Misery Bay

by Steve Hamilton

  Once again, I didn’t want to picture it. But I saw a man standing in her bedroom, looking down at her as she slept. He has a tank of helium, a hose, a plastic bag, a strap. He’s probably wearing surgical gloves. If he’s gone this far, he probably knows not to leave fingerprints.

  “This is why I called you,” Haggerty said, looking back and forth between us. “I had to hear from you in person. You actually believe that my daughter might have been murdered.”

  “We’re asking you to consider that possibility, yes.”

  “The possibility that somebody broke into Dina’s apartment and killed her in her bed. That’s the possibility you’re asking me to consider. This is why the FBI agents came to talk to me.”

  “Did they ask you about your old partner?”

  “Donald Steele, yes. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but I heard about his son shooting himself behind the barn. Then just a few days ago, he ended up being murdered at his girlfriend’s house, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That part wasn’t a huge surprise, if I’m being honest with you. He always had a wandering eye. But I understand the girlfriend was killed, too. And they suspect her husband.”

  “They suspect him,” Maven said, “but they haven’t found him yet. So nobody knows for sure.”

  “Your idea is that somehow these deaths were all connected?”

  “I know this was a number of years ago,” Maven said, “but back when you were at St. Ignace with Sergeant Steele, did you ever happen to run into another state cop named Charles Razniewski?”

  “The agents asked me the same question,” he said, “but I don’t remember that name at all. How long was he on the force?”

  “Just short of two years. Are you sure you never ran into him? Big blond guy? Most people just called him Raz. He was stationed down at the Lansing post.”

  “That’s a long way from St. Ignace. No, I honestly don’t remember him at all. Actually, I do remember your name from back then, now that I think of it.”

  “I was down there, too. I was a sergeant.”

  “Yeah, I must have seen your name somewhere,” he said. “I mean, before you came up here to take the Soo job. I don’t think we ever ran into each other on the job, did we?”

  Maven shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so. I hardly ever got this far north, and I don’t imagine you came down to Lansing all that often.”

  “Not if I could help it.”

  “I was hoping you could give us something that would tie the three of you together.”

  “I’ve got nothing,” the lieutenant said. “If you really think there’s some connection…”

  “If there is,” I said, “you may be in danger. The pattern would suggest that you’re next on the list.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry to have to put it that way,” I said, “but that’s the cold hard reality. I’m just glad we got here before anything happened to you.”

  “You still don’t get it.” He shook his head and he was almost smiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at me. What do you see?”

  “A man who has suffered a great loss,” I said.

  “Nice try. I appreciate the thought, but no. What you’re actually looking at, gentleman, is a dead man.”

  “Lieutenant…”

  “I’m still breathing,” he said. “My heart is still beating. But those are just illusions. I know all about death, believe me. I faced it every day when I was in the lab. I studied it inside and out. I know a dead man when I see one, and that’s me.”

  “You have to let us help you,” Maven said. “It’s natural to think that you don’t—”

  “No, don’t even start. When you lose the only person who makes you get out of bed in the morning, you can come back and talk to me, okay? But for now? You say this guy, whoever he is, he’s still out there? He’s gonna come for me next? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “If we’re right,” Maven said, “then yes. It’ll be soon.”

  “Perfect.” He stood up, showing more energy than he had at any point in our conversation. Hell, probably more energy than he’d had in the last two weeks. “Let him come, I say. I’ll be right here waiting for him.”

  “Whoever this guy is,” I said, “he’s a cold-blooded killer.”

  “You still don’t get it!” He slapped his hand down on the table, as loud as a gunshot. Then he regained his composure as quickly as he lost it.

  “He can’t touch me. Don’t you understand? He’s already killed me once. He can’t do it again. In fact…”

  He sat back down in his chair.

  “I hope he gets here soon,” he said. “The sooner the better. I don’t have a helium tank, and I don’t feel like going out and buying one.”

  “Lieutenant Haggerty,” Maven said, “you need to listen to us.”

  “Where do you even buy a helium tank, anyway? At a party store? When’s the last time I filled up balloons with helium? Dina’s birthday party. Sweet Sixteen. Eleven years ago.”

  “Lieutenant Haggerty…”

  “Sweet Sixteen. Never been kissed.”

  “Please,” I said, putting one hand on his shoulder. “You have to let us help you.”

  “Get out.” He didn’t look at us. “Get out right now, please. I don’t imagine he’ll come if you’re here.”

  “We’re not leaving.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re leaving right now. You’re no longer welcome in my house.”

  “Then you’re coming with us.”

  “No. No, I’m not. And don’t try to send anybody else over here, either. Do you hear me? No matter who it is. Cops, troopers, even asshole FBI agents—I will not let anybody else take one single step onto this property. If this person is really out there, then it’s just him and me now. Just him and me.”

  “You were a cop for a long time,” I said, playing my last card. “You know you can’t face him alone. The only thing you can do is work with everyone else to catch him, so he can pay for what he did to your daughter. Don’t you want that to happen?”

  He closed his eyes. He didn’t say a word.

  Maven and I stood there. Minutes passed. The wind blew and rattled the window and we both seemed to come to the same conclusion without exchanging a word. As we left the room, I took one more look over my shoulder. He stayed in the chair, not moving a muscle, his eyes still closed. Waiting.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Maven said.

  The headlights swept across the snow-covered trees. As we left Haggerty’s driveway, I pointed the truck north, back to the main road.

  “I figure the Marquette post,” I said. “No matter what the lieutenant says.”

  “Makes sense. They know him there. We can get somebody out here to watch over him.”

  We drove back into Au Train and I made the left turn. We were heading west, along the lake. We’d be in Marquette in half an hour.

  “This is what he wants,” Maven said. “We just saw it with our own eyes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man who’s doing this. Whoever he is. This is what he wants to do to these men, before he kills them. He wants them to suffer.”

  I couldn’t argue. I knew he was right.

  “If this does go back to something that happened on the police force…” I said. “Even if there is a connection and we don’t see it yet, I still don’t get it. What could three cops do that would make somebody come after them, and their families, all these years later?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Raz never killed anyone on the job, did he?”

  “I’m pretty sure he never took his gun out of the holster, no. I know I never did myself.”

  “Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you something else. About what Agent Fleury said to you.”

  He fidgeted in his seat, but otherwise kept his cool. “Yes?”

  “We don’t know for a fact that
you’re connected to this. But if you are…”

  “I called Olivia. I told her to make arrangements to stay in Europe for a while. Just to be safe. Until we know for sure she won’t be in any danger.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  I kept driving. It was after midnight now. There wouldn’t be many state police officers on duty at the Marquette post, but somebody would be there. Somebody would be able to watch over Lieutenant Haggerty, if we explained the situation carefully enough.

  “They can’t watch him forever,” Maven said, as if reading my mind. “They’ll send a man out tonight. Then tomorrow night. But who knows how long?”

  “We don’t even know if Haggerty will be his next target. If you think about it, he’s been mixing it up so far. The suicides and the outright murders.”

  “You’re right,” Maven said. “It could be another cop’s kid. Somebody we don’t even know about yet. Who knows how far this goes?”

  “So I guess there’s only one way to do this.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking straight out the window, into the cold heart of the night. “We have to find this guy and stop him.”

  And we’re rolling …

  … Big scene. Everybody, we gotta nail this one.

  … Cue the fire. Get it going.

  … Come on, I said fire! Let’s go big here! We’re not roasting marshmallows.

  … There you go. Boom, right out the window. Look at that smoke. Now we’re talking.

  … Must be hot in there, eh? Oh, man. Talk about one well-done Monster.

  … Fire engines, do your thing. That’s right, get in there. Everybody’s doing great.

  … Keep on that fire. Keep going. We’ll use all of this, I promise you.

  … That’s a wrap for the Monster! His last scene, give him a hand.

  And cut.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was two days later. I was back home, trying to work on the cabin but unable to focus. I kept thinking about Haggerty sitting alone in his cabin, waiting for a killer to come through the back door. We had been to the Marquette post, of course, and now as far as we knew there was a state car positioned at the head of the driveway whenever possible. That’s what they had promised us, anyway. Pretty amazing, if you think about it. Two guys stumbling into the station in the middle of the night, with this crazy story about a killer with a list of former state cops and their children. Yet they bought it. Or at least the sergeant we talked to was willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, especially if it meant his old friend the retired lieutenant might be in any kind of danger.

  It was morning. I was back from breakfast at the Glasgow and trying to do something useful so I wouldn’t drive myself completely crazy. There was a knock on the door. Way the hell back here, at the end of the road. I had no idea who it could be. It wasn’t Vinnie, I knew that much. He had already been by and was on his way to the rez again, and he sure as hell wouldn’t knock on the door, anyway. He’d just come on in.

  I opened the door and saw Agent Long standing out there in the freezing cold. She was wrapped up tight in a long woolen coat that wasn’t nearly thick enough. I could tell she was miserable.

  “Come on in,” I said. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “We do have winters in Detroit, you know,” she said. “They just don’t stick around until April.”

  “Come by the fire,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, I was just stopping by. Nice place you got here. Although I wasn’t sure which cabin is yours. The man at the gas station said it was the second one.”

  “Well, I own the second cabin and then everything after it,” I said. “I’m living in this one while I finish it.”

  “You built this yourself?”

  “I’m kinda rebuilding it.” I didn’t feel like getting into that story, but I wasn’t sure where else to go. “Why, um … I mean, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “I wanted to let you know,” she said, finally taking her coat off. There was a warm light coming from the woodstove and it made her look good, I had to admit. For a man who had lost so much, it was a strange thing for me now, this unimaginable fact of feeling attracted to another woman. But she had this slow, careful way of smiling, like she didn’t want to give too much of herself away. And she had those eyes.

  “They finally tracked down Donna Krimer’s husband,” she said. “He was hiding out at a friend’s house in Green Bay. An off-duty cop spotted him in a bar late last night.”

  “And?”

  “And he says he didn’t do it. He says he came home and found two dead bodies on the floor, panicked, and took off.”

  “Does anybody believe him?”

  “Well, normally a story like that told by a man who’s been arrested six times before wouldn’t exactly hold up. But in this case…”

  I waited for her to get to the punch line. Instead she took a slow lap around the place, looking it over.

  “Tell me,” she said finally, “do you really believe this is all one person we’re talking about? All these deaths?”

  “I think I have to. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. Besides that…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been getting the same feeling, every time I talk to somebody or every time I go see where somebody died. If you’re really a fellow cop at heart, I don’t think I have to explain that.”

  She looked at me for a long time.

  “So what’s next?” I said.

  “I understand you and the chief talked to Lieutenant Haggerty the other night. Right after we did.”

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “He specifically asked to talk to us,” I said. “He wasn’t getting the answers he wanted from you and your partner.”

  “We told him everything we knew. We asked him to do the same.”

  “Well, maybe he just wanted to hear it from us in person. It was hard enough for him to lose his daughter like that. I can’t imagine having somebody come around two weeks later and tell me she might have been murdered instead.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “I don’t think it even matters anymore. Although, actually, I think by the time we left he was anxious to meet this guy. Whoever he is.”

  “I’ve been on the job for twelve years,” she said. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this.”

  “I think I’ve run into some pretty evil people myself. Even more now that I live way the hell up here, if you can believe it. But yeah, this is a whole different kind of animal we’re talking about. It’s a shame we can’t put our heads together and catch him.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the other reason I came by. I was hoping we could sort of start over here. I think we all got off on the wrong foot.”

  “You think ‘we’ did, huh? Let me ask you something. I’ve seen I don’t know how many partners over the years. When I was down in Detroit and even up here. FBI, DEA, cops in other towns, even state guys, and every time it’s the same story. One partner’s a human being, and the other one’s, well … let’s say the other one’s usually a more colorful character. Every single time.”

  She couldn’t help smiling a little bit. “Agent Fleury’s not that bad, believe me.”

  “I’ve seen him in action a few times by now, remember? Seriously, do they actually pair you up that way? Separate you into two groups, one from column A, one from column B. Or do you both start out human and then one partner has to go to the dark side?”

  “Well, why don’t you ask him yourself? He’ll be at the state post today, going over some old records with Chief Maven. If you’d like to be a part of that…”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “There isn’t one. You’ve helped uncover something important. We need to investigate it as thoroughly as we can, as quickly as we can. So we need your help.”

  “Your partner’s really on board with this?”

  “We both had a talk with
our boss this morning. Believe me, Agent Fleury’s officially on board.”

  “This I gotta see,” I said. “Just tell me what time to be there.”

  “Noon should be fine.”

  “Okay, Janet. I’ll see you there.”

  She stopped in the middle of putting on her coat. “When we’re all done with this, you can use my first name,” she said. “For right now, I’m still Agent Long to you.”

  I put up my hands in surrender. “I’ll see you at noon, Agent Long.”

  She said good-bye and went back out into the cold. An hour later, I was still thinking about her.

  * * *

  It felt strange to be doing this in the state police post. Maven’s office was just down the street, after all. If the wind chill was above zero, we all could have gotten up and walked over there. Instead we were in this too-small interview room at the Soo post, with Maven on one side of the table, and Agent Fleury on the other. It was the only interview room in the building, so I couldn’t imagine what the state guys must have thought of this imposition. From the looks I saw walking in, we weren’t exactly welcome guests.

  No, who am I kidding? It wasn’t about having strangers taking over their room at all. By now, the word must have gotten around. If they were like any other cops in the world, they looked out for each other, to the very end. I could only imagine how it must have felt that day, with no official bulletin yet but this vague story floating around about ex-troopers and ex-troopers’ kids. Making it twice as bad if you had kids of your own. On top of that, having the FBI taking over the case—because sure, it all started with a U.S. marshal, which made it automatic, and one of the murders happened to take place over state lines. But if this story was true, it was their family.

  That’s why the place felt so cold, and I tried not to take it personally. I followed Agent Long past the front desk, back to the room in question. Maven looked up as we walked in. He was never exactly a magazine model on a good day. Today, he badly needed a shave and about ten hours of sleep.