Blue Wolf In Green Fire (8 page)

“Nah,” Service retorted. “We'll just let technology take care of it.”

Gus Turnage laughed. “Yah, technology, that's a good one.”

It was an inside joke. Under the previous state DNR law enforcement chief there had been a move to make up for the shortage of law enforcement people with increased technology, but so far not a lot of it worked as advertised and budget constraints were such that there weren't enough maintenance personnel to keep the equipment working. When equipment malfunctioned or failed, it could be a long wait to get it back.

Every CO in the state knew that technology could never replace officers. The same thing was in evidence in Afghanistan, Service reminded himself. The United States had satellite pictures out the wazoo but few assets on the ground to tell them what terrorists were thinking. Current state law enforcement chief Lorne O'Driscoll was not as enamored of technology as his predecessor, but his hands were tied by Bozian's budget cuts, and even replacements for retiring officers were slow.

“Be careful,” Service told his friend.

A minute later the phone rang again. It was Nantz. “Well?” she said in her confrontational I-told-you-so tone.

“You were right.”

“I wish I wasn't,” she said, softening her voice. “Have you heard anything?”

“I talked to Gus. They found two devices, now disarmed. No casualties. Wink Rector is handling it. They're thinking ecoterrorists.”

“Ecoidiots,” Maridly Nantz said. “They'd burn the whole world to save it.”

Echoes of Vietnam, Service thought. “People with passions don't necessarily have their brains fully engaged.”

“You mean like when we're rattling the bedsprings—not that I can remember what that's like.”

“Hang in there, honey,” he said. “November ninth, right?” He didn't want to think about their situation now. It was too depressing and he missed her more than he was able to adequately express.

“It's been more than a month, Service. When I was at the academy I didn't have time to think about sex and now all I have is time and that's
all
I think about. What's on your agenda today?”

“I've got choices: illegal minnows, stolen timber, and rattlesnake trafficking. Or I can rattle a lawyer's cage.”

“I miss you, honey.”

“November ninth,” he said.

“Yah, yah, don't you go trying to disarm any bombs, you hear me?”

“No problem.”

“I mean it, Grady. My wants have merged with my needs and we are talking burgeoning, do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Did she think their separation wasn't affecting him?

“Okay, you may now go chase your little fishies and snakes.”

He laughed out loud, hung up, and filled his coffee mug.
Weird fall
was an understatement. September 11 had been followed by the yet-unexplained anthrax contamination and now there were bombs at Michigan Tech. How much weirder could it get?

He decided to call Sandy Tavolacci.

It took ten minutes for the lawyer's receptionist to put him through.

“This is the son of the asshole,” Service said when Tavolacci finally picked up.

The lawyer laughed. “Okay, okay, I was out of line on dat one. I apologize.”

“Who's Kate from Wakefield?” Service asked.

“Da fuck should I know?”

“She hired you to take Nurmanski's case.”

“Prove it,” Tavolacci said defiantly, hanging up.

Captain Grant walked into his office. “Bad day, Detective?”

“Lawyers,” Service said.

“Look at the bright side,” his boss said. “You won't have to deal with them in heaven.”

7

November 9 had arrived, Nurmanksi was gone to South Dakota, Grady Service had reluctantly arranged for his former girlfriend Kira Lehto to take care of Cat and Newf at her veterinary clinic until he got back on Sunday, and the days had dragged as he tried numerous avenues to develop information on Wealthy Johns, getting nowhere. Today he would meet the federal undercover agent, stop to see a troublesome old friend near Brevort, and finally see Maridly Nantz at a B&B in Mackinaw City. He could hardly contain his anticipation.

Pidge Carmody had called two days ago and Service picked a place for their meeting, a nameless roadside rest area two miles east of Naubinway, which in Ojibwa means “place of echoes.”

The meeting site was only an hour from St. Ignace and the bridge. Twenty-five years ago the shoreline south of US 2 and west from Rapid River to Naubinway had reverberated with the sounds of clashes between white and Native American commercial fishermen. The DNR had been caught in the middle of what was now known as the Garden Wars, and had absorbed the anger and frustration of both sides as judicial rulings earmarked large areas of the Great Lakes exclusively for Indian fishermen, thus sealing the fate of the white operations, which were marginal under the best of conditions. Yooper distrust of government was never far from the surface, but the court rulings had caused an explosion of pent-up violence. With a lot of luck and professionalism, law enforcement had gotten through the mess without a fatality.

Service remembered a night in the late 1970s in Big Bay de Noc off Garden Bluff when he and Sergeant Blake Garwood had boarded an illegal fishing tug in total darkness. They had drifted in with their lights out and gone over the gunwales. The captain immediately cranked his engines and tried to run while his crew turned on the two COs. Blake had been thrown over the side during the melee, managing to yell before he splashed. Service screamed for the captain to come about, and when he kept the tug racing away from Garwood, Service fired two shots through the cabin roof. There was a heavy fog on the water and Garwood, a veteran of the Garden conflict, always carried a maritime flare gun attached to his life vest by a lanyard. He used his flares to help them find him and get him aboard. The captain and his crew had gone to jail, but Service still shuddered when he remembered how close he had come to losing his sergeant. Garwood had since retired to the mountains of Tennessee with no desire to be near, much less in a boat on the water. A sign of age, he told himself, when you start remembering the old days.

This time of year, most state-owned rest areas and pull-overs in the U.P. were closed until spring, but this was one of the few left open to service travelers. Before the reign of Sam Bozian, rest areas on both peninsulas had been open year-round. Never mind that snowmobiles had led to a greater influx of tourists to northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula in winter than in summer. Clearcut had slashed everything he could, and services to winter travelers had been among the first to go. Here a small cedar log building housed rest rooms and vending machines. The facility was only a couple of years old, which made Service suspicious. It wouldn't surprise him if one of Bozian's relatives owned the company that sold the prefab structures to the state. Service left his truck a hundred yards from the building and walked the rest of the way. It was just after sunrise.

There was one man in the small lobby and he was bumping the pop machine with a Frisbee-sized hand. He was tall with massive shoulders and long auburn hair showing hints of gray and tied back in a bobtail. A red goatee made it look like he had chugged a mug of blood. He had a gourd-shaped head and a thick neck bulging with muscular cords. His nose trended toward bulbous, and his cheeks showed webs of blue veins just under his ruddy skin. He wore an electric-green T-shirt proclaiming
irishmen last longer.

DNR Detective Grady Service paused to scrutinize what he was seeing. If this was Pidge Carmody, he was not at all what he had expected. Carmody looked nothing like a cop and even less like a top undercover man. Most successful UCs were nondescript people who could blend anywhere. Carmody would stand out in a circus. But Barry Davey of the USF&WS had given Carmody his highest recommendation, and Davey wasn't one to bestow compliments or respect unless it was hard earned over a long period of time.

“Anything good in the machine?” Service asked.

The man in the green shirt turned and squinted with the eyes of the nearsighted. It was a strange first impression to be sure.

“Just disgustin' nonalcoholic shite,” the man said in an Irish brogue. “You'd be Service?”

“That's me.”

“Carmody,” the big man said, not extending his hand. “Let's be done with da fookin' gettin'-to-know-you games and have us a ramble.”

Service wasn't sure what to do. He knew how to develop and run snitches, but working a federal undercover agent was uncharted water. It was difficult to tell Carmody's age. Fifty, maybe fifty-five, he guessed.

The man led the way down a groomed path from the rest area onto a rocky beach of Lake Michigan. Service automatically noted that the water level continued to be way down despite a wetter-than-normal summer and autumn. The water had been falling in the Great Lakes for years, but Bozian had announced a plan to pipe water to other states. Leave it to Clearcut to turn a pimple into a boil, Service thought.

“Davey did a fine job describin' you. What's this job you've got?”

“You in a hurry?”

“Let's not be fookin' with each other, Service. We've both jobs to do, so let's get on with it.”

Service was not prepared for such directness. “How much did Davey tell you?”

“Shite-all, the usual. There's a job needin' doin'. You'd be fillin' in the blanks.”

“He didn't have all the details to share.”

Carmody's shaggy left eyebrow arched almost imperceptibly, and Service knew the man was wondering what he had on Davey to get a top federal agent assigned undercover to a state operation. He'd let Carmody stew on that for a while.

Ordinarily the DNR took undercover personnel from their own ranks, pulling officers from other parts of the state, but this poaching operation at least circumstantially seemed well organized and virtually invisible, which suggested a greater degree of sophistication than normal, and he'd decided he wanted an agent who was unlikely to be inadvertently exposed and compromised. He'd not been entirely candid with Davey in their negotiation around Jason Nurmanski, but now that he had Carmody, he intended to use him to the fullest. Maybe Nurmanski would be relevant to the bigger case, maybe not. Davey had agreed because he'd seen the possibilities of a major bust.

Service explained the situation. “At the end of last year's firearm deer season, an Indiana man named Kaylin Joquist was stopped for speeding by Michigan State Police between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. He blew point-two on the Breathalyzer. They had him cold on DUI, but he was not too happy about being stopped and got abrasive. They found ten pounds of wacky weed and three trophy buck heads in his truck. The Troops called us, and one of our District Twelve people responded. The guy refused to talk about anything and got a Chicago lawyer. Every time the case came up, the lawyer got a delay.”

“Where was his client in the meanwhile?”

“Cooling it inside the Kent County lockup. Ten pounds of dope and two priors took him out of the bail picture. It turned out that he had two previous felonies, both for distribution, one in Indiana and one in Illinois. He did a year in an Illinois facility.”

“Did the lad have a go at bail?”

“Technically, yes, but what his lawyer did was pretty much pro forma. He didn't even begin to push all the buttons.”

Carmody nodded solemnly. “Suggesting a symbolic gesture intended to appease outside eyes, and Joquist's happy enough plopped on his arse amongst the brotherhood of perverts and fudge-packers.”

“That's how we read it.”

Carmody's bushy eyebrow wiggled again.

“Joquist was found dead in his cell about a week ago. He'd hanged himself.”

“And you'd be thinkin' it's not a suicide.”

“Possibly. There's an investigation, but you know these things don't break unless somebody spills.”

“If your boy is in the ground, he can't be affectin' a seasonal business above it.”

Carmody was sharp.

Service nodded. “We've gotten information about a poaching operation specializing in trophy deer heads and bear parts. Our info says they operate throughout the Midwest. You want a trophy, you make a bid, and high bid wins. Earlier this month I busted a young guy with a ten-point out of season. His name's Jason Nurmanski. He'd stuck an arrow in the bullet hole hoping to pass it off. Like Joquist, he seemed content to stay inside and wasn't interested in cooperating initially, but last week he changed his tune, dismissed his lawyer and said he wanted to deal. His lawyer was a guy named Tavolacci. He specializes in big-league poachers. We couldn't figure out why Tavolacci would be interested in Nurmanski, but he was and he didn't like being fired.”

“Jailhouse percussionists put a beat on the wire,” Carmody said with a nod. “Nurmanski learned about the suicide.”

“Not a suicide, he claims. He says the person who hired him to take the deer showed up at the Iron County Jail the day of the suicide and told him that a man in the Kent County facility was going to be taught a lesson that same day. The next morning he heard about the suicide. He hoisted the white flag and asked for a deal.”

“By his reckoning, it was a hit.”

“Right, and he was very hinky. We interviewed him and took his statement. He claims he did his shooting for a woman from Wakefield named Kate. He didn't know her last name and we haven't been able to identify her, but his story seems to check out. He registered at a hotel with her. We thought it interesting that she drove him an hour south to Ironwood from Wakefield and paid for the room. The next morning she offered the cash-for-horns deal.”

“And the lad agreed?” Carmody asked.

“She threw in some enticements,” Service said. “Kate from Wakefield has bright red hair upstairs and down. She's five-two or five-three and she wants to hire poachers for cash. A woman doing this is unusual.”

“Tiz a fact,” Carmody said with a grin.

“Nurmanski didn't want a lawyer, but then Tavolacci showed up. We see him a lot. He works for big-time poachers in the west end.”

“And Nurmanski isn't of that caliber.”

“Exactly. He says that Kate of Wakefield hired him to take his case. Here it starts to get complicated. In September a bear guide found a bear near McMillan. The animal had been shot once with a fifty-caliber rifle and only its gallbladder removed. I put out an alert for other COs to be on the lookout for a fifty, and about a week ago I got a call from one of our people in Ironwood. He stopped a man for shooting at a grouse decoy and the old man told him he'd seen a woman shooting a fifty-caliber rifle near the Porcupine Mountains. He identified her as Wealthy Johns.”

Service stopped for a breath. “Johns works for Skelton Gitter, a taxidermist who owns a gun shop called Horns in Ironwood. She also lives with him. I sent our people to see her, express an interest in the fifty-cal, and see what flopped out. She said it had been owned by Gitter, but he'd sold it to a man in Indiana. Wealthy Johns is five-two or five-three, with short black hair, and she's a gun expert who hangs out at a bar called the Copperhead Inn in Wakefield.”

“The place where the lad met the mysterious Kate,” Carmody said.

“Right, and Johns is a regular at the South Superior Gun Club and said to be an accomplished shooter. Gitter's been in business nearly thirty years. He's always been clean when we've inspected his taxidermy operation, and BATF has never had a violation on him. In fact, he's usually first to blow the whistle on competitors who step over the line.”

“The paragon of the public-spirited citizen. God save us from righteous bastards.”

“Gitter has a reputation and he is good at his craft. He's done mounts for all sorts of species and has clients all over the world. He's won international awards for his work.”

Carmody made a face. “Cosmetics. An undertaker can't bring the dead back to life.”

“The woman Nurmanski described closely resembles Johns except for hair color, so we've been quietly taking a closer look at Johns, but there's nothing there. It's like she landed in Ironwood fully grown with no history. What we know is that she's a gun expert and spends a lot of time at the gun club.”

“Johns is to be the object of my attention then?” Carmody asked.

“Yes, but if this operation is real and as big as it seems, we need to assume Gitter and Johns are in it together until we determine otherwise. Gitter is one of those types who are always in full control and well connected.”