Kate Nordquist was a young officer who had trained with Moody and been recently assigned to Schoolcraft County with him. She was Nantz’s friend.
“Witnesses?” he asked.
“None. Gutpile called 911 and the city, county, and Troops are investigating. He followed Kate to the hospital. Where are you?”
“With Candi. We’re waiting for the sun to go down to pay a call on a parolee.”
“Be careful.”
“Count on it. See you later tonight. Tell Gutpile I’ll give him a call, and say hi to Vince for me.”
“I almost forgot,” she said. “You also had a call from Sheena Grinda.”
“What’s with her?”
“Said she found a bear with cable wrapped around its neck. She wants to talk to you.”
“Dead?”
“No, alive, but she sounds uptight. Tell Candi no poaching my man.”
Elza “Sheena” Grinda was an extremely self-contained officer. It was unusual for her to call anyone and he had not gotten around to contacting her. A bear with cable around its neck?
“How’s Nantz?” McCants asked as he eased back beside her.
“She says no poaching her man,” Service said.
“I rest my case,” the younger officer said. “Married in her mind. Got her claim all staked out.”
Service waited calmly. If Bryce Verse came out of the trailer, they would be ready for him. Experience had taught him to respect fear and wear it like an outer skin attuned to threats and acting like an early warning system. Just about everything he’d done in his life entailed various degrees of physical risk—hockey, the USMC, state police, DNR—but physical risk alone rarely activated his early warning system. Physical risk was more a matter of applying a skill to the challenge. If any fear persisted for him, it was the fear of not acting, rather than trepidation over results. In this way, it was like regret—which for him grew only out of things not done.
McCants slid over to him. “We’ve already got the stolen veek,” she said. “If we want to get Verse with weapons in possession, we need to take him inside. He could claim he didn’t know they were there. I wish I could look in his truck.”
“Still too light,” Service said.
McCants got to her knees. “I’m going to look around, see if there are other two-tracks out this way. If there’s only the one road and he’s not spooked, he’ll come out the way he came in.”
It didn’t matter how many roads there were, Service told himself. They were not going to let Verse get to the blue truck. Service watched her move away in a low crawl. The first time he’d worked with her they had stopped three snaggers. One of them had swung his rod at her and buried a one-ounce lead silver spider deep in her cheek. She had not hesitated or backed off, but tackled the man and took him down with blood running down her face. She still had a small scar.
While McCants scouted, he sat so he could keep an eye on the trailer and thought about recent events, starting with Walter. Why had Bathsheba not told him about their son? He told himself if he had made an attempt to maintain even a superficial relationship with his ex-wife, he might have found out about him sooner. Something not done: regret.
He cautioned himself to keep his mind on the trailer and what might be inside, but his mind kept wandering back to other things.
Ralph Scaffidi was perplexing: wholly harmless on a superficial level, but there was always something deeper and more sinister just below the surface. Still, he felt attracted to the man. Was Magic Wan part of something real, a lead worth following? This whole bear thing was a lot of nothing so far. Hairs in a car, galls mixed with poisoned figs, some game-playing among guides, a couple of empty traps, old Trapper Jet up to something . . . None of it amounted to anything he could really work with, which was not unusual, but lack of hard evidence and direction always irritated him. And now there was possibly a bear-napper with access to drugs, meaning a link to a vet? And Grinda had a bear with a steel cable around its neck. Were any of these things connected? Was the peculiar informer right—were these symptoms of an international bear parts ring moving in?
McCants returned right at last light. “We’ve got a good one,” she said, her voice tight, words clipped. “Windows blacked out, crawled under the trailer, coffee filters stained red, dozens of empty boxes of Nyquil, evidence of dry ice, a cylinder of liquid ammonia, and a box of empty twenty-pound propane tanks. Behind the trailer, empty case of lithium batteries,” she said, finally stopping to catch her breath. “You know what this means?” she asked him.
“Drugs,” he said.