Misery Bay

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was after ten o’clock at night when we got back to the Soo. I dropped Maven off at the state post so he could pick up his car. He told me he’d be going over to the Ojibway to find the agents before they went to bed. He had to tell them this one small thing he had figured out, this glimpse into the past. No matter how late it was, he would not be able to sleep until he told them.

I wasn’t sure if he’d tell them the exact spot he was standing when he had his little epiphany. But what the hell, maybe he would.

I didn’t think I could sleep either. It felt like I was missing some essential part of the story, something that I should have seen already, but I couldn’t even begin to figure out what that might be.

There was only one person to talk to. So instead of heading back home, I went to the other side of town. To the movies.

The parking lot was jammed. On a frozen Friday night in Sault Ste. Marie, it was either the movies or a bar. I went inside and saw Leon scooping a tub-sized bucket of popcorn and then squirting what looked like yellow motor oil on top of it. He gave the bucket to a couple of teenagers and they gave him money in return. Then he went on to the next customer. I sat down at one of the little tables and waited. Before long, the customers all disappeared and the lobby was quiet.

“Alex!” Leon said, finally noticing me.

“You got a minute?”

“Yeah, why not?”

He came out to the table. He winced as he sat down and leaned forward to stretch out his back.

“Too much standing in this job,” he said.

“Leon, I don’t want to keep bothering you every time I get stuck on something.”

“You’re not bothering me. You know I love this stuff.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I didn’t want to go down that road again, so instead I just launched into my full update. All of the things we had learned since the last time I had spoken with him. Going out to Iron Mountain to talk to Mrs. Steele, finding her husband and his girlfriend both dead in her house in Wisconsin. Then finding out about Haggerty’s daughter and that cheerful little trip out to talk to him. The troopers watching his driveway around the clock. Then this whole new information dump from the state police records, leading right up to Maven’s almost-breakthrough that very evening.

“We just can’t find that one link,” I said. “That one person who crossed paths with all four of them.”

“I think you’re drowning in the details, Alex. You’re not the one who’s gonna find it, remember. Maven’s the one with the memories, and the FBI agents have all the raw data.”

“So I’m useless. Yeah, thanks, I feel better now.”

“You’re the neutral party here,” he said. “You’re the one who can sorta stand above everything and see it all from a thousand feet.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Think about it. Do your own little profile here.”

“That sounds like something the FBI would do.”

“It’s all common sense, Alex. Just think, okay? Think like him, whoever’s doing this. Why are you doing all this?”

“Well, let’s see…”

“Think, but don’t overthink. Just say the first thing that comes to you. Right from the gut. That’s usually pretty close to the truth. Why are you committing these crimes against these people?”

“Revenge.”

“Okay. For what?”

“For what they did to me.”

“What did they do?”

I hesitated. “They arrested me. They took me away.”

“Why are you killing their children first?”

“Because I want them to suffer before they die.”

“So you really must hate them.”

“Yes.”

“So why are you making these deaths look like suicides?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. At first, I thought it was because that would make it worse somehow. But if I just took them away and then killed them-”

I stopped.

“What is it?” he said.

“Because it happened to me. That’s why I’m doing this, Leon. Because the exact same thing happened to me.”

His eyes lit up. “That’s good. Because you suffered the same loss. So put it all together now. What’s the whole story?”

“I was arrested and put in prison. My son killed himself. Or my daughter. While I was in prison.”

“Is that really enough of a reason?”

“They died alone, from their own hand. They killed themselves while I was rotting away in a concrete box.”

“So now you’re having your revenge,” he said. “All these years later, right? Why have you waited so long?”

“Because I just got out of prison.”

“Maybe.” I could see Leon thinking that one over. “Or there might be some other reason why now is the right time.”

“Yeah, maybe I had other reasons to wait. Other things in my life that I didn’t want to lose. But maybe now there’s nothing stopping me.”

“Exactly. So how old are you?”

“Well, if I was arrested what, like ten, eleven years ago…”

“And you already had a son or daughter at the time.”

“I’m guessing this suicide probably happened fairly close to the time of the arrest,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t necessarily connect the two in your mind.”

“Okay, so your son or daughter must be of age already. Old enough to commit suicide, anyway.”

“If you add it all up, you’re talking about somebody who’s at least in his midforties?”

“Or older, right.”

“But hold on.” I flashed back to what Maven and I had already talked about. “We’re talking about taking my revenge against the cops who arrested me. What about the judge and the DA and hell, for that matter, even the defense attorney who obviously didn’t defend me too well?”

“From everything you’ve seen, would you say this guy is smart?”

“Smart, yes. Ingenious even, if you think about what he did to Haggerty’s daughter with that bag full of helium.”

“Would you call him methodical? Is that a word you’d use?”

I thought about it. “Yes. Methodical.”

“So who’s to say those other people, the judge and the DA and the defense attorney, aren’t further down on the list?”

“What, are you saying…”

“He’s starting at the beginning. And the beginning is what?”

“The cops who arrested him.”

Leon didn’t say anything else. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

“This guy is a smart, patient killer,” I said. “And he may only be getting started. That’s what we’ve got here.”

“It would seem so.”

“But Maven can’t even remember him.”

“Doesn’t matter who remembers him. He remembers them, that’s all that matters.”

Some kid in his twenties, wearing the same uniform as Leon’s, came up to us right about then and asked him to get back to work.

“Hey, give us a break,” I told him. “This is important.”

“Not as important as changing the syrup in the Coke machine,” the kid said. “Not when he’s on the clock, anyway.”

I could have put him right through the window, but Leon put up his hand and told me to take it easy.

“We’re about done here,” he said to the kid. “I’ll go change that syrup.”

“Leon, you don’t belong here.”

“It’s only temporary. Don’t worry about it. Go help catch that guy and then come back and tell me all about it.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Leon. Yet again.”

“Just be careful, all right? My wife is right, this is no job for a middle-aged man with too much to lose.”

“Tell her hello,” I said. I thanked him again and left. As I went back out the cold air hit me in the face and I couldn’t help thinking to myself, Leon’s got something to lose, all right. A wife and two kids. Me, I’ve got nothing left. So maybe I’m the right man to go chase this killer after all.

When I got to the state police post the next day, Maven’s old friend Sergeant Coleman was waiting for me with a cup of coffee.

“I heard you guys weren’t exactly the most welcome guests yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I hope you can understand why it might have seemed that way.”

“It’s okay. I know this is a tough situation for everybody.”

“We’ve got everyone in the state on notice. We’re all trying to figure out who this guy could be.”

“You know I was a Detroit cop myself, right?”

“So I heard.”

“I had the chance to interact with a few state cops along the way, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better police force in the world.”

I was leaving out a few personality issues I might have run into, but yeah, overall it was the truth. He thanked me for the compliment and I thanked him for the coffee. Then I joined Chief Maven and the two FBI agents in the interview room.

Agent Fleury was talking to somebody on the house phone while Agent Long and Chief Maven sat on the other end of the table, going over a fresh pile of papers. Maven looked a little better today. Maybe he’d actually gotten a few hours of sleep. Agent Long gave me a quick smile.

“Good morning,” she said. I thought I heard a little extra something in the way she spoke to me today. Either that or I was just imagining things.

“Looks like you guys have already gotten started,” I said. “Did I misunderstand the schedule?”

“We wanted to get an early jump, because we’ve actually got something to work with today.”

“Oh yeah?”

I sat down next to her.

“Our team in Detroit has been looking at this overnight, and they’ve identified three men who were all arrested by Steele and Haggerty, right around the time when Chief Maven and Razniewski were still on the force. As you know, we’ve established that Chief Maven has at least a partial memory of being up at the St. Ignace post at some point. Although we still don’t see anything reflected in the official records.”

“Sometimes cops assist on arrests but don’t show up on the official reports,” Maven said. “You know how it is with paperwork. Some days you just don’t get it all done the right way.”

“I do remember that much,” I said. “I used to hate that part of the job.”

“We’re trying to cross-reference arrests that resulted in significant jail time, and beyond that we’ve got a general profile that would suggest a suicide in the family right around that same time.”

Exactly what Leon and I were talking about last night, I thought. I was going to bring that up as soon as I got here today, but it looks like Agent Long is already way ahead of me.

“It’s not easy to make those connections, because the information isn’t in one place. But we have people in the Detroit office working on it.”

“You say you have some hits already?”

“The three men arrested by Steele and Haggerty working together, yes. All in the right time frame, as I said, and in all three cases, there was a suicide in the family, within the following two years. The only sticking point will be tying in Razniewski and possibly Chief Maven.”

“It sounds like the right place to start,” I said. “So who are these guys?”

“Well, here’s what we have…”

She shuffled back through her papers.

“Candidate number one,” she said. “Andrew Parizi, age forty-five at the time of his arrest. His vehicle was stopped by Steele and Haggerty just short of the bridge. He was driving a station wagon and they could see all this stuff piled up in the back, lots of boxes and a few television sets. He went racing up to the toll booth, it sounds like, but they caught him before he could go through. He became combative when they tried to cuff him, so they could already add on felony resisting to the felony eluding, to whatever they ended up finding in his car.”

“What did they find?”

“The stuff they’d already spotted. The televisions and the stereo equipment and a bunch of other stolen items. Power tools, jewelry. There’d been a string of break-ins in Cedarville and out on Drummond Island. Vacation homes, mostly. This guy was loaded up and heading downstate with it, so they were able to connect him to most of the robberies. He was already a repeat offender, so he got sent away for five years. He did three, it looks like, but about a year and a half in, his son Patrick killed himself. He jumped out a window.”

“What was his name? Andrew Parizi? Does that mean anything to you, Chief?”

“No. Agent Long and I have already been through this. The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Neither Razniewski nor Maven were involved in the arrest,” she said. “That much we know from checking their daily logs. That was pretty early on in Razniewski’s career, actually, so he was definitely in the car with Sergeant Maven all day. From the logs, we can determine that they never went farther north than Mount Pleasant. Of course, we’re still keeping open the possibility that they may have had some form of contact with our eventual killer. On a different date, or maybe even out of uniform.”

“So it’ll be hard to eliminate anybody,” I said. “But okay, who’s next?”

“Clyde C. Wiley. You may have heard of him before.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, no.”

“He’s an actor,” Maven said. “You’ve probably seen him on TV.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even watch that much TV anymore.”

“This guy’s been around forever,” Agent Long said. “He did a lot of biker movies, right after Easy Rider came out. Did you ever see Road Hogs? That was probably his biggest.”

“I vaguely remember the title,” I said.

“He was kind of a maniac back then, even for Hollywood. He got busted a few times for possession, got in a big fight on a movie set, ended up getting thrown out of town for a while. He did some low-budget horror movies, until he finally worked himself back into television. Whenever some crime show needed somebody to play a psycho tough guy, they’d give him a call. He’s got real wild eyes, long hair, tattoos, arms like a body builder. I’m sure you’ve seen him a million times.”

“Honestly, no. I don’t own a television.”

She looked at me for a moment like she was trying to decide what planet I’d come from.

“You really don’t watch TV,” she said.

“If there’s an important game on, I’ll catch it at Jackie’s place. That’s about it.”

“Okay, whatever. Point is, Mr. Wiley’s had a long and colorful relationship with law enforcement, going all the way back to before he even went to Hollywood. He grew up here in Michigan, down in Bad Axe.”

“‘The Bad Boy of Bad Axe,’” Maven said. “I remember when he got arrested.”

“He was in his sixties at the time of this arrest,” Agent Long said. “Now he’s seventy-two.”

“But you say Steele and Haggerty popped him?”

“Flying down I-75. Apparently, he had assaulted somebody and a tip was called in. They were waiting for him at the bridge, ended up chasing him all the way down to Indian River, until they finally ran him off the road. Then he got into it with both troopers.”

“So what happened to him?”

She picked up another sheet of paper.

“Besides the assault, there was a gun in the car. Traces of cocaine, a few bottles of pills. Tack on the eluding, obstruction, another assault or two on the officers, and just for good measure, he was on probation back in California and wasn’t supposed to leave the state. So with the violation and the prior offenses, he ended up getting fifteen. Did seven and a half. During that first year his daughter killed herself. It was hard to track that down because she had a different last name, but we found her.”

“How did she do it?”

“She cut open both wrists,” Agent Long said, then she drew an imaginary line down the length of her forearm. “She even knew to do it the long way to bleed out faster. There was no chance of saving her.”

“So what do you think, Chief? This Wiley made it a few miles downstate at least. Any chance you were involved?”

“I told you, I recognized the name right away,” Maven said. “But if anybody assisted on that arrest, it would have been out of the Mackinaw City post, or maybe Gaylord. And hell, if it was me helping to bust a celebrity, I’d certainly remember it.”

“Not to mention he’s kind of old now to be killing people,” Agent Long said. “And according to the logs, neither Razniewski nor Maven had any activity that day at all. It just says ‘Admin.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means running around doing nonsense,” Maven said. “We were at the Lansing post, remember, so every once in a while we got to go run errands for the governor.”

“Didn’t he have a regular attachment for that?”

“The governor had four state guys on a permanent assignment, yes, but you know how it is. There’s always somebody from the mansion who needs a ride somewhere, or something stupid like that. You can guess who usually got picked for that exciting duty.”

“So maybe you guys were close to the arrest that day,” I said, “while you were running an errand. Isn’t that possible?”

“If we were in on that arrest, it would be in our daily logs, believe me. And I told you, I’d remember it, anyway.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “So I guess that’s strike two. Who’s the third candidate?”

“Here’s where it takes a little different turn,” she said. “Candidate number three, a man named Kenny Fraser, was actually a city police officer in St. Ignace. He was charged with a number of aggravated assaults, apparently committed while on duty, and as you can imagine, it would have been tough for one of the other officers in town to arrest him. I mean, the whole force couldn’t have been more than a half dozen officers, right? So they called in the state police to make the arrest. You can guess who did that.”

“Steele and Haggerty.”

“Apparently, Fraser made quite a scene about it. I’m told he even swore to both Steele and Haggerty that they’d pay for breaking the cop code. No matter how long it takes, this guy’s yelling as they’re taking him away, he’ll get even. At least that’s what the guys at the St. Ignace post are saying. We found one sergeant this morning who’s been around long enough to remember it.”

“What kind of assaults are we talking about?”

“We don’t have that information yet. The sergeant can’t quite recall. But if you think about it, a former cop knows how to use a gun, knows how to access information about other cops…”

“What about it, Chief?”

“It’s ringing a faint bell,” Maven said. “But again, I might have just heard about this guy through other channels.”

“The suicide?”

“His son, the same day his father got arrested. Sixteen years old. Hanged himself in the garage.”

“A hanging,” I said. “Just like our first suicide.”

“On the day of this arrest, it looks like Maven and Razniewski were riding separately. Maven’s log shows activity south of Lansing, Razniewski’s north of Lansing.”

“That sounds promising. How far north?”

“There’s nothing logged north of St. Johns, but there’s a fair amount of time not accounted for. It doesn’t look like Trooper Razniewski was a ticket-writing machine, if you catch my drift.”

“I told you guys,” Maven said, “he hated that part of the job.”

“Okay, so maybe he ended up having some contact with this guy Fraser.”

“We don’t know that yet. We’re still tracking all this down.”

“We’ve got a line on Parizi,” Agent Fleury said as he hung up the phone. “We’ve already got a man heading out to talk to Wiley. The ex-cop, Fraser, is still an unknown.”

“What about Dr. Sizemore?” Long said. “Is he on his way up?”

“He’ll be here in about two hours.”

“Who’s Dr. Sizemore?” I said. Whoever he was, he must have hit the road pretty damned early in the morning to be two hours away by now.

“He’s our psych man in Detroit. He’s going to try hypnotizing Chief Maven to see if we can help him remember any possible connections.”

“You’re actually going to try hypnosis?”

“Why not?”

I looked over at Chief Maven, who was sitting there with his usual unhappy troll face, or rather an even more unhappy version than usual on account of everything that was happening around him. If I knew anything about the chief, I knew that he liked to be in complete control of things, which would probably make him the worst possible subject in the history of hypnosis.

“I know,” she said, apparently understanding exactly what I was thinking. “But we have to try.”

“All I can say is good luck, then.”

“I’m not sure what else we should do right now,” Agent Fleury said. “We’ll wait to hear what happens with those three candidates. When Dr. Sizemore gets here, we’ll need a quiet room with absolutely no interruptions. Alex, we’ll have to ask you to leave at that point. The doctor and Chief Maven will need to be alone.”

“No problem,” I said. “I understand.”

He looked like he was about to say something else to me. He gave Agent Long a quick look and then he turned away. Of course, I knew all too well that they were continuing to break the rules every day, having me here in these meetings. I had done my part and by all rights I should have been debriefed and shown the door. I knew Chief Maven still wanted me here, as strange as that would have seemed to me just a few days ago. Would that be enough? Maybe this was mostly Agent Long’s doing. Either way, I knew it could end at any second.

“Let me look at those files again,” Maven said. “Maybe I’ll remember something on my own, before the stupid goddamned headshrinker gets here.”

This poor Dr. Sizemore, I thought. He has no idea what he’s about to run into.

Many hours later, when the sun was long gone and the temperature had dropped back toward zero, I was sitting in front of the fire at the Glasgow, a Molson in hand, but my only beer of the night. I was thinking about Haggerty again, sitting alone in his cabin, his life in ruins around him. All his tears cried out and nothing left at all.

That’s when the door opened up and the cold air came blasting in. Chief Maven came over and joined me in front of the fire. He didn’t sit down. He kept standing and he was looking into the fire and warming himself.

“How did the hypnotism go?” I said.

“He should have tried to hypnotize a cinder block instead. That might have worked a little better.”

“Some people don’t hypnotize well.”

“Some people have actual working memories, too.”

“This isn’t about your memory, Chief. It was at least ten years ago.”

“I came face-to-face with a killer, McKnight, and I can’t even remember him.”

“Sit down.”

He did, but he left his coat on.

“What happened with your three candidates? Did the agents find out any more information?”

“Yes, they did.”

I waited a beat. But he didn’t continue.

“Chief, what did they find?”

“Parizi’s living in Flint. He’s the guy who got busted with all the stuff in his car. He’s on parole now for another bust, and apparently his parole officer can vouch for his whereabouts.”

“His parole officer doesn’t live with him.”

“No, but he sees him often enough. If you do the math on him getting all the way up here and back, it just doesn’t work.”

“Okay, what about the actor? What was his name?”

“Clyde C. Wiley? Our seventy-two-year-old actor? He’s living in Bad Axe again. I guess he’s been working on a film, except he’s actually the director this time. Which means, apparently, that he’s working almost around the clock. He’s got people around him at all times, and there’s just no way he could have slipped away for more than a few hours at a time.”

“The third man?”

“Fraser, the ex-cop.”

I waited again.

“The ex-cop,” I said. “What happened with him?”

“He did his time. Finally got out of prison about a year ago.”

“Okay, that’s perfect. Then what?”

“Then nothing. He’s dead. He moved to Florida and died in a car accident, about six months ago.”

“They’re sure it was him?”

“Yes.” He still hadn’t looked at me. “They’re sure. He’s in the ground.”

I put my head back and closed my eyes.

“All this running around,” he said, “and it comes to nothing. We’re right back where we started.”

“We’ll keep looking.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I could hear the defeat in his voice. Something I never expected to hear. Of all the things you could say about this man, good or bad, I would never, ever expect him to give up on anything.

“You need a drink,” I said.

Maven didn’t answer me. He kept staring into the fire while outside in the cold dark night the snow began to fall.

A hundred and fifty miles to the west of us, Lieutenant Dean Haggerty sat in his own chair, with no fire to warm him. At the head of his long driveway, through the blanketed trees, a lonely state trooper sat in his idling patrol car with the heat turned up as the falling snow melted on his hood.

None of us knew it at that moment, but there was one other person sitting in another vehicle, either down the road or on another road entirely but within walking distance of the house. Staying awake, staying warm, and waiting for the right time to move.

And we’re rolling…

… Slow approach to the barn. Nice and easy.

… Look at that light. Is that perfect or what?

… The camera loves the snow, you gotta admit.

… Careful now. Don’t rush the shot.

… Close to the wall. Let the camera feel it. That’s right.

… Hello, young Brandon! Mind if I borrow this for a second?

… Boom, just like that. Oh, that’s beautiful. Look at that.

… Bravo, young sir. That’s how you do it. That’s how you own a scene, people.

… Stay on his face. Drink it in. That is so goddamned perfect.

And cut.