Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Read online

  “It’s also worth twenty years for possession.”

  “Then it’s a lucky thing I just handed it over to the law, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m making you the same offer I gave your girlfriend, LaCrosse. The state forest is bigger than a lot of countries. Reefer grows wild in the woods, always has. Now and again my boys harvest a few plants, sell a pound or two downstate, like we have for a hundred years.

  “But lately we’ve been finding a lot more than reefer out there. They’ve been coming across campers and motor homes stashed in the big timber. They ain’t there on no vacation.”

  “Meth labs,” I said.

  She nodded. “Crank crews from downstate are moving into our territory. We’ve already had some trouble. The fellas that cooked up that packet you got in your hand took a shot at one of my boys.”

  “What happened?”

  “I just told you,” she said coolly, “they shot at my boy. What do you think happened? Lucky they were city boys who couldn’t shoot for squat. A bad mistake.”

  “How bad?” I asked.

  She met my eyes for a moment. Her face showed nothing at all. She didn’t expand. Didn’t have to.

  “We found that crystal in their rig after they . . . departed. But that was just one lab. There’s a half-dozen setups out there, and more on the way unless we do somethin’ about it. It could turn into a shootin’ war. Folks could get killed.”

  I suspected they already had, but let it pass.

  “You told Sherry about this?” I asked.

  “We made a trade. She drops the story about a few wood-smoke boys growin’ weed, goes after the big-city gangs that are cookin’ up poison on state land. She shines a light on ’em, they’ll scatter like the cockroaches they are.”

  “Or maybe they break her neck and roll her car down a ravine.”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ on that since I heard.” She sighed. “I liked that girl. She was pretty, she had grit. If I thought one of them cookers . . . But I doubt it was them, Dylan. We hadn’t closed no deal yet. I had the boys make up a map that shows where the labs are now. They move the rigs after every second batch, never stay more than a week or two in one spot. We’ve been keeping tabs on ’em, and they’re all still in place. If they thought they’d been burned—?”

  “They’d be in the wind,” I agreed. “I want that map, Emmaline.”

  “And I’d dearly love to wake some mornin’ in Brad Pitt’s bunk. We’ll both have to settle for what we can get. I’m offering you the same deal I gave Sherry. The map will aim you straight at them crank labs, but in return, you leave me and mine be for a while. If your people come across a reefer patch in the woods, you blink your eyes and keep right on walkin’. Deal?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s the right thing, Dylan. The weed grows wild in the woods. It can soothe your spirit, ease your pain. Meth’s an abomination that rots out your mouth and steals your damned soul. I won’t tolerate it, you understand? You move that scum off my ground, or by God we’ll put ’em under it.”

  “Deal,” I said grudgingly. “You give me the map, we’ll cut you some slack. But tell your people to stand down. No more shootouts in the woods. You leave them to the law.”

  She spat in her hand, we shook, and that was it. Done deal. No contracts, no lawyers. In wood-smoke country, your word is all that matters. And it damned well better.

  “I’m real sorry about that girl, Dylan. Tell her family—”

  “She had no family, Miss Emmaline. She was a foster child. Grew up in the system.”

  “No family?” she echoed. “Not even . . . ? No people at all?”

  Emmaline Gauthier frowned off into the distance, as if searching the hills for answers. Her extended clan was her whole life. I doubt she could even conceive of a world without blood ties.

  “My God, Dylan, that’s . . . godawful sad, ain’t it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It is.”

  Driving out of the hills, I sorted through what Miss Emmaline had told me. And what she hadn’t.

  She’d lied about one thing. Not all of her clan were Robin Hood back-to-nature types, growing weed, living off the land like their forefathers. Two of her punk nephews had been caught on video downstate, buying up pseudoephedrine, a key element in cooking crank. Some of the Gauthiers were involved in the meth trade, and if they were, she knew about it.

  Which made the rest of what she said more likely to be true. She’d given me a map of the sites of the meth labs in the state forest, partly because they were operating on land she considered her personal turf.

  Partly because they were her competition.

  Still, the pound of crank in my pocket proved some of her story was true. Downstate gangs were operating on our ground and with deer season only weeks away, half a million hunters would soon be invading the north. If they stumbled across the crank labs, it could turn into World War Three. A disaster.

  Especially for the Gauthiers. The last thing Emmaline wanted was an army of cops in the state forest. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That made us allies. For now, anyway.

  Had she offered the same deal to Sherry? Probably. Emmaline wouldn’t have wanted her family name in the news. Trading up to a bigger story worked for both sides. It’s a deal Sherry would have jumped at. Her ticket to the big time.

  But had her eagerness gotten her killed?

  Miss Emmaline thought not, because they hadn’t closed their deal. She hadn’t given Sherry the map with the lab coordinates so she wasn’t a danger to anyone yet. I didn’t think so either, but for a different reason. Sherry wouldn’t have gone to that lonely turnout to meet anyone she didn’t know. Certainly not a Gauthier or anyone connected to downstate gangs. Whoever she’d met there was someone she trusted.

  My phone buzzed, breaking into my thoughts. I checked the screen. It was a text, from Zee. Sherry’s apartment. We need to talk. Now.

  I knew the way.

  Sherry’s condo is part of a new, ultramodern complex built on the bones of an old lumber baron’s mansion, a block from Old Town, the original heart of Valhalla. The place felt like a rabbit warren to me, too many people packed into hyper-

  efficient little boxes. Sherry said she liked hearing her neighbors fighting at night or gargling in the morning. Said it made her feel like she was part of a family.

  To me, the place was a glorified motel with yuppie transients for tenants. It would only feel homey to a foster child who couldn’t tell the difference.

  The front door was ajar. I eased in, then stopped, frozen by a sudden flood of memories. The faint scent of Sherry’s perfume. The bland, beige IKEA furniture that had come with the place, and would soon pass to someone else. Sherry should have been sitting at the Swedish birch-and-glass desk, scanning her laptop for breaking stories.

  But now she was the story. And my partner Zina Redfern was at her desk, riffling through her papers. The laptop was gone, probably being analyzed in the basement lab at Hauser Center.

  Zee swiveled in the chair to face me. She wasn’t happy.

  “I called the office,” she said. “The desk sergeant said Rob Gilchrist talked to you, then you disappeared. Without saying where.”

  “Gilchrist didn’t know anything useful. He’s not the guy.”

  “Damn it, that’s not your call, Dylan. You shouldn’t have talked to him at all—”

  “You could have chewed me out over the phone and saved me a trip, Zee. What have you got?”

  “Officially, the investigation is progressing. Off the record, you’d better take a look at this.” She handed me a thin sheaf of papers.

  I glanced through them. Colored bar graphs and percentages. The business heading on the front page was BetaPhase Genetics. “What is this?”

  “A DNA test, of sorts,” Zee said, watching my face. “It’s not for paternity. It’s for genealogy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sherry
apparently learned she was pregnant about ten days ago, and had her doctor administer this test. For paternity, you have to supply DNA from the father. For genealogy, nucleotides from the fetus are enough to do the trick.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “The test can determine the father’s ethnic heritage without his cooperation,” Zina continued. “It’s obvious what she was looking for. Gilchrist is Nordic. Apparently the other candidate wasn’t. The test results are at the bottom of the page.”

  I checked it. It was a ragged bar graph, a mix of northern and southern

  European. The only bar that stood out was Native American, 24%.

  “That would be you, right?” Zee said.

  I stared at the graph, didn’t say anything.

  “The baby’s ethnicity was Native American to the twentieth percentile, so the father would be roughly double that. Forty percent, give or take. That means he’s almost certainly Metis, Dylan. You’d better talk to me.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I felt like I’d been kicked in the belly.

  “Look, this test isn’t definitive,” Zee pressed, “but a paternity test will be. If something happened with you two, you need to get in front of it—”

  “Nothing happened.”

  It was her turn for silence. “So . . . this isn’t you?” she said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Did you find anything else?” I asked.

  “Sherry had an appointment with her OB/GYN for Thursday.”

  “For a checkup?”

  “More than that. Her doctor pleaded patient confidentiality, but I bluffed her. Off the record, Sherry was scheduled to terminate her pregnancy. That’s what I’ve got. What have you got?”

  I thought about lying to her again but knew I’d make a hash of it. I walked out, instead. So enraged, my whole world seemed to be bleeding red around the edges.

  Every cop has a neutral look, a mask we wear on duty. It’s called a cop face. It’s supposed to conceal emotions, from fear to fury. Mine must have slipped as I pulled into Max Gillard’s driveway.

  He was raking a few errant leaves from his bedraggled front lawn as I rolled up. His welcoming smile turned cautious as he walked over to greet me. He glanced around to be sure the neighbors weren’t watching—then he pulled an ugly brute of a revolver from the small of his back, aiming it straight at my head.

  “Get out of the car, Dylan.” He tossed the rake aside.

  “What are you doing, Max?”

  “It’s game over and we both know it. Now get out, walk ahead of me into the garage. Don’t do anything sudden. Or stupid.”

  He eased the hammer back to full cock to underscore the point. A quick read of his eyes changed my mind about trying to bluff him. The gun muzzle gaped wide as a railroad tunnel.

  I marched ahead of him into the garage. He hit a button, the garage door closed, then it was just the two of us in an empty box of a room. A tool bench along one wall, a concrete floor. A dangerous place.

  Desperate men often kill themselves in garages, a final courtesy to their families. Easier for the survivors to clean up the mess.

  The same would be true for a murder.

  I turned to face Max.

  He looked red-eyed and haggard, like he hadn’t slept in a month. Needed a shave. He was wearing a U of M T-shirt and faded jeans. Despite the weather, he was barefoot. I didn’t know what to make of that. But the weapon in his fist was rock steady, aimed at center mass. Military style. Any wound would be fatal at this range.

  “I’ve covered enough crime scenes to know the drill,” he said, brushing his thinning hair back with his free hand. “I know the head games too, so skip the bushwa. I’m at the end of my rope, Dylan. I’ve got nothing left to lose. Clear?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “I know you killed Sherry, Max. I didn’t until I drove up, but I do now. I don’t know why.”

  “It was a mistake. A bad one all around.”

  “She was pregnant. It was your child, wasn’t it?”

  “Another mistake,” he said grimly. “We weren’t really involved.”

  “Apparently you were.”

  “Not the way you think. We were on an out-of-town assignment, closed up the hotel bar, both of us pretty hammered. Maybe she felt sorry for me, I don’t know. It was all wrong, but I was so desperate. . . .”

  He waited for a comment. I didn’t say anything.

  “It was never about sex with her, anyway,” he said. “It was just another way to be the center of attention. Even for a few hours on the road with a has-been cameraman. It didn’t mean a thing.”

  “Until she turned up pregnant.”

  “She called me at home, late. Asked me to meet her at the turnout. All very hush-hush and melodramatic.”

  “She was being careful, Max, protecting you. If Milano found out, he’d can you in a New York second.”

  “She shouldn’t have told me at all! I wouldn’t have known. It was all just a soap opera to her.”

  “Maybe she thought you deserved to know.”

  “To know what? That with my whole life falling apart, one small miracle happens and she was going to brush it off like a breadcrumb?”

  “What did you expect her to do, Max? In her situation—”

  “What about my situation! My wife is dying, I’m a quarter mil in the hole for medical bills, we’re losing the house—”

  He looked away, swallowing hard, his jaw working. But the gun never wavered. He was on a tightrope, stretched taut across the abyss, only a word away from killing me. Or himself.

  Or both of us.

  “Just tell me what happened, Max. I need to know.”

  “She said she was getting rid of it,” he said, looking away a moment. “She didn’t ask what I thought, or what I wanted to do. Everything is falling apart and—I snapped, I guess. Lashed out. I’ve never laid hands on a woman in my life.”

  “You didn’t lay hands on her, Max,” I said, straining to keep my voice even. “You smashed her larynx with a kill strike.”

  “Reflex from the army. A heartbeat later I would have cut my arm off to take it back. But I couldn’t. I can’t. There’s no going back now.”

  “Or for me, Max. People know I’m here.”

  “Actually, I’m counting on that,” he said, his eyes locking on mine.

  “There’s no way out for me, I get that. But I can’t just quit, either. None of this is Margo’s fault, but if I go to jail, she’ll lose everything. She’ll die in some charity ward.”

  I swallowed a surge of bile in the back of my throat. I knew where this was going. It was in his eyes.

  “Somebody has to pay the tab for Sherry,” he continued. “That’s on me. But somebody has to see to Margo too. And I only know one way to do that.”

  “To hell with you, Max! I won’t help you. It won’t work anyway.”

  “Then we’ll both die for nothin’. I’ve already made my choice, Dylan. I thought it would be hard but it’s almost a relief. I’m already in the wind, almost gone. If I have to take you with me, I will.”

  He fired a round. Point blank. The bullet ripped past my ear like a thunderbolt! I flinched, but managed to stand my ground. Max’s eyes were glittering with battle madness. He fired again! And then once more! Punching a hole through the wall, exploding a window behind me. And somehow I stood there. Didn’t move.

  That’s three, I thought. He doesn’t want to kill me and he only has three rounds left—

  But he was way ahead of me. Flipping the revolver’s cylinder open, he spun it hard and snapped it closed. Then he aimed straight at my head and pulled the trigger.

  Click! The hammer fell on an empty chamber. My knees turned to water.

  “Damn it, Dylan, you’ve the devil’s own luck!” he cackled. “Your odds—”

  Pure reflex: I drew my weapon and fired two shots, a double tap to the torso, dead center. The impact sent Max stumbling backward into the tool
bench, then he dropped to his knees.

  I was so enraged I almost fired again. Probably should have. His gun was still in his fist. But he didn’t seem aware of it anymore.

  Blood was bubbling from his mouth. He thrust his face upward, keening for a few final breaths. His eyes met mine and I could read his desperation.

  Kneeling beside him, I took the gun out of his hand, grasping his shoulder to keep him from falling. He sighed, and I realized his eyes had lost focus, as though he were staring off into some immeasurable distance. Perhaps he was.

  In the space of a single breath, he was gone.

  I eased him gently to the concrete floor. A part of me hoped he choked all the way to hell. But he’d been a brave man once, a man who ran into shellfire to get a picture. With his world crashing around him, he’d lashed out in a moment of fury. And in that split second . . . ?

  God.

  Whatever mistakes Sherry and Max had made, they’d paid a terrible price for them. And the worst of it was, it was for nothing.

  Sherry died trying to save the career she wanted so desperately, and Max died trying to provide money for his wife’s care. It wouldn’t happen.

  The syndrome is called suicide by cop. A desperate man provokes a shootout with police, hoping to go out in a blaze of glory. But insurance companies recognize it for what it is. And they don’t pay off for suicide. Period.

  Max’s wife wouldn’t see a nickel. And Sherry would be dismissed as another ditzy blonde with a messy love life. Unless . . .

  I rose slowly to my feet, looking around me, evaluating the garage as a crime scene. I could hear sirens in the distance. Valhalla isn’t Detroit. Gunfire in a quiet neighborhood triggers 911 calls. I had a few moments, not much more.

  A minute later the first prowl car came howling down the street with lights and sirens. It screeched to a halt in the driveway. Two Valhalla patrolmen came boiling out with weapons drawn. I knew them both, but I stepped out of the garage very slowly anyway. Holding my badge in plain view, I placed my weapon on the ground. And then things started happening very quickly.

  The shooting occurred inside Valhalla’s city limits, but with a local officer involved, the state police took over jurisdiction. I spent the rest of the day in a Hauser Center interrogation room with a tag team of detectives from downstate, Bendix and Coughlin.