“Came back early.” Phillip paused. “So, what do you need?”
“Why you think I need something?” Louis asked.
“A visit and a phone call in the same week?” Phillip laughed. “Not your usual M.O.”
“Okay, okay, cut the sarcasm,” Louis said, laughing softly. “I’ll call more often, I promise.”
“Just busting your chops. How are you?”
Louis shifted the phone to his other ear, looking at his bandaged hand. “Fine. Getting a cold, I think.”
“I won’t tell Fran.”
“Good.”
Louis closed his eyes. For a second, he considered telling Phillip Lawrence the truth, that he was drinking too much, putting his fist into trees, finding Kotex pads in his locker, and jumping every time he heard the snap of a tree branch. But he couldn’t. And Phillip Lawrence knew he couldn’t.
“Listen, Phillip, I was wondering if I could pick your brain about something,” he said.
“You’re asking me for help? That’s a switch.”
“It’s about the case. Remember I asked you about my suspect being military? Well, it turns out I was right. I have his military record and a couple things don’t make sense.”
“I’ll help if I can, Louis.”
Louis picked up the top paper. “What’s LRRP?”
“It stands for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. We called them lurps. Your guy was in Vietnam?”
“Yup.”
“The lurps were the guys dropped by helicopter behind enemy lines to scout, not kill. They were usually left in there a week, ten days, before being picked up. Real testosterone cases.”
“Tough on the nerves,” Louis said.
“You had to be half nuts to be a lurp. If you made it out alive you were completely nuts.”
Louis was making notes on the margins of the report. “This guy made sergeant, but was a corporal by the time he got out.”
“On a general, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“You’re never promoted to corporal, you’re demoted,” Phillip said. “He probably did something to piss of a superior.”
“He got something called an Article 15.”
“That’s a non-court martial punishment. Probably a refusal of orders. I knew a guy like that in Korea. He was a good soldier but he was getting short — near discharge time — and one day we were ordered to go into this village. Well, the guy refused. Just put down his gun and refused.”
Louis shook his head slowly. “But this man, he looked to be on a straight track. He made sergeant, got some citations….”
“The military changes men, Louis,” Phillip said. “Often for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Some guys just finally flip out. My C.O. called them cracked jugs. They’re okay, except for a tiny crack that you can’t see. You kept filling them up, pouring in more water and everything’s fine. Then one day, without warning, the crack gives way.” Phillip paused. “You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Louis, are you sure you’re all right up there?”
Louis leaned on the nightstand. “I’m okay.”
There was a pause.
“Louis?”
“I gotta go, Phillip.”
“Louis…be careful,” Phillip said.
“I will.” He hung up the phone and sat there for a moment. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. A cracked jug.
A sudden vision of the advertisements in Lacey’s room came back to him. The infrared scopes. Long-range rifles. Had Lacey progressed from a shotgun to more sophisticated weapons? Were his days of walking up to his victims and killing them face-to-face over?
He felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. Louis got off the bed, grabbed a shoe and went to the heater. He banged on the gauge several times. The heater gave out a wheeze and a blast of hot air. Louis crawled back on the bed, turning back to Lacey’s personal history.
After his discharge, Lacey returned to Dollar Bay. Cole was born a year later. Here, Bjork had inserted her own notation that Lacey couldn’t find work and moved in with his mother, Millie. Louis thought of Millie’s gloomy little two-bedroom house in Dollar Bay. Three adults and three kids crammed into that dump. Who wouldn’t go crazy?
Louis read on. Back in Dollar Bay, Lacey resumed his criminal history. An arrest in a Houghton bar fight, an arrest for vandalizing the office of a Veteran’s Administration agent. Two years later, he assaulted a doctor at a VA hospital in Marquette. He served three days when charges were dropped by the local DA; the judge directed Lacey to remain on lithium.
Louis glanced at Lacey’s mug shot. Lacey’s eyes stared back, with the flat sheet of ball bearings. Louis went on reading.
There it was: the first domestic violence report. Christmas Eve, 1970. A drunken Lacey had thrown all the Christmas presents out into the snow, smacked Helen, and then passed out on the sidewalk. Bjork was the responding officer. In June 1972, Lacey put Helen in the hospital with a smashed jaw and two broken ribs. She, in turn, finally put him in jail. He served sixty days.
A year later Lacey was arrested again, this time for child abuse. Louis picked up the small Polaroid attached to the report. It was a close-up of Cole’s thin shoulders with six small red marks. The cigarette burns. Louis tucked the photo back into the file. He read a brief synopsis of the unsubstantiated sexual assault charge. As Bjork had said, Social Services had removed Cole Lacey from the home but he was returned six months later.
Up to this point, Lacey had kept to beating up women and kids. What had finally turned him into a murderer? What had finally caused the jug to break?
Louis returned to the rap sheet and finally reached February 1977 and the assault that had resulted in Lacey’s prison sentence.
Lacey had said it was a bar fight where he had just pulled a knife. Lacey had pulled a knife, all right, slicing open an old man’s abdomen five times. He was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in Marquette State Prison. Bjork had included a brief report on Lacey’s prison record. It was surprisingly unremarkable.
Louis drained the Dr Pepper and leaned back against the headboard. But Lacey had been busy in prison, real busy. Somehow, he had found out about the raid. Maybe Cole had told him, maybe his mother. But Lacey had found out that his son and daughter had been killed by Loon Lake cops. And for two years, he just sat in his cell, with nothing to do but wait and plan his revenge.
Louis closed the file. There was a knot in his stomach, the same one he had felt earlier back in Lacey’s room but with a slight nausea creeping in. He knew Lacey now. And Lacey knew them. Lacey knew who he wanted to kill, knew where they lived, when they were on duty, even their call numbers. All Lacey had to do was pick his time.
Louis slipped off the bed and walked to the window, throwing it wide open. The sound of laughter drew his eyes down to the street. His room overlooked downtown Houghton. The snow was heaped in eight-foot drifts along Main Street, more falling now. But the town was alive with activity, mostly college kids, he guessed. He watched a couple stroll under the window. The woman’s laugh drifted up to him again. They paused to share a kiss.
He moved back to the bed, staring down at the files spread over the rust-colored spread. He had to get out.
King’s Tavern was quiet except for a jukebox near the back that was playing “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” A trio of coeds sat at the bar, heads together, giggling softly. Louis slid onto a stool, laying his coat on the stool next to him.
He ordered a Heineken and when it came he ignored the glass and gulped it quickly. The beer dripped onto his chin. He started to reach for a bar napkin but one appeared in front of his face.
