“We did a quick search on the vic,” Ellen said. “She looks clean as a whistle. No record, not even a speeding ticket.”
I thought about my interaction with Molly. Precise. Efficient. Maybe a tad on the cold side. But that was her job. To protect her boss.
It looked now like she should have been a little more worried about protecting herself. Whatever it was she’d found, she was trying to get to me. But why me? If it had something to do with the murder of Jesse Barre, why not go to the cops? I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question.
She was worried about what might happen to her.
So she was going to let me get the evidence.
In short, she wanted me to take the fall.
I winced at the irony.
•
Ellen went back into the crime scene where I still wasn’t allowed, so I turned my attention once again to the lake. When you lived in Grosse Pointe, you couldn’t help but associate the lake with events in your life. Lake St. Clair sat there, a silent witness of the community next to it. I had my own personal history with the lake. Culminating in the death of Benjamin Collins. His life ended in the lake. Along with what used to be mine.
And now, here I was back at the lake, working a case that was spiraling out of control. Every one of my instincts told me that my meeting with Shannon later tonight was a setup. Shannon luring me to the park after dark. The death of her assistant only a few hours old. Someone was trying to tie up loose ends.
But I didn’t believe Shannon was in on it. She was kooky. She played the star thing to the hilt. But for some reason, I didn’t think she was a killer. Maybe I’d been taken in a bit by her beauty. No, not her beauty. The warmth of her beauty. Some women are beautiful like crystal. Cold, cool lines. Others have the beauty of a glowing fire. I felt Shannon was the latter.
But I’d been wrong plenty of times before.
Something was nagging at me. Like a hair-trigger on the verge of being pulled. My mind kept going back to Laurence Grasso. He was a trigger too.
Rufus Coltraine had been the second to die. There was something about his role in this thing too. Something about him that kept coming back to my mind but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Something about—
Family.
And then something sparked in my mind. Family. Joe Puhy, the prison guard at Jackson had said he thought Coltraine would head South to see his family. So why hadn’t he? And Puhy had said that Coltraine didn’t get any letters—so how did he know he had family in . . . where was it?
Goddamnit. I pulled out my cell phone. I almost had it, and then it would slip away. If Puhy worked at Jackson, he probably lived in the area. There were only a few small towns nearby. Plymouth. Ann Arbor.
I punched in the number for information and asked for Joe Puhy’s number. There were three of them. I jotted them down and called the first. I got a machine, but when the voice of the answering machine clicked on, I knew I didn’t have the right one. The Puhy I’d spoken to was older and gruff.
Exactly the voice I got on the second try.
“I’m very sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Puhy,” I said. “This is John Rockne, the private investigator. We spoke earlier about Rufus Coltraine and Laurence Grasso.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, not happy at all. “I remember. Look, we’re about to sit down to dinner.” I could hear voices in the background.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. This won’t take more than a minute.”
He sighed. “You’re a friend of House, right?”
House was my buddy who worked on Cell Block A, who’d initially put me in touch with Puhy. Thank God for House. I owed him one.
“Yeah,” I said.
“All right, go ahead.”
“I was just looking back through my notes, and I saw that you said you thought Rufus Coltraine would go down South to see his family. Or that you thought he had family there.”
“Uh-huh.” More dishes clattering in the background. I had to make this fast.
“But you also said that you didn’t recall him getting any letters or anything from family members,” I said.
There was a pause as Puhy thought about the contradiction.
“Uh . . . right.”
“So how did you know he had family down there?”
This time the pause was longer. I heard more voices in the background, including a woman calling out, “Joe!” She had that kind of voice that you ignored at your own peril. Kind of like my wife’s.
“Uh . . .” he said.
Shit, I didn’t want to lose him.
“You know, this is really a bad time,” Puhy said.
“I know it is, but another person has died, Mr. Puhy.” I was starting to get mad. People were dying, and this guy’s Beef Fucking Stroganoff was more important.
He must have heard the tone in my voice.
“Hold on!” he shouted to the people in the background.
“All right,” he said. “Let me think.” We both waited. A freighter nosed its way out of the Detroit River, heading north. The clatter of silverware sounded from the Puhy kitchen.
“Okay, I think I remember,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“It wasn’t a letter or anything,” he said. “I think I overheard him talking about it.”
“Was he talking about it with Laurence Grasso?”
“Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Yeah, I think I overheard Coltraine saying something about getting out and going there.”
“Where, Mr. Puhy?”
“Home,” he said.
“Home where?”
“I’m pretty sure it was, um, Tennessee.”
A shiver ran down my spine. The little thing that had been dancing around in my brain finally let itself be known.
“Where in Tennessee?” I asked, even though I already knew.
A giant block had slammed into place.
“Memphis,” he said.
Chapter Forty-One
Something about a house. Fuck. I was losing my mind: short-term, medium-term and long-term memory loss. All at the same time. I pounded the steering wheel with my hands. Think, think, think. I pulled onto Vernier from Lakeshore, heading toward I-94.
I needed to start making more connections. That feeling of being close wasn’t good enough.
Where had I been when I felt things starting to come together? At the party. The first time. Talking to Shannon’s entourage for the first time.
A car pulled in front of me, and I reefed the wheel to the right, sped up, and floored it past him.
Something about a farmhouse?
What the fuck was it? We were all sitting around, talking about escapes or something. And Memphis mentioned something about looking at a house. Was she buying?
Finally, it clicked.
A lighthouse. That’s right, a lighthouse. Because she said she was on Harsen’s. The island at the other end of Lake St. Clair.
I pounded the wheel again and roared onto I-94. Harsen’s Island. A lighthouse. And someone had said something about Memphis milking cows. A joke that I assumed meant she had a little farm or something. Farms on Harsen’s weren’t unheard of.
I glanced at the clock on the dashboard.
It’d been nearly three hours since Molly had been killed. If the same person was headed for Memphis’, he or she had a big jump on me.
I pushed the pedal all the way to the floor.
•
Harsen’s Island is the biggest of a small group of islands at the north end of Lake St. Clair. The lake narrows and eventually turns into the St. Clair River for a brief thirty miles or so before opening back up, this time into Lake Huron.
I exited I-94, sped across Harper and pulled into the parking lot at the ferry harbor. Fifteen minutes later, the ferry dumped us on the island, and I hit the road running. Even though Harsen’s has its own yacht club and for years was a miniature summer playground for Grosse Pointers, it still feels like you travel back twenty years or so. Mostly summer cottages and the occasional bait shop/convenience store.