Dead of Winter (4 page)

“In this town, why do you need it?” Louis asked as he followed Jesse Harrison out the door.

“Kincaid, I’ve been unlucky all my life. I was born on September 13, my badge number is 113 and when I joined this department, Gilbralter gave me call number 13. If you were me, what would you carry?”

“A gun,” Louis said.

Jesse opened the glass door with his rear end. “I like a man with a sense of humor, Kincaid. We should get along fine.”

The moment Louis got inside the police cruiser he flipped the heater up to high.

“Living down South thin your blood?” Jesse asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“My car wouldn’t start. I had to walk in.” He wondered how Harrison had found out so quickly about his stint in Mississippi.

“Where you staying, at the Loon Lake Lodge?”

“No, I rented a cabin on the lake.”

“North or south side?”

Louis thought for a moment. “South. Just outside town.”

Jesse swung the car down Main Street. “Good. You don’t want to be staying up north with the Eggers.”

“What?”

“That what I call the rich tourists. You know, East Egg. You never read
The Great Gatsby?”

“Saw the movie.”

“Bad movie, great book.” Jesse’s grin had a touch of superiority. “I read a lot. Anything I can get my hands on. Lots of biographies, history books. I like psychology stuff best. The chief says I’m an autodidact. That means I’m self-taught.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Jesse glanced over at him. “You went to University of Michigan, right?”

Again, Louis wondered how Harrison had found out so much about him so fast. “Yup,” he answered.

“That’s great,” Jesse said softly, nodding his head.

They drove on, Jesse offering a lay of the land. The town of Loon Lake was clustered on the southeastern end of the lake. Jesse explained that it was not hard to get the feel for the town’s layout: the small commercial heart was bordered by the residential houses, perfect little square lots with chain-link fences that split the area into a grid. The city park, with its new baseball diamond, sat on a tract of pine-choked land just north of the residential area.

As Jesse drove north up Highway 44, which circled the lake, the homes grew sparser, giving way to bait shacks, trailers and towering pine trees. Up on the north end, Highway 44 was intersected with dozens of narrow roads. They were the driveways of the tourists’ properties, Louis realized. Most were gated or chained with signs that hinted at the humor and hopes of the people who dwelled within: BLISSFUL ACRES, TWIN PINES, THISTLE DEW, THE LOONEY BIN. Louis strained to get a glimpse beyond the thick trees but could see nothing. Jesse told him that the locals didn’t really mix much with the tourists.

“They look down their noses at us some,” Jesse said. “You know, like we’re a bunch of yahoos.”

Louis nodded.

“But we just smile and take their money,” Jesse went on. “We’re a big tourist destination here. Hell, if it wasn’t for the Eggers, Loon Lake would be just like all the other crappy little dots on the map up here.”

Louis was looking out the window.

“You see that fire station back there?” Jesse said. “Egg money built that place last year. Best in four counties. Bought the lights on the baseball diamond, too.”

It took forty minutes to drive around the lake. As they came back to town, Jesse pulled out a bag of peanuts. Louis politely refused his offer to share. Jesse expertly popped open the shells with one hand, his left hand steady on the wheel.

“Well, I suppose I should fill you in on how things are at our house.”

Louis hid his smile. Jesse had obviously seen to many cop shows.

“Gibralter’s a great chief,” Jesse said. “Runs a clean department and a clean town. What he says goes.”

“I already got that impression. What’s with the quotes?”

“What’d you get, Baudelaire or Churchill?”

“Baudelaire.”

“Chief’s a smart man. Stanford grad, majored in Asian studies.”

“Why’d he become a cop?”

Jesse shrugged. “He told me it was to piss off his old man but I don’t believe it. Chief was a captain in Chicago before this.”

“What the hell is he doing here?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Jesse grinned as he popped a peanut into his mouth. “U of M. Isn’t that supposed to be the Stanford of the East?”

“Harvard of the Midwest.”

“Maybe that’s why he hired you. A meeting of the minds.”

Louis squinted out at the snowy landscape. “So, who’s our shift supervisor?”

“We don’t have shift supervisors.”

“Watch commander?”

“Don’t need one. Chief’s always there late, sometimes till ten or eleven. Anything comes up after that, we call him at home.”

Louis shook his head. “A little thin at the top.”

“Chief likes it that way, lean and mean. Alpha units all the way. Gilbralter says if we needed partners he’ll get us dogs. After the chief thinks you’re broken in you’ll be on your own.”

“What about that thin guy I saw last night? He was wearing a sergeant stripe.”

“Ollie Wickshaw. Yeah, he’s a sergeant but he pulls a shift with the rest of us. He’s okay, a little strange. Into that occult shit. Supervision isn’t his strong suit. If it were up to him he’d rather be with his damn homing pigeons than human beings.”

Jesse swung the cruiser off Main Street and into a residential area.

“Anyone else have rank?” Louis asked.

Jesse shook his head. “There’s only nine guys total on the force, including you now. And we’re all on the street, equal in the eyes of the chief.”

“And God,” Louis added.

“One and the same, my friend.”

They drove on in silence for several blocks. Louis gazed out at the neat bungalows with their snowy yards. The sky was a brilliant blue and cloudless. He sank back into the seat, lulled by the heat.

What an odd department structure, he thought. A dictatorship, union-free to boot. But Gibralter seemed to be well liked by his men. Hell, maybe having one man at the top was better than the twenty layers of gold-plated bullshit most departments had.

The photograph on the wall of Thomas Pryce floated into his mind and he wondered if the man had died in the line of duty. But what could get a cop killed in a place like this? Walking into a bad domestic? That could happen anywhere.

“Thomas Pryce,” Louis said. “How did he die?”

Jesse didn’t look over at him. “He was shot.”

“On duty.”

Jesse’s jaw moved. “No, in his own house. Someone walked up and just blew him away with a shotgun.”

“Jesus,” Louis said. He wanted to know more but he sensed Jesse didn’t want to talk about it. Pryce’s death had been only a few weeks ago and he knew how long it took for a wound to scar over in a small department when a cop was killed. He had been to only one cop funeral, right after he started his fist job in Ann Arbor. He hadn’t known the man but he had felt the current of pain and anger that ran like some subterranean river below the smooth daily workings of the department.

“You get the guy who did it?” Louis asked.

“No,” Jesse said.

“So the case is still open?”

“Technically.”

“Who’s running it?”

“Nobody right now,” Jesse said. “We don’t have an investigator. That was Pryce’s job.”

“He was the investigator?”

Jesse didn’t look at him. “Yeah, Pryce was the investigator. Not that we ever have much to investigate around here.”

Louis thought he heard an edge in Jesse’s voice. They rode slowly down the freshly plowed street for several minutes.

“So who worked the case?” Louis asked.

“Chief gave all of us bits and pieces.”

“You got any suspects?”

“No.”

“Any theories?”

“Chief hasn’t really asked us for our theories. We sit around and speculate sometimes. The other guys think it’s probably a prior bust, some perp Pryce put away.”

“But?” Louis prodded.

“Pryce didn’t have any big cases. Just little shit. Nothing worth getting shot for.”

The dispatcher broke in with a vandalism call. Jesse keyed the mike and answered that they were on their way.

“Christ, I get tired of this Mickey Mouse shit,” he said, swinging the cruiser into a driveway to turn around.

The drove several blocks and stopped in front of a two-story colonial. An old woman was out front, shivering in a pink sweater. As Louis and Jesse got out, she pointed to a life-sized plastic reindeer lying on the snow.

“Look what they did! Just look!” she said.

Louis looked down at the deer. Someone had knocked the head off and spray painted FUCK YOU on it.

“What are you going to do about it?” the woman demanded, her voice shaking as she clutched her sweater around her.

Louis frowned slightly. “Well, ma’am...”

“I demand you do something!”

Louis started to take out his notebook, just to shut the woman up.

Suddenly, Jesse dropped to his knees and laid an ear to the reindeer’s torso. Then he began pumping with both hands on the deer’s chest. After a few seconds, he stopped, sighed heavily and dropped his head.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jaspers, he’s gone,” he said softly.

She glared at Jesse. “That’s not funny, Officer Harrison.”

Louis turned away to hide his smile.

Jesse stood up, brushing the snow from his pants. “Kincaid, do you have rape kit in the car?”

Mrs. Jaspers set her flabby jaw and wagged a finger. “I’m going to report you, young man. For all the good it does.”

“Just having a little fun, Mrs. Jaspers,” Jesse said.

“That reindeer has been in my family for years.”

“Well, maybe the life insurance can help with the burial expenses.”

Mrs. Jaspers crossed her arms and began to describe the hoodlums. Jesse pulled the cap of his pen off with his teeth and started to write in his notebook. Louis glanced up and down the street. Kids usually liked to see the results of their pranks and he suspected the culprits were lurking nearby. But his eye was drawn to the white house at the corner.

It was a pretty house, two stories with green shutters and trimmed evergreens. It was the kind of house you’d expect to see on “Happy Days”. Only this one had yellow crime tape strung on the porch.

“Jess, you need me here?”

“What?” Jesse said, scribbling in his notebook. He spun around. “Where you going?”

Louis crossed the street and stopped at the black mailbox. Across its side it read: THE PRYCES. He heard Jesse come up behind him.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked.

“I’d like to go in,” Louis said.

“What for?”

“I’d just like to see the scene.”

Jesse looked at the house then shrugged. “Go ahead. “We’ve already been through it a hundred times.”

Louis trudged up the snowy walk and stepped over the crime tape onto the porch. The green wood door was intact but a piece of plywood had been nailed over the hole where the glass window once was. There were black smudges on the edges of the door and the porch railing where they had been dusted.

“What happened exactly?” Louis asked Jesse.

“Pryce came downstairs. He was standing behind the door when he was blasted through the window. It was a twelve gauge. Hit him in the chest. We found Pryce’s gun lying on the floor.”

“He pulled his gun?”

“Never fired it.”

“What time?”

“About three-fifteen a.m.”

“You get anything?”

“One boot print. A neighbor heard the shot. Another neighbor thought he saw somebody in the backyard.”

“Not much to go on,” Louis said, his gaze roaming over the door.

Jesse let out a sigh. “There was one other thing.”

Louis turned.

“We found a card next to the body.”

“A Christmas card?”

“No, a playing card, like for poker. It had this weird drawing on the back.”

“Of what?”

“A skull and bones, you know, like a pirate flag or a poison bottle.”

“What number?”

“Huh?”

“The card...a number or a face card?”

“It was an ace.”

“Of what?”

Jesse shifted uneasily. “Spades.”

Louis watched him for a second then looked away. “Think it was symbolic of anything?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t.”

“You’re sure Pryce wasn’t working on something when he was killed?”

“I told you, we went through all the stuff in his desk but there was nothing but a routine burglary of a tourist cabin. Other than that, I’ve got no clue what Pryce was doing.”