“Yes, it does. Which lake?”
“I don’t know. He just said it that one time. The cottage is on a lake and ‘I don’t want anybody else coming up there having a big party and no, you can’t come with me because I’m the only one who’s allowed to go there.’”
“He said that? Those exact words.”
“Pretty much.”
“He said a lake. Not the lake.”
“Yes. A lake.”
“Because if he said the lake, it would be Lake Superior, right?”
“Right. There’s only one the lake around here.”
“Okay, so a smaller lake,” I said. “And did he actually say, what did you just say, now, he didn’t want you guys coming up there to have a party?”
“He said up, yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. He said up.”
“What kind of car does he drive?”
“A junky old Subaru. Black.”
“So a black Subaru,” I said, “sitting next to a cottage on one of the inner lakes, north of Houghton. I wonder how many there are.”
“You want to see a map?”
I smiled at him. My first real smile of the whole day. I was sure it would probably be my last, but for that one moment I felt almost human again.
“Bradley, you are a good man to have around,” I said. “Don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”
I was about to get up. Then I thought of one more thing.
“Do you remember that story you told me about how Charlie’s father was giving him a hard time about switching to forestry?”
“Was that me?”
“Yeah, don’t you remember? You said his father didn’t understand why he’d give up law enforcement and go study forestry? It was a big thing between them? They had a big fight about it?”
Looking back on it, it sounded to me now like somebody was trying to make Charles Razniewski Sr. feel one hundred percent responsible for his son taking his own life. Like the ultimate twist of the knife.
“I have a bad habit of just saying stuff without thinking, Mr. McKnight. I really should have kept my mouth shut.”
“But did Charlie really say those things?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did Charlie really complain that much about his father?”
“Well, he didn’t really say it to me so much.”
“Didn’t say it to you?”
“No, now that I think of it, it was RJ he talked to most of the time. I don’t know, maybe RJ might have said something to me about it. Like I said, I should have kept my mouth shut.”
But you didn’t, I thought. RJ knew you wouldn’t. In case it ever came up in the future… he didn’t have to say a thing about it, just put a quarter in your slot and stand back. Like a director feeding lines to one of his actors.
A few minutes later, I was back in my truck. I had a good map of the Keweenaw Peninsula on the seat next to me. I called Agent Long on my cell phone.
“What the hell’s going on?” she said. Her voice broke up slightly, making me believe she was still in her car. “Where are you?”
“Robert James Bergman is most likely somewhere north of Houghton right now. Sean could very well be with him. If they’re up here, they’re in a cottage on one of the interior lakes.”
“Wait, what? What are you talking about?”
“Just listen to me. I assume you’re pretty close by now, but you really need to get some other people up here right away. I’ll keep my cell phone on, although I don’t know how good the signal will be once I leave Houghton.”
“Alex, damn it, I want you to stop right now.”
“Just get up here. I’m the one with the head start, and we’re gonna need all the manpower we can get. Bergman’s car is a black Subaru. Sean’s driving a vintage Corvette, mint-green.”
“Alex-”
“A mint-green Corvette. Did you hear me? That should be easy to spot.”
“I got it, I got it.”
“Did you hear from Chief Maven?”
“It’s looking better,” she said, her voice softening. “They think his daughter will be okay.”
“That’s great to hear. Swing and a miss this time for the evil bastard, huh?”
“Alex, you sound like you’re losing your mind. You’ve got to let us catch up to you. You shouldn’t be up there alone.”
“I shouldn’t be up here at all, you mean. But thanks.”
“For the last time-”
“Call me when you get here,” I said. Then I ended the call.
It was almost midnight now. It was dark and I was exhausted and I had no real idea where I was going. No sensible person would have gone any farther. Not another foot.
I put the truck in gear and took off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I crossed the bridge over the canal, which was really just the western arm of Portage Lake, thinking this was probably not the lake I’d be looking for. Even if you had a cottage on the other shore, you’d say it was “across the lake” or something like that. You wouldn’t say it was “up on a lake.”
I went up through Ripley and Dollar Bay, each town asleep now in the dead middle of the night. Not long after that, I started to see the dark water of Torch Lake to my right. It was the biggest lake on my list, and from the looks of the map it was completely surrounded by paved roads. It probably had more cottages on it than all the other Keweenaw lakes combined, but here again I started thinking that this wouldn’t be the lake I was looking for. It was attached to Portage Lake, after all, and really still part of the greater Houghton-Hancock area. If you happened to have a cottage there, I still didn’t think you’d say “up on a lake.” It just didn’t feel “up” enough. So I kept going, passing driveway after driveway, and eventually starting to regret my decision to skip all of them. It’s a pretty damned long lake, I told myself. You’ve been driving a while and it’s starting to feel kind of “up” now.
I stayed with my original call. If I had started going down every driveway here, I would have never made it past this lake. So when I got to the top of it, I swung east and headed down the county road toward Rice Lake. The map showed it surrounded by maybe three or four miles of access road. When I got to it, I started nosing my way down each driveway until my headlights lit up the cottage and whatever vehicles might be nearby. It would have been a hell of a lot easier in the daytime, or even in the middle of winter when I’d be able to see which driveways had been plowed or driven down recently. In late April, with the snow mostly gone, it was a ridiculously slow process. Still, I kept imagining Bergman in one of these cottages, not even twenty-four hours gone by since the attack on Olivia Maven. And Sean Wiley on his way up here to find him, with a fair chance he knew exactly where to go.
Another driveway, another cottage. Most of them still closed up for the winter so I had that going for me, at
