Ice Hunter (Woods Cop Mystery 1)

by Heywood, Joseph

  The district court in the annex handled misdemeanors, and this was where most COs did their court duties. But this case was a felony and being tried in the circuit court in the old building. The venue pleased him.

  The charges also included a federal ding for use of a silencer, but this case was being tried in the state circuit court first. They had enough to put the defendant away without the silencer count; if they could get him on the other charges at the state level, the feds would jump in next to try to bend the man for information about where he had gotten the device. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms rarely passed a chance to follow up on such opportunities. The DNR and other state agencies almost always cooperated.

  The judge was Onty Peltinen, a forty-year-old University of Michigan freak who drove a maize-and-blue conversion van and hung four gigantic yellow-block M flags off his front porch on game days. The judge always wore a blue suit, a yellow shirt, and a yellow-and-blue striped tie. If not for trout, Peltinen would no doubt be riding herd over a court nearer to Ann Arbor. As it was, he fancied himself the new John Voelker, the judge from Ishpeming who had written under the pen name of Robert Traver. Peltinen fished for brook trout in his free time and wrote exaggerated accounts of his self-absorbed exploits for obscure trouting journals. He was a short man with razor-cut pale brown hair and a handlebar mustache that sometimes seemed red. No doubt Peltinen liked presiding in the same courtroom where parts of Voelker’s Anatomy of a Murder had been filmed.

  Service had no idea what sort of a judge Peltinen was technically, but he had shown good sense in his rulings and appeared to be an unabashed friend of natural resources and COs. Probably because Service and other COs told the judge about great places to find trout. There were precious few like Peltinen nowadays and whatever his peculiarities and proclivities, they could be forgiven. Especially in the U.P. where everybody tended to skate in the more extreme bands of the eccentricity spectrum.

  Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Joe Doolin met Service outside the courthouse. They both lit cigarettes.

  “Fuckin’ pain in the ass,” Doolin said, “this no-smoking shit. Someday they’ll pass laws so’s a body can’t even smoke in the bloody bush. Mark my words.”

  “They’ll have to catch me,” Service said.

  Doolin looked at him and grinned. “I expect that might be a problem for the no-smoking cops.”

  The deputy prosecutor was sixty-seven, of average height, with a crooked nose and missing the lobe of his left ear. Nobody asked how the ear had been injured, and Doolin never volunteered. He had grown up in Ishpeming, been a trouting pal of John Voelker’s, gone to school in Illinois, practiced law with a big firm in Chicago, gotten fed up with cities, and returned home to Marquette. In recent years Service had noticed more and more big-timers suddenly deep-sixing their careers and coming home or relocating to out-of-the-way places where the pace of life was slower. Doolin called the trend downshifting, and Service thought that was about as good a description as any. Sometimes he wished he could downshift, but what would be down from where he was, a hermit in Alaska?

  “You ready for this doozy?” Doolin asked.

  “Let’s press on,” Service said, flicking his cigarette away and opening the door for the prosecutor.

  There were the usual preliminaries before Service was sworn in for the state and took his place in the witness chair. It was an expansive room with a stained-glass cupola overhead and balconies with glass-fronted bookcases filled with law books bound in red and gray. The carpet was red with green squiggles that looked to Service like snowflakes. The walls were gray with recessed white plaster alcoves and small columns with gaudy gold leaf. The old court’s nearly black hardwood paneling and heavy, ornately carved railings made him think of all the people who had sat in the seats for more than a century, following essentially the same process as today. Things were different now, but the law still had force, and this comforted him. In some ways the cavernous room looked like the inside of a cathedral, but the justice sought here was for this life, not the next.

  His old man had sat here many times, doing the same job.

  “Good morning, Officer Service,” Doolin opened.

  Judge Peltinen sat behind a raised black wood desk. There was an American flag nearby and seven white globes on posts on the front corners of the desk. He looked small behind the official barrier.

  The conservation officer nodded.

  “You were the arresting officer in the case of State versus Schembekeler?”

  “I was.”

  “Excuse me,” Judge Peltinen said, interrupting with a hopeful look on his face. “Is the defendant any relation to the legendary Glenn ‘Bo’ Schembechler?”

  Schembechler had been U of M’s football coach for many years and was one of Peltinen’s personal heroes.

  “No, Your Honor,” Doolin said, answering quickly before the defense could jump in. “Different families, no connection, even the spelling is different.” Leaning toward Service he whispered, “I knew that was coming.”

  “Just wondering,” the judge said wistfully. “Okay, Joe. Sorry to butt in. Let’s move on. I just had to ask.”

  “Understood, Your Honor. Go Blue.”

  “Go Blue,” Peltinen said brightly.

  Doolin turned back to Service and rolled his eyes so that only the conservation officer could see.

  “How long have you been a conservation officer?” he asked.

  “Twenty years.”

  “Before that?”

  “I had two years in the Michigan State Police and three years in the U.S. Marine Corps after college.”

  “During your police career, how many tickets have you written?”

  “I don’t know.” Why had Doolin asked that?

  “Thousands?”

  “Objection,” the defense attorney said. “Leading the witness and this line of questioning has no point.” The attorney was from downstate, some subspecies of Detroiter. He wore a shiny black suit with gold flecks, a scarlet tie, and gold-rimmed pilot’s glasses. His name was Hardin Bois.

  “Mister Bois,” Judge Peltinen said, “you’re new in my court and to this area and I need to tell you up front that up here we do things a little differently. If you have good cause for objection, by all means raise it. Otherwise, shut your trap. This ain’t gonna be on CNN tonight. We assume you know your stuff or you wouldn’t be here, so do your client a favor and jump in when it makes good legal sense. We trout fishermen don’t like to waste time on dead water. Am I clear?”

  “Very clear. Thank you, Your Honor.” The attorney’s face reddened.

  “You’ve written thousands of citations?” Doolin repeated, turning back to Service.

  “Probably.”

  “You have a lot of experience with violators. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “How many of your cases have come to trial?”

  “This makes about twenty.”

  “Only twenty in twenty years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that normal for officers in your position?”

  “No. Most are in court more often.” Most COs who wrote a couple of hundred tickets in a year could expect six to eight of their busts to go to court. The fact was that no CO spent much time in court unless there was a complex case. His record was better than other CO’s, but only marginally. Doolin would not bring this out.

  “I would say that this attests to your thoroughness at your job.”

  “Objection,” the defense attorney said.

  “Sustained,” Peltinen said. “Dammit, Joe, we all know Grady and we all know he’s a fine officer. Can we just keep this thing moving?” The judge moved his hand like he was turning the crank to a reel.

  “Yes, Judge.”

  Service guessed that Peltinen had brook trout on his mind.

  “Officer Service, please tell the court what happened on September 29 of last year.”

  “It was six weeks before the gun season for deer
and two days before bow season and I was on patrol. Several times over the summer I had seen a large buck with a pretty fair rack in fields along the edge of the Mosquito Tract. This was up near the headwaters of the river. In our training, and this gets reinforced by experience on the job, we learn that when we see a trophy animal we should assume it will become a target for poachers or illegal takers. It’s like following the money in other criminal matters. Our currency is wildlife. Having seen this animal several times, I decided to patrol the area regularly, alternating the times when I was there.”

  “To look for poaching activities?” Doolin asked.

  “My primary intent was to let my presence deter illegal activity.”

  “Does deterrence work?”

  “It’s a central precept of law enforcement.”

  “Continue, please.”

  “It was 7 p.m., not long until dark. I saw the animal in the same area where he usually was, at the edge of a field, barely out of the woods. Suddenly, I saw the animal’s hindquarters flatten. Then the buck got up, made a twisting jump to the right, and jumped down into the swamp. Deer don’t behave this way unless they’ve been startled, frightened, or hurt.”

  “Are you an expert on white-tailed deer behavior, Officer Service?”

  “I’m not a biologist, but COs accumulate a lot of experience observing animal behavior, and our experience makes us knowledgeable.”

  “You’re also a tracker, correct? In fact, you are a nationally known tracker who is sometimes asked by other state and also federal agencies to lead various searches.”

  “Yes, I can track.”

  “In fact, you are a member of a Native American group called the Shadow Wolves. These are trackers who have proven themselves in their profession, and you are the only Caucasian who has ever been inducted by the group. Is this correct?”

  “They don’t exactly induct you.”

  The Shadow Wolves had been created by Ted Owlfeather, a Cherokee who worked for the Texas Rangers. Owlfeather brought together six Native American trackers, called a press conference, and proclaimed them the best in America.

  A few years later Service was on his way home from spending New Year’s with Treebone and his family in Detroit. Despite a heavy snowstorm, he kept to back roads. About a mile north of Caffee, at the entrance to Fiborn Road, he found an older-model green Torino station wagon with its nose stuck in a snowbank forty yards off M-40. Three doors were standing open, and the interior was piled with blowing snow. He brushed off snow to find a Kansas license plate. He called in the number and was informed that the vehicle had been stolen from Liberal, Kansas, on New Year’s Eve.

  Service drove into Caffee and talked to the man who ran a wrecker service. He was unaware of the Torino and checked around. Nobody knew anything. The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Department had not gotten a call about a car in trouble, and Service decided to investigate. Where were the people who had been in the vehicle?

  Long-abandoned Fiborn Quarry was a mile or so north up the narrow lane from the Torino’s resting place, the quarry a source of limestone in the nineteenth century. Service took his snowshoes and emergency pack and started down the lane, but it was drifted over; other than a deer trail or two crossing over, there was no sign anyone had been down it. If the people in the car had not headed toward the village of Caffee, they would have moved into the pines, where the snow wouldn’t pile up so fast. Why they would head this way escaped him, but after a few minutes he cut a trail in the pines, called in his location with his hand-held radio and continued following three sets of prints. The trail petered out in drifted-over open areas, but each time it disappeared he rediscovered it farther north in heavier cover where there was a protective canopy and easier footing.

  Late that day another snowstorm moved in, but he pressed on. Perhaps the people had been hurt when they plowed into the snowbank and gotten disoriented. They were heading away from the road and civilization and into the deep swamps that surrounded the Hendrie River. Without equipment and know-how, most people wouldn’t last long in this weather. He melted snow in a water purification device and ate the energy bars he kept in his emergency food supply. The state police and Mackinac County Sheriff’s Department tried to mobilize to help him, but the storm stopped them. He continued north on his own, afraid that if he didn’t push on, the people would die.

  It took three days, but he finally smelled smoke, and when the snow relented a bit he saw smoke from a small fire going under some cedars. As Service approached, a gunshot sounded. Service yelled to identify himself but got another gunshot in answer. He alerted the state police, who wanted him to hold off and wait for backup, but he could hear frightened female voices coupled with an angry male voice and knew he could not wait. Having no idea what he was dealing with, he moved cautiously. The man took several shots at him as he maneuvered. Eventually he could see where the fire was and shot into the tree above it, dislodging a pile of snow that plopped on the fire and put it out. The man came forward trying to fire a rifle, but it was jammed. Service met him in thigh-deep snow and broke his jaw using the heel of his hand.

  The man had robbed a bank in El Paso, Texas, two days before Christmas and disappeared despite a national manhunt. He had carjacked the Torino and, because of the storm, gotten all the way to the U.P. without detection. The women were frightened and suffering from exposure, but survived. The bank robber was returned to Texas, where he was also wanted for murder. He was later executed. Service never learned why the man had gone north into the swamps or spared the women.

  In the wake of his hunt, Wansome “Wally” Purple, an Ojibwa from Rice Lake, Minnesota, had called Service to inform him that he had been chosen for the Shadow Wolves, a group he had heard of but knew nothing about. As it turned out the group’s founder, Ted Owlfeather, objected to his induction, but Owlfeather was no longer in charge. Service went to Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to meet the other members. There was no formal ceremony and they drank heavily for nearly forty-eight hours, but Purple knew how to publicize things so there had been a good deal of national and state publicity about Service’s new status. This was about two years before he got Trip Bozian as a probie, and Service suspected that his status with the group had made it tougher for Bozian to retaliate. He had talked occasionally to Wally Purple and two or three of the other Wolves since South Dakota, but had not seen them again. Once in a while he read in the newspaper about something one of them had done. His membership, he decided, was strictly honorary, which suited him.

  “My point is that you are a skilled and proven tracker, correct?” Doolin’s voice brought him back to the present.

  “I usually find what I’m looking for.”

  “Is it true that you have never failed to find a lost person that you’ve been looking for?”

  “Objection,” Bois said for the defense. “This is irrelevant.”

  “Your Honor,” Doolin said, “tracking requires attention to detail and powers of observation beyond what we normal folks possess. A tracker needs knowledge, wilderness skills, keen eyes and ears, and a fine analytical mind. I’m trying to establish Officer Service’s competence in this regard, and his success rate is the measure of how effective he’s been at using these critical skills.”

  “Overruled,” Peltinen said from high above. “Witness can answer the question.”

  “Have you found every lost person you’ve ever searched for?”

  “Yes.” Which was true, but too damn many of them weren’t alive when he finally got to them. He knew Doolin would not ask this.

  “And you use your highly developed skills to track animals and violators as well, is that correct?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the Mosquito. You saw the buck go down, then get up and flee?”

  “Correct. I thought someone had taken a shot.”

  “You heard the report of a firearm?”

  “No, but I saw how the animal reacted.”

  “This led you to investi
gate further?”

  “Yes. I circled on the presumption that a shot would most likely come from the animal’s downwind side. I hiked in about a quarter mile and cut trail.”

  “Cut trail?”

  “I saw fresh signs that someone had been there.”

  “What signs?” Doolin asked.

  “There were deadfalls arranged in a vee, a pretty typical makeshift blind. There was also evidence of some scraping on the top log, a rest for a weapon. The grass behind the blind was pressed down. And I saw heel indentations to indicate that somebody had been sitting there.”

  “Could you tell how recently the place had been occupied?”

  “Yes, only minutes before. Some bent grasses were recovering their elasticity.”

  “You say there were boot prints?”

  “Yes and the left heel had a distinctive nick in it that made it easy to read on the ground.”

  “Then what?”

  “I followed the trail.”

  “In the footsteps?”

  “No, trackers always offset six to eight feet to one side or the other. Otherwise you can spoil the evidence.”

  “Please continue,” the prosecutor said. “What did you find?”

  “The trail led me to where I had last seen the buck. The animal’s tracks were fresh and there were patches of deer hair on the ground, but no blood. I believed the animal had been grazed, perhaps along the spine, which would account in part for the way its back legs splayed when it went down.”

  “But there was no blood.”

  “Right, no blood.”

  “Meaning the animal might not have been struck at all?”

  “No, there was hair. It had been struck.”

  “How do you account for the lack of blood?”

  “Even with a kill-shot, an animal may not bleed right away. It depends on the nature of the weapon used and, if it’s a firearm, the caliber, the cartridge load, and the site of the wound. An arrow, for example, rarely shows blood after a hit. It penetrates and causes massive internal hemorrhaging, which leads to shock, which eventually kills the animal. You often find no blood until the animal is down and nearly dead. Deer shot in the gut or heart by a rifle don’t always bleed immediately and often can travel a long distance before there’s a blood trail. The hair tufts and the animal’s behavior told me it had been hit.”