Shadow of the Wolf Tree (38 page)

66

Iron River, Iron County

THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2006

When Grady Service walked into the post ten minutes after Friday, she handed him a slip of paper, which said, “Gabby at Forensics.”

He punched in her number. “Service here.”

“Got it.”

“First batch?”

“
Everything.
I know a prof at Northern with a lab. He did the assays on the last batch, and I'll send the evidence out to our regular vendor too, but we can trust this quickie alternative.”

“And?”

“Gold traces in all the samples you provided. But the last one is purest of all. You want the reports by e-mail or snail?”

“Both. Can someone drop hard copies at the DNR Regional Office?”

“Thy will be done,” Gabby said. “Anything else you need yesterday?”

“Won't know till tomorrow,” he countered.

“Tomorrow's yesterday is today,” she said.

“Thanks a lot, Gabby. Peace be upon you,' she said, hanging up.

Service looked at Friday. “Someone mined those various outcrops for veins of almost pure gold.”

“Damn,” she said. “Noli?”

“Not sure.” He took a pad of paper and began sketching a wolf tree.

“What's the weekend look like?” Friday asked.

Thought I'd crash a party. Interested?”

“Seriously?”

67

Skanee Road, Baraga County

SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 2006

They met in the parking lot outside the L'Anse post. Sergeant Sulla Kakabeeke in civvies, her shift over, was standing beside her personal Ford 150 truck.

“Pretty sudden, his retirement decision,” Service said to her.

“I guess,” Kakabeeke said.

“License plate numbers?” he said.

She sighed. “I can smell where this is going, Detective. Pinky's one of us, and more to the point, one of
you.
He just wants to retire quietly.”

“With a big party, while bodies are still on autopsy tables?”

Kakabeeke looked sad. “You know he couldn't have had anything to do with any of that Art Lake mess.”

“Define
mess,
” Service said. “Personally, I'm having a helluva time with all this.”

“You know what I mean. It's not in him to do anything illegal. For crying out loud, he didn't
create
the Art Lake deal; he inherited it from his predecessors.”

“Admirably defended,” Service said. “But Pinky still needs to answer some questions.'

“He'll get a lawyer to protect his retirement.”

“I don't care if he calls in the pope.”

“This is really hard for me,” the Troop sergeant said. “I care about Pinky.”

“You think it's equally reciprocated?”

She looked off in the distance and chewed her lip. Her right hand was lightly tapping her hip.

“The IRS is about to be all over this thing,” Service told her. “Their ability to dig surpasses all of us put together. Money leaves a trail. Why the retirement party at your place and not his?”

“He prefers to keep his Hermansville place private.”

“And you've never found that odd?”

She nodded.

“He give a reason?”

“Yeah—he's got things people don't need to see.”

“Such as?”

“He inherited a lot of money,” she said, a catch in her voice, and the hint of a deep frown etching her face.

“The IRS will sort that out pretty fast. You don't believe the inheritance story?”

She shook her head solemnly. “Vegas a couple of times a year, Jamaica every winter; we've lived a pretty good life together since we met.”

“On his inheritance?”

Kakabeeke opened her hands, begging understanding. “You can't live in cop mode every second of your life.”

“He sent out invites for the party.”

“Did it all himself.”

“To whom?”

“All county law enforcement and some downstate cops.”

“I never got one.”

Kakabeeke stared at him. “Seriously?”

“See you out there,” he said, and went to his truck, leaving her to her own thoughts.

Friday looked at him. “What was that all about?”

“Tell you later.”

• • •

Pinky Barbeaux looked at Grady Service and shook his head. “Didn't expect to see youse today,” the retiring sheriff said.

“You want to take a walk, and talk to me?”

“Think I'd rather get swarmed by pine beetles.”

“This has to be done,” Service said.

They walked through a grove of second-growth Norway pines behind Kakabeeke's house. “You want me to read the Miranda card?” Service asked.

“That won't be necessary,” Barbeaux said.

Grady Service took the laminated card out of his shirt pocket. “I'm becoming a strict constructionist on legal procedures,” Service said. Then he read the retired DNR lieutenant his rights.

Barbeaux said, “Let me say this about those bodies and all that—I don't know nothing about any of it. And I want my lawyer.”

“Alyssa Mears,” Service said.

“I know her, of course.”

“Biblically?”

“You've got a filthy mind.”

“You trade a lot of e-mails with former department pals?”

“We're a family and a community. You know that.”

“Sometimes it's eyes-only internal stuff.”

“No comment.”

“Like the wolf tree drawing.”

Barbeaux looked away.

“Computer geeks,” Service said. “They can find stuff in hard drives, who sent what, who got what, like that. No idea how, but they can do it with all sorts of tricks.”

“I got nothing to hide,” Barbeaux said.

“That's good. You think Ginny Czuk can say the same?”

Intuition had fueled his math. It had been Czuk with the sheriff when Pinky told him his warrant had run his course. Why her and not Mears, if Czuk was just an assistant? No, Czuk was something more, and she was pulling Pinky's strings. Czuk had to be the one who gave the wolf tree instructions to William Satago, the drawing, which originated with Pinky Barbeaux. There had to be more to this for Pinky than new patrol vehicles and departmental equipment.
Did Kakabeeke know, or just suspect he was on the take?

Barbeaux's paste-on gregarious facade had begun to crack.

“Czuk hired a Keweenaw Bay kid to set up the wolf tree. You gave her the drawing.”

“Why do you assume it was me?”

“Plain as a moose in a fridge. You didn't deny the allegation. You tried to find out what I based it on. Shame on you, Pinky. This is basic Interviewing Suspects 101 stuff. We've got two bodies, one of them a federal agent. All federal hell is about to be visited on Baragastan. The IRS is going to peel you and Van Dalen like cheap onions.”

“Okay, maybe I give da girl da wolf tree thing.”

“Why?”

“Was interested.”

“You banging her?”

“I want my lawyer.”

“Kakabeeke seems nice, but I don't think she'll ignore this, and when she hears you were banging that young woman, she'll suddenly recover some of her lost memories and suspicions,” said Service. “Talk to me, Pinky. At this point there may be room for some dealing. Once the feds swoop in, forget it.”

Barbeaux sighed. “I give her the sketch. But I swear it was just because she's interested. She hikes a lot and didn't want to stumble into a trap.”

How'd she even know about such a thing? The Ontonagon event had never been made public.
“Before that memo came out, Station Twenty circulated some photos of a wolf trap found in Ontonagon County.”

“Yeah, I give her those too.”

“How much is Gorsline paying you?”

“Gorsline?” Barbeaux said, and Service suddenly felt light-headed.
Gorsline is the center of gravity for this, right? Has to be.

Kakabeeke joined them and Service said, “Sergeant, let him enjoy his party. Then haul him to the county and book him on three open murder charges. I'll be in later to talk to the prosecutor and supply details. Between now and then, he gets no phone calls until you book him.”

“And you?” Kakabeeke asked.

“Digging,” he said.
Literally.

68

Baragastan

MONDAY, JUNE 26, 2006

It was not yet 5 a.m. on Monday morning.

“Hoot,” Service greeted Jen Jeske as she crawled out of an unmarked black DNR truck driven by Marquette County CO Alvin “Leadfoot” Leader.

Jeske looked at Service and held up one of her hands, which was shaking. “I thought the speed of light was a buncha Hollywood Star Trek crap,” she said. “Never been so scared in my life.”

Service said, “Everybody feels that way after they ride with Alvin.”

“Why the heck am I here?” the woman asked. “Your officer showed up at my house, said you needed me urgently, and here I am.”

“Thanks. It is urgent.”

“It better be. We've got eight people coming to dinner tonight. Am I gonna make it back to cook, or should I call my old man and tell him to go to plan B?”

“Better make the call,” Service said. “
Is
there a plan B?”

“Plan B means he's on his own to figure it out.”

He had no way to estimate how long, but he was sensing a very long day and probably a night ahead of them. Friday and Millitor were with him, along with conservation officers Simon del Olmo, Elza Grinda, Junco Kragie, and Sergeant Willie Celt.

Another vehicle pulled up, and Judge Taava Kallioninen got out with a coffee mug in hand.

“Your Honor,” Service said.

“I was a Troop before law school,” Kallioninen said. “Sulla Kakabeeke and I are longtime friends. She told me what went down at the sheriff's get-together when I showed up to make my official, pro forma appearance. I figure you're on the cusp of something big, and given Van Dalen's past record with lawyers, I figured it wouldn't hurt to have me on the scene and at your side. Objections?”

“None, Your Honor.”

Service introduced the judge to everyone and explained what he hoped to accomplish. Turning to Jeske, he asked, “You bring the information?”

“Yeah, we're definitely on state land here, and there're no mineral leases—not now and not in the past—at least, none I can determine.”

“You inspect mines for the state, right?” he asked.

“New operations, for the Department of Environmental Quality, but not for engineering or employee safety.”

“But you've been down in hardrock mines.”

“More times than I care to remember,” Jen Jeske said. “I'm sensing here you want me to go underground and evaluate your blockage, to see if it's possible to get past it.”

“You're psychic.”

“That's one way to look at it,” she said. “How deep am I going?”

“Ten feet max.”

Kragie nodded agreement.

“That's good,” Jeske said, “because the really deep stuff seriously creeps me out, especially if there's been a collapse.”

Jeske went to the Marquette officer's unmarked truck, fetched her equipment bag, put on a helmet with a light mounted to it, grabbed a loop of line, a small pack, and a long-handled hammer with a pick on one end.

“You come prepared,” Service said.

“My gear goes everywhere I go—just in case. Where's the opening?”

Kragie and del Olmo had hidden the entrance with plywood, covering it with dirt and debris, but the board was off now, the hole revealed.

“You already been down there?” Jeske asked Service as she looped line through her harness belt and worked her way down to the opening.

Service nodded.

She straddled the hole and shone her flashlight into it, then knelt and pulled a respirator out of her pack. “How long were you below?” she asked Service.

“Not long,” he said.

“There's another respirator in my big equipment bag. Help yourself. Are the walls reinforced?”

“Yes, but it's mostly solid rock.”

“Correction: solid except for the collapse.”

He shrugged.

She handed one end of her line to Kragie, gave a thumbs-up, and disappeared into darkness.

Below they could hear her hammer tapping rock.

When Kragie helped her back up, her face was covered with sweat and dust. She accepted a bottle of cold water from Friday. “Good news, bad news,” she said after a long pull on the liquid. “It's definitely open past the slide, but I can't tell how far. There could be another blockage to the east.”

“Good or bad?” Service asked.

“Depends on who goes with me. It's a tight squeeze down there.”

“I'm going,” Service said.

“You'll never fit.”

“That's what they always told Harry Houdini.”

“This isn't a stage trick.”

“You've got that big hammer.”

“Plastic explosives maybe would help, but I couldn't even handle a cap gun as a kid. Jen Jeske don't do bang-bang.”

The judge stepped forward. “Please explain to a layperson what's going on.”

“Public land,” Service said. “There are no leased mineral rights here, which means this is an illegal operation, and I'm going to bet that it leads east under Art Lake property, and that in fact they have been mining this for a long time. I'm also betting I don't have enough probable cause for search warrants, so if we go in underground and it pops out at Art Lake, we will have entered legally and legitimately.”

The judge smiled. “You might have a future in the law,” she said.

“I'm already in the only part of the law that interests me,” he said.

Friday nudged him. “I'm a lot smaller than you. Let me go.”

“No argument on size or pluck,” he said, “but at this time, this tunnel is a DNR-DEQ issue, not one for the state police.”

Service guessed that any of the COs would volunteer to go in his place, but he was determined to see this through. His case, his job. “If I can't get through, one of you will have to try. Draw straws or something,” he said, putting on the respirator and the night goggles head harness he'd dug out of the Tahoe.

“We don't have a helmet big enough to fit over that rig,” Jeske said.

“I need eyes, not a brain bucket.” Even superior vision would be worthless in total darkness underground.

Service looked at Jeske and she looked back and said, “Do everything really slow, okay?”

There were no good-byes or good lucks.

He nodded as Jeske lowered herself back into the opening, and when she was gone, he gave a thumbs-down to lower him to Kragie and del Olmo, who anchored his rope as he dropped into the old mine.

Crammed against each other at the bottom, Jeske said, “I've got a low-lumen red penlight. Will it screw up your night-vision gear?”

“Just try not to point it right at me.”

“It's really, really tight from here,” she said. “I shit you not.”

He looked at the blocked area. “Tight for you?”

“Not bad, but for you . . .” She didn't finish her sentence.

“I'll hold my breath,” he said.

“Spoken like your average half-witted caver.”

“Humor can be a good thing,” he told her.

“Hold that thought—see if it helps.”

“You go through and I'll watch. When you get to the other side, talk me through.”

“I repeat, take it
really
slow.”

After a while he saw a glint of light. “How far?” he asked.

“Eight feet,” she said. “There's a forty-degree angled shelf on your left, and maybe a foot from the lip of that to the right rock wall. Fourteen inches, max. That enough?”

“Before we find out, how about moving down the tunnel where you are and see how far it's clear?”

When she returned fifteen minutes later, she said, “I walked seven minutes. No problem. There's some debris on the floor, but nothing insurmountable. The footing sucks, is all.”

Service took off his shirt and pants and gunbelt and put everything in a pile, pushing it ahead of him with his boot.

“Can I do this standing up?” he asked.

“I can't imagine how.”

“I can't crawl on my side.”

“Then try it standing up,” she said.

Though it was cool underground, sweat poured off him.
No way to crawl.
Too big, too inflexible, not limber enough. Too damn old.
He eased into the opening. The ledge tilted upward from the top of his thighs. “Okay,” he said, trying not to grunt.

“Okay what?”Jeske shot back.

Too tight to talk. Tilt upper body to parallel the sloping shelf. First take off your Night Vision Device. Loop the NVD over your right arm. Make a fist, put it in the middle of your forehead to serve as a bumper. Move one inch at a time. Hit my elbow.
“Fuck.”
Shut up. Discipline. Can feel blood on elbow. Shit.

“You doing okay?” Jeske called softly to him.

“Peachy.”

Ten minutes later he finally cleared the last inch of blockage and immediately squatted, Jeske's red light illuminating him as he put the NVD back in place.

“Nice 'wears,” Jeske said, shining her light on his underpants.

“This tunnel better take us out,” he said. “I'll never get back through that.”

“The way ahead is clear as far as I followed it. But the footing's tough, very uneven and slippery.”

Service put on his pants, shirt, and utility belt. “Let me lead,” he said.

“I'm used to moving underground.”

“Are you used to ducking bullets?”

“You win,” she said, patting his arm. “Unassailable logic.”

Service wished they had radio contact with the surface, but on Jeske's advice, he'd left the 800 with Friday.

Clothes on, equipment in place, Service said, “Your GPS work down here?”

“Nope.”

“Paces then. I figure if we go more than two hundred meters, we'll be past the Art Lake perimeter fence.”

“I'll do the counting,” Jeske said.

“It doesn't have to be exact,” he said.

“It won't be.”

Later he heard her voice close behind him. “Three fifty, and we've been descending since about pace one hundred,” she said, veering northeast, “best as I can tell.”

“You can sense that?” He had no sense of direction underground and was in no moody to experiment. Or if he did, he didn't trust it.

“No, I always carry a button compass. It's not worth beans if there's any iron, but it always spins like a Sufi master when that happens, and so far, no spinning, so I think we can trust it.”

What the hell was a Sufi master?
“Okay, keep moving.”

Along the way they passed a number of tunnels branching left and right. Mostly Service paid no attention, but at one of them he ducked right and moved until he hit a dead end. Jeske stayed right behind him.
Damn NVD. No depth perception.
He turned off the device and said, “Use your light.”

“On what?'

“The rock face.”

She shone her light past him and said, “Holy cow!”

“More specificity, please,” he said.

“Look at the groove in the wall. Four inches wide, two feet deep. That's amazing. Never seen anything quite like that. Rare as hell,” she continued, “but not unheard of. Could very well have been almost pure ore. You know about Silver Islet, off Thunder Cape in Lake Superior?”

“No.”

“Copper discoveries made on the mainland. Prospectors went a mile or so into the big lake to put down observation markers, and one of them noticed galena. A few whacks with the pick and there's pure silver. The vein was twenty feet wide, and the men stripped it with crowbars. But the vein dropped straight down the middle of the island into the lake, and engineers found a way to tunnel down to recover the ore. In ten years they took out a million and a half ounces. There's still silver down there, but nobody wants the risk or expense of getting it out. This vein is like that one. Beyond belief.”

“But people know about that island.”

“Yes, but there are other deposits here and there that nobody ever hears of. They're maintained as private resource banks.”

“If gold was sold, someone would know,” Service said.

“Presumably, but a lot of precious gems and metals get moved off the official tax books.”

Damn. No wonder Leukonovich and the IRS are on this thing.

Two and a half hours after bypassing the blockage, the tunnel began to angle upward until it suddenly ended. Service looked up, saw metal-bar ladder rungs built into the rock.

“I'll go up,” Jeske said, and moved past him.

“There's a platform here, and six more feet of tunnel, ending at a big iron door.”

“I'm coming up,” he said.

It was cramped above, so he took off his NVD and used his SureFire to examine the door.

“Old hinges,” he said, running his hand over the nearest one. “Old, but solid as all get-out.”

“Do we just knock on the door?” Jeske said.

“No. You go back to the others. Explain to the judge what we found and how far we've come. Tell her it would be sweet if our colleagues came through the Art Lake gate and found their way to the other side of this door so I can get the hell out of here.”