“Well, with any records you might have on him.”
She set a thick folder on the table. “I could have faxed you this stuff. You didn’t have to make the trip.”
“My chief thought it would be better this way,” Louis said. “Plus, I want to talk to his mother.”
“Millie?” Bjork slowly shook her head. “I don’t know how much help she can be to you.”
“Why?”
“She’s not exactly Donna Reed.”
Louis nodded. “Just the same, I need to see Lacey’s home.”
Bjork shrugged. “It’s after noon. She might be sobered up by now.”
Dave came to the table and deposited two plates between them. Louis looked down at the steaming, fragrant pie-like concoction.
“It’s a pastie,” Bjork said. “Kinda like a Swanson’s pot pie, only better.” She smiled. “It’s the
Louis took a bite. It was delicious. “May I?” he said, pulling over the file.
Bjork nodded, digging into her food. Louis quickly scanned the contents of the file. It was filled with detailed reports: Lacey’s arrest records, including copies of every incident report, judicial files, fingerprints, even high school transcripts. Louis focused on the military record. It took him a moment but he found it: Lacey had been attached to the 123rd squadron in Vietnam. He closed the file.
“This is very complete,” he said.
Bjork gazed at him over the frosty glass. “You sound surprised.”
“No, I just…”
“We run a very professional department here, Officer Kincaid,” Bjork said.
“I didn’t mean – ”
“Do you know how many Yoopers it takes to screw in a lightbulb?”
“Pardon?”
“None. We don’t have electricity here.”
Louis smiled weakly.
“You hear about the Yooper who saw the billboard that said ‘Drink Canada Dry’? He’s been trying to ever since.”
Louis gave a chuckle.
She smiled. “We know what you think of us up here. We know you think we do nothing but hunt deer, drink and go bowling. That’s how you trolls see us, right?”
“Trolls?”
“Yeah, all you folks who live under the bridge.”
Louis laughed.
“Eat up, Officer Kincaid,” Bjork said. “And I’ll take you to meet Millie.”
“Call me Louis, please.”
She gave him a curt nod. “Only if you call me Bjork.”
They rode in Bjork’s Jeep. Leaving Houghton, they passed over an old iron bridge that spanned a partially frozen river. Abandoned shipping berths loomed to the south, framing the river like a giant rusty chain. Hancock on the other side was not nearly as pretty as its sister-city Houghton and faded quickly as Bjork steered her Jeep up a hill and out of town. Five or six miles later, they saw the state-issue, green metal sign for Dollar Bay.
The town had a haphazard look, as though it had come together out of plain bad luck rather than some neat chamber of commerce design. Even the streets seemed an afterthought – no names, just numbers that intersected letters. The town’s core was a clump of buildings: a general store, a beauty parlor, a bar and further on, a ramshackle lumberyard.
Louis stared at the rows of shingled houses that made up Dollar Bay’s residential area. Gray…everything here was gray. Even the damn snow. The place smelled of dirt, rust and defeat. Coverdale’s profile came back to him in that moment.
They passed a two-story school of old brick and just as Louis was wondering why they needed a school so large, Bjork told him that it drew students from all around the area.
“So Lacey went there?” Louis asked.
“Me, too.”
“Did you know him?”
She nodded. “There were only ten in my graduating class. So yeah, I knew Duane.”
“What was he like?” Louis asked.
“Quiet. Skinny. Skipped school a lot, ya know? I never took him to be dangerous, though. He was just one of those weird guys who took shop class, smoked in the john and lurked around the edges of everything.” She reached down and pulled out a thin blue book. “Here’s our yearbook. Make sure you get it back to me.”
Louis took it and opened to the seniors. He quickly found Lacey’s picture. He was thin-faced and unsmiling, his odd watery eyes unsettling even then. He looked like some kind of feral animal, like a stray cat or ferret. There was nothing listed under his name except “Audio-Visual Club.” The yearbook editors had used popular song titles for future predictions and in a stroke of cruelty some smartass had stuck Lacey with Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go.”
“Duane wanted to go to college,” Bjork said.
“College?” Louis said.
“Yeah. He applied to Tech but didn’t get in. Couple months later he got arrested, joyriding with some older kids in a stolen car. Judge told Lacey to shape up or he was headed for jail. Recommended he join the service.”
“Lacey have a juvenile record?”
“Yeah, but it’s sealed.”
Louis nodded. “Judges think if parents can’t straighten a kid out, the service will.”
