“What about it, Chief?”
“It’s ringing a faint bell,” Maven said. “But again, I might have just heard about this guy through other channels.”
“The suicide?”
“His son, the same day his father got arrested. Sixteen years old. Hanged himself in the garage.”
“A hanging,” I said. “Just like our first suicide.”
“On the day of this arrest, it looks like Maven and Razniewski were riding separately. Maven’s log shows activity south of Lansing, Razniewski’s north of Lansing.”
“That sounds promising. How far north?”
“There’s nothing logged north of St. Johns, but there’s a fair amount of time not accounted for. It doesn’t look like Trooper Razniewski was a ticket-writing machine, if you catch my drift.”
“I told you guys,” Maven said, “he hated that part of the job.”
“Okay, so maybe he ended up having some contact with this guy Fraser.”
“We don’t know that yet. We’re still tracking all this down.”
“We’ve got a line on Parizi,” Agent Fleury said as he hung up the phone. “We’ve already got a man heading out to talk to Wiley. The ex-cop, Fraser, is still an unknown.”
“What about Dr. Sizemore?” Long said. “Is he on his way up?”
“He’ll be here in about two hours.”
“Who’s Dr. Sizemore?” I said. Whoever he was, he must have hit the road pretty damned early in the morning to be two hours away by now.
“He’s our psych man in Detroit. He’s going to try hypnotizing Chief Maven to see if we can help him remember any possible connections.”
“You’re actually going to try hypnosis?”
“Why not?”
I looked over at Chief Maven, who was sitting there with his usual unhappy troll face, or rather an even more unhappy version than usual on account of everything that was happening around him. If I knew anything about the chief, I knew that he liked to be in complete control of things, which would probably make him the worst possible subject in the history of hypnosis.
“I know,” she said, apparently understanding exactly what I was thinking. “But we have to try.”
“All I can say is good luck, then.”
“I’m not sure what else we should do right now,” Agent Fleury said. “We’ll wait to hear what happens with those three candidates. When Dr. Sizemore gets here, we’ll need a quiet room with absolutely no interruptions. Alex, we’ll have to ask you to leave at that point. The doctor and Chief Maven will need to be alone.”
“No problem,” I said. “I understand.”
He looked like he was about to say something else to me. He gave Agent Long a quick look and then he turned away. Of course, I knew all too well that they were continuing to break the rules every day, having me here in these meetings. I had done my part and by all rights I should have been debriefed and shown the door. I knew Chief Maven still wanted me here, as strange as that would have seemed to me just a few days ago. Would that be enough? Maybe this was mostly Agent Long’s doing. Either way, I knew it could end at any second.
“Let me look at those files again,” Maven said. “Maybe I’ll remember something on my own, before the stupid goddamned headshrinker gets here.”
This poor Dr. Sizemore, I thought. He has no idea what he’s about to run into.
Many hours later, when the sun was long gone and the temperature had dropped back toward zero, I was sitting in front of the fire at the Glasgow, a Molson in hand, but my only beer of the night. I was thinking about Haggerty again, sitting alone in his cabin, his life in ruins around him. All his tears cried out and nothing left at all.
That’s when the door opened up and the cold air came blasting in. Chief Maven came over and joined me in front of the fire. He didn’t sit down. He kept standing and he was looking into the fire and warming himself.
“How did the hypnotism go?” I said.
“He should have tried to hypnotize a cinder block instead. That might have worked a little better.”
“Some people don’t hypnotize well.”
“Some people have actual working memories, too.”
“This isn’t about your memory, Chief. It was at least ten years ago.”
“I came face-to-face with a killer, McKnight, and I can’t even remember him.”
“Sit down.”
He did, but he left his coat on.
“What happened with your three candidates? Did the agents find out any more information?”
“Yes, they did.”
I waited a beat. But he didn’t continue.
“Chief, what did they find?”
“Parizi’s living in Flint. He’s the guy who got busted with all the stuff in his car. He’s on parole now for another bust, and apparently his parole officer can vouch for his whereabouts.”
“His parole officer doesn’t live with him.”
“No, but he sees him often enough. If you do the math on him getting all the way up here and back, it just doesn’t work.”
“Okay, what about the actor? What was his name?”
“Clyde C. Wiley? Our seventy-two-year-old actor? He’s living in Bad Axe again. I guess he’s been working on a film, except he’s actually the director this time. Which means, apparently, that he’s working almost around the clock. He’s got people around him at all times, and there’s just no way he could have slipped away for more than a few hours at a time.”
“The third man?”
“Fraser, the ex-cop.”
I waited again.
“The ex-cop,” I said. “What happened with him?”
“He did his time. Finally got out of prison about a year ago.”
“Okay, that’s perfect. Then what?”
“Then nothing. He’s dead. He moved to Florida and died in a car accident, about six months ago.”
“They’re sure it was him?”
“Yes.” He still hadn’t looked at me. “They’re sure. He’s in the ground.”
I put my head back and closed my eyes.
“All this running around,” he said, “and it comes to nothing. We’re right back where we started.”
“We’ll keep looking.”
“Yeah. I know.”
I could hear the defeat in his voice. Something I never expected to hear. Of all the things you could say about this man, good or bad, I would never, ever expect him to give up on anything.
“You need a drink,” I said.
Maven didn’t answer me. He kept staring into the fire while outside in the cold dark night the snow began to fall.
A hundred and fifty miles to the west of us, Lieutenant Dean Haggerty sat in his own chair, with no fire to warm him. At the head of his long driveway, through the blanketed trees, a lonely state trooper sat in his idling patrol car with the heat turned up as the falling snow melted on his hood.
None of us knew it at that moment, but there was one other person sitting in another vehicle, either down the road or on another road entirely but within walking distance of the house. Staying awake, staying warm, and waiting for the right time to move.
And we’re rolling…
… Slow approach to the barn. Nice and easy.
… Look at that light. Is that perfect or what?
… The camera loves the snow, you gotta admit.
… Careful now. Don’t rush the shot.
… Close to the wall. Let the camera feel it. That’s right.
… Hello, young Brandon! Mind if I borrow this for a second?
… Boom, just like that. Oh, that’s beautiful. Look at that.
… Bravo, young sir. That’s how you do it. That’s how you own a scene, people.
… Stay on his face. Drink it in. That is so goddamned perfect.
And cut.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I got the call at 4:30 in the morning. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and it was cold enough to see my own breath as I stumbled out of bed. I knew the call would not bring good news. No call at 4:30 in the morning is ever good news.
It was Maven who called me. Lieutenant Haggerty had been killed by a single gunshot, sometime between 3:00 and 4:00. The trooper did not hear the gunshot, although there was some question as to how well he’d hear a gunshot a good one hundred yards away, through snow-covered trees, with his windows shut and the engine running.