Death Stalks Door County Read online

  “You always this chipper?” Her question had been posed lightly. His, delivered like a sledge hammer.

  “Well, touché!” Cate said.

  She ignored him for several minutes. Then she snatched two flutes of champagne from a passing tray. “Maybe this will mellow you out,” she said, handing one to Cubiak. “Ruby was supposed to meet me here. Guess she got tied up. You know her?”

  “Not really. Met once.”

  “Bit of a character. Local treasure. Dedicated environmentalist. Nationally known fabric artist. Like a second mother to me. You don’t mind my chatting, do you? It’s just, you’re going to live here you may as well know some of the folklore.”

  When she was eleven, Cate told him, she and Ruby had hiked up the bay side from Ephraim to the tip of the peninsula. Door County was different then. Just a few condos. Mostly cottages and houses and a couple rustic resorts dotting the waterfront.

  “Ruby knew all the Indian tricks. How to walk without making a sound or leaving a trail, but I couldn’t do it, not as well as she did. I’d step on twigs and muss up the trail.”

  After three days of walking, they camped on a high, wooded bluff overlooking Porte des Morts, the deep channel where the waters from the bay and the lake converged.

  “Death’s Door is a treacherous stretch of water,” she said. Hundreds of ships had gone down there. Nobody knew how many people have drowned. Probably thousands.

  “Legend has it that the currents trap the ghosts of the dead, and on moonless nights, you can hear their cries.” She looked past him again. “You believe in ghosts?”

  He fidgeted. “No.”

  But didn’t he? Lying in bed one night a week after the accident, he’d sensed Lauren behind him in the dark and understood that her presence was a gift and that turning around, insisting on seeing her, was blasphemous. He’d willed himself still and waited. After a bit, he’d felt her breath warm his neck. She’d come to say good-bye.

  Cate swallowed a yawn. It was late, and she was tired. Could she impose on him for a ride back to her aunt’s house? “It’s a bit of a haul, I’m afraid.”

  Cubiak was glad for an excuse to leave.

  They were silent on the way to the jeep and then north through Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Ephraim, and beyond. As he drove, Cubiak relaxed into the engine’s steady hum and the insignificance that the immense darkness conferred upon them. At Gills Rock, a tiny fishing village near the tip of the peninsula, the road narrowed and curved sharply to the right. Thick pines crowded on either side. A crescent moon hung above the tree line, creating a patchwork of shadows on the undulating roadway. Inhaling the cool night air, the ranger felt settled and calm.

  “So, you married or what?”

  Cubiak started. His passenger had been quiet so long he thought she was asleep. In the dappled dark, the familiar agitation returned and he shook his head.

  “No? Divorced? Single?”

  “Widowed.” The word caught in his throat.

  “Oh. Sorry.” There was an awkward pause. “I’m divorced, myself. Six months,” she said at last. Cate pointed in the dark. “Left at the next driveway.”

  Cubiak careened between the trunks of two large trees and coasted into a wide clearing where a sprawling one-story ranch and several outbuildings hunkered in the sparse moonlight. The aroma of magnolias hung over the yard, and in the distance a dog yelped. He rolled to a stop where an old-fashioned fixture threw a tight splotch of light on the rear steps.

  “Sucks, don’t it,” Cate said.

  “What?”

  “Life.” She popped the door and slipped out. “Maybe we can get together sometime, for coffee or something, and, you know, talk.” She ducked down toward him, one hand on the back of the seat, waiting for a reply. When none came, she pulled herself straight. “Or not,” she said and banged the door. “Bastard.”

  WEDNESDAY

  Cubiak drove with the front windows down, hoping the cool night air would keep him alert and blow away the remnants of Cate’s perfume. He was glad he’d annoyed her. He didn’t want to think of her because she made him think of Lauren, and he missed his wife to the point of pain.

  More sober than drunk, he rolled into the park entrance. It was well past midnight and a wall of clouds had blotted out the moon. He stopped alongside the maintenance shed and fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He was halfway to the station door when a vehicle peeled off the road and tore up the drive, momentarily blinding him with its headlights before the yard went black once more.

  “Who’s there?” Cubiak called out.

  A door slammed.

  “Get out of the truck.” Otto Johnson’s brusque voice cut through the dark.

  Cubiak flipped a switch on the yard pole and a cone of light fell over the gravel lot. From the shadows, the park superintendent pulled Barry Beck from the passenger seat of the pickup and dragged him center stage. The boy was pasty white and wobbly. A thick trail of something that looked like vomit ran down his shirt. His hands were streaked with something that looked like blood.

  “I found him like this near Turtle Bay. I think he’s in shock,” Johnson said.

  Barry stank of piss and fear. The two men maneuvered the boy through the back door, into the kitchen, and onto a chair.

  Cubiak handed him a glass of water. “What happened?” he said.

  Barry choked on the water and began to cough and cry at the same time.

  Cubiak waited for him to recover. “Were you alone?” he said finally.

  The boy’s eyes glazed over.

  “You were with a girl?”

  Barry nodded. His breathing was rapid and shallow.

  “What were you doing, messing around?”

  Barry nodded again. “Yeah.”

  The story came out in spurts. He’d taken a girl named Alice to the hilltop clearing behind Turtle Bay Campground. After about an hour or so, they ran out of beer. Alice said she was cold so Barry gave her his jacket and the flashlight and left to get another six-pack from the car. Coming back he got lost, and when he finally located the spot where they’d been hanging out, he found her. He looked at them in panic as if they should know the rest without his having to spell out the details.

  “What happened?” Johnson shouted. He tried to shake the boy but Barry swatted at his hand.

  “Is she okay? Is Alice all right?” Cubiak said quietly, tamping down his own fear. What could harm someone in the woods? A hungry bear? Wolves?

  Barry shuddered and doubled over. “She . . . she . . .” The rest dissolved into sobs as he rocked back and forth, sputtering saliva at the floor.

  Cubiak snatched a coat from the hall and dropped it over the boy’s shoulders. “You better call Beck and Halverson,” he told Johnson. “I’ll go and check. Maybe she’s hurt.”

  In the blackened forest, Cubiak felt the same cold dread he’d experienced as a cop answering a call in the most violent urban neighborhood. No matter how much information the police had going into a situation, there was always the unknown factor: the door knob wired to a bomb, the guy at the bottom of the basement stairs waiting to slam a nail-studded board into the face of the first person down. Maybe Alice had passed out from drinking. Then how to explain the blood on Barry’s hands? A nosebleed, animal bite?

  Cubiak missed the campground cutoff and had to double back. On the second go-round, the headlights caught the marker. He parked at the bottom of the trail, flipped on the flashers as a signal for Halverson, and climbed up the path, spurred on by the nervous click-click of the emergency lights.

  The sound ebbed away and a cobweb brushed Cubiak’s face. A ridge of sweat rose on his spine.

  The woods were familiar in the daylight. At night, they were changed, at once vibrant and soulless, alert and sleeping. Darkness reshaped the landscape until time and distance lost their meaning. He was a man accustomed to sodium-vapor streetlamps. In the dark forest, even with the flashlight, he felt powerless.

  An owl hooted. Cubiak spun toward th
e sound. Behind and to his right, the wind whistled through the trees. He turned again and through a thicket of wild blackberry bushes spied a faint yellow glimmer.

  As he pushed through the brush, he caught a whiff of wood smoke. It was cold in the woods, and he figured the two had disregarded park regulations and made a fire. Cubiak expected to find Alice curled up alongside it. But she wasn’t anywhere near the mound of embers. She was sitting at the far side of the small clearing, braced against the trunk of a young white birch tree. A blue-and-yellow plaid blanket draped her head and torso. Her lap was heaped with empty beer cans and her bare legs extended straight out toward him. She was shoeless, and the soles of her feet glistened winter-white in the light from the lantern that lay near her thin canvas slip-ons. The forest was oddly quiet.

  “Alice?”

  There was no answer.

  A sense of rage pulsed through Cubiak as he crossed the patch of trampled grass. Was this some kind of sick joke? Or a prank, an initiation into an adolescent club that Barry wanted to join?

  Cubiak trained the flashlight down and lifted the blanket, scattering the empty cans. Alice was slumped forward. Her hands were clasped over her stomach, the long nails, one of them broken, were painted the same bright red as her shorts. Her face was hidden by her hair, and her neck obscured by the jacket’s crumpled blood-soaked hood. Alice’s skull had been neatly dissected, both the frontal and parietal bones split down the middle from front to back.

  A battery of klieg lights ringed the crime scene, illuminating the individual pebbles and blades of grass and keeping the spooky shadows at bay. Bathed in the unnatural glow, Bathard went about his methodical work. In the surrounding darkness, three deputies searched the underbrush for the murder weapon. Cubiak listened to them call out to each other as they thrashed through the undergrowth. He and Halverson stood on opposite sides of the clearing, each man half in light and half in darkness, each lost in thought. Had Barry murdered the girl? The sheriff had dared whisper the question earlier. “Oh, Jesus, God, I hope not,” he’d said, paling at the prospect. Cubiak couldn’t see it. The boy wanted to fuck Alice, not kill her. Why was she attacked here? Why the park again? Cubiak scrubbed his scalp, trying to blur the images of the dead girl. He needed a drink.

  Late in the morning, Beck phoned Jensen Station. Three hours’ sleep didn’t go far, and Cubiak struggled to follow the man’s compulsive patter. “Why are you telling me this?” he said. Beck didn’t reply, just kept on with the story of how Halverson had questioned Barry for an hour, with the family lawyer present, until a fuller picture emerged of the previous evening’s events. The victim was Alice Jones, sixteen going on seventeen that month, a local girl who’d just finished her junior year at Door County High and was known largely for being a regular at Kingo’s Resort.

  “Kingo’s,” Beck said, spitting out the word.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Count yourself lucky. Kingo’s is a goddamn genuine biker bar on Kangaroo Lake.”

  Cubiak had heard of the lake, the peninsula’s largest inland body of water. Kingo’s, according to Beck, was a colossal thorn in his side and an affront to all that Door County represented. Unfortunately for the Tourism Board, the resort was a legitimate business, handed down by a drunken father to a druggie son.

  “Tourists don’t generally frequent the joint but Petey Kingovich, the owner, is pretty lax about checking IDs, a policy that cultivates a certain clientele among the younger locals,” Beck said.

  “That why your son goes there?”

  Beck swore. “Barry claims he’d only been to the bar the one time, the night he met Alice Jones. It wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Beck went on, “if Alice wasn’t one of Petey’s girls. He’s known to like his ladies on the young side.”

  In fact, Beck allowed, he and Halverson figured that Barry had probably frequented the bar often enough to goad Petey into a jealous attack on Alice. The murder weapon had not been found in the woods. The sheriff was laying odds it might show up at Kingo’s.

  “Halverson’s going there later to check things out. I want you with him,” Beck said.

  “Why? There’s no reason I should go.”

  “She was killed in the park. That’s reason enough,” Beck said and slammed the receiver down. “Son of a bitch,” he growled.

  On the wall behind Beck’s desk, four generations of family history were documented in an array of photos, certificates, and news clips. Beck knew each one by heart. Understood their progression, their testimony to the one-upmanship of the generations. “Son of a bitch,” he said again.

  The sheriff ’s entourage picked up Cubiak at dusk. From the park the caravan sped east across the peninsula. The ranger rode in the rear of Halverson’s jeep, which was driven by the First Deputy. Six more men followed in three additional vehicles, an excessive show of force in Cubiak’s opinion, but he said nothing. This was the sheriff ’s call, not his.

  As the convoy approached Kingo’s, Halverson ordered the men to cut their lights and pull off the road. “You sure you don’t want one of these?” he asked Cubiak, indicating the extra pistol tucked into his belt. “I could deputize you right here. Make it all legal-like.” Cubiak shook his head. He didn’t want to be armed and didn’t need Halverson’s permission to carry a weapon.

  “Whatever.” The sheriff directed the officers to silence their phones and motioned for them to move around to the back of the tavern.

  “The bastards are all here,” Halverson said, peering through the supply room window into the saloon. “That’s him.” He pointed at a skinny, scar-faced man slouched against the bar. Lining the stools were Kingovich’s cousin and three buddies, all of them greasy and unsavory. Halverson didn’t know their names. Behind them, a sixth man aimed the eight ball at the right side pocket of a pristine, tournament-size pool table. He was short and squat and built like a wrestler. “Look at those scum,” Halverson whispered. “Filthy, no-good scum.”

  The sheriff was wired. He had been on the case since Johnson’s call the previous night. Beck had given him twenty-four hours to find the killer, and he told Cubiak that he intended to get the job done on time. That morning Halverson’s men had interviewed a half-dozen people who had placed Alice Jones in or around Kingo’s at 6 p.m. Tuesday, just hours before she was found murdered. The sheriff didn’t need to know any more than that.

  Leaving the other troopers to watch the bar, he led Cubiak and his First Deputy on a search of the remaining buildings. “We’ll find something,” he said.

  In the bedroom of Petey’s one-story frame house, the men discovered four small bags of cocaine and marijuana at the back of a sock drawer. The six cabins yielded only dust and stale air. The toolshed was empty except for a gas-powered lawn mower and a shelf lined with cardboard file boxes.

  The sheriff was jogging toward the small boathouse when his deputy popped out of the garage. “Jumpin’ jeepers Christ hey. Leo, over here,” he called out cheerfully and then led them inside. In a dark corner, the deputy pointed to a stack of discarded tires and behind it a bloody axe propped against the wall.

  Halverson and four of his men barged into Kingo’s. Cubiak trailed behind. Gagging on air heavy with the odors of sour beer and something coming from a backed-up toilet, he stayed near the door, determined to remain an observer.

  “For shit.” At the bar, the cousin regarded the officers with their drawn weapons and raised his right hand in a five-finger salute. “For crying out fucking shit.”

  Petey Kingovich waved him quiet.

  “Who’s he?” Petey said, with a glance at Cubiak.

  “None of your fucking business,” the sheriff said.

  The man at the pool table jeered as he flipped his cue and clutched it like a club, fat end up.

  The deputy moved into his face. “You got two options, buddy,” he said quietly. “Either you put that stick down or I’ll ram it up your ass so hard you’ll have a blue chalk mark on the inside of your fucking skull.”

&
nbsp; “Do it. Now,” Petey said.

  The stick thudded against the floor.

  They were all high and too stupid to be dangerous, thought Cubiak. Except Petey. It showed in his eyes. He was too smart to do something dumb like kill Alice and leave the murder weapon lying around but borderline crazy enough to commit murder and assume he could get away with the crime.

  Halverson signaled his men to spread out along the length of the room. While one of the detail droned the Miranda litany, Petey glanced at the roach in the ashtray. “That the problem, Sheriff ?” Petey had both hands on the bar. He knew the routine well.

  Halverson ignored him.

  “For chrissake,” the cousin bellowed.

  “Shut up,” Petey said. His eyes flicked to Cubiak then pinned on Halverson.

  “There’s more just like us waiting outside,” the sheriff said quietly. “Only they got even bigger guns. So I suggest you come with us nice and easy. Just ease out from behind the bar nice and slow.”

  “Not ’til I know why. I gotta right to ask why.”

  “Why?” Halverson mocked him. “Maybe because you’re the scum of the earth and we’re having a litter drive. Murder, that’s why.”

  The room hushed suddenly. A dark shadow played across Petey’s face. “Whose?”

  “Alice Jones.”

  “Alice! You ain’t gonna pin that one on me.” Petey spoke with casual disdain.

  The sheriff opened his jacket and pointed to the search warrant in the inside breast pocket. “We got a bloody axe in the trunk of my car that says we are,” he said evenly.

  The men at the bar looked at Petey. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  Cubiak watched Halverson test the weight of the gun in his hand. The sheriff had seen the girl. Cubiak knew what he was thinking. Knew how much he wanted to blow the place apart. How he’d like it if Petey or one of the others made a quick move and he and his men could open up on them.

  “Let’s go.” The sheriff waved Petey forward.

  A heavy mist had risen from Kangaroo Lake and rolled out over the resort, obscuring trees and buildings alike. A mixed chorus of frogs and crickets sang in the soup, and then fell silent as the men filed past to the cruisers along the road. Cubiak shared the back seat with Petey.