Chasing a Blond Moon (43 page)

“Do you remember when she started using a cell phone?”

“Last spring when Onte was sick, I tink. Yeah, I'm sure, it was den.”

“Do you know what brand or service it was?”

“She never showed it to me, but I seen 'er usin' it plenty. Was purple, I remember.”

Service immediately called the store in Marquette again and got the same clerk. “I don't have the brand, but the phone I'm interested in may be purple,” he said.

She laughed. “They almost all make a purple phone now, and there are companies who make colored covers. Purple doesn't tell us anything. Sorry.”

He noticed that the e-mail had finished coming in, and saw that the note, along with an attachment, was from Ferma. Her address was: [email protected]. The message was to the point:

Dear Officer Service: I regret the untoward delay in responding to your inquiry. A colleague was derelict in informing me. If the samples of
S. thibetanus
are as purported, they represent invaluable scientific evidence of what may be a rare color phase of
S. thibetanus,
or more likely, and in my opinion, a new species of
ursus
, heretofore unconfirmed, but long rumored. Reports of the animal have persisted in Southeast Asia for the past century. During the Vietnam War there were several serendipitous reports, but the Khmer Rouge was in brutal and absolute control of the target habitat, and no on-site scientific inquiries or expeditions were possible. A live animal has never been confirmed by a reliable source, and the sole evidence consists of the hair sample preceding yours. As a ­conservation ­officer you are undoubtedly aware of the global animal parts market; in this regard, a live specimen of a new mammalian species would be scientifically invaluable. Commercially such an animal would bring a price beyond imagination, one estimate being in the range of $200K USD. Everything must be done to ensure the safety of a live specimen. That you collected samples in Michigan may suggest that a live animal has been captured and maintained there. There being no modern photograph extant, I am attaching a copy of a rare nineteenth-century print (of poor quality) from Southeast Asia. You will note the hanging cage. We believe this species to have been decimated over the centuries. Its flesh is said by practitioners of various cultural traditional medicines (China, SEA, etc.) to possess significant medical properties, which is what drives the current market in bear parts. More importantly, it is thought that the consumption of the animal's flesh will cause good fortune and power to accrue to the consumer. Specifically, it is believed that if the animal is eaten immediately after being dipped
in vivo
into boiling oil that the meat and tissue provide advantages beyond medicinal powers. The heart is, of course, the most valued part. The rarity of the animal, we believe, stems from these and similar beliefs fostered in part by those who seek commercial gain. If through some fluke there is a live specimen, we must do all in our power to see that it is protected, or a species may pass that will never be seen again. The animal is thought to range in size from 45 to 65 kilos, which places it at the lowest end of the ursine spectrum. Males, of course, are larger than females. Please keep me informed of further developments.

Sincerely, T. Ferma, Ph.D.

He checked the top of the note. No copies. The professor apparently didn't wish to share her speculations with others—or share credit if her hunch was right. Goddamned metrics. He got out his dictionary, looked under the listing for measures, converted kilograms to pounds, which worked out to ninety to one hundred forty.

He looked at the sepia print for a long time. A light-colored bear (nearly white against the brown background) was locked in what looked like a huge birdcage, suspended in the air. Despite the print's poor quality, the animal's terror seemed palpable.

The captain came over after Service called him, read the note without comment, and studied the photo on the computer. When he was finished, he looked up at his detective and said, “Siquin Soong?”

Service forwarded the e-mail to his home computer before leaving the office, and called Les Reynolds, who was just leaving his house for night patrol. “Can you talk to Colliver? We need to know if he ever called Kelo, and if so, the number. Otherwise, how did they communicate?”

“Consider it done,” Reynolds said.

Les Reynolds was a pro, unflappable, thorough—very unlike Wayno Ficorelli.

36

Nantz called at 5 p.m. “Did I catch you eating?”

“Thinking about thinking about it,” he said. His mind was too occupied to be hungry.

She laughed. “You're not thinking about food. I'm hungry for you, Service, what about that?”

“That's different,” he said.

“Jackson on Friday, right?”

“We're all set. I talked to Tree. He and Kalina have a plan for us. Fourteen hundred hours at the airport, right?”

“I'll have to be handcuffed to not attack you on the tarmac.”

“I'm ready,” he said.

“I talked to the people at the Lansing Board of Education and they did some poking around. It turns out that the yearbook photographs of Toogood and another kid got flipflopped by mistake that year.”

Service sat back and put his hand on his forehead. A mistake?

“You're not talking. Do you want the right photo faxed up to the office?”

“Yes, to tie off the loose end. Thanks.”

“You're still not talking.”

“Stuff on my mind.”

“Hope it's the same stuff I have on mine,” she said. “How's our kid?”

“Good. I stopped to see him the other night.”

“I know, he called me. He was really pleased, Grady.”

“Is this a conspiracy?”

“Of the best kind, honey. Nothing but the best.”

Her voice made him smile, did something to his chemistry. “I love you, Mar,” he said.

“Friday, babe,” she said. “Gotta scoot.”

Service greeted the sun, sitting on the back steps with Newf and Cat, who had decided to grace them with her presence. They shared a raspberry Pop-Tart.

Les Reynolds called later that morning as Service sat in his office, staring at the photograph of the blond moon bear on his computer screen.

“We got a number from Colliver. It's a cell phone.”

“Prepaid?”

Reynolds paused. “Just a cell phone. We called the number, but no answer. The vendor gave us an address in Nelma, Wisconsin, that's Forest County. I'm there now with the county people and the Wispies. There's a body.”

Wispies were members of the Wisconsin State Patrol, the state's equivalent of the MSP.

“Who does the phone belong to?”

“It's registered to an Oliver Toogood of Iron County.”

Service sat back and blinked. Trapper Jet? “Did you find Kelo?”

“The deceased is an elderly male with one leg. There's gonna be an autopsy.”

“That's Toogood,” Service said. “He claimed that Kitella burned his cabin.”

“You don't say.”

“Get the autopsy results to me soon as you can, okay?”

“One of the Wispies used to be a registered nurse. He says the old man looks like he starved to death.”

Service went outside to walk around and clear his head and the captain followed him.

“Are you all right, Detective?”

Ollie Toogood had not been the only nearly blind man.

Trapper Jet and Honeypat had teamed up against Kitella. Skunk had helped. This made sense, he tried to tell himself, but there was something still gnawing at him. The cell phone in Nelma had not been disconnected. Somebody wanted them to find Ollie. They would not find Kelo, Service expected, dead or alive.

The fax from Lansing came in just before noon. The student photo was definitely Ollie Toogood.

Service wished Eugenie Cukanaw would call back with information on Magic Wan, but after their one brief conversation with the investigator, she had not returned his call. He pulled up the picture of the bear again. The blue boat had been scuttled off Laughing Fish Point for a reason. The bear could have been moved with a lot less trouble, but Terry Pung had taken the boat there, and sunk it. Why?

Irvin Wan allegedly had a camp in the U.P. His connection to Pung, if any, was not apparent. He couldn't just sit around. He needed to start preparing to look, and western Alger County looked like the only logical starting place.

He hoped.

37

Six-foot-six Jake Mecosta pulled on his rain slicker, uncapped a tin of Marvil Hot, and tucked a pinch between his cheek and gums. Mecosta was one of a few Native American officers in the DNR, a Baraga-L'Anse Chippewa. Mecosta and Service were the same age, longtime friends who shared a love for wild brook trout.

“Hope I can find the way,” Jake said, eyeing the angle of a steep ridge overgrown with beech and maple.

Service grunted. “We'll just have to walk a little more. You take care of your feet and I'll take care of navigation.”

Jake Mecosta grinned and nodded. He had long been an effective officer, but he had a couple of weaknesses—he was both clumsy and had an amazingly poor sense of direction. Fellow officers teased him about it; he had laughed at himself, and said it just caused him to walk a little more than his colleagues, so he kept himself in better shape. Neither man was perfect: For Service it was dogs, for Jake, direction.

Service did not know western Alger County well enough to make a one-man search. The boat had to have been dumped in this area for a reason. Last night he had studied maps and plat books and given up. Nothing fit, and his time was limited. He had called Jake Mecosta, who covered western Alger.

“Let's talk to Santinaw,” Jake had said after hearing the problem.

“He's still around?”

“Eighty-five and still going. Walks down to Eben and back once a month, eight-mile round trip.”

Santinaw was Huronicus St. Andrew, a Munising Ojibwa who had served in the Pacific in World War II, and come home in 1946 after some time in Japan. As a boy, Huronicus pronounced St. Andrew as Santinaw, and that had been his name ever since. He lived alone, never married, and occasionally worked as a hunting or fishing guide. Service's old man had known him well, but Service hadn't thought about Santinaw for at least fifteen years.

His cabin was in the deep ridge area of the headwaters of the Rock River, east of the Laughing Whitefish, and they were getting ready to hike in to find him.

“Santinaw's been living here since he come back from the war,” Mecosta said. “If anybody knows the area, he'll be the man.” But you did not call St. Andrew on a telephone. You had to go to him, and before you got to him, you had to know where he lived.

Service studied the ridge. “This doesn't look too bad.”

Jake Mecosta grinned. “Isn't too bad—for a bit—then she turns nasty. This rain and all that slate, we'll be lucky not to break a leg.”

“How far?” Service asked.

“Mile, maybe two,” Jake said. “It twists around a lot.”

“Your route, or Santinaw's?”

“Santinaw never walks the same way twice; claims it keeps his footprints out of the forest.”

The rain was falling steadily and it was cool.

“Let's do this,” Grady Service said.

If Santinaw would allow it, Jake would remain with him in order to use the 800 MHz radio to maintain contact with Service, who would hike out and head for Jackson for the meeting with Siquin Soong.

The first quarter-mile was uphill, through a relatively clear maple and scrub oak forest, until they came to the lip of a ridge, where the terrain dropped straight down into an alder and cedar swamp bottom with braids of a small stream wandering through.

“We can climb down here,” Mecosta said, moving to Service's right. “Further along, we might need our ropes.” They both had harnesses and safety lines in their packs.

A man in his eighties walked around here year-round, Service reminded himself.

After an hour's walk along the cluttered streambed, Mecosta stopped. “I think we gotta climb back out somewhere around here.”

Service looked up at the rock ledges that seemed to stick to the cliff wall like a five-year-old's Legos.

“You got a favorite route?” Service asked, looking up into the rain.

Jake sighed. “Seems like I always take a different one.”

They used their green lights to climb, so they wouldn't be throwing wide, bright beams all over the woods. It was dark.

Sweat was pounding out of Service when they got to the top. “Now where?”

“East, down a bit, south over a ridge, and there we are.”

Which translated into two sweaty, tricky hours, and a small cabin built near a rock shelf looking down on what was the beginning of the Rock River.

They smelled smoke before they got to the cabin, and as they approached, a small bear came hurtling past them. Even in the green beam its fur was deep black and shiny. Both men laughed.

“Santinaw, me and Service came to talk with you,” Mecosta yelled from the front of the cabin.

The old man stepped outside, holding a pipe. His loose, shoulder-length hair was bright purple and lime green, and he was smiling.

“Young Service,” he said with a big smile. “Lucky you got here at all, following Jake. Come in, come in.”

The interior was tight and dry and warm, a small fire going in a wood stove. There were cured furs on the walls, tools, rifles, a honed crosscut saw, a shelf filled with old crocks and bottles, and a rack with fishing rods. The wooden floor was shiny from use, no dust.

Jake and Service put their packs on a small table, opened them, dug out the contents. Coffee, tea bags, brown sugar, snuff, pipe tobacco, matches, aluminum foil, duct tape, smoked whitefish, some cigars. “For you,” Mecosta said.

Santinaw ignored the goods, asked them to sit. “Just about to make some tea,” he said. “I took honey off a bear.”

“We saw a bear on the way here.”

Santinaw smiled. “That's him. The tyke's been hanging around ever since I took his honey, hoping I'll share. I might, but don't be tellin' him. Good to keep bears and women guessing.”

St. Andrew put on a teakettle and sat down with his visitors.

Mecosta touched his own hair, said to the old man, “That the new look in Rock River country?”

“Got a woman over to Eben. Her idea. Said it makes me look like a rock star, whatever that is.”

Mecosta smiled. “How old, twenties?”

Santinaw pursed his lips. “She's a mature woman—thirty at least.”

Mecosta looked at Service and rolled his eyes.

“We need help,” Service said, and told the man the whole story of the murders, the blue boat, the bear, everything.

Santinaw listened without interrupting.

“You think they brought this animal up into the Laughing Whitefish country?” he asked when Service had finished.

“I'm guessing,” Service said. “They sank the boat off the point for a reason. If they were going to transfer it to a truck, they could've done that elsewhere.” In Hancock, for example.

“You say this is a sacred bear?” Santinaw asked.

“Not sacred—rare. And if it's real, maybe the only one of its kind that anybody's seen.”

“That makes it sacred,” the old man said.

“You've been all over the area,” Jake Mecosta said.

Service said, “We're looking for a camp, not sure of the size, but we figure it's isolated, not that easy to get to. Probably not on the lake.”

“Be easier if you knew the owner,” Santinaw said.

“We think the people we're looking for are Asian: Korean or Chinese. They've brought the animal here for a reason, maybe to sell it.”

“I'm not a holy man. I don't see futures,” Santinaw said. “Except in bed with that woman in Eben. I always know what she's going to do.”

“Like dye your hair?”

“I didn't see that one coming,” Santinaw said with a wink. “You know
maw-wi-win a-tik-a-meg.
”

“Weeping whitefish,” Service said.

Santinaw nodded. “Your father taught you well, young Service. We fought together, you know; Guadalcanal, Okinawa, all those places, a long time ago. Too much blood, too much blood.”

Service thought they were about to lose him, but the old man recovered, heard the teakettle whistling, filled cups, added tea bags, let them steep. “
Ja-ga-nash,
the English, could not read a brown face. They came here and found many whitefish in the river, took the fish, did not offer to share, saw some of our people crying and thought they were laughing.”

He paused. “They cried not for the fish.
Match-i manito
lived up the river, above the lake in the canyon
ma-da-gam-ish-ka ni-di.
”

“Where the water moves quickly?” Service said. “I'm a little rusty.
Match-i man-i-to?
”

“I can't speak it at all,” Jake said.

“Yes, fast water, above the lake.
Matchi manito
is the one
ja-ga-nash
called the devil. To us that is
matchi or wa-ni-sid
—unclean.”

“An evil spirit.”

“For Christians,
the
evil one, but our people knew him since time began. He would come to that place above the river to do things that would make our people cry.”

“But there's no place for a camp up that way,” Mecosta said.

“Now,” Santinaw said. “Now.”

He got up, added honey to their tea, dumped two huge spoons of sugar into each, and gave the cups to his guests.

“It is true,” Santinaw said. “
Nin ba-ba-mosse, ond-jish-ka-osse, bi-jiba-osse, qwai-a-kosse, be-dosse, ki-ji-ka, nan-do-dish-kig.
”

Service had to concentrate hard to understand. St. Andrew had said something like, “I walk about, into the wind, slowly and fast, in circles and straight ahead, feeling my way.”

“You walk a lot,” Mecosta said.

Santinaw laughed. “Enough Ind'in talk. My memory is better with tobacco.”

Service opened the outside pocket of his pack, took out two cartons of Marlboro Light 100s in boxes.

Santinaw opened the first pack delicately, tapped a cigarette out of the pack, put a piece of dry spaghetti in the woodstove, used the pasta to light his cigarette.

“You want me to talk
nish-naw-be?
” St. Andrew asked Service.

“You've taxed my vocabulary already.”

“The Iroquois, the
na-do-we,
used to go up above the lake and eat their enemies. Long ago some of my people met the Iroquois down near the lake and killed them. We never saw
na-do-we
again. This isn't in many white history books. My people avoided the above-the-lake because they wanted to let the
manitos
there have their peace. They had seen too much. But there was a time when the whites had a camp up there, a big cave.” He made a shape with his hands.

“A grotto?” Service said.

“Yes, grotto. It goes deep into the side of the canyon and it is dry. Some white trappers lived there for many years and then a sickness came and they were gone.”

“I think we're looking for something a little more recent than a grotto,” Service said.

“I will leave in the morning, walk around, see what is to be seen.”

“I'd like to stay and go with you,” Jake Mecosta said.

“A man is free to choose,” St. Andrew said.

Following his own route, Service was back in his truck in just over one hour.

How the old man had lived so long in such punishing territory was impossible to comprehend.

Service was almost home when the cell phone buzzed. It was Teddy Gates.

“I've been calling all day, but I didn't want to leave this message. Toogood withdrew all his funds from that bank up there.”

Ontonagon. “When?”

“The day after I talked to you.”

“Did he go there himself?”

“No, he was up there earlier this fall and asked for a cashier's check to be picked up by a friend. He even gave them a photograph of the guy.”

Service sighed. Had Trapper Jet been to Ontonagon before Betty Very stumbled on to him? Was this why Toogood had been up there? If so, what was he doing wandering around the Firesteel River?

“Toogood's dead,” he told his old commander. “The body was found yesterday.”

The general cursed. “The check was for just under a half a million smackers.”

Service hung his head, did not think, listened to the rain thumping the cab, mocking him: “You dumb fuck, you dumb fuck.”

He called Betty Very and asked her to make a run to the bank in Ontonagon.