It was morning. I was back from breakfast at the Glasgow and trying to do something useful so I wouldn’t drive myself completely crazy. There was a knock on the door. Way the hell back here, at the end of the road. I had no idea who it could be. It wasn’t Vinnie, I knew that much. He had already been by and was on his way to the rez again, and he sure as hell wouldn’t knock on the door, anyway. He’d just come on in.
I opened the door and saw Agent Long standing out there in the freezing cold. She was wrapped up tight in a long woolen coat that wasn’t nearly thick enough. I could tell she was miserable.
“Come on in,” I said. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“We do have winters in Detroit, you know,” she said. “They just don’t stick around until April.”
“Come by the fire,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I was just stopping by. Nice place you got here. Although I wasn’t sure which cabin is yours. The man at the gas station said it was the second one.”
“Well, I own the second cabin and then everything after it,” I said. “I’m living in this one while I finish it.”
“You built this yourself?”
“I’m kinda rebuilding it.” I didn’t feel like getting into that story, but I wasn’t sure where else to go. “Why, um… I mean, to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I wanted to let you know,” she said, finally taking her coat off. There was a warm light coming from the woodstove and it made her look good, I had to admit. For a man who had lost so much, it was a strange thing for me now, this unimaginable fact of feeling attracted to another woman. But she had this slow, careful way of smiling, like she didn’t want to give too much of herself away. And she had those eyes.
“They finally tracked down Donna Krimer’s husband,” she said. “He was hiding out at a friend’s house in Green Bay. An off-duty cop spotted him in a bar late last night.”
“And?”
“And he says he didn’t do it. He says he came home and found two dead bodies on the floor, panicked, and took off.”
“Does anybody believe him?”
“Well, normally a story like that told by a man who’s been arrested six times before wouldn’t exactly hold up. But in this case…”
I waited for her to get to the punch line. Instead she took a slow lap around the place, looking it over.
“Tell me,” she said finally, “do you really believe this is all one person we’re talking about? All these deaths?”
“I think I have to. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. Besides that…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been getting the same feeling, every time I talk to somebody or every time I go see where somebody died. If you’re really a fellow cop at heart, I don’t think I have to explain that.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“So what’s next?” I said.
“I understand you and the chief talked to Lieutenant Haggerty the other night. Right after we did.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“He specifically asked to talk to us,” I said. “He wasn’t getting the answers he wanted from you and your partner.”
“We told him everything we knew. We asked him to do the same.”
“Well, maybe he just wanted to hear it from us in person. It was hard enough for him to lose his daughter like that. I can’t imagine having somebody come around two weeks later and tell me she might have been murdered instead.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I don’t think it even matters anymore. Although, actually, I think by the time we left he was anxious to meet this guy. Whoever he is.”
“I’ve been on the job for twelve years,” she said. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this.”
“I think I’ve run into some pretty evil people myself. Even more now that I live way the hell up here, if you can believe it. But yeah, this is a whole different kind of animal we’re talking about. It’s a shame we can’t put our heads together and catch him.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the other reason I came by. I was hoping we could sort of start over here. I think we all got off on the wrong foot.”
“You think ‘we’ did, huh? Let me ask you something. I’ve seen I don’t know how many partners over the years. When I was down in Detroit and even up here. FBI, DEA, cops in other towns, even state guys, and every time it’s the same story. One partner’s a human being, and the other one’s, well… let’s say the other one’s usually a more colorful character. Every single time.”
She couldn’t help smiling a little bit. “Agent Fleury’s not that bad, believe me.”
“I’ve seen him in action a few times by now, remember? Seriously, do they actually pair you up that way? Separate you into two groups, one from column A, one from column B. Or do you both start out human and then one partner has to go to the dark side?”
“Well, why don’t you ask him yourself? He’ll be at the state post today, going over some old records with Chief Maven. If you’d like to be a part of that…”
“What’s the catch?”
“There isn’t one. You’ve helped uncover something important. We need to investigate it as thoroughly as we can, as quickly as we can. So we need your help.”
“Your partner’s really on board with this?”
“We both had a talk with our boss this morning. Believe me, Agent Fleury’s officially on board.”
“This I gotta see,” I said. “Just tell me what time to be there.”
“Noon should be fine.”
“Okay, Janet. I’ll see you there.”
She stopped in the middle of putting on her coat. “When we’re all done with this, you can use my first name,” she said. “For right now, I’m still Agent Long to you.”
I put up my hands in surrender. “I’ll see you at noon, Agent Long.”
She said good-bye and went back out into the cold. An hour later, I was still thinking about her.
It felt strange to be doing this in the state police post. Maven’s office was just down the street, after all. If the wind chill was above zero, we all could have gotten up and walked over there. Instead we were in this too-small interview room at the Soo post, with Maven on one side of the table, and Agent Fleury on the other. It was the only interview room in the building, so I couldn’t imagine what the state guys must have thought of this imposition. From the looks I saw walking in, we weren’t exactly welcome guests.
No, who am I kidding? It wasn’t about having strangers taking over their room at all. By now, the word must have gotten around. If they were like any other cops in the world, they looked out for each other, to the very end. I could only imagine how it must have felt that day, with no official bulletin yet but this vague story floating around about ex-troopers and ex-troopers’ kids. Making it twice as bad if you had kids of your own. On top of that, having the FBI taking over the case-because sure, it all started with a U.S. marshal, which made it automatic, and one of the murders happened to take place over state lines. But if this story was true, it was their family.
That’s why the place felt so cold, and I tried not to take it personally. I followed Agent Long past the front desk, back to the room in question. Maven looked up as we walked in. He was never exactly a magazine model on a good day. Today, he badly needed a shave and about ten hours of sleep.
“Come on in,” Agent Fleury said to us. “We were just about to get started.”
“How are you, Chief?” I said.
He looked up at me and shrugged.
When we were all sitting down, Agent Fleury waited approximately a tenth of a second and then dove right in. He had a tall stack of loose paper in front of him, but for now he pushed it aside. The man looked freshly scrubbed and caffeinated-in other words, the exact polar opposite of Chief Maven.