“Does Ficorelli know him?”
Masonetsky nodded. “Everybody knows him. He’s the county’s animal control guy. You busted me up good,” Rafe said.
“We’ll call it even on that score,” Service said, his face aching.
Ficorelli was outside, sticking close to Pyykkonen. Service looked at him and shook his head. “Jubal Charter supplies rabbits and cats to Gage.”
“Hah,” Ficorelli said. “They hire Wisconsin wardens up there in Michigan?”
“It happens. Tell your mom thanks for her hospitality.”
On the drive back to Madison, Nantz said, “You’d recommend he be hired?”
“He’s unorthodox, but he gets the job done.”
Service was surprised to see Nantz’s Cessna on the tarmac. “I thought the senator sent her plane?”
“Sent her pilot. Actually she didn’t have a choice. I was coming whether she approved or not. I wanted to bring Walter and I couldn’t justify burning her fuel.”
Service sat in the right seat while Nantz did her preflight check and started engines. Walter sat in the jump seat just behind and between them. “You never called me back,” Service said.
“Her pace is a killer,” Nantz said. “We were on the go constantly and we had some mechanical problems in Saginaw. Grady, the polls show her moving ahead. I think she’ll win.”
“You never called me back,” he repeated.
“She came as soon as she heard,” Walter said. “Cut her some slack.”
“Put a sock in it,” Service said over his shoulder. “This is between us.”
“What he said,” Nantz said, asking for taxi instructions.
As they turned over Lake Michigan and began to climb, Nantz looked over at him. “That girl who was burned? She didn’t make it. Candi says they’re gonna petition to try the other kid as an adult.”
“Fourteen,” Service said, shaking his head. It sometimes seemed that God’s only interest in mankind was body count. “Are we dropping the kid in Houghton?” he asked with a nod toward Walter.
“Duh, I’m coming home for a couple of days,” Walter said. “Remember?”
Nantz looked at Service. “The captain says you will take a couple of pass days. He also says he has the information you wanted, but not to think about any work until you’ve been off a couple of days.”
“What about you?” Service asked.
“Lori said we can take as long as we need. Have you heard what Sam is going to do when he leaves office?”
Die, Service thought. “No.”
“Lori says that there’s some inside talk that he may move to Washington and take a cabinet job.”
“His reward from the Republicans for destroying the state?”
She shook her head and called, “Level at angels fourteen.”
Service looked at her. “Why do they call it angels? If you put the plane a thousand feet into the ground, do they call smashed at devils one or something?”
“Is he always like this?” Walter asked.
“Sometimes he’s worse,” Nantz said, adjusting the throttles.
13
Service’s home office was still a work in progress and consisted mostly of an old oak door across two sawhorses, a rickety desk chair, a battered metal file cabinet, and two huge wall maps. Nantz was constantly threatening to bring in a builder to construct a proper office, but he preferred the basement as it was and asked her to leave it alone. So far she had. One map was of the Mosquito Wilderness, the other of the Upper Peninsula. Since putting up the U.P. map the previous summer, it had hung untouched. By contrast, he was constantly making new notations on the Mosquito chart. For Service the Mosquito remained alive in all ways, though his notations had tapered off since Candi McCants had taken responsibility for the area.
He got out a box of red pushpins, lit a cigarette, and stood in front of the U.P. map, which was mounted on a floor-to-ceiling cork wall. He started inserting pins, one for each event that could be connected—at least in his mind. The pins stretched from McMillan in the east, to Iron and Gogebic Counties in the west, a distance of almost one hundred and eighty miles. He inserted pins for Griff Stinson, Betty Very and She-Guy Zuiderveen, Sheena Grinda, Trapper Jet, Dowdy Kitella, and finally, a red pin at the location of Pung’s body on the Portage Canal. He wrote off the events in Trenary with Bryce Verse and the girls as separate and unrelated.
He balanced an unlit cigarette in his mouth, put his feet up, and studied the pattern. Griff lost a bear—confirmed. Bearclaw probably lost a bear. Sheena found a bear caught in steel cable. There was ursine hair in Pung’s Saturn and more hair resembling it in the Brown camp at Lac La Belle in the Keeweenaw. Trapper Jet’s presence on Betty Very’s turf remained unexplained, and his grousing about Kitella probably was no more than a gripe. There was no pattern to be seen. The only pattern he had to work with was ursine hair in the car in Hancock and hair and a steel cage at Pung’s rented camp at Lac La Belle. Had a bear been kept at the camp and moved to a boat in Hancock? This was the only way to read it at this point, and the main thing he wanted to focus on.