Heart of Ice (12 page)

Chapman hesitated, then took the yearbook. The office
was quiet as he turned the pages. After a few minutes he closed the yearbook. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t recognize anyone. It was a long time ago.”

“What about here on the island?” Louis asked.

Chapman shook his head. “I don’t remember seeing her with anyone special.”

“Your father mentioned a housekeeper that came up here with you every summer,” Louis said. “We’ll need to talk to her. Can you tell us where we can find her?”

“She’s at the cottage with my father.”

Louis glanced at Rafsky. He had assumed that the black woman with Edward Chapman had been a health aide.

“How long has—?” Louis paused, unable to remember the housekeeper’s name.

“Maisey,” Chapman said.

“How long has she worked for your family?”

“Forever,” Chapman said.

“Can you be more specific?” Rafsky asked.

“Since I was two,” Chapman said.

“Would Julie have confided in her?” Louis asked.

Chapman shook his head. “No, Maisey’s just the housekeeper.”

Louis had seen the tenderness between Edward Chapman and Maisey. This woman was not
just
a housekeeper. He made a mental note to talk to her later—alone.

Chapman set the mug on Flower’s desk. His eyes were fixed on something on the wall over the desk. He seemed to be staring at an old photograph of Mackinac Island’s Main Street. Finally he looked back at Flowers.

“When can I take my sister home?” he asked.

Rafsky stepped forward. “I’m sorry, but the remains cannot be released until we have a positive ID.”

“So you’re telling me there’s nothing I can do?” Chapman said.

This was wrong, Louis thought. Wrong and unnecessary. Ross Chapman just wanted to take his sister home and bury her. Edward Chapman had waited twenty-one years and didn’t have time to wait any longer.

“Actually, there is something you can do,” Louis said. “Have you heard of DNA testing, Mr. Chapman?”

Louis could feel Rafsky’s eyes on him, but he kept his own on Chapman.

“Yes,” Chapman said. “They use blood or tissue to identify bodies.”

“Bones can also be used,” Louis said.

“How does it work?” Chapman asked.

“We would need some DNA that we were positive belonged to your sister for comparison, like hair from her brush,” Louis said. “That’s impossible in this situation.”

“But you said—”

“We can test the bones for what is called mitochondrial DNA,” Louis went on. “That is DNA passed on to children by their mothers. It’s exactly the same for each child. We can take DNA from you, and if it matches the DNA in the bones, we know the remains belong to your sister.”

Chapman stared at him. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just tell me this when I walked in?”

Rafsky took the question. “It’s not as easy as Mr. Kincaid makes it out to be. The genetic material could be too degraded or contaminated. Also, testing takes a long time, and it is extremely expensive. With all due respect, Mr.
Chapman, this is not something the state is prepared to do at this time.”

“You’re telling me I can’t bury my sister because the state is too damn cheap to do a test? You expect me to go back and tell my father that?”

“Mr. Chapman—”

Chapman cut Rafsky off with a raised hand, then looked at Flowers. “I want you to make this DNA test happen. I want to know for sure it’s Julie. I will pay for it. I don’t care what it costs.”

Flowers made it a point not to look at Rafsky before he spoke. “Yes, sir. I will get things in motion immediately.”

“What about the fetal bones?” Louis asked.

Chapman’s eyes swung to Louis.

“Do you also want to pay for testing the fetal bones?”

“Why? We know it’s Julie’s baby,” Chapman said.

“We should test for paternity,” Louis said.

“I’m confused,” Chapman said. “I thought you said you can only test for matches between siblings?”

“Paternity is different,” Louis said. “The fetal bones contain the DNA of Julie and of the baby’s father. And the father of that baby is our best suspect right now.”

Chapman hesitated. “I understand,” he said softly. “I know that you want to find the man who killed my sister. But you don’t understand what the last twenty years have done to us. All we wanted to do was find Julie. And now all we want to do is take her home.”

“Mr. Chapman—” Rafsky interrupted.

“You have to understand, Julie was my father’s . . . everything, she was his princess,” Chapman said. “If he
found out she had gotten pregnant, it would kill him.” He hesitated. “Maybe later.”

Louis knew Chapman meant after his father had died.

The room was silent for a long time. Then Flowers cleared his throat.

“Mr. Chapman, we appreciate your situation,” Flowers said. He picked up the
Lansing State Journal.
“The news about the bones has already gotten out. But you have my word that we will do everything we can to keep the pregnancy quiet.”

Chapman considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Thank you. Now, what do I need to do for this DNA test to identify my sister?”

“You can go to the clinic here on the island and give a sample,” Flowers said. “I’ll have one of my officers take you over now if you like.”

Chapman shook his head. “I really need to see to my father right now,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow.” He started for the door, then turned back. “Thank you again for your discretion.”

With a quick look at Rafsky and Louis, he left.

Rafsky waited until the door had closed, then turned to Louis. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he said. “You’ve hung that man’s hopes of identifying his sister on a one-in-a-million chance.”

Rafsky swung to Flowers. “And if you knew what the hell you were doing, you wouldn’t be taking advice from this loser.”

Louis straightened from his position leaning against the wall. “Wait a minute—”

“He lost his badge in this state,” Rafsky said. “You want to know why? He killed his own chief.”

Flowers’s eyes shot to Louis.

Rafsky picked up his files and started to the door. “You want to keep him here, fine. Just don’t turn your back on him.”

Rafsky left, leaving the door open. Louis shoved it closed.

Damn it.
He was tired of having to defend himself every time he came back to this state. He was tired of feeling like an outcast in the place where his dream of being a cop had been born. And now that son of a bitch Rafsky . . .

Flowers was staring at him, waiting.

“It was a complicated case,” Louis said.

“I’m listening,” Flowers said.

“We were after a cop killer. My chief was corrupt and out of control. I did what I had to do to save a boy’s life.”

Flowers dropped back into his chair and picked up the
Lansing State Journal.
Louis wondered if he was thinking about the shit-storm that lay ahead—or about what kind of man he had teamed up with.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” Flowers asked, tossing the paper aside.

“Unless you want me gone now.”

Flowers leaned back in his chair. “I’ll take your word you did what you had to do with your chief,” he said.

Louis nodded. “I appreciate that.”

“So can you give me a few more days?”

Before Louis could answer, the phone rang. Flowers picked it up, grunted a few words, and hung up. “I have to go take care of something,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Flowers left, leaving the door open.

Louis sat down in the chair Chapman had been using. From the outer office came the sounds of radio traffic and the laughter of two officers sharing a joke. He started to reach for one of the Chapman folders but pulled over the Kingswood yearbook instead.

He opened it and began to look for her. So many pretty young faces, smiling into the camera and ready to get on with their lives. And then, there she was.

The black-and-white missing persons flyer that he had shown to the ferry employees and Edna Coffee hadn’t really registered in his consciousness.

But the photograph of Julie Chapman in front of him now did. The angles and symmetry that gave Ross Chapman his handsomeness were visible here but softened to beauty. Where Ross Chapman’s hazel eyes telegraphed strength, his sister’s darker ones conveyed vulnerability.

He hadn’t noticed before, but unlike the other girls Julie wasn’t looking into the camera. It was as if she was afraid the photographer was thinking she wasn’t as pretty as the others.

A few more days . . .

Louis looked back up at the map of Michigan on the wall behind Flowers’s desk, focusing on the little dot of Echo Bay. He had promised Joe he would be in Echo Bay tomorrow. It was only a three-hour drive. Would Joe be willing to come to him?

But what about Rafsky? He didn’t want their past infecting his future with her. He’d have to tell her Rafsky was here, and he’d have to trust her.

He picked up the phone and dialed Echo Bay.

T
he front page of the
St. Ignace News
was spread out on the table before him. He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. When he opened his eyes the newspaper was still there. So was she.

Cooper Lange stared at the black-and-white photograph that dominated the top half of the front page.

Julie.

The headline above her photograph was big and black and ugly.

BONES FOUND IN ISLAND LODGE

He had been so shocked to see her picture when he opened the paper this morning that he hadn’t even read the story. He read it now, trying to go slow so his reeling mind could absorb the details.

There weren’t that many. A tourist had found bones in the Twin Pines lodge. Police were calling it a possible homicide. The lodge had been abandoned and boarded up for decades. . . .

Cooper’s eyes locked on one sentence: “Although a positive identification has not yet been made, sources close to the investigation say police are proceeding on
the theory that they may belong to Julie Anne Chapman, who disappeared from her Bloomfield Hills home twenty-one years ago.”

The photograph pulled him back. She looked exactly the same as he remembered. The same oval face framed by straight black hair and somber dark eyes. If was as if the past twenty-one years had never happened. Or as if she had been frozen in time. Frozen in his mind.

Cooper rose and went to the coffeemaker. He poured himself a fresh mug and stood at the sink, staring out the window at the flannel-gray fog.

It felt like the fog was there in his head. It had felt like this for as long as he could remember.

Like those warm nights with her in the lodge were something he had only imagined. Like that cold day on the ice bridge had never happened. Like those eleven months in Vietnam had been a nightmare and the six months in the VA hospital one big narcotic dream. Like the constant pain in his leg was something his mind made up when he needed an excuse to crawl into himself and die for just a couple of hours.

“You’re up early.”

He turned. His father was standing in the doorway. It was just a trick of the gloomy morning light, but for a moment he saw his father as he had that day twenty-one years ago, when they had stood in this very same spot and he had told his father—
lied to him—
that he was going ice fishing for three days up near Whitefish Bay. The next thing he remembered was his father’s face above him when he woke up in the St. Ignace Hospital, half-dead from hypothermia.

“You okay? You look a little pale,” his father said.

“I think I got a bug or something,” Cooper lied.

His father moved into the kitchen. He glanced at the newspaper, but nothing registered. There was no reason it should. Cooper had never told him why he had been out on the ice bridge that day, never told him about the girl on the island.

For a second he thought about telling his father all of it now. Telling him, too, that maybe he needed to go to the island and talk to the police.

“The cold’s coming early this year,” his father said.

“Yeah.”

“The storm windows—”

“I already did them.”

“I better check the furnace.”

“I’ll do it, Pop.”

His father’s eyes lingered on him before he turned to the coffeemaker.

“Flu’s going around,” his father said. “Maybe you should stay home today. I can go open the bar.”

Cooper didn’t answer. He moved past his father out of the kitchen. In the bedroom he pulled on a sweater and work boots. He went to his closet, looking for his down vest because he felt the cold so easily these days. As he grabbed the vest his eyes were drawn to the old Converse shoe box on the shelf.

He pulled it down and sat on the bed.

There wasn’t much in the box. But then, there had been no reason to add anything for a long time. And even less reason to look at what was there.

But he did now. He pulled out the black case and
cracked it open. He ran a finger over the Purple Heart, closed the case, and set it aside. He barely gave a glance to the faded varsity letter from LaSalle High School but took a long time staring at the Timex watch that had belonged to his grandfather. There were papers that he sifted through quickly, things that he didn’t remember keeping, and the coaster from the New York Bar in Saigon made him remember a night he had tried to forget. At the bottom of the box were the photographs.

Only a few. Most faded-to-orange Polaroids of bare-chested smiling men with palm trees and tanks in the background. A few of the guys he had worked with on the pipeline and a blurred one of his ex-wife on the beach at San Padre Island. And then . . .

A black-and-white photograph of a girl with long dark hair and somber eyes. Its edges were curled, its image faded.

He stared at it for a long time, then turned it over.

The delicate handwriting had been lost a long time ago in the icy water. Only a few words of what she had written to him remained.

Love . . . may shatter your dream

What had happened? The newspaper told him nothing, just that there were bones in the lodge. He closed his eyes against the image in his head.