Chasing a Blond Moon (14 page)

9

He crossed into the central time zone during the two-hour trip to meet Grinda, driving with his window open, the predawn air cool, but comfortable. Grinda was standing beside her truck staring down at the black Tamarack River. His upper arm ached from his wound, but he worked the old trick of telling his mind to ignore the pain. Each year the trick got harder and harder to pull off.

“Got some risers?” he asked as he got out.

“You fishermen,” she said. “I was just staring.”

“You don't fish?”

“Can't stand their smell or their slime. My mother tried to raise a lady with alabaster skin, untouched by the sun. Except for hating to fish, she failed on all counts.”

In the time he had known Elza Grinda, this was the most she had ever disclosed about herself. He poured coffee for both of them and they drank and ate donuts in silence.

“Might as well get moving,” she said after a while.

“Still pretty dark.”

“I thought we'd get down to where I lost the trail and be ready to track at daylight.”

He didn't ask her if the trail was marked. Some COs used various physical markers while others relied on their instincts, and if either method worked, it was fine by him. So far, few woods cops had taken to using Global Positioning System units. He knew a few officers who had terrible senses of direction, a deficiency that sometimes interfered with their ability to do their jobs. Grinda wasn't one of them.

“You know the guides who work this area?” he asked as they put on their packs.

“A couple of dog-chasers from Kentucky, but they're not up yet. I've never had any serious problems with them, and they at least pay lip service to the rules.”

Grinda moved like a snake, weaving through the slash without sound, finding her way through the dark without a light. Service followed a few yards back, trying not to snap branches or trip. As with his ability to deal with pain, his night vision at nearly fifty-one was not what it once was, and the idea of losing his night vision petrified him and made him cranky.

One morning in bed Nantz had been pawing at his head.

“You've got a bald spot,” she said.

He'd leaped out of bed and got one of her hand mirrors.

“It's not a bald spot,” he insisted.

“Don't let it bug you,” she said.

“Doesn't bug me,” he told her, and she had laughed. He had added, “We'll see how funny it is when you start graying.”

She had poked him in the ribs and thrown a leg over him, which had ended the conversation.

It took nearly an hour to find the place where Grinda had last seen sign, and when they reached it, they found windfalls to sit on and got out the thermos again. He calculated they had walked a bit more than two miles.

“National Weather Service is calling for El Niño,” she said. “Another light winter, at least to start with. But a lot colder than normal.”

The previous winter had been virtually snowless until March when five big storms swept down from the Canadian prairies. After the snow, the air warmed, it began to rain, and most of April the western U.P. was beset by floods. Over the winter, the snowfall had been so low that the DNR had not run any group snowmobile patrols. By the time the snow came, downstaters were starting to turn their minds to spring sports, and the Yooper economy had suffered another disastrous winter.

“Even Mother Nature seems to want to kill our economy,” he said. Some U.P. businesses were more dependent on winter tourists than their summer brethren. When the snowfall was down, the economy tanked.

“Maybe she just doesn't want to share,” Grinda said. “You know how women can be.”

They both laughed.

“What's this Doc Emmarpus like?”

“Earthy,” Grinda said. “I asked her to join us this morning. She'll follow our sign.”

“Her grandfather couldn't find his car in a parking lot.”

“Joe is one thing, Rosary is another.”

They started searching at first light. Working together, they were able to follow the animal's trail, mainly because the cable trailing from it had nicked and scarred the branches and rocks it had whipped against.

It was just after 9 a.m. when they slid down into a cedar bottomland. It was dark and wet and Service grumbled as they crawled over logs and blowdowns. Several times they crossed well-traveled bear runs and saw scat piles, some of them fresh.

Service thought about how bears had prospered in the state, the population increasing nearly 50 percent to an estimated fourteen thousand animals over a ten-year period—and that estimate was now several years old. In the U.P. bears were everywhere, and often nuisances. The animals had done even better BTB (Below The Bridge), where they were now being reported as far south as the suburbs of Grand Rapids.

“Grady,” Grinda said. She was just ahead of him.

He saw her point to their right. There was a large white cedar branch about eight feet off the ground. Small brown plastic bottles were hung from the branch by wire. Such baits were illegal now, though they had once been lawful.

Service sniffed one of the bottles and made a face. “Anise,” he said. “Fresh,” he added, jiggling one of the plastic bottles to slosh the dark liquid around. Unless it was an airtight container, anise evaporated.

They both stood still and studied the area. Grinda lifted an arm and pointed. There were kernels of corn all over the ground. Bear baiters were supposed to bury and anchor their baits, either in holes or in hollowed logs, covering the bait sources with boulders or logs to discourage foraging deer.

“Dirty bait,” she said. This year Lansing had sent down a directive urging all officers to be aggressive on bait violations for bear and deer. Corn was outlawed for bear baits because if it got spread out or scattered around, it caused opportunistic deer to congregate and feed in herds. The regs against corn for bear baiting were designed in part to prevent deer from spreading bovine TB. More importantly, Chronic Wasting Disease had been discovered last year in southwest Wisconsin and had already moved into northern Illinois.

He knew CWD was a prion disorder, and that it was related to mad cow disease, but he had no idea what a prion was. The disease destroyed the brain and central nervous systems of stricken animals, and was thought to have come into Wisconsin from infected animals on a game farm. So far it had not appeared in Michigan, but Service and other officers felt it was inevitable and, when it came, there would be wholesale changes in all baiting regs, and no doubt some sort of massive panic to eradicate the disease by killing thousands of animals, as had been done in the region of Wisconsin where the disease had struck. The last figures he had seen reported more than nine hundred commercial game farms in Michigan; he knew for a fact that the state Department of Agriculture, which had the responsibility for policing them, did not pay a great deal of attention. CWD would come, either naturally across the border or from an infected animal imported from another state. So far scientists had shown no linkage between CWD and humans, but if that proved to be the case, the effect on the state's herds would be catastrophic. He remembered TV reports of British farmers shooting and burning their cattle and shuddered.

No steel cable could be seen, but the broken condition of the soft ground beneath the branch made it obvious that something had been in a struggle there.

Grinda climbed up a tree. “The limb's grooved,” she called down to him. “The cable must've been here.”

“If it snapped, there ought to be something left,” he said.

“Not if somebody cleaned the site,” she said.

“Wouldn't they take the anise bottles?”

Grinda didn't have an answer, which was not unusual. You rarely got a neat package of evidence that all fit together.

After searching methodically and taking down the bottles to dust later for fingerprints, they found no human footprints in the area and sat down to rest and think. A hunter using dirty bait was smart enough to wear gloves in handling things to avoid leaving any prints, but this was Grinda's case and she liked to follow the book. Service lit a cigarette.

“Nice picnic spot,” a voice said, startling them both.

They had not heard or seen Rosary Emmarpus approach. One second they were alone and the next she was standing not ten feet away.

She didn't look anything like her grandfather, who was tall. She was short with frizzy black hair, wearing cut-off jeans and a sleeveless olive drab T-shirt. Her legs, arms, and neck and shoulders were literally covered with dozens of tattoos that ran together and made him dizzy to look at. She had a gold ring in a nostril, two more in her left eyebrow, and the countenance of a turtle sticking its head out of its shell.

“Hey, Elza,” the vet said.

“Morning, Rose. This is Grady Service,” she said, “our detective out of Marquette.”

The woman nodded.

“Any trouble finding us?” Grinda asked.

“I could smell his cancer stick a hundred yards back,” she said.

Service wet his fingers, extinguished the cigarette and put it in his pocket.

Rosary Emmarpus was so strange looking that he found it impossible not to stare.

The woman looked directly at him. “You're sitting there wondering how such a freak got through vet school, right?”

Service shrugged.

“Animals don't give a shit what people look like,” she said. “Neither did the people in Alaska, and I'm hoping it's not going to be an issue here. Alaska's okay, but the winters are too damned long and I hate flying with bush pilots to take care of clients. Anything else you want to know?”

He shook his head.

Emmarpus looked at the cedar limb. “That's where the snare was,” she said with a nod.

“How do you know? You saw this in Alaska?” Grinda asked.

“Several times. Up there they used bottles of maple syrup to draw the animals in. The cable hangs down in a big loop. The baits are above it. The animal has to stand up in the loop and when it pulls the bait, there's a trigger that tightens the cable. Then the bear is usually caught. Sometimes the snare gets the neck, sometimes the trunk of the body. The neck kills pretty quick. The body eventually kills because the animal struggles until it crushes its ribs or spine. Either way, it's not pretty.”

“Professional poachers?” Service asked.

“They all poach for money up there,” the vet said. “Poachers are thieves and they all kill in any way that will work. The advantage of this gimmick is that it's quiet.” She looked up in the tree. “They had the cable up there, right?”

Grinda nodded.

“You find the trigger?”

“Nothing.”

“They won't be back,” Emmarpus said. “They seldom hit the same place twice, especially if somebody gets on to them.”

“How's the animal?” Grinda asked.

“He'll survive, but he's not that big. The bigger the animal, the more valuable the parts. They'd found this one they would have been pissed.”

Service walked over to his truck to get a pack of cigarettes and as he reached for the door, he heard Rosary Emmarpus tell Grinda, “Great buns.”

Grinda said, “Not available.”

The peculiar little vet laughed. “That's always the case. The good ones are always married or gay.”

The three of them were back at the trucks by 2 p.m. and the vet left them. Grinda said, “Gus told me about the prof at Tech—cyanide in figs, and bear galls in the same box?”

He shook his head. “It's a beaut.”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make sure your professor passed on,” she said.

She was right on in her assessment, but how did the murder connect to the other stuff going on in recent days and weeks?

Grinda reached into the bed of her truck and pulled out the remains of cable she had recovered last night. “I'm going to check around, see if anybody around here sells this kind of material,” she said. “If this stuff snapped, it might come from a defective spool and there could be reports of others. I also dusted for prints. Nothing.”

It was about ninety miles north to Houghton and Service drove at a steady sixty-five, having plenty of time for the meeting with Gus and Walter.

He parked in the lot behind the Best Western and walked down Shelden Avenue. The Douglass House Saloon was in a brick building with towers on the corners, its bricks a brilliant orange in the low afternoon sun. He walked inside to a cloud of smoke and liked the smell. There were lots of towns in the process of banning smoking, but so far U.P. bars were being exempted. Good thing. When people couldn't smoke in bars, the bars would go belly-up. Or there would be a revolt.

The interior was made of wood, darkened by smoke and age. Tiffany-style glass chandeliers hung from high ceilings, creating atmosphere but delivering little light.

Gus was at a booth in the dark back bar, dressed in civvies.

“How'd the meeting go with Grinda?” he asked.