08-A Thousand Bones, page 14
Rafsky leaned back in the booth. “You just made an important leap there.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“From mythological beast to human behavior.”
“I was getting to that. There is a medical condition called Windigo psychosis.”
“You’re kidding.”
Joe shook her head. “It’s a mental illness where patients show signs of extreme violence, antisocial behavior, and cannibalistic urges. I couldn’t find much on it in the library, but I’ll keep looking.”
Rafsky pushed his plate aside and pulled the book over, looking again at the moon symbols. “So how do we kill this bastard when we find him—a silver bullet?” he said.
Joe sat back. He was dismissing the Windigo theory—and her. She should have never brought it up.
He looked up. “I’m kidding, Frye.” He smiled. It was a kind smile.
The waitress appeared to refill their coffees. Joe took the moment to wolf down a couple of bites of her sandwich, watching Rafsky joke with the waitress. When he held out his coffee mug, Joe found herself looking at his left hand. He was wearing a gold wedding band.
“All right, so let’s stay with this Windigo psychosis idea,” Rafsky said, lowering his voice when they were alone again. “You’re saying we could have someone killing and eating his victims. That could explain why we haven’t found any graves.”
Joe nodded. “Any theories, sir? I mean, on what kind of person we’re looking for?”
“As I told Ahanu, a white male is my guess.”
Joe stayed silent.
“A white male who abducts a girl, brings her up here and kills her, and leaves her in the woods in winter, knowing her bones will be scattered by scavengers,” Rafsky went on. “He’s a typical sexual predator with no special thoughts or powers. And the carvings are meaningless, probably just stuff done by some Indian trying out a new knife.”
Joe fought to hide her disappointment.
“Theory two,” Rafsky went on. “A white man who abducts, kills, and leaves his victims in the woods. An Indian comes along and finds the remains after they have been partially devoured. The Indian believes a Windigo is at work and leaves the carvings as some kind of warning to other woodsmen.”
Rafsky was looking at her, waiting for her reaction.
“Theory three,” he said. “White killer leaves his victims in woods, then does the carvings himself to make us think it’s related to some weird Indian myth, knowing that the police up this way will quickly arrest an Indian on almost any evidence.”
Joe nodded.
“Theory four. We are dealing with someone who really does believe he’s a Windigo and commits his crimes up here because he feels the land is sacred to his mission. And he carves the moon symbols as a way to feel he is somehow part of the Indian culture.”
“That would make him a true monster,” Joe said.
“A true monster?” Rafsky said. “Do you believe there are such things?”
“I don’t know.”
He offered another of his easy smiles. “Neither do I. Although I’ve had a few cases where I had doubts I was dealing with a human being.”
Rafsky finished off his coffee and started looking for the waitress to get the check. She wanted to ask him more about his cases, but he seemed in a sudden hurry to get going. When he turned back to Joe, his expression had settled back into business mode.
“Okay, I need you to do something for me,” he said.
“Anything, sir.”
“Make some copies of the twelve moon symbols and drive them out to the search team. Tell them to look for anything resembling any of the symbols.”
She closed the library book and started to stack up the photographs. Rafsky tossed a twenty onto the table. They went out into the cold wind, pausing just outside the restaurant door.
“I have a question,” Joe said.
“Ask.”
“You sound convinced this is a white man. You don’t think he could be Indian?”
“Do you?”
“I read an account of an actual Windigo trial among the Ottawas in the 1800s,” Joe said. “A young hunter confessed he wanted to eat his sister’s flesh, so the tribal council condemned him to death. He willingly submitted to a hanging.”
Rafsky pursed his lips. “Case history tells us multiple killers are almost always white men. But if you want to look further into this Windigo thing, go ahead.”
Joe nodded. She put on her hat, tugging it down over her ponytail. “Thanks for the lunch, sir.”
Rafsky was looking at her, head cocked. “One more thing I need you to do.”
“Anything, sir.”
“Drop the ‘sir’ thing.”
Joe blinked. “I…what do I call you, then?”
He looked equally confused for a moment, his eyes wandering out over the street before coming back to her. “Rafsky. I’ll call you Frye. How about that?”
Joe looked down.
“What?”
She looked back up. “It wouldn’t look right. Around the other men.”
He sighed. “Okay. ‘Sir’ in public. ‘Rafsky’ when we’re alone. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir.”
He smiled and nodded to her books. “Get those copies out to the searchers.”
He turned, slumped down into his collar against the wind, and started away. Joe headed in the opposite direction.
“Frye!”
She turned.
“In that stuff you read,” Rafsky said, “you read anything about how they killed Windigos?”
“No, sir,” Joe said.
Rafsky nodded and turned, disappearing around a corner.
She parked the cruiser on the side of the road behind a blue van marked with the Michigan state flag and headed down a hill, the copies of the moon symbols in her hand. Some men were sifting leaves with a large screened frame. She started with them. They listened intently, dutifully studying the moon symbols before folding the copies and putting them in their pockets.
Joe moved on to two men in Michigan state police vests. They were working with rakes and three large metal cans. One looked up as she approached, then elbowed the other.
Their gaze dipped to the patches on her jacket before their faces pained with annoyance. She could guess where it came from. Mack had probably spent a good part of the last few days here, and these men were just tired of dealing with the local idiots.
“Afternoon, officers,” she said.
One of them went back to raking. The other propped his hand on the rake handle and looked at her. His name badge read t. elkins.
“You got something else you want us to do, you need to ask my supervisor first,” he said. “He says we don’t answer to you guys.”
“I know that, Officer Elkins,” she said. “And we appreciate all your efforts. I don’t know what small towns like ours would do without the experts to step in and offer a hand sometimes.”
Elkins stared at her, the half-sneer on his lips fading. “Well, that’s our job,” he said.
“And you do it well.”
He shifted the rake and tipped back his blue ball cap. “You a fully commissioned officer here?”
“You mean, am I a real cop?” she asked.
He gave her a weak grin. “Yeah.”
“Yes,” she said. “Went to the real academy and everything. Just like you.”
He took that with a flex of his jaw, then cocked his head toward the envelope. “What do you have there?”
“You know about the tree carvings, right?”
Elkins nodded. “We’ve been told to watch for marks in trees, yeah.”
She held out one of the copies. “This is exactly what they should look like.”
He took the paper, studied it, and smacked the officer working next to him on the arm. “Nick,” he said, “look at these.”
Nick came up from his pile of leaves, and they looked at the symbols for a moment. “That’s Indian stuff,” he said.
“Yes,” Joe said. “But it’s best if we don’t broadcast that to everyone. They could make the wrong assumptions too early.”
“Right,” Elkins said. He stepped to the nearest tree and took a slow walk around it. He came back, a hint of disappointment on his face. “If there’s more of these out here, we’ll find them for you, Deputy,” he said.
Joe smiled. “Thanks.”
She moved on to the next group of searchers, and then the next, passing out the copies, advising them not to speculate, especially in public. It became increasingly easy to win them over. Even the veteran officers seemed intrigued by the symbols, and she knew that they would not be able to keep them a secret very long. Theo and other reporters would be intrigued, too, and before long, the word Windigo would somehow make it into some headline. And Echo Bay—and Detective Rafsky—could be the laughingstock of the state.
Joe found herself back by the prayer tree, and she paused, wishing she had a warmer jacket. The sun was slipping away, and the eastern sky was deepening in color. The searchers were starting to pack up for the night, and she watched as a trio of officers began arranging sleeping bags inside the back of the blue van.
That surprised her. She didn’t know Rafsky had posted anyone here all night, but it made sense. It was important that they keep wanderers out. But maybe Rafsky was also thinking that with the colder weather, their killer might return.
She turned a half-circle, struck with the feeling that he may have already come back. Maybe lived up here. Or was here even now.
Something cried above her, and she looked up, trying to see what kind of bird it was. The branches were black against the pink sky, the remaining leaves flittering in the breeze like shreds of tissue paper. She heard the cry again but saw no bird, and she had started to look away when something else caught her eye.
She stepped away from the tree, trying to find a different slant of light so she could see it better. It appeared to be just a broken branch caught in the other limbs, but it was awfully thin. And perfectly straight.
She moved again and stopped.
It was no branch. It was a piece of rope. And it was hanging straight down from a thick limb about thirty feet over her head.
She changed position again, and the rope caught a lingering ray of sun and brightened for just a moment. How had they missed it before?
But then she realized the tree had shed most of its leaves in the last couple of weeks. The branches were now exposed.
She stared at the rope, a part of her knowing it could easily be something a hunter used or maybe even the remains of a swing strung up by a kid. But it was so high, and as she looked closer, she could tell the end was frayed.
The hoist. There was a piece of rope attached to the hoist that had also been frayed.
And it came to her in that instant.
Oh, my God…
He hung them.
He tied them to the deer hoist and pulled them up into the trees. She closed her eyes. She could see it. She could see them, tied by the ankles, legs spread, suspended upside down.
She grabbed her radio.
“Augie,” she said, “find Detective Rafsky and have him meet me out here immediately.”
20
The leaves were still green downstate. And she hadn’t noticed it on her last trip, but the air smelled different here, too. It was heavier, thick with the smells of humanity, exhaust, and the dreariness of the coming winter.
Yesterday, after the piece of rope was retrieved from the tree, Rafsky had pronounced it a good enough match to the rope on the hoist to be sent off to Lansing. The hoist itself, underneath its layers of rust, still had a serial number. It had taken Holt three hours of phone work to find the manufacturer. The hoist had been made in Wisconsin but shipped to a sporting goods store called Hunter’s Haven in August 1962. The address was on Middlebelt Road, in Inkster, Michigan.
Now they were in Rafsky’s Chrysler, on the way back to Inkster. Joe had been surprised when Rafsky asked her to come along. So had the others, especially Mack. But when Rafsky explained to Leach that Joe had been the one to make the hoist connection and that he wanted her on the case, Leach had been quick to give his assent.
“That hoist bothered you from the start, didn’t it?” Rafsky said.
She nodded. “It just didn’t seem like something someone would leave behind, but I never hunted, so I didn’t take it any further. Then when I saw that piece of rope in the tree so high up…” She let her voice trail off. “Just a hunch, I guess.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Rafsky said.
He eased the car toward the freeway exit. She listened to the plink of the blinker and looked back out the window.
“So, tell me more about this charm bracelet no one thought was important, either,” Rafsky said.
Joe began with the discovery of the bracelet and why she thought it didn’t belong to Annabelle Chapel. She told Rafsky about her first trip to Inkster, the high school Spartan head, and the bracelet’s possible owner—an unknown girl with a boyish nickname.
“I tried to talk to the Inkster police,” she said. “They were less than helpful.”
“I think they’ll talk to us now,” Rafsky said.
Joe watched the landscape change again, as the cornfields gave way to the brick enclaves of suburbia. The Inkster PD would talk now only because Rafsky was with her, and that bothered her.
“Thank you for coming along,” Rafsky said.
Joe glanced at him. But suddenly she was seeing Brad, standing in the bathroom doorway this morning, dripping with soapy water, a towel held around his waist. You’re going all the way to Inkster with this state investigator?
“I appreciate you asking Sheriff Leach if I could,” she said. “I’m learning a lot.”
Rafsky turned the Chrysler onto Middlebelt Road. Joe knew they were somewhere near Cherry Hill High School.
“Sheriff Leach speaks highly of you,” Rafsky said. “And I haven’t worked with a partner for a long time.”
Partner? She wasn’t sure what to say, and she decided on something bland. “Thank you.”
The Hunter’s Haven sign came into view, nestled between a party store and a Marathon gas station. Inside was a sea of broad shoulders, blue jeans, and ball caps. The place was packed with merchandise: racks bulging with quilted jackets and vests, targets, glass cases of rifles, end caps of boots.
Joe rounded a corner and stopped abruptly. A giant stuffed brown bear loomed in front of her, teeth bared. “Jesus,” she whispered.
Rafsky laughed softly and placed a hand on her back, leading her to the counter. The man behind it was ringing up boxes of shotgun shells. Rafsky eased his way through the bodies to the front. The man’s face crinkled in annoyance when he saw Rafsky’s offered badge, and he whispered, “Shit.” He motioned Rafsky to the corner next to a rack of fishing poles. Joe could feel all the eyes on her as she followed. Rafsky introduced her to the owner, Randall Geren.
“Look, if you guys are here to see my gun registrations again—” Geren began.
“No,” Rafsky interrupted, pulling out a copy of an invoice. “We just want to find out who bought this hoist from you.”
Geren took the paper and rubbed his forehead. “This is from 1962. How am I supposed to remember who I sold something to that long ago?”
“You keep records, don’t you?” Rafsky said.
“Man,” Geren said. “Even if I knew where to find it, it might not have a name on it.”
“We’d like you to look anyway.”
Geren glanced toward the cash register, where the pimply clerk was struggling to find a price on a pair of long johns. He sighed and shook his head. “I’ll look next week when—”
“You’ll look today,” Rafsky said. “Please.”
“What’s the big hurry?” Geren asked. “It’s not like poaching is a real big deal, you know.”
“It’s not a poaching case, it’s a homicide.”
Geren’s shoulders slumped, and his eyes drifted back to the register. “Can you guys cut me some slack and look yourselves? I’m losing money here, and this is my best week.”
“Your records on-site?”
“Yeah, twenty years’ worth. I got audited once, so I keep every friggin’ scrap of paper.”
“You game?” Rafsky asked Joe.
“You bet.”
Geren led them to the back room and unlocked the door, shoving it open with one hand. The walls of the room were yellowed by years of cigarette smoke and dust. A desk, heaped with gun and hunting magazines, took up half the room. A line of file cabinets owned the other half. A deer head looked down at Joe with baleful eyes, a black bra draped on its antlers. Geren saw her looking at it, yanked the bra down, and made a quick exit.
Joe stacked up the magazines and catalogues and dropped them into a box, clearing the desk. Rafsky opened a drawer labeled 1960–1970 and pulled out a manila folder labeled 1962.
“Damn, he’s got the whole year’s worth just crammed in one file,” Rafsky said. “We’ll have to go through all of them.” He separated the invoices into two piles and pushed one over to Joe.
They were standard preprinted invoices, all handwritten. The one she held listed thirteen items. Two shotguns, three boxes of ammo, gloves, hat, primers, and several items that she couldn’t read because the handwriting was illegible. The tiny scrawled serial numbers—when they were even listed—were even harder to decipher.
“This is going to take a while,” she said.
Rafsky pulled up a metal crate and sat down. “This part always does.”
Joe looked around for a crate, and seeing none, she slid her hip onto the desk and started through the invoices.
It took three hours to find it. Joe spotted it because it was the only item listed on the invoice, and it was a special order. “One Hansen’s Heavy Duty Poly Rope Hoist.”
The name on the invoice was Kenneth Snider. It meant nothing. But the address did. Joe stared at the street’s name.
Avondale. She had been there once before.
21
It was the same house she had noticed before, the old stone one that had caught her eye because it had looked so out of place among the cookie-cutter tract houses. But now it didn’t seem quaint so much as creepily convenient.
