Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  The signal wavered. For a few seconds all I heard was static, until finally the voice broke through again. “The police said they found Red’s van in the woods up there. You wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. “Are you gonna tell me who you are or not?”

  “Red is my brother, all right? Now just tell me what the fuck is going on up there.”

  “You gotta talk to me first,” I said. “You’re one of the men who came up here, aren’t you? Are you the guy with the big nose?”

  “Friend, you are really pushing your luck. You know that?”

  “You were up here, looking for Albright,” I said. “Where are you now?”

  The line was silent for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if I was still connected. Finally, the voice came back on. He spoke slowly, as if he could barely control himself. “I will find out who you are. And I will break every bone in your body. You got that? Every fucking bone in your body. And when I’m done, I’ll go back and break every bone again. Okay? Are you hearing me?”

  He said a few more words, but I didn’t catch them. Then the signal went out for good. I threw the phone on the seat.

  “What was that about?” Vinnie said.

  “One of those other men who were up here,” I said. “He said he was Red’s brother. He must have gotten into Albright’s phone messages.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just wanted to know what’s going on up here. You should’ve heard this guy, Vinnie. I gotta tell ya, this is getting worse by the minute.”

  “His brother’s missing. I can relate to that. Of course he’s gonna be mad.”

  “No, it’s more than that. He sounded like the kind of guy who gets mad for a living.”

  “Meaning what? You think Tom got hooked up in something?”

  “It doesn’t look real good right now. You’ve got to admit it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  There was no need to push it any further, so I settled in for the long drive. The snow started to let up. I drove for a while, never thinking about looking in the rearview mirror. Up here, you don’t even need one.

  I heard the buzzing noise, then finally looked up and saw the motorcycle closing on us from the rear. My first thought was the police—this was DeMers coming to hunt me down like he said he would. But no, he’d be the last man on earth to get on a motorcycle.

  My second thought was the phone call. Red’s brother had connections in Canada, and this was his way of letting us know he didn’t appreciate my attitude.

  The motorcycle moved over to the other lane and drew even with me. The rider gestured for me to pull over. He had a black helmet on, so I couldn’t see his face. But I recognized the blue-and-white coat. I pulled over.

  The motorcycle fishtailed as it came to a stop in front of us. The rider got off and walked over to us. He shook his hands. With no gloves, they must have been colder than hell. When he got to the truck, I rolled down my window. He took his helmet off.

  “You always drive that fast?” he said. He had long dark hair, dark eyes, and the wide cheekbones of a full-blooded Indian. He looked in past me at Vinnie.

  “You must be Guy Berard,” I said.

  If he was surprised, it didn’t show. “You’re McKnight and LeBlanc. I’ve been trying to catch up to you ever since you left the police station.”

  “How’d you know we were there?”

  “I saw you guys on the road,” he said. “Where that van was. I saw the police take you away.”

  “Yeah? And how did you know who we were?”

  He gave me a slight smile. “My mother told me all about you.”

  “You were at home, weren’t you,” I said. “How come you were hiding from us?”

  “Can we go talk about this somewhere? I’m freezing my ass off.”

  “What do you know about the men on the hunting trip?” Vinnie said.

  Guy looked past me again. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. “You’re the brother.”

  “Yes,” Vinnie said.

  “We need to talk,” he said. “Follow me.”

  “Why should we?” Vinnie said. I was surprised at the hard edge in his voice. “If you know something about my brother, just tell me now.”

  The wind came up again. It kicked up a riot of snowflakes. Guy buried his hands in his armpits.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “And then you can decide if you want to hear the rest. I was there at the lodge on Saturday.”

  “We already figured that out,” Vinnie said. “That’s the day Tom’s group flew back from the lake.”

  “Did you talk to them?” I said.

  “No, not that day,” Guy said. “They were already gone.”

  “Okay, so what’s the big deal?” Vinnie said.

  “I don’t think they came back that day at all,” he said.

  “What are you saying?” I could feel Vinnie sliding over on the seat.

  “I’m saying I think they either came back on a different day,” he said. “Or else they never flew out to that lake in the first place.”

  Chapter Ten

  We followed Guy back to the reserve. I got a little anxious driving by the crime scene again. There were five OPP cars parked up and down the road, along with three cars from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A thin yellow tape was stretched from tree to tree, forming a loose circle around Albright’s Suburban. Some of the officers on the scene looked up at us as we passed, but nobody stopped us.

  Just for the hell of it, I turned my cell phone back on. Our new friend from Detroit had called three more times just in the past few minutes, and left one message. I tried calling in to hear it, but the signal faded out almost immediately. I left the phone on the seat and got out of the truck.

  “Same guy?” Vinnie said.

  “Apparently.”

  “Shouldn’t we call him back? He might know something.”

  “It sounds more like he wants us to tell him what’s going on. But yeah, I suppose we should. As soon as we head south a little bit, we’ll pick up a signal again.”

  Guy parked his motorcycle behind his house and came back around to lead us through the front door. His mother nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw us.

  “It’s okay,” Guy said. “I stopped them on the road. I decided I needed to talk to them.”

  She nodded her head, but kept staring at us with wide eyes. Guy sat down next to her on the couch and slid over to give Vinnie room. I sat on the chair next to the television. The air in the room was hot and stale.

  “So why are you talking to us now?” I said. “Earlier today, you were hiding from us.”

  “A lot’s happened since then,” he said. “They found that Suburban in the woods, for one thing. Then the police came by looking for me. Just to ask me some questions, they said.” His mother closed her eyes as he said that. “They must have got my name from the lodge. And with me living here on the reserve, I mean, you can imagine what they were thinking. I know they’ll ask me if I had ever met Tom before, or if I had talked to him at the lodge.”

  “Did you?” Vinnie said. “You said they were already gone when you got there on Saturday.”

  “It was the Saturday before, when they first got there. I had just come back with a group that day, and I was still hanging around when they pulled up. Mr. Gannon had told me they didn’t want a guide. So when I saw Tom, I said to myself, no wonder, these jokers brought their own guide. I was a little upset. Then I heard these guys carrying on, and I wasn’t upset anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were just a bad bunch, you know? The white guys, I mean.” He slipped me a quick look. “Not Tom. He was cool about it. These guys were all hitting on Mrs. St. Jean and making all these jokes about shooting anything that moved. I mean, you hear that kind of stuff a lot, but these guys—There was something about them, like they weren’t just kidding around. I was pretty sure
Tom was at least part Indian, so I went up to him and asked him what the deal was on these guys. He said they were all a little drunk already. I guess it was quite a trip getting up there. I asked him if he was up for spending a whole week with these guys, and he said he’d deal with it.”

  “Had Tom been drinking?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Okay. So what happened then? They loaded up the plane and flew out?”

  “I don’t know. I left. I had just been out in the woods for a week. So I wanted to get home and take a shower.”

  “So you never actually saw them fly out in the plane.”

  “No,” he said. “I just assumed they did. The next time I was at the lodge was this past Saturday, the day they were supposed to come back. By the time I got there, they were already gone. The plane was back on the dock, and their Suburban wasn’t there anymore.”

  “So what makes you think they never flew out there?”

  “It’s just a bunch of things, you know? I never really put it together in my head until today, when they were asking me all those questions. When I got to the lodge on Saturday, it was like nobody had been there at all. The butcher shed was clean, the dock was clean. It was just … weird.”

  “Gannon said they didn’t get a moose,” Vinnie said. “So of course the shed’s gonna be clean.”

  “Yeah, well, I asked him about that. And that’s what he told me. He flew them back that morning. No moose. No nothing. They got in their van and left. But it was just—I don’t know, the way he said it. It just gave me a funny feeling. And then when the other group got there, I was busy helping them get their stuff together, while Mr. Gannon fired up the Otter. That’s his plane—it’s an old DHC-3 Otter. Sometimes it takes a while to get warmed up, you know. Anyway, I’m helping out these guys and I can’t help noticing, he’s cranking and cranking that thing until it finally starts. If he had just been out that morning, the engine would have still been warm.”

  “Are you gonna tell the police this?” I said.

  He raised his hands. “I’m gonna tell them I’ve got this funny feeling Mr. Gannon never actually flew out on Saturday to pick them up? And that everybody at the lodge is lying to them? How do you think that’s gonna go over? They’re already asking questions about me, like they’re thinking maybe me and Tom had something to do with this.”

  His mother closed her eyes again. She put her hand to her face and took a deep breath. “Guy, mon coeur,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. It’s gonna be okay.”

  “It’s not good,” she said. “For any of us. It’s the last thing this place needs right now.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just from my old days as a cop, I gotta tell ya. The odds of getting four people to all tell you the same lie …”

  “Did you talk to all four of them?”

  “Well, actually no. Just Helen and Gannon.”

  “And let me ask you this,” he said. “How was Mr. Gannon acting?”

  I thought about it. “Like he was unhappy we were there,” I said. “Like he couldn’t wait to get rid of us.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “What do you think, Vinnie?” I said.

  “We can’t just go back to the lodge and ask them. Is there some other way we can tell if they went out there?”

  “Yes,” Guy said. “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  “How?”

  “I was out at that cabin three weeks ago. I remember how we left it. If we go there now, I’m sure I’ll be able to tell if someone else has been there.”

  “Gannon took those two constables out there yesterday,” I said. “They looked all around the place. It sounded like it was a real mess.”

  “Maybe it was,” Guy said. “But who knows if those men really made that mess?”

  “What, you mean somebody else did?”

  “If they can lie about them going out to that cabin, they can certainly take a few minutes to make it look like they were there.”

  “So how will you be able to tell?”

  “I’ll know,” he said. “If somebody’s really spent some time up there in the last three weeks, I’ll know.”

  “Okay, so how do we get out there? Gannon certainly isn’t gonna fly us.”

  “He doesn’t have to.”

  “Who else has a plane?”

  Guy smiled. “I’ll show you.”

  Guy led us back outside and down the street to the house next door. If Guy’s house needed a little work, this house needed to be run over by a bulldozer. If you believed what was left of the paint, it looked like one side had been green and the other side red. A thin stream of smoke rose from a metal chimney pipe, set at a crazy angle in the middle of the roof. Someone had put down the black tar paper on that roof, but had never bothered with the shingles.

  Guy pushed open the front door. “Grandpère?”

  We followed him into the room. The television was on, and a fire glowed red through the glass door of the wood stove.

  “Grandpère!” Guy said, a little louder.

  A man came in through the back door. He was carrying enough firewood in his arms to keep the house warm all night. He dropped it all in a heap next to the stove and clapped the wood chips off his bare hands.

  “You’re back,” he said to Guy. “What’s happening?”

  “I want you to meet Alex and Vinnie,” he said. “Vinnie’s brother was one of the men in the hunting party.”

  He looked at us carefully. His face was wrinkled, but he had the barrel chest of a circus strongman. His black hair was streaked with gray, and even longer than his grandson’s. A great red flannel shirt hung untucked over his waist.

  “Some people call me Maskwa,” he said.

  “The bear,” Vinnie said.

  “Yes, very good.” He shook my hand. His skin felt as tough as an old catcher’s mitt.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said.

  “And you,” he said, shaking Vinnie’s hand. “You’re not Cree, are you?”

  “No, I come from the Bay Mills Reservation,” he said. “In Michigan.”

  Maskwa nodded at that. “Casinos.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Casinos and a golf course.”

  Vinnie just smiled.

  “Grandpère,” Guy said, “Alex and Vinnie were at the police station.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was the best way to make an impression, but Maskwa seemed pleased by it. “They have a good jail there,” he said. “It’s all brand-new.”

  “We were the lucky guys who found the vehicle in the woods,” I said.

  “And this was your reward” Maskwa said. “A fine thing.”

  “Grandpère, these men came all the way up here to find out what happened to Vinnie’s brother. We’ve got to help them.”

  “Excuse me for saying so,” he said. “Why do we need to do this?”

  “Because something’s not right,” Guy said. “And it might end up hurting all of us.”

  “That sounds like something your father would have said. Or even me, about forty years ago.”

  “We need to fly out to Lake Agawaatese,” Guy said.

  Maskwa looked at us all, one by one. “Fly to Lake Agawaatese? Are you making a joke?”

  Guy ran down the quick version of what he had told us, and his suspicions that everyone at the lodge had been lying to us. “We have to find out if they were really there,” he said.

  Maskwa listened carefully, and when it was over he stood there with a troubled look on his face. He stepped in front of Vinnie and grabbed him by the shoulders. “What’s your real name, young man?”

  “Misquogeezhig.”

  “That means … red sky, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Minoonigeezhig.”

  Maskwa hesitated. “Pleasing sky? Where the sun sets?”

&nb
sp; “Yes.”

  “Those are very old names. You don’t hear them anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “Where do you think your brother is right now?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Do you think he’s in trouble?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Does your heart tell you he’s in trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  Maskwa nodded his head. “Okay. So we’ll go to the lake. We’ll see if that tells us anything.”

  “Do you have a plane?” I said.

  He said a couple of words I couldn’t understand. Guy laughed, and Vinnie apparently understood enough to laugh, too.

  “It’s too late to fly now,” Maskwa said, smacking me on the shoulder. “We’d never make it back before dark. So first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I looked at Vinnie. I didn’t have to say anything. He knew what this meant.

  “You should go home,” he said. “I’ll stay and go out there.”

  “I’m not leaving you here,” I said.

  “DeMers will kill us if he finds out.”

  “He can try,” I said. “I think he’s too old to catch us.”

  Vinnie smiled. Without another word, we were both in all the way.

  “You’ll stay here,” Maskwa said. “Have you eaten yet? Come, sit down.”

  We had dinner with them, all five of us crowded around Maskwa’s little table in the kitchen. Guy’s mother kept sneaking sly looks at Vinnie and me, and then looked quickly away. After dinner Maskwa fixed us up with sleeping bags on the floor of his living room. He went off to his little bedroom behind the kitchen, leaving us alone. We watched the fire through the glass doors of his stove as the wind blew outside.

  “Where do you think they really are?” Vinnie finally said. It was another night, just twenty-four hours later, and we were asking ourselves the same questions as we tried to go to sleep. Tonight it all looked a lot worse.

  “The police have everybody looking for them,” I said. “They’ll find them.”

  “What if Guy’s right? What if they never flew out to that lake?”

  “We’ll find them, Vinnie.”

  “Do you think they’re alive?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that one. I didn’t even try.