“Anyone know the weather forecast?”
“Six inches by midnight,” Louis said.
“Well, we damn well better try to preserve something,” Giubralter said sharply. “I need these spots intact. Harrison, go get a broom from the cabin. I want the snow around this shanty carefully removed and the ice checked for evidence all the way to the shore.”
Louis was going to say that there had been two hard snows in the last week. But judging from the look on Gibralter’s face, logic wasn’t going to go very far.
“Want me to go get a fucking tent, too?” Jesse said.
Louis glanced at him, stunned by his sarcasm.
Gibralter glared at Jesse. “Do what I say, Harrison.”
Jesse trudged off across the ice.
“And watch where you step!” Gibralter hollered, standing and brushing the snow from his hands. He turned and peered back in the shanty’s door.
“Was there a card?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes.”
“Where was it?”
“Next to his chair, under the crossword.”
“What?”
“He was working the crossword puzzle, sir, when he was shot.”
Gibralter’s eyes grew distant. “Crossword,” he said softly. He turned away, his gaze wandering out over the lake. Louis watched his profile. Whatever emotion Gibralter was allowing himself to feel he wasn’t going to let anyone else see it.
After a moment, Gibralter turned back to face Louis. “Anything else?” he said brusquely.
Louis hesitated.
“You’ve got something on your mind, Kincaid. What is it?”
“It’s Jesse, sir,” Louis said.
“What about him?”
“When we were searching the cabin, Jess got pretty shaken up. I just think he — ”
“I know Harrison better than you do, Kincaid,” Gibralter interrupted.
Louis nodded. “I know. It’s just that, well, I think he’s scared by all — ”
“Scared?” Gibralter shot back. “He can’t afford to be scared. None of us can right now, Kincaid. There’s a fucking cop killer out there.”
“Chief, with all due respect, I don’t think you can fault a man for being — ”
“Two men, two of my men are dead!” Gibralter yelled. “I want this fucker found now! I don’t care what it takes! If it means Jesse gets down on his hands and knees and examines every fucking inch of this ice, or you climb every fucking pine tree in those woods then you’ll do it, you hear?”
“Yes, sir,” Louis said.
Gibralter turned and started back to shore. He stopped and turned to Louis.
“Find him, Kincaid,” he said.
CHAPTER 10
It was almost eleven. Still no sign of her.
He had stood out on the porch for an hour, waiting for her to emerge from the fog that covered the lake. Finally, he went in. Now he sat slumped on the worn sofa, staring into the dying fire. A yellow legal pad lay on his lap, filled with notes about Pryce and Lovejoy.
He couldn’t get the images out of his head. Fred Lovejoy’s face as he lay frozen in the ice. Pryce’s face as he lay dead on the stairs, captured in the crime-scene photo.
And Jesse face. He couldn’t shake off that look on Jesse’s face after he had run from the cabin. Some cops were lucky enough to go their whole careers without pulling a gun or seeing a corpse, and living in a place like Loon Lake Jesse had probably never seen a dead man before Pryce. No, not just a dead man — a dead cop.
Louis let out a breath, thinking now of Gibralter. No matter how distraught he was about his friend Lovejoy he had been too hard on Jesse. Jesse had a right to be afraid. Hell, they all had a right to be afraid.
He stared vacantly at the television. The sound was off, the images throwing flickering shadows over the walls. He pulled the afghan up around his shoulders but nothing seemed to warm him. The cold came from somewhere inside him. It had started in Lovejoy’s cabin when he had seen that dog. It had built in the shanty when he saw the bloody jagged hole in the ice. And it had finally overtaken him as he stood in the bitter cold and listened to Gibralter’s command.
Find him.
Find what? A monster who had murdered two men. A deviant who might kill again. A phantom who was as ephemeral as the fog. Louis tossed the legal pad aside, his feeling of impotence growing. He didn’t know what he was doing, where to start with this investigation.
Louis reached for his glass of brandy but it was empty. He pushed himself off the sofa to get a refill. As he trudged back from the kitchen, he spotted the box of books in the corner. He stared at it, something pricking his memory.
Setting the glass down, he knelt and started rummaging through the books, pulling out the blue paperback had had been looking for. The title was The Criminal Mind by Dean Franklin.
Picking up his brandy, Louis returned to the sofa and turned the book over to the back cover. Franklin’s penetrating eyes stared back at him, transporting Louis immediately back to the lecture hall at University of Michigan. The elective class was called “Investigative Analysis,” taught by Franklin, a retired FBI agent who believed that killers could be apprehended by understanding their psychological makeup.
Louis had taken it because he couldn’t get the elective he wanted, and he remembered thinking, like all the other students, that it was all hocus-pocus bullshit and that Franklin was a washed-up desk jockey put out to academic pasture. He had only half-listened to the craggy old agent who droned on about the brave new world of “criminal profiling.”
Louis stopped at a chapter called “Inside the Mind of the Monster.” He skim-read it, digesting its point that a profile of a killer could be constructed from evidence and tendencies like an abusive childhood.
Louis closed the book. Shit, so all he had to do was find some poor, mistreated dirtbag who had mutated into a cop killer.
He tossed the book aside, and his eyes drifted to the television screen. The eleven o’clock news was on, a feed from a station down in Lansing. It flashed a photo of Fred Lovejoy in the corner. Louis jumped up to turn up the sound but was too late. Great, Loon Lake had made the big time.
He watched listlessly through a series of other news stories, until a familiar graphic caught his attention. It was a blue-and-gold shield, the badge worn by Detroit police officers. Over it were the words “Drug Bust Gone Bad?”
The talking head blabbed on about cops and then cut to film footage of a tall man in a suit emerging from a building. He was stone-faced but strikingly handsome with reptilian eyes. The type under his face identified him as MARK STEELE, CHIEF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR FOR THE STATE POLICE.
Louis leaned forward. He vaguely remembered hearing about Steele during his days in Ann Arbor. Steele had headed an internal affairs case involving Detroit cops accused of brutalizing an innocent couple during a drug raid. The cops had been suspended; the couple settled out of court. But the episode had made Mark Steele’s career. The combination of his telegenic looks and the anti-police sentiment in Detroit was too potent for the media and politicians to resist. It was no secret the Steele wanted to be state attorney general, and he was paving his path to the capital with the crushed careers of cops.
Louis stared at the man’s flickering face. He suddenly remembered something he had seen in the locker room of the Ann Arbor station. Someone had cut a photo of Steele from the newspaper, smeared it with excrement and hung it on the bulletin board.
Steele’s face disappeared. The talking head moved on to a story about a puppy rescued from a drainpipe.
Louis turned off the television and sank back into the sofa. He reached for the glass of Christian Brothers, raised it to his lips and drained it.
A soft sound behind him made him freeze.