Killing a Cold One (16 page)

Service had trouble processing what he had heard. “What's this thing look like?”

“Like any person. It's a mental disorder.”

“Not hairy, like a dog or wolf.”

“We're not talking about a werewolf, though the French concept of
loup garou
included werewolves
and
windigos, stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

“How do people detect it?”

“Usually they don't until its too late and the killing begins. In some places there are elders who know how to identify symptoms, but they're dying out over time. It's possible to intervene early and stop it from progressing, but this rarely happens. Medical science can treat the disorder with a number of psychoactive agents, but usually the windigo ends up dead before any westernized medicos can get involved. The degree of fear this condition creates is difficult for a white person to appreciate.”

“Happens in this state?” Service said. “I've never heard any such thing.”

“Rare condition anywhere, never in this state, so far as I know. Mostly in Canada. I've heard of someone who's a true expert on the condition. Name is Lupo, Grant Lupo, a professor of aboriginal ethnology at Michigan Tech. I can find out how to contact him, ask if he'll get in touch with you and help. He seems to know just about everything about this disorder from what I remember. Problem is that Lupo's got a bad dose of egomania. Late thirties, Hollywood looks; women cling to him like barnacles.”

“How would one know if there's a problem?”

“Tribals won't say much to whites, so they'll keep it close in their own community. But you'll start to see amulets, manitu pouches—things to ward off the evil spirit.”

“Pouches, like little leather bags?”

“Very common,” the priest said. “If they start to become widespread, you can interpret it that the people think a windigo is operating. The bags will have small red figures on them, like stick figures. This represents the evil—the beast.”

Service gave the priest his business card and thanked him.

“You know Father Clem Varhola?” the priest asked.

“May have heard the name; might even have met him once. Why?”

“No reason. Just priestly curiosity,” Father Eyes said in an icy tone. “You think you might have this problem up your way?”

“Got something around L'Anse, just not sure what yet.”

“Father Clement Varhola,” the priest said, rolling his eyes. “Over in Assinins, north of Baraga.”

“Someone we should talk to?” Service asked.

“Only if you have to.”

 

•••

 

A young Hispanic woman had replaced the man with dreadlocks at Tonia's house. She let them in without a challenge.

Tonia died just before noon the next day, with Noonan holding her hand and Service in a threadbare wingback chair faded from burgundy to skin tone. She was cremated the next morning. No funeral, no memorial service, no next of kin. Noonan placed obituaries in the two Detroit daily papers. “Tonia Sorrowhorse passed away peacefully. She did everything in life with grace.”

Service decided that the extremely strange retired detective was one of the rarest of creatures: one who took friendship as a sacred pledge.

23

Thursday, November 13

BLOOD CREEK CAMPGROUND, BARAGA COUNTY

Travel was beginning to wear on Service mentally and physically. So much time in trucks, always moving; he had lower back pain and felt perpetually velocitized. As they headed north that morning, Friday telephoned.

“I've been thinking about our victims' feet,” she said. “Why does he leave the heads and hands, but take some feet? It makes no sense. As I think about it, the victims so far aren't necessarily the type who'd be fingerprinted—you know, ex–special military, cops, or ex-cons—so the perp may feel safe in leaving hands and heads. Last night I was thinking about Shigun and that girl in Mack City, and it hit me: Hospitals up here take footprints of newborns and give them to the families as souvenirs. They have no official standing, or legal value as ID, but there are prints of every kid born in U.P. hospitals. Could be a back door in for us. Also, those hearts at Nepo's? They were porcine, which I don't get. Where are you?”

“Headed north to talk to Denninger. We had a meeting with a priest in Mount Clemens, and he told us about some stuff that may or may not relate.”

“Care to share?”

“I don't know enough to share yet. This Father Bill Eyes is going to put us in touch with a Tech professor named Lupo who might be able to help us. Denninger called, and she wants to meet out at the Ridge, something relating to Kelly Johnstone.”

“She's surfaced?”

“Don't know. Dani just said she wants us over there, so we'll collect Tree and Limpy and head over that way.”

“Meaning Johnstone's still AWOL?”

“Apparently.”

“She that important?”

“Can't say she's not; we do know that if something is going on anywhere in the Ridge community, Johnstone will know what it is.”

“We'll talk later,” Friday said, and broke off.

 

•••

 

Blood Creek flowed into the Sturgeon River about two miles east of where the Sturgeon curled into Houghton County. The campground had been closed years before, too little use, too remote, too small. There were eight campsites on a steep rocky precipice, with a drop of at least one hundred feet straight down.

It was just turning dark when they all pulled into the campground entrance road and parked.

Denninger had not been able to find Johnstone, but she had found deerskin pouches on every door of every house and trailer she had checked in the Ridge community, and while the Natives refused to talk, much less explain, a citizen named Rodney Folsom called her to let her know he had heard from a friend that “untoward things were occurring out at the Blood Creek Campground.” She pulled Service aside, told him all of this quickly as she studied the man sitting in her truck: blond, balding, beady-eyed, breathing through the mouth, squinty, with lizard-like brown eyes. She referred to him as Rod the Odd.

One look told Service her description seemed to fit. Mr. Folsom lived downstate, was chief financial officer for a multimillion-dollar trash company headquartered in Grand Rapids. The man had no specifics to share on the campground warning, but Denninger had persuaded him to come along. Service could see the man was both irritated and intimidated and trying to balance the two feelings.

Service heard him tell Dani, “I'm a CFO.”

She said, “And I'm a CO. We share two letters in our titles, so what's your point?”

The man grimaced. “I did my duty as a good citizen, notified the authorities.”

“You gave us no details. Do CFOs and accountants accept reports and balance sheets with no details or specifics?”

“Of course not,” Rod the Odd said.

“There you go,” Denninger said with a huge grin.

Service marveled at her skill in handling the man, who was obviously accustomed to giving orders, not taking them, especially from women.

“I asked you along so you can see what you reported. You
are
curious, right?”

“Am I in any danger?” the man demanded to know.

“I don't know. Are you?”

“You know how Indians are,” he said.

“No, why don't you tell me about that,” she said.

“Vindictive, a menace to civilized society, worse than radical Islamists.”

“You lost me there, sir. Nobody will hurt you when you're with us.”

“But you won't always be
with
me,” he complained.

“True,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Why didn't I think of that?”

They parked the trucks at the mouth of the one-time campground and went in on foot: Service, Noonan, Treebone, Allerdyce, Denninger, and Folsom.

“Where's your sarge?” Service asked Denninger as they walked.

“Sitting on Johnstone's trailer.”

“You think she's coming back soon?”

“I got an anonymous call that she's gone hinkybird and is on the move constantly.”

“Including her own hacienda?”

“That was the word.”

“You know what those pouches are?” he asked her.

“No,” Denninger said.

A trail led from the campground to the cliff. Service could smell the dregs of a fire. A pit was built not six feet from the edge of site number four, and dry deadwood had been stacked near the fire. Several peeled aspen poles had been placed in the fire circle, leaning into each other, tepee-like. A deerskin pouch was attached to each pole, and each pouch had a red stick figure on it. There were no footprints in evidence, but there were dark stains on the rocks around the pit. Noonan knelt, wet a finger, and swiped a rock, coming up with a red fingertip he lit with his flashlight. “The fuck is this shit?” he said.

Service nudged Rod the Odd, who jumped. “Ideas?”

“All I heard was there were some weird things out here.”

“Heard from whom?”

“I don't recall. Hell, everybody's heard the dogman stuff. It's all over Baraga and L'Anse. You hear it everywhere—something about chopped-up dead bodies and such.”

“Ojibwes up here don't go in for this stuff,” Denninger said. “Most of them are Catholics and Methodists.”

Noonan sniggered. “Means shit all. Santeros in southwest Detroit practice a form of voodoo combines African gods and R.C. saints. With religion, anything is possible.”

Service said, “Let's separate, spread out, and sweep the area.”

It was Treebone who made the discovery: a red wooden figure, five feet tall and sticklike, eye-popping red, with an eerily lifelike face. It had been flayed, singed, and impaled on a white pine stripped of its branches. A black cloth was attached to the figure's head, and snapped in a steady northwest breeze that smelled like snow was in the offing.

“Like a giant party favor,” Treebone said.

Service stood close to Allerdyce. “Seen anything like this before?”

“No, I ain't.”

“What does it mean?” a very shaky Rod the Odd asked in a quavering voice.

Denninger shone her flashlight around the damp ground. It had sleeted and rained that morning. “Just our prints. How did this thing get here?”

“Maybe it flew,” Noonan offered. “Had a Santero priest one time tell me he could fly and shape-shift into other creatures.”

“You believed him?” Tree asked.

“Fuck no. I was pinching him for capping his old lady and I told him, ‘You gon' fly, motherfucker, this be the time.' He never moved.”

Willie Celt called on the 800. “I've got Kelly Johnstone in protective custody. Says she wants to talk to you out there at the campground.”

“Bring her,” Service said, and wondered why.

 

•••

 

Celt parked by the other trucks and led the woman to them. She was uncuffed, walking slowly and not talking. They met at the red effigy and Denninger lit it with her flashlight. “You've sure been gone a lot, Chairman,” she said.

Suddenly Kelly Johnstone grabbed the effigy, ran straight to the precipice, and disappeared over the top into the night. No sound, no warning; just gone and over. Service and Allerdyce were behind her and heard only a dull splat as something struck the water below.

“Check it out,” Noonan said. “She can't fly neither.”

Willie Celt said, “We'll play hell recovering her body. Bad current, whirlpools, some deep-ass holes filled with sweepers and crap, snags everywhere down there.”

“There an easy way down?” Service asked.

“None I know of,” Celt said.

“Lot of heavity here,” Allerdyce said to Service, who had no idea what he meant.

Service looked at Sergeant Celt. “Did you tell her we were at the campground?”

“Nope. She seemed to know that.”

The sky began to spit ice pellets.

24

Friday, November 14

L'ANSE, BARAGA COUNTY

Service and crew took two rooms at the Hilltop Motel after the fiasco at the campground. County deputies put personnel there overnight, but no serious body-recovery effort could begin until they would have morning light, and perhaps the sleet and snow had let up.

A cell phone buzzing under Service's pillow woke him up. “What?”

“Cale here; sorry to call so early, but I wanted to catch you.”

“You have. Who the hell is this?”

“Cale Pilkington, biologist.”

“Sorry, Cale. We had some weird times last night. What have you got?”

“Nancy Krelle is a paleobiologist and anthropologist with the Oregon lab. She geeked out when she got the tooth we sent. She's seeking confirmation from a colleague at UCLA who works La Brea.”

“The tar pits?”

“In the vernacular. Technically, the substance is asphaltum.”

“Cale,
focus.
Please.”

“Sorry. Dr. Krelle is four nines certain your canine tooth is a specimen of a very large
Canis dirus.
”

“English, Cale.”

“Four nines means ninety nine point nine nine, or almost one hundred percent probability the tooth belongs to a dire wolf.”

“Like the Grateful Dead tune?”

“No, for real. They died out about nine thousand years ago.”

“All but this one?” Service said. “How the hell does a nine-thousand-year-old tooth end up in a moose's thigh in 2008?”

“That is
the
question, isn't it,” Pilkington said.

Service said. “I can't think. I need coffee. I'll call you back in thirty minutes, tops.” He dressed and walked across the shared parking lot to the Hilltop Restaurant, which was just opening for breakfast, ordered a cup of black coffee to go, took it outside, lit a cigarette by the front entrance, and called the biologist back.

“Okay, I'm afoot now. Talk. You're not suggesting an extinct nine-­thousand-year-old animal is alive and among us.”

“
I'm
not, but Dr. Krelle says there's a chance. She says the crypto community has been talking like this was a likelihood based on reports of moose kills in Saskatchewan, all of them in the northern river watershed, big-time moose country.”

“Creep-toe community?”

“Crypto, as in cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals—you know, legends and shit, like Bigfoot and so forth.”

“That's real?”

“The study, sure. Even though some of the practitioners are lulucakers and nutsawillies, there are plenty of legit people interested in the subject.”

“I don't believe in Easter Bunnies,” Service said.

Pilkington said, “This Easter Bunny is about one and a half to two times the size of our gray wolves. Squatter build, wider, huge teeth and jaws. It lived exclusively off large game. When the large prey began to die off, the wolves died, too.”

“There you go,” Service said.

“Listen, please. What I'm going to say is speculative and highly theoretical, but that doesn't automatically render it inaccurate or impossible, then or now. Follow me?”

“I'm not sure. Keep going.”

“The dire wolves were here at the end of the Pleistocene epoch—the Ice Age, if you will.”

“Gimme a time estimate.”

“Started twelve thousand years back, give or take, but we've recovered remains, and there are
a lot
of dire wolf remains. Suggests the wolves were still around three thousand years after that, give or take.”

“People around then, too?”

“Heavens, yes. The first
Homo sapiens
dates to about two hundred thousand years back, and some of the most recent fieldwork has put man in the New World
possibly
as early as eighteen thousand years ago. Now understand: The dire wolves were only in this part of the world. They're not exactly wolves. More like a separate species, like a coyote or a hyena or something. The common time for man here is eleven thousand years ago, which could put dire wolves and mankind side by side in North and South America, and we're pretty sure that man is responsible for the extinction of a great number of large mammals.”

“Dire wolves included?”

“We don't really know. What you need to know is that there is anecdotal evidence of a dire wolf killed by Florida farmers in the 1920s, but no evidence or photographs, just several questionable newspaper accounts. There's some possibility that was
Canis rufus,
the red wolf, but we don't know. The reds were still being reported around the same time. And people still claim to see them, but it's not substantiated and they're considered extinct in Florida. Add to this the Inuit talk about
Waheela,
a giant white wolf, which some think is a relict
Canis dirus,
and the Sioux stories of
Shunka Warakin,
which translates roughly as ‘one who carries off dogs.' Gray wolves, we all know, will kill any and almost all canid competition, so this Siouxan creature could certainly be a wolf. The thing is, if there's a relict subpopulation contemporary to the present, it's small and rarely encountered by man.”

“Here, in the U.P.?”

“Well, we have some fine, isolated areas that theoretically could hold such animals if there was adequate prey. There are undocumented reports of three U.P. trappers bumping heads with a giant white wolf in northern Iron County in 1918. All of this is hearsay, but hearsay often has some basis in reality, even if we can't immediately find supporting evidence.”

Service's brain was spinning. “Cale,
whoa.
What the heck is your take-home here?”

“I'm sorry, Grady. I'm so damn excited I'm about to wet my pants. What I'm saying is that we may have a dire wolf in the McCormick Wilderness. It may be indigenous, or it may be just passing through; we can't know that yet.”

“You base all of this on one goddamn tooth?”

“A tooth
you
pulled out of moose remains. The moose didn't fall on that tooth. The measurement from the tooth to the other fang puncture tells us this is probably not a gray wolf, as does the horrific damage to the remains. We don't have anything that can do that to a moose . . . at least, nothing we know of.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do, Cale? I don't even know what to think,” Service said.

“Neither do I, Grady. I mean, is
endangered
in the same regulatory status as
once-thought-extinct?
I'm clueless on the implications of what we're supposed to do here. The only thing I'm sure of is that we can't say anything until we're certain. If we let this leak, every headhunting yahoo in the country will be up here trying to bag this thing. We don't need that sort of crap in conjunction with the deer-season opening. We already have enough wolves being shot by allegedly frightened deer hunters.”

“The governor wants me to find this thing and kill it,” Service said.

Silence from Pilkington. Then, “
Man . . .
Why?”

“What if it's killing people?”

“Listen, we think these things lived off carrion, not fresh meat they killed.”

“You theorize. You don't know for certain, Cale.”

“True.”

“What if you and your scientific colleagues are wrong?”

The biologist gulped loudly and hung up.

Grady Service dumped his coffee dregs and lit another cigarette.

Dogman, dogshit, windigo, dire wolf,
Waheela, Shunka Warakin,
five dead (counting Nepo), and now Kelly Johnstone—three people reported missing, including the teacher and her two kids. The governor wants me to hunt down the dogman. Given all this, what does that really mean? Am I under orders to kill an animal that might be the last of its kind on Earth? Is there even a link between the killings and this animal? No satisfactory answers. Even fewer satisfactory questions.

Service felt like getting back into bed and covering his head with a pillow. “This gets shittier and shittier,” he said out loud and headed back to the motel to get the others moving.