Blue Wolf In Green Fire

by Joseph Heywood

  “This is Detective Grady Service, DNR.”

  “SuRo’s woods cop,” Wiggins said. “How’s it going?”

  “Not good. SuRo has been arrested in Trout Lake. The county is still trying to sort out charges, but right now it looks like inciting to riot, trespass, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. More important, she’s also a suspect in a murder case.” Service quickly briefed the lawyer on Vermillion, the shootings, and the finding of SuRo’s Walther at her compound.

  Wiggins grunted. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s bent but not broken. She’ll be arraigned in the Soo.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe today if the county can get its act together. They’ve got at least fifty people to transport.”

  “Can I talk to her when she gets to the Soo?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Miranda yet?”

  “In a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay. Tell her to keep that big yap of hers shut until I get up there. I’ll meet her at the jail.”

  Service took two mugs of coffee into the room with SuRo, set one in front of her, and sat down. “Wiggy will meet you in the Soo. He asked me to tell you to keep your big yap shut until you can meet with him.”

  Genova sat with her arms crossed. “When do I get advised of my rights?”

  “Feeling pretty smug?” Service asked.

  “Did it hurt all those big men in uniforms to have to do their duty?”

  Service stared at her. “SuRo, the two people who died at Vermillion were shot with a .380. A search warrant was executed on your place this morning and your .380 Walther was found. The lab will do a ballistics comparison. I told Wiggy about this.”

  “Like that’s the only .380 in existence, rockhead?”

  “Can the bravado, SuRo. The feds have you in their sights and they aren’t going to let up until they take you down. Why are they so set on getting you?”

  The veterinarian looked across the table at him. “I want to talk to my attorney,” she said.

  Service got out a Miranda card and read her her rights. When he was done, he added, “That formality out of the way, you don’t have to say anything to me. Wiggy will meet you in the Soo before the arraignment, but maybe you’d do better to talk to me. Once the attorneys wade into this thing, both sides are going to become strict constructionists.”

  “Do you honestly think I would kill someone?” she asked.

  Service thought for a minute. Could or would, one letter difference in words, and miles of difference in meaning and intent. When he had first met her she had seemed on the verge of doing just that—with what he assumed was the same Walther that was now being tested. “In anger, yes. In cold blood, no.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Grady.”

  “Sometimes drawing a line in the sand too early isn’t the way to go,” he said. “What’s your relationship to that zoo parade in the other room?”

  “I’m their leader,” she said.

  He felt his neck heat up. “You said you weren’t part of that stuff in England.”

  “This isn’t England and I said I had nothing to do with killing anybody in the U.K. I never denied being an activist.”

  “You’d better hope the ballistics come back negative.”

  “You know bloody well the feds can make things come out the way they want,” she said angrily. “I have no more to say, rockhead,” adding, “Nothing personal, okay?”

  Genova was seething and Service couldn’t quite read her. Usually her temper was open for all to see and pale before, but this morning it was under the surface and intense. Maybe not enough sleep. He could identify with that.

  After getting his thermos from his truck and filling it with coffee, he said good-bye to the sheriff and drove north, headed back to Newberry to meet McKower and look at Kota’s tape. It was just after 4 a.m. He decided he’d bunk at the district office and get with Lis in the morning.

  His cell phone rang five miles north of Trout Lake.

  It was Nantz. “Grady, I am going to see the governor today and I’m going to give that insufferable dickhead a piece of my mind.”

  “I’m coming to Lansing,” he said, the decision made and announced before he could think about it. “Don’t do anything until I get there.”

  “I’m really pissed, Grady. I’m sick of being treated like a fucking pawn by a bunch of suits.”

  “I know,” he said weakly.

  “We’re gonna do something about this, right?”

  “I’ll be there, five hours max,” he said.

  She slammed the phone down.

  Service pulled over to the shoulder to think. Carmody was working the case in the west and he had Kota’s tape, which he had not had time to look at and didn’t want to look at until he and Lis could view it together. He hadn’t checked in with the captain since yesterday, or was it the day before? And he was going to miss another meeting in the Soo. Time was losing context. Logic and duty told him to stay in the U.P., but Nantz was hurting and he was going south. There was no real decision to be made: Maridly came first.

  He called McKower. “I’m going to Lansing.”

  “You what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Is Maridly okay?”

  “No,” he said, hanging up.

  Two hours later he was passing Indian River on I-75 when he got another call on the cell phone. “Detective Service? This is Lorne O’Driscoll. Maridly Nantz has just been admitted to Sparrow Hospital.”

  “What happened? Is she okay?”

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” the chief said, abruptly ending the conversation. The chief had called him about Nantz? This wasn’t good. Service flipped on his blue lights and accelerated. The computer in Lansing was tied into the GPS system and would detect that he was exceeding ninety and the chief would know why he was barreling south.

  Around Mount Pleasant he got a call from Treebone.

  “Grady, Tree. I’ve got someone you need to meet.”

  “Tree,” Service said, interrupting his friend. “Nantz is in Sparrow Hospital. I’m headed there now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

  19

  The parking lots of Lansing’s Sparrow Hospital were jammed. Service beached his vehicle at the front entrance and hurried inside. A blue-haired woman sat at the reception desk. “Maridly Nantz,” he said.

  The woman smiled insipidly. “What a beautiful name. Is that a man or a woman?”

  He was tempted to reach over and grab her by the throat. “She was brought here this morning.”

  “Let me check.” The woman awkwardly punched some numbers into the computer console. “The machine’s dreadfully slow this morning. Aren’t you glad the snow hasn’t come yet? I can’t wait to get to Palm Springs.”

  Service wished she were there now. He left her fumbling with the computer and went back to Emergency Services. The seats in the hallway were filled with pale people, some with fresh bandages, some with tissues pressed to their faces.

  He grabbed a doctor by the arm. “I’m looking for Maridly Nantz.”

  “Ask there,” the doctor said, pointing at a window.

  The young woman inside looked exhausted. “Maridly Nantz,” Service said.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “ICU,” she said.

  Service found his way without asking for directions and found Chief O’Driscoll sitting in a waiting room with his hands folded in his lap.

  “Chief?”

  O’Driscoll looked up. “Detective, I want you to take a deep breath. Maridly has had a rough time. It appears she was attacked.”

  Attacked? Service felt his blood boil. “Where is she?”

  �
��They’ve done some surgery and she’s under heavy sedation.”

  “Goddammit, Chief!”

  “We don’t know what happened, Grady. She was found in the hallway at her hotel.”

  “This wouldn’t have happened if she was still at the academy,” Service said. He was on the verge of exploding, realizing that this had happened after he had talked to her. “When was she found?”

  “About an hour before I called you. Why were you headed to Lansing?”

  “Nantz got it in her mind to go visit the governor.”

  O’Driscoll looked concerned.

  “She called me about 4 a.m. and I decided I’d better get down here. What happened?”

  “We don’t know yet. There was an anonymous call to nine-one-one. The Lansing police and hotel personnel found her. The police said the door to her room was open.”

  Service had to fight to keep his temper in check. “How bad is it?”

  O’Driscoll shook his head. “We’d better wait for the doctor.”

  Service sat unmoving for twenty minutes. Above him was a no smoking sign. He ignored it, took out a pack, and tapped out a cigarette. Chief O’Driscoll stared at him, glanced at the sign, and said, “Got an extra one?”

  The doctor finally showed a half hour later. He looked to Service like an undernourished high school student—a sophomore, not a senior.

  “I’m Doctor Caple.” The diminutive man faced Chief O’Driscoll. “Ms. Nantz is stable. Her sixth and seventh ribs are severely fractured in the rectus abdominus area. Her clavicle has been shattered between the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid. She has a spiral fracture of the upper radius.”

  Neither Service nor O’Driscoll spoke.

  “I’m not a forensic specialist,” the doctor said. “I’m a surgeon—a mechanic—but it looks to me like Ms. Nantz was struck forcefully on the clavicle, perhaps to deny her use of her arms. Blows were then delivered to her ribs, and her arm was brutally twisted to produce the fracture of the radius.”

  “Somebody beat the shit out of her,” Service said.

  “Yes,” the doctor replied, “but I don’t think he counted on her fighting back. Her knuckles are lacerated and we have recovered flesh samples from under her fingernails. You find who did this and you are likely to find some deep scratches and horrendous bruising. She fought hard, despite the pain that must have radiated from the clavicle. Ms. Nantz must have a very high threshold for pain.”

  O’Driscoll surreptitiously squeezed Service’s arm to calm him.

  The doctor said, “I’ve inserted a pin in her clavicle. It will be there a while, and then we’ll take it out. We’ve also pinned the radius. More surgery may be needed. We won’t know that for a while.”

  “Permanent damage?” the chief asked.

  “Probably not,” the doctor said. “She’s fit and seems to be a resilient young woman.” The doctor put his hand on Service’s shoulder. “There was no sexual assault.”

  Service wrenched away. “I want to see her.”

  “She’s sleeping,” the doctor said.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Service said with a menacing growl.

  The doctor led him into the business end of the ICU cube farm and showed him to the one marked 14–3. Service sucked in a breath when he saw the tubes and monitors attached to her. He sat down beside the high-tech table-bed and held her hand and felt tears welling in his eyes.

  The doctor and the chief were talking quietly when he emerged from her room. “I’ll take one of your smokes,” the doctor said. “To hell with the rules.”

  Service offered his pack.

  “Doctor Caple thinks she’ll recover just fine, Grady.”

  “But I do have a concern,” the doctor said. “Her X rays concern me. We’ll do some tests, but Ms. Nantz appears to be lacking bone mass, which could presage injuries in the future. What does she do for a living?”

  The chief spoke before Service could. “She’s a conservation officer.”

  The doctor nodded. “Physically strenuous and dangerous. I want to do more tests.”

  “Some people have thin bones,” Service said in his girlfriend’s defense.

  “It’s not that simple. Probably we have nothing to worry about, but if she has thinning bone mass, we will want to find out why and take the appropriate steps. You can’t be physically confronting people if your bones are going to break easily, right?”

  Service tried to wrap his mind around the concept of Nantz and thin bones and couldn’t. “How long will she be in the hospital?”

  “Three days, four max. We want to guard against clots. If all goes well, she’ll be released from ICU recovery after twenty-four hours.”

  At that moment Service saw someone at the end of the hall who made his blood pressure skyrocket. Governor Samuel Adams Bozian was waddling down the hall, an overcoat draped over his shoulders and flapping as he walked, making him look like an obese vampire.

  Service clenched his fists, but O’Driscoll’s hand held him in place.

  “Officer Service,” the governor said with his most concerned political stump-face. “I am so sorry about Maridly. I heard about the accident when I reached my office and came right over. How is she?” Two of the governor’s bodyguards hovered down the hallway. “Chief O’Driscoll,” the governor added coolly.

  “Governor,” the chief said in a low and threatening voice. “This is the last place you should be.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Service said.

  Bozian ignored Service and talked to O’Driscoll. “Maridly’s father was my friend. I’ve known her since she was a wee one.”

  Service was shaking, but his chief held on. The chief said, “Governor, there was no accident. All the evidence points to an assault, and Governor, we are going to use every law enforcement resource in the state to find out who did this and then we are going to put the coward so deep into lockup he’ll never crawl out. Him and anybody else involved.”

  The implied threat in the chief’s voice was clear. The governor took a step back.

  “Good God, Lorne. I know my people and your people have had some political and philosophical differences, but you can’t seriously think I’m responsible for this.”

  The chief did not back off. “You ordered Nantz out of training, Governor. You stuck her in a bogus task force in an empty office with nothing to do and left her there. You have a personal problem with Detective Service, Sam, but you don’t have the balls to go after him head-to-head. You picked on Nantz and now she’s in ICU. How would you read it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Bozian asked, stammering. “Lorne, do you honestly think—”

  “I only know what I know,” the DNR law enforcement chief said, cutting off the governor. “And right now I don’t like what I know.”

  “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Michigan’s governor said, jerking a tiny cell phone out of his suit pocket and launching his massive body back down the hallway, the bodyguards falling into step beside him.

  Chief O’Driscoll released his grip on Service’s arm.

  “If that bastard had anything to do with this, he’s dead,” Service said.

  “If that turns out to be the case, we will do our jobs and use the system the way it is designed to be used. There will be no vigilante effort, am I understood?”

  Service nodded, but thought, We’ll see. He toyed with telling the chief that Bozian may have targeted Nantz because of what she had done last summer to help him, but decided the chief didn’t need to look at the situation from a new angle. O’Driscoll was pissed and Bozian deserved to sweat.

  “Grady, there’s nothing you can do here now.”

  “I’m going to be here when she wakes up.”

  “All right, but after that you will let Fae and me worry about Maridly
. We have plenty of space. When Maridly is released from the hospital, she’ll come home with us. If she finds you hanging around all the time, she may start wondering if the doctors have told her the whole truth. She’ll be fine with us. When did you last eat?”

  Service shook his head. He couldn’t remember.

  “I want you to go down to the cafeteria and get some food in you. Then come back and wait for your lady to wake up.”

  Service ate a toasted bagel with veggie cream cheese in the cafeteria and went out to the parking lot to have a cigarette. He called Treebone, but his office said he was on the way to Lansing. He wasn’t surprised. If it were Kalina in the hospital, he’d be there for Tree.

  Grady Service went back up to Nantz’s room, pulled a chair next to the bed, and sat there. “As soon as you can speak, Nantz, I am asking you to marry me and you’d better say yes.”

  20

  Treebone called on the cell phone while Service was out for a smoke break.

  “ETA in ten, where you at? How’s Nantz?”

  “I’m in the parking lot in front of the entrance. She’s still sedated.”

  Treebone arrived in a black van and when he removed his massive frame from the vehicle, it rocked in relief. A woman got out of the passenger side and followed behind him.

  The two men embraced briefly. “What’s the story?” Treebone asked.

  “Somebody attacked her.”

  Treebone sucked in a deep breath and chewed his inner cheek. “They get the perp?”

  “She was found in the hallway outside her room at the hotel where she’s been staying. But she fought back. There was skin under her nails and her knuckles are torn up.”

  “Hotel where she’s staying? She’s at the academy, Grady.”

  “I’ll explain later,” Service said.

  The woman joined them. She was tall, her skin the color of obsidian, henna-colored hair cropped short. “Shamekia Cilyopus-Woofswshecom, meet Grady Service,” Treebone said solemnly.

  The woman’s handshake was firm enough to let him know she was strong, but pliant enough to communicate the greeting.