Dead of Winter

CHAPTER 3

“Raise your right hand.”

Louis lifted his hand and took a deep breath.

“Do you, Louis Washington Kincaid, on this twentieth day of December, nineteen hundred and eighty-four, solemnly swear to uphold and enforce the laws of the United States of America and the great state of Michigan to the best of your ability?”

Louis looked down at the silver shield in Gibralter’s hand.

“With professionalism, integrity and honor?” Gilbralter added.

“I do,” Louis said.

Gibralter slapped the badge in Louis’s palm.

“Welcome to Loon Lake, badge number 127.”

Louis heard soft applause and turned. Five officers stood in a half-circle, all dressed in light blue shirts, dark blue trousers, navy ties and billed Garrison caps. Louis pinned the badge on this shirt.

“McGuire, is Kincaid ready to go?” Gibralter asked.

Dale hustled over. “You sign that gun agreement, Louis?”

Louis nodded, watching the chief as he ambled away to talk to another man. “I signed everything. Didn’t see a union card.”

“You won’t,” Dale said quietly. “And we don’t use that word in civilized conversation in this office, Louis.”

A union-free department. That was scary.

“Read your manual, Kincaid,” Gibralter said, turning back. “Ignorance is not an acceptable excuse here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your call number is 11. Loon-11,” Dale said.

Louis would have laughed except for the utter seriousness on Dale’s face.

“Chief, who you want to put him with?” Dale asked.

Louis looked at the officers. Damn, he was getting a training officer.

“Harrison!” Gibralter called out.

A man stepped out of the knot and sauntered over. He was about the same age as Louis. His thick hair was like rich mahogany. He had expressive brown eyes that softened his slightly pitted face. There was a long thin scar down his neck that disappeared into his collar. He looked up at Louis, shaking his head.

“Jeez, Chief,” another six-footer. When you going to give me someone I can look in the eye?”

Gibralter, on his way back to his office, hollered back over his shoulder, “Buy some goddamn elevator shoes.”

Harrison grinned and thrust out his hand. “Jesse Harrison. Welcome to Loon Lake, Kincaid.”

Louis shook his hand. “Thanks.”

“You ready?” Jesse put on his jacket and reached for the car keys on the desk. On the ring was a dirty orange rabbit’s foot. He saw Louis looking at it.

“Don’t say a word about my rabbit’s foot,” he said. “It brings me luck.”

“In this town, why do you need it?” Louis asked as he followed Jesse Harrison out the door.

“Kincaid, I’ve been unlucky all my life. I was born on September 13, my badge number is 113 and when I joined this department, Gilbralter gave me call number 13. If you were me, what would you carry?”

“A gun,” Louis said.

Jesse opened the glass door with his rear end. “I like a man with a sense of humor, Kincaid. We should get along fine.”

The moment Louis got inside the police cruiser he flipped the heater up to high.

“Living down South thin your blood?” Jesse asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“My car wouldn’t start. I had to walk in.” He wondered how Harrison had found out so quickly about his stint in Mississippi.

“Where you staying, at the Loon Lake Lodge?”

“No, I rented a cabin on the lake.”

“North or south side?”

Louis thought for a moment. “South. Just outside town.”

Jesse swung the car down Main Street. “Good. You don’t want to be staying up north with the Eggers.”

“What?”

“That what I call the rich tourists. You know, East Egg. You never read The Great Gatsby?”

“Saw the movie.”

“Bad movie, great book.” Jesse’s grin had a touch of superiority. “I read a lot. Anything I can get my hands on. Lots of biographies, history books. I like psychology stuff best. The chief says I’m an autodidact. That means I’m self-taught.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Jesse glanced over at him. “You went to University of Michigan, right?”

Again, Louis wondered how Harrison had found out so much about him so fast. “Yup,” he answered.

“That’s great,” Jesse said softly, nodding his head.

They drove on, Jesse offering a lay of the land. The town of Loon Lake was clustered on the southeastern end of the lake. Jesse explained that it was not hard to get the feel for the town’s layout: the small commercial heart was bordered by the residential houses, perfect little square lots with chain-link fences that split the area into a grid. The city park, with its new baseball diamond, sat on a tract of pine-choked land just north of the residential area.

As Jesse drove north up Highway 44, which circled the lake, the homes grew sparser, giving way to bait shacks, trailers and towering pine trees. Up on the north end, Highway 44 was intersected with dozens of narrow roads. They were the driveways of the tourists’ properties, Louis realized. Most were gated or chained with signs that hinted at the humor and hopes of the people who dwelled within: BLISSFUL ACRES, TWIN PINES, THISTLE DEW, THE LOONEY BIN. Louis strained to get a glimpse beyond the thick trees but could see nothing. Jesse told him that the locals didn’t really mix much with the tourists.

“They look down their noses at us some,” Jesse said. “You know, like we’re a bunch of yahoos.”

Louis nodded.

“But we just smile and take their money,” Jesse went on. “We’re a big tourist destination here. Hell, if it wasn’t for the Eggers, Loon Lake would be just like all the other crappy little dots on the map up here.”

Louis was looking out the window.

“You see that fire station back there?” Jesse said. “Egg money built that place last year. Best in four counties. Bought the lights on the baseball diamond, too.”

It took forty minutes to drive around the lake. As they came back to town, Jesse pulled out a bag of peanuts. Louis politely refused his offer to share. Jesse expertly popped open the shells with one hand, his left hand steady on the wheel.

“Well, I suppose I should fill you in on how things are at our house.”

Louis hid his smile. Jesse had obviously seen to many cop shows.

“Gibralter’s a great chief,” Jesse said. “Runs a clean department and a clean town. What he says goes.”

“I already got that impression. What’s with the quotes?”

“What’d you get, Baudelaire or Churchill?”

“Baudelaire.”

“Chief’s a smart man. Stanford grad, majored in Asian studies.”

“Why’d he become a cop?”

Jesse shrugged. “He told me it was to piss off his old man but I don’t believe it. Chief was a captain in Chicago before this.”

“What the hell is he doing here?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Jesse grinned as he popped a peanut into his mouth. “U of M. Isn’t that supposed to be the Stanford of the East?”

“Harvard of the Midwest.”

“Maybe that’s why he hired you. A meeting of the minds.”

Louis squinted out at the snowy landscape. “So, who’s our shift supervisor?”

“We don’t have shift supervisors.”

“Watch commander?”

“Don’t need one. Chief’s always there late, sometimes till ten or eleven. Anything comes up after that, we call him at home.”

Louis shook his head. “A little thin at the top.”

“Chief likes it that way, lean and mean. Alpha units all the way. Gilbralter says if we needed partners he’ll get us dogs. After the chief thinks you’re broken in you’ll be on your own.”

“What about that thin guy I saw last night? He was wearing a sergeant stripe.”

“Ollie Wickshaw. Yeah, he’s a sergeant but he pulls a shift with the rest of us. He’s okay, a little strange. Into that occult shit. Supervision isn’t his strong suit. If it were up to him he’d rather be with his damn homing pigeons than human beings.”

Jesse swung the cruiser off Main Street and into a residential area.

“Anyone else have rank?” Louis asked.

Jesse shook his head. “There’s only nine guys total on the force, including you now. And we’re all on the street, equal in the eyes of the chief.”

“And God,” Louis added.

“One and the same, my friend.”

They drove on in silence for several blocks. Louis gazed out at the neat bungalows with their snowy yards. The sky was a brilliant blue and cloudless. He sank back into the seat, lulled by the heat.

What an odd department structure, he thought. A dictatorship, union-free to boot. But Gibralter seemed to be well liked by his men. Hell, maybe having one man at the top was better than the twenty layers of gold-plated bullshit most departments had.

The photograph on the wall of Thomas Pryce floated into his mind and he wondered if the man had died in the line of duty. But what could get a cop killed in a place like this? Walking into a bad domestic? That could happen anywhere.

“Thomas Pryce,” Louis said. “How did he die?”

Jesse didn’t look over at him. “He was shot.”

“On duty.”

Jesse’s jaw moved. “No, in his own house. Someone walked up and just blew him away with a shotgun.”

“Jesus,” Louis said. He wanted to know more but he sensed Jesse didn’t want to talk about it. Pryce’s death had been only a few weeks ago and he knew how long it took for a wound to scar over in a small department when a cop was killed. He had been to only one cop funeral, right after he started his fist job in Ann Arbor. He hadn’t known the man but he had felt the current of pain and anger that ran like some subterranean river below the smooth daily workings of the department.

“You get the guy who did it?” Louis asked.

“No,” Jesse said.

“So the case is still open?”

“Technically.”

“Who’s running it?”

“Nobody right now,” Jesse said. “We don’t have an investigator. That was Pryce’s job.”

“He was the investigator?”

Jesse didn’t look at him. “Yeah, Pryce was the investigator. Not that we ever have much to investigate around here.”

Louis thought he heard an edge in Jesse’s voice. They rode slowly down the freshly plowed street for several minutes.

“So who worked the case?” Louis asked.

“Chief gave all of us bits and pieces.”

“You got any suspects?”

“No.”

“Any theories?”

“Chief hasn’t really asked us for our theories. We sit around and speculate sometimes. The other guys think it’s probably a prior bust, some perp Pryce put away.”

“But?” Louis prodded.

“Pryce didn’t have any big cases. Just little shit. Nothing worth getting shot for.”

The dispatcher broke in with a vandalism call. Jesse keyed the mike and answered that they were on their way.

“Christ, I get tired of this Mickey Mouse shit,” he said, swinging the cruiser into a driveway to turn around.

The drove several blocks and stopped in front of a two-story colonial. An old woman was out front, shivering in a pink sweater. As Louis and Jesse got out, she pointed to a life-sized plastic reindeer lying on the snow.

“Look what they did! Just look!” she said.

Louis looked down at the deer. Someone had knocked the head off and spray painted FUCK YOU on it.

“What are you going to do about it?” the woman demanded, her voice shaking as she clutched her sweater around her.

Louis frowned slightly. “Well, ma’am…”

“I demand you do something!”

Louis started to take out his notebook, just to shut the woman up.

Suddenly, Jesse dropped to his knees and laid an ear to the reindeer’s torso. Then he began pumping with both hands on the deer’s chest. After a few seconds, he stopped, sighed heavily and dropped his head.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jaspers, he’s gone,” he said softly.

She glared at Jesse. “That’s not funny, Officer Harrison.”

Louis turned away to hide his smile.

Jesse stood up, brushing the snow from his pants. “Kincaid, do you have rape kit in the car?”

Mrs. Jaspers set her flabby jaw and wagged a finger. “I’m going to report you, young man. For all the good it does.”

“Just having a little fun, Mrs. Jaspers,” Jesse said.

“That reindeer has been in my family for years.”

“Well, maybe the life insurance can help with the burial expenses.”

Mrs. Jaspers crossed her arms and began to describe the hoodlums. Jesse pulled the cap of his pen off with his teeth and started to write in his notebook. Louis glanced up and down the street. Kids usually liked to see the results of their pranks and he suspected the culprits were lurking nearby. But his eye was drawn to the white house at the corner.

It was a pretty house, two stories with green shutters and trimmed evergreens. It was the kind of house you’d expect to see on “Happy Days”. Only this one had yellow crime tape strung on the porch.

“Jess, you need me here?”

“What?” Jesse said, scribbling in his notebook. He spun around. “Where you going?”

Louis crossed the street and stopped at the black mailbox. Across its side it read: THE PRYCES. He heard Jesse come up behind him.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked.

“I’d like to go in,” Louis said.

“What for?”

“I’d just like to see the scene.”

Jesse looked at the house then shrugged. “Go ahead. “We’ve already been through it a hundred times.”

Louis trudged up the snowy walk and stepped over the crime tape onto the porch. The green wood door was intact but a piece of plywood had been nailed over the hole where the glass window once was. There were black smudges on the edges of the door and the porch railing where they had been dusted.

“What happened exactly?” Louis asked Jesse.

“Pryce came downstairs. He was standing behind the door when he was blasted through the window. It was a twelve gauge. Hit him in the chest. We found Pryce’s gun lying on the floor.”

“He pulled his gun?”

“Never fired it.”

“What time?”

“About three-fifteen a.m.”

“You get anything?”

“One boot print. A neighbor heard the shot. Another neighbor thought he saw somebody in the backyard.”

“Not much to go on,” Louis said, his gaze roaming over the door.

Jesse let out a sigh. “There was one other thing.”

Louis turned.

“We found a card next to the body.”

“A Christmas card?”

“No, a playing card, like for poker. It had this weird drawing on the back.”

“Of what?”

“A skull and bones, you know, like a pirate flag or a poison bottle.”

“What number?”

“Huh?”

“The card…a number or a face card?”

“It was an ace.”

“Of what?”

Jesse shifted uneasily. “Spades.”

Louis watched him for a second then looked away. “Think it was symbolic of anything?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t.”

“You’re sure Pryce wasn’t working on something when he was killed?”

“I told you, we went through all the stuff in his desk but there was nothing but a routine burglary of a tourist cabin. Other than that, I’ve got no clue what Pryce was doing.”

Louis turned to face him. “He didn’t talk to you about what he was working on?”

Jesse picked at an evergreen. “No. He wasn’t big on casual conversation. He never really talked to anybody in the department about much.”

“How long was he with the department?”

“About three years.”

“Three years on a force with only nine men and he didn’t talk to the rest of you?” Louis said.

Jesse was looking at him but Louis couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Pryce wasn’t exactly your basic party animal.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he kept to himself. That’s all it means.”

Louis stared at him. “What about you? Did you like him?”

Jesse shrugged.

“What about the chief? Did Pryce get along with him okay?”

“You’ll have to ask the chief that.”

Louis turned away, looking again at the porch. “Where’d you find the boot print?”

Jesse came up the steps. “Right here, where the overhang kept the snow off. We lost anything out there in the yard because it was snowing like a motherfucker that night.”

“You try to trace it?”

“Yeah, I did. It was from some company called Warden’s. Cheap work boot, thousands of them sold around the state.”

Louis reached for the knob but Jesse caught his arm. “It’s locked. Hold on.” He disappeared around the back of the house. Minutes later, Louis heard sounds inside the house and the door opened. “Went through the basement window,” Jesse said.

The white tile foyer was wallpapered in faded pink roses. The bottom four stairs, carpeted in pale pink, were splattered with dried brown blood. There was a brown stain the size of a dinner plate on the bottom stair.

Louis looked left into the living room. It was empty of furniture, but little things — small plastic toys, dust bunnies and books — were scattered across the rug.

“They left in a hurry,” Louis said.

Jesse came up behind him. “Mrs. Pryce took the kids and went back to Flint the next day. A week later, she came back for the body.”

Louis started up the stairs, Jesse trailing behind. He paused at the door of a blue bedroom. There was a wallpaper border of ducks and some toys on the floor.

“How many kids did they have?” Louis asked.

“Two. One was just a baby.”

Louis went down the hall to the master bedroom. The walls were painted a mint green. There were depressions in the carpet where the king-sized bed had been. On the floor were bits of papers, some beads from a broken necklace and several magazines.

Louis went to the center of the room. He thought he could still smell the scent of aftershave, hear the kids giggling. He closed his eyes and imagined the sound as the blast ripped through the door below. He saw Stephanie Pryce bolting upright in her bed. He turned and saw Jesse staring at him.

“You take this kind of personal, don’t you, Kincaid?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was watching you. It’s like you could see it in your head.”

“Sometimes it helps to try and get a feel for things,” Louis said. He saw something in the closet and went to it. Hanging there were two Loon Lake uniforms, still in their plastic dry cleaning wrappers.

“Damn, she just left them hanging here,” he said quietly.

Jesse came up behind him. “I should take these, I guess. Chief asked me to come get them two weeks ago.”

Louis moved to let Jesse gather up the uniforms, turning to survey the empty room again. He saw a curled photograph on the floor and reached down for it. It was of a small child, light-skinned with a tumble of black curls.

“Is this one of his kids?” Louis asked.

Jesse peered over Louis’s shoulder. “Yeah.”

Louis stared at the picture. “Is Mrs. Pryce white?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you guys consider that could be a motive?”

“Sure. The wife had an ex-husband that we thought was weird but the chief didn’t agree.”

“How long were the Pryces married?”

“Seven years.”

“Long time for an ex to stew about something,” Louis said, slipping the photograph in his pocket. He walked to the window and looked out at the street. There was a little girl making snow angels on the lawn across the street.

“What was Pryce like?” Louis asked.

“I told you. He kept to himself, so none of us really got to know him. He always seemed, I don’t know, uncomfortable with us. He was…intense, off in his own world, a classic Type A personality.”

Louis didn’t answer, his eyes still on the little girl.

“Personally, I always thought maybe he considered himself an outsider because he was black,” Jesse said.

Louis turned. “Was he?”

Jesse hefted up the uniforms. “Shit, no, not from our side,” he said. “I just always thought he needed to lighten up.”

“Lighten up?”

“Christ, Kincaid, you know what I mean. You know, like a guy might make a joke or something, about color or something, but they don’t mean anything by it. But Pryce never saw it from that point of view. He just couldn’t, you know…”

“Lighten up,” Louis said.

Jesse sighed. “No way am I going to get this right.”

“Okay, here’s a soft-ball pitch for you. What kind of cop was he?”

Jesse thought for a moment. “Civil, even to the dirtbags. He was the kind of cop that polished his badges, his buckles and probably his balls with Brasso.”

Louis smiled slightly. Jesse’s mouth curved up gratefully.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jesse said. “Chief’ll ream me a new asshole if he finds out we were here.”

Outside on the porch, Louis held the uniforms as Jesse pulled the door shut and tested it to make sure it was locked.

“Do you think the chief would let me see Pryce’s old case files?” Louis asked.

“What for?”

Louis shrugged. “A fresh pair of eyes maybe.”

Jesse slipped his sunglasses back on and stared at Louis. “We tried, Kincaid. We talked to local criminals, retired criminals, local mental cases, Pryce’s relatives. We even visited the Rambos up at Lake Orion.”

“Rambos?”

“You know, those weird Vietnam vets who live in the woods. Chief thought maybe they just decided to start popping cops. I’m telling you, we talked our asses off. And we didn’t find squat.” Jesse started down the porch.

“Jesse.”

He stopped and turned.

“I wasn’t implying you didn’t try.”

“Sounds like it.”

Louis hoisted the uniforms. “Sorry.”

Jesse turned and walked to the cruiser. Louis followed, laying the uniforms across the backseat. They drove in silence, heading back to Main Street.

Louis pulled the photograph of the Pryce kid from his pocket.

Jesse noticed him looking at it. “I keep thinking of his kids,” Jesse said quietly. “I keep thinking of those kids and hoping they didn’t come down those stairs.”

“Yeah,” Louis said.

They were silent again. The radio crackled as a call came for another unit to assist a man who had fallen on some ice.

“You know,” Jesse said, “more cops are killed during December than any other month.”

Louis didn’t respond. They headed back onto Main, starting into the business district.

“Hey,” Jesse said suddenly. “I almost forgot to show you the most important place in Loon Lake.”

He did a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. “Ground zero,” he said with a grin. “Dotty’s Blue Star Cafe. The state’s biggest deposit of natural gas.” He grabbed the mike. “Florence, this is L-13. We’re 10-7 for a few.”

Louis slipped the photograph back in his pocket. His mind was working back, replaying his job interview with Gibralter, wondering if the chief intended to appoint someone to take Pryce’s investigator job. If he himself had been interviewing for it, he wished Gibralter had mentioned it. Maybe Gibralter had been doing just that and he hadn’t picked up the clues. He had worked for only two men before. His first chief in Ann Arbor had been as easy to read as a telephone book. But his experience with the sheriff in Mississippi had told him that impressions and, worse, assumptions about character, could be dead wrong.

Gibralter…what in the world was he? Soldier? Scholar?

Louis shook his head. Whatever Brian Gibralter was, it was clear that beneath that starchy exterior buzzed a Byzantine brain.

A meeting of the minds. Shit, maybe that was why he had been hired.