“I’d like that,” she said enthusiastically. “But I need to sleep on all this.”
“No problem,” he said.
“You,” she said, laughing again. “I love you, Service.”
“Even though I’m a busted-up old man?”
“Who said that?”
“Joke,” he said. That asshole, Treebone.
She said, “I’ll call you in the morning, honey.”
Simon del Olmo called as Service was getting into bed.
“Sorry I had to leave the truck,” Simon said. “Something came up.”
“Thanks for dropping it.”
“Did you hear about Dowdy Kitella?”
“She-Guy called me about it.”
“He’s in custody in the Iron River hospital.”
“For getting his ass kicked?”
“No. Elza and I found steel cable in his truck. It matches the stuff she found. We also found a chemical the arson people said was the accelerant at Trapper Jet’s place. We’re headed out to his place with a search writ.”
Simon and Grinda working together? That was interesting. “Have you asked him about Trapper Jet yet?”
“Not yet. The docs won’t let us in. His head got bent pretty bad. We’ll make the formal arrest tomorrow. You want to be here?”
“No, just let me know how it goes down.”
“Si, jeffe.”
“Good work, Simon.”
“Better to be lucky than good. An Iron County cop noticed the cable near where they found Kitella and called us.”
Us? Service lay his head on the pillow and couldn’t sleep. There was too much luck and too damn many coincidences in this case.
The phone buzzed at 4 a.m. It was Nantz.
“Good morning, love. I’m going to talk to the senator for you this morning.”
“No concerns?”
“Some, but if Soong has nothing to hide, there should be no concerns about talking to you.”
“Thanks, Mar.”
“I’ll call you later today, darlin’.”
“You’re the best,” he said.
She laughed. “Damn right.”
18
The first thing Service did when he got to his office was to check e-mail. There was a note from Stretch Boyd of the department’s PR group saying that DNR Director Eino Tenni had prohibited the use of outside electronic libraries and that he was sorry he couldn’t help with the LexisNexis search.
“Great,” Service muttered. He had traded for nothing.
The captain strolled by and looked in at him. “Are you familiar with Captain Richard Sorgavenko?”
“Should I be?” Service countered.
“Air Force Academy of 1963. Graduated at the top of his pilot training class and ended up in F-105s at Khorat in Thailand in 1966. He flew one hundred missions and volunteered for another tour. When he began to approach the end of his second hundred, he volunteered again and was turned down. So he began to destroy paperwork after every sortie and the planners lost track of where he was on his tour. He continued like this until he was shot down and killed on his two hundred and eighteenth sortie. What was his mistake?”
Service stared at his captain. “Pushed his luck, tried to do too much?”
The captain stared at his detective. “He got shot down,” the captain said, walking away.
Service faced a quandary about what to do next. He finally decided he needed to get something started on Irvin “Magic” Wan. He had had the option of calling in a detective from the downstate Wildlife Resources Protection Unit; instead, he had called Treebone, who was supposed to have had a P.I. contact him. So far, not a damn word.
Service hung up and leaned back in his chair. He hated begging and depending on others.
The captain wandered into the office, sat down across from him, looked like he was going to say something, stood up and walked out without speaking.
He snatched up the phone as soon as it rang. “DNR, Service.”
“Good morning. I’m Eugenie Cukanaw. I talked to Tree and I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. I was wrapping up a case.”
Her voice was solid, neither high nor low. “Thanks for calling,” he said.
“You must be a good friend to get Treebone to pull in a chit. I’m doing this gratis.”
“We go back.” Service wondered if gratis was why she was so long in getting back to him.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“There’s an Asian guy who lives in Grand Rapids. He owns some clubs, said to be in the drug and skin biz. I know one club is in Kalamazoo and that’s all I know.”
“Magic Wan,” she said. “We know Irvin pretty well. What is it you need?”
The question caused him to pause. What exactly did he want? “We are led to believe he works for a man called Mao Chan Dung and that Wan owns some sort of hunting camp in the U.P. What can you find out about his relationship to and dealings with Dung, and where’s the hunting camp?”