Strike Dog

by Joseph Heywood

  The fact that he’d never heard of the blood eagle didn’t mean it had not been used somewhere; maybe not the whole thing, but part of it. If the killer was truly a perfectionist, as Bonaparte insisted, and he wanted to get it right, he’d do all kinds of homework about game warden habits and movement patterns. Wouldn’t he also do the same in creating the blood eagle? So why had his timing been off in Wisconsin?

  Only Monica and her analyst knew about the control. Significance? He wasn’t sure. Why didn’t Bonaparte know? Had she intentionally withheld it from him and other agents? And if so, why?

  And what was it that Bonaparte had said to him that struck an odd chord? He couldn’t remember the specific thing, only that it had jarred him momentarily.

  Something Eddie Waco said had stayed with him: “Babe Ruth never stopped swinging for the fences.” In hockey when you tried to score a goal on every shot, you were bound to score some, miss some, and have some blocked or saved. So why didn’t this killer ever miss?

  This thing was way out of his league, he decided, but he had to do something, and he knew he needed help.

  Special Agent Temple met him when he parked at the command post on the hill above the Pine River. Her hair was mussed, her clothes dusty, her shirt soaked with sweat. The temperature was in the low nineties, the humidity unbearable, especially for those who lived this far north. Yoopers would walk about on a sunny thirty-below-zero day talking about the nice weather, and carp incessantly when the temperature got above eighty in summer.

  She said. “Tatie called me about what you found in Missouri.”

  He nodded. “Anything new here?”

  “Not a lot. The techs don’t think the vick got it in the water. No drag marks up to the kill site, just down that other bank. Something or someone got him to get out.”

  The techs thought? “That’s it?” Service said, mulling over the information. This wasn’t new. Dammit, he’d read the signs himself, pointed them out to Tatie Monica.

  “I swear this asshole could clean my apartment,” Temple added. “He’s a neat freak.”

  If so, why hadn’t the neat freak picked up Ficorelli’s fishing gear in order to mask the kill site? He felt like blowing up, but took a deep breath. This wasn’t Temple’s fault. “Where’s the vick’s vehicle now?”

  “Impounded in town.”

  “Has it been announced yet?”

  “If it had, I’m sure you would have heard about it,” she said. “We’ve been able to sit on it so far.”

  Given where he’d been the last few days, he might have missed the opening of World War III. “Does his mother know?”

  “She died last month.”

  Service sucked in a breath. “She died?”

  “Car wreck.”

  Another car wreck? Service said, “This needs to be announced. If the media finds out you’ve been sitting on this for so long, they may jump on you and play the story in a bigger way than they might have.”

  “You’re singing to the choir. Special Agent Monica has her own mind and ways of doing things. Her orders are to sit on it.”

  Service said, “If it’s made public, we might get some people coming forward, maybe find someone who saw something that could help us.” This tactic had worked with fish and game violations and had led to the conviction of illegal wolf and bear killers.

  “More likely to pull in cranks and nutcases,” she said.

  “Some of the things cranks and nut jobs see are real,” he reminded her. What had Bonaparte said—that the perp had never tried to communicate with law enforcement? Would an announcement stimulate that? Maybe, maybe not. “What else have you got?” he asked. “Did those people seen down by the river that night get interviewed?”

  “Transcripts for you,” she said, pulling a clipboard out of her vehicle and handing him some stapled pages.

  “You mind if I look around the site?” Service asked.

  “You know the drill,” she said.

  The only change he saw at the kill site was an orange-string grid and several marker flags inside a yellow-ribbon perimeter. Other pennants had been placed where he had found the rod and fly box. Service thought himself through what he’d seen previously, and retraced the discovery of the kill site. After an hour he moved over to the riverbank and sat on a cedar blowdown to read the transcripts. The man and woman both had been interviewed. Neither had been shown a photograph of Ficorelli. All the questions had been about movements on the road on the other side of the river, and questions about any suspicious activity they might have observed. What the hell was the FBI thinking? They’d missed the point.

  Service tapped the pages. They had not just missed a potential trail, but also ignored the possibility of another angle. He corrected himself: They had no way of knowing firsthand about Wayno’s predilections, so he couldn’t fairly hang an oversight on them. But not announcing the killing to the public could have played into the law of unintended consequences, and he had a hunch. Not exactly a hunch; more like elevated curiosity. Monica knew Wayno couldn’t keep it in his pants, but it was doubtful she knew the extent of his philandering.

  Service didn’t let Special Agent Temple know his real intentions, but asked permission to take his truck through the river at the four-wheeler ford. When he asked her for a photograph of Ficorelli, she hemmed and hawed before providing one.

  According to transcripts, the woman’s name was Sondra Andreesen, married fifteen years to Monte, who owned Super-Saver Appliances & Electronics, a chain headquartered in Milwaukee, with stores stretching from northern ­Illinois up to St. Paul, Minnesota. She was forty-four, her husband, forty. The man the FBI had caught her with was Jinks Schwarz, thirty-nine, a house painter and year-round resident of the area; no criminal record, not even a traffic citation.

  He saw no point in talking to Schwarz until he met the woman.

  The Andreesen house was five miles south of the river. It looked new and out of place, a three-story glass-and-steel-beam monstrosity that towered over a grove of five-year-old aspens like a botanical goiter. A driveway curved about a hundred yards from the road to the house. The road to the river was invisible from the house.

  When he arrived, a woman was standing on the porch. She wore a yellow sundress draped to her ankles, and stringy gold sandals with soles as thin as vellum. She had a deep, unseasonal tan, no jewelry or makeup, but reddish polish on several fingernails. It looked like she had been interrupted. He could smell fresh nail polish.

  “Mrs. Sondra Andreesen?” He showed his FBI ID. “Do you have an electronic security system?” Service asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It looks to me like you were out on the porch waiting for me.”

  “I was just on my way out to run some errands.”

  Service said, “I thought maybe your system alerted you I was coming in.”

  “It’s an eye or something,” she said, blinking furiously. “I don’t really pay attention to it.”

  “You didn’t finish your nails.”

  She instinctively curled her fingertips to hide them.

  “Can I have a few minutes of your time?” Service asked.

  “I have some errands,” she said. “Really.”

  “This won’t take long,” Service said. She was uptight.

  “I already talked to the other agents,” she said, adding, “and I’m ashamed. Are you people ever going to leave me alone? I don’t even know what the point of this is.”

  He could sense she wanted to let loose her indignation, but was holding back. Her eyes were wide, her posture tense. She was nervous as hell about something.

  “If you give me a few minutes, maybe I can clarify the situation,” Service said.

  She reluctantly opened the door and led him into a great room with one wall of windows and half a roof of sloping skylights. The place was shades of white, tot
ally sterile, no sign of children. “Plenty of room,” Service said, looking around.

  “This house was Monte’s idea,” she said. “I wanted a little cabin in the woods and of course he wanted an investment. With Monte everything is about money.”

  A less-than-blissful union, Service observed.

  She didn’t offer a seat or refreshments. “What’s this about?” she wanted to know.

  Service handed her a five-by-seven photograph of Wayno Ficorelli.

  She lurched visibly, but tried to recover her poise.

  “Do you know this man?”

  She answered, “With Monte’s business we meet so many people.”

  “His name is Wayno Ficorelli,” Service said.

  “I just don’t remember,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Is it important?”

  Service considered his options. The woman had been caught in flagrante dilecto with one man, and there had to be a reason other than fishing for Ficorelli to keep coming back to this area. It was a long shot that felt right. “He’s been murdered, Mrs. Andreesen.”

  Blood ran out of the woman’s face and she started to wobble. Service caught her by the arm and guided her down into a chair. She shook her head listlessly and stared at the floor, her breath coming fast. “When?” she asked.

  Service told her the date and she began to gasp for air.

  “Nothing . . . in . . . news,” she mumbled, her voice cracking.

  “There are reasons for that,” Service said, not amplifying. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but we need help finding his killer.”

  She responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

  “You knew him,” Service said, a declarative statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “That same day,” she said. “He got here late morning and left to meet Arnie Thorkaldsson to fish.”

  “You know the sheriff?”

  “For a long time.”

  “Did Wayno act different in any way on that day?”

  She rolled her eyes and managed a smile. “God, he was the poster boy for different.”

  “But that day specifically?”

  “He wasn’t himself,” she said with resignation. “He was really hurting over his mom’s death. He never talked about work. I want work talk, Monte has more than enough.”

  “What time did Wayno leave here?”

  “Four, maybe a little after. He usually left about the same time. He and Arnie always bet a beer on the most fish, and he liked to get there first. But that day he was reluctant to leave, said he wasn’t in the mood, and I told him to go,” she said, stifling a sob.

  “This is not your fault,” he said, trying to keep her calm and talking. “Did you see Wayno often?”

  “Whenever he came to see Arnie.”

  “Three times a year?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled, her eyes wide with disbelief, obviously disturbed that he knew the frequency.

  “Does Arnie know about you and Wayno?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “Knew.”

  “Where’d you two meet?”

  “Monte’s company sponsors youth outdoor education programs, and sometimes we have Wisconsin wardens come in to talk to the kids. Wayno was a guest speaker at a meeting near Fond du Lac.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Seven years.”

  “And you’ve been seeing him ever since?”

  “It was flingy,” she said. “You know, not serious. Wayno had a wild, bad-boy side and Monte has none, and doesn’t know anything about having fun unless he’s making money.”

  “Seven years seems like a long fling,” he said.

  “Like I already said, Wayno was Wayno, and what it was, was all it ever was going to be,” she said.

  “How’d you arrange your meetings and times?”

  “We set them a year ahead,” she said.

  “And he never missed?”

  “He said he controlled his own schedule,” she said. “Did he suffer?”

  “No,” Service said, knowing this was what she wanted to hear. “Did you vary the dates?” he asked.

  “No, it was pretty much the same three days every year. You know, because of the fishing, something to do with certain insects.”

  “I appreciate your cooperation,” Service said, knowing now that fishing was not Wayno’s only reason for coming to Florence County.

  “Who told you about us?” she asked.

  “That’s confidential, and you also need to keep this quiet. We won’t be talking to your husband.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Like I’m going to talk about it?” she said. “I feel stupid and I feel bad about all of this. Wayno was . . .” Tears were welling in her eyes.

  “I can let myself out,” Service told her. He turned around at the door. “You said Wayno was really bothered by his mom’s death?”

  “Devastated. He couldn’t understand how it happened.”

  When he got to the truck he sat for a while. Wayno’s mother, Elray Spargo’s sister, Maridly Nantz. Two murdered game wardens and another on the alleged target list, and all with sudden losses of people they were close to. This defied coincidence. He had seen Wayno in action. He had been an aggressive warden. And because of his mother’s death Wayno may not have been on his game.

  Now he also knew that Wayno wasn’t as unpredictable as he should have been. Three times a year, same place, parking in the same spot—these were things a killer could work with, and they probably had cost him his life. What it didn’t do was explain why Ficorelli was chosen by the killer, or how. Killer or killers, he reminded himself. The list? Maybe, maybe not. Keep an open mind, he cautioned himself, as he drove back down to the river, showed his temporary ID to the security agents on duty. He parked where Wayno’s vehicle had been, got out his waders, and walked down the path into the river and up toward the kill site, trying to sort out his thoughts.

  The killer had missed Ficorelli’s gear. Had he planned to dump the body and come back? Had Thorkdalsson’s arrival been too close a call and spooked him? What else had he missed?

  24

  FLORENCE COUNTY, WISCONSIN

  MAY 30, 2004

  What would get a fisherman out of the water? Correction: not just a fisherman, but a game warden. If he had been on duty, it might have been to help someone, or to watch or stop something, but Wayno had been off duty, and fishing. Service sat on the log where he had found the rod and the fly box, which had been submerged but open. Had Wayno been changing flies? If so, was it because he wanted a new pattern, or because he’d lost one in the trees or foliage? The greenery was certainly dense enough along the bank to eat flies.

  Service tried to read the water. There was a pool with smooth water about thirty yards upstream, and a riffle nearer to him—less a riffle than pocket water. The best run was close to the bank, and that’s where the trout were most likely to be—unless a hatch was happening in low light, in which case the trout would be inclined to move more toward the middle to feed, which could have put Ficorelli’s backcast in jeopardy. But if the rises had been along the seam by the bank, Wayno would have been in the middle casting toward shore, with little chance of getting hung up high behind him. The old rule was that if you weren’t occasionally getting hung in the low wood, you weren’t fishing aggressively enough. Rising trout stuck close to cover, which meant casts had to be no more than an inch or two off the target. His attention kept shifting from the coincidental deaths to Wayno’s fishing. He needed to focus. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and let his eyes begin to sweep the foliage along the banks. Looking for a fly in a tree was worse than looking for a needle in haystack.

  Grady Service was studying the trees when Special Agent Temple showed up.

  “Bird-watching?” she joked
from above him.

  “Something like that.”

  What would be hatching now? Not sulfurs at night, and it was too early for hex. Drakes probably, brown or gray. Drakes would mate and spin down over the riffle. Drakes were good-size flies, 10s or 12s. If Ficorelli had lost a fly, was it because he snagged a leaf or a woodpile, or because of a bad knot? Bad knots combined with poor casts took more flies than anything else. He guessed Ficorelli was a pretty good caster, but everyone tied bad knots, either because they were in a hurry, or because the tippet was old or frayed.

  “Geez,” he said out loud.

  “What?” Temple asked.

  “Where’s the evidence recovered from the river—the victim’s rod and the fly box?”

  “Locked up back at camp.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about?” she wanted to know.

  “Tree fish,” he said, not bothering to expand.

  When they got to the evidence locker, he put on latex gloves and got out the rod with the reel still attached. He looked at the tippet, the end-portion of the leader, and saw a telltale curlicue, which suggested a bad knot or weak tippet. The leader was segmented with different diameters of monofilament, hand-tied. The closest knot to the end of the tippet was about four inches up. Obviously some tippet had come off with the fly. “Okay then,” he said.

  “Okay what?” the federal agent asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a tree fish,” he said. He handed her the rod, peeled off the gloves, and started back to the river.

  He tried to use the late sun to his advantage. If tippet was still attached to the fly, the monofilament might catch and reflect some light. He eased slowly along the bank, using a long stick to part leaves and branches. It took fifteen minutes to find what he was looking for: about six inches of mono wrapped around a tag alder branch, impossible to reach unless you got onto land and came down the other side of the trees.