P. Parrish - Dead of Winter

“Clothes and food. Cleaned out the kitchen, took all the Dinty Moore and Spaghettios. Took my truck, too.” She puffed furiously on the cigarette.

“Anything else?” Louis pressed.

“His guns. And snowshoes. I remember he went down and got ‘em out of the basement.”

Louis glanced at Bjork then back at Millie. “Mrs. Cronk, may we look at Duane’s room?” he asked.

“You need a warrant for that, eh?”

Bjork pulled a paper from her jacket. “Got it right here, Millie.”

“Well, just don’t tear anything up,” Millie said, falling back onto the couch.

Bjork led Louis up the gaunt staircase, pushing open several doors as they walked the narrow corridor. There were only two bedrooms and a tiny dingy bath. Bjork stepped aside so Louis could enter Lacey’s room.

Louis stopped at the door. It was a small room, smelling of soiled clothes and cigarettes. The wallpaper was a drab yellow with what looked like flowers, but were little figures of cowboys and bucking horses. The furniture seemed undersized — a narrow single bed, a tiny nightstand, a small desk and an old four-drawer bureau with DUANE carved prominently on the front. It was kid’s furniture, a little boy’s room. Until you looked more closely.

Louis’s eyes went from the taut army blanket on the bed to a framed photograph hanging above the desk. It was of three bare-chested soldiers.

He went to the desk. It was covered with junk — papers, a few books, beer cans, an overflowing ashtray and several Soldier of Fortune magazines. Louis carefully sifted through the papers.

There were brochures from gun shows, including one flyer that shouted “Get Yours Before It’s Too Late.” There was an ad for fully dressed AK-47s, “Visa and MasterCard accepted,” and another for flak vests and rifles with infrared scopes. A flyer hawked burial tubes to hide guns and food in preparation for “The New World Order.”

Louis turned his attention to the small stack of books. There was a paperback called How to Create a New Identity and a guide to Third Reich daggers. Another was a poorly bound paperback that detailed homemade bombs. Louis picked up the last book, titled The Turner Diaries, by a man named William Pierce. His gut tightened. He had heard about the book before. It was a novel set in the future, the late 1990s, about a race war in the United States. The hero, Earl Turner, leads a group of Aryan warriors who dole out justice by lynching or shooting Jews, blacks, journalists, politicians, feminists and race-mixers.

“What’s that?” Bjork asked, coming up behind him.

“His bible,” Louis muttered, tossing it back on the desk.

Louis looked back at the photograph of the GI’s and spotted Lacey immediately. He took the photo off the wall. He felt suddenly lightheaded in the stuffy room and went slowly to the bed and sat down with it.

“You okay?” Bjork asked.

He looked up. Bjork was standing at the closet. He nodded, staring at the photograph. It was quiet, except for the scrape of wire hangers against a metal closet pole as Bjork sifted through Lacey’s clothes.

Louis’s glance fell on the nightstand. He reached over and pulled open the single drawer. It was a mess of papers, nothing that looked important. He pulled out a printout from a Radio Shack store in Houghton. It was an instruction sheet on how to program something, followed by a printout of numbers.

His gaze drifted to the top of the nightstand. Its scarred top was filmed with a heavy layer of dust except for one small area about two by three inches. Louis stared at it for several seconds then looked back at the Radio Shack printout in his hand. The spot on the nightstand was exactly the size of a portable, battery-powered scanner. The printout, he realized suddenly, showed the police frequencies for Oscoda County.

“Louis, look at this.”

Bjork came over to the bed and handed Louis an envelope. It was addressed to Lacey in prison, in a childish scrawl. Louis pulled out the letter. It was from Cole, dated December 5, from the juvenile center.

Dear Dad,

I saw it on TV! I am proud of you. I can’t wait until you come see me Sunday. Man that was so cool. Everyone here was talking about how that nigger cop got blowed away. I bet that fucking Gibralter guy is pissed. And scared too now. Right? You must be feeling real good right now.

Louis handed her the letter. She read it quickly. “Bastard,” she whispered, moving away.

Louis felt a tightening in his stomach. He had known when he set out for Dollar Bay that Lacey was the killer. But being here, in his room, breathing his air, made things different. It made Lacey real, more real even than he had been that day in the bar. He slipped the letter into his pocket with the Radio Shack paper.

“So, what’s your area of search?”

Louis looked up at Bjork. She was leaning against the door frame, arms folded over her chest.

“What?” Louis asked.

“Where you looking for him?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Louis said. He looked away, not liking the question he saw in her eyes, namely, “Why the hell aren’t you down there looking for him?”

“I’d bet he’s holed up in the woods somewhere,” Bjork said, pushing off the door.

“He’d freeze,” Louis said.

Bjork shook her head. “Lacey lived outdoors all his life. When he was a kid he built a shack out in the woods. He used to hide in there when Millie went off the deep end on one of her binges.”

“You check it?”

“First thing. No sign of life.”

Louis rose slowly from the bed. He glanced around the room, unsure where to go next. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?” Bjork said.

“How’d his kids get to Loon Lake? Lacey never lived there.”

“His wife did. She was from there.” Bjork frowned. “Shoot, can’t remember her name…”

“But Lacey never lived there?” Louis pressed.

Bjork shook her head. “No, but after his wife finally got fed up and put him in jail for battery she went back down there to stay. That was in early ’77, I think. Then when Duane went up for the assault she left here for good.”

“Any idea where she is now?”

Bjork shook her head. “I had my men check but we can’t find her.”

“Think she’ll come back?”

“Would you?” Bjork paused. “I feel sorry for Cole. My daughter went to school with him.”

Louis gave a derisive sigh. “Oh yeah, Cole’s a real upstanding young man. Real proud of his dad for blowing away a nigger cop.” Louis shut the drawer of the nightstand roughly.

Bjork said nothing. She turned and went to the window. “I was here that first time we came out on the child-abuse complaint,” she said. “I was a rookie.”

Louis turned to look at her. She was staring out the window.

“Cole was only five,” she said. “He had all these little red circles on his back. He was crying and I remember thinking it was chicken pox. Turned out to be cigarette burns. Duane burned him because he wet his bed.”

Louis waited, not knowing what to say.

“The doc said that he thought Cole had been sodomized, too. Probably with a broom handle. But Cole refused to tell us. The doc wouldn’t swear to it in court and we had no proof. Social Services refused to act. Cole was returned to Duane after six months in the system.”

Louis let out a sigh. The room was very still for a few moments.

“Helen,” Bjork said finally. “That was her name. The mother…Helen.” She turned to face Louis. “Let’s get out of here.”

He followed her down the staircase. Bjork went quickly out the front door without a word to Millie but Louis paused at the living room, trying to think if there was anything else to ask the old woman.