Heart of Ice

by Parrish, P. J.

  “Yes, I do,” Dancer said. “It’s Aunt Bitty’s 1966 Ford pickup. License plate RFS456. I keep it in a garage in St. Ignace for ten dollars a month. I drive it to find the animals.”

  “Do you hunt the animals?”

  “No, I never kill,” Dancer said, “I pick them up off the road, and I make them clean.”

  Louis could actually see this guy scraping up roadkill. But he also remembered seeing some large skulls in the cabin.

  “Where do you get the big skulls?” Louis asked.

  “Max trades me sometimes. Big skulls for skins and eyeballs and claws.”

  “Max?”

  “Max the taxidermist in Escanaba,” Dancer said. “He hunts places he’s not supposed to and gets me big skulls. We trade lots of things. That’s how I got Callisto.”

  “Who’s Callisto?” Louis asked.

  “My bear skull.”

  Rafsky sighed loudly.

  Louis knew now where he wanted to go with his questions. He also decided to get more personal and use Dancer’s first name.

  “Danny,” he said. “Do you name all your skulls?”

  Dancer started to fidget, as if he knew naming skulls made him look childish. “Some of them.”

  “Can you tell me the names?”

  Dancer shrugged. “Callisto, Penelope, Lycus, and—”

  “Do you have a skull named Julie?”

  Dancer bolted from the chair, but Louis caught the back of his overalls and yanked him back. Dancer fell, tipping over the chair. His notebook skidded across the floor.

  Joe picked it up. Dancer’s eyes were riveted on her. Louis tapped the table to get Dancer’s attention.

  “Danny,” Louis said. “You didn’t answer me. Do you have a skull named Julie?”

  Dancer wrapped his arms around himself and lowered his head. He began to rock gently.

  “Louis?”

  He looked back at Joe. She had the notebook open.

  “May I speak with both of you?” she asked Louis and Rafsky.

  Dancer didn’t look up as they left, closing the door behind them.

  “I think Dancer’s autistic,” Joe said.

  “Autistic?” Louis asked.

  “He has many of the symptoms,” Joe said. “The rocking motion, the recoiling from touch. And he has trouble looking people in the eye.”

  “The man runs a business,” Rafsky said. “Autistic people aren’t that high-functioning.”

  “You’re wrong. There’s a wide spectrum to autism and often they’re highly intelligent,” Joe said. “Those names he mentioned, they’re Greek. The name he has for his bear skull, Callisto, is from Greek myth about a girl who was changed into a bear.”

  Rafsky let out an annoyed breath.

  Joe held out the notebook. “Look at this.”

  Louis looked at the notebook page. It was a sketch in brown crayon of Joe. It was a perfect likeness right down to the tiny mole near her left eye. Louis knew Dancer had seen Joe only once before she walked in this room—for those seconds outside his cabin as he fired his rifle and maybe as he sat in the back of the SUV before the police took him away. How had he so accurately captured her likeness?

  Joe flipped the page. “And look at this one.”

  Another crayon drawing, and this time Louis felt as if he were looking at himself in a mirror. Again every feature was perfectly rendered.

  Louis looked up at Joe. “How the hell—?”

  “Autistics sometimes have remarkable talents,” she said. She turned to the next page.

  Julie Chapman stared back at them.

  It wasn’t the somber senior class portrait that had been printed in the newspapers. It was a different Julie. A dazzling smile, windblown hair, long-lashed eyes dotted with carefully drawn little stars.

  “May I question him?” Joe asked Rafsky.

  Rafsky’s eyes went from the drawing up to the window. Dancer was still rocking, head down.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  They went back into the room. When Joe sat down across from Dancer, he looked up. He held out his hand for the notebook but Joe shook her head.

  “Who is this?” Joe asked, showing him Julie’s picture.

  Dancer’s mirror eyes clouded.

  “Who is this, Danny?”

  “It’s Julie Chapman,” he whispered. “But I didn’t know it was her until I knew it was her.”

  “You mean you didn’t know her name?”

  “Not until the newspaper told me it was her.”

  “Why did you draw her?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I saw her in the newspaper.”

  Joe leaned over the table. “But she didn’t look like this in the newspaper,” she said. “You drew her very happy with a big smile. Where is she in this picture, Danny?”

  “Bonfire. Bonfire on the beach.”

  “When?”

  “Summer.”

  “Which summer?”

  “Just summer.”

  “Were you friends with her?”

  “No, she never talked to me.”

  “How old were you the summer Julie went to the bonfire?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was your aunt Bitty alive that summer?” Louis asked, hoping Dancer could give them some point of reference.

  Dancer didn’t look up at him. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you have other drawings of Julie?” Joe asked.

  “Lots of them. At home.”

  “Do you have photographs of her?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Photographs,” Joe repeated. “Your picture of her is very accurate. Did you take pictures of her to look at later so you could draw?”

  “Yes, photographs here,” Dancer said, pointing to his temple.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My camera is up here,” Danny said, tapping his head again. “My brain-camera takes the picture and later if I want to draw it I just go get it.”

  Joe stared at him for a moment, then flipped back a couple of pages in the notebook. “When did your brain take this picture of me?”

  Dancer slumped. “When you were scared. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  Joe held up the sketch of Louis. “When did your brain take this picture?”

  Danny wiped his nose with his sleeve. “When he was trying to help Chief Flowers.”

  Joe started to flip back to Julie’s sketch, but Rafsky stepped in. He took the notebook from Joe, and she sat back in the chair.

  “You’re a liar, Dancer,” he said. “You can draw Julie Chapman at seventeen because you knew Julie Chapman when she was seventeen. You watched her. She was pretty, you liked her, and one day you decided you wanted to fuck her.”

  “Don’t curse,” Dancer said softly. “Aunt Bitty said don’t curse.”

  “When she left the island you decided to go get her back,” Rafsky said. “You drove downstate and brought her back up here to that lodge.”

  “No,” Dancer said.

  “Then you murdered her,” Rafsky said.

  Dancer pressed deeper into the corner, murmuring incoherently.

  “And you waited,” Rafsky said. “You waited and watched her as she rotted away. And when she was nothing but bones you took what you wanted.”

  Dancer wrapped his arms up over his head and began to rock.

  “Look at me, Dancer.”

  Dancer was crying softly.

  Rafsky straightened and gave the notebook back to Joe. “He’s done,” he said. He looked at Louis. “You two can stay if you want. I’m out of here.”

  He left the interview room.

  Joe watched Rafsky, then with a glance at Dancer, she rose. Louis followed her out into the hallway. When Louis looked back at Dancer through the wiandow, he was curled up on the floor, arm under his head.

  “Maybe I can try later,” Joe said.

  Louis shook his head. “We’re all tired. I say
we call it a night.”

  Joe was looking at something in the notebook. Louis saw it was a drawing of Rafsky.

  “I think Rafsky’s burned-out, Joe,” Louis said. “I’m worried about what he might do.”

  She closed the notebook. “I’m worried, too.”

  21

  It was only nine thirty, but it felt much later. It was, she knew, the stress of the long day. A day that had started with the warmth of the sun on her face as she looked out over Lake Huron and ended with the cold of the water on her hands as she washed away Chief Flowers’s blood.

  Joe finished rubbing lotion into her hands and came out of the bathroom. Louis was hunched over the desk, and except for his reading glasses had nothing on except a towel around his waist. When they had arrived back at the hotel neither had said a word as Louis moved his things into her room. There had been no need for words, either, when they made love or afterward as they lay in each other’s arms listening to the rain. Words didn’t seem to have a place at the end of this day.

  “The bathroom’s all yours,” she said.

  He was busy writing something and gave a grunt but didn’t look up.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Postcards.”

  “What?”

  He turned and held up one. “It’s for Lily. I’m writing out a week’s worth tonight so I can mail one every day.”

  “That’s cheating.”

  “I know, but I might not have time later.” He held her gaze for a moment. “You okay?”

  She nodded as she fished a hairbrush from her travel bag.

  “You feel like going downstairs to get a glass of wine?”

  She came over to him and ran a hand over his neck. “I don’t think so,” she said. His hand came up to grasp hers, and he kissed her fingers. Then he let go and went back to his postcard.

  Her eyes drifted down to his back, to the small scars just below his shoulder blades. She had seen them before, of course, the first time they had made love. But she had been hesitant to ask him about them because she knew he had been a foster child and she had a feeling the scars were something he wanted to forget. Finally, when she did ask, he told her he had fallen off a bike. She had let it go. There were doors she knew he would never open, not even for her.

  Dancer’s notebook was sitting on the desk by Louis’s elbow. She picked it up and went to the window seat. She sat down and opened the notebook to the crayon drawing Dancer had made of Louis.

  She realized now that Dancer had captured Louis in those first moments as he was kneeling over Flowers after the shooting. It was all there on Louis’s face—anger, anxiety, and the fierce need to right the wrong. There was something else there, too. It was in the eyes, a soft swirl of pain. But whose pain?

  She turned the page. Dancer’s drawing of her. Her eyes wide and liquid, her mouth agape as if caught in midquestion.

  She shut her eyes. But it didn’t help because the images were all there in her memory. Fifteen years and it was still there, every detail of the ambush that had killed two of her fellow officers and left her for dead in the snow.

  And Rafsky . . .

  She opened her eyes and turned to the next page in the notebook.

  The man in the sketch had Rafsky’s features—the long straight nose, concave cheeks, thin lips, and pale eyes. But there was something disturbingly empty about the likeness, as if there were nothing behind the skin, nothing alive in the eyes. Dancer hadn’t drawn a man. He had drawn a ghost.

  Joe shut the notebook and drew up her knees. She looked over to the desk, but Louis was gone. She heard the groan of the plumbing and then the rush of the shower in the bathroom.

  She drew back the curtain and looked down. The rain had stopped, and the street was dark and quiet. She saw someone step out of the shadows and then a flick of a lighter as it caught the tip of a cigarette. A face was revealed just long enough for her to see it was Rafsky.

  He turned in a slow half circle, as if trying to figure out where he wanted to go. But then he just stood there in the middle of the street.

  He was Section-Eighted to Siberia.

  That’s what her friend at the state police had told her when she made a discreet inquiry about what Rafsky had been doing for the last fifteen years. She had felt guilty about checking up on Rafsky after Louis told her he was on the island, but she gave in to her curiosity.

  Section Eight was the official name of the district of the Upper Peninsula covered by the state police. But it was also military-discharge jargon for mental cases. Norm Rafsky, once one of the state’s most respected investigators, had been exiled to a remote post in the U.P. Her friend at the state police didn’t know all the details, just what he had heard. That after the ambush at Echo Bay fifteen years ago, Rafsky’s injury had sidelined him to a desk job for two years. And when he returned to active duty he was never the same. Something had been lost, iced over.

  Joe looked toward the bathroom. She knew Louis would stay in the shower until the water went cold. She went to the desk, scribbled a note that she was taking a walk, grabbed her leather jacket, and left the room.

  Rafsky was still standing in the street when she emerged from the hotel. His back was to her, but he heard her and turned. In the light spilling out from the hotel windows, she saw his face tighten.

  As she came closer he looked up at the night sky, as if trying to avoid meeting her eyes.

  “It’s a blue moon tonight,” he said.

  The cloud cover was so dense there was no moonlight at all. The air was so cold it almost smelled of snow.

  “Do you know what a blue moon is?” he asked. When she didn’t answer he went on. “Two full moons in one month, a rarity. Once in a blue moon.”

  He finally looked at her. “I’ve done everything I could not to run into you in the last fifteen years, and now you show up here.”

  “I didn’t plan on it,” she said.

  Rafsky took a final drag on the cigarette, tossed it to the street, and crushed it out with his heel. “How do you know Kincaid?” he asked.

  “We met two years ago when I was with Miami homicide. I helped him with a case.”

  “Two years,” Rafsky said. “That’s a relationship.”

  Joe didn’t say anything. The silence lengthened.

  “How have you been, Norm?” she asked.

  Maybe it was because she used his first name when they had always called each other by their surnames. Rafsky-Frye, it had always been Rafsky-Frye. Maybe he took it as a signal that their old relationship of mentor-rookie was long gone. Maybe he thought she was patronizing him. Whatever the reason, he took a half-step away from her.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “You know how it goes.”

  She touched his sleeve. “How’s your arm?”

  He flexed his forearm beneath the trench coat. Then, suddenly, she felt him relax.

  “It’s not worth a damn anymore, Joe,” he said.

  Her hand moved up to his shoulder, and she gave him a squeeze. He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away.

  “I had to learn how to shoot all over again lefty,” he said.

  “You don’t need a gun to do your job,” she said.

  He gave her a withering look.

  “Okay, forget that,” she said. She struggled to find something neutral to talk about.

  “How’s Gina?” she asked.

  “We split up twelve years ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.” He reached into his coat and pulled out his cigarettes again. He lit one and drew deep on it.

  “When did you start smoking?” she asked.

  “Twelve years ago.”

  “How’s your son, Robert?” Joe asked.

  “Ryan,” Rafsky said.

  “Sorry. He must be, what, in his twenties now?”

  “Twenty-five. Married. Associate professor of biology at Northern. He’s got a daughter, five years old.”

  Joe stayed quiet, waiting for Rafsk
y to go on. He took a step away, then looked back at her.

  “I need to walk. You want to come?” he asked.

  She nodded, and they started down the street. They turned onto Main Street, where the old globed lamps left pearly puddles on the wet street.

  “Your son and granddaughter,” Joe began, “do you get to see them much?”

  It was a long time before Rafsky answered. “After Gina left we lost touch.” He paused. “It was my fault. I let them both go without a fight.”

  He took another drag on the cigarette, and it was a few more steps before he spoke again. “When Ryan got the job at Northern last year I called him. I wanted to reconnect.”

  Joe had a sudden memory from the case fifteen years ago. Over dinner, Rafsky had given her advice on not letting the job take over her life. She could still remember his exact words.

  You have to be careful. You have to have another life. A lot of cops let their work become their life. And my God, that will kill you.

  She remembered that after enough wine he had pulled out his wallet and proudly showed her a picture of Ryan. She could remember, too, how the boy had looked—a small replica of his father, right down to the spiky sandy hair.

  “So are things going well with Ryan now?” she asked.

  Again he was slow to answer. “He’s having a hard time forgiving me for not being there. And he’s having a hard time believing me when I tell him I want to be there now for Chloe.”

  They stopped under a streetlamp, and she could see his face clearly now. She could see now that what Danny Dancer had captured wasn’t emptiness. It was something as hard and ungiving as stone. Norm Rafsky, she realized in that moment, wanted to be forgiven, yet he didn’t know how to do it himself.

  That was the source of the contempt in his eyes when he had first seen her today. Fifteen years and he still hadn’t been able to forgive her for what happened in Echo Bay.

  It had taken her a long time to get over what she had done during her rookie year, conspiring with her fellow officers to leave a killer in the woods to die instead of taking him in to stand trial. Rafsky had been there, and she could still hear his words. You’ll be murderers, all of you.

  He hadn’t turned them in, and when she asked him why his voice had gone cold.

  I made a choice about what I could more easily live with—letting you get away with what you did or sending three decent young cops to jail.