Steve Hamilton - Blood is the Sky

“No, that was a four-day hunt, over on a different lake,” she said. “Thank God. If it was a seven-day hunt, we’d still be stuck here waiting for them to get back.”

“Well, either way, I’m sure I saw him.”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe he was still here. He’s such an odd young man, I have to say. I never could figure out what made him tick.”

The office door opened and DeMers stuck his head out. “What’s going on out here?”

“We’re just talking,” I said. “If you’re about done in there, Helen would like her office back.”

“We’re done with Mr. LeBlanc,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

This will be loads of fun, I thought. I gave Helen a little smile and stepped up to the plate. As Vinnie came out of the office, he looked cool and unruffled, like he’d spent the last hour just having a nice chat. But that was something Vinnie had in his blood, going back a thousand years. I didn’t have that. Not one drop.

“Right in here, Mr. McKnight,” DeMers said. “Make yourself comfortable.” As he closed the door I thought I heard the moose wailing again.

“Let’s talk about you first,” the senior constable said. He was sitting in Helen’s office chair. Constable Reynaud was sitting next to him in another chair. A real chair. I got the rickety folding chair.

“Those men apparently told Gannon they were gonna have some fun before heading home,” I said. “So they might not have gone straight home. Are you looking for them in Toronto? Windsor, maybe?”

“Constable Reynaud, did you say something?” he said. “I must be hearing things, because I know you and I are the only ones asking questions here.”

“I didn’t say a thing,” she said.

“It’s all part of getting old,” he said. “Half of what you do hear is only in your head.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get the point.”

“Alex McKnight of Paradise, Michigan,” he said, smoothing out a wrinkle in his pants. I was starting to get a little better picture of the man. I was sure all of his socks were neatly folded and organized by color. “Constable Reynaud did some checking up on you. Turns out you were a police officer.”

“Eight years in Detroit,” she said, looking at her notepad. She was another type of cop entirely. The old line about a woman having to be twice as smart as a man to get half the credit was never more true than in a police station. I was sure her partner would do most of the talking, but she would be the one who really knew how to listen.

“More recently,” she said, “you were granted a private investigator’s license.”

“I understand that’s a pretty easy ticket in Michigan,” DeMers said. “As long as you’ve got the years in law enforcement, it’s pretty much automatic. Just fill in a form and you’re in business, no matter what kind of person you are.”

“I’m not practicing,” I said. “That has nothing to do with why we’re up here.”

“In Ontario, it’s a whole different ball game,” he said. “You’ve got to be interviewed by the deputy registrar, provide a list of references. Then they do a thorough investigation, really turn you inside out. If anything looks fishy, you don’t get that license.”

“Yeah, good thing I didn’t apply up here,” I said. “I would have missed out on so much fun.” I was trying very hard to keep cool. It was starting to make my stomach hurt. “Look, I’m not working as a private investigator. I came up here with Vinnie to help him out, because he’s my friend.”

And this is what I get for my trouble, I thought. I help out a friend and I end up getting grilled by another hard-ass cop. It was pretty much automatic. Come to think of it, maybe this senior constable was the only hard-ass cop left in the entire OPP. They wouldn’t let him retire yet, just in case I ever decided to come to Ontario.

“Yes, about that friend,” he said. “About Mr. LeBlanc. He told us quite a tale about his brother Tom, and why he felt it necessary to have him misrepresent his identity. Would you care to tell us your version?”

“He knows better than I do,” I said. “I’m sure he gave you the whole story.”

“Yes, but you know, it was such a compelling story, I think I need to hear it again.”

“I know it looks bad,” I said. “But this business with Tom is really a separate issue, okay?”

“Give me your version,” he said. “And then we’ll talk about how bad it looks, and how it may or may not be related to our situation.”

Our situation, he calls it. I was about to say something cute, but restrained myself. No sense making it any worse. Instead I took a deep breath and gave them a quick rundown, beginning with Tom’s release from prison, continuing through Vinnie’s brilliant plan to let his wayward brother use his identification because it was just the thing to get his head on straight, and ending with our attempt to find out what the hell happened up here. Constable DeMers made an elaborate show of cleaning his glasses while I talked, while his partner hung on my every word and wrote notes on her pad. It may have been a new twist on the old good cop, bad cop thing. Or maybe he just liked clean glasses.

Either way, he put his glasses back on just as I finished. He took a moment to adjust them on his ears, gave his partner a quick glance, and then looked back at me. “Thank you,” he said. “That was illuminating. Although I think you may have left out a couple of details.”

“Such as?”

“Well, number one, where you fit into this whole thing. Surely you must have had some part in it from the beginning.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “If I had any idea what they were trying to do, I would have stopped them.”

“Being a former police officer and all.”

“Former police officer or not, I would have known it was a bad idea.”

“You didn’t know anything about it until he went missing. At which point you dropped everything to come all the way up here to look for him.”

“Vinnie’s my friend,” I said. “Tom’s his brother.”

DeMers sneaked another quick look at his partner. “The LeBlancs are very lucky,” he said. “Most friends wouldn’t go to such extremes.”

“It was no big deal,” I said. “We drove up, we asked some questions, we left.”

“And the other two men? The ones who were up here the day before you?”

“We don’t know anything about them. Gannon told us they were looking for Albright.”

“Two men come all the way up here looking for Albright, and the very next day, two other men come looking for Tom LeBlanc.”

“They were all due back,” I said. “They didn’t show. It’s not so unusual people would come looking for them.”

“And yet, according to Hank, you knew that one of them had a rather large nose.”

“What?”

“You asked him that,” he said. “You asked him if one of the men had a big nose.”

“That’s just because-” I stopped myself and counted to three. “Constable, what are you getting at? Is there some point to this?”

“You were a cop once,” he said. “Put yourself in my place. Four men leave Detroit on a hunting trip. You want to tell me about those men, by the way?”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No. How could I?”

“You know where they live?”

“Detroit. You just said that.”

“Their actual home addresses were all in Grosse Pointe. Does that tell you anything?”

“It tells me they had some money.”

“Four seriously wealthy, well-connected men go on a hunting trip, and they never make it back home. The wives file missing-person reports. We get contacted to look into this end of things, because this lodge is the last place they were seen. We soon find out there was a fifth man on the team. Just enough for a hockey line.”