08-A Thousand Bones, page 12
She spread Natalie’s flyer out on the shelf and held the glasses next to the pair in the picture. They looked exactly the same.
16
Everything had changed. Since the discovery of the jawbone two days ago and the matching of the glasses with Natalie Newton’s flyer, the leap had been made that they might now have more than one victim. And once Joe found out from Dorothy Newton that Natalie had never owned a charm bracelet, there was also the possibility that they could have three victims.
As Leach had told Joe this morning, one victim probably meant they were dealing with something isolated and personal, like a relative or an angry boyfriend. But two or more—that meant they could be looking at a psychopath who killed for no reason other than his sick needs.
The volunteer searchers from the university were now gone, replaced with an army of blue uniforms from the state police. The sagging tape printed with POLICE LINE that Holt had strung had been ripped down, and a squared-off grid had been marked with taut barriers of wide yellow tape that shouted crime scene do not cross.
Even the trees were different. The cold front that had crept down from Canada had triggered the trees to begin their change. The leaves, which had gorged all spring and summer on green chlorophyll, now were starting their slow starvation.
Joe looked up. The colors had seemed to appear from nowhere. The red-purple of the sumacs, the brilliant orange of the sugar maples, the russet brown of the oaks, the gold of the birches. She squinted, and it blurred into one Impressionist swirl.
How many bones were still out there? How many more would they find? How many girls had he killed?
The sharp bark of a dog drew her eyes to the distance. The technicians were out by the oak tree, and she wanted desperately to go there and watch them work. But Leach had told her to stay here, at the northern boundary of the tape, to make sure no gawkers intruded. The state police had set up a roadblock out on the logging road to keep the curious out, but a few hikers had managed to sneak in already this morning before she and Holt threw them out.
A search dog broke through the trees. The grim-faced state cop at the other end of the leash gave Joe a nod as he went by.
“They really expect the dogs to find anyone?” Holt asked.
Joe looked at Holt. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not like we have bodies or something here.”
Joe turned back to watch the German shepherd. “A dog’s sense of smell is forty times better than ours, and humans are smelly creatures. So to a dog we smell as powerful as a just-baked apple pie.”
“Your boyfriend tell you that?” Holt asked.
“As a matter of fact, yeah,” Joe said, remembering how excited she had been telling Brad about the case last night.
“Well, there’s nothing here for a dog to smell,” Holt said.
“A dog can pick up a scent from a bone or even skin cells. We shed cells all the time, Holt. You’re shedding all over the place right now, in fact.”
He gave a grunt of disbelief as he watched the dog.
Joe was quiet, the same doubt Holt felt swirling in her head. Hell, Chips was so dumb he couldn’t find a saltine cracker in the kitchen. And increasingly it appeared that there was nothing else out here to find.
She had been watching all morning as the state police set up a command post and marked off an elaborate search grid. She had watched the teams of men carefully clearing away the blankets of leaves, depositing them in heaping mounds that looked like so many benign yard piles raked to the curb for burning. They were searching for patches of ground that looked disturbed or different, anything that might be evidence of a shallow grave. Crews with hand trowels and screened sifting boxes were at work where the two sets of bones had been found. But so far, nothing had been unearthed. Not a shred of clothing. Not a bone. Not a tooth.
Mack had put in an appearance that morning. He stood watching, unable to hide his anger at the state police taking over. He was still waiting for the dentist in Chicago to report back. He wasn’t convinced that the glasses were important. As he told Leach, they looked exactly like the ones old man Dirksen at the Rexall wore.
“Jesus, how are these people getting in here?” Holt said.
Joe watched as Holt moved to the tape to chase four teenagers away. Leach was just coming up the hill as the kids left. There was a tall man in a tan trench coat with him. The sheriff ducked under the tape. The sandy-haired man had to stop and collapse his gangly frame to get under the same tape Leach had so easily broached.
The man’s long, pale face slowly registered in Joe’s memory. It was the state investigator who had shown up at the station two weeks ago. Joe couldn’t remember the guy’s name. All she could remember was the odd color of his eyes, blue shot through with white stress lines, like a frozen lake.
“Joe, you remember Detective Norm Rafsky,” Leach said. “He’s here to advise and assist.”
Joe gave a curt nod with a finger to the brim of her hat. As the state investigator’s eyes focused on her, she found herself wondering how eyes the color of ice could look so warm.
“Norm was asking me about the carvings,” Leach said.
“Sheriff Leach said you found them,” Rafsky said. His speech had the flat, nasally vowels of a native Michigander.
“Yes, sir,” Joe said. “One on that tree over there.” She pointed into the woods. “The other one is maybe a half-mile off that way.”
“Why don’t you show me?”
“Yes, sir.”
They went to the prayer tree, stepping carefully around the area where the dirt was being sifted. At the back of the trunk, she pointed.
Rafsky stepped up next to her. His long, bony fingers came up to trace the faded carving lightly before he looked back at Joe.
“Any ideas?”
“Sir?”
“What this might mean?”
Joe felt Leach’s eyes on her. “No, sir. Could be anything or nothing. Maybe just kid’s stuff.”
“I think they are too high for kids to have made them,” Rafsky said.
She hesitated. “That was my thought as well, sir.”
“And your other thoughts?”
Again, she hesitated, thinking now of what her mother had said about toeing the line. “I have a feeling they are Indian markings of some kind,” she said.
Rafsky smiled slightly. “I think you’re right. I saw something similar once when I was working in Alpena.”
Joe glanced at Leach. He didn’t seem upset with her. In fact, there was something close to pride in his eyes.
“Deputy Frye, does the second carving look like this one?” Rafsky asked.
“It has the same U shape,” she said, pointing to the bottom of the carving. “But the other one looks like a man standing in a boat.”
“A boat? You’re sure?”
“That’s what it looks like to me, sir.”
“Any rivers, streams around here?” Rafsky asked Leach.
“Just Houdek Creek. But it’s a good ways from here.”
A gust of cold wind poured in from the west, sending a fresh shower of leaves swirling down on them.
“We need to find out what this means,” Rafsky said, tapping the bark. “You have any locals who will talk to us?”
“Lots of Ojibwa around here,” Leach said. “But they don’t trust us, and we don’t really trust them.”
“Well, let’s try.” Rafsky turned up his collar against another gust of wind. “I’ll need to hang around here a couple days. Maybe you could recommend a place, Sheriff?”
“Sure, come back to the cruiser,” Leach said. “I’ll radio back to Augie to call the Riverside.”
Joe followed them back to the yellow tape perimeter where Holt waited. She watched Rafsky and Leach duck under and head down to the logging road.
“What do you think?”
She turned to Holt. “About what?”
“That Rafsky guy.”
Joe gave a shrug, still hanging on to what she had felt when Rafsky said she was right about the carvings, still seeing the gleam of respect in the investigator’s eyes. She was hoping now, more than ever, that Leach would keep his word about letting her work on the case, if Rafsky allowed it.
“He seems okay,” she said.
“Did he know what the carvings were?” Holt asked.
“He thinks they might be Indian,” Joe said. “And he wants Leach to find an Indian who might talk to us.”
“I know somebody,” Holt said.
Joe faced him.
“Well, I don’t know any Indians,” he said. “But I know somebody who knows somebody.”
There was an eagerness in Holt’s voice. Joe could tell he felt left out, and she felt a twinge of sympathy. Holt wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, as her dad used to say, and now that the state police had taken over, Holt would be pushed even further to the margins.
“Go tell the sheriff,” Joe said.
Holt grinned, ducked under the tape, and hurried off down the hill toward the logging road.
She turned back to watch the searchers. The German shepherd was sitting obediently at its handler’s feet, ears pricked. The steady scrap of the trowels went on. The leaf mounds were growing larger.
Another gust of wind blew in from the west, sending the birches sighing. The German shepherd raised its snout. Joe looked up as a shower of leaves fell. The ground that the men had cleared just a half-hour before was already covered again. Winter was moving in. It was now a race against time and weather.
She heard a sound, the shuffle of feet through leaves, and looked to her left. Far down the yellow line of crime tape, she saw a woman. She started to go to her to tell her she had to leave. But then she stopped.
It was Dorothy Newton. She was standing there huddled down into her blue wool coat, a bright scarf covering her head. She was watching the men digging in the dirt.
17
They entered a tunnel of blood red. For a moment, the sun was gone, and then it was back, sifting down through the red leaves of the sugar maples arching over the road.
Joe blinked against the sun as she stared out the window. She was in the passenger seat, and Rafsky was driving, his long body relaxed in the soft leather seat of the Chrysler sedan. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and navy tie. His dark blue suit jacket and trench coat were draped over the seat between them.
They were heading away from Echo Bay, down the thin finger of land that separated Lake Leelanau from Lake Michigan. Rafsky had his window cracked, and the crisp pine-scented air swirled around them.
“This is beautiful country,” Rafsky said.
Joe glanced over at him. “You haven’t been here before?”
He shook his head. “Never had reason to. I was born in Bay City, and when I joined the state police, I got assigned to Saginaw. I was sent to Gaylord two years ago. Never been over in this neck of the woods before.”
They were quiet for a few miles.
“Leelanau,” Rafsky said. “That’s Indian. Means ‘delight of life.’”
“I didn’t know that,” Joe said.
“Me, either, until the waitress at the Early Bird told me this morning.”
Rafsky turned left onto a county road that jagged east across the peninsula. The hardwood and pines soon fell away, and they entered a new landscape of cherry orchards and vacant land, cut through with dirt roads that seem to lead nowhere. Every so often, Joe could spot a cabin or a small house. She knew that many of the people here were poor, that for every dazzling sand-duned vista or pristine pine forest, there was a ramshackle trailer or shingled shanty stuck back in the woods. For every family hauling the camper up from Detroit or for every leaf peeper who rented a cabin on the shore, there was a local who had to live through long winters on the crumbs left over from the too-short summers.
She knew this. But she didn’t know it the way the locals did. She didn’t know it with the cold certainty of living through a winter here. Not yet.
Joe pulled up the collar of her jacket. Rafsky glanced over and rolled up the window.
“Thank you for bringing me,” Joe said.
Rafsky smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I enjoy the company. And it never hurts to have a different viewpoint on things.”
They were almost to the eastern shore of the peninsula, and the trees were thickening again, the narrow blacktop road providing a stage for a frenzied ballet of leaves. She picked up the folder from the seat and opened it to the photographs of the carvings.
Holt’s friend had hooked them up with an Ojibwa man named Thomas Ahanu, who said he would be willing to talk to the police. Joe didn’t know too much about Indians. Most of her perceptions had come from TV or movies. Or what she had heard up at Northern. It had seemed to her that most of the students—who, like her, were almost all white Michiganders—had no interest in the Indians. And it seemed the Indians had little interest in them.
The car slowed, and she looked up. A small green sign told them they were entering Peshawbestown. At first, she saw nothing, then finally a store, a gas station, and a smattering of houses. Two men standing at the gas pumps watched the Chrysler as it cruised by.
Rafsky stopped the car in front of a white frame church to check his directions. Joe rolled down her window. The church looked oddly out of place here where there was so little else. Or maybe it wasn’t. She had no idea if the Indians were Christian or anything else.
Rafsky took a side road through a woods so thick she couldn’t see a glimmer of a sunray. He made another turn onto a dirt road, then another, and as he pushed the heavy car up a hill, branches clawed at the car doors.
She smelled the burning firewood first, then saw the curl of gray smoke above the trees. As they rounded a corner, she saw the house. Part wood, part metal siding, a stovepipe chimney on the tar-paper roof.
Rafsky stopped the car and killed the engine.
The silence dropped over them, heavy at first, then lightening with the chirp of birds and the far-off bark of a dog.
“You ready?” Rafsky asked, grabbing his jacket.
She nodded and followed Rafsky across the grass to the house. There were two aluminum lawn chairs on the porch, draped with Indian blankets. Between them was a ceramic pot, filled with dirt and stabbed with cigarette butts.
The front door opened, and a man stepped out. A broad, burnt-brown face, a wide nose, and a suspicious set to his jaw. His onyx hair was pulled back in a ponytail. A nickel-plated handgun sat in a woven leather holster on his hip.
“You Mr. Rafsky?” the man asked.
“Yes, sir,” Rafsky said. “And you are Thomas Ahanu?”
Ahanu’s black eyes cut to Joe, and he said nothing.
Rafsky extended a hand to him. “How do you do?”
Ahanu turned away from Rafsky and walked back inside his house, leaving the door open. Rafsky gave Joe a look, then motioned that they should follow.
The inside of the house was dim, lit only by oil lamps that gave a sheen to the bare floor and the trunk-like legs of the wood chair and table in the middle of the room. A fire was burning in a fieldstone hearth that was coated with years of thick black ash. The mantel held colorful Indian dolls and stone sculptures of animals.
Joe’s eyes were riveted on Thomas Ahanu. He moved to the kitchen and was stirring a pot at the stove, sending the scent of something gamey into the air.
“So talk,” he said.
Rafsky stepped closer to him, but he didn’t say anything. Joe knew he was waiting for Ahanu to look at him, demanding his attention as politely as he could. Ahanu stayed at the stove for almost a full minute before he finally turned. He was a big man, but he made no sound as he came toward them across the planked floor.
“Talk.”
Rafsky held out a hand to Joe and she gave him the photographs of the two carvings. Rafsky offered them to Ahanu, but he refused to take them. But he did look at the one on top. His eyes came up to Joe before moving to Rafsky.
“You want to know what that is,” Ahanu said.
“Yes,” Rafsky said.
“Where did you find it?” Ahanu asked.
“Near a crime scene over by Echo Bay,” Rafsky said.
Ahanu wiped his fleshy hands on his blue jeans and took the photos, moving closer to the oil lamp on the table. He held them down to the flicker of light.
“What kind of crime scene?” he asked.
Rafsky hesitated and Ahanu tilted his head with suspicion. “Someone is dead?” he asked.
“Yes, possibly murdered,” Rafsky said. “We found human remains not far from these carvings.”
Ahanu came back to them, slapping the photos against Rafsky’s chest, forcing him to take them. “You see a carving on a tree, and you come here to accuse an Indian of murder?”
“No,” Rafsky said quickly.
Ahanu walked back to the stove, stirring the pot. Rafsky gave him a moment, then went to him, smoothing the wrinkled photos.
“My apologies, Mr. Ahanu,” he said. “The fact is, we believe a white man did this.”
“Then why do you ask about the carvings?” Ahanu asked without turning.
“Because they were found on trees nearby,” Rafsky said. “That’s the only reason. They probably have nothing to do with the remains, but we need to know if they are Indian and what they symbolize.” Rafsky held out the carving from the oak tree. “Please take another look.”
Ahanu set the wooden spoon on the stove and faced them. “It is a symbol of the moon, the Hunger Moon.”
“And this one?” Rafsky said, holding up the second photograph.
“I do not know,” Ahanu said. “It could be one of the others.”
“How many are there?” Joe asked.
Ahanu looked to her as if he were surprised she could speak. “Twelve months, twelve moons,” he said.
“Do the symbols have any other meaning besides the months?” Joe asked.
Ahanu’s black eyes studied her before he answered and she had the sense he thought her stupid. “There is much meaning in them,” he said. “There are many things to be seen in the moon symbols.”
