Heart of Ice (6 page)

Victorian mansions, lined up like giant dollhouses, one after another. They were almost absurd in their elaborate beauty, multistoried monstrosities with great yawning porches and peaked towers topped with widow’s walks. All the homes seemed to be closed up for the season, their porches shrouded in heavy plastic as if some giant had Saran-wrapped them for storage.

Flowers pulled to a stop in a cul-de-sac. “This is it.”

The Chapman “cottage” was not the largest of the bunch, but to Louis’s eye it was the strangest. It sprawled over its lot as if the builder had had no master plan but just kept adding rooms at whim. It also looked older—or maybe just more neglected—than its pristine neighbors. Its white paint had gone gray, and the lawn needed mowing. The only sound was the clang of halyards on the empty flagpole.

“Does the family still come here?” Louis asked Flowers.

Flowers shrugged. “I don’t know anything about them, but Barbara’s lived here all her life and says that after the daughter disappeared in 1969 they closed it up and no one came back for years. Barbara remembers that the father came back once or twice after his wife died but he kept to himself.”

“No other kids?”

“An older brother, but he’s never been back.”

“It looks like no one’s been here in a while,” Louis said.

“Barbara heard rumors that the place might be going on the market,” Flowers said. “But it’s been in the family for generations, so I guess the old guy can’t bring himself to sell it.”

Louis looked at the house. The dark windows stared back at him, the furled awnings sitting like questioning brows above.

“We’d better get going,” Flowers said.

He turned the Ford around and soon they were heading deeper into the island’s wooded interior. Some bikers stared at the sight of the SUV, but most of the pedestrians just waved. There were only about five hundred permanent residents on Mackinac, Flowers explained, and everyone knew everyone else’s name, face, and business.

“This is the Village, where the locals live,” Flowers said as he slowed to go through a small residential area. “That’s my place over there.”

Louis caught a glimpse of a small green bungalow set back among the pines before they headed back into the woods again.

“So why’d you change your mind about staying?” Flowers asked.

“It was changed for me,” Louis said. “Lily said it was my responsibility to help.”

Flowers smiled. “I get that. Got two girls of my own.”

“They stay here on the island all year long?”

Flowers smile faded. “No, they’re with my ex in Kansas City.”

They rode on in silence, passing a sign that read
MACKINAC ISLAND STATE PARK
.

“So where’s Rafsky?” Louis asked.

“Far as I know he’s checking in at the Potawatomi. I told one of my men to bring him out here in the golf cart. I don’t want to deal with him any sooner than I have to.”

“He’s not going to like me being here.”

“He’ll have to adjust,” Flowers said.

They turned onto a sandy road, coming up behind the lodge from the back. The chain-link fence was roped in yellow tape. A man in a blue paper jumpsuit was scouring the weedy yard with a metal detector.

Flowers led Louis to the side porch. A tech with tweezers looked up when he heard their footsteps on the planks.

“You got anything there, Henry?” Flowers asked.

The tech shrugged. “Hairs, maybe human, maybe skunks. Some brown stuff, maybe blood, maybe dirt. Maybe nothing.”

“You seen the state investigator yet?” Flowers asked.

“Nope.”

“Good, I want to go down in the basement and take a look before he arrives,” Flowers said. “You guys done down there?”

“I think they’re done,” the tech said. “But the rest of this place is going to take days. You sure you want us scratching in every corner of every room for every hair?”

Flowers glanced at Louis, clearly looking for affirmation, and when he got none he gave a nod. “You never
know what evidence might have survived,” he said. “Just do what I asked, please.”

When they were out of earshot Flowers said, “I heard of a case once where they kept a bag of stuff for thirty years that they vacuumed up from a rape scene. Turns out later they matched some hairs in the bag to someone.”

“You did the right thing,” Louis said. “Until you know more about this girl and why she was here you can’t assume there isn’t evidence in other rooms.”

The boards had been removed from the front door, but the windows were still shuttered. The electricity had been turned on, and the foyer was brightly lit by a huge driftwood chandelier.

As Louis followed Flowers through the rooms he had the feeling that the place had been frozen in time. The walls were a mix of smooth logs, paneling, and peeling wallpaper. A single red chair with button cushions sat alone in one room, a three-legged piano stool in another. In the room where he had found the oil lamp there was a large deer head over a sooty stone fireplace.

“What did this place look like in 1969?” Louis asked.

“About the same,” Flowers said. “It was built just after the turn of the century as a hunting and fishing camp.”

“When did it close?”

“Like 1930 or something.”

“You need to be sure, Chief.”

Flowers glanced at him over his shoulder. “Yeah. Right. Watch that hole there. That’s where your little girl fell through.”

They were in the kitchen now. Louis moved gingerly
around the broken boards. It was easy to see the wood rot that rimmed the hole. A bright light coming from below gave him a view of the basement floor. He leaned over and peered down. It was a farther fall than he remembered, easily twelve feet.

Flowers opened a door leading to steep wooden slat steps. Louis went down first, surprised to see the ceiling was lower than he remembered. He was starting to wonder exactly how he had found his way back out to the sunlight carrying Lily.

At the bottom of the stairs they paused. The portable lights revealed the basement to be a large open area with stone walls and a series of small rooms. The boiler that Louis remembered seeing stood in the corner like a huge rusting robot.

But it was the place where the bones had lay that drew Louis’s eyes. There was a faint whitish outline on the concrete floor, and, for a second, he took it for a chalk sketch left by the techs. But then he realized what it was. Sometimes, if the conditions were just right, the fluids from a decomposing body would soak into the surface beneath it, leaving a pale ghost image.

Louis glanced at Flowers, but he didn’t even notice the stain. He was just standing there, hands on hips, surveying the scene.

“I need to confess something to you,” Flowers said. “I’m not sure where to go from here. Any ideas?”

“Let’s start with the basics,” Louis said. “How’s the identification going? You find anything else besides the ring that could link the bones to this Julie Chapman?”

Flowers shook his head. “No clothes, no purse, nothing
else here so far, but we’ll learn a lot more when her father gets here tomorrow.”

“Her father?”

The new voice made Louis turn.

Rafsky was halfway down the stairs, and as he ventured forward his face came into the harsh light. “You called her father?” he asked.

“Why not?” Flowers asked. “We can’t ID the bones without teeth. When we find the skull I figured her father could get her dental—”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

Flowers glanced at Louis, then back at Rafsky. “I’m just trying—”

“Do you know what parents go through when their children go missing?”

“Detective Rafsky,” Louis started.

The sharp blue eyes caught the light as they swung to Louis. “You shut up,” Rafsky said. He turned back to Flowers. “They live for any shred of news, so when you give them something you better be damn sure you’re right.”

Flowers’s face had gone tight.

Louis felt a twinge of sympathy for Flowers, but Rafsky was right. Flowers should have researched other missing girls, talked to someone at Kingswood to see if the ring had ever been lost or given away. He should have waited until he had the Bloomfield Hills police report in his hands. On the basis of just the ring he had assumed the bones belonged to Julie Chapman, and now there was no way to take back whatever hope he had given her family.

Rafsky suddenly turned to Louis. “What are you doing here?”

“Chief Flowers hired me on as a consultant,” Louis said.

Rafsky shook his head slowly, drew a deep breath, and opened the envelope he was carrying. “I have the preliminary lab reports from Marquette.”

“I’ve been waiting on those all morning,” Flowers said.

“You don’t wait, Chief Flowers,” Rafsky said. “You get off your ass and get them, even if it means driving to Marquette yourself.”

Flowers started to say something, but Rafsky cut him off.

“Every bone was here,” Rafsky said.

“Except the skull,” Louis said.

“Which means the body was not ravaged by animals,” Rafsky said. “Other bones would be missing and the skeleton would be scattered. Except for the slight disturbance from your daughter’s fall, the skeleton was intact.”

“So the killer decapitated her and took the head?” Flowers asked.

“The ME hasn’t been able to determine yet whether the head was cut off at the time of death or detached naturally during decomposition.”

“Either way, where the hell is it?” Flowers asked.

Rafsky gave him a hard stare. “It’s too early to speculate.”

“What else did you get from Marquette?” Louis asked.

Rafsky’s eyes slid to Louis, then back to his report. “The skeleton is a Caucasian female about five-five in height, approximate age sixteen to twenty-five, with no other injuries or signs of disease.”

“That describes Julie Chapman,” Flowers said.

“And a hundred other girls from this state who went missing over the last twenty years,” Rafsky said.

Louis took a few steps away. He was looking at the ghost stain, but he was thinking about the serial killer Joe and Rafsky had hunted in Echo Bay in 1975. That man had killed for fifteen years, and part of his signature had been to leave a bone from each victim out for animals as an offering. Also, the time period fit.

“Detective,” Louis said, “I remember reading about an old case, a serial killer who operated around Echo Bay. He abducted his victims and took them up north. He hid the remains but always left a single bone exposed.”

Rafsky had been looking at his report, and his eyes were slow to come up to Louis.

“Could this be related?” Louis asked.

Rafsky closed the folder. “The signature doesn’t fit,” he said. “The Echo Bay killer collected all the other bones in one place. And he killed only once a year, always at the same time in February. He also hung his victims in trees.”

“But how do we know Julie Chapman wasn’t kept for a month and killed in February?” Flowers asked. “How do we know—?”

“Because I know,” Rafsky snapped. He looked at Louis and took a breath. “There were other signatures, carvings in trees. This isn’t the same man.”

Rafsky turned and went back up the steps.

“Asshole,” Flowers said, starting after him. “I need to—”

“Let it go, Chief,” Louis said.

Flowers and Louis went up the stairs, catching Rafsky on the veranda.

“I’ll be in Marquette tomorrow,” Rafsky said. “I have an appointment with a forensic anthropologist.
He might be able to narrow the time of death. We need to know if she’s been in that basement two years or twenty.”

“Detective,” Louis said, “as long as the father is coming here, why don’t we consider DNA testing so we can at least confirm that this is Julie Chapman?”

Rafsky hesitated, then said, “At this point it would be a fishing expedition. A very expensive one.”

Louis knew bone marrow could be used for DNA and there was plenty of that, if it was not too degraded. But Rafsky was right—that it would be expensive and there was no way the state was going to foot the bill at this point. A simple dental comparison would confirm if the bones belonged to Julie Chapman, so it made sense to continue searching for the skull.

Rafsky grunted a good-bye and left.

Louis zipped up his jacket and stood at the end of the veranda looking out at the lake. They were only a couple of miles from Main Street, yet it felt like the end of the earth. And there was a strange expectant feeling in the air, as if the old lodge itself were waiting for someone to come back.

“You think it’s here?”

Louis turned to Flowers. He was leaning on the railing, looking out at the tech with the metal detector in the front yard.

“The skull, I mean,” Flowers said, turning to Louis.

“I don’t know,” Louis said. “But I do know that this place means something to the killer.”

Flowers looked up at the lodge. “Nobody comes here. It’s just a broken-down old dump.”

Louis shook his head. “No, it’s important. It’s his Room 101.”

“What?”

“It’s from George Orwell.
1984
?”

“Never read it,” Flowers said.

Flowers moved away, and Louis went back to looking at the lake. He could still recall the exact quote from the book—maybe because it reminded him of things in his foster homes he wanted to forget.

“The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

T
here were thousands of them. Small, black jelly-bean creatures crawling around the big plastic bin, piggybacking one another to get to that one last shred of meat left on the bone.

The beetle larvae were hungry today.

This skull would be ready by nightfall.

He pressed his face closer to the slimy plastic. The smell was strong, and the inside of his mouth filled with the sickening sensation that comes just before the vomit.

He swallowed it away and held his breath.

He should’ve taken the time to remove the brain. It stunk like hell when the beetles ate the brain.

Danny Dancer made sure the lid was secure on the bin and left the room, closing the door behind him. As he walked across the cabin the floorboards gave under his weight, reminding him again that it might not be a bad idea to work on getting healthier. After all, Aunt Bitty died at sixty-four, her veins clogged with that cholesterol stuff. He missed her, but he didn’t grieve. It was only because she died and left him the cabin that he was able to do what he did now. The cabin was way atop the island, too far from the other villagers for them to smell the beetles.