Die a Stranger

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I slept more than I’d thought I would. But it was a thin troubled sleep born of sheer exhaustion, and I awoke the next morning feeling like it had done me no good at all. I got up and looked at the sunlight streaming through the window. It was another goddamned beautiful useless day in Paradise.

When I was cleaned up and ready to go, I drove down to the second cabin. Lou was gone, just like the morning before. Only this time he didn’t come walking up the road. So I got back into the car and drove down past the other cabins, past the cabin with the four women from downstate, up here on their quest to help protect the nesting plovers. Right about then I would have paid big money to have that as my biggest problem, to be going out on the beach and looking for nests instead of whatever the hell the day had in store for me.

I drove past the next cabin, with the family here to visit Tahquamenon Falls and the Shipwreck Museum. Past the next three cabins, all empty that week. I finally found Lou sitting on a rock, just past the last cabin, on the edge of the woods. There was a slight wind that morning, and it was well past black-fly season. Otherwise he would have been sitting there on the rock being slowly eaten alive.

His eyes were closed. He opened them when he heard me coming closer.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’ve come to tell me your great idea for the day.”

“I wish I was. I’ve got nothing.”

He just nodded at that. “It’s been so long since I lived here, I swear, it’s like I almost forgot I’m an Ojibwa. But being here, I don’t know, it makes me remember that I’ve got roots here, going back a thousand years. Like I’m just a little twig on this one big tree.”

“Okay…”

“So I guess I’ve just been sitting here trying to feel where my son is. Or if he’s still even on this earth and part of the same tree.”

“Are you having any luck?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s alive. That’s all I can say.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“You don’t totally believe me,” he said, getting up slowly, “but that’s all right.”

“Maybe I do. I’ve lived around Vinnie and his people for a while now. I’ve even done a few sweats.”

“In that sweat lodge at Buck’s place? Did you have any visions?”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. There had been a time, shortly after Natalie…

“It’s a personal thing,” he said, before I could even start answering. “I’m glad you did the sweats. It makes you a better man.”

He took a minute to shake out the kinks. I had no idea how long he’d been here, but the rock didn’t look too comfortable.

“Come on,” he said. “Now that we know he’s alive, let’s go find him.”

We started out with breakfast at the Glasgow. We might have been telling ourselves that we were being smart and fueling up before starting a tough day, but the truth was that we had no idea what to do or where to go. We had hit a brick wall.

When we were done eating, I gave Janet Long a call. It was something I should have done the night before, I realized, and besides, I probably needed at least one person to give me a hard time before I could call it a good day. But she didn’t pick up her cell phone, so I just left a message.

“That’s my friend at the FBI,” I said to Lou as I hung up. “I was just hoping she might have some new information.”

“Would she actually tell you?”

“No, actually she probably wouldn’t. She’d probably just read me the riot act and tell me to stay the hell away from everything. But I honestly don’t know what else to do at this point.”

“Maybe we should go back down to the Kaisers’ house,” Lou said, “see if we missed something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything that might point us in the right direction, to wherever they went. Just some little thing we might have missed.”

“You sound like Leon now.”

“Who’s Leon?”

“He’s a local private-eye wannabe,” Jackie said, wiping down the bar, “but he’s twice as smart as Alex.”

“Not today, Jackie.”

“No, wait, I’m twice as smart. Leon is three times as smart. I get that mixed up sometimes.”

“I said not today,” I told him. “Leave us alone, please.”

Jackie walked away, mumbling.

“No, seriously,” Lou said. “The Leon guy. Do you think he can help us?”

“He’s on vacation,” I said. “Camping with his family.”

“Damn.”

“But we can think like him,” I said. “Hold on. What would he say if he was here right now? He’d say we should go over everything we did, step by step, and figure out the one small thing we’re missing.”

“What we did? Or what we think Vinnie and Buck did?”

I looked at him.

“I’m just wondering,” he said, “if we try to follow their footsteps instead of ours, it might get us closer to what we’re looking for.”

“Okay, so I’m Buck,” I said. “These people from downstate come up here. I know these people, a little bit. Or if I don’t, at least my dealer in the Soo does. He can vouch for them. Anyway, they want me to help them do this thing over at the airport. Maybe I know the whole story, maybe I don’t. But they come pick me up.”

“Your truck is still at your house,” he said. “So yeah, they had to come pick you up.”

“Well, plus I’m the driver.”

“Or at least the navigator.”

“Or the navigator. Either way, they need me in the vehicle if we’re going to take the back roads. So that’s the plan. We go to the airport, we’re expecting the plane to land. Then unexpected company arrives, and all of a sudden I’m in a bad situation I didn’t ask for. Things get out of hand fast, somebody takes out a gun, and now everybody’s shooting.”

“You take one in the armpit.”

“I do. I’m bleeding, probably in mild shock, even if the wound isn’t that bad. Just the whole situation has me freaked out of my head. I have to get out of there.”

“Why not take their vehicle?”

“Because it’s theirs. Because this is a multiple-murder crime scene and I don’t want to drive away with their vehicle, their keys, their license plate…”

“Either that,” he said, “or you just ran away. Then you called later.”

“That could be,” I said. “I’m bleeding and I’m walking down the side of the road. I don’t want to hitchhike and have somebody ask me what happened. Somebody who will read the paper and make the connection later.”

“Okay, so your good friend and second cousin or whatever the hell he is comes and picks you up. I’m Vinnie now. That’s something I’d actually do, right? Phone call in the middle of the night? I’d come pick you up?”

“That’s something you’d do, yes. You might give me hell about it, but you’d do it in a second.”

He nodded at that, thinking about his son. Thinking about what kind of man he was, this man he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

“So I’m still Buck and I’ve got this cousin down by the Saginaw rez,” I said. “He’s a vet, but I know he can patch me up. It’s three hours away, too. Just far enough for us to lie low for a couple of days.”

“I drive you all the way down there.”

“Three hours, like I said. That’s nothing. You drive me down there and the good doctor fixes me. By then I’m already starting to wonder what we should do next.”

“I’m telling you we should go to the cops, tell them everything that happened.”

“That’s probably what you’re saying, right. I’m a little more worried about it. I saw those men trying to hijack the operation. I saw the shootout. I was the only man to walk away from it. I’m thinking I’m in a world of trouble if the wrong people find out about that.”

“But how would they? Everybody who was there is dead.”

“They’d find out. It might take a while, but they would. Especially if I go talking to the cops about it. If I tell them I was there, put it down on the record, hell, I might as well go rent out a billboard.”

“Okay,” he said, “so I leave a message with the Bay Mills police, just to let everybody know we’re okay. How come I don’t call anybody else?”

“Because you don’t want to deal with the questions,” I said, starting to get worked up about it again. The man was helping Buck deal with a serious situation and he didn’t call me, I thought. I’m going to kick his ass all up and down this bar when I get him back here.

“Then you make a call yourself,” he said. “To your friends the Kaisers. The people who got you in this mess in the first place. They’re the people who sent the two men to the airport. It was their idea for you to be there, too.”

“Right. It’s all on them. I call them, and I tell them they have to help me. They say, don’t worry, everything’s gonna be cool. We’re gonna take care of everything.”

“So that’s two days ago,” he said. “We spend one more night down there and then you make one more call to the Kaisers. That’s yesterday morning. Then we’re off.”

“We’re off in a hurry.”

He thought about that one. “We’re in a hurry because…”

“Because the Kaisers aren’t stupid. They know they’re in as much danger as we are. Maybe even more.”

“Okay, so we drive to their house, right?”

“Yes.”

We both stopped there.

“Vinnie and Buck left in a hurry,” I said, abandoning the role-playing game, “and they drove to the Kaisers’ farmhouse in Cadillac.”

“Meaning that the Kaisers must have been waiting there.”

“So they could all leave together.”

“Right.”

“They’re convinced that they’ve got cold-blooded killers bearing down on them,” I said, “and yet they wait for Vinnie and Buck to get there before leaving?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They would have gotten the hell out of there in two seconds. Told them to meet them somewhere. Or something.”

“It makes no sense at all.”

“And yet they were in a hurry to leave,” he said. “Vinnie and Buck were, I mean. I don’t imagine it’s because they wanted to make teatime at the Kaisers’ house.”

“Jackie, where’s the phone?” I said.

He looked up from the other end of the bar, where he was cleaning some glasses.

“I thought you told me to go away.”

“Just give me the phone.”

He came down the bar, grabbed the phone from underneath, and put it on the bar top.

“You know where the phone is,” he said. “You could have gotten it yourself.”

I dialed Information and asked for Dr. Carrick’s number in Mount Pleasant. When it connected, it was answered on the second ring by one of the assistants.

“I need to speak to Dr. Carrick right away,” I said. “Tell him it’s Alex McKnight, the man he talked to yesterday.”

“I’ll see if he’s free.”

I waited a couple of minutes, tapping my fingers on the bar top. Lou got up and stretched, walking to the window and then back when he heard me start speaking again.

“Dr. Carrick, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said when I finally got him on the line. “I just wanted to ask you one more question. Actually, before I do that, is there anything else in general you might have remembered about Vinnie and Buck being down there, anything else they might have said or done that you didn’t tell us yesterday.”

“No, Mr. McKnight, I think I told you everything I could recall.”

“Okay, then if you can just think back to yesterday morning. They’re about to leave and they say they’re in a hurry, right?”

“Yes…”

“Try to remember everything as it happened. They’re packing up the truck…”

“Well, there was nothing to pack, remember. It’s not like they had luggage or anything. They just got in and left. They were still wearing the same clothes.”

“Okay, good. These are all good details. They get in the truck, and you said you wanted them to stay and have lunch at least?”

“Yeah, but they said they had to get there by a certain time.”

“Wait,” I said. “See, this is new. There’s a difference between being in a hurry just because you want to get somewhere as fast as possible, or because you have to be at a specific place at a specific time.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah. But I thought I told you that yesterday.”

“No, but that’s okay. That’s why the police will interview somebody a couple times, because you’ll often remember something different every time you tell the story.”

I flashed back to Detroit, and one particular witness who was trying to describe an armed robbery at a bar. There were two men, and one of them held a shotgun while the other one cleaned out the register. I kept asking the witness if the second man was armed and the witness kept saying no. It wasn’t adding up, because we found a second gun on the scene. A revolver which apparently didn’t belong to anybody. Finally, my partner asked him the same question and the witness said no, he wasn’t armed because “armed” means you’re carrying a gun and this man had the revolver tucked in his belt.

We joked about that one for a few days, but it was a good lesson. My partner was in the ground now and I was years away from being a cop, but that same lesson was about to get learned, one more time.

“They had to be there by a certain time,” the doctor said. “That’s all I remember. I didn’t ask about it, but I guess I was just assuming it was because they had to make a certain ferry. So they just got in the truck and-”

“Wait, stop,” I said. “What ferry?”

“The ferry that they had to take to get to the island. I thought I told you that yesterday.”

“No, you didn’t. Which island?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t say. I was assuming Mackinac.”

Lou leaned in closer, hanging on every word now. At least my side of the conversation.

“When they left your office,” I said, “they drove to Cadillac. That’s where we found Vinnie’s truck.”

“Cadillac? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I said that when we were… Wait.”

I closed my eyes and flashed back to one more interview, this one just the day before, in the doctor’s office. I tried to reconstruct the whole conversation, word for word. Something I’m usually pretty good at doing.

He’s telling us about them leaving. I say they went to Cadillac…

No, I was about to say it. That’s when Lou jumped in and asked the guy why he let them leave if he knew they were in some kind of trouble. We would have gotten there if Lou could have just kept his cool.

“I think we got a little derailed yesterday,” I said, giving Lou the eye. “So I guess this part of the story is new to both of us. You say they were going to an island, but they didn’t say which?”

“Let me think… No. Like I said, I was assuming Mackinac, because, well, it’s summertime in Michigan. What other island do you go to?”

“There’s Drummond Island,” I said. “Right down the road here.”

“Ah, okay. So they could have been going there, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t say. They just said they were going to the island, and yeah, that’s what Buck said. He’s standing there by the truck. I can see him in my mind. They were going to the island and they had to make the ferry. I was assuming that these people they were going to meet, that they were going to meet them there.”

“But they didn’t actually say that?”

He thought about it. “No, they didn’t. I was just assuming. But you said Vinnie’s truck was in Cadillac.”

“That’s right.”

“So maybe they went there first. And then they went to the island.”

“Which would explain everything,” I said. “It all adds up.”

“I guess it does, yes.”

“Doctor, I can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s my pleasure to help, Mr. McKnight.”

I hung up the phone and asked Jackie for the Michigan map. When he brought it over, I spread it out on the bar. I grabbed a pen and made a big star over Mount Pleasant. Jackie complained that I was ruining his map but I ignored him. I made a second star over Cadillac.

“They were all on their way to an island,” I said. “They were in a hurry to catch a ferry.”

“Maybe they’ve got a summer house on Mackinac,” Lou said, looking over the map. “We know they’ve got some money.”

“Good point.”

I put a question mark next to Mackinac Island.

“It would be a hell of a place to hide out, too,” I said. “A million people in the summer. No cars. Just horses and bikes. If you were in one of those houses up on the hill, how’s anybody going to find you?”

“So there or Drummond Island. Lots of summer places there.”

“Right,” I said, marking Drummond Island with another question mark. “That’s one more island and one more ferry.”

“How about Beaver Island? You ever been there?”

“No, I don’t believe I ever have. It’s a lot less developed, right?”

“Yeah, but there is a ferry, so…”

“You’re right,” I said, sliding over to that side of the map and putting a third question mark next to the big island in Lake Michigan.

“There’s a ferry at Sleeping Bear Dunes,” he said, moving down the Lake Michigan shoreline. “It goes out to the Manitou Islands.”

“But those aren’t even inhabited. Unless they’re hiding out in a tent.”

“Yeah, I think we’re talking about one of the big three,” he said. “Let’s just go to all of them. If we start now, maybe we’ll find them by Christmas.”

“If we have to pick one,” I said, “it’s gotta be Mackinac, right? It’s got the most people by far. So just from a probability standpoint…”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Jackie said, “but why would you have to hurry to catch a ferry to Mackinac Island?”

We both just looked at him without saying a word.

“The ferry leaves every half hour. If you miss one, no big deal.”

“It’s the same story with Drummond Island,” Lou said. “It’s such a quick ferry ride, those guys are running it back and forth every few minutes.”

“That leaves one island,” I said. I didn’t have to point. All six eyes were already drawn to it. Beaver Island, with the long ferry ride across Lake Michigan. Even in the height of the season, that ferry might go across two or three times a day. Maybe four times on a Saturday.

“Yesterday was what,” I said, “Thursday?”

“They’ve got two ferries on Thursday,” Jackie said. “Mondays and Thursdays, those are the slow days. I had a guy in here once asking about it.”

“Do you remember what times?”

“I think the last one went out at like three or something. Maybe two thirty, I don’t know. I remember thinking you better like being on Beaver Island because it sure sounds easy to get stuck there.”

“That’s a ferry you’d really have to hurry to get to,” Lou said.

He didn’t have to say anything else.