Shadow of the Wolf Tree

by Joseph Heywood

  “We’re hearing about all kinds of bodies up where you are. One of them isn’t yours, is it?” she asked.

  “Limpy Allerdyce just gave me sassafras tea,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  He started laughing uncontrollably again.

  Limpy took the cell phone away from him and said, “Da dickteckerative’s kinda bushed. He’ll call youse back,” and closed the phone.

  Service looked at the old man. “She isn’t going to like that.”

  Allerdyce shrugged and poured more tea for himself.

  57

  Harvey, Marquette County

  MONDAY, JUNE 19, 2006

  Service called the captain and outlined the most recent developments, including the discovery of the two bodies and the whole line of experiences he had had regarding gold ore veins. The captain listened attentively and said, “See Jen Jeske, at the ore sample repository, over by the maintenance garage in Harvey.”

  At the repair shop he found a female fire officer reading the latest edition of The North Woods Call. She had blonde hair and wore a yellow Nomex shirt.

  “Jen Jeske?”

  “Second tin building east of here,” the woman in yellow said. “I think I saw her going into the office earlier.”

  “Second tin building to the east and straight on till morning,” he said, joking.

  The woman in Nomex looked up at him.”Yeah, that’s a real hoot.”

  A weathered brown-and-white wooden sign on the tin building said Michigan Geological Survey—Core Sample Repository. A smaller sign, handwritten, said, hoot’s house.

  When he stepped inside he found himself among twenty-five-foot-high stacks of musty wooden boxes painted blue and orange and white, and on the floors, more wooden boxes filled with ore samples that looked like colorless stone candles. The place felt like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

  A diminutive woman was in an office at one end of the tin building, seated at a desk, staring at a computer.

  “Hoot’s House?” he greeted her.

  “Yeah, I’m Jeske.”

  “Service, DNR Law Enforcement.”

  “The butt-kicking detective in the flesh, eh. Lots of stories goin’ ’round about youse.”

  Butt-kicking detective. He cringed. “I’ve got some weird questions.”

  The woman smiled encouragement. “My specialty. Let ’em rip.”

  He unfolded the 1:24000 quadrangle map he had taped together and explained the overall situation, including specific assay results.

  “Where’s the last outcrop you talked about?” Jeske asked.

  He pointed to it. “I don’t know if there was gold there at one time, but someone definitely excavated what looks to me like a vein.”

  “Get a sample of the surrounding rock. If there’re traces, the tests will show it,” Jeske said.

  “Tests are already in the hopper,” he said.

  Jeske picked up a pencil and a set of dividers and a plastic navigation plotter and began to draw lines between Service’s sites.

  “What’s with this place?” Service said. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “By law, if you drill in Michigan, you need to provide coordinates and send drill core samples to the state.”

  “Even if you drill on private property?”

  “Environmental liability the way it is nowadays, you’d be dumb or myopic not to alert the state, but it’s not legally required, especially if you’re not activating a mine.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Volume, depending on the ore. Over volume X, you’re mining. Under X, you’re not.”

  ‘Loophole?” he said.

  “Depends on your viewpoint.”

  Lines complete, she stepped back to get a wider view of the charts.

  “You have records of everything in the state here?” he asked.

  “Mining records back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, core samples from the early twentieth onward—if the mine owners complied with state law, which not all of them did.”

  “You have records on gold mining?”

  “Not exactly. The required state records are by mine, not by ore body, and I’d have to go to every entry to find what’s in each mine. But I’ve also got some folders by ore. They’re just not complete.”

  He wasn’t sure if this stop was worth his time.

  “Sonuvagun,” Jeske said in a hissy voice.

  “What?”

  “Had an old-timer swear to me once that Peter Paul’s mine in Iron County was a red herring—that the real strike was north of there, which lines up with your finds. Peter Paul’s claim is south of your travel line.”

  “That’s significant?”

  “Not sure, but it intrigues the hell out of me. Back in the 1920s an old army vet who had served in France claimed he’d struck a rich vein of bedrock ore in the western Huron Mountains. The thing is, he was shell-shocked and in and out of reality, ya know? The man spent an entire winter in the mountains and stumbled into L’Anse one spring. Lost all his toes on his left foot and all the fingers on his right hand to frostbite. Damn lucky he didn’t die. He came out with a half-pound of nuggets, nearly pure, the richest assay seen in state gold history.”

  “In the western Hurons?” he asked.

  “Ironically, he couldn’t remember precise or general locations, and he died that summer from complications following surgery. Somehow those nuggets ended up here. Want to see?”

  “Sure.”

  He held some of the nuggets, noticed they were pink in hue. “So his mine is lost?”

  “More or less, but you know how things work up here. Locals know a helluva lot more than they let on, except to each other. Word in L’Anse was that the strike was beween the Arvon slate quarry and Henry Ford’s logging operations in Alberta. The mineralogy isn’t right for gold in that area, but veins can run underground for miles and miles and pop to the surface in some strange places.”

  Service studied the map and mentally extended Jeske’s pencil line. The extension seemed to pass through Art Lake property. “Any possibility the gold wasn’t ever in the Hurons?”

  “Sure, but exactly where is another issue.”

  He made a circle with his finger, southwest of L’Anse. “Any mines in this general area?”

  “Fifty to sixty of them, mainly exploratory holes, but there are also eight or nine mine shafts.”

  “Gold?”

  “All ores. Years back a Michigan Tech team surveyed everything—hundreds of mines and tunnels. It’s all in the computer now as an interactive map. You want to look at the area, I can put you into the database and you can have at it while I try to get some work done.”

  It took him three hours, looking mine by mine, but in the end he built a mind picture. One of the mines he looked at, called Leftover, was just west of Art Lake.

  Jeske looked at his printout and went to her folder. “They were looking for gold, but it was a dry claim.”

  “That’s in your folder?”

  “No, in the codes. Leftover was opened in 1930, shut down in 1932.”

  “A mine opened during the Great Depression?”

  “People do dumb things in good times and bad,” she said.

  “Did the mine owners own the land, or was it state property?”

  “State-owned, mineral rights leased by Taide Jarvi Explorations out of Chicago, a subsidiary of Last Carde Enterprises.”

  “Huh,” Service said out loud, his heart racing as he repaired to the computer. “Will this thing give me GPS coordinates?”

  “No, just geographical coordinates. You’ll have to convert. You know how?”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s a pull-down menu in the program.
Select GPS and Map.”

  He did as instructed and wrote down the coordinates. “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said.

  “I don’t mind. I’m glad to help.”

  “One last thing,” he said. “Hoot?”

  She blushed. “I was in a basic Geology 100 class at Northern, and I bet my friends I could get the whole class hooting in one minute.”

  “Hooting?”

  She made a godawful sound, pumping her arm like a piston. “Hooting,” she said. “I won fifty bucks. The day I graduated I walked onto the stage at the Yooper Dome to get my diploma, and the whole student body hooted me. I just about died!”

  Service liked Jen Jeske. “Thanks.”

  When he looked at his AVL in the Tahoe he saw that the wolf tree and dry mine were almost identical coordinates, and he smiled and called the Baraga County registrar of deeds, identified himself, and got immediately to the point. “Van Dalen Foundation owns Art Lake, correct?”

  “Yessir.”

  “When did they purchase the property?”

  The man left the phone and came back minutes later. “There’s not one answer for that. They bought parcels over time, a little now, a little later, and so forth.”

  “Where was the first purchase, the second, et cetera?”

  “I’ll have to go back to my files. You want section, township, range, or GPS?”

  “Everything.”

  An hour later he had it all written down, and the man was sending a package of hard copies to his office in Iron River.

  Sitting in his Tahoe he dropped electronic markers on everything into his AVL. The initial Art Lake property was that with the pond and the dam.

  He called the registrar back. “Art Lake. There’s a pond on the property. Has it always been there?”

  The man grunted. “Have to ask the owners about that. Our data doesn’t show that kind of thing.”

  What the hell are you looking for? he asked himself as he headed the Tahoe toward the state police lab.

  58

  Marquette, Marquette County

  MONDAY, JUNE 19, 2006

  Gabby was in her lab, a tray of slides in front of her. “You,” she said when she saw him.

  “In the flesh.”

  “Bad choice of images in this joint,” she said.

  “You said assay results in seven to ten days.”

  She reached for her desk diary. “You delivered the slides on the fifteenth. They teaching you game wardens new math or something?”

  “It’s pretty important.”

  “Everything here’s important. How about I call the lab and check?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but will you still love me in the morning?”

  After the phone call she turned and faced him. “June twenty-second, guaranteed.”

  He made a mental calculation. “Seven days.”

  “Truth in advertising,” she said. “You want the results by phone, e-mail, or snail mail?”

  “Can you call me and put the paper in the mail?”

  She scribbled a note in her planner. “You’ve got it. Will you have phone coverage out in the woods?”

  “Hard to predict.”

  “I’ll leave a message on your voice mail and double with your e-mail.”

  59

  Baragastan

  TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 2006

  Word came from Indianapolis that the two sporting-goods lovebirds had confessed to conspiracy in the death of Jimbo Macafee, but Friday didn’t seem the slightest bit elated at the case break.

  Last night he’d told her, “You should be happy.”

  “The Box case is still out there,” she countered.

  “Enjoy your successes.”

  “Like you?”

  He rarely basked in success, but he’d not known her long enough for her to know this about him, and her knowing bothered him. Was she asking people about him, or was she prescient?

  This morning he again called Zhenya Leukonovich and was surprised when she picked up on the first ring. “You still on Van Dalen’s ass?” he asked.

  “Zhenya neither confirms nor denies.”

  “Are you aware that Penny Provo has been found dead?”

  He heard the air go out of the IRS special agent. “What are you telling me?”

  “We found Provo in a shallow grave just off Art Lake property. An autopsy is under way.”

  “Foul play?”

  “One small-caliber bullet in the head—about as foul as it gets. I met her, you know.”

  Another sudden exhalation. “Explain.”

  “I had a search warrant for Art Lake’s grounds. She intercepted me at night and we talked.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “She didn’t deny being a plant,” he said.

  More silence.

  “She yours, or Hike Funke’s?”

  “Zhenya will arrive in Michigan tomorrow. Where will you be, Detective?”

  “Where they pay me to be—out in the woods.”

  She hung up without further comment.

  He considered asking other COs for help, but decided to perform the next task alone. He called Junco Kragie. “Did you ever go back and check the wolf tree site?”

  “Once.”

  “Anything?”

  “Not that I seen. Why?”

  “Just jumping through hoops,” Service said. “Dotting my i’s, crossing my t’s . . . shit like that.”

  “Roger that,” Kragie responded.

  Something said by the boy William Satago had stuck with him, and he telephoned Betty Lachoix. “Grady Service. Is William around?”

  “He just finished cutting the lawn and is sitting down for iced tea.”

  The boy came on the line. “What?”

  “You told me about a drawing. Did the woman give it to you, or just show it to you?”

  “Just showed it.”

  “She say why?”

  “No.”

  “Could you re-create it?”

  “Already done that.”

  “You did?”

  “Figgered a wolf might could mess up the sets, so I come right home and drew up what she showed me.”

  “You still have the drawing?”

  “In my bedroom.”

  “Give it to Betty, William. I’ll be by to pick it up.”

  “Is that all?” the boy asked.

  “Thanks, William.”

  • • •

  Service parked a long mile from his intended destination and came at the site from the boggy swamps to the south rather than from the roads to the north. Ground always looked different in daylight than at night, and it took him a while to work out the exact location where they’d found Dani Denninger, but eventually he found the tree where the deer had been cabled, and he saw the damage to the bark from where the cable had been looped.

  Kragie had sent the cable and traps to the Marquette lab. No fingerprints, no nothing. The boy, William, had been meticulous in avoiding signs or incriminating evidence, and the DNR lacked the resources of some of its sister law enforcement agencies—the sort of sophisticated state-of-the-art high-tech resources necessary to crush a crime scene with technology, all in support of the investigators. In the DNR they had their brains, and not a lot else.

  Someone who knows about wolf trees. The kid knew, didn’t he? Need to ask. Woman who paid the kid was not Penny Provo, and it wasn’t Penny Provo who approached Allerdyce. Close to something, his gut said. But what?

  “Holy cow,” a voice said.

  Junco Kragie was in full camo, not ten feet away.

  “I liked ta shit when I seen your silhouette
,” Kragie said shakily.

  Overreaction? “What’re you doing out here?”

  “Same as you,” Kragie said, sitting down. “That Denninger kid’s a little fleshy-flashy for my taste, but she’s one of us, eh. I keep thinking there’s got to be a reason for a bloody wolf tree, so here I am on my pass days. Had it in mind to take this place apart, inch by inch. You?”

  “Great minds,” Service said, causing Kragie to look puzzled.

  “Same idea occurred to me,” Service clarified.

  “How long you been here?”

  “Not long. Been sitting, noodling the case, trying to find angles and options.”

  “Do any good?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If somebody asked you to set up a wolf tree, could you do it?”

  “Now . . . maybe,” Kragie said.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, since we found Denninger and we seen the real thing.”

  “You’d never seen one before?”

  “Just the drawing Station Twenty put out to the field.”

  “Lansing sent a drawing?”

  “Last year after deer season.”

  Shit. He hated computers and e-mail, and did a less-than-satisfactory job of staying abreast of electronic traffic. “You still got a copy?”

  “On my computer, back in my truck. We going to look around here now?”

  “Changed my mind. How about we go look at that drawing?”

  Kragie shrugged. “Sure.”

  Back at the officer’s truck Service looked at the drawing on the screen and asked Kragie to e-mail a copy to him.

  “You want to go search now?” Kragie asked after sending the document.

  “No, I’ve got some other things to look into first.”

  “Mind if I do some looking around on my own?”

  “Just be careful.”

  60

  North Bear Town Road, Baraga County

  TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 2006

  Betty Lachoix invited Service in for iced tea and gave him the boy’s drawing, which he took out to his truck. He called up Kragie’s e-mail and compared the two renderings. Damn near identical. What’re the odds? he asked himself.

  He sat in the truck and thought hard. What’re the chances someone outside the department has the DNR drawing? And if so, how’d they get it?