by P J Parrish
From the police reports, he knew the candle box had been found about fifty feet in, just past a fork. He decided to go that far and then get out.
He shined the beam ahead into the darkness and moved on. Two black holes appeared ahead—a fork in the tunnel. He took the left side, but ten feet in it dead-ended in a pile of rock so he backtracked out. The right tunnel was lower, and he had to stoop slightly to keep going. The ground began to slope and the air grew frigid.
He stopped. His breath was shallow and he felt a tightening in his gut.
For a second, he flashed back to another dark place, another time he had left the sunlight behind and gone underground. It had been the tunnels under an abandoned insane asylum and he had been lost down there for hours, chasing a mad killer.
He pulled in a deep calming breath. He was alone here, yet it felt as if he wasn’t. It was just a feeling, another one of those odd vibrations he got when he was in a place where someone had died. In his early years as an investigator, he used to dismiss them. But over time, he had learned to respect them.
He ran the flashlight beam slowly over the walls and ceiling, not sure what he expected to find. Maybe carved initials or graffiti the police had missed in 1979 when the box had been found. Maybe even a message or memento that would tell him the killer had returned to emotionally relive his crime.
There was nothing.
Louis started to turn back. But something pulled at him and he shined the beam downward, sweeping it slowly across the floor. He knelt and carefully sifted through the cold coppery dust. It was littered with pebbles and splinters of rock. Then he touched something that didn’t feel like a rock. It was flat and perfectly round. He held it up in the flashlight beam.
It was metal, the surface covered in a black film and a crust of green oxidation. He weighed it in his palm. It was too light for a half-dollar, too small for a silver dollar. What the hell was it? And why hadn’t the cops found it in 1979? Given what Nurmi had told him about Sheriff Halko, such an oversight could be chalked up to incompetence, though Louis knew any CSI tech would have found this. It was more likely this thing, whatever it was, had been placed here after the candle box had been removed. But why? And by who?
He rummaged for a Kleenex in his jeans, wrapped up the piece of metal and put it in his jacket pocket. For twenty more minutes, he scoured the dust for more pieces of metal, but finally, finding nothing else and frozen to the bone, he left a pencil to mark the spot.
When he shined the flashlight on his watch, he saw he had been in the mine almost an hour. If he didn’t call Monica soon, she’d send out a rescue team. Besides, he still had to get to Copper Harbor and see Grascoeur.
He rose and started back toward the mouth of the mine, walking quickly toward the light.
CHAPTER TEN
The first thing he did when he got back in the Explorer was radio Monica. Then he started the engine, turned the heat on high and held his cold hands up to the vent.
When the feeling had returned to his fingers, he reached over to the passenger seat for the accordion file and pulled out the photographs. After being inside the mine, he had an itch in his brain that he had overlooked something.
He sifted through the photographs taken in 1979, starting with the exteriors of the mine. It had been early October when the hikers had found the candle box and the photos showed the rocky canyon around the mine’s entrance softened by yellowing trees, lush ferns and grass, and a riot of purple and orange wild flowers. Whoever had taken the photographs seemed to dwell on the flowers, making the place look almost as pretty as one of those postcards he sent to Lily.
In stark contrast, the photos of the mine’s interior looked exactly like the shaft looked now—cold and dead—with eerie shadows on the rock walls created by camera flash. There were several photos of the closed candle box, copper-dusted against the rock wall, and one taken outside in the sunlight of the empty box sitting in the grass, lid open, after the bones had been removed.
Louis moved on to the second set of photographs, the ones taken in the Blue Water lab. There was the same close-up photo of the two skulls that had been tacked to the board in Lansing, others of the full skeletons arranged on a stainless steel table, and two photos of the long leg bones on a measuring board.
But there was nothing new here that he could see.
He started to put the photographs back in the accordion file then paused, his eyes fixed on the top photo of the candle box sitting in the grass. The empty candle box.
That’s when he saw it—saw what was not there. There wasn’t one photograph of the candle box with the skeletons still inside it.
He went back through the photos to make sure he hadn’t missed it. It wasn’t there, and it should have been. A full-sized photograph of the bones in the box would have been vital to legally document how the boys had been positioned when they died.
He flipped over the top photo. The stamp on the back read PHOTOS PROPERTY OF KEWEENAW COUNTY SO. There was a faded inked-in signature: J. Halko.
The dead sheriff’s name was Tom. This J. Halko had to be a relative, which wasn’t surprising given that small town departments were often deep in cronyism. He keyed the radio and reached Monica.
“I was just getting ready to call you,” Monica said. “We got a lake effect snow warning.”
He peered up through the windshield. The sky was gray but didn’t look threatening. “Consider me warned,” he said. “Monica, do you know who J. Halko is?”
“That would be Jennifer, Tom’s daughter.”
“Do you have an address for her?”
“Sure. She lives in her dad’s old house out on Wyoming Road, not far from where you are now. She’s a strange bird, so you might need to tread gentle about her old man.”
“Will do.”
Monica gave him directions and he thanked her and signed off. He put the Explorer in gear and started away from the mine. It was a long shot, but he was hoping that the woman who had taken all those pretty pictures of the wild flowers had kept her negatives.
It looked like a farmhouse but Louis could not tell what, if anything, was grown here in the flat, empty fields. The hulking old barn had probably been red once, but the years and hard winters had turned it the color of dried blood. The clapboard house had probably been white once but now was as gray as the sky. NO TRESSPASSING signs were tacked on the trees all the way down the road.
He was just opening the Explorer door when he heard the roar of an ATV. Across the field, a three-wheeler was rumbling his way, kicking up mud in its wake.
The rider, dressed in a mud-splattered camouflage jumpsuit and black helmet, skidded the ATV to a stop a few feet from the Explorer and dismounted. A shotgun was secured to the side of the ATV and a pistol hung on the driver’s leather belt. When she pulled off the helmet, a nest of dark hair sprung free.
She was in her mid-forties, almost as tall as he was. Her eyes were tiny green ponds in her dirty face, her lips flat pink lines in a puppet chin.
“Detective Kincaid, state police,” Louis said.
“Jenny Halko.”
She had a strong grip and a stronger Yooper accent. When she released his hand, she just stood there, staring at him.
“I have some questions about a case your father worked,” he said.
“The boys in the box,” she said. “I heard there was a statie in town sniffing around. What do you think I can tell ya?”
“My questions concern the crime scene photos,” Louis said. “You took them?”
Jennifer nodded. “I took them all right.”
“Did you keep your negatives?”
She cuddled the helmet to her chest, taking her time to thaw out towards him. “No, afterwards I turned everything in to my father’s office. I didn’t need any photographs to remind me what I saw that day.” She paused. “That was a long time ago. Why are you asking about my pictures?”
“I think some photographs might be missing from the case file,” Louis said.
Louis reached in the open door of the Explorer and pulled out the photographs. “This is all there is,” he said, holding the stack out.
She took the photographs and sifted through them, rapidly at first then more slowly. “I took a lot more than this,” she said, looking up.
It was there in her voice, confusion and something Louis couldn’t quite decipher—pride?
“Do you have any idea where they might be? Did your father keep files here at home?”
Her look was as if he had asked to search through her bedroom drawers, but when she spoke her voice had softened. “I don’t know. I boxed everything up after he died,” she said.
“Do you still have his things?”
She was silent.
“Miss Halko, I’m not suggesting your father did anything wrong,” Louis said. “If there are more photographs, I just need to see them.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then held out the photographs. Louis took them and set them back on the Explorer’s passenger seat.
“I put all his stuff in the barn,” Jennifer said. She hesitated then gave him a short nod. “Okay, follow me.”
At the barn, she unlocked the door and waved him to follow her inside. Louis expected the place to smell of animals and hay but there was nothing in the air but dust. Two snowmobiles sat in the horse stalls. A pair of skis was propped against the wall, near a snow blower.
Jennifer pointed to a ladder that led up to the loft. It was a high climb, twenty feet easy. “Go ahead and look all you want,” she said. “It’s mainly just boxes, his tool chest, and an old Army footlocker. The locker’s padlocked.”
“Do you have a key?”
“Nope. If you can get it open, you’re free to look. Just stop by the house and let me know if you’re taking anything.”
“Thanks. Will do.”
Jennifer left and Louis climbed the ladder. The loft was full of junk—broken furniture, boxes, plastic bins, bowling trophies, green rubber fishing waders, rusty fans, a stuffed elk head, and old plaid coats strewn over a trunk.
Louis started with the boxes, figuring that was the logical place to store old office files. But a quick look told him all the papers appeared to be personal—tax returns, old newspapers, some letters and military records. The second box held Louis L’Amour paperbacks and soggy magazines, mainly copies of Argosy and Penthouse.
The tool chest yielded rusted saws, hammers, wrenches and a tangle of fishing lines, lures and hooks. The plastic bins were filled with old clothes.
He blew on his cold fingers and searched the shadows for the footlocker. He found it in the corner, buried under a pile of plaid wool coats. It was the standard khaki-green wood chest, scarred and stenciled on the side: L.T. T.M. HALKO 0-456029.
Louis looked around the loft for something he could use to pry off the padlock and spotted a spud bar, a metal tool used in ice fishing. It took him four tries but he finally popped the lock.
When he opened the locker, the strong odor of must drifted out. The tray on top held yellowed wool socks, old, green boxer shorts, and a pair of scuffed, black boots.
Louis removed the tray. He jumped back at what he saw beneath—a clump of brown fur.
It took him a second to realize he was looking at a coat and not a dead animal. When he shook out the fur, he saw a faded orange tag pinned to the sleeve. He had left his glasses in the Explorer and had to squint to read it.
EVIDENCE DESCRIPTION: mink coat size 12
VICTIM: Gloria Halloway
RECOVERED: KCSO
Louis set the coat aside, shaking his head. Halko had recovered the coat from a burglary and for some reason never returned it to the owner. He probably planned to sell it. It wasn’t the worst thing a cop could do, pinch something from a crime scene, but it definitely told him what kind of man he was looking at here.
The next item he pulled from the locker was a small box with .22 Colt revolver inside. The serial number was scraped off. No evidence tag.
Then came a rhinestone necklace, a pair of women’s pink panties, both items still bearing evidence tags from a 1982 rape case in Alpena.
There was more.
A bloody blouse in a plastic bag, sealed with evidence tape from the Ypsilanti police department, packaged with a certificate of authenticity and stickered with a label: Alfred Yules, $150.00.
A child’s white sock in a Ziploc labeled Lori Butts, 1984, $400. A lock of blonde hair in a bag sealed by the Muskegon police. Holly Cardrone, 1986, $200.
Louis realized he was holding his breath and when he exhaled, it came out in one long stream in the cold air. He knew these cases—they had all been part of his homework in getting familiar with Michigan’s most infamous crimes. Yules was a serial killer who had worked the I-94 corridor. Lori Butts was a seven-year-old who disappeared from her Flint home. Holly Cardone was a suburban mother of three whose body had been ground up in a wood chipper by her husband.
Halko wasn’t just an evidence thief. He was a dealer in crime memorabilia, the kind you could auction off only in a very special black market.
What a sicko.
But it gave Louis hope that somewhere in this footlocker were the photos he was looking for. He just hoped Halko hadn’t sold them before he croaked.
Finally, near the bottom of the locker, he found a stack of manila envelopes. Each envelope contained photographs from different crime scenes—eight-by-tens of bloodied and decomposing bodies. Each picture had a price tag.
Then there it was—an envelope marked GRAY WOLF BONES. Sitting back on his heels, Louis pulled the color photos from the envelope.
There were twelve, each taken by Jennifer Halko from slightly different angles but all showing the same thing: the bones of the boys lying inside the candle box, just as they had looked when the top of the box was pried off.
He knew they were the same skeletons he had seen in the lab photos, but here, in their makeshift coffin, they looked so different. The skeletons were lying on their sides, kept intact by strings of mummified skin and cartilage, the pelvises encased in the yellowed Jockey Junior briefs. One skeleton was cradling the other in a position lovers would call spooning. The right arm bones of one boy were draped across the shoulder of the smaller boy.
For a long time, Louis just sat there, staring at the photograph.
The boys might have clawed for a while at the underside of the wooden lid, but it was clear to anyone who saw this photo that in the end, they had turned to hold onto each other.
He slipped the pictures back into the envelope and rose. The barn was ice cold, the air thick with dust. He was hit with the same feeling he had last night—the need to get out—to run blindly and quickly away from this place with its macabre souvenirs. But first he had to face Jennifer Halko.
He knocked on the door of the farmhouse and waited, a cold wind blowing at his back. He had managed to get the footlocker down from the loft by lowering it by rope. It was locked in the Explorer.
Everything Tom Halko had collected was the property of various law enforcement agencies, and he would have to take the footlocker with him, so it could be sorted out. Jennifer Halko might understand that part. He didn’t know if she would understand what a disgusting man her father had been.
The door opened, and Jennifer stood there, arms folded over her chest.
“Can I talk to you for a moment?” he asked.
She stepped aside, and he came in. A skinny hound dog rose to its feet from its place by the roaring fireplace and started a throaty growl.
“Sit, Ansel!” Jennifer snapped.
The dog obediently sat, but the look on its face told him it would get back up if it had to.
“I saw you moving my father’s footlocker,” Jennifer said. “I take it you found my photos in it?”
Louis looked back at her. “That and more.”
Jennifer sighed, like she knew this would be a longer conversation that she had expected. “Would yo
u like some coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“I need some if you don’t mind,” she said.
Jennifer led him into a family room. When she stepped away to the adjoining kitchen, Louis looked around. Braided scatter rugs lay over scarred wood floors, and a sagging sofa covered in a Northern Michigan University blanket sat near a picture window that overlooked the empty fields. But folks invited in probably never noticed any of that because their eyes would have been drawn immediately to the photographs on the walls.
Evocative landscapes of bright colors. Streaks of midnight-blue, flamingo-pink, and cherry-red that captured Lake Superior at sunset. Splashes of tangerine, russet, dove-gray, and foamy-white that brought Tahquamenon Falls alive.
He moved to the wall, drawn to a photograph with an almost solid white background. In the center, at the end of a snow covered breakwater, stood a small lighthouse, shrouded in icicles, freezing it—and the Michigan winter—in time.
Suddenly the dog’s name clicked: Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer.
Jennifer came back into the room, blowing softly into her coffee cup.
“You took these?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“They’re beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He looked back at her. “Quite a contrast to crime scene photos.”
Jennifer hesitated then nodded. “When the boys were found, I had just returned home here from Cheboygan, broke and divorced. My grandfather talked my father into paying me for taking the department photographs so I could get on my feet. That case was my first assignment.” She paused. “It was also my last.”
“This might not mean much to you,” Louis said, “but you should know you did a good job. The photos I found in the barn will help us. I’m sure of it.”
Jennifer sipped on her coffee, quiet, her eyes drifting to the still alert Ansel.
“You need to know something else,” Louis said. “There were other things in the trunk besides the missing photos.”
“Other things? Like what?”
