Red-eyed, coldly furious, he listened with folded arms as I offered my sympathies on the death of his daughter, then outlined Avery’s offer of compensation. His eyes widened at the figure. Cocking his head, he eyed me curiously.
“Two hundred grand?” he echoed. “For real? Jesus. Do you know how many cords I’d have to drop to make that much?”
I nodded. “My dad was a logger.”
“I know. I worked with your old man years ago, on Moose’s crew, cuttin’ pulpwood in the Comstock. He’s dead now, right? Car crash?”
“Killed by a drunk driver,” I said.
“Tough break. Anybody offer you two hundred thousand for him?”
I didn’t answer.
“Nah, of course not,” he said. “I liked Dolph, he was steady, a good worker. But your old man wasn’t worth no two hundred grand, dead or alive. But that’s what them people figure my Julie’s worth, eh?”
“Mr. Novak—”
“Save it, LaCrosse,” he said, waving me off. “This ain’t on you, I know that. And it sure ain’t on Julie. It’s on me, and I ain’t even got enough put aside to bury her decent. Been working two jobs just to keep her in school, and I got three more kids to think of. I—” He looked away, swallowing hard. “I’ll take the money. Got no choice.”
“You realize if you do, it’s over. You can’t sue later.”
“Never figured to. But off the record? Just two wood-smoke boys sittin’ in a room? Who done this, Dylan? Who killed my girl?”
“It’s an open case, Mr. Novak. I truly can’t comment. But I can tell you this much. Nobody meant Julie harm. It was an accident, or close to it. Hard as it might be, it’s best to accept that, and move on.”
“Is that what you’d do?”
“I don’t know what I’d do, Mr. Novak.”
“My Uncle Matt was killed in Vietnam,” he said absently. “My ma’s only brother. Know what his wife got? Ten thousand. And a flag to lay on his coffin. Ten grand for his life. I’m getting a lot more for Julie. Maybe I should be grateful.”
He waited for a comment. I didn’t have one.
“Hell, maybe you’re right,” he sighed. “There’s no help for a thing like this. No way to set it right. Tell your people I’ll take the deal.”
“They aren’t my people,” I said.
He met my eyes dead on. Cold as the big lakes in January.
“Sure they are,” he said.
I didn’t attend the snow angel’s funeral. I wasn’t sure how the Novaks would react and I didn’t want to intrude.
A week passed, and then another. Christmas was in the air, and as an early present, Vale Junior College won state approval to become a fully accredited, four-year institution.
Good for us.
I began to think Jason Avery had been right. We’d salvaged a positive outcome from a God-awful situation. Won the greatest good for the greatest number.
I thought that right up until the night Derek Patel disappeared.
Ten days after Julie Novak’s funeral, Derek Patel vanished from the campus of Vale Junior College. His folks weren’t overly concerned when he didn’t show for dinner; the boy often stayed after class on lab nights. But when he wasn’t home at ten, his mother called the school.
A security guard answered. The school was locked down, but Derek’s VW Bug was still parked in the lot. The guard found it unlocked, with the driver’s door slightly ajar. Odd, but not necessarily ominous.
Until he noticed Derek’s keys in the snow beside the car.
And the bloodstains on the headrest.
The crime occurred on school grounds so jurisdiction initially fell to the state police. But when my chief informed their post commander the missing kid was part of an open case, they kicked it to us.
Not that it made any difference.
We had nothing. CODIS, the combined DNA index system run by US & Canadian crime labs, identified the blood spattered in the car as belonging to Derek Patel. Violence had obviously been done, but in the swirling snow and the bustle of the busy parking lot, nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary.
A few students mentioned a rust-bucket white pickup truck parked near Derek’s V-dub around the time he vanished, but nobody got a good look at the driver, caught a plate, or could even swear to the make of the truck.
Maybe a Ford. Maybe a Chevy. White. Rusted out around the wheel wells. Big guy behind the wheel. A working stiff, not a student.
Why a working stiff?
“You know. Tractor cap, canvas vest, wild hair? A wood-smoke boy. Cedar savage. You know the type.”
I knew. Which narrowed my list of potential suspects down to the sixty thousand blue-collar folks who didn’t live in Sugar Hill or the condos along the lakeshore strip.
Rusty white pickups? That slimmed our suspect list down to a thousand or so. But I didn’t need a thousand names. I already knew the name.
I questioned Carl Novak, of course. Spoke to him on the porch of his doublewide in Poletown, a Slavic enclave in the smokestack shadows of the Deveraux hardboard plant. Novak didn’t invite me to step in out of the weather, a deliberate breach of etiquette in the north.
His alibi was rock solid, though. Novak could account for every minute of the day Derek Patel disappeared. Witnesses could vouch for his whereabouts the entire time.
Which proved beyond a doubt that he was involved. Nobody keeps total track of a day, unless they expect to answer questions about it. Innocents don’t need alibis.
Still, on the face of it, Novak was as pure as the new fallen snow. Probably felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. He was sure that he’d won, and he wanted me to know it.
And I did. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Dr. Patel and his family were out of their minds with worry. The state police assigned an electronic intercept team to their home to deal with a possible ransom demand.
They tapped their landline home phone and their cells, ready to identify the relay tower as soon as the call came, then triangulate the signal and home in on it.
But there was no call. No ransom demand. No threats.
As the shopping days before Christmas dwindled down to the final few, there was no word at all.
Derek Patel had vanished as though he’d never been.
And when the dreaded phone call finally came, it didn’t ring at the Patels’ home. Or even at my office. It came to Bowie Cadarette, a conservation officer with the DNRE.
A farmer named Pete DeNoux capped a coyote that had been killing piglets. Pete hurried his shot, didn’t nail the rogue cleanly. Gut-shot him, he thought.
That would have been sufficient for some folks. The wound would likely prove fatal. The predator would crawl off into the brush and bleed out. Even if he survived, he’d be minus his taste for bacon.
But DeNoux was a wood-smoke boy, born in the north. Raised on some unwritten rules. If you shoot something, you damn well put it down. You never leave a wounded animal to suffer. Ever. Not even a thieving coyote.
Pete had no trouble following the blood spoor through the snow. Trailed the rogue male back to the farthest corner of his land, near his fence line.
He found what was left of the animal near its den at the base of a toppled pine. The poor bastard had made it home, only to have his own pack turn on him. Maddened by the blood scent, they ripped him to pieces.
The deep-woods wild has countless graces, but mercy isn’t one of them. It’s a human concept, and not all that common with us.
Satisfied, if a bit dismayed, Pete turned to leave, then hesitated. There were a lot of bloody bones around that den. Too many for a rogue coyote. The pack had been working over another carcass. DeNoux took a closer look, expecting to find the remains of his piglets. The bones weren’t from a shoat, though. Nor a deer, nor anything else he recognized.