“You really don’t watch TV,” she said.
“If there’s an important game on, I’ll catch it at Jackie’s place. That’s about it.”
“Okay, whatever. Point is, Mr. Wiley’s had a long and colorful relationship with law enforcement, going all the way back to before he even went to Hollywood. He grew up here in Michigan, down in Bad Axe.”
“‘The Bad Boy of Bad Axe,’” Maven said. “I remember when he got arrested.”
“He was in his sixties at the time of this arrest,” Agent Long said. “Now he’s seventy-two.”
“But you say Steele and Haggerty popped him?”
“Flying down I-75. Apparently, he had assaulted somebody and a tip was called in. They were waiting for him at the bridge, ended up chasing him all the way down to Indian River, until they finally ran him off the road. Then he got into it with both troopers.”
“So what happened to him?”
She picked up another sheet of paper.
“Besides the assault, there was a gun in the car. Traces of cocaine, a few bottles of pills. Tack on the eluding, obstruction, another assault or two on the officers, and just for good measure, he was on probation back in California and wasn’t supposed to leave the state. So with the violation and the prior offenses, he ended up getting fifteen. Did seven and a half. During that first year his daughter killed herself. It was hard to track that down because she had a different last name, but we found her.”
“How did she do it?”
“She cut open both wrists,” Agent Long said, then she drew an imaginary line down the length of her forearm. “She even knew to do it the long way to bleed out faster. There was no chance of saving her.”
“So what do you think, Chief? This Wiley made it a few miles downstate at least. Any chance you were involved?”
“I told you, I recognized the name right away,” Maven said. “But if anybody assisted on that arrest, it would have been out of the Mackinaw City post, or maybe Gaylord. And hell, if it was me helping to bust a celebrity, I’d certainly remember it.”
“Not to mention he’s kind of old now to be killing people,” Agent Long said. “And according to the logs, neither Razniewski nor Maven had any activity that day at all. It just says ‘Admin.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It means running around doing nonsense,” Maven said. “We were at the Lansing post, remember, so every once in a while we got to go run errands for the governor.”
“Didn’t he have a regular attachment for that?”
“The governor had four state guys on a permanent assignment, yes, but you know how it is. There’s always somebody from the mansion who needs a ride somewhere, or something stupid like that. You can guess who usually got picked for that exciting duty.”
“So maybe you guys were close to the arrest that day,” I said, “while you were running an errand. Isn’t that possible?”
“If we were in on that arrest, it would be in our daily logs, believe me. And I told you, I’d remember it, anyway.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “So I guess that’s strike two. Who’s the third candidate?”
“Here’s where it takes a little different turn,” she said. “Candidate number three, a man named Kenny Fraser, was actually a city police officer in St. Ignace. He was charged with a number of aggravated assaults, apparently committed while on duty, and as you can imagine, it would have been tough for one of the other officers in town to arrest him. I mean, the whole force couldn’t have been more than a half dozen officers, right? So they called in the state police to make the arrest. You can guess who did that.”
“Steele and Haggerty.”
“Apparently, Fraser made quite a scene about it. I’m told he even swore to both Steele and Haggerty that they’d pay for breaking the cop code. No matter how long it takes, this guy’s yelling as they’re taking him away, he’ll get even. At least that’s what the guys at the St. Ignace post are saying. We found one sergeant this morning who’s been around long enough to remember it.”
“What kind of assaults are we talking about?”
“We don’t have that information yet. The sergeant can’t quite recall. But if you think about it, a former cop knows how to use a gun, knows how to access information about other cops…”
“What about it, Chief?”
“It’s ringing a faint bell,” Maven said. “But again, I might have just heard about this guy through other channels.”
“The suicide?”
“His son, the same day his father got arrested. Sixteen years old. Hanged himself in the garage.”
“A hanging,” I said. “Just like our first suicide.”
“On the day of this arrest, it looks like Maven and Razniewski were riding separately. Maven’s log shows activity south of Lansing, Razniewski’s north of Lansing.”
“That sounds promising. How far north?”
“There’s nothing logged north of St. Johns, but there’s a fair amount of time not accounted for. It doesn’t look like Trooper Razniewski was a ticket-writing machine, if you catch my drift.”
“I told you guys,” Maven said, “he hated that part of the job.”
“Okay, so maybe he ended up having some contact with this guy Fraser.”
“We don’t know that yet. We’re still tracking all this down.”
“We’ve got a line on Parizi,” Agent Fleury said as he hung up the phone. “We’ve already got a man heading out to talk to Wiley. The ex-cop, Fraser, is still an unknown.”
“What about Dr. Sizemore?” Long said. “Is he on his way up?”
“He’ll be here in about two hours.”
“Who’s Dr. Sizemore?” I said. Whoever he was, he must have hit the road pretty damned early in the morning to be two hours away by now.
“He’s our psych man in Detroit. He’s going to try hypnotizing Chief Maven to see if we can help him remember any possible connections.”
“You’re actually going to try hypnosis?”
“Why not?”
I looked over at Chief Maven, who was sitting there with his usual unhappy troll face, or rather an even more unhappy version than usual on account of everything that was happening around him. If I knew anything about the chief, I knew that he liked to be in complete control of things, which would probably make him the worst possible subject in the history of hypnosis.
“I know,” she said, apparently understanding exactly what I was thinking. “But we have to try.”
“All I can say is good luck, then.”
“I’m not sure what else we should do right now,” Agent Fleury said. “We’ll wait to hear what happens with those three candidates. When Dr. Sizemore gets here, we’ll need a quiet room with absolutely no interruptions. Alex, we’ll have to ask you to leave at that point. The doctor and Chief Maven will need to be alone.”
“No problem,” I said. “I understand.”
He looked like he was about to say something else to me. He gave Agent Long a quick look and then he turned away. Of course, I knew all too well that they were continuing to break the rules every day, having me here in these meetings. I had done my part and by all rights I should have been debriefed and shown the door. I knew Chief Maven still wanted me here, as strange as that would have seemed to me just a few days ago. Would that be enough? Maybe this was mostly Agent Long’s doing. Either way, I knew it could end at any second.
“Let me look at those files again,” Maven said. “Maybe I’ll remember something on my own, before the stupid goddamned headshrinker gets here.”
This poor Dr. Sizemore, I thought. He has no idea what he’s about to run into.
Many hours later, when the sun was long gone and the temperature had dropped back toward zero, I was sitting in front of the fire at the Glasgow, a Molson in hand, but my only beer of the night. I was thinking about
