Chasing a Blond Moon(102)
“The APA won’t fight bail,” Service said over Ficorelli’s head.
“I’ll post bond when I get to it,” the wife said. “Do him good to think about what he’s done.”
Wayno nodded and closed the door.
Service went into a McDonald’s and got a cup of coffee. It was a long drive to Watersmeet and too late to call the office. Fern would be pissed.
24
It would take too long to get to Watersmeet through Michigan. Service headed due west out of Marinette, and forty miles out swung north on W-32 just east of the Menominee Indian Reservation. From the turn it was pretty much a straight eighty-mile shot through the Potawatomie Indian Reservation and Nicolet National Forest to Iron River, and then another forty miles to Watersmeet, a total of about one hundred and sixty miles, all on two lanes in the darkness under a canopy of stars and a gray sliver of moon.
The road north passed through few villages and no towns of any size, the undulating terrain marked by rolling hills and occasional hogback ridges, both sides of the two-lane road covered with dense forests that grew down to within a few feet of the shoulders and threatened like a constrictor to cross and pinch the road closed. The air was cooling, inviting nightly freezes that would begin to sink a layer of permafrost into the ground for the snow blanket that would follow. Deer were still in their summer habitats, grouped by gender, bucks with bucks and does with fawns. Soon, when the weather turned cold enough, bucks’ chests would swell with hormonal surges and they would separate, each male alone to begin hunting does to mate with. Tonight the deer were interested only in food, and were gathered in openings and along the roads, taking the easy grass, their eyes reflecting a witless green in his headlights.
After so many years in the north, Service was completely attuned to the rhythms and whims of the seasons, and he drove at night with two minds operating independently—one of them working actively and silently to assess the hazards and threats along the roads, the other buried deeply in the case that had propelled him all across the Upper Peninsula, east to west and north to south—a case that in many respects was not one case at all.
Harry Pung was the catalyst, and many things had happened since his death. But despite any glaringly clear connections, it felt to him that somehow it was all part of a whole. Siquin Soong might be part of it. That remained to be seen. Trapper Jet might be part of it. Dowdy Kitella’s problems, too. The date-rape bozo in Wisconsin, and now Colliver and Fahrenheit—each element leading in a certain direction and creating a path, but so far few of the paths had crossed. Even so, the tangents made it all very interesting.
In his twenty-one years in the DNR he had never considered investigation either art or science. It was, if anything, more like tracking, where you got on a spoor and followed it to the end, wherever it led. Such things never proceeded in a straight line. It was like waking up in a cedar swamp in a soggy floodplain, the trees thick and close together, whipped, bent and broken by wind, genetics and ice. And underfoot, tenuous ground, quicksand and sink holes, and you knew you had to keep walking to get out, and even when you had some vague sense of where out might be, there was no direct path possible. You advanced ten yards only to retreat the same distance or more in order to get a better angle around barriers. And in the process of finding safer footing and watching your step, you lost total awareness of where here might be—only that you wanted to get out, and that you could do it only one step at a time, forward, backward, sideways, doing whatever worked, while steeling yourself with perseverance and stubbornness until you finally emerged from darkness into light. In an investigation it was always the investigator who started out lost. The details of the case were irrelevant and served only as stepping stones to lead you out.
At the State Police Academy in East Lansing there had been a course in investigation techniques taught by Calvin Shall, then in his sixties and retired but still teaching. Cal Shall had taken a shine to Service and pulled him aside one day to tell him, “Ignore the theories and formulae. An investigation is about two things: luck and determination, and it is determination that makes your luck. When you deal with criminals you will ultimately find that greed is the engine that drives all crime. The shrinks will try to split hairs, but greed is the nexus. People want what they don’t have or more of what they do. The feds will tell you to follow the money, but money can be hidden. I say follow the greed. It will always be there in plain view.”
Following greed, Cal Shall’s creed, had always worked for him, and in this case greed appeared to be the one constant in all the events that had transpired. Despite his efforts he felt no closer to solving anything, and as he drove north he felt increasingly irritable. He was still stumbling in the treacherous footing of the floodplain, still lost, the distance from the light not clear at all.