various online databases.

Service waved as Noonan and Tree sped west past him. He pulled into Champ's parking lot and punched in Val Houston's phone number. Val had been a classmate of his at Northern long, long ago. Back when they were both students, she had also bartended at the Holiday Inn. She had gone on to New York City to Columbia Unversity and gotten her master's degree in social work. A Potawatomi, she had married an Ojibwe lawyer and moved to the Walpole Island Ojibwe Reserve in Ontario. Houston had once explained the Council of Three Fires to him, the confederation of Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi tribes. The Ojibwe were the faith keepers, the Ottawa, the trade keepers, and the Potawatomi, the fire keepers, or “cheek blowers.”

“Val, this is Grady.”

“Let me guess—you miss me?” she said.

“You miss
me?
” he countered.

“Not so much after the first fifteen years,” she said, and laughed out loud.

“You know me and communcations,” he said sheepishly.

“Meaning no commo, at all. I don't suppose you're somewhere near Walpole?”

“Parking lot of a funeral home in Ishpeming.”

“Not family, I hope.”

“A case,” he said.

“When did animals start being handled by funeral homes?” she asked. “Things that bad up there economically?”

“They are,” he said, “but that's not why I'm calling.”

Val Houston was a social worker at the reserve. When Service was a Troop, he'd once driven over to Walpole to see Val and her husband Briscoe. The island was almost all swamp, with mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. She and Briscoe would talk about nothing but reparations from the United States and Canada to aboriginals. Service had lasted one day and departed. He had little interest in the past, his or theirs, or the issues that lay in the way-back-when. Yesterday was gone. You had today and tomorrow, especially today. Still, Val was a smart cookie, a straight talker, and a master at navigating government red tape. If anyone could find certain Native Americans, it would be Val. Why he'd not thought of her until now was beyond him.

“I assume you're looking for someone,” Houston said.

“I am.”

“Let me guess: female?”

“Yes, but it's business, not personal. One of your people.”

“Walpolean?”

“No, Ojibwe, from up here. Teacher. She had twins, now five or six years old.”

“Hold up, big guy: You
do
know Walpole's in Canada?”

“I know some tribal folks don't pay a helluva lot of attention to US or Canadian borders.”

“Any chance the twins are Canadian-born?”

This had never entered his mind as a possibility. “Nothing pointing that way,” he said.

“You said the teacher
had
twins. Meaning?”

“Suicide, offed herself. One of her kids was murdered, identity confirmed by DNA. The other kid is missing. We don't have positive ID on the missing kid; no name, nothing really. The woman's name was Martine Lecair. Don't know where she was born either, but we assume up this way somewhere.” The mental picure of Lecair dead on a floor in Bodison persisted, along with the lipstick figure on the bathroom wall. He told Houston the story, about all the killings and bodies.

“Good god,” she said. “It sounds like a bloodbath up there. How come it's not major news?”

“All tribals so far,” he said. “Maybe they lack news value.”

“And maybe you people sat on a lot of it, to keep the investigation close?”

“Could be a factor,” he admitted. “You know anything about windigos?”

“Good
god,
Grady! Listen, I hope you're not buying into that windigo psychosis crap.”

“A psychosis is real, right?”

“Listen to me, Grady Service. Here's the truth about the windigo psychosis: It was white anthropologists' attempt to rationalize murder by groups and individuals in situations where survival was threatened and food was short, too much snow to get out and hunt, and not enough summer and fall preparation . . . Hear what I'm saying?”

“Donner Party, Andes crash survivors?” Both situations had spawned so-called survival cannibalism.

“There you have it,” Val Houston said. “Same behavior, different label; problem of white-skinned academics being blinded to the dynamic and wanting to give it a forgiving, dismissive new set of clothes. Tell me what you've seen.”

He did, sparing no detail.

“Seriously, not a windigo, Grady. Windigo is about starving people desperate for food. Seems to me you've got a nutcase either trying to make a statement to the world, or hiding something else he's up to.”

“He?”

She laughed. “Near hunnert percent, big guy.”

“Social workers deal with this sort of thing?”

“Do you know how difficult it is to find missing Indian children?”

“No.”

“Massive dislocation, drugs, violence, mental illness, poverty, kids ending up with grandfathers, uncles, aunties, cousins, distant friends, unofficial foster families. Many are sent away and keep moving. Finding Indian kids can be next to impossible, depending on the situation.”

“People don't care?”

“Some do; many don't. Many can barely care for themselves, and this isn't some recent phenomenon. It's been like this for close to a century. This is Canada, Grady. Just like where you are, we get paid little and are expected to do everything. Give me some call-back numbers.”

Service did, closing with “Do what you can.” He put away his cell phone and went into Champ's funeral home.

A vaguely familiar shape stepped over to him in the reception area. “Speedoboy,” Service said.

“Fish cop,” the man said with a mouthful of gleaming white teeth.

“You're a long way from your doghouse,” Service said.

“Where that motherfucker, Noonan?”

“On a mission. You two have a history?”

“Gangsta, that one. I come to help.”

“Help with what?”

“You talk to Father Bill Eyes?”

“We did. I also talked to Val Houston.”

“Cheek-blower social worker over to Walpole?”

“She told me the windigo thing is a bunch of hot air.”

“She wrong, Service. Windigo is serious shit.”

“No doubt. What do you want here?”

“Payback.”

“Don't we all. For what?”

“Kelly Johnstone.”

“What about her?”

“My ma. Heard she offed herself.”

Speedoboy is Dwayne Johnstone?

“Heard there's a reward,” the man added.

“For a suicide?”

“I hear she got whacked.”

“Your mother gets whacked and you want a reward to find out who did it?”

“A man gotta live,” Dwayne said.

“I think our definitions of living differ significantly,” Service said. “What do you think you can do to help?”

“You lookin' for bitch called Lecair, coupla brats?”

Grady Service stared at the hulking form. “What if we were?”

“One of them is over to the Soo, man. Some cops you are . . . can't find a body one town over.”

“You need a geography refresher, Dwyane. The Soo's a hundred and eighty miles east. You need to chill.”

“Don't dis me, man. She had old man named Bernard. Way I hear it, she got tired of her old man and no money.”

“So she took her kids to the Soo?”

“No, man, she split like a spirit. Her old man run to Soo, live out Sugar Island. So how much is this shit worth?”

“Bambi Sorrowhorse said you're a good man.”

“Even good men need money,” Johnstone said.

“I got nothing for you, Chief.”

“Don't call me Chief.”

“Got nothing for you, Geronimo.”

Johnstone sputtered. “I be 'round. When you ready, we be ready.”

“That's comforting, I'm sure.”

The man tossed a small deerskin bag to Service. “They talking about that shit everywhere, man. I come see. Medicine bags up on the Gorge, out on the rez, too. Keeps windigo off,” he added with a grin. “You don't gotta fuckin' clue what goin' down, do you, man?”

Grady Service said, “It's been real instructive, Dwayne. But your mother's not dead.”

The man stared, blinking fast. “Say
what?
”

“You heard me: She's not dead. She's missing, intentionally, and we don't know where she is, or why she staged her own suicide.”

“ 'Member, time come, we all be there,” the man said.

“I'd be more impressed if you'd have been here before this shit started. Your mother's not dead.”

“That ain't the word on the drums,” he said, turning and walking out the front door.

Service called out for Joan Champ and she answered faintly, “Back here.”

He found her in some kind of lab. There was a naked old man on the stainless-steel table in front of her.

“Artist at work?” he asked. The room smelled of chemicals and sanitizers, an unpleasant combination.

“That trooper you run with—you hauling her ashes?” Champ asked.

“Not your business.”

“You see the fat boy out front?” she asked.

“I did. I'll wait outside if you want to talk.”

“Five minutes, max,” she said.

The next time he saw her, she was in a sleeveless black cocktail dress so tight he was sure she'd been poured into it. She had a cashmere overcoat on her arm and held it out to him.

“Be a gentleman?”

Service helped her into her coat and she looked up at him, winked, and said, “You a player?”

“Not hardly.”

Joan Champ smiled. “Hey, I'm an unwilling mortician in the U.P. What's not crazy about that combo?”

“You called me.”

“For the fat boy. We went to school together, long time ago.”

“That's all you got?”

She smiled and nodded.

Service walked out ahead of her, got into his truck, and watched as her Cadillac fishtailed into the street.