“Sorry, Grady. I’m outta that shit now and happy to be out. Not fair to ask me that. Cecilia’s happy I’m out and she wouldn’t like me crawling back in.”
Cecilia was his wife, a beautiful redhead who was a fine singer. She had never been a big supporter of his CO work.
“You into something heavy?” Southard asked.
“Just trying to help a Wisconsin warden close a case.” Heavy was a relative concept with too many interpretations.
“Huh,” Ironhead said. “Most of the cheesies were a good lot in my day. I guess I could maybe have a chat with my man. What’s the harm, eh? It’s all in the past now.”
“Thanks, Steve.”
“Hey, it true you’ve got a son?”
“Looks that way.” He gave Southard one of his cards.
Southard studied it and shook his head. “Cell phones, e-mail—you got more bloody numbers than a banker. Technology,” he added with obvious distaste. “I’ll call you soon.”
“Give my best to Cecilia,” Service said.
“She’s at the church tonight—choir practice.”
He called Pyykkonen from Palmer and got an immediate pick-up.
“Uncanny timing,” she said. “I think we’ve got the blue boat.”
“No shit?”
“A couple of wading salmon guys found it hung up off Laughing Fish Point,” she said. “Looks like she was scuttled further out, but broke loose, drifted in, got hung on a boulder fifty feet off the beach in six feet of water. Ten feet north and it would have drifted east into the big lake. Fate, I guess, hitting that rock. I guess the guys who found it didn’t think much about it, you know, with Superior spitting stuff up every now and then. Locals take what they can use, leave the rest to rot. Turns out one of the men has a son who’s coast guard in the Soo. He came home for a day of fishing with his dad, saw the boat out on the point, and remembered the bulletin. I got the call yesterday, asked the Alger County marine safety officer to pull it out and put it in the vehicle impoundment in town, but Alger kicked the job over to Marquette. I got a call an hour ago. It’s in Marquette now. No registration number. Maybe somebody obliterated it to make sure it couldn’t be identified.”
“I’m near Negaunee. I can get over there and take a look.”
“I was gonna drive over in the morning,” she said.
“Let me take a look and give you a shout.”
“I’ll be at Shark’s tonight,” she said. “He’s a hoot, you know.”
Hoot wasn’t the word he’d select to describe his friend.
The Marquette County marine safety officer was Guy Bartoletti. He had been a longtime road patrol officer and a sergeant who retained his stripes when he was shifted into the current job in preparation for his retirement. Service had known him a long time, as had his father before him.
The vehicle impoundment was nearly in the middle of downtown Marquette, inside a double chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
Bartoletti said, “This should be Alger’s, but their sheriff called in a favor from my boss, so here we are.”
The wooden craft had a blue hull and a gaping hole in the bottom.
“Looks like it hit something,” Service said.
“More likely an insurance job,” Bartoletti said with a smile. He started to reach for the hull, but Service blocked his arm, gave him rubber gloves.
“You’re a hotshot detective now, eh?” He put on the gloves and grabbed the broken edge. “See, when you hit something, most of the damage goes inward. Not all of it, ’cause the boat rocks and so forth, but mostly, see? This one’s all outward. I’m guessing a sledge. Somebody wanted this thing on the bottom.”
Service looked at the damage, saw the marks, agreed with the assessment.
“Twenty-six-foot Miltey Commander,” Bartoletti said. “Built in 1995. Not many of them around.”
“Miltey Boat Company,” Service said. “Chassell.”
“That’s it.”
“There’s no registration.”
“Don’t matter,” Bartoletti said. “You need a sign on a whitetail’s ass says it’s a deer?”
Bartoletti stepped into the hole in the hull and flicked on his flashlight. “See there? Joe Miltey burns the serial number into the hull in six or eight places so nobody can mistake his work. New, this rig went for nearly twentyfive thou. Twin Chrysler inboards, wide beam, high gunwales—she’d plane good on the lake and go like a scalded dog in a pretty good sea.”
Service wrote down the serial number, checking two of them to be sure they were the same. “I want to get inside,” he added.