Strike Dog (26 page)

32

SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN
JULY 15, 2004

Service had called Shark on his way to Limpy's to tell him about Wayno Ficorelli's fly collection. Shark had called back and announced that he and Limey would be bringing dinner over that night. Grady Service didn't want company. McCants had dropped off his animals that day, and they were about all the companionship he could handle.

He had maps and charts pinned up all around the main room of the cabin. He had taken locations of killings from FBI reports and tried to convert them to points on the maps so that he could see what sort of patterns might appear. He didn't want to be interrupted, but Shark was a force and would be there soon.

The results of his efforts so far seemed negligible. Most of the bodies had been found near rivers and streams—water. But those in Rhode Island, Louisiana, and Florida were on the ocean or one of its brackish bays. Given the disparity, how the hell had Monica's analyst found a pattern? He sure as hell didn't see it. All by water. Big deal.

Newf tipped her water bowl, a signal that it was empty and she was thirsty. As he filled the bowl, some of it slopped over the side and soaked his bare foot. It struck him: moving water. Rivers and streams moved, and oceans moved; they had tides. The link wasn't simply water, but
moving
water, and the way the killer moved Ficorelli's body suggested why. But what about Spargo? He had been killed two hundred feet
above
the Eleven Point.

It was an alarming realization. How many other obvious things was he missing?

He wanted to keep working, but suddenly the cabin door flew open, Newf started barking and charged Shark, who collided with the dog. Limey came in behind her husband, caught Service's eye, and shook her head. Yalmer Wetelainen was an old friend from Houghton who managed a motel and worked only to finance his hunting and fishing obsessions. He was bald, thin, short, and partial to beer, especially homemade, which he made and drank in copious quantities, mostly because it was cheap. Service and Gus Turnage had once administered a preliminary breathalyzer test to their friend during an all-night nickel-and-dime poker game. The unique Finn drank a case of beer and shots of straight vodka in a fairly short time, but never registered legally drunk. Neither CO could figure it out. Yalmer drank like a fish and ate like a pig, yet there was not even a hint of fat on his body.

They decided that their friend didn't fit any known human physiological profile, and because of his unique metabolism, they nicknamed him Shark, and the name stuck. Limey Pyykkonen was a homicide detective for Houghton County. A strapping, angular woman with a small round face, Limey had close-cropped blonde hair and thin lips. She had once had a brief fling with Wayno Ficorelli, but for some time now, she and Shark had been married and were a rock-solid couple.

Limey hugged Service while Newf and Shark wrestled. “I was really sorry to hear about Wayno,” she said. “The feds got any leads?”

“Don't know,” Service said as Shark came bouncing over with a gallon jug of bright red wine. “Last year's chokecherries,” Shark announced, plopping it down on the kitchen table. “Kicks like a ten-gauge. Where the heck are the new flies?”

They went over to the area in the main room where Service kept his fishing gear. Wetelainen was like a kid at Christmas, ripping through the fly boxes. He shouted, “Hey woman, fetch your man some wine!”

Pyykkonen yelled back, “You break a leg?”

Service said, “I'll get it,” and heard Pyykkonen mumble, “Why do men revert to adolescence when they get new toys?”

“That hurts,” Service said, pouring three glasses of wine and putting one in front of her. Limey rolled her eyes.

When Service got back to Shark, he found his friend holding a fly and looking perplexed. “Somebody steal one of your patterns?”

“You know what this is?” Shark asked, holding up a fly.

Service looked at it. “Some kind of brown drake?”

Shark shook his head. “Right, brown drake, but what
kind
of brown drake?”

“Dun?”

“Holy Wah! You gotta stop working so bloody much and fish more. It's a booger brown drake.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Booger flies,” Shark said. “
Look
at it.”

Service took the fly and examined it. “It's got a rubber body. Should float good, right?”

“Float
good?
Hell, they float the
best,
and they aren't made of rubber.”

“Some kind of plastic?”

“Nobody knows
what
it is. A guy from Curran ties these things, or he used to. I don't know if he's still alive. Crazy old fart; he always claimed they were made from nasal mucus.”

Service dropped the fly on his desk and grimaced.

Wetelainen picked it up and touched the tip of his tongue to it. “Got a faint flavor. This is the real deal, not a knockoff.”

“Boogers?” Service said disgustedly.

“Could be,” Shark said obliviously. “Man, you do
not
see booger flies in the boxes of weekend warriors. Only serious trout-chasers know about them, much less use them. Hell, they were three bucks a copy back when I bought them—and that's a good fifteen years ago.”

“
You
bought flies tied by somebody else?”

Shark got defensive. “Just a couple. I wanted to see if I could replicate the body material, but I couldn't. The way these flies are made, they ride right in the film. Sweet! And they'll float all night. Only drawback: One good bite and they're usually shot. I thought I could come up with something more durable. I managed the durable part, but I couldn't get mine to float low like the originals.”

Wetelainen suddenly looked around the room. “You putting together a national compendium of trout spots?”

“Right,” Service said. “Trout in the ocean,” he said sarcastically.

Shark looked at his friend. “Sure.”

“Bullshit.”

“Not bullshit, science.”

“Trout in Florida and Louisiana?” asked Service.

“
Cynoscion nebulosus,
” Wetelainen said. “Spotted sea trout.”

“An actual trout?”

“The rednecks are a little loose in their definitions. They look a lot like trout, though, and they eat good. Sometimes they even call them specks, like Funnelheads call brookies. Only their specks got a couple of big fangs, like this,” his friend said, using his fingers to simulate protruding fangs.

Wetelainen walked over to the maps and tapped the northeastern states where there were marks along the oceans. “I don't think
Cynoscion nebulosus
is that far north. When they talk about sea trout up there, they'd probably mean salmonids that migrate into the oceans and return to rivers to spawn. You get up into Maine and eastern Canada, and they have both rainbows and brookies that do this. In the other states, it's pretty much browns.”

“I've never heard of such a thing.”

“Because you live in your own world. In New England the boys who chase sea-run browns are more secretive than morel-chasers up here. Hell, the fish and game departments in those states can't even get an accurate estimate on the populations because the guys who catch the most fish never report them, and some people think because there's no data, there're no fish.”

Service sipped his wine. In his current state of mind, drinking too much invited disaster, and Shark's chokecherry wine was known for its potency—far above commercially available wine in alcohol content. “You're telling me that all of those marks on the maps are places where trout are caught?”

“What's the question?” Wetelainen countered. “'Course you can catch trout in all those locations.”

Service pointed at the other maps. “What about the other states?”

“Hell, it's like Michigan. Some will be warm-water fisheries, some cold-water. Each state's DNR would have to tell you what's what.”

Great,
Service thought.
More information to chase
. He nudged the fly on his desk with a pencil. “Booger fly, huh?”

“You betcha. The old guy's name, I think it was Main. The old man, he was a strange duck, always going on about astronomy and physics. His shop was like something out of a Hollywood back lot, shit everywhere. But the man was a genius when it came to inventing flies. Had him a whole line of booger flies: brown drakes, gray drakes, green drakes, Hexagenia, even a white-gloved howdy.”

“In Curran—south of Alpena?”

“Yeah, that general area.”

“You've been there?”

“Once. I'd been striper fishing down in Kentucky, and I was on my way back to the U.P. I'd heard about this guy, so I stopped in. He and I had one helluva discussion about flies and their histories.”

“You bought the flies then?”

“Nah, I needed what dough I had for gas to get back to Houghton. He gave me a cheap mimeographed catalog, and when I got back I wrote him a letter and placed my order. See, his shop isn't listed officially as a shop. It's in his house. There's nothing about it in the Yellow Pages. If you asked around Curran, everybody would play dumb because he was a foul-tempered old coot and he let his neighbors know the only way people could find out about the place was through word of mouth from other trout fanatics. To know about the place, you had to hear about it and get directions from somebody who had been there. Talk about brilliant marketing! The old man didn't even have a phone. I've heard about guys who drove a thousand miles to see him, and when they got there he was gone fishing. I doubt the old ­bastard cared about missed sales. The flies were just something he did when he wasn't chasing trout.”

“Have you still got the catalog?”

“Somewhere, but it's, like, ancient.”

Shark's place was a virtual graveyard for old fishing supplies, but he was generally organized.

“Give a call when you get home and give me the address, okay?”

Shark Wetelainen shrugged. “Yah, sure.”

“Let's eat, boys,” Limey announced.

Shark said with a grunt, “Man, it's about time! You know, if I remember right, New Mexico tried to plant sea trout in mountain streams about fifteen years back.”

“Ocean-runs or spotted?” Service said.

“Holy Wah!” Shark snorted. “What's wrong with your head? Ain't no place to run
from
into New Mexico, boy. It was spotteds, I think.”

The thing about Shark was that once somebody flipped his switch, it was hard to shut off. As they sat down to eat, he said, “Zane Grey claimed ocean-run browns were the kings of the trout world, toughest fighters by far.”

Limey Pyykkonen said, “
Yalmer,
” and he was immediately silent.

Service looked at his friends and knew that Shark Wetelainen was head-over-heels for the cop who stood a good six inches taller than him.

He also realized that it had been a booger fly he had recovered from the Ficorelli kill site, and his gut was telling him this was important. If it was as rare and valuable as Shark said, it helped explain why Wayno got out of the river to try to recover it. There was one other realization: The bodies were found not just near water, but moving water, and according to Shark, it was probably all trout water. This was the funny thing about investigations. They could stall for eons and suddenly vault forward on some seemingly insignificant fact that all at once became significant. Nantz would really appreciate this. She'd be running around the room right now, pumping her arms in triumph.

“Grady,” Limey Pykkonnen said. “Are you coming back soon?”

He looked at the woman and said, “I'm back,” picked up his fork, and began eating. All the while he ate, he saw Nantz sitting next to Limey, the two women yakking away at each other. He knew she wasn't really there, but it felt right to imagine she was.

33

MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN
JULY 16, 2004

“I might have something for you to work with,” Shamekia said. The former FBI agent tended to get right to the point. Service was sitting in his cubicle, planning to spend the morning contacting state fishery agencies to verify if the places where murdered game wardens had been found held trout. Looking at a map wasn't enough, because over many generations, most state agencies had finagled with natural orders, planting all sorts of species in places where nature had never put them, and they couldn't and didn't survive, including Shark's odd story about sea trout being planted in New Mexico. In many states fishery people were torn between planting rubber fish from hatcheries and managing the rivers to create naturally reproducing wild stocks. Michigan was moving steadily toward the latter strategy.

Shamekia added, “I'm sending everything I have via messenger, there tonight. Want it at your house or office?”

“House,” he said, then gave her the Slippery Rock address and told her the messenger should leave the package and not wait for him to be there to sign for it.

She said, “Okay, it's going out the door now, but here's the short version.”

She continued, “June 1970, the Mexican federal police arrested a U.S. citizen in Ciudad Juárez—that's across the river from El Paso. A woman reported her husband being assaulted by an Americano in a black El Dorado. About the same time, a couple of local cops stopped the same guy in town, probably to shake him down, and he resisted. There was a fight and they put the cuffs on him. Turns out he was driving a black Cadillac. Had a woman and a boy with him. The locals found blood all over the trunk of the Cadillac, and the assaulted man identified the adult male as his assailant. The locals called the
federales
to brag themselves up some, and the
federales
immediately swooped in and intervened. They took the vehicle and the prisoner. Turns out that there had been three brutal killings in Nogales, Mexicali, and Matamoros, all male victims with mutilations along their spines. A black Cadillac had been reported near two of the killings.”

“This was 1970? Near El Paso?”

“Mid-June.”

Service immediately checked the list of killings he had gotten from the FBI. The body of a New Mexico game warden had been found in late June 1970. He looked quickly at the atlas he kept on his desk and saw that El Paso, Texas, was not that far from New Mexico. Geographic coincidence? “What did the federal police do?”

“My sources say they interrogated the man with great vigor.”

“Car batteries and wires?” Service interjected.

“The Mexicans believe in going right at the bad guys—unless, of course, they have some political clout and can get back at them. But this was just some asshole gringo, so they probably did a number on him. Only he wouldn't crack. He insisted he'd done nothing and, according to the reports, remained silent, no matter what they did. They tried him in 1972, found him guilty of three homicides and one attempted, sentenced him to death, and packed him off to some shithole prison in the south of the country to await execution. But before they could carry out the sentence, the American was murdered by a prison guard. This was just before Christmas 1974,” said Shamekia.

“There a name for this guy?”

“Wellington Ney from Pigeon River, Indiana.”

He'd never heard of a town called Pigeon River. There was a river by that name in northern Indiana, close to the Michigan border, but not a town. “What about his wife and kid?” asked Service.

“It's not clear it was his wife or his kid. The reports say simply a woman in her thirties, and a boy of fifteen or sixteen. The locals kicked them after they pinched the guy. They split after the arrest and were never seen again. The
federales
called in the Bureau, but the town name was bogus, and there was nobody named Ney anywhere in Indiana.”

“False name?”

“Maybe. The Mexicans weren't that competent in those days, and it was easy enough to hide your identity, even in this country,” said Shamekia.

“Did you get the names of the Bureau agents who worked the case on this side of the border?”

“Lead man was Special Agent Philip L. Orbet. He retired in 1976 and died ten years later.”

“Others on the case?”

“Just Orbet after a while. Apparently he was obsessed with the case, thought there was something more to it, and kept looking into it after he retired, but he died before he got anywhere with it. You know how cold cases go,” she added.

He did. “But this wasn't a U.S. case,” Service said.

“Right, but Orbet was one of those old-time G-men who felt that if this guy had been a serial killer in Mexico, he probably did it up here too.”

“Where did Orbet live?” Service heard the lawyer leafing through ­paperwork.

“Toledo, Ohio.”

“You think this fits?” he asked.

“You tell me: The victims had an ax taken to their ribs along the spine,” she said.

“Hmmm,” Service said. “Photos in the paperwork you're sending?”

“There are. Photos of the victims and of the man Ney.”

“Can you get me an address for Orbet in Toledo, names of his survivors, all that?”

“It's in the package. You thinking he left behind his case notes?”

“Could be,” Service thought.

“Okay,” Shamekia said, “write this down.”