Chasing a Blond Moon (35 page)

“I didn't hit it,” he said.

“Shut the fuck up,” the second man said.

“
You,
” she said to the second man. “Did you shoot the swan?”

“No,” he said, his voice faltering.

She shook her head and breathed in deeply. “You are in deep trouble, sir. God is about to punish you.”

The man's face turned red and he started to stand.

Service stood up, trying to fight back a laugh.

Both men were startled by his sudden appearance. The second man screamed, “I did it, I did it!”

Service got up and walked forward. The first man looked up at him.

“Roll on your backs and take off your jackets,” McCants said.

“It's raining,” the first man whined.

Both men did as they were told. The second man was wearing a shoulder holster with a Colt 45.

“Hands out like you are on a cross,” McCants said.

The men did as they were told. Service cautiously removed the .45 and pointed it toward the hill. “Safety's off.” He pulled the clip, checked the chamber. “One in the boiler.” He emptied the clip into his hand and put the rounds in his pocket. He removed the round from the chamber and put it with the other bullets.

“Shoot a lot of ducks with this?” he asked the second man. He grabbed the man by the shoulder and pulled him up. “Licenses.
You
get them both.” Service went with him into the blind, was gone three or four minutes, and emerged with two shotguns, two wallets, and a wood duck decoy. “No plugs. There're fifty rounds of lead shot in there, two expended.” He flipped wallets to McCants, who looked through them and shook her head. “No hunting licenses, no waterfowl stamps.”

Neither man spoke.

“A whole bag of these decoys inside,” Service said. He turned over the one he was carrying and asked, “Which one of you is Bruce Mosley?”

“Neither,” McCants said, holding the wallets.

“And the boat?” Service asked.

“Mine,” one of the men said. “The decoys belong to a friend of ours.”

“That's good,” Service said. “There's no registration on the boat.”

“Okay,” the first man said, “I shot the swan. It was gonna fuck up our duck huntin'.”

“No, it wasn't,” McCants said. “This area's closed to duck hunting this year.”

She walked over by the blind, took her 800 MHz off her belt, and called the driver's licenses in to Lansing. She gave Station 20 the name and phone number of the decoy owner and the driver's license numbers of the two men. It took ten minutes to get answers.

The first man was Dray Boekeloo, forty-one, of Thompson. He had two outstanding Schoolcraft County warrants, for possession of meth and contributing to the delinquency of minors. The second man was Jordie Rockcrusher, thirty-six, who was wanted for felonious assault in St. Ignace. The owner of the decoys had reported them stolen two weeks before. He'd never heard of Boekeloo or Rockcrusher.

“You guys hit the jackpot,” McCants said. “Possession of stolen goods, killing a swan, lead shot, no plugs in your guns, a loaded, concealed weapon without a CCW permit, the unregistered boat, no waterfowl stamps or hunting licenses, and hunting in a closed area. I warned you not to lie over the bones. Where's your vehicle?”

Both men pointed north.

They cuffed the men and took the guns and decoys and started marching out of the swamp up the hill. It was easier going out than the way they had come in.

Up on the hill McCants called Delta County and asked for deputies to meet them out on the Rapid River Truck Trail to transport the prisoners. There was no way for a patrol car to get back to them. Service laughed thinking about this. Until a few years back all COs had were sedans, and they took them into places the manufacturers would never believe. Got them hung up and trapped a lot too. The trucks weren't perfect, but size and four-wheel drive had opened a lot of new territory to officers.

They took one man in each truck, made the handoff, and went back across the creek and along the hills until they found the men's truck. Service dropped McCants, who walked back to the beaver pond and started north in the boat. Service was waiting for her when she bumped the nose of the boat against the grassy bank. It was a struggle to pull the boat up to the truck, but they got it done, securing it with bungee cords. McCants drove it out to the main road to meet the wrecker driver, who hooked it up and hauled it away. Service took McCants back to her truck and called the captain at home. “I'm with McCants. Do you still want me to come by?”

“No. There are rumors in Lansing and Detroit that the feds are exorcised by a woods cop sniffing around one of their investigations.”

Siquin Soong? Service wondered. He still hadn't heard back from Tree, which was unusual. “I haven't talked to the feds, Captain.”

“Are you in tomorrow?”

He said he would be.

McCants said, “Want to grab a burger? I'm gonna sit on a field tonight.”

“Want company?” he asked.

“Sure.”

They bought burgers at the McDonald's in Gladstone and headed to a potato field not far from the Mosquito Wilderness. They backed the truck into some spruce trees and sat inside with the windows cracked, eating burgers and fries. “Good field?” McCants asked.

“Got a lot of shiners here over the years,” he said. Too many to count.

At 11 p.m. a small buck walked past the truck, no more than ten yards away, sticking close to a wild olive hedgerow. McCants got antlers out of the back of the truck and rattled them together. The animal stopped and turned back to see what the sound was. The buck's brisket was not swollen. It would take colder weather to turn on the rut, but deer were naturally curious, which got a lot of them shot every year.

When the deer winded McCants, it sprang away and disappeared into the hedgerow with its flag up in alarm.

McCants got back into the truck, turned on a small red light, and started her paperwork for the day.

Service said, “Where the hell did you come up with that pouch routine?”

“Red Eacun,” she said.

Eacun was a sergeant who had retired ten years ago, spent winters is Arizona, summers at his home in Cheboygan. He was a horseblanket, like his father, an old-time conservation officer who wore a full-length wool coat. Horseblankets were considered a breed apart by their successors.

“He said one of his guys used to use it. Works about ninety percent of the time if you size up the violets right.”

“You read those two right,” he said.

“It
was
sweet,” she said.

“Total bozos,” he said.

“Job security,” she said, grinning.

“What exactly is in the pouch?” he asked.

“That, Detective, must remain a trade secret.”

28

As soon as Newf was free of the dog run, she ran into the side hedges, snarling and barking. Service tensed, thinking the red dog was back, but Newf soon came back panting and wagging her tail and made straight for the house.

“Miss Congeniality,” he said to the dog, who looked quizzically at him.

There were two messages on the answering machine, the earliest from Pyykkonen, the latter from Treebone.

Tree's said, “Call you back from a Clark Kent. You probably just off making life miserable for your Bammas.” A Clark Kent was Tree-talk for a phone booth. He had no idea what a Bamma was, but he could guess it related to rednecks. Tree's wanting to call from a phone booth was a distinctly negative indicator.

He tried Pyykkonen at her office and got a recording. He called her house and the line was busy. It took four calls for her to finally pick up.

“You been trying to get through?” she asked.

“Couple tries,” he said.

“I've been online with Shark,” she said.

“Wetelainen online?” It was unthinkable. Yalmer Wetelainen's life revolved around food, drink, fishing, and hunting—until recently.

“I showed him a site called Flyanglersonline.Com. It's got loads of antique fly recipes. He loved it, went right out and bought a Dell. Now I'm teaching him e-mail and Instant Messenger.”

Service had no idea what Instant Messenger was, and didn't care. “You called,” he said.

“I talked to the dean at Virginia Tech who was Harry Pung's boss. Just as the records showed, he was not aware of a son and had never heard Harry talk about one. I don't know what the hell to think anymore. I also put out a BOLO to the coast guard, county, and Troops for a blue watercraft. Nothing back yet. I called the locks at the Soo and asked them to scan the tapes. Anything on your end?”

BOLO meant Be On The Lookout. Cops rarely used the term APB anymore. “They have tapes at the locks?”

“Every boat that goes through.” He hadn't known this and he was impressed that Pyykkonen had thought of it. He had assumed the blue boat had ducked into a harbor in the northern U.P.

“Irons in the fire here,” he said.

“We're gonna break this,” she said, sounding like she was singing in a graveyard.

He opened a can of Diet Pepsi and leafed through a copy of
Atlantic Monthly
that Nantz had left when he heard a siren pass in front of the house. He sometimes heard sirens below the Bluff on US 2, but rarely in the neighborhood. He put down the magazine, went out to the truck with Newf on his heels, and clicked on his 800 MHz. Nothing.

There were two radio systems in all DNR vehicles, the 800 MHz for talking to Lansing, all DNR field personnel and district offices around the state, and for talking to Troops. The county and city were on a separate system. With the 800 silent, he dialed in Delta County on the other radio and heard the dispatcher talking to a deputy. “Code 10-54X, Code 3,” she said.

Code 10-54 was a possible suicide; X indicated a female. Code 3 meant get there fast. He depressed his mike button. “Delta, DNR Twenty-Five Fourteen, where's that Code 10-54?”

She gave him the address, which he automatically scribbled in the notebook he stored by the radio. His heart sank. It was Outi Ranta's house.

He let Newf into the truck and blue-lighted to the house. Two Delta County cruisers were just pulling in, along with an EMS Ramparts unit. A third county unit was on his heels. He grabbed a pair of disposable latex gloves from a box in the backseat, and got out.

The Delta County undersheriff, James Cambridge, pulled in beside him. Cambridge was sixty, overweight, had a chronic bad back, and would retire this summer. He was the sort of county cop who was gruff, unfriendly, and uncooperative with other agencies. His personality had cost him two runs at sheriff, and only the benevolence of the current sheriff allowed him to keep his job this time around.

“James,” Service greeted him

“I hate calls like this,” the undersheriff said. Service knew Cambridge would soon question his presence.

Service stepped into the house behind Cambridge. There was a young deputy in the hallway. The kid looked pale, about to be sick. Cambridge squeezed his shoulder, a gesture that caught Service by surprise. The undersheriff was not known for giving warm fuzzies to his people.

Service looked into the kitchen. Cambridge said, “Mind your step,” and went back to talking to his deputy.

There were two lower panes of glass gone from the bay window. The rest of the glass and white wood were sprayed with blood and gray tissue. Service saw a body on the floor and leaned to look, not wanting to soil the evidence. It was Outi Ranta, her skirt hiked up around her thighs, one shoe off. She had a corn pad on the uncovered foot. A Colt Python with a four-inch barrel was on the floor. He guessed it was a .38. The two bottles of vodka were where he had last seen them, one of them unopened, the other one looking to have about the same amount as earlier. Ranta's chair was tipped over. It was the same chair she had been sitting in when he last saw her.

He stepped out of the kitchen and went outside for a smoke. A Gladstone cop pulled up and went inside. Then a Troop Service didn't recognize joined them. Cop lights always drew crowds. He walked along the side of the main house to the guesthouse in back. It was unlit, small. He tried the door. Open. He flipped on the light, saw the bed was made, no dirty dishes. It looked unlived in. He backed out, circled the small house, looked through a window into the bathroom. Clean towels, new soap in the dish. He sat down on a lawn chair and finished his cigarette.

He found Vince Vilardo stepping out of the house when he got back to the front. He was telling Cambridge and the deputy, “Body temp says two, three hours max. Who found her?”

Cambridge gave a soft nudge to the young deputy, who said, “A neighbor two doors down thought she heard a noise, but she was making supper for her kids. Later she come over and saw the broken glass and blood, and called.”

“When did she hear the noise?” Vince asked.

“Suppertime,” the kid cop said.

Cambridge said, “Go ask for an actual time—even if it's an estimate.”

The young deputy took off on a run. Cambridge looked at Service and shook his head.

Vince nodded for Service to follow him. They went to the side of the house. “This wasn't a suicide,” Vince said quietly. “Paraffin shows no traces of nitrates on either hand. The projectile appears to have traveled downward, right to left. Nitrate and appearance of the wound suggest five, six feet away. I'll verify all this in the lab, but I thought you'd want to know.”

“You wondering why I'm here?”

“I gave up speculation long time ago.”

“You're sayin' homicide, not suicide?”

“Ninety percent,” Vilardo said.

“Thanks, Vince.”

Cambridge drifted back to them. “Thanks for responding,” he told Service. “We'll take it from here.”

Translation, “Butt out and adios.”

Vince leaned close to Service, whispered, “I'll call you in the morning.”

When he got home there was still no call from Tree.

Why had Outi Ranta been killed? She and Honeypat had had a falling out. Was there someone or something else? He started to make a list but pushed the pad away. Not his business. Most victims knew their killers and most murders were crimes of passion, unplanned events that simply happened. He had not taken a close look, but it looked to him like there had been no struggle in the kitchen. Did Outi think she was alone or had she let someone in? Leave it be, he told himself. Let the process run its course and let the county do its job. Still, he couldn't help feeling that there was something he should have done to prevent this. He had seen her only two nights ago, and though she had been upset, he was sure she was all right and strong.

He fed Cat and Newf and let them out. Cat stayed out to hunt. Newf came running in and raced upstairs to the bed so she could claim it. He didn't bother pushing her off and slept fitfully.