P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

“I don’t have a fucking clue if we can get phone records from 1969,” Rafsky snapped into the phone. “Have you ever heard the term ‘Give it a shot’?”

Rafsky listened for a moment before he launched into a tirade about getting ahold of the Mackinac County DA Greg Thom and securing a quick search warrant for Cooper Lange’s home in St. Ignace. Louis knew Rafsky was hoping to find anything to put Lange in a bad light. Maybe Lange had lied and had kept Julie’s letters. Maybe he had lied about not knowing she was pregnant.

Rafsky hung up and dropped into the chair. “Good job with Lange,” he said.

“Thanks,” Louis said.

The phone rang, but Rafsky let it go. He picked up the pile of pink message slips and spent the next minute sorting through them. Finally he tossed them aside and tipped his chair back. The man looked exhausted.

“Do you think he killed her?” Rafsky asked.

“I don’t know,” Louis said.

Rafsky swung his chair around to the murder board. He stared up at it for a long time.

“I blew it,” he said.

Louis understood. If Rafsky hadn’t been so aggressive, Lange might have kept talking. He could have told them more about Rhonda Grasso and other kids who had been involved with Julie. Lange clearly needed to unload something, and if they had kept him talking through the night he might have even confessed to killing Julie.

“Look,” Louis said, “something will break. We could find something of Julie’s at Lange’s place. Your investigators in Ann Arbor might uncover something about Ross. Hell, the skull still might turn up at Dancer’s cabin.”

Rafsky pushed from the chair and reached up to straighten the photograph of the fetal bones.

“I have to get this right,” he said. He turned to face Louis. “I don’t want my last case tainted ten years down the road with an overturned conviction when it comes to light we arrested the wrong man.”

“Your last case?”

Rafsky picked up a set of stapled papers. “These are my retirement papers. I filled them out weeks ago. I just haven’t turned them in yet.”

“You having second thoughts?” Louis asked.

“Maybe,” Rafsky said. “I don’t know. It’s just hard to pick up the pen and make it final. Once a decision like this is made you can’t go back.”

There was a knock on the door, then it opened.

“Hey, guys, am I interrupting anything?”

Flowers. The last time Louis saw him was in the medical center more than two months ago. Flowers had been unconscious then, and there had been no time for Louis to say a proper good-bye before he left for Echo Bay.

Flowers’s voice was soft and raspy, but Louis was surprised how good the guy looked. There was a healthy glow to his face and a fresh trim to his mondo-grass hair. He was wearing jeans and a turtleneck instead of his uniform, and Louis remembered what Clark had said last month when Louis called to check on the chief’s health. Flowers’s release from the St. Ignace hospital had been complicated by a respiratory infection and his recuperation at home had been long and hard.

“Come in, Chief,” Rafsky said. “It’s still your office.”

Flowers shut the door behind him. He gave Louis a big smile and stuck out a hand. “Hey, man, what are you doing back?”

Before either Louis or Rafsky answered, Flowers noticed the murder board. He moved around the desk toward it. It took almost a full minute before he turned back to Rafsky.

“What’s all this?” Flowers asked.

“Things are heating back up, Chief,” Rafsky said.

When Flowers glanced back at the board, Louis saw something flit across his face, like the chief knew he had never been a big part of the investigation and the shooting and his long recovery had shoved him even further into the margins.

Flowers pointed to the drawing of Cooper Lange. “Who’s that?”

“Our latest best suspect,” Rafsky said.

“His name is Cooper Lange,” Louis said. “He was Julie’s boyfriend her last summer here.”

“How the hell did you find him?” Flowers asked.

Louis gave him a rundown of the visit to Dancer and how Lange had run when they confronted him in the bar.

“Who’s this?” Flowers asked, pointing at the drawing of Rhonda Grasso.

“A local girl who worked on the island. She was Julie and Cooper’s go-between to keep their relationship secret.”

Flowers nodded. “Makes sense. A girl like Julie would have to keep it a secret. She wasn’t a pop-and-drop.”

Rafsky looked up. “A what?”

“It’s what the Bluff boys call it when they take up with a local girl.” Flowers shook his head. “But for a Bluff girl like Julie to be with a local kid like Cooper? It just doesn’t happen, even now.”

The office was silent as Flowers went back to looking at the murder board. Louis wondered if Flowers thought it was odd that Ross’s picture was up there, but the chief probably thought Rafsky was just keeping track of the case’s cast of characters. Louis and Rafsky had agreed not to tell Flowers about the incest.

“I heard they set Danny’s trial date,” Flowers said.

“Yeah, but his lawyer is still fighting for psychiatric commitment,” Rafsky said. “And if that happens, he’ll be right back here in a year.”

Flowers was staring at Dancer’s mug shot now. “I know in my heart Danny didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “And I know he’s different than us and doesn’t understand things like we do.”

He pulled down the collar of his turtleneck, revealing a jagged red scar. “But every time I look at this thing in the mirror I don’t know if I can forgive him.”

No one said anything. The awkward silence lengthened.

“I need a drink,” Rafsky said suddenly.

“I need some food,” Louis said.

“Chief?” Rafsky asked.

Flowers looked surprised Rafsky had invited him.

“My treat,” Rafsky added.

Flowers cleared his throat, wincing. “Okay, but don’t you guys laugh at me when I cut my burger up into little tiny pieces. I lost some of my swallowing room when they patched me up.”

* * *

The table was a mess. Three empty burger baskets, seven empty shot glasses, five empty beer bottles, crumpled wet napkins, cigarette butts that had tumbled from Rafsky’s ashtray, and a scattering of pretzel crumbs.

Except for a big bearded guy in a flannel shirt at the bar, they were the last three customers in the Mustang.

Louis picked up his Heineken and looked around the table. Flowers was wasted. He had announced when they got here that this would be his first drop of alcohol since the shooting, and it hadn’t taken him long to make up for lost time.

Rafsky was drunk, too, but he was holding it well. Just sitting there hunched over the table, turning his bottle as he talked shit about his bosses, his days as a trooper, and his first car-a 1949 Kurtis in which he had “deflowered” his future wife during the summer of 1964. It wasn’t easy, either. It was a fuckin’ two-seater.

His side of the conversation finally deteriorated to passing around pictures of his granddaughter, whose name Louis couldn’t remember at the moment.

That prompted Flowers to pull out a picture from his wallet of his twin girls. Rafsky peered at it, grunted out a compliment, and handed it back to Flowers. Flowers turned to look at Louis.

“Show him yours,” he said.

“My what?”

“A picture of your daughter.”

Rafsky’s head swiveled to Louis. “You got a daughter?”

Louis hesitated, then fumbled for his wallet. He felt an odd swell of pride as he pulled out the picture from behind his license. Rafsky took it, stared hard at it, then even harder at Louis before he gave it back.