Heart of Ice (18 page)

“Maybe I can try later,” Joe said.

Louis shook his head. “We’re all tired. I say we call it a night.”

Joe was looking at something in the notebook. Louis saw it was a drawing of Rafsky.

“I think Rafsky’s burned-out, Joe,” Louis said. “I’m worried about what he might do.”

She closed the notebook. “I’m worried, too.”

I
t was only nine thirty, but it felt much later. It was, she knew, the stress of the long day. A day that had started with the warmth of the sun on her face as she looked out over Lake Huron and ended with the cold of the water on her hands as she washed away Chief Flowers’s blood.

Joe finished rubbing lotion into her hands and came out of the bathroom. Louis was hunched over the desk, and except for his reading glasses had nothing on except a towel around his waist. When they had arrived back at the hotel neither had said a word as Louis moved his things into her room. There had been no need for words, either, when they made love or afterward as they lay in each other’s arms listening to the rain. Words didn’t seem to have a place at the end of this day.

“The bathroom’s all yours,” she said.

He was busy writing something and gave a grunt but didn’t look up.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Postcards.”

“What?”

He turned and held up one. “It’s for Lily. I’m writing out a week’s worth tonight so I can mail one every day.”

“That’s cheating.”

“I know, but I might not have time later.” He held her gaze for a moment. “You okay?”

She nodded as she fished a hairbrush from her travel bag.

“You feel like going downstairs to get a glass of wine?”

She came over to him and ran a hand over his neck. “I don’t think so,” she said. His hand came up to grasp hers, and he kissed her fingers. Then he let go and went back to his postcard.

Her eyes drifted down to his back, to the small scars just below his shoulder blades. She had seen them before, of course, the first time they had made love. But she had been hesitant to ask him about them because she knew he had been a foster child and she had a feeling the scars were something he wanted to forget. Finally, when she did ask, he told her he had fallen off a bike. She had let it go. There were doors she knew he would never open, not even for her.

Dancer’s notebook was sitting on the desk by Louis’s elbow. She picked it up and went to the window seat. She sat down and opened the notebook to the crayon drawing Dancer had made of Louis.

She realized now that Dancer had captured Louis in those first moments as he was kneeling over Flowers after the shooting. It was all there on Louis’s face—anger, anxiety, and the fierce need to right the wrong. There was something else there, too. It was in the eyes, a soft swirl of pain. But whose pain?

She turned the page. Dancer’s drawing of her. Her eyes wide and liquid, her mouth agape as if caught in midquestion.

She shut her eyes. But it didn’t help because the images were all there in her memory. Fifteen years and it was still there, every detail of the ambush that had killed two of her fellow officers and left her for dead in the snow.

And Rafsky . . .

She opened her eyes and turned to the next page in the notebook.

The man in the sketch had Rafsky’s features—the long straight nose, concave cheeks, thin lips, and pale eyes. But there was something disturbingly empty about the likeness, as if there were nothing behind the skin, nothing alive in the eyes. Dancer hadn’t drawn a man. He had drawn a ghost.

Joe shut the notebook and drew up her knees. She looked over to the desk, but Louis was gone. She heard the groan of the plumbing and then the rush of the shower in the bathroom.

She drew back the curtain and looked down. The rain had stopped, and the street was dark and quiet. She saw someone step out of the shadows and then a flick of a lighter as it caught the tip of a cigarette. A face was revealed just long enough for her to see it was Rafsky.

He turned in a slow half circle, as if trying to figure out where he wanted to go. But then he just stood there in the middle of the street.

He was Section-Eighted to Siberia.

That’s what her friend at the state police had told her when she made a discreet inquiry about what Rafsky had been doing for the last fifteen years. She had felt guilty about checking up on Rafsky after Louis told her he was on the island, but she gave in to her curiosity.

Section Eight was the official name of the district of the Upper Peninsula covered by the state police. But it was also military-discharge jargon for mental cases. Norm Rafsky, once one of the state’s most respected investigators, had been exiled to a remote post in the U.P. Her friend at the state police didn’t know all the details, just what he had heard. That after the ambush at Echo Bay fifteen years ago, Rafsky’s injury had sidelined him to a desk job for two years. And when he returned to active duty he was never the same. Something had been lost, iced over.

Joe looked toward the bathroom. She knew Louis would stay in the shower until the water went cold. She went to the desk, scribbled a note that she was taking a walk, grabbed her leather jacket, and left the room.

Rafsky was still standing in the street when she emerged from the hotel. His back was to her, but he heard her and turned. In the light spilling out from the hotel windows, she saw his face tighten.

As she came closer he looked up at the night sky, as if trying to avoid meeting her eyes.

“It’s a blue moon tonight,” he said.

The cloud cover was so dense there was no moonlight at all. The air was so cold it almost smelled of snow.

“Do you know what a blue moon is?” he asked. When she didn’t answer he went on. “Two full moons in one month, a rarity. Once in a blue moon.”

He finally looked at her. “I’ve done everything I could not to run into you in the last fifteen years, and now you show up here.”

“I didn’t plan on it,” she said.

Rafsky took a final drag on the cigarette, tossed it to the street, and crushed it out with his heel. “How do you know Kincaid?” he asked.

“We met two years ago when I was with Miami homicide. I helped him with a case.”

“Two years,” Rafsky said. “That’s a relationship.”

Joe didn’t say anything. The silence lengthened.

“How have you been, Norm?” she asked.

Maybe it was because she used his first name when they had always called each other by their surnames. Rafsky-Frye, it had always been Rafsky-Frye. Maybe he took it as a signal that their old relationship of mentor-rookie was long gone. Maybe he thought she was patronizing him. Whatever the reason, he took a half-step away from her.

“I’m okay,” he said. “You know how it goes.”

She touched his sleeve. “How’s your arm?”

He flexed his forearm beneath the trench coat. Then, suddenly, she felt him relax.

“It’s not worth a damn anymore, Joe,” he said.

Her hand moved up to his shoulder, and she gave him a squeeze. He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away.

“I had to learn how to shoot all over again lefty,” he said.

“You don’t need a gun to do your job,” she said.

He gave her a withering look.

“Okay, forget that,” she said. She struggled to find something neutral to talk about.

“How’s Gina?” she asked.

“We split up twelve years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” He reached into his coat and pulled out his cigarettes again. He lit one and drew deep on it.

“When did you start smoking?” she asked.

“Twelve years ago.”

“How’s your son, Robert?” Joe asked.

“Ryan,” Rafsky said.

“Sorry. He must be, what, in his twenties now?”

“Twenty-five. Married. Associate professor of biology at Northern. He’s got a daughter, five years old.”

Joe stayed quiet, waiting for Rafsky to go on. He took a step away, then looked back at her.

“I need to walk. You want to come?” he asked.

She nodded, and they started down the street. They turned onto Main Street, where the old globed lamps left pearly puddles on the wet street.

“Your son and granddaughter,” Joe began, “do you get to see them much?”

It was a long time before Rafsky answered. “After Gina left we lost touch.” He paused. “It was my fault. I let them both go without a fight.”

He took another drag on the cigarette, and it was a few more steps before he spoke again. “When Ryan got the job at Northern last year I called him. I wanted to reconnect.”

Joe had a sudden memory from the case fifteen years ago. Over dinner, Rafsky had given her advice on not letting the job take over her life. She could still remember his exact words.

You have to be careful. You have to have another life. A lot of cops let their work become their life. And my God, that will kill you.

She remembered that after enough wine he had pulled out his wallet and proudly showed her a picture of Ryan. She could remember, too, how the boy had looked—a small replica of his father, right down to the spiky sandy hair.

“So are things going well with Ryan now?” she asked.

Again he was slow to answer. “He’s having a hard time forgiving me for not being there. And he’s having a hard time believing me when I tell him I want to be there now for Chloe.”

They stopped under a streetlamp, and she could see his face clearly now. She could see now that what Danny Dancer had captured wasn’t emptiness. It was something as hard and ungiving as stone. Norm Rafsky, she realized in that moment, wanted to be forgiven, yet he didn’t know how to do it himself.

That was the source of the contempt in his eyes when he had first seen her today. Fifteen years and he still hadn’t been able to forgive her for what happened in Echo Bay.

It had taken her a long time to get over what she had done during her rookie year, conspiring with her fellow officers to leave a killer in the woods to die instead of taking him in to stand trial. Rafsky had been there, and she could still hear his words.
You’ll be murderers, all of you.

He hadn’t turned them in, and when she asked him why his voice had gone cold.

I made a choice about what I could more easily live with—letting you get away with what you did or sending three decent young cops to jail.

But she knew now that he had never forgiven her. Not
just for what she had done but also for what keeping silent about it had done to him.

“Forgiveness is easy to ask for,” she said. “But it’s hard to give.”

He just stared at her.

“Good night, Rafsky,” she said. She turned and started back to the hotel.

I
t was still drizzling by the time Louis got to the station the next morning, and a heavy fog had turned Main Street into a smudged charcoal drawing. Head turtled into his collar, he didn’t even see the crowd until he was almost upon it. It was the press scrum. Like a lab experiment gone bad, it had doubled in size since yesterday.

He did a quick count: six reporters, three photographers, and two TV camera guys were huddled under umbrellas at the side of the station’s steps in the area Clark had cordoned off that was normally used for the police bikes. No one looked at him as he went up the steps.

There was no room to move in the small foyer; two huge state troopers in black rain slickers had taken up the space. Louis nudged past and went to the Dutch door. Two more state guys were inside, crowding a harried-looking Barbara at her radio console. Louis caught her eye, and she pressed the buzzer to let him in. Heat was blowing down from a ceiling vent. The small office was hot and stuffy with the smell of wet wool. Rafsky was back in Flowers’s office on the phone.

Clark saw Louis and came over.

“What’s with the heat?” Louis asked.

“The janitor turned on the furnace last night and no
one seems to know how to turn it off,” Clark said. “I’m working on it.”

“Any word on the chief?” Louis asked.

“He was transferred to St. Ignace Hospital this morning.”

“So he’s better?”

Clark nodded. “Still not conscious, but they said he was stable enough to be moved. He should be in surgery by now. I just sent one of my guys down to Pellston to pick up his ex-wife. Her plane gets in in a half hour, and we’re taking her right over there.”

“Good,” Louis said. He pulled a manila envelope from his jacket. “I wanted to make sure you got Sheriff Frye’s statement,” he said.

Clark took it reluctantly. “So this means you’re out of here?”

“It’s Rafsky’s show now.”

An officer came up to Clark. “Sergeant, somebody better get out there and feed the animals.”

Clark’s eyes went to Rafsky. “Like you said, it’s his show now, right?”

Clark went to Flowers’s office and said something to Rafsky. Louis heard Rafsky spit out a string of obscenities. A moment later he came out. He gave Louis a glance as he passed, stuffing his arms into his sports jacket. Louis decided he had to see this and followed him outside.

The moment Rafsky took his place on the station steps the TV camera lights went on. They created an eerie glow in the mist. The reporters tried to shout out questions, but Rafsky quieted them with a raised hand.

“I have a statement about the events of yesterday,” he
said. “We have a suspect in custody in the shooting of Chief Jack Flowers. His name is Daniel Albert Dancer, and he is a resident here on the island.”

“Why were you at Dancer’s cabin?” someone yelled out.

“We just wanted to ask him some questions,” Rafsky said.

“Was it because you found skulls at Dancer’s cabin?”

There was a rumble in the crowd. Louis’s eyes shot to the scrum, but he couldn’t figure out who had asked the question. It was a female voice, and there were two women in the crowd. He focused on a blonde in a red raincoat.

“Detective, did you find skulls at Dancer’s house?”

Rafsky was staring at the blonde as if his eyes could turn her to a pillar of salt.

“No comment,” he said.

“Is Dancer a suspect in the Julie Chapman case?” the blonde called out.

“I said no comment. That is all for now. There will be no questions.”