Heart of Ice (32 page)

Louis stared at the photo, stunned by how accurate Danny Dancer had been in capturing Rhonda’s likeness.

He heard a rustling, and a second later Flowers appeared with a black garbage bag.

“Look,” Louis said, handing him the photo of Rhonda.

Flowers took it and let out a low whistle.

Louis went back to plowing through the box, pulling out more snapshots. There were plenty of other teenagers, many of young men or Rhonda with a young man. None had names on the back.

He dug out another handful. Street scenes, blue water, and horses. The photos were of Mackinac Island. He tossed the landscapes in the box and sorted through the rest. He stopped.

It was a group shot, six teenagers standing in front of a grassy knoll. Louis couldn’t make out their faces. He held it up to Flowers.

“Is that Rhonda?” he asked.

Flowers took the photo. “Yeah,” he said. “This was taken up at Fort Holmes.” He pointed to tiny lettering on the photograph’s edge. “ ‘July 1968.’ ”

Louis stood up. “The summer before Cooper met Julie. Is that Cooper Lange next to her?”

“Looks like him.” Flowers was sniffling from the cold. “Come on, let’s pack this up and get out of here.”

Louis slipped the group shot and the close-up of Rhonda into his parka pocket. Flowers held the garage bag open while Louis dumped in the contents of both wet boxes.

A small metal box missed the bag and fell to the floor. It was an old Band-Aid tin. Flowers was about to throw it in the bag, but Louis stopped him.

“Open it.”

Flowers shook it. “It’s empty.”

“Open it anyway.”

Flowers popped the top and shook the tin over his palm. Six tiny pieces of fabric fell out.

“What the hell?” Louis said.

Flowers fingered them and chuckled. “Fruit loops,” he said.

“What?”

“Man, I haven’t seen these since I was a kid.”

“What are they?” Louis asked.

Flowers paused. “Where’s that group picture?”

Louis fished it from his pocket and held it out. Flowers pointed to one of the boys. “See the shirt this kid is wearing? There were little loops on the back. Girls would cut them off and collect them.”

“What for?”

“Conquests. Guys notched their belts. Girls collected fruit loops.”

Louis was thinking about Danny’s sketch of Cooper. He was almost positive Lange had been wearing a madras shirt. He retrieved his glasses from his parka pocket and held the group photograph up to the window.

Cooper Lange at age eighteen—blond and slender, wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a confident smile. He looked like the whole world was spread out before him. He looked nothing like the faded man who had sat hunched in the interrogation room.

And Rhonda . . .

She was dressed in tight white shorts and a pink blouse tied below her breasts. One of her long tan legs was bent like a model’s, and her arm was draped over Cooper Lange’s shoulders.

Her father had described her as “boy crazy,” but it was more than that. Even at sixteen, Rhonda Grasso was a girl at ease with her sexuality.

“Chief,” Louis said, holding out the photograph, “I think we might have a triangle—Rhonda, Cooper, and Julie.”

Flowers looked up, letting the garbage bag fall. He came over and took the photograph, looking at it for a long time.

“If it was, it was a pretty ugly triangle,” he said softly.

“Aren’t they all?”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to understand what it’s like up here,” Flowers said. “The locals are stuck here all winter and then summer comes and the fudgies take over. They make a big mess, then leave everything for us to clean up.
If a townie girl like Rhonda thought a Bluff girl like Julie wanted her guy, she wouldn’t give him up easily.”

Flowers handed Louis the photograph and went back to bagging up the papers.

Louis started to put the photograph away, then stopped. He stared at Rhonda Grasso, thinking about Danny Dancer’s description of her—
eyes like ice, heart like ice
—and he had the feeling he was looking at a killer.

T
he first thing Louis did when they got back on the island was drop Flowers off at his home. It was clear the trip had taken all the starch out of him. Louis caught a glimpse of Carol waiting for him at the front door as he trudged up the walk. She waved to Louis, wrapped an arm around her ex-husband, and ushered him into the house.

Louis turned the police SUV around and started back to town, eager to tell Rafsky about Rhonda Grasso. But then he stopped at an intersection, remembering his promise to Danny Dancer.

I’ll take care of your skulls.

Dancer’s cabin was just up the road from Flowers’s house. What the hell he was going to do with the damn skulls, he had no idea.

A few strands of yellow crime scene tape hung limply from the trees. Apparently it had been enough to keep trespassers out, as Louis saw no fresh footprints close to the cabin and no sign anyone had poked around. The evidence tape that sealed up an active crime was gone from the front door, so Louis knew the police and DA were finished. He could enter without disturbing anything.

The door was locked. The shutters had been taken down, so Louis tried the front window. It took him a
while to get the frozen window open, but finally he was inside.

He hadn’t been back since the shooting. Parts of that day were a little fuzzy, blurred by the memories of bullets whizzing over his head and Flowers bleeding in his arms. Yet the place seemed less gruesome. Then he knew what it was—the stench was gone. All the beetles were dead.

Louis looked around. The cops had cleared the shelves of Dancer’s sketchbooks. But his other books remained and Louis took a moment to scan the titles:
Greek Mythology for Children, The Road Less Traveled,
and a third book,
The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self.

So Joe’s hunch had been right.

He opened it to the copyright page. It had been published in 1967 and checked out of the St. Ignace library that same year, when Dancer would have been about sixteen. He thought of Aunt Bitty and how hard it must have been for her to raise a child she had probably not understood very well.

Louis turned to the task of gathering the skulls. The only containers he could find were the plastic bins with the dead beetles in them. He took two of them outside and rinsed them out with half-frozen water from the spigot.

Back inside he lined each bin with sheets off Dancer’s bed and started putting the animal skulls in them, starting with the large ones. When both bins were full, he began gathering up the smaller skulls. It was freezing in the cabin, and he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. He thought about leaving the smallest skulls, then realized he couldn’t.

You got to get them all.

He went through the kitchen cabinets, finally spotting a large shoe box under the sink. He dumped out the hammer and small crowbar and started back to the skulls. Halfway across the room, he stopped and looked back at the tools.

He was remembering what Pike said that day at the lodge.

Want to see his little rat hole?

The hole in the foundation that was Dancer’s secret entryway. The hole where, each time he left, he would carefully re-place the boards’ nails into the same well-worn holes.

Louis turned a slow circle. The interior wood walls already had holes cut in them from where Rafsky’s men had searched inside.

Louis looked up. Nothing but a peaked roof and rafters.

He looked down at the floorboards.

Pike had said the foundation under the cabin was concrete. Louis had a sudden memory of the movie
Escape from Alcatraz
and Clint Eastwood chipping away at the old concrete in his cell with a spoon.

Louis grabbed the crowbar and scanned the floorboards again, looking for uneven slats or protruding nails. He saw nothing, so he started moving the furniture.

He dropped to his hands and knees. Starting in the farthest corner from the door, he crawled along the wall, sliding his palm over the worn boards and tapping to find a hollow spot.

In a corner by the bed he found what he was looking for. A hollow sound beneath three boards, which all had holes wider than those of the abutting boards.

It was easy to use the crowbar to pull up the boards. Beneath, set down in a hole in the concrete, was a wooden box about the size of a twelve-pack of beer. He wedged his fingers down each side, lifted the box out, and opened the lid.

Fur. Brown and red fur.

An animal pelt wrapped around something else. He peeled away the top flap of fur.

Julie Chapman’s skull lay on the leathery underside of the pelt.

Rafsky had been right. Dancer had Julie’s skull all along. And it had been well cared for. It was clean and smooth and Dancer had even used fine wire to attach the jaws, giving the skull the look of a perfect laboratory specimen.

Louis gave the pelt a shake. A wad of money, a brooch, a tiny Bible, and a set of keys tumbled to the floor. He was sure the keys were for the Ford Dancer kept garaged in St. Ignace. He stuffed them and the other things in his parka pocket, pushed, to his feet, and took the skull to the window so he could get a better look at it.

There it was—a small crack in the right temple area. Now they had a cause of death.

He turned the skull around to the front.

There was something about seeing a human skull that conveyed a reality that a photograph could not. As he stared at Julie Chapman’s skull he could imagine the white bone with long black hair and brown eyes. But as his eyes moved over the curves and ridges, an uneasy feeling started to settle inside him.

It was the teeth.

There was a bottom molar missing and the two front teeth . . .

There was a gap between them.

Jesus
.

Louis set the skull on the counter and reached into his parka, pulling out the photographs he had taken from Chester Grasso’s garage. He held the close-up of the smiling Rhonda Grasso next to the skull.

He let out a long breath. He was no expert, but to his eye there was no doubt that this was not Julie Chapman. It was Rhonda Grasso.

I
t took Rafsky a good five minutes to open his hotel room door. He was wearing a wrinkled T-shirt, sweatpants, and his face was lathered with shaving cream. His eyes looked like a road map, blue shot through with red, and his hand holding the razor trembled slightly.

“Kincaid, where have you been?” he asked.

“Cedarville,” Louis said.

Rafsky frowned, then nodded. “Oh yeah. Rhonda Grasso. You find her?”

“I think so.”

Rafsky stepped aside, and Louis came into the room. The drawn drapes glowed gold with the afternoon sun. The room smelled stale, and there was a pile of clothes on the floor and a scattering of case folders on the unmade bed.

Louis set the wood box on the desk near the window along with the folder holding Julie Chapman’s dental records. He had swung by the station and picked them up before coming to the hotel because he knew Rafsky would want to see hard proof.

Rafsky came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel. “Look, I know I made an ass out of myself last night,” he began.

“Forget it,” Louis said. “You need to see this.”

Louis opened the box and carefully took out the skull. Rafsky’s mouth dropped open, and he came forward. He switched on the desk lamp and stared at it.

“Where’d you find it?” he asked.

“Dancer had a hole carved in the cabin foundation. I found the loose boards.”

Rafsky took the skull and turned it around. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the fracture. “That’s what killed her.”

Louis pulled the dental X-ray from the folder and held them out to Rafsky.

“What’s that?”

“Julie Chapman’s dental records.”

Rafsky took the X-ray, holding it against the lamp. It took him a few moments, but when he looked back at Louis his face was gray and it wasn’t from the hangover.

“Jesus Christ,” Rafsky said softly. “It’s not her.”

Louis pulled the snapshot of Rhonda from his pocket and held it out to Rafsky. “I found this in Chester Grasso’s garage in a bunch of Rhonda’s stuff.”

Rafsky stared at the picture for a long time. Then he set the X-ray aside and, still holding the skull, went to the bed and sank down on the edge.

Louis had known that Rafsky would take this hard. Not just because they had spent three months, countless man-hours, and a lot of money racing down the wrong road. But also because when this got out, Rafsky would be crucified as an incompetent burnout who had tried to rebuild his reputation on the bones of a young girl.

“I should have known better,” Rafsky said.

Louis said nothing.

“I should have waited for the DNA identification on the bones,” Rafsky said.

Louis took off his parka and sat down in the chair across from the bed. Rafsky was still staring at the skull in his hands. Finally he rose slowly and set the skull down on the desk. He went to the window and moved the drape aside, looking out at the fast-gathering darkness.

“Norm,” Louis said. “What do you want to do?”

“We start over,” Rafsky said, his back still to Louis. “And this time we don’t make any fucking assumptions.”

“When’s the DNA identity test coming back?”

“I called the lab yesterday. Our test got pushed back in line by a triple homicide. They said it will be at least three more weeks.”

“Without DNA, we can’t even assume this skull is part of the skeleton found in the lodge,” Louis said. “We can’t even assume whoever died in that lodge died twenty-one years ago.” He paused. “We need to get in to see Dancer again. We need him to admit he took the skull from the lodge.”

Rafsky was quiet, just staring out the window.

“Ross is still the father of the baby,” Louis said. “We at least know that’s a fact. Which puts him back as our number one suspect.”

Rafsky finally turned around. “That certainly explains his behavior when we picked him up at the airport. He waited twenty-one years to take his sister home, and all he could think about was his new house in Georgetown. He knew the bones weren’t Julie’s.”