Blue Wolf In Green Fire (10 page)

“Only to those who harass it—or cage it,” she said, scooping dollops of viscous pancake batter into a huge black skillet. “And it's not just bad luck, but massive disruption.”

“There's no law against people believing what they want. A cult over by Helps believes God is coming back to earth in a UFO.”

Genova turned around and arched her eyebrows. “You mean she's not?”

Service went to the refrigerator and poured two glasses of orange juice for them.

“You look good,” Service said, setting the glasses on the table.

“Knock on wood,” she said. “Nothing wrong a sweaty romp in the kip wouldn't cure.”

“How's Howard?” Howard Genova, M.D., was her estranged husband, estranged in the sense that she lived in the U.P. while he practiced thoracic surgery in Ann Arbor. He couldn't tolerate the people or weather of the north and she couldn't abide flatlanders and their ways. They tended to meet when their moods coincided, which apparently wasn't all that frequently. SuRo did not talk much about her marriage.

“All surgeons are board-certified assholes,” she said. “You may quote me liberally.”

“What about the blue wolf?” Service asked, his curiosity piqued.

“You
don't
know, do you?”

He shrugged. “First I've heard of it.”

“I guess feds are feds,” she said, “always playing the secrecy game.”

She placed a plate with a half dozen small pancakes in front of him and sat down across from him. “Is this Nantz thing serious?”

“You never can tell,” he said.

“I can,” she said, grinning. “I hear she's at the academy. How are you two gonna mix work and noogies?”

“We'll manage,” he said.

“I imagine you will, rockhead.”

8

It was an easy fifteen-mile drive from SuRo's to St. Ignace. Traffic south across the Mackinac Bridge went smoothly while the northbound lanes inched along only feet away. As Service reached the highest point of the bridge he glanced back at the northwestern sky and thought it looked like a storm in the offing. The color was right, but the winds were calm, the temperatures unseasonably warm. Rain maybe, sleet if the temperature dropped. There were better odds in playing the state lottery than guessing the weather at the Straits of Mackinac.

The Brigadoon was a sprawling pale yellow building with green-tile gables, Victorian or Queen Anne; he couldn't remember which. There was no sign of Maridly's truck in the bed-and-breakfast's small parking lot, or along the curb of the facing street.

When he walked in and identified himself, the reception clerk grinned crookedly and jerked her head toward the stairs to her right. “Room Fourteen, the Forget-Me-Not. You're already registered and I expect you'd better get yourself down to business PDQ. That woman up there is antsier than a deserted cat on a rock in a rising river.”

He wondered where her truck was as he made his way upstairs and down the brightly wallpapered hallway. When he pushed open the door he saw a naked Nantz sitting on the edge of a king-sized bed. Her clothes were in a heap on the floor, her shoes flung against the baseboard of the wall.

She looked coyly over her shoulder at him.

“You're late,” she said.

“It's not noon yet.”

“If you're not here before me, you're late.” She turned around and pointed her finger at him, forming a pistol. “Drop 'em, Banger.”

When he reached for his belt buckle, she jumped up and flung herself on him, her arms holding so tight around his neck that she pulled him down onto the bed.

“Forty-three damn days,” she said. “That's biblical, a damn lifetime. I love your ass, Service.”

“Just my ass?”

Three hours later they walked down to the tourist district near the Shepler Line docks that were home to jet boats that carted summer Fudgies back and forth to Mackinac Island. They settled themselves into a booth on the ground floor of the Oz Marsh Club. They sat beside each other and found themselves surrounded by men decked out in faded red plaid wools and new blaze-orange camo coveralls, most of their faces bristling with whiskers that might reach some semblance of beard status over the next two weeks. The hunters were boisterous, brimming with optimism for the coming hunt.

“Two more weeks,” he lamented as they ordered a pitcher of draft beer. “How'd you get here?”

“I flew,” she said.

“Into Pelston?” It was the closest commercial airport.

“To here. I flew myself.”

“What do you mean you flew yourself?

She rolled her eyes. “I . . . fly,” she said. “I'm a pilot. My own plane? A Cessna One Eighty. You still don't get it, Service. I told you I was
loaded
. I got a lift over from the airfield. I've been hangaring my bird in Lansing for a year or so. Just haven't gotten around to moving it up to Escanaba, and I figured it was time to get the wings out of the hangar. If this 2001 shit drags on, it'll save us time. Smart thinking, huh?” She playfully nudged him with an elbow. “You got a problem with girl pilots?”

He shook his head dumbly and grinned, unable to think of a thing to say. She was so nonchalant about her wealth that he rarely thought about it. She was a
pilot
?
What other surprises would Maridly Nantz have for him?

After drinking half a glass of beer, she leaned her head on his shoulder and rubbed his inner thigh. “I'm not hungry. For food.”

On the quick walk back to the B&B, Service noted that the temperature was falling fast as they made plans for their belated Thanksgiving. Because the holiday this year fell during the middle of the firearm season, they would have to celebrate in early December. If she could get loose from Lansing, they would meet at her house in Gladstone and cook a turkey and all the trimmings. If the damn task force didn't interfere. If it did, he'd go to her.

“How's Newf?” Nantz asked.

“She and Cat are bunking with Kira.”

Nantz poked him in the ribs. “When you pick up our dog and cat that's
all
you'd better be picking up. I don't
share
my man.”

Just after midnight, Service's cell phone awakened them. As usual Nantz was instantly alert and got to it first.

He heard her say, “He's right here, Captain.”

Service took the phone. It was Captain Grant. “Yessir?”

Service grunted as he listened. “When?”

Another grunt. “Injuries?”

“Yessir, right away.” He hung up and felt his shoulders slump.

“
What?
” Nantz asked.

“The federal wolf lab at Vermillion. They've had an explosion.”

“When will this shit end, Grady?”

“Two fatalities. It looks like somebody touched off a bomb to release some wolves. That wrinkle makes it my business. I've got to go.”

“
This
instant?” she asked.

“I suppose we can take ten minutes for us.”

“Make it twenty,” she said, pulling him down beside her and rolling on top of him. “This has to last us a
looong
time, baby.”

9

Their allotted twenty minutes turned to thirty. When Service finally negotiated the severe curve that merged with the bridge approach, he was shrouded in heavy fog and it was just before 1 a.m. At this hour he expected the traffic to be lighter than what he had seen earlier, but it was even worse than before; he was hemmed in by the crush. By the time he left, Nantz had decided to go back to Lansing the next day, knowing he was going to be tied up. She was clearly disappointed but didn't say a thing about it, knowing this was the job.

Captain Grant had made it clear that he should expedite getting to Vermillion, which with luck, sparse traffic, and a heavy foot lay about an hour north of the bridge. He turned on his blue lights to goose the traffic along, and most vehicles squeezed right so he could pass. As he carefully crawled past cars and trucks, he remembered the chaos that had prevailed before there was a bridge. Before 1957 five state-run ferries carted vehicles across at a rate of about four hundred an hour, each crossing taking just short of an hour under ideal conditions. Some years, on the night before hunting season, cars had been backed up fifty miles below the straits with waits as long as twenty-four hours. Now, under ideal conditions, you could be across in ten minutes. This morning's conditions were the antithesis of ideal.

There were seagulls hanging suspended in the air at the apex of the bridge, illuminated by lights strung on the three-foot-thick cable housings. The temperature seemed to be rising. The weather at the straits and above could change with breathtaking speed, from good to awful in a near blink. There had been no more snow since Halloween. But it would come, as it always came. Without snow, hunters would be complaining, and with this warm spell continuing, the deer would not move around and hunting would be tougher. In a warm spell deer wouldn't move much during the day, and hunters would quickly start complaining that the lack of sightings meant there were fewer deer—and that this was the fault of wolves.

It didn't matter that there were fewer than three hundred gray wolves roaming the U.P., and that they each ate nine or ten whitetails a year for a total kill of fewer than three thousand deer. Vehicles killed close to twenty thousand deer in the U.P. every year, and the hunters wouldn't be blaming them. A difficult winter would claim another hundred thousand or more, and a severe winter twice that. If hunters weren't finding deer, it wasn't the fault of wolves, but facts seldom mattered when hunters began shooting off their yaps. The reality was that the last winter had been tough, and the deer herd was down in numbers.

A year ago he'd run into a hunter who said he'd stopped hunting near his home in the southern part of the state because the DNR had planted coyotes that were decimating the deer population there. Service had to explain that the DNR had never planted coyotes in the state, but the man refused to believe him, preferring to have an excuse for his inability to bag a deer, an event that many Michiganders took as an entitlement.

On the St. Ignace side he cut through a lane reserved for official vehicles and noticed an unusual amount of activity at the state police post west of the row of tollbooths. There were several National Guard vehicles and soldiers in camo fatigues, more spillover from September 11. Two weeks before, California's governor had gotten tips from the intelligence community and warned his citizens of possible terrorist attacks against the Golden Gate and other California landmarks. Sam Bozian had quickly and publicly beefed up security by sending the National Guard to the Mackinac Bridge and Soo Locks. Service wasn't aware of any specific warnings about Michigan targets, and didn't bother to examine the governor's motives. If Bozian could get in front of a camera, he'd do it—no matter how stupid or petty he looked. In the political world there was no such thing as bad publicity. Regardless of the governor's motivation, increased security in these times was probably smart.

Before racing north, he checked his fuel gauge and cut west onto US 2. He had enough to get to Vermillion, but knew from experience that keeping a full tank was the safest and most practical course—especially on the cusp of seasonal changes. It was warm enough now, but this could change any moment. He pulled into a Jet gas station and saw emergency vehicles converged in the parking lot of the McDonald's next door. Squad car light-bars flashed blue and red under the garish yellow arches. Two town cops and two Mackinac County deputies milled around the restaurant's parking lot.

He watched the activity next door while gas ran into his tank. There were faster pumps at other stations, but Jet had the cheapest gas in Iggy and even with his state credit card he tried to find bargains. After all, the money behind the credit card came out of his taxes too.

A blue state police Yukon joined the other vehicles and Service recognized the trooper who got out; Sergeant Lungo Ocha was known as Bilko by other Troops because of his office gambling pools and various schemes to make money for his retirement.

Bilko saw Service, puffed up his chest in an effort to hide his beer belly, and strutted over.

“What brings you this way?” Bilko asked with his customary cockiness.

“Stuff to take care of before the grind begins. What's up over there?” Service asked with a nod toward McDonald's.

Bilko grimaced. “Some assholes busted the front window to get inside. They spray-painted all over the place.”

“It begins early,” Service said.

“There it is,” Bilko said, shaking his head.

“What was spray-painted?”

Bilko pursed his lips and said with a sigh, “Meat is Murder. Mickey D is McPorkers.”

“Did they sign their work?”

“AFL.”

“I thought they merged with the NFL.”

Bilko grinned. “Animal Freedom League or some such shit. Buncha middle-age pinkos and college kids. I guess we should be happy it's not that bin Laden fuckstick.”

Service wished the trooper luck, headed north on I-75, and sped up until he got to the M-123 cutoff. He cursed when he found the two-lane M-123 jammed with campers and trucks all wending their way north into the bush; six days until deer season began and the BOB was already out in force. He used his blue lights to surge past clots of vehicles, through Moran, Greene, Kenneth, past Ozark into Trout Lake, and from there north to Eckerman Corners. At the M-28 he saw that east–west traffic was as congested as the north–south 123. He couldn't remember traffic this heavy in previous hunting seasons. Most people might be hunkering down in fear because of terrorist threats, but not hunters. He didn't welcome the influx, but there was some comfort in knowing that some Americans were still out and doing. Maybe carrying guns boosted their confidence. Guns had never done much for him. In fact, in twenty years he had tried never to draw his weapon. Once a weapon was unholstered you were deep in shit-happens-land where all outcomes were seriously in doubt. He'd been forced to pull his weapon on a few occasions, but he had never shot anyone, a distinct change from his tour in Vietnam.

The traffic thinned north of Eckerman, allowing him to settle into a steady eighty miles per hour through the fog, trying to keep an eye out for deer and other animals along the roads. He slowed to a moderate speed only when he reached Paradise.

It was twenty miles to Vermillion, but the road was a washboard from all the rain this fall; he drove cautiously to keep from bouncing into a ditch. He eventually crossed a half-mile-wide marsh where the road had been built on a steep berm and came to the main gate of the federal wolf lab, more commonly called Vermillion.

The lab was two miles east of where the old Vermillion Point Life-Saving Station had once been located, chosen because it was one of the most isolated places in the Upper Peninsula and adjacent to major shipping lanes from the iron fields of Minnesota and the U.P. to Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. The lifesavers had been called storm warriors, and six of them and their families had lived at the station until the 1930s. Winter supplies and mail were brought in back then from Whitefish Point, ten miles to the east, winter trips taking eight hours by dogsled. As much as he loved the bush, Service couldn't imagine living near the southern shore of Lake Superior, taking her nasty winter blasts for as much as seven months a year. His old man had always called the taigalike area Michigan's Siberia, an especially apt description in winter. A group called Piping Plover Pals had recently acquired the old lifesaving station and turned it into a conservancy.

The gate to the federal wolf lab normally was attended by a security guard, but this morning it was standing wide open and two Chippewa County patrol cars were blocking the road. He had been to the Vermillion facility twice before, once two winters ago with other COs for a group snowmobile patrol and once just a month ago as part of Captain Grant's directive that he introduce himself around in his new capacity as a detective in the Wildlife Resource Protection Unit. That time he'd met Dr. Barton Brule, the lab's director. Brule had been gruff, not particularly friendly, and obviously irritated to have a visitor interrupt his routine. Brule was a lumbering man with long gray hair and sagging jowls.

He wondered if Brule was one of the victims.

A deputy sheriff waved him past the roadblock, where he parked his truck off the side of the road. He headed east on foot along the road, which passed through tamaracks and cedars in the lee of the sand barriers that lay between him and the largest and deepest of the five Great Lakes.

Through the fog he saw the blinking of emergency lights—two fire trucks, two more Chippewa County sheriff's cars, and two ambulances, all of them pulled up near the lab. There were also two state police cruisers and a lot of people milling around with flashlights. He saw no hoses from the fire equipment, but firefighters were plodding around in their dark, bulky gear.

Service walked toward the knot of people and saw that one side of the building was gone, as were several sections of twelve-foot-high steel fencing that surrounded the compound behind the building. He could smell smoke, see plumes rising from the debris, hear steam hissing. He could also smell the residue of an explosive, but couldn't identify it.

It was difficult to tell now, but the building had been new, less than three years old. Now half of it was in a pile. Service recognized only one of the Chippewa County deputies, a thin woman named Altina Lodner. She was a lethargic, even-tempered professional who took her work seriously, seemed a little stiff around strangers, and didn't leave much of an impression on most people she met.

Lodner nodded when she saw him. “Service. They call you out too?”

“My captain,” he said.

“Bad news travels fast.”

“What have we got?”

“Two bodies, one male, one female. Prelim says Dr. Larola Brule and Dr. Lanceford Singleton, staff biologists. We're leaving everything alone until the Troop crime scene team gets here.”

“Brule, related to the director?”

“His wife,” Lodner said.

Service hadn't known Brule's wife worked at the lab. The director had not been chatty the day he'd met him.

“Crime scene team coming from Negaunee?”

The deputy sheriff nodded, and he walked on. Negaunee was a long 160 miles west of Vermillion. The Troops had put their lab there to create a central location to serve the entire U.P., but it was more in the west than the east.

Service pulled his six-cell Mag-Lite from its holster, snapped down the red lens cover, pulled up the collar of his green Thinsulate coat, and walked over to the fence, which was made of ten-by-ten gray steel panels with golf-ball-sized perforations. The fence was connected to the building that housed the wolf lab by a narrow tunnel of steel panels. He had no idea what the tunnel was for. His previous tour had been cursory; Brule had made him uncomfortable and he hadn't asked many questions, figuring it wasn't likely he'd have much contact with Brule or his facility in the future. At least four panels of the larger enclosure had been blown away where the wall was attached to the building. Shreds, strips, and scraps of metal gleamed in the beam of his flashlight.

Service walked around the exterior of the lab building and saw mounts for security cameras. Were there cameras on the gates, elsewhere along the fence? He'd have to check.

He cupped his hands to light a cigarette and continued walking. The wolf compound was oval in shape. He found nothing of interest near the destroyed sections and decided to make the full circuit of the perimeter fence, not sure how far it was. He flicked on his light periodically to study the ground or scan part of the fence.

The morning dew would preserve tracks like disappearing ink, the rising sun quickly melting them away. Dew in November? More strangeness. Usually there was frost—or snow, and up here a lot of snow. Thirty minutes into his tour he saw a small light flicker along the fence ahead of him and stepped under some overhanging cedar branches. When the light got to within ten feet, he said, “Looking for something?”