Leon didn’t say anything else. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
“This guy is a smart, patient killer,” I said. “And he may only be getting started. That’s what we’ve got here.”
“It would seem so.”
“But Maven can’t even remember him.”
“Doesn’t matter who remembers him. He remembers them, that’s all that matters.”
Some kid in his twenties, wearing the same uniform as Leon’s, came up to us right about then and asked him to get back to work.
“Hey, give us a break,” I told him. “This is important.”
“Not as important as changing the syrup in the Coke machine,” the kid said. “Not when he’s on the clock, anyway.”
I could have put him right through the window, but Leon put up his hand and told me to take it easy.
“We’re about done here,” he said to the kid. “I’ll go change that syrup.”
“Leon, you don’t belong here.”
“It’s only temporary. Don’t worry about it. Go help catch that guy and then come back and tell me all about it.”
“I can’t thank you enough, Leon. Yet again.”
“Just be careful, all right? My wife is right, this is no job for a middle-aged man with too much to lose.”
“Tell her hello,” I said. I thanked him again and left. As I went back out the cold air hit me in the face and I couldn’t help thinking to myself, Leon’s got something to lose, all right. A wife and two kids. Me, I’ve got nothing left. So maybe I’m the right man to go chase this killer after all.
When I got to the state police post the next day, Maven’s old friend Sergeant Coleman was waiting for me with a cup of coffee.
“I heard you guys weren’t exactly the most welcome guests yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I hope you can understand why it might have seemed that way.”
“It’s okay. I know this is a tough situation for everybody.”
“We’ve got everyone in the state on notice. We’re all trying to figure out who this guy could be.”
“You know I was a Detroit cop myself, right?”
“So I heard.”
“I had the chance to interact with a few state cops along the way, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better police force in the world.”
I was leaving out a few personality issues I might have run into, but yeah, overall it was the truth. He thanked me for the compliment and I thanked him for the coffee. Then I joined Chief Maven and the two FBI agents in the interview room.
Agent Fleury was talking to somebody on the house phone while Agent Long and Chief Maven sat on the other end of the table, going over a fresh pile of papers. Maven looked a little better today. Maybe he’d actually gotten a few hours of sleep. Agent Long gave me a quick smile.
“Good morning,” she said. I thought I heard a little extra something in the way she spoke to me today. Either that or I was just imagining things.
“Looks like you guys have already gotten started,” I said. “Did I misunderstand the schedule?”
“We wanted to get an early jump, because we’ve actually got something to work with today.”
“Oh yeah?”
I sat down next to her.
“Our team in Detroit has been looking at this overnight, and they’ve identified three men who were all arrested by Steele and Haggerty, right around the time when Chief Maven and Razniewski were still on the force. As you know, we’ve established that Chief Maven has at least a partial memory of being up at the St. Ignace post at some point. Although we still don’t see anything reflected in the official records.”
“Sometimes cops assist on arrests but don’t show up on the official reports,” Maven said. “You know how it is with paperwork. Some days you just don’t get it all done the right way.”
“I do remember that much,” I said. “I used to hate that part of the job.”
“We’re trying to cross-reference arrests that resulted in significant jail time, and beyond that we’ve got a general profile that would suggest a suicide in the family right around that same time.”
Exactly what Leon and I were talking about last night, I thought. I was going to bring that up as soon as I got here today, but it looks like Agent Long is already way ahead of me.
“It’s not easy to make those connections, because the information isn’t in one place. But we have people in the Detroit office working on it.”
“You say you have some hits already?”
“The three men arrested by Steele and Haggerty working together, yes. All in the right time frame, as I said, and in all three cases, there was a suicide in the family, within the following two years. The only sticking point will be tying in Razniewski and possibly Chief Maven.”
“It sounds like the right place to start,” I said. “So who are these guys?”
“Well, here’s what we have…”
She shuffled back through her papers.
“Candidate number one,” she said. “Andrew Parizi, age forty-five at the time of his arrest. His vehicle was stopped by Steele and Haggerty just short of the bridge. He was driving a station wagon and they could see all this stuff piled up in the back, lots of boxes and a few television sets. He went racing up to the toll booth, it sounds like, but they caught him before he could go through. He became combative when they tried to cuff him, so they could already add on felony resisting to the felony eluding, to whatever they ended up finding in his car.”
“What did they find?”
“The stuff they’d already spotted. The televisions and the stereo equipment and a bunch of other stolen items. Power tools, jewelry. There’d been a string of break-ins in Cedarville and out on Drummond Island. Vacation homes, mostly. This guy was loaded up and heading downstate with it, so they were able to connect him to most of the robberies. He was already a repeat offender, so he got sent away for five years. He did three, it looks like, but about a year and a half in, his son Patrick killed himself. He jumped out a window.”
“What was his name? Andrew Parizi? Does that mean anything to you, Chief?”
“No. Agent Long and I have already been through this. The name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Neither Razniewski nor Maven were involved in the arrest,” she said. “That much we know from checking their daily logs. That was pretty early on in Razniewski’s career, actually, so he was definitely in the car with Sergeant Maven all day. From the logs, we can determine that they never went farther north than Mount Pleasant. Of course, we’re still keeping open the possibility that they may have had some form of contact with our eventual killer. On a different date, or maybe even out of uniform.”
“So it’ll be hard to eliminate anybody,” I said. “But okay, who’s next?”
“Clyde C. Wiley. You may have heard of him before.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, no.”
“He’s an actor,” Maven said. “You’ve probably seen him on TV.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even watch that much TV anymore.”
“This guy’s been around forever,” Agent Long said. “He did a lot of biker movies, right after Easy Rider came out. Did you ever see Road Hogs? That was probably his biggest.”
“I vaguely remember the title,” I said.
“He was kind of a maniac back then, even for Hollywood. He got busted a few times for possession, got in a big fight on a movie set, ended up getting thrown out of town for a while. He did some low-budget horror movies, until he finally worked himself back into television. Whenever some crime show needed somebody to play a psycho tough guy, they’d give him a call. He’s got real wild eyes, long hair, tattoos, arms like a body builder. I’m sure you’ve seen him a million times.”
“Honestly, no. I don’t own a television.”
She looked at me for a moment like she was trying to decide what planet I’d come from.
