P. Parrish - Dead of Winter

Louis looked left into the living room. It was empty of furniture, but little things — small plastic toys, dust bunnies and books — were scattered across the rug.

“They left in a hurry,” Louis said.

Jesse came up behind him. “Mrs. Pryce took the kids and went back to Flint the next day. A week later, she came back for the body.”

Louis started up the stairs, Jesse trailing behind. He paused at the door of a blue bedroom. There was a wallpaper border of ducks and some toys on the floor.

“How many kids did they have?” Louis asked.

“Two. One was just a baby.”

Louis went down the hall to the master bedroom. The walls were painted a mint green. There were depressions in the carpet where the king-sized bed had been. On the floor were bits of papers, some beads from a broken necklace and several magazines.

Louis went to the center of the room. He thought he could still smell the scent of aftershave, hear the kids giggling. He closed his eyes and imagined the sound as the blast ripped through the door below. He saw Stephanie Pryce bolting upright in her bed. He turned and saw Jesse staring at him.

“You take this kind of personal, don’t you, Kincaid?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was watching you. It’s like you could see it in your head.”

“Sometimes it helps to try and get a feel for things,” Louis said. He saw something in the closet and went to it. Hanging there were two Loon Lake uniforms, still in their plastic dry cleaning wrappers.

“Damn, she just left them hanging here,” he said quietly.

Jesse came up behind him. “I should take these, I guess. Chief asked me to come get them two weeks ago.”

Louis moved to let Jesse gather up the uniforms, turning to survey the empty room again. He saw a curled photograph on the floor and reached down for it. It was of a small child, light-skinned with a tumble of black curls.

“Is this one of his kids?” Louis asked.

Jesse peered over Louis’s shoulder. “Yeah.”

Louis stared at the picture. “Is Mrs. Pryce white?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you guys consider that could be a motive?”

“Sure. The wife had an ex-husband that we thought was weird but the chief didn’t agree.”

“How long were the Pryces married?”

“Seven years.”

“Long time for an ex to stew about something,” Louis said, slipping the photograph in his pocket. He walked to the window and looked out at the street. There was a little girl making snow angels on the lawn across the street.

“What was Pryce like?” Louis asked.

“I told you. He kept to himself, so none of us really got to know him. He always seemed, I don’t know, uncomfortable with us. He was…intense, off in his own world, a classic Type A personality.”

Louis didn’t answer, his eyes still on the little girl.

“Personally, I always thought maybe he considered himself an outsider because he was black,” Jesse said.

Louis turned. “Was he?”

Jesse hefted up the uniforms. “Shit, no, not from our side,” he said. “I just always thought he needed to lighten up.”

“Lighten up?”

“Christ, Kincaid, you know what I mean. You know, like a guy might make a joke or something, about color or something, but they don’t mean anything by it. But Pryce never saw it from that point of view. He just couldn’t, you know…”

“Lighten up,” Louis said.

Jesse sighed. “No way am I going to get this right.”

“Okay, here’s a soft-ball pitch for you. What kind of cop was he?”

Jesse thought for a moment. “Civil, even to the dirtbags. He was the kind of cop that polished his badges, his buckles and probably his balls with Brasso.”

Louis smiled slightly. Jesse’s mouth curved up gratefully.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jesse said. “Chief’ll ream me a new asshole if he finds out we were here.”

Outside on the porch, Louis held the uniforms as Jesse pulled the door shut and tested it to make sure it was locked.

“Do you think the chief would let me see Pryce’s old case files?” Louis asked.

“What for?”

Louis shrugged. “A fresh pair of eyes maybe.”

Jesse slipped his sunglasses back on and stared at Louis. “We tried, Kincaid. We talked to local criminals, retired criminals, local mental cases, Pryce’s relatives. We even visited the Rambos up at Lake Orion.”

“Rambos?”

“You know, those weird Vietnam vets who live in the woods. Chief thought maybe they just decided to start popping cops. I’m telling you, we talked our asses off. And we didn’t find squat.” Jesse started down the porch.

“Jesse.”

He stopped and turned.

“I wasn’t implying you didn’t try.”

“Sounds like it.”

Louis hoisted the uniforms. “Sorry.”

Jesse turned and walked to the cruiser. Louis followed, laying the uniforms across the backseat. They drove in silence, heading back to Main Street.

Louis pulled the photograph of the Pryce kid from his pocket.

Jesse noticed him looking at it. “I keep thinking of his kids,” Jesse said quietly. “I keep thinking of those kids and hoping they didn’t come down those stairs.”

“Yeah,” Louis said.

They were silent again. The radio crackled as a call came for another unit to assist a man who had fallen on some ice.

“You know,” Jesse said, “more cops are killed during December than any other month.”

Louis didn’t respond. They headed back onto Main, starting into the business district.

“Hey,” Jesse said suddenly. “I almost forgot to show you the most important place in Loon Lake.”

He did a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. “Ground zero,” he said with a grin. “Dotty’s Blue Star Cafe. The state’s biggest deposit of natural gas.” He grabbed the mike. “Florence, this is L-13. We’re 10-7 for a few.”

Louis slipped the photograph back in his pocket. His mind was working back, replaying his job interview with Gibralter, wondering if the chief intended to appoint someone to take Pryce’s investigator job. If he himself had been interviewing for it, he wished Gibralter had mentioned it. Maybe Gibralter had been doing just that and he hadn’t picked up the clues. He had worked for only two men before. His first chief in Ann Arbor had been as easy to read as a telephone book. But his experience with the sheriff in Mississippi had told him that impressions and, worse, assumptions about character, could be dead wrong.

Gibralter…what in the world was he? Soldier? Scholar?

Louis shook his head. Whatever Brian Gibralter was, it was clear that beneath that starchy exterior buzzed a Byzantine brain.

A meeting of the minds. Shit, maybe that was why he had been hired.

Louis lingered on the porch until the moon scuttled behind a cloud, then he went back inside the cabin. He stood for a moment, looking at his suitcase sitting on the bed then went to the kitchen. Grabbing a Heineken from the refrigerator, he popped it open and took a long drink as he surveyed his new home.

The placed was a little shabby but not bad for two hundred a month. The moment the real estate agent had unlocked the door Louis had liked the place. The furniture was utilitarian, standard-issue rental stuff. But the wood floors, rough-hewn walls and log-beamed ceiling had a certain rustic charm. It was the fireplace that had cinched it, though, a huge stone thing dusty with soot and cobwebs. The agent was barely out the door with the signed lease before Louis was out back gathering wood.

It took four tries but now a fire was blazing, softening the dark corners and dissipating the mildew smell with the sweet scent of burning wood. Louis looked down at the rug in front of the fireplace. It was a bear rug, dusty brown and pocked with moth holes. He had found it rolled up in the closet. It smelled like dirty sweat socks but he doused it with some foot powder from his ditty bag and it had settled down. The taxidermist had given the bear a maniacal grin, and as Louis stared down into the animal’s glassy eyes, he found himself smiling.