There were a dozen people in a large room in various stages of undress. Noonan looked them over. “Yogi Berra class?”
“This is a nonviolent gathering,” a woman said, holding out a spliff. “Hit?”
Service said, “We’re looking for Martine Lecair or Wheat Kurdock.”
Somebody to Noonan’s right shifted weight, and he instinctively stepped in that direction.
“We’re not local heat,” Service said. “Got no warrants, no hassles intended.”
Dead silence.
A thin man from Service’s left scampered for the door, but didn’t get four steps before Service had him facedown. “You want to calm down, or do I have to call the local badge up here? You Kurdock?” Service asked the man on the floor.
“I guess,” the man said.
Noonan said with a snarl, “Foo’, this is a yes-no question, not no damn blue book.”
“Yes, Kurdock, Wheat. That’s me.”
“Let’s step outside and talk,” Service said.
“I prefer to talk here in front of my friends.”
“You think you need witnesses?”
“One never knows,” Kurdock said.
“Okay,” Service said. “I’m okay with an audience.”
Noonan turned to the man who had met them at the door. “Hey, shit-for-brains, I thought Kurdock wasn’t here.”
“Wasn’t the last time I looked,” the man mumbled with an insipid grin.
A woman said, “Make love, not war, amigos.”
Noonan retorted. “Make silence, not sentences.”
Service felt his shirt sticking to his skin. He hated heat. This shit in December? God.
“Where’s Martine Lecair?” Service asked his subject.
“Marti moved.”
“To where, from where?”
“Over to Bodison.”
“Which is where?”
“It’s a town out beyond the air base. You know, Davis-Monthan?”
“I’m anal-retentive. I need more detail.”
The man got up, went to a table, got out a notepad, wrote something, tore it out, and handed it to Service. “She’s not here,” Kurdock repeated.
“If we don’t find her in Bodison, we’ll be back with the chili peppers,” Service said. “Do you good to remember that, sir.”
Downstairs Sisneiga said, “Took you guys a long time up there.”
“Language barriers,” Service said.
“Shoulda have tooken me along,” Sisniega said.
“We wanted information, not war,” Service said.
•••
Service had seen many peculiar places in his life, but Bodison, Arizona, was unique: The town, such as it was, sat southeast of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the southeast side of Tucson. Martine Lecair, according to Kurdock, had been hired to teach at an “Academy for Indians,” the school run by the Minnesota Ojibwe Missionary Society. What business did Minnesota have sending missionaries to Arizona? He knew Minnesota to have plenty of its own ugly, homegrown problems.
Bodison lacked trees except for a few scraggly specimens in pots. The surrounding area was desert, the dominant color, babyshit brown. It was only December and the heat was such that you could see mirages of water ahead on the pavement.
The missionary school was fenced in with double rolls of concertina wire strung across the top, and the fencing made Service wonder if the hardware was intended to keep students in or non-students out. That was the thing about fences: It was sometimes tough to measure intent. Nobody greeted or stopped them at the front gate, which suggested security was more a matter of low-grade image than reality. A sign instructed visitors to sign in, but not where. Twenty-first-century communications deficiency disorder, Service told himself. It was a plague on the country.
Noonan grabbed a janitor by a building. “Martine Lecair.”
“Did you folks sign in at Admin?” the man asked.
Noonan said, “Not much sense of direction.”
“Hopi Lodge,” the man in khaki coveralls said. “Down the block beside the outdoor swimming pool. Ask there.” He pointed.
Hopi Lodge had varnished brown elk antlers over the front entrance. They went inside and found several children in a hallway tapping frantically on laptops. “Anybody here know where Ms. Lecair is?” Service asked.
A girl stood up, smoothed out her pink floral smock, and stepped over to them. “Miss Lecair? I’ll show you.”
There was a woman sitting alone at a table in an outside courtyard, reading a book.
“Martine Lecair?” Service asked, looking around. There was only one escape route and Noonan was close to it. “We’ve come a long way to talk to you.”
Lecair was an attractive woman with large brown eyes, a round face, and a major case of instantaneous heebie-jeebies. “I don’t know you,” she said tentatively.
He showed his badge. “No, ma’am, you don’t, but I’m Michigan Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer Service. My partner over there is Noonan. You disappeared pretty fast from Negaunee, and that’s got a lot of people worried.”
“The State sent a game warden all the way out here to tell me that? I don’t understand.” The woman’s head drooped and she began to tremble. She said, “I lost one, won’t lose the other one.” Then, “I need to use the bathroom,” and scrambled to her feet.
“Whoa—tell us what happened,” Service said.
“Not now,” the woman said, “I have to go now; I really have to go.”
She looked back from the bathroom door, said, “I’m not going back. We’re safe from it here in the heat.” She stepped inside and Service lost sight of her.
He yelled into the opening. “I need for you to talk to me about your daughters.”
“You’re here,” the voice came back, “which tells me it’s still going on.”
Women and johns. “Don’t take all day in there.”
The shot came seconds later and set all the kids in the nearby corridors and courtyards shrieking and running around in panic. Service and Noonan charged into the bathroom, saw the teacher’s feet sticking out from under a stall door, got the door open, saw the blood and the wound. The woman had stuck a .32 snubbie in her mouth. Noonan said, “No cry for help, this.” Two-inch barrel, the kind some cops called a Good-bye Special. The pistol had skittered into the adjacent stall. Service looked at the wall, above the body. There was a familiar red stick figure hastily drawn. The lipstick tube had rolled out into the larger room.
“Fuck,” Service said.
A woman came into the bathroom and Noonan told her to call 911, tell them there had been a shooting.
“What about an ambulance?” the woman asked calmly.
Service felt her femoral artery. No pulse. Checked her pupils: Fixed and dilated. He shook his head.
•••
Wheat Kurdock was arrested in Nogales four days after the suicide, caught trying to go south across the border, which struck the Border Patrol as somewhat against the flow of the majority of border crossings, putting the event into its own special classification and priority, which is why Sisniega managed to pick up on it soon afterward.
The three men drove down and were taken to see the prisoner.
“Don’t catch many going south, Wheat—like, nada, dude,” Sisniega said.
The border agent who sat with them had the neck of a bull, and Cherry asked him, “I know you, man?”
“Perez. Played linebacker for the Cards,” the man said.
“I remember you,” Cherry said. “Arizona sell you to Detwat.”
“Death sentence,” the former player said. “Thank God I couldn’t pass the physical. I come back out here and got work right away. Decided it was time to do something with the rest of my life.”
“You were a good player,” Sis
niega said.
Noonan added, “You passed the physical, you’d have been in the ass-end of hell.”
“Tell me about it,” Perez said.
“Once had a petition in town to change the team name from Lions to Hos,” Noonan said. “Got seventy-five thousand signatures, more than can fit in the stadium. Border Patrol’s a big step up from Detroit Lion,” he added.
Perez left them with Kurdock. Service said, “Yo, Wheat, let me guess—you were rushing down to Cozumel for surfing season.”
“I heard she committed suicide,” Kurdock said.
For once, the media got a story right. “You must have a better class of reporters than we have.”
“She was a very frightened lady,” Kurdock said.
“She say why?”
“She refused to talk about it.”
“And you weren’t curious?” How many thousands of people had he interviewed over the decades? It was like there was a set score they had to be guided to, same tune, different lyrics.
“Of course I was curious. I asked her and asked her, but she was wrapped so tight she wouldn’t say nothing. Muckwa,” he added with obvious disgust.
“You tribal, Wheat?”
“Saginaw Chippewa. Former.”
“Mugwop?” Noonan said.
The man curled a lip. “Muckwa—Bear Clan. Stubborn as hell, born trouble, especially their women.”
“Where are her kids?” Service asked.
“I don’t know, man. She never said nothing about no kids.”
“So you ran?”
“Little time in Mexico can’t hurt the soul,” the man said.
“She had two kids, Kurdock.”
“No, just one,” the man said.
“You just told us she never said nothing about kids.”
“She didn’t say nothing. I seen her with a kid one time, figured it was hers. You can tell, right?”
Service felt like the man was telling the truth, or his version of it. There were sometimes several versions and multiple follow-up adjustments.
Service showed the man a photograph of the dead woman and the red stick figure from the bathroom stall. “Any bells ringing?”
Kurdock stared at the floor, shrugged. “Windigo sign . . . about all I know. Supposed to keep the cold one away.”
“Cold one?” Noonan asked, and Service let him.
“Right. Like a monster.”
“She used lipstsick to keep away a monster?”
“Muckwa,” Kurdock said. “They believe all that shit.”
“But you don’t?” Service said.
“I’m Catfish Clan, Manumaig, on my father’s side. My mother was Udekumaig, Whitefish.”
“I’m a fricking Scorpio,” Noonan said. “And everybody hates my ass. Catfish, whitefish, bat shit, bear shit, monsters: All this shit is ozone, like foreign zoo duty.”
Service told the man, “Go back to Tucson and keep your ears on for anything about her kid, or kids. You hear something, you call me right away. Fuck time zones and all that shit, hear me?”
“Am I under arrest?” Kurdock asked
Noonan said, “Is English like your fifth language, asshole? You leave Tucson without telling Sergeant Sisniega, or hear something you fail to pass along, and we’ll be back. Then you’ll get to see a real monster.”
“Yessir,” Kurdock said.
•••
Heading north Service looked at his friend. “Jesus, Cherry, can’t you drive any faster?”
“Hey, this ain’t like Detroit—like, we’ve got real speed limits.”
“You know anything about monsters?” he asked his friend.
“Like Creeper from Black Lagoon and all dat shit?”
“Like the windigo.”
“No, man, I don’t know no monster like that.”
Service telephoned Friday while they were in transit.
“Thought you fell off the edge of the earth,” she said, teasing.
“Lecair committed suicide, and I was ten feet away, pistol in her mouth. We can’t find her kids. She drew a lipstick figure where she died, red stick figure.”
“Windigo?”
“Looked like it to me,” Service said. “I didn’t really get to talk to her. She went hinky right away, said something about losing one and not losing another.”
Both of them went silent until Friday said, “Gut?”
“Only one kid made it out here.”
“Grady, get her DNA to me ASAP.”
Service said, “Damn, that fits. I’m thinking maybe she lost one kid there and ran out here to hide the other one.”
“We have an unidentified child in the morgue,” Friday said. “Maternal mitochondrial DNA is the genetic link to mom.”
“I’ll bring the results myself,” Service said.
“I especially like the myself part,” his girlfriend grumped. “It’s about damn time.”
37
Monday, December 15
KETCHKAN LAKE, BARAGA COUNTY
Grady Service was beginning to regret how he had tied up Noonan and Treebone by dragging them into a fool’s errand. Part of him wanted to cut them loose and send them home subject to recall, but all of this had broken so fast and erratically that another part kept insisting he keep his reserves close and on the ready. This was the sort of lesson you learned hard in the military, and as a cop. Out-of-reach backup wasn’t backup at all. His gut told him to keep the two men near, even if they weren’t busy.
It was just after dark when he slogged through the snow into the camp between Ketchkan and High Lakes. There had been more snow as there always was higher up, but no major new dumping, and there was a nice fire going and a couple of lanterns hung on the tent.
Nobody greeted him as he stepped to the fire and shed his pack. No sign of Cale Pilkington. Krelle had dark bags under her eyes, and Allerdyce looked the way he always did: untouched by reality. Service lit a cigarette.
Krelle said, “You didn’t get the memo? The whole world quit those things.”
Pretty playful for as disjointed as she looks, Service thought. Krelle ran her fingers through her hair, looked at him with a crooked smile, her pupils growing, suggesting she was glad he was back. He immediately wondered if Allerdyce had been hitting on her, or if her eyes were simply reacting to fire.
He took two large thermoses out of his pack and set them down. “Dinty Moore beef stew. Heated it in a microwave at a Shell station on the way up here.” He shoved his ruck into the tent, noticed Allerdyce sitting beside Krelle like an adoring dog. He nodded in their direction. “Have I missed something?”
Krelle took a digital camera out of her pocket, hit some buttons, and handed the camera to him. Three wolves in the first frame, all large, one of the three looking like it was inflated by steroids. He looked up at Krelle and raised an eyebrow.
“Keep going,” she said, “Film at eleven.”
He flicked through more stills until he came to a movie segment which he watched for almost a full minute. The three animals were running perpendicular to the camera, or sort of running. It was more like . . . Jesus! It was just like that hand motion Donte DeJean showed us! Hand straight up, up and over to fingertips, pull hand heel in, repeat. At the start of the movie when the animals moved, it looked like they were on two legs, but this was just an optical illusion, a snapshot from a sequence that made you see what wasn’t.
Was this the source of the dogman crap? True, some disc jockey had created the whole deal as a prank, but the thing had persisted since the eighties. Had people been seeing these animals all along?
“What are they?” he calmly asked Krelle, who held her arms and hands out to her sides.
“The beefiest one has short legs,” she said. “The other two are large, although their proportions seem more normal. Until we ge
t some actual DNA samples, we’re not going to know anything.”
“Where’d you get these?”
Allerdyce said, “Sout’ a High Lake, mile mebbe, place call High Crick, jess little piss crick is all, but lots beaver in meadow, some willow, moose sign.”
“Any more moose carcasses?”
Allerdyce shook his head. “No time look, eh. Girlie dere, she want wolfie movies.”
Krelle said, “Mr. Allerdyce’s ways in the woods border on the supernatural.”
Service didn’t ask for an explanation. He already knew. “Eat some stew. There’s fresh bread in my pack from the Huron Mountain Bakery. Who shot the movies?”
Allerdyce nodded almost imperceptibly as he dumped stew from a thermos into a pan and stirred it with his ballpoint pen.
“How close?” Service asked.
Limpy said, “Forty paces, mebbe.”
“What are they?” Service asked.
“Wolfies, t’ink, but not like I seen ’fore.”
“Behavior suggest anything?” he asked Krelle.
But Allerdyce answered. “Pack for sure, family mebbe; sure di’n’t like my smell.”
Service asked, “Can you find them again?”
“T’ink so,” Allerdyce said. “You want me pop one?”
“No,” Krelle squawked.
“I take one kittle from pack, old man an’ old lady can make more kittles replace one dey lose.”
“No,” Service said.
The poacher rolled his eyes.
Krelle said, “Scientists do this sort of thing in the name of science.”
“Yeah, I remember a bunch of black guys down south that science types let carry syphilis to the end,” Service said.
“This is not like that,” Krelle snapped.
“Wolves are still protected here,” Service said. “All wolves.”
“You’re assuming Canis lupus, and we don’t know that.”
“It’s a subspecies?” Service asked. He’d never really had a good grasp of species classification systems.
“In fact,” Krelle said, “there are forty subspecies of Canis.”
“In my business, when we don’t know what something is, we assume it should be protected,” Service said.
Killing a Cold One Page 21
