Chasing a Blond Moon

by Joseph Heywood

  LeBlanc reappeared, put another sheet of paper on his desk. Her eyes were teary and her hand was shaking. “I got this off the Dictaphone tape he made early this morning.”

  Service read. “How’s the cow? She walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk. The lactine liquid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the nth degree. Go Army!”

  “He shouted the last part, almost burst my eardrums,” LeBlanc said.

  Service said, “Come with me,” led her down to the captain’s office. The door was closed. He knocked once and walked in. The captain had a foot on his desk, the sock off. He was studying it through a magnifying glass. He looked up at Service, said, “If God inhabits our souls, he is in our toenails as well.” He pulled his foot down and his tone changed. “What’s the meaning of this? My door was closed.”

  Service put the two pages from LeBlanc on the captain’s desk. The captain ignored them.

  “Where are your keys, sir?”

  The captain pointed at the corner of his desk. Service picked them up and handed them to LeBlanc. “Fern is driving you home, Captain.”

  The captain clutched his sock, held it against his chest, and looked confused. Service said, “If we can’t go at one hundred percent, sir, the team suffers.”

  “Listen to him, Captain,” Fern added.

  The captain did not protest. Service walked beside him out to Fern’s car, made sure he was buckled in, and watched them drive away, the captain staring straight ahead.

  He went back to his cubicle and called Grant’s doctor. “This is Detective Service. The captain is on his way home and he is not to come back here until he is ready. Concussion, my ass!” he added, slamming the phone down.

  He was disgusted with himself and pissed at the captain’s selfishness for putting him in this position. He had just turned on his computer to call up his e-mail when he heard a cough and looked up to see the captain standing just inside the cubicle.

  “Writing utensil and paper,” the captain said. He took a pen from Service, standing by the desk, and wrote, then handed the pad to Service. His handwriting was normal, flawless.

  “It takes courage to do what’s right,” the captain said. “I never again want to hear that you lack management potential. Leadership is a burden few can endure and fewer are willing to do so. I will be in my office, Detective Service. Carry on.”

  Fern LeBlanc was standing behind the captain, smiling slyly. “Cash register,” she said.

  Service closed his gaping mouth. “What the hell is going on?”

  “The captain is somewhat unorthodox in his methods,” she said.

  “I called his doctor.”

  “Exactly,” she said, turning, swirling her skirt and disappearing.

  He went directly to the captain’s office and found him writing. Grant held up the pad of paper. “Do you wish to inspect?”

  Service nodded, took it and scanned it. Normal, perfect. He handed it back.

  “Excellent,” the captain said. “Perfect. Good leadership: Assume nothing. Always follow up.” He was smiling.

  Service told LeBlanc he was going out. “Lunch,” he said. Only when he got into the truck and pulled out onto US 41 toward town did he notice it was only 9 a.m.

  30

  Teddy Gates called on Service’s cell phone. “I tried the office, but they said you’d gone to lunch. Lunch at this hour?” Gates asked with a chuckle.

  “What is it?” Service shot back, still shaken over the captain’s strange little performance.

  “Oliver Toogood, Sarn’t.”

  “He’s a fake.”

  “On the contrary, he’s very real and quite authentic. He receives a one hundred percent medical, which goes to a bank in a town called Ontonagon. He rarely draws on it and he has never made a deposit, the result being that he has accumulated a rather hefty nest egg.”

  “How can you get into bank records without a subpoena?”

  “Work-around. It all depends on who you know,” Gates said.

  Trapper Jet was legit? “How can we be sure?”

  “The bank has his fingerprints and they match the ones we have at DoD. I’m going to fax you some photos from his swearing in as an officer and another at the time of his release as a POW.”

  “When was the most recent withdrawal?” He was desperate for something.

  “Three years ago.”

  If he was on the level, where the hell was he? “Thanks,” Service said.

  “Glad to be of assistance, Sarn’t. You need any more help, you call.”

  “Yessir.”

  His mind drifted back to Cal Shall at the academy. The first day in investigations class Shall had given each student what he called a paint-by-number canvas. There were squiggles and geometric shapes all over it, but no numbers.

  “What are you looking at? Please write your answer on the back of the board and pass it forward.” Service still remembered what he saw. It was a message that said, “The obvious is only as clear as you allow it to be.”

  A second board was passed out. This showed the same black squiggles as the first one but this one had numbers in the shapes. “What are you seeing?” Shall asked. “Answers on the back, pass ’em forward.”

  A third board was the same as the second. Cadets were given blue and black crayons and told to use them to try to bring out a picture, write their answers on the back, pass them forward.

  The fourth board was passed out, same as the last three, and an entire box of Crayolas was given to each cadet. “Color them in, write your answer on the back, pass it forward. You have ten minutes,” the instructor said.

  Not everybody finished their coloring, but Shall collected the boards and sent the cadets out for a break. “Back in fifteen minutes,” he told them.

  There was some laughing, but not much discussion of the exercise. Service thought it a foolish waste of time.

  When they filed back into the classroom, they saw that Cal Shall had written on the blackboard:

  •LEVEL ONE: 1 of 30

  •LEVEL TWO: 2 of 30

  •LEVEL THREE: 5 of 30

  •LEVEL FOUR: 24 of 30

  “Allow me to summarize,” the instructor began. “Only one of you correctly visualized the unnumbered scenario. Only two decoded level two. Five got the two-color work-up, which is excellent. Only three quarters of you got the full picture in color, though this particular result is related to individual working speeds. If you’d had enough time, you would all have gotten it,” he said.

  “Gentlemen, the first board is actually the second stage of most investigations. The initial situation consists of a crime and a few facts. ­Investigative techniques allow you to create level one, and from there you begin to ascertain how things relate and you assign them numbers, which equate to colors in level two. At this point you begin to try to relate the clusters, and often you do not have the full palette of evidence available, so your picture lacks full color and you are in level three. It is only at level four that full color enables you to easily decipher your situation. And it is from level four that the prosecutor will assemble the case for court.” Shall looked at the clock on the wall. “Dismissed.”

  The instructor found Service outside and pulled him aside. “You were the one who got level one. Level one minds are rare; you’d better take care of and nurture your instincts and intuition.”

  “This is only an exercise.”

  “This exercise has predictive power. Looking back at scores of my students, I can see which ones were destined to become successful investigators.”

  “It’s not realistic,” Service said. “There are times when there are no shapes and the board is totally blank.”

  “You’re mistaken, Cadet. There is always a starting point: a body, a theft, an accident, and so on. With each criminal event there is alw
ays the fact of the crime, and this becomes your point of embarkation. Even if you have nothing but suspicion—for example, in the case of a missing person—you have the person and the facts of their life. Do you understand?”

  All of which brought him back to the present, staring at the seventy-five-foot-high Lake Superior and Ishpeming Railroad ore dock, where each week a couple of huge ships were filled with taconite pellets from the Tilden Mine.

  He was back in his office at ten. A quick look at the fax from Teddy Gates confirmed that the Ollie Toogood he knew as Trapper Jet was indeed the officer being sworn in—and the released POW. What the hell was the story with the yearbook photo?

  Wisconsin Warden Les Reynolds called while he was puzzling over the photograph.

  “Thought you’d want to know, Mary Ellen Fahrenheit was killed in a vehicle accident last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Thought you’d want to know because it happened up your way.”

  “It did?”

  “M-35 at the Cedar River Bridge. She was southbound, lost control, went over the guardrail and into the river. A trucker behind her saw it happen, tried to pull her out, but failed. They had to call in a dive team. They recovered the body two, three hours after the accident.”

  Southbound? She had been a long way from home. “What time was this?”

  “I think seven-thirty, eight p.m., your time.”

  “Where’s the body now, Les?”

  “Bay Area Med in Menominee. There’ll have to be an autopsy. The roads were dry, she was thirty-nine and in good health. No reason for this.”

  Service looked at the map in his head. The next city north of Cedar River was Escanaba, then Gladstone, and she had been headed south. From where? Cal Shall’s words came back to him: “The obvious is usually the right choice.” Cedar River was thirty to forty minutes south of Escanaba and Gladstone. Mary Ellen Fahrenheit had taken up with Ficorelli as much for a payback to her husband as anything else, and when Service told her that her husband was in jail, she wanted to leave him there.

  Could she have found Outi Ranta? He had done so, based on what Charlie Fahrenheit had told him. Mary Ellen seemed a determined woman—but to kill someone with a gun? His gut said no. This was not the sort of crime you attached to the average person, and even less often a woman.

  He called Vince Vilardo at home and Rose said he was on the back deck, working on a report. She went to fetch him.

  “Grady, I was gonna call you in a little while. Ranta was definitely a homicide.”

  “Have you got a time of death?”

  “Temperature would indicate TOD sometime between six and seven p.m.”

  The time frame was more than intriguing. If Ranta died between six and seven, that could easily put Mary Ellen Fahrenheit around Cedar River at the time of the accident. “Do you know the M.E. in Menominee County, Vince?”

  “Blaize Jenner. She’s the only board-certified forensic pathologist in the U.P. right now.”

  “She the cooperative type?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you ought to be lookin’ for a date.”

  “This is professional. There was a fatal accident near Cedar River last night, a woman named Mary Ellen Fahrenheit. The body is at Bay Area Med and there will be an autopsy.” Service explained what he wanted.

  “Blood tox is standard,” Vince said incredulously, “why the heck do you want paraffin tests for a car wreck?”

  “Please humor me, Vince. I’m in the middle of a convoluted case and I’m desperate to nail down anything.”

  “Desperate, eh? Okay, I’ll do what I can. You at your office?”

  He wanted to correct his friend and call the office his cell because every day he felt more and more like a prisoner.

  Vince called back thirty minutes later. “Jenner will do it tomorrow, but she’ll do the paraffin today and then let us know about the tox results when they come back. You coming over for supper soon?”

  “Soon. Thanks, Vince.”

  Fern LeBlanc poked her head in his office. “The Secret Squirrels are outside.”

  The Secret Squirrels were Egon Spurse, the outdoor reporter for Marquette’s Channel 22 (“For the latest Yooper Sports and News, Tune in The Double Deuce!”), and Mia “Midge” Private, who had an outdoor radio program at a small station in Munising. Private’s station might be tiny, but her weekly thirty minutes of anti-DNR vitriol was syndicated by tape across the U.P. She called her show “Sporting Voices,” but the only voice heard on the program was her own: angry, shrill, and filled with righteous indignation over “the gray-shirted Nazis who usurp our rights as Yoopers and Americans.”

  Spurse was a bit more restrained and attempted to cover various sports and goings on in the U.P., but every program carried a two- to three-minute “DNR Report Card,” at the end of which he flashed a letter grade for the department for that week. The grade rarely got as high as C-minus.

  The two often worked together and were known throughout U.P. law enforcement circles as the Secret Squirrels. Both were married—to other people—but had engaged in a not-so-secret years-long affair. The source of their well-known animus for the DNR stemmed from a time when Lisette McKower, prior to her promotion to sergeant, caught them in flagrante dilecto in a van parked by the Rock River in Alger County. Shortly thereafter, the rants against the DNR began, and every U.P. officer except one had at least once been the subject of their on-air scorn. The only exception was McKower.

  Spurse was short and wide with a bushy red beard and always dressed in camo, which he strong-armed from various sporting goods stores in return for “editorial consideration.” Mia Private was not quite five feet tall, and had abnormally large breasts she displayed to maximum effect in tight blouses. She was a tiny woman, which had given her the nickname of Midge (a very tiny insect), and she had long straight black hair and looked like an aging hippie. She also had a concealed weapons permit that had been granted because of numerous alleged death threats.

  The two had room-temperature IQs, huge egos, and excessive ambition. Their audience was said to be largely composed of the mullet-andmilitia crowd, those locals across the peninsula who claimed to love their country and hate their government.

  “The captain asks that you talk to them,” LeBlanc said.

  “Have they asked for someone?”

  “Not yet. They’re out by our sign.”

  “Crew?”

  “One camera operator with Spurse. Midge has her recorder over her shoulder.”

  “Get me a tray with three cups, sugar, milk, and a jug of coffee. Is Romy working today?”

  Romy van Essen was a Northern Michigan graduate student who worked as an intern with the wildlife biologists. She was in her late twenties and had worked several years as a TV reporter in Mt. Pleasant before deciding she needed a life of more substance, and returned to school in Marquette. She would go to Alaska-Fairbanks to start her Ph.D. in the fall. She was a great kid, and a friend of Nantz’s. Though no longer in the TV biz, she carried a small video camera everywhere and shot footage of everything.

  “Okay,” Fern said, heading for the canteen.

  Romy came to his office and looked in, “Wass’up?”

  “The Secret Squirrels,” he said. “Grab your camera.”

  Fern met him at the door with the tray of goodies, including a plate of Pecan Sandies. Romy came with her camera. “Just follow my lead,” he said. “Make sure you keep pressing tight on Midge’s face. She’s got a lot of wrinkles and she covers them with enough makeup to ski on.”

  “Not to worry,” Romy van Essen said.

  Midge Private saw them coming and turned to face them. Spurse was talking at the camera pointed by his operator, a man with a port wine stain on the right side of his face.

  Service held out the tray. “Coffee and cookies?” Romy van Essen pointed her camera an
d began to record. It made no sound.

  “Bribes won’t do you any good,” Midge said.

  “Sound level,” Romy said.

  “We thought you’d probably like a snack and a pick-me-up,” Service said, raising his voice. He looked at Romy. “Sound okay?”

  Romy said, “Perfect.”

  Service turned back to Private. “We call this hospitality, not a bribe.”

  Midge Private glared at Romy’s camera.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?”

  “Recording for the record,” Romy said politely. “To keep the record accurate. You shoot and edit your tape. We show ours in its entirety, let people see what we’re seeing.”

  “Like the DNR has budget to buy air time,” Midge Private shot back sarcastically.

  “Not the DNR,” Service said. “Outside donors.”

  Egon Spurse had finished his bit and turned to join them. “Hey, Service,” Spurse said. “Thought your office was over ta Newberry.”

  “I moved.”

  “At citizen expense, no doubt,” Midge Private said.

  Spurse saw the tray, grabbed a handful of cookies and stuffed his mouth.

  “What can we help you with?” Service asked Midge, who immediately thrust her microphone at him. “I have a source inside the DNR who has shown me a memorandum directing gray shirts to make life miserable for bear- and deer-baiters this fall.”

  Service smiled. “The baiting rules are designed to protect the herd,” he explained. “When the animals congregate, they can pass bovine TB, and I’m sure you and your listeners are just as concerned about the threat of Chronic Wasting Disease coming across the state line from Wisconsin.”

  Romy stepped forward, her camera up.

  “Get that outta my face!” Midge snapped.

  “Camera off,” Romy said. “I’m sorry, Ms. Private.” Service saw a green light still illuminated on the side of the camera. “You’ve got something on your blouse,” Romy said.

  Midge stared down and began brushing herself. “Keep that camera off.”