The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  Louis thought about what Tooki had said about coming from the streets of Madras. Louis knew little about India, but he did know that it operated on a strict caste system, with a society of very rich and very poor.

  “Louis Kincaid,” Emily said.

  He looked back at her. She wasn’t reading from the paper now. “Dissatisfied PI, loner, wanders the earth like Caine in Kung Fu, looking for wrongs to right and women to love.” She smiled. “And he’s fluent in French.”

  “Not yet.” He took a drink of beer, debating whether to tell her about Joe and Lily. He wanted to tell someone about the good in his life, but that part of him that couldn’t share personal stuff put on the brakes, and he decided it could wait.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What do you speak?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Hello...Farentino?”

  The waitress appeared, asking if they wanted anything else. Louis looked at Emily, nodded at their empty beer bottles and ordered two more.

  “You know, the others all have nicknames,” Emily said.

  “Then we need nicknames.”

  Emily glanced at the professor reading his Stendhal. “The Red and the Black?”

  “Too literal. Rocky and Bullwinkle?”

  “Now you’re making short jokes?”

  The new round of beers appeared. They both took drinks and then Emily leaned her head back on the booth and closed her eyes.

  “What about Steele?” Louis asked. “Did you look him up?”

  Emily opened her eyes. “I get hired sight unseen with a phone call from a mystery woman? You bet I looked him up.”

  She sat up and looked at her legal pad. “Michigan man all the way,” she said. “Born and raised near Mt. Pleasant, undergrad degree from Central, master’s from MSU.”

  “In what?” Louis asked.

  “Double major in psychology and legal studies, minor in art.”

  “Art?”

  Emily shrugged. “I knew a cop once who glued rhinestones to her handcuffs.”

  “What was the master’s in?”

  “Psychology.”

  Louis took a drink of beer. “Any family?

  “He’s never been married. He has no living relatives, in fact,” Emily went on. “He’s an only child, and his father died of a heart attack when Steele was young. For some reason, Steele went to live with his aunt and uncle not long after the father died, even though his mother was still alive.”

  “Was his father a cop?”

  “No, but his uncle was Mecosta County Sheriff.”

  “Where’s Mecosta County?”

  “West of Mt. Pleasant. Pretty rural. Biggest place to work is the shoe factory.”

  Louis took a drink. Maybe Steele’s grieving mother thought her son needed a firm hand after losing his dad. And ending up a state police captain was a helluva lot better than stuffing boots in boxes. But just the idea of a parent dumping their kid on someone else because things got a little too tough hit a sore spot with him.

  “So, Steele followed in his uncle’s footsteps?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah, he started as a state trooper right out of college. It looks like his degree did him some good because he moved up fast and ended up in the recruitment department, doing background investigations and psych interviews for new candidates.”

  Louis nodded. “I remember that from my first job in Ann Arbor, the fit-for-duty shit.”

  “That led to a job with the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

  “Ah, yes, internal affairs, the assholes who bust other cops.”

  Louis realized Emily was staring at him oddly. He had heard the bitterness in his own voice and so had she. But he wasn’t about to spill his guts to her about what happened in Loon Lake. But then, given her access to FBI files, maybe she already knew.

  He took a big swig of beer. “So, what does he do, when he’s not being king?” Louis said.

  “He goes skiing, takes trips all over the world to the most dangerous slopes. Went to New Zealand last year to ski down some volcano there.”

  Louis nodded. “Expensive hobby. Maybe that’s why he wears the same black suit every day.”

  “He also collects antique death masks.”

  “What?”

  “Death masks,” Emily said. She must have seen something on his face because she laughed softly. “It’s not as gruesome as it sounds. In Victorian times, it was popular to make a cast of the corpse’s face for identification. Turns out, folks liked to keep them, and they eventually became collector’s items.”

  “Still sounds macabre,” Louis said.

  “It’s not much different than forensic sculpting.” Emily punctuated this with a huge yawn.

  Louis realized she looked exhausted. “Maybe we should get going,” he said.

  She sat up straighter. “No, I’m okay.”

  “I should warn you,” Louis said, “Steele wants us to hit the road running. We’ve already gotten our first cases.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and he gave her a quick summary of Steele’s approach.

  “You all got to choose your cases,” she said. “Which one is left?”

  Cam had taken the hookers, Junia took the black widow and Tooki got the Palmer Park wolf pack.

  “Three hanged students at Central. Apparent suicides but too many questions. Maybe a cult thing,” Louis said.

  Emily stared at him for a long time then looked away. He had the weird feeling she had gone somewhere else. The swoosh of the dishwasher started up and Louis looked around. The place was almost empty.

  “Where are you staying?” Louis asked.

  “A friend of a friend got me a townhouse out near Patriarche Park. Cute place but a little big for one person.”

  It didn’t surprise him that Emily Farentino was still alone in the world. She was certainly attractive, but there had always been something about her that was all business, all career. Like a lot of women cops he knew. Hell, like all cops he knew.

  “Those files you have on us,” Louis said. “Junia, Cam, and Tooki. Any of them married?”

  She rifled back through her notes, then looked up. “None of us is married. None of us has children.”

  Steele had put together a team of loners. People without family or spouses. It had to have been deliberate because a man like Steele didn’t leave anything to chance. He wanted the team to be their sole focus, the only thing they thought about, maybe the only thing in life that gave them purpose.

  It was possible that Steele knew about Joe and didn’t care. But Louis was sure now Steele didn’t know about Lily. If he did, there was no way Louis would have gotten this job. A cop desperate to reconnect with a ten-year-old daughter didn’t fit Steele’s mold.

  “Louis?”

  He looked over at Emily.

  “Something wrong?”

  Again, the temptation was strong to tell her about Lily. But he knew he couldn’t take the chance. He had taken this job partly because it had given him the chance to come back to Michigan to be close to Lily. He didn’t want anything to screw that up.

  “No,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Let’s get going. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The church was quiet. The only sounds came from the click-click of Tooki pecking away at his computer and the sigh of the wind through the broken window pane.

  Louis had gotten to work at eight but was the last one to arrive. It didn’t surprise him. The team was primed and eager to move forward. Since the moment when Steele had handed out their gold shields, there had been an undercurrent among them, like they all understood they were connected to Steele in some unique way and that now their powers came from him.

  The first business of the day was a private meeting with Steele. Junia Cruz had been the first to meet with Steele and had left quickly after, heading up to Bay City, the site of the black widow case. Tooki had finished his meeting as well and was now hunched over his computer, tethered by earphones to a CD playe
r on his desk, almost hidden from view by a white case file box. Emily had been third up and had said nothing to Louis when she returned. She went immediately to her desk and began to read the thick case file on the college suicides.

  As he waited to be summoned to the choir loft, Louis concentrated on his own task—learning to navigate the computer.

  The access the computer provided was mind-boggling. He was used to a dispatcher or admin person doing all the work or wearing down his own shoe leather in search for information. Now, here at his fingertips was a new world of databases. Michigan BOLOS, warrants, rap sheets, driver licenses, inmate populations, vehicle info and anything else anyone had ever typed into state’s computers. Even better was being able to tap into Lexis Nexis, a powerful search engine, and Westlaw, a new database of all trials.

  Within weeks, Tooki had told him, they would also have access to VICAP, the FBI database that categorized crimes of a similar nature, an invaluable tool to catch serial offenders who crossed state lines.

  Footsteps thumped from the spiral staircase and Louis glanced up to see Cam coming down from the choir loft. He looked different today—cleaner. Same leather jacket but new jeans and a pale, yellow dress shirt. He carried a large, white storage box to his desk.

  “You’re up, Lou,” Cam said looking to Louis.

  Louis headed upstairs. He hadn’t slept well. Too much beer with Emily and too much thinking afterwards. He had finally drifted off about three a.m.

  At the top of the stairs, Louis paused. The choir loft was filed with gray shadows, silhouetting Steele and his desk in front of a peaked window. Louis hadn’t heard music when he was downstairs but now he could—a whisper of a piano coming from the CD player on the otherwise empty bookshelf. Behind the desk was a credenza that held a neat stack of folders, a long wood plaque engraved with the words The Truth Takes Time, and a miniature wood staircase that spiraled up and stopped in midair. Something an architect might create as a model, Louis guessed—a staircase to nowhere.

  “Louis, come in.”

  Steele stood up and gestured to a chair in front of his desk. Today he wore a crisp white shirt with a burgundy tie, the only color to break up the black vest and slacks. A matching suit coat was draped across the back of his chair.

  Louis saw the jewel case for the CD sitting on Steele’s desk and could read the title—George Winston’s Winter into Spring.

  “Sit down, please.”

  Louis took the chair and waited as Steele reached back to pick up a thin manila folder from the credenza. He handed it to Louis then sat down.

  “This is what we have on the boys in the box,” he said.

  Louis opened the folder. Inside was the same photo of the skulls that had been tacked to the board yesterday. Clipped to the picture was a Xerox of an article from the Daily Mining Gazette, the northwest U.P.’s newspaper. The headline read: BONES FOUND IN MINE. The date was October 1979.

  Louis scanned the short article, which revealed little more than the fact that the bones were found in a wooden box by two teenagers trespassing in an old copper mine.

  There was a second shorter article about how the community was organizing a memorial service and burial for the boys, whose remains had never been claimed.

  Louis looked up at Steele. “Where’s the rest?”

  “There is nothing else.”

  “There has to be more,” Louis said. “The ME’s report, witness statements, interviews, forensic tests on the bones. Where is the real file?”

  “I imagine it’s locked away in some dusty store room in the Keweenaw County Sheriff’s Office.”

  For a second or two, Louis could only stare at Steele. “I don’t understand, sir,” he said finally. “If the sheriff’s office up there asked the state to come in this why didn’t they provide you with what they had?”

  “They never asked us in,” Steele said. “You’re going to have to persuade them to extend an invitation.”

  Louis was quiet, remembering his last case here in Michigan back in December, up on Mackinac Island. State investigator Norm Rafsky had treated the local police chief like he was a dog catcher. In the end, Rafsky turned out to be a decent guy—in fact Rafsky’s recommendation was one of the reasons Louis had gotten this job—but in the early days of the investigation Rafsky’s hubris and condescension had won him no friends and no cooperation.

  Louis remembered what Steele had said the first day, that the real work would come later, that these cases were only to see how they handled themselves. But Emily had been given a thick case file and both Cam and Tooki had full evidence boxes. Was this some kind of special test?

  Louis set the folder on the desk. “With all due respect, sir,” he said, “I don’t like the idea of muscling my way into a small agency’s investigation when they haven’t asked for help.”

  “I don’t expect you to muscle anyone,” Steele said. “I expect you to use persuasion.”

  The music was there again, a slow, solemn trill of piano chords. Steele reached back and turned the music down. It seemed a long time before he spoke again.

  “Listen to me, Louis,” Steele said. “Most of the time we’re invited in. But there have been times in my career when I have felt compelled to pursue jurisdiction. In all but one case we were successful in bringing a killer to justice and saving lives.”

  And the one time you failed?

  The question was there but Louis didn’t ask it. He already knew the answer. The failure had been the Loon Lake cop killings.

  “We are justice seekers, Louis,” Steele said. “That’s what we do and who we are. And we do not let small town sheriffs, politics, lack of evidence, or even time get in our way.”

  Steele picked up the thin file, and for a second time, held it out to Louis. “Until we get other cases, this is your focus. Make something happen.”

  Louis took the folder. “Yes, sir.”

  Steele picked up a second folder from his credenza. “Here is some background on the Keweenaw County Sheriff, Reuben Nurmi. It will help you figure out how best to approach him.”

  Of course, Louis thought, wasn’t that the nut truth behind psychology? Know the man’s mind and you have his heart. Louis accepted the second folder.

  “I want you up there by tonight,” Steele said. “Check in with Camille after you talk to the sheriff.”

  Louis stood up and left the loft. He could hear the piano music again as he went down the spiral staircase. Everyone was gone but Cam, who was at his desk, sipping a Mountain Dew as he read his hooker files.

  Louis went to his desk and put the folders in his new briefcase. When he grabbed his jacket off the chair, Cam looked up.

  “Where you off to?” he asked.

  “Keweenaw Peninsula.”

  Cam swung his chair around. “Keweenaw,” he said. “My grandfather used to talk about that place all the time.”

  “He from there?” Louis asked.

  “Nah, just made a few trips up to hunt until diabetes took his feet. But he absolutely fucking loved it up there. Called it God’s Country.”

  Louis snapped his briefcase shut. “I have to get going. Catch you in a few days.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cam said as he turned back to his files. “Stay safe, my friend, and watch out for the wolves.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was almost a nine-hour drive to Keweenaw but, five hours in, he was stiff and had a hunger-headache from the Ho Hos and coffee he had grabbed back at the Marathon station before leaving Lansing.

  He had been to the Upper Peninsula before, but he had forgotten how long the distances were between towns and how desolate it could be—especially now in early April when the tourists hadn’t yet returned and there was nothing to relieve the eye except spindly pines and heaps of dirty snow bordering the blacktop.

  The road was deserted. He hadn’t seen a town of any size since crossing the Mackinac Bridge hours ago. He needed a hamburger, a Dr Pepper and a bathroom.

  Hell with this.


  Louis slapped the button on the dash to start the gumball light and floored it. The Explorer shot ahead, the red needle creeping up toward ninety.

  He didn’t let off the gas until he hit Munising. In a log cabin restaurant called The Dogpatch, he wolfed down a steak sandwich, fries and a Dr Pepper, grabbed a postcard for Lily from the cash register display, and was back on the road by three.

  Just after Marquette, Louis picked up US-41 and he had the crazy thought that if he turned around right now he could take the road all the way back down to Fort Myers.

  It was another monotonous two-hour drive through pine forests before he hit Houghton, a hilly college town of red brick buildings. Across a suspension bridge, through Hancock and Calumet, and he was in the country again. He was in the Keweenaw Peninsula, the huge expanse of empty land that extended like a crooked finger out into Lake Superior, pointing the way toward the Canadian wilderness beyond.

  Every ten miles or so, he would pass through a knot of weathered buildings. But he didn’t take notice of the names of the little towns on the small state-issue green signs. There were no stores that he could see, no businesses of any kind except one boarded-up motel and an abandoned building bearing the letters THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH.

  What the hell did people up here do for a living?

  He knew the area had once been a big mining center—copper, iron, silver, even some gold. But all of that had closed down decades ago. The harsh winters probably ruled out any kind of farming, so that left logging and tourism.

  His thoughts turned to Reuben Nurmi. Back in Munising, as he ate his lunch, Louis had read Steele’s file on the sheriff. Nurmi was fifty-two, a born-and-raised Yooper, working for a logging company in L’Anse before he joined the Keweenaw County Sheriff’s Department. He had just been elected to his second term as sheriff.

  Louis knew what his reception in Eagle River would be like. The sheriff had no college degree and was probably a little defensive about it. Entrenched in his small town and protective of its people and its past. And like all cops everywhere, suspicious and probably resentful of any state interference.