No Man's Dog (26 page)

17

Friendly Dog

W
unney stood staring at the lake, fists buried in the pockets of an old twill tanker jacket. The lake was empty and gray, rimmed in dark green pines on the far shore. A couple of lonely rays shot through the low gray clouds, spotlights searching an empty stage. Where the light struck the water it glowed emerald green and the luminescent patches wandered across the lake toward the shore but never quite reached it before being blotted up by the leaden chop. Wunney’s eyes glistened in the chill breeze.

Wunney turned at the sound of truck tires on the gravel of the parking lot. Mulheisen spotted him immediately: he looked like a merchant seaman. His hair was cut in a brush, as ever—no hat. His face blank, noncommittal. He looked neither comfortable nor ill at ease, just ready for whatever presented itself.

Mulheisen’s heart unexpectedly warmed. He knew this man. Reliable, honest, intelligent, if not overly imaginative, or one might say not incapable of imagination but distrustful of it. A man who knew what he knew, and no bullshit. Mulheisen realized that he missed men like this. Wunney was nothing like the man riding with
him, the subtle Colonel Tucker, to say nothing of the mercurial Joe Service, whom they’d left behind.

They got out and went to meet Wunney, who stopped short when he saw Tucker. When they came up he nodded to Mul and said, with hardly a glance to his boss, “Tucker.” Wunney looked to Mulheisen for enlightenment.

Mulheisen turned to Tucker, “Excuse us for a minute, Colonel.”

“Sure,” Tucker said. He walked away toward the lake, hoisting the collar of his trench coat against the breeze. He trudged through the sand toward an empty wooden jetty.

Wunney looked after him, then he and Mulheisen strolled back toward the old truck. Wunney said, “I thought you and he weren’t communicating.”

“The Colonel dropped by last night.” Mulheisen explained about Joe Service. “Joe stayed behind at the cabin. He’s trying to keep his buddy list down to one cop, I guess. He was planning to take Tucker’s car back to Traverse City, to exchange it for his truck. The midnight visit was a spur of the moment thing, it seems, inspired by Joe with a little input from Smith and Wesson. Anyway, Tucker and I had a little heart-to-heart. About Miss Malachi. He agreed that her case might bear looking into.”

Wunney nodded. “That’s what I thought after you called. I picked up some files. Tucker’s involved. You want to discuss this with him present?”

“Let’s be open,” Mulheisen said. “He seems prepared to let it all come out. Do you mind?”

Wunney shrugged. “Okay.”

“Oh, what about Hook? Anything?”

“I couldn’t get much on short notice,” Wunney said, “but it appears that he’s on the list of al-Qaeda operatives that the FBI and others want. Some kind of specialist in military organization. No pictures of al-Huq, I’m afraid. But the description sounds likely: mid-thirties
or early forties, slim, medium height, dark-complected, usually a mustache. Whatever that’s worth. Homeland Security says he’s important, and they want him. Do you want to discuss it with Tucker?”

“Let’s see how the talk with him goes,” Mulheisen said.

They went back to the beach. Tucker was standing right out on the end of the wooden jetty, hunched and staring across the lake. They started after him, but he turned, saw them, and came back. He appeared refreshed by the changeable weather. He’d been hungover, then talking nervously driving in, but now he was cheerful, calm, and self-possessed.

“I was telling Mul,” he said to Wunney, “that it seemed advisable to take a look at the records of Malachi. It appears we were a little hasty in dismissing her role, her potential impact on case. It’s possible there could be an enlightening element here, in regard to M. P. Luck’s involvement. What do you think, lieutenant?”

“Could be,” Wunney said. “As a matter of fact, I brought some material along about Malachi.” He nodded toward his car, a black Ford parked nearby. “You want to go someplace to discuss it? Or do you want to chat out here?”

Mulheisen said, “There’s a café back on the main street. We can walk, if you’d rather.”

“Yeah,” Wunney said. “It’s good to get out in the fresh air. It’s nice up here. The rain must have cleared the air.”

He went to his car and got out a briefcase, then the three of them walked without comment to the café. They ordered coffee and, after it was served, Wunney opened the case and brought out some files. He looked at Tucker to see if there were any objections, but Tucker seemed unconcerned, so he began.

“This is a report on Malachi, from the FBI. She was hired as an attorney by the Justice Department, as you can see, about ten years ago. Appointed finally a U.S. attorney. Then she was recruited
by the CIA.” He hauled out another file. “Her case officer was Colonel Tucker. She was investigating some so-called patriot groups. Not really CIA business, but . . .” He glanced at Tucker, who didn’t react.

Wunney went on: “One of her objectives was Luck. As it happened, she’d already met Luck. Which was . . . lucky, I guess.” Wunney didn’t smile.

“That was the point of recruiting her,” Tucker said.

“It doesn’t look like you got much from her,” Wunney said, tapping the papers.

“No, it was disappointing. I explained all that to the sergeant,” Tucker said. “I’d say she fell under his thrall. It happens, as you know.”

Wunney nodded. He sipped his coffee, then said, “She inherited some property from her father, downstate. It’s near that town Wards Cove. For some reason, the investigation of the bombing never touched on this.”

“I never heard anything about it, until the bombing,” Tucker said. “When I looked into it I couldn’t see anything relevant. Just an issue with her family, not connected to Luck, really. As she was an undercover operative, the powers that be decided it was just as well to sit on it.”

Wunney looked at Mulheisen, who said, “I’d have thought that any issue in which Luck played any part at all would be relevant in an investigation. No?”

“The Wards Cove property was an old farmstead, just sixty acres,” Tucker said. “The old man had acquired it back in the thirties. Evidently, he bought it from a couple of relatives, presumably as a way of helping them out during the depression. Those folks stayed on the property for several years, but eventually they moved on and he leased it to another farmer, who used it for agricultural purposes—he didn’t live there. The house and other buildings were
allowed to fall into dilapidation. He signed it over to his daughter before he died, in the seventies. It might have been a tax thing, or maybe it provided her with an income, or collateral, but that’s just speculation. I didn’t see any substantive connection to Luck. It seemed like sheer coincidence that a deceased agent’s family was wrangling over her estate.”

“That’s all I have about it,” Wunney said. “Not much of an issue, as you say. But when Constance died, apparently intestate—which is a little odd for a lawyer, don’t you think?—other members of the family sought to recover the property. A couple of cousins, children of the original owners. They claimed that it was supposed to come back to their parents, if they survived Constance’s father, which their mother did, barely. For some reason, they didn’t contest it as long as Constance was alive, but since she had died . . . They felt it belonged in the family, shouldn’t pass to Luck. He naturally dismissed their claim. But somehow they came up with this notion that he’d never actually married Malachi. And so far, he hasn’t provided any evidence of a marriage. He could claim a common-law marriage, I’m told. But the question of the promised reversion might override that anyway.

“Now, we have the bombing. Most of the original papers and documents in the case were destroyed, along with some people. There are copies, of course. Quite a bit of fuss for a piece of not very valuable property.”

“Are you sure it isn’t valuable?” Mulheisen asked.

Wunney shook his head. “Just an old farm, leased out for hay. The state has built a campground nearby. The farm has no great commercial value. It’s not related to that industrial developement in Wards Cove that was, coincidentally, the subject of a hearing that day, which your mother attended. This property is way on the other side of town, out in the country. I suppose, in some unforeseeble future, if Wards Cove continues to grow, it will become more
valuable. But for now its value is still just as more or less ordinary agricultural property.”

Tucker observed, “It didn’t look like a meaningful connection to Luck. It wasn’t enough of a link, and anyway he didn’t bother to come and contest it. Didn’t even send a lawyer. It looked like he had decided to let it go.”

“It could be an issue, of sorts,” Mulheisen mused. “If Luck thought he’d have trouble proving a marriage it might be problematical when it came to other property of Malachi’s.”

“What other property?” the Colonel asked.

“All that property along the Manistee River, before you get to McVey’s cabin, where we were last night,” Mulheisen said. “I noticed it on the plat map when I was looking in Traverse City to see how much and where Luck owned property. Just a coincidence . . . sort of. But it’s a similar situation: Luck’s grandfather seems to have given it to a faithful servant, who built that cabin. Subsequently, the servant left it to McVey. When I talked to Luck, a couple days ago, he displayed some interest in regaining property he felt belonged to his grandfather, presumably that property. There’s also some adjoining property that, for some reason, was in Constance Malachi’s name. A different issue, but it suggests he’s very keen on his property rights. It’s a fundamental part of his antigovernment philosophy, in fact. This might be part of the same problem, in his eyes. I got the impression from McVey that Luck wasn’t likely to recover the cabin property. But if this Wards Cove suit by Malachi’s family goes through, he could also lose that other property.”

“That’s a bit far-fetched,” Tucker said. “A lot of what-ifs.”

Mulheisen shrugged, then gestured at Wunney’s briefcase. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of Malachi’s employment records with the CIA?”

Wunney dug them out. Mulheisen riffled through some official forms until he came to a medical record. He scanned that while
the other two looked on. Finally, he said, “Looks like she had a clean bill of health. No mention of any congenital heart defect. She evidently went through the agency’s training program—that should have revealed any serious condition. Still,” he tossed the forms back, “it’s inconclusive, isn’t it? Pretty hard to demonstrate the absence of something, especially if you don’t have the body. No autopsy, of course. You could ask the family doctor, but it seems he’s deceased. Might not be easy to locate his records, if they still exist. I talked to the doctor who saw her. He’s an old country doctor, I don’t think he’d ever seen her before. He admits that he based his diagnosis on information from the family doctor. I’d say we need the body. Question is, where is it?”

“When she died,” Wunney said, “the doctor up here signed the death certificate and that was that. No record of a funeral, no indication of where she’s buried. Any ideas on that?”

Tucker shrugged. “I was out of the country. When I heard about it, I sent condolences. I assumed it was taken care of in the normal way. It didn’t ring any alarm bells.”

“Where would you guess she’s buried?” Wunney asked Mulheisen.

“Same place you would,” Mulheisen said. “So now, what we need is a search warrant.”

“I can get a warrant,” Tucker spoke up eagerly. “It shouldn’t be a problem, with the authority of the Homeland Security. I’ll have to go back to Detroit, probably even Washington. We’ll need to clear this on the highest level, get the best pathologists, the latest postmortem equipment. They’ve got some terrific techniques now. If there’s a body, they’ll find out how she died.” He sounded enthused.

Mulheisen had visions of a massive operation forming up. Squads of federal marshals, maybe even troops, a mobile lab, helicopters, infrared sensing equipment to locate possible burial sites,
earth-moving equipment. He wondered if there weren’t satellite infrared mapping technologies available.

“I think we could get a warrant from a local judge,” he suggested. “It would save time. There could be an easily identifiable gravesite on the property. Luck might even take us to it.”

“No, no,” Tucker said. “That wouldn’t do. This will have to be a federal operation. We’re talking about the murder of a federal agent! This has, besides, immense security implications. No, I’ll have to get back, right away.”

“I can drive you,” Mulheisen said.

“Thanks, but that’s not necessary,” Tucker said, “besides, it’s too slow.” He glanced at his watch. “My crew should be here,
tout á l’heure.
”

Wunney frowned. “Toodle-loo?”

“Sorry,” Tucker said, smiling. “ASAP. I called them a little bit ago, from the beach, while you boys were chatting. They’ll have a chopper. You’re both welcome to ride back with me, but you have your vehicles, don’t you? Well, I better get down to the beach.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mulheisen and Wunney stood by while the chopper lifted up and whirled away. The Colonel had been explicit: they were not to approach Luck or his property. One thing he hadn’t mentioned was Mulheisen’s employment with the task force. Evidently, that was a dead issue. As for Wunney, he expected him to be back in Detroit, “toodle-loo.” He’d added that with a sly smile.

“Well, I guess I blew that,” Mulheisen said. “I thought I had the man in a corner, but it looks like it was my foot in the crack. And I didn’t even get a chance to ask him about Hook.”

Wunney said, “He kind of blindsided you.”

“The man’s a whiz at stonewalling,” Mulheisen said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, somehow, that body wasn’t found. Well, it’s out of our hands.”

Wunney nodded reluctantly. “What are you going to do now?”

“I guess I’ll return this old beater of a truck, get my car, and go home. I’m out of cigars anyway.”

“Just like that, eh?” Wunney said. “You don’t want to take a look, see if Luck doesn’t have a pretty little shrine out back, with plastic flowers and a headstone?”