P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

“Kincaid, where have you been?” he asked.

“Cedarville,” Louis said.

Rafsky frowned, then nodded. “Oh yeah. Rhonda Grasso. You find her?”

“I think so.”

Rafsky stepped aside, and Louis came into the room. The drawn drapes glowed gold with the afternoon sun. The room smelled stale, and there was a pile of clothes on the floor and a scattering of case folders on the unmade bed.

Louis set the wood box on the desk near the window along with the folder holding Julie Chapman’s dental records. He had swung by the station and picked them up before coming to the hotel because he knew Rafsky would want to see hard proof.

Rafsky came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel. “Look, I know I made an ass out of myself last night,” he began.

“Forget it,” Louis said. “You need to see this.”

Louis opened the box and carefully took out the skull. Rafsky’s mouth dropped open, and he came forward. He switched on the desk lamp and stared at it.

“Where’d you find it?” he asked.

“Dancer had a hole carved in the cabin foundation. I found the loose boards.”

Rafsky took the skull and turned it around. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the fracture. “That’s what killed her.”

Louis pulled the dental X-ray from the folder and held them out to Rafsky.

“What’s that?”

“Julie Chapman’s dental records.”

Rafsky took the X-ray, holding it against the lamp. It took him a few moments, but when he looked back at Louis his face was gray and it wasn’t from the hangover.

“Jesus Christ,” Rafsky said softly. “It’s not her.”

Louis pulled the snapshot of Rhonda from his pocket and held it out to Rafsky. “I found this in Chester Grasso’s garage in a bunch of Rhonda’s stuff.”

Rafsky stared at the picture for a long time. Then he set the X-ray aside and, still holding the skull, went to the bed and sank down on the edge.

Louis had known that Rafsky would take this hard. Not just because they had spent three months, countless man-hours, and a lot of money racing down the wrong road. But also because when this got out, Rafsky would be crucified as an incompetent burnout who had tried to rebuild his reputation on the bones of a young girl.

“I should have known better,” Rafsky said.

Louis said nothing.

“I should have waited for the DNA identification on the bones,” Rafsky said.

Louis took off his parka and sat down in the chair across from the bed. Rafsky was still staring at the skull in his hands. Finally he rose slowly and set the skull down on the desk. He went to the window and moved the drape aside, looking out at the fast-gathering darkness.

“Norm,” Louis said. “What do you want to do?”

“We start over,” Rafsky said, his back still to Louis. “And this time we don’t make any fucking assumptions.”

“When’s the DNA identity test coming back?”

“I called the lab yesterday. Our test got pushed back in line by a triple homicide. They said it will be at least three more weeks.”

“Without DNA, we can’t even assume this skull is part of the skeleton found in the lodge,” Louis said. “We can’t even assume whoever died in that lodge died twenty-one years ago.” He paused. “We need to get in to see Dancer again. We need him to admit he took the skull from the lodge.”

Rafsky was quiet, just staring out the window.

“Ross is still the father of the baby,” Louis said. “We at least know that’s a fact. Which puts him back as our number one suspect.”

Rafsky finally turned around. “That certainly explains his behavior when we picked him up at the airport. He waited twenty-one years to take his sister home, and all he could think about was his new house in Georgetown. He knew the bones weren’t Julie’s.”

“When do we bring Chapman back here?” Louis asked.

Rafsky picked up the skull. “Not until we know beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt that this skull is part of the skeleton and that the skeleton is Rhonda Grasso.”

“I’ll go back to Cedarville tomorrow and track down Rhonda’s dental records,” Louis said. “I’ll also stop by the jail and get Dancer to confirm he took the skull from the lodge.”

“We need to know more about Rhonda. Maybe she told someone she was pregnant. Maybe she told someone she was meeting Ross. Did you talk to her family?” Rafsky asked.

Louis quickly summarized what Chester Grasso had said about Rhonda having a wild streak, working summers on the island, and leaving home sometime after graduating from high school in 1969. When Louis mentioned that Rhonda had a brother living in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, Rafsky said he’d contact an inspector he knew in Ontario.

“We still need to link Rhonda with Ross after that summer,” Rafsky said.

“Flowers said it’s common for the Bluff guys to pop and drop the local girls,” Louis said. “Ross said that after Julie rejected him, he screwed around a lot. So maybe when he got Rhonda pregnant she figured she had caught a big fish. When she demanded Ross marry her, he freaked and killed her.”

“Assumptions,” Rafsky said quietly.

“The time line fits,” Louis said. “Ross said he left the island around August 20, and we know that Rhonda was about four months pregnant when she was killed. Our time of death is still late December.”

Rafsky set the skull down on the desk. His eyes drifted to the mess of case folders on his bed. He gathered up the folders, slipped the photograph of Julie back into the Bloomfield Hills missing persons file, and set it aside.

The clanking and hissing of the radiator filled the silence.

“What are you going to tell your boss?” Louis asked.

Rafsky shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. He glanced at his watch, then picked up the phone. But before he dialed he gently put the receiver back in the cradle.

“We don’t tell anyone anything yet,” he said. “Not my boss, not the press. Not even Flowers.”

“We hauled two garbage bags of Rhonda’s stuff back, and he took it back to the station to sort through.”

“Let him. It’ll keep him busy. But don’t tell him anything we’ve talked about.”

And don’t tell Joe, Louis thought. Because he knew what Rafsky was asking him to do. He was asking him to go off the grid and try to clean this up before anyone found out how badly they had screwed up.

“I’ll understand if you want out,” Rafsky said.

Louis realized in that moment that while his head had been telling him he needed to go back to Florida, his heart was pulling for him to stay with Joe. But if he went all in with Rafsky now and this backfired, he didn’t have a prayer of working in Michigan again, not even as a security guard.

A light came on. Rafsky was standing next to the bedside table, his face drawn in the harsh upward glare of the bulb.

And Rafsky? Louis knew he wouldn’t survive.

Louis rose and went to the desk. He set the skull back in its fur-lined box and closed the lid.

“All right,” he said. “I’m in.”

The sun was hovering above the lake, and the wind was cutting across the water like knives. Louis hustled from the police SUV to the porch of the lodge.

He fumbled with the key in the frozen lock, yanked open the door, and stepped inside. It took him a second to catch his breath. It was just as cold inside as out.

The lodge windows were still shuttered, and the entrance hall was dark. He hit the light switch. Nothing. The power had been turned off again.

He opened the front door to let some light in and glanced at his watch. It was only four but it felt later.

First the long drive to Cedarville on icy roads to get Rhonda Grasso’s dental records. On his way back through St. Ignace he stopped at the jail and got Dancer to confirm that the skull he had hidden in his cabin had come from the lodge.