“What happened to the boyfriend?”
“The media never got the real story, but his wife was given a copy of the tape and she divorced him. He didn’t get reelected.” She looked over at Service. “I make no apologies. We were consenting adults and sometimes you just do what you do. It didn’t affect the investigation.”
“Except to interrupt your focus.” She didn’t like the comment and he decided to back off. “They get the guy who killed the kid?”
She nodded. “I got a tip from a snitch after I got canned. I passed it on and they found the guy. He had some of the girl’s clothes in his apartment. He was a student taking a semester off and working at a store where the kid went to buy pop.”
“And, of course, you got the credit,” he said sarcastically.
“It wasn’t about credit, Service. It was about taking down a dirtbag. Then I moved up here with the boyfriend and I made another bad decision and he lit out. Macofome was a lieutenant when we first hooked up.”
“When he made sheriff, you got promoted.”
“I know it looks fishy,” she said, “but I was also the most qualified. I just hoped the thing would end differently.”
“Where are we going?” he asked, noticing that they were driving south.
“We’re short of people—like all cop shops these days. I have homicide, but we all have to do vake fills. There’s a complaint from a woman who lives just inside the city limits. The city could handle it, but I don’t want to be in the office. The woman claims there’s been a lot of kids in and out of a house near her. The old suspicious activity call.”
“School liaison gets you the short straw.”
“You’ve got it.” She looked over at him. “You’re probably wondering about your friend, Shark. He’s a great guy,” she said, “but he’s also totally consumed by his fishing and stuff. It is what it is,” she said. “Am I being clear?”
Service wondered if Shark could handle it. His friend tended to go all out with anything he got interested in.
“Not my business,” he said.
“Bull,” she said. “You penises always stick together,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“That’s a kinky metaphor,” he said.
The complainant was in her late forties, severely thin, well dressed and pleasant in an oily way.
“I don’t know if it’s anything, but traffic down the road at the yellow house has been pretty unusual,” she explained. “Nights mostly. Kids. They don’t raise the dickens or nothing. They’re just there.”
“Do you have kids?” Pyykkonen asked.
“Grown up, gone,” the woman said, with a tone suggesting she was relieved that they weren’t around for this.
“You recognize any of the kids?”
The woman shook her head.
Service was skeptical.
Pyykkonen made notes, didn’t ask a lot of questions. The woman had obviously gotten herself worked up, but she was organized and gave them some license plate numbers, and times of activity—a lot more detail than normally came with complaints. Whatever the house’s draw, it had been underway for just over two weeks.
“Why didn’t you call us earlier?” Pyykkonen asked.
“Din’t want to make trouble, hey. I thought it would go on for a weekend and that would be that. You know how kids are. But it din’t stop, so I started thinking something’s just not so right at da yellow house, hey.”
“Who lives there?”
“Don’t know. It’s a rental. The owner’s Maggie Soper.”
“From Painesdale?” Pyykkonen asked.
“Ya, youse know her?”
Pyykkonen nodded and glanced at Service, who nodded to let her know he’d also picked up on the name.
“You don’t know the renter?”
“No. I just got back from Duluth couple weeks ago. My sister’s sick. Before that I was in Montana all summer, with my son and ’is wife. The place was empty when I left.”
They thanked the woman and drove by the house. It sat on Portage Lake, just west of where Torch Bay angled sharply. Further south, just above Chassel, the shipping canal cut southeast through to Keeweenaw Bay and the open waters of Lake Superior. Ore boats had once used the canal to steam east to the Soo locks so they could deliver their cargoes to lower Great Lakes ports.
The house was a small yellow cottage with an addition that didn’t blend well. There was green mildew on the white shutters and roof. An aluminum dock was out front in the water and an orange plastic buoy beyond the dock. The lawn was torn up by tire marks. Several beer cans flashed in the grass in the early afternoon sun.