P. Parrish - Dead of Winter

“About two years,” Jesse said. “Fred trained me. I liked the guy. Everybody did. Even the Chief.”

“The chief?”

Jesse nodded slowly. “They were friends, sort of. After Fred retired, they went fishing together sometimes.”

They fell silent.

“Jess, about the cabin,” Louis began.

“Drop it,” Jesse said sharply, and walked off toward Gibralter.

Louis frowned as he watched him go. What was going on here? What had caused Jesse’s reaction in the cabin? And why was he refusing to go back in? Then it came to him. Jesse hadn’t been sick from the smell. He was scared. Two of his colleagues had been gunned down. And for all any of them knew, whoever had done it wasn’t finished.

Gibralter and Jesse came back to Louis. “What’s going on?” Gibralter said, his eyes scanning the shanty.

“This is where Lovejoy was shot,” Louis said.

Gibralter’s eyes registered surprise. “Here? How do you know?”

But he didn’t wait for an answer. He stepped around Louis and looked inside the open door of the shanty. “Kincaid, hand me your flashlight,” he said.

Gibralter stepped inside, directing the flashlight over the chair and the jagged hole with its bloody edge. Then he slowly backed out of the shanty and turned to face Jesse and Louis.

“Fred was a good man. I could count on him,” Gibralter said tightly. He looked away abruptly, his eyes going back to the cabin, then up at the pines rimming the lake.

Louis watched him carefully, looking for a reaction, not just of a chief for a downed comrade but for a man mourning a dead friend. But Gibralter’s face remained composed and Louis didn’t know whether to feel pity or admiration.

“I want this entire area secured and searched thoroughly,” Gibralter said. “From the cabin to those trees.”

Louis scanned the shoreline. The area had to be at least a mile square. He caught Jesse’s eye and knew he was thinking the same thing. Gibralter was grasping at straws.

“Harrison, has Cedar Springs been notified?” Gibralter said.

“Yes, sir.”

Gibralter knelt and brushed a layer of powdery snow away from the ice. Visible on the surface were a few dark spots Louis thought at first might be blood. Gibralter stood, took a deep breath and blew it out in a white vapor. He looked at the sky.

“Anyone know the weather forecast?”

“Six inches by midnight,” Louis said.

“Well, we damn well better try to preserve something,” Giubralter said sharply. “I need these spots intact. Harrison, go get a broom from the cabin. I want the snow around this shanty carefully removed and the ice checked for evidence all the way to the shore.”

Louis was going to say that there had been two hard snows in the last week. But judging from the look on Gibralter’s face, logic wasn’t going to go very far.

“Want me to go get a fucking tent, too?” Jesse said.

Louis glanced at him, stunned by his sarcasm.

Gibralter glared at Jesse. “Do what I say, Harrison.”

Jesse trudged off across the ice.

“And watch where you step!” Gibralter hollered, standing and brushing the snow from his hands. He turned and peered back in the shanty’s door.

“Was there a card?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes.”

“Where was it?”

“Next to his chair, under the crossword.”

“What?”

“He was working the crossword puzzle, sir, when he was shot.”

Gibralter’s eyes grew distant. “Crossword,” he said softly. He turned away, his gaze wandering out over the lake. Louis watched his profile. Whatever emotion Gibralter was allowing himself to feel he wasn’t going to let anyone else see it.

After a moment, Gibralter turned back to face Louis. “Anything else?” he said brusquely.

Louis hesitated.

“You’ve got something on your mind, Kincaid. What is it?”

“It’s Jesse, sir,” Louis said.

“What about him?”

“When we were searching the cabin, Jess got pretty shaken up. I just think he — ”

“I know Harrison better than you do, Kincaid,” Gibralter interrupted.

Louis nodded. “I know. It’s just that, well, I think he’s scared by all — ”

“Scared?” Gibralter shot back. “He can’t afford to be scared. None of us can right now, Kincaid. There’s a fucking cop killer out there.”

“Chief, with all due respect, I don’t think you can fault a man for being — ”

“Two men, two of my men are dead!” Gibralter yelled. “I want this fucker found now! I don’t care what it takes! If it means Jesse gets down on his hands and knees and examines every fucking inch of this ice, or you climb every fucking pine tree in those woods then you’ll do it, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Louis said.

Gibralter turned and started back to shore. He stopped and turned to Louis.

“Find him, Kincaid,” he said.

It was almost eleven. Still no sign of her.

He had stood out on the porch for an hour, waiting for her to emerge from the fog that covered the lake. Finally, he went in. Now he sat slumped on the worn sofa, staring into the dying fire. A yellow legal pad lay on his lap, filled with notes about Pryce and Lovejoy.

He couldn’t get the images out of his head. Fred Lovejoy’s face as he lay frozen in the ice. Pryce’s face as he lay dead on the stairs, captured in the crime-scene photo.

And Jesse face. He couldn’t shake off that look on Jesse’s face after he had run from the cabin. Some cops were lucky enough to go their whole careers without pulling a gun or seeing a corpse, and living in a place like Loon Lake Jesse had probably never seen a dead man before Pryce. No, not just a dead man — a dead cop.

Louis let out a breath, thinking now of Gibralter. No matter how distraught he was about his friend Lovejoy he had been too hard on Jesse. Jesse had a right to be afraid. Hell, they all had a right to be afraid.

He stared vacantly at the television. The sound was off, the images throwing flickering shadows over the walls. He pulled the afghan up around his shoulders but nothing seemed to warm him. The cold came from somewhere inside him. It had started in Lovejoy’s cabin when he had seen that dog. It had built in the shanty when he saw the bloody jagged hole in the ice. And it had finally overtaken him as he stood in the bitter cold and listened to Gibralter’s command.

Find him.

Find what? A monster who had murdered two men. A deviant who might kill again. A phantom who was as ephemeral as the fog. Louis tossed the legal pad aside, his feeling of impotence growing. He didn’t know what he was doing, where to start with this investigation.

Louis reached for his glass of brandy but it was empty. He pushed himself off the sofa to get a refill. As he trudged back from the kitchen, he spotted the box of books in the corner. He stared at it, something pricking his memory.

Setting the glass down, he knelt and started rummaging through the books, pulling out the blue paperback had had been looking for. The title was The Criminal Mind by Dean Franklin.

Picking up his brandy, Louis returned to the sofa and turned the book over to the back cover. Franklin’s penetrating eyes stared back at him, transporting Louis immediately back to the lecture hall at University of Michigan. The elective class was called “Investigative Analysis,” taught by Franklin, a retired FBI agent who believed that killers could be apprehended by understanding their psychological makeup.

Louis had taken it because he couldn’t get the elective he wanted, and he remembered thinking, like all the other students, that it was all hocus-pocus bullshit and that Franklin was a washed-up desk jockey put out to academic pasture. He had only half-listened to the craggy old agent who droned on about the brave new world of “criminal profiling.”