Death Roe

by Joseph Heywood

  “The brotherhood?” Service asked.

  “Brotherhood of the Reeds. That’s what the sturgeon poachers along the Volga River call themselves, but it applies to the whole network that smuggles beluga eggs out of Russia.”

  “Krapahkin is a member of this brotherhood?”

  “Technically, no,” said Lafleur. “Before the Soviet Union split up he was getting caviar directly from the Soviet government. After the breakup the government had other priorities, and exports weren’t high on the list, so Semyon had to deal with the Brotherhood. Over time the new Russian and Ukrainian governments began to get their acts together and clamped down on the Brotherhood in order to reduce the loss of national resources. With sturgeon eggs getting harder to obtain, Semyon had to find egg sources elsewhere. That’s when we got involved. Quint heard Krapahkin was looking for other caviar sources to augment his product line, and he went to him with the idea of salmon caviar, but the Ukrainian didn’t like the price. That’s when Quint came up with the idea of blending eggs from two sources to lower his cost, and therefore, the price. Once he did that, Krapahkin began to take all we could send.”

  “About a hundred thousand pounds a year?”

  She nodded. “Like I said, fall was real busy, and it was all cash. I’d go to New York and Crimea would give me a bag with nine thousand dollars in cash, and I’d take it back as luggage. Sometimes I went back and forth every other third or fourth day to collect money. Crimea always paid promptly, and the count was always right.”

  “How much money?”

  She closed her eyes. “I don’t really know. A lot. We always had three to four hundred thousand in the office safes. I gave the money to Quint, and I assume that’s the cash we had in the safes, but I don’t know that for sure. Quint had a lot of things going that he didn’t talk to me about.”

  “The cash was at the Elk Rapids plant?”

  “There, at the Old Mission Peninsula house, and at the house on the Grand River in Grand Ledge. Quint never puts everything in one place.”

  “He lives in Grand Ledge?”

  “That place is strictly for politics and entertainment. His family is in Whitehall.”

  “You were the only one to pick up the cash?”

  Lafleur paused and pursed her lips. “Mostly me, but sometimes Quint went, and also Gary Hosk brought us the money a few times.”

  “Hosk?”

  “He’s an assistant prosecutor in Barry County now, but years back he was one of Crimea’s lawyers.” Service felt his temperature rise. Every time he learned something new, the case grew more convoluted.

  “Did you meet Langford Horn?”

  Lafleur rolled her eyes and her face reddened. “Horny Horn? Quint set me up with him, gave me fifty grand and told me to get the man whatever he wanted, which turned out to be mostly the same thing Quint wanted. Between the two of them . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Do you know anything about Piscova buying a boat for Horn?”

  “No. I bought the boat with cash, but Piscova paid the fees at the marina, and sometimes paid for repairs. They stored it at the plant during the off-season. The cash, of course, was from a business that doesn’t officially exist, so there’s no record, and no trail of any kind.”

  “Horn helped Fagan with his contracts.”

  “Langford wrote the contracts based on what Quint wanted. Horn knew contracts really well, and between them, they structured them to provide max bennies for Piscova.”

  “You saw them do this?”

  “They met at the house on the Old Mission. I cooked and, you know . . .” she said with a shrug. “I didn’t mind,” she added. “I was young and full of myself.”

  Service looked over at Miars, whose eyes were bulging.

  “The house on the Old Mission?”

  “It’s Quint’s, but it’s in my name. He’ll sell it and take the cash and put it into stop-and-robs in the Ann Arbor–Ypsilanti area. He already owns about twenty of the things. He also probably owns fifty houses around the country. He buys everything with cash and usually puts assets in other people’s names so the IRS won’t know. Quint gave me cash for the Old Mission place, but I went out and got a mortgage, and acted like I was anyone else going through the process. All I did was take the cash I needed out of the stash every month and make the payment.”

  “When did the cancer show up?”

  “I was having some strange feelings all last year, so I finally got my act together and went for a checkup, and that’s when they found it.”

  “Last summer?”

  “June.”

  “And you retired the following month.”

  “I had already paid for this place and I had some cash squirreled away. I was so angry with Quint I couldn’t talk to him, and I told him I’d go to the authorities. He magnanimously decided to grant me a monthly stipend—cash, of course—and to pay for my medical bills.”

  “Do the doctors think the cancer was caused by the mirex eggs?”

  “Doctors can rarely tell anyone the specific cause of their cancer. Back in the early eighties the FDA set a safety level of one hundred picograms per kilogram as the safety level for mirex. A picogram is one trillionth of a gram. When Quint had Jensen Labs test Michigan salmon contamination, he also had them test the eggs, and the eggs showed much higher than the meat—like a million times higher. Quint never showed that egg data to the state, but I stopped sampling after that. I guess it didn’t make any difference. The damage was done.”

  She laughed out loud. “The irony is that at one time, mirex was being used as a pesticide to kill fire ants. Well, it sure put out my fire! Our sex life ended after I learned about the mirex levels, and Quint was not very happy with me.”

  Lafleur suddenly looked tired. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I have to take a couple of naps a day as part of my recovery. We can talk more later on, if you’d like.”

  “We’d like that,” Service said. “If you could write down names and dates and places, as many as you can remember, we’d appreciate it—and the name of the convenience store chain.”

  “I can try,” she said. “Is Quint going to jail?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Miars inserted uneasily, “We’re going to do our best.”

  “How do we contact you?” Service asked.

  Lafleur smiled. “I have a track phone with prepaid minutes. This way nobody can bother me.” She gave him the number.

  As they walked back to the truck, Miars said, “You can’t make promises like that.”

  “The hell I can’t,” Service said. “Did you hear that shit?”

  They rode back to Marquette in silence and Service dropped Miars at his truck. “We need to sit down and review where your internal investigation has taken you.”

  Miars looked perturbed. “How about you take care of the egg mixing and I’ll take care of the other stuff?”

  “I think we’ll both be stronger if we combine forces.”

  “I’m not so sure. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen or been through what I’ve been through. Your case could be open and shut—if you can pull together the evidence.”

  It was an unsatisfactory conclusion, but on his way to Slippery Creek Service decided that Miars was probably right, and that his sergeant was nervous about pressing the internal investigation. Still, if there was a way to take the case back inside, he was determined to do it.

  When he got to the cabin, Candace McCants was sitting outside in the cool air with a cup of coffee, smoking a small cigar. “I’m here to inform you that your animals and I are having an affair,” she said with a big grin.

  Candi had been a CO for more than seven years. She was five-six, 160 pounds of muscle, afraid of nothing, and gifted with an inordinate amount of common sense. Born in Korea, she had been adopted by
a family in Detroit when she was twelve and joined the DNR after finishing a police academy at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

  “My dog and cat are females.”

  “Don’t quibble,” she said. “Take love where you find it. How’s Karylanne doing?”

  Take love where you find it? What the hell was wrong with Candi?

  Karylanne Pengelly had been his late son’s girlfriend. He died before learning she was pregnant.

  “Good, I guess. She’s tired all the time.”

  “Full class load at Michigan Tech, preggers, and tired. Duh, Service. You need to talk to that girl regularly.”

  “I do,” he said.

  “When was the last time?” McCants shot back.

  He held out his hands in submission.

  16

  Tuesday, October 26, 2004

  MARQUETTE, MARQUETTE COUNTY

  Service called Rogers in New York and told him what he had learned in Anchorage from Andriaitis, and from his visit and talk with Roxanne Lafleur. He left out everything bearing on the internal situation in Michigan, even though he wasn’t sure why he withheld that part. Maybe because Michigan was family and New York wasn’t.

  Rogers said he was still plowing through paper taken from the plant and added, “We’re familiar with the Crimea Group. We had a conference with U.S. Fish and Wildlife last spring. They’re investigating Crimea for unrecorded shipments of Russian sturgeon roe. Apparently poachers in Russia have killed several wildlife agents and their families, and Crimea’s implicated.”

  “Fish and Wildlife close to warrants?”

  “That wasn’t the impression they left me with, and I haven’t talked to them since then. They briefed us only to alert us that the Russian and Uke authorities have been squeezing poachers pretty hard, and they expected Crimea would start looking for product alternatives.”

  “Salmon eggs, for example.”

  “They never said, but if your information is accurate, Crimea has been in the red roe business for a long time, well below the feds’ radar.”

  “This thing’s layered like an onion,” Service said.

  “All we can do is peel it back one layer at time,” Rogers said.

  “Too many players,” Service said. “IRS, Fish and Wildlife, you guys, us.”

  “Don’t forget FDA, EPA, state police agencies, and the FBI. At some point it could take input and assistance from all of them.”

  Grady Service kept thinking about dead Russian wildlife agents and their families. “Crimea sounds like the old mafia.”

  Rogers laughed. “They’re totally new mafia. The Eye-ties and Sicilians are pretty much finito. I think the feds are moving cautiously on Crimea because these new outfits are not like the old boys. The Sicilians had a lot of rules and didn’t involve civilians unless they were forced to. The Russians and Ukrainians have no rules or compunctions, and they think Western cops are a bunch of pussies.”

  Service said, “We’ve got evidence pointing to Crimea.”

  Rogers said, “But what if Crimea thinks the caviar they bought is legit?”

  “They’re paying cash,” Service reminded the New Yorker. “Under the goddamn table.”

  “So they can only be tagged for financial irregularities—but that doesn’t mean they know they’re buying and selling contaminated eggs, which I remind us both, we have not yet actually verified. Until we have some of Piscova’s product in our hands, this is all hypothetical. When we get the caviar, the FDA’s got a DNA template that will detect mirex. If there’s even a trace, we’re good to go, because fish out your way don’t have mirex in them.”

  Service said, “We need to intercept a shipment.” He was suddenly sorry he had gone along with New York’s push for fast action. If Fagan was as good as Roxy and Andriaitis said, he’d lay off the illegal business until the subpoenas and what they led to were over.

  “Or grab some from Crimea—at the other end.”

  “Which means we have to pull in more agencies.”

  “The inescapable reality of law enforcement in the twenty-first century.”

  Service hung up and realized even more than before that he was in over his head. He knew how to deal with assholes breaking the laws during deer season. But this was new territory, and he didn’t like any of it.

  He called Tree’s cell and found him at his camp in Chippewa County. They made plans to meet that night. He also called Karylanne, but her answering machine said she was in class until after four.

  McCants answered her cell phone, and Service said, “I’m taking Newf and Cat with me to see Tree.”

  “They’ll be just fine with me.”

  “I think they need some male attention.”

  “Don’t we all,” she said icily.

  What’s her problem? he wondered. If something was bugging her, why didn’t she just spit it out? Nantz would have.

  17

  Wednesday, October 27, 2004

  NORTH OF NOWHERE CAMP, CHIPPEWA COUNTY

  Newf loped down the two-track toward the cabin a quarter-mile down the road while Service undid the lock to the chain gate. He parked beside a giant red cedar at the end of the narrow road, and saw lights in the tiny cabin. He let Cat out, smelled burning charcoal, went looking for his friend, and found him in the shed south of the cabin. A small doe was hanging from a ceiling beam, its hind hoofs barely off the unpainted plywood floor. The back straps had been cut out and were in a pan on a two-by-eight shelf. Tree’s arms were covered with blood and he grinned when he saw Service.

  “We’ll grill the straps. Mr. Weber’s already going.”

  Newf came into the shed and sniffed the blood pooling beneath the deer.

  Tree growled, “Don’t be snackin’ on my deer, dog.”

  Newf barked at the massive Treebone, but backed away.

  “I passed on three dandy bucks,” Treebone said, picking up the pan and plastic bag with the heart and liver and heading toward the cabin with Service in tow, Newf bounding around them like a shepherd with ADD.

  Service had bought the camp and given it to his friend as a gift earlier in the year. At the time the camp hadn’t had power or a drinking-water source. What power it had now came from a small generator Treebone had installed. He had also sunk a well on the property.

  Service watched as his friend dropped the heart and liver in the sink, ran cold water on them, trimmed off some fatty deposits, slapped them on a carving board, sliced them paper-thin, threw them in a bag with flour, pepper, and cornmeal, and vigorously shook the bag. Service grabbed an onion and a bowl of mushrooms, chopped them, and diced half a dozen garlic cloves. He put the vegetables in aluminum foil, made a tent, dashed some olive oil on them, added salt, pepper, and some butter, and pinched the tent closed.

  The two men stepped onto the porch. Service put the back straps on the grill, sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and Montreal Steak Seasoning, set the foil tent beside the meat, and closed the cover. Treebone uncorked a bottle of cheap Crane Lake cabernet sauvignon and poured some into enameled tin cups.

  “Define dandy,” Service said.

  “Big six, small ten, and a monster ten.”

  “Very sporting to take a doe.”

  “Gotta let them genes fill the pool,” his friend said.

  “Maybe you ought to let Chewy know.”

  Buster Beal was a biologist in the Escanaba office, a man who loved white-tailed deer, took care of the herd as a sacred responsibility, and killed them with equal fervor during rifle and archery seasons. Beal was well over six foot, burly, hairy, and known throughout the DNR as Chewy, after the hirsute Star Wars character.

  Treebone exhaled loudly. “So that motherfucking killing machine can whack my pets!”

  “Pets?”

  “My property, my anim
als. You got a case yet?”

  “We’ve got an asshole mixing contaminated Lake Ontario salmon eggs with clean Michigan eggs and selling them as caviar to a New York City outfit that may or may not be Ukrainian mafia. And they’re not your pets.”

  “That ain’t so much.”

  “With at least one state BAO man and some DNR personnel, including the director, possibly on the take—or at least in the know—and all the egg deals are in cash and off the books.”

  “Now it’s getting complicated.”

  “You said something about making a tree.”

  “Eat first, work later.”

  Service went to get Chinet plates, looked in a cooler, and found four eight-inch brook trout. He looked over at his friend. “Are you poaching during closed season?”

  “Just a couple for breakfast, man. Most of ’em are gonna die over the winter anyway.”

  “You know better.”

  “Just this once,” Treebone said. “Man, you gonna stroke me?”

  “The law’s the law.”

  “And you game wardens wonder why everyone thinks you’re a bunch of chickenshit pricks.”

  “We embrace the love,” Service said.

  “Learn how to make your own damn tree,” his friend grumbled.

  “Now that’s chickenshit,” Grady Service said.

  The meat was tender, the veggies a bit underdone. Tree mumbled with a full mouth, “I love this shit. You’re not really stroking me.”

  “Technically you’re within the possession limit. The rules don’t say you can’t legally possess in the off-season. Of course, you took these earlier this year, right?”

  “No man, first thing this morning.”

  Service rolled his eyes and Tree said, “Why’d you have to go and open the damn cooler? Write the ticket, man. I deserve it.” Treebone took a sip of wine. “You got yourself hard-wired to cop-analog mode: On-off, good-bad, right-wrong. Real talk, yo, you get head-to-head with those other agencies and politicians thinking like that and you’re going nowhere, man. Analog is Martian to them boys. See, you can point the weapon, but only they can pull the trigger, hear what I’m saying? These aren’t your backwoods perps, bro. You start fucking with organized crime, politicians, and bureaucraps, and there will be a shitstorm with you in the middle.”