Pyykkonen tugged Service’s sleeve, led him to the bathroom, urged him inside. The smell from the door told him what was waiting.
Dozens of empty yellow plastic ice bags were on the floor, and more were piled in the corner by a closet. There was water on the floor and muddy footprints.
The shower unit was a modular model, the type builders and do-it-yourselfers could pop into place and attach to the plumbing. Pyykkonen pulled open the shower door. There was a plastic board across the inside of the door, up about three feet. She nodded for him to look.
The body inside was naked, curled in the fetal position inside plastic. Bags of ice were piled around it. Some of them had melted. The body’s skin was blue.
“Don’t inhale too deeply,” Pyykkonen said. She slipped a small jar of Vicks from her pocket, dabbed some under her nostrils, offered the jar to him.
Service tried to memorize what he was seeing. The body was male, Asian. Eyes closed, no overt signs of violence. Pyykkonen had put on rubber gloves and was pushing down on his skin. She said, “Long past rigor.”
He didn’t ask what all the kids were doing in the house with a body that had been dead long before tonight. In due course, they would find out. His job was to stand clear and let the cops do their work. He remembered a case in downstate Newaygo County where some teens had found the body of an old man in a trailer and charged friends admission to see the corpse. The U.P. was not exclusive domain to antisocial and macabre behaviors. He’d thought then it was a once-in-a-lifetime case. It was disturbing that he couldn’t remember where his keys were from one minute to the next, but he could recall the details of years-old cases he’d had nothing to do with. Gus called it “cop mop”—a cop’s brain absorbing all sorts of dirty water and letting it float around inside the brain for years.
“I’m gonna get out of your way,” he told Pyykkonen.
He went outside and lit up. There was a dark pickup near the porch.
It had two stickers in the back window: I PLAY HOOKIE FOR NOOKIE, and THUGS DRINK BLOOD. He rarely worried about people with such stickers. It was the ones without decals he worried about: The bad ones didn’t have to advertise.
Sheriff Macofome was fifteen minutes behind the others and stopped like he wanted to confront Service, who just pointed through the door. “She’s in there.”
EMS arrived along with a van with the same crime lab techs he’d worked with in Hancock when all this started. The same medical examiner arrived after the techs.
Flashbulbs popped inside. At one point Pyykkonen came outside, took a cigarette, smoked silently, and went back inside.
Adults began arriving in vehicles. Parents, Service assumed. Cops brought out kids, handed them over to the adults, told them to go to the station in Houghton. Just after eleven, Pyykkonen came out, nodded for him to come in.
A boy and a girl were sitting at a table. They both looked shaken.
“Daran Cencek and Sally Grice,” Pyykkonen whispered. “He’s a junior at Houghton High School and she’s an eighth-grader.”
“You know them?” he said. The girl was well developed, and looked at least twenty. Her mascara and eye makeup had run and left her with the mask of a raccoon. The boy had acne, his hair spiked and dyed purple and green. He had a gold post in his left nostril, another in his right eyebrow. If he spoke, Service expected he’d hear another one in his tongue, clicking against his teeth.
She nodded. “Daran claims he was buying dope from a Tech student here all summer. He brought the girl here because she wanted to fish for salmon.”
“Salmon here?” This was news to him.
“No,” she said. “He just told her that. Thought they’d do some weed and beer, get it on. The night he brought her there was an aluminum boat tied up to the dock and a bigger boat, a twenty-five- or thirty-footer with a cabin. Daran went up to the house and bought a couple of dime bags just like he says he always did. The college kid came out afterward, took the aluminum boat out to the bigger boat, hitched the aluminum to it, and headed south down the lake.”
“The guy in the shower?”
“I’m getting to that. Daran and Sally smoked and fished and drank, then came up to the house. It was locked, but Daran jimmied the lock and got in. They used the bed. The bathroom was empty. Afterward he took the girl home and came back alone. He wanted to snag a salmon.”
“But there aren’t any salmon.”
“He was high. He claims he was flinging a spider and it got hung up by the buoy. It felt like it was draped over the line, and he didn’t want to bury the hook because he had only the one spider with him. So he swam out to retrieve it, but the spider wasn’t hung on the line. It was way over the line and hooked down below. He swam down to pull it loose and felt something. He panicked when he realized what it was. He went back to get a couple of friends and the three of them pulled the body up. It was in plastic and weighted in about ten feet of water. They took the body inside and put it in the shower until they could decide what to do. Then they started worrying about the cops blaming them. One of them got the bright idea that this was an opportunity. They went out and bought ice, put the barrier inside the shower door, and packed the body. They’ve been re-icing it a couple of times a day since then. The next day at school Daran told a couple of kids he had a dead body. He charged them each thirty-two bucks a look and provided beer. Daran fancies himself a real entrepreneur.”