“I’ve got something I want to run by you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve been thinking about those photographs we saw today.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I know this is going to sound crazy. It already sounds crazy in my head and it’s going to sound twice as crazy when I say it out loud, but I’m gonna say it anyway, all right?”
He inched up his chair a notch and leaned forward.
“Those photographs,” I said. “You saw them, too. I mean, I know you’ve seen crime scenes before, but was there a little something, I don’t know, extra in those photographs?”
“Extra what?”
“I don’t know, it’s just like there was something a little bit too… what’s the word… a little too composed about them.”
“Composed. I’m sorry, I still don’t follow you.”
“When I run those pictures through my mind, which I can’t stop doing, it feels like each one of those scenes was somehow… I don’t know, like they were thought out in advance. You know what I mean? With everything in the perfect position. Even the bodies…”
“Go on.”
“Go back in your mind and picture every one of those bodies, especially the suicides. The so-called suicides. Whatever. Haggerty’s daughter in her bed, with the tank. Steele’s son in the snow. And more than anything, my God, Raz’s son hanging from that tree? The way he was looking out at the lake? Perfectly framed by those trees?”
“You’re saying, what… that he wanted each crime scene to look a certain way? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Think about it, Chief. If you were going to fake somebody’s suicide, why would you take him all the way down there to Misery Bay? You could hang him almost anywhere, couldn’t you? Why there?”
He didn’t say anything. I could tell he was thinking hard about it. He was running all the photos back in his mind, trying to see the same thing I was.
“I told you it was crazy,” I said, “but you were there. You stood right in that same spot. What did you feel?”
“At Misery Bay?”
“Yes. What did you feel when you stood there?”
“I felt like…”
“What? Tell me.”
“I felt like I was seeing something out of a bad dream.”
I waited for him to complete the thought.
“Or…” he said. “A movie.”
“Exactly. That’s the same feeling I had.”
“Now, wait a minute,” he said. “Just because one of those three men we were looking at yesterday happens to be an actor…”
“And a filmmaker.”
“And a filmmaker. But come on, you’re not suggesting this guy is… what, filming these people?”
“No, that would be the sickest thing ever,” I said. “But if you’re the kind of person who’s always thinking about putting things together in just the right way… so it all looks right… I mean, God, okay, I told you this was going to sound crazy.”
“You heard what they said about this guy. He’s been in the studio, or wherever they do it, working on a film. Downstate, right? Doesn’t he live in Bad Axe?”
“So they said.”
“They interviewed him. They eliminated him as a suspect.”
“Again, so they said. That’s what the agents told us. But they’re getting that information secondhand. Which means you and I are getting it thirdhand.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“When I was a cop,” I said, “I always had this belief. Whether it was strictly true or not, I don’t know, but I always felt that if I could confront somebody face-to-face, I would know if they were lying.”
“You mean if you look them in the eye.”
“Yes. You ask them the question, right to their face. ‘Were you there? Did you do this?’”
“I’ve always felt the same way,” Maven said. “I think any good cop does.”
“It’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to do that here, Chief. That’s all it would take. Go see this Clyde C. Wiley guy. Ask him point blank.”
“We’ve already been down this road before,” Maven said. “Interfering with an active investigation. We can’t do that again.”
“ You can’t do it,” I said, standing up. “But guess what? I’m pretty sure I can.”
And we’re rolling…
… All right, you’re gonna have to trust me on this one.
… After that last scene, we’re gonna play this one soft.
… It’ll be amazing, don’t worry. You’ll love the contrast. Just watch.
… That’s right. Just like that. Nice and quiet.
… Like you’re never going to wake up.
… Perfect. I love this.
… Good night, Dina. Sleep tight.
And cut.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I drove out of Paradise early the next morning. It looked like there was snow on the way again, but it didn’t start falling until I was almost out of the Upper Peninsula. As I climbed the steady incline to the Mackinac Bridge, I looked down at the St. Ignace post, right there on the shoreline.
It was all open highway as I went down the middle of the Lower Peninsula’s mitten. As I got near Indian River, I knew that there was some exact point in the road where Clyde C. Wiley had been arrested all those years ago. Some lonely, empty spot where he finally ran out of gas or gave up, or hell, maybe they even “pitted” him. PIT standing for pursuit immobilization technique, where you clip a vehicle from behind, just enough to make it lose control but not so much that you cause a major rollover. I’d never gotten the chance to do it myself, but then vehicle pursuits in the middle of a crowded city are a whole different animal.
Wherever the spot was where that arrest was made, I sped right by it and kept going, due south, through Gaylord and Grayling, three and a half hours of billboards and snow and just about nothing else until I finally got to Bay City. That’s when I cut east and it was just another hour until I saw the sign welcoming me to Bad Axe, right in the middle of the Lower Peninsula’s thumb. So that told me one thing straightaway. If my crazy gut feeling was right and Clyde C. Wiley was somehow involved in this case, it wouldn’t take him more than four and a half hours or so to be right in the heart of the Upper Peninsula, where everything had happened.
I called Chief Maven on my cell phone as soon as I hit Bad Axe. He had promised me he’d find out everything he could about Wiley, without tipping our hand. God knows what the FBI agents would say if they found out I was down here on my own, snooping around.
“I listened in while Long and Fleury rehashed the interviews with the new guys on the team,” Maven told me. “They talked about all three candidates, of course, but this is what I found out about Wiley. He’s got a film company in Bad Axe called Grindstone Productions. They’ve been working on this movie, I guess it’s like Wiley’s life story or something, which is why he’s supposedly been way too busy every day to even leave the studio. He’s seventy-two years old, remember, so I don’t know.”
“Did you find out where this place is? What is it, Grindstone Productions?”
“Yeah, I looked it up on the Internet. There was a news story about this guy coming back to his hometown and buying the Bad Axe Theater, which is right there in the center of town, on Huron Avenue. That’s the mailing address for his film company, although I’ve got to believe they have other buildings if they’re actually shooting movies.”
“I got it, Chief. I’ll check out the theater and ask around if I have to.”
“Keep a low profile, eh? We don’t need this getting back up here or we’ll have our asses in a sling.”
“Now that you’ve slept on it, do you still think this is worth doing?”
There was a long silence on the line. I started to wonder if I had lost him, but then he finally spoke.
“I still agree with what you said, McKnight. I got the same feeling you did looking at those photos. I wish I was down there to ask him in person. That’s all we’re going to do, right?”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
“Well, be careful, just in case it turns into more than that.”
I told him I’d call him back later when I had any news. Then I ended the call and started looking for the Bad Axe Theater. It was a small city much like any other in Michigan, laid out flat with streets that ran perfectly north-south and east-west. There was snow on the ground but a hell of a lot less than in Paradise. Amazing how much different things can look in this state when you drive a little bit south. I knew that it would be cold when I finally got out of the truck, but it wouldn’t be painful. It wouldn’t be a physical trial with every breath.