Chasing a Blond Moon (21 page)

“Doesn't matter,” Service said, “as long as it keeps us moving.”

Pyykkonen laughed and said, “We're gonna crack this.”

“If you say so.”

“Did I ever mention I've never had an unsolved homicide?”

“No, you didn't.”

“'Course, that was downstate and this is here.”

“There is that,” he said.

“You ever have any unsolveds?”

“In my business most of my violets are habituals. They can't stop. Sooner or later we get them.”

“Violets?”

“Violators.”

“I like that,” she said.

The house was empty until after dark. Only then did cars and pickups start to roll in quietly. From where they stood, behind a neighboring house's storage shed, they couldn't make out anything more distinct than blurred movement. Occasionally a flashlight beam moved around inside. Then some candles began to flicker. The place was quiet.

They waited an hour until the traffic seemed to clear. A couple of times there was a muffled shriek inside, the sound immediately cut short. Somebody came out the back door and lit a cigarette.

“Weed?” Pyykkonen asked.

“Odds are,” he said.

At 9 p.m. she said, “Shall we dance?”

“Front door, back door?” he asked. All of the traffic had been through the back door. “I'll take the front,” he said, wishing they had compatible radios. Troops and the DNR were on the 800 megahertz, counties on another system, which required Troops and DNR personnel to carry two radio systems in order to be fully coordinated.

He stood beside the front door with his MAG-LITE, moved to a screened window, peeked inside. Candles everywhere, shadows of movement. What the hell were they doing in there? The scent of dope wafted through the screen.

Somebody inside hissed, “Everybody fuckin'
chill!
”

He saw movement come to a stop, heard Pyykkonen rapping on the back door.

“Cops!” somebody said in a panicked whisper.

The stampede came at the front door.

Service stood to the side, waiting for the door to open. When it swung inward, he stepped across the opening and was banged into by someone, who bounced off him and fell back into the darkness. “Police!” he said. “Everybody freeze.” He clicked on his light, scanned the room, and counted eight people, all of them cowering. One of them began to sniffle. He tried to figure out who had collided with him. His upper lip felt numb, then started to hurt again.

“Service?” Pyykkonen yelled through to him.

“Secure here,” he answered.

The lights came on.

He had miscounted by one. There were nine kids in the room. “Everybody sit where you are,” he said. Pyykkonen herded three more in from the back of the house.

The musk of dope hung in the air.

“What's going on here?” Pyykkonen asked.

The question was met with silence.

“I'm going to look around,” she said.

Service moved to the middle of the room to see front and back. Some kids stared at him, but most of them studied the floor or gazed past him, avoiding eye contact.

One girl had her blouse off. “Put on your shirt,” he said. She started groping for the garment.

Pyykkonen came to the end of the hall that opened into the room where Service had the kids. She lifted her radio and called for backup, starting with the ten code for an emergency.

Service saw that she was red in the face, the lines tight around her mouth.

She looked at him, said, “You're bleeding.”

He licked his upper lip, tasted salt and iron. From the collision in the doorway? He hoped the stitches were holding.

They heard sirens, saw lights outside. The kids inside looked shaky and huddled together, staring at the floor.

A city cop was first to arrive. He looked to be the same age as the kids in the living room.

A Houghton County deputy came next. Pyykkonen talked to the two officers, who moved into the living room, took out notebooks, and started taking names. A girl against the wall suddenly vomited, causing the others to draw up their legs and scrunch away from her.

Pyykkonen tugged Service's sleeve, led him to the bathroom, urged him inside. The smell from the door told him what was waiting.

Dozens of empty yellow plastic ice bags were on the floor, and more were piled in the corner by a closet. There was water on the floor and muddy footprints.

The shower unit was a modular model, the type builders and do-it-yourselfers could pop into place and attach to the plumbing. Pyykkonen pulled open the shower door. There was a plastic board across the inside of the door, up about three feet. She nodded for him to look.

The body inside was naked, curled in the fetal position inside plastic. Bags of ice were piled around it. Some of them had melted. The body's skin was blue.

“Don't inhale too deeply,” Pyykkonen said. She slipped a small jar of Vicks from her pocket, dabbed some under her nostrils, offered the jar to him.

Service tried to memorize what he was seeing. The body was male, Asian. Eyes closed, no overt signs of violence. Pyykkonen had put on rubber gloves and was pushing down on his skin. She said, “Long past rigor.”

He didn't ask what all the kids were doing in the house with a body that had been dead long before tonight. In due course, they would find out. His job was to stand clear and let the cops do their work. He remembered a case in downstate Newaygo County where some teens had found the body of an old man in a trailer and charged friends admission to see the corpse. The U.P. was not exclusive domain to antisocial and macabre behaviors. He'd thought then it was a once-in-a-lifetime case. It was disturbing that he couldn't remember where his keys were from one minute to the next, but he could recall the details of years-old cases he'd had nothing to do with. Gus called it “cop mop”—a cop's brain absorbing all sorts of dirty water and letting it float around inside the brain for years.

“I'm gonna get out of your way,” he told Pyykkonen.

He went outside and lit up. There was a dark pickup near the porch.

It had two stickers in the back window:
i play hookie for nookie
, and
thugs drink blood
. He rarely worried about people with such stickers. It was the ones without decals he worried about: The bad ones didn't have to advertise.

Sheriff Macofome was fifteen minutes behind the others and stopped like he wanted to confront Service, who just pointed through the door. “She's in there.”

EMS arrived along with a van with the same crime lab techs he'd worked with in Hancock when all this started. The same medical examiner arrived after the techs.

Flashbulbs popped inside. At one point Pyykkonen came outside, took a cigarette, smoked silently, and went back inside.

Adults began arriving in vehicles. Parents, Service assumed. Cops brought out kids, handed them over to the adults, told them to go to the station in Houghton. Just after eleven, Pyykkonen came out, nodded for him to come in.

A boy and a girl were sitting at a table. They both looked shaken.

“Daran Cencek and Sally Grice,” Pyykkonen whispered. “He's a junior at Houghton High School and she's an eighth-grader.”

“You know them?” he said. The girl was well developed, and looked at least twenty. Her mascara and eye makeup had run and left her with the mask of a raccoon. The boy had acne, his hair spiked and dyed purple and green. He had a gold post in his left nostril, another in his right eyebrow. If he spoke, Service expected he'd hear another one in his tongue, clicking against his teeth.

She nodded. “Daran claims he was buying dope from a Tech student here all summer. He brought the girl here because she wanted to fish for salmon.”

“Salmon
here?
” This was news to him.

“No,” she said. “He just told her that. Thought they'd do some weed and beer, get it on. The night he brought her there was an aluminum boat tied up to the dock and a bigger boat, a twenty-five- or thirty-footer with a cabin. Daran went up to the house and bought a couple of dime bags just like he says he always did. The college kid came out afterward, took the aluminum boat out to the bigger boat, hitched the aluminum to it, and headed south down the lake.”

“The guy in the shower?”

“I'm getting to that. Daran and Sally smoked and fished and drank, then came up to the house. It was locked, but Daran jimmied the lock and got in. They used the bed. The bathroom was empty. Afterward he took the girl home and came back alone. He wanted to snag a salmon.”

“But there aren't any salmon.”

“He was high. He claims he was flinging a spider and it got hung up by the buoy. It felt like it was draped over the line, and he didn't want to bury the hook because he had only the one spider with him. So he swam out to retrieve it, but the spider wasn't hung on the line. It was way over the line and hooked down below. He swam down to pull it loose and felt something. He panicked when he realized what it was. He went back to get a couple of friends and the three of them pulled the body up. It was in plastic and weighted in about ten feet of water. They took the body inside and put it in the shower until they could decide what to do. Then they started worrying about the cops blaming them. One of them got the bright idea that this was an opportunity. They went out and bought ice, put the barrier inside the shower door, and packed the body. They've been re-icing it a couple of times a day since then. The next day at school Daran told a couple of kids he had a dead body. He charged them each thirty-two bucks a look and provided beer. Daran fancies himself a real entrepreneur.”

“Thirty-two bucks?”

“It's his lucky number. He's a hockey player. They've been running their little sideshow since then. He says he's cleared almost four grand.”

“And no rumors got out?”

“You know how kids can be when they want to.”

“When did they find the body?”

“August twenty-sixth,” she said solemnly.

“The night we found Harry Pung,” Service said.

“Right.”

“So who's the dead kid?”

“They don't know, but it's not the guy who sold the drugs.”

“Did you get a description of the other kid?”

“Asian,” she said, “about five-ten, maybe six-foot, heavy build. The big boat had a blue hull.”

Parents took their kids to the station for processing. Police took Daran and Sally. The ones over eighteen were being held at the county all night; the others were taken to Juvie. They would all be arraigned in the morning on charges of unlawful entry, failure to report a dead person, possession and distribution of illegal substances. There were so many potential charges and so many statements to sort out that the prosecutor would work all night getting everything ready for court in the morning.

Service and Pyykkonen got to the hospital after 2 a.m. They were both tired. The medical examiner showed them into a room. “We've done the gross and prelim tonight,” he told them. “Labs tomorrow.”

“What do we know so far?” she asked.

“Not a helluva lot. The body's in good shape, considering how long it's been, but we'll need the labs to point us. No signs of violence and no defensive marks or anything like that. Could be natural.” The M.E. saw Pyykkonen's look and amended his statement. “That's just theoretical.”

“You mean CYA,” she said.

The M.E. grinned. “They're synonyms.”

Service and Pyykkonen went outside for a smoke. “We got all sorts of prints from the house. It's gonna take time to sort it all out. We tried to take prints off the stiff, but I don't know how good they are. The skin was beginning to come apart. We'll put them into AFIS later today.” The FBI maintained AFIS—Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems.

“I hate waiting,” she said. “I'm thinking about getting Maggie Soper down here. You think that friend of your son's could look at the body for us?”

“Let's set it up for seven in the morning,” he said.

He went to Walter's dorm and knocked on the door. His son opened the door with sleep in his eyes. “Got a place for me to bunk for the night?”

The boy opened the door and let his father in. “You're bleeding.”

Service said, “We need Enrica to come to the hospital tomorrow.”

“Why?” The boy tossed a hand towel to his father.

“There's another body.”

“She's pretty delicate right now.”

“We need her to do this.”

“I'll call Karylanne.”

“Six,” Service said. “We'll pick her up.”

“Karylanne and I better go with her.”

Service wondered if the boy could handle it, but didn't challenge him. He needed this to go as smoothly as possible. Walter took his cell phone into the hall. Service curled up on the floor and went to sleep. When he awoke there was a blanket over him and a pillow under his head. He found a bloodstain on the pillow case. Damn stitches.

Maggie Soper took one look at the body and said, “That's him—Terry Tunhow.”

“You're sure?” Pyykkonen asked.

“I don't forget people who pay me,” she said.

Enrica came in next. She was shaky and teary. Karylanne and Walter helped her into the viewing room.

She stared at the body and began to sob.

“You recognize him?” Service asked.

“It's the guy from my class,” she said. “What happened?”

“Terry Pung?” Pyykkonen asked. “Not the Terry Pung from the lake?”

The girl nodded, shook her head, and began to faint. Walter caught her before she hit the floor and carried her into the hallway.

 

Service and Pyykkonen got coffee out of vending machines and went outside to light up.

“Harry Pung's dead,” Service began, trying to focus his mind. “Bear hair in the car, and at the camp. Dead at a boat ramp on the same body of water where we found this last guy.”