Dead Folks Read online

  Also by Jon A. Jackson

  Deadman

  Hit on the House

  The Diehard

  The Blind Pig

  Grootka

  Man with an Axe

  Dead Folks

  Jon A. Jackson

  GROVE PRESS

  New York

  Copyright © 1996 by Jon A. Jackson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10011.

  The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Salt Lake City Police Department and the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jackson, Jon A.

  Dead Folks / Jon A. Jackson.

  p.cm.

  ISBN 0-8021–3602–8

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9122-9

  1. Mulheisen, Detective Sergeant (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Salt Lake City (Utah)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.A216D39 1996

  813’.54—dc2096-2289

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Cover design by David High

  Grove Press

  154 West 14th Street, 12th Floor

  New York, NY 10011

  99 00 01 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For David Morrell, creator of Rambo, the most widely recognized literary character since Sherlock. My thanks to a wise and generous teacher.

  Prologue: Talking Horse

  Mulheisen was sitting in Pinky's restaurant, staring at a remarkable picture of a naked woman. Pinky's was one of his favorite places in Detroit. It was basically just an old frame house, located near the MacArthur Bridge, on Jefferson Avenue. The house had legendary associations for Mulheisen since, in his childhood, every time they passed the house in his father's car, his father or his mother would point it out as the place “where they caught those Nazis.” The “Nazis” were said to be spies who had assisted a Luftwaffe pilot, a prisoner of war who had escaped from a Canadian prison camp. This was not exactly the case, as Mulheisen eventually learned.

  Mulheisen's father had been for many years the water commissioner, responsible for, among other things, the municipal waterworks in Detroit. One of the principal installations of these works was located in Waterworks Park, just a few blocks farther out Jefferson Avenue from Pinky's. During World War II, it was feared that the waterworks might be sabotaged by Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers—"fifth columnists” in the slang of the day—which tremendously enhanced the glamour of the tale of the escaped Luftwaffe pilot in little Mul's mind. The fact that the naval armory was nearby also helped in building this legend. Wow! Nazis! Actual Nazis, here in ordinary old Detroit! The mind reeled.

  That Mulheisen later bothered to find out the known facts about this legend says something about his character. He had become a policeman, ultimately a detective, a career choice that greatly startled his parents. What he learned was that Pinky's was not the house where the escaped Luftwaffe pilot (a magical phrase that rang in little Mul's imagination like a golden bell) had been arrested. It was in the neighborhood, though, and the pilot had been briefly harbored by an amiable middle-aged couple who were not Nazis or even Nazi sympathizers, but merely Germans who had immigrated to Detroit at least twenty years earlier . . . innocent people, themselves victims of war.

  The Luftwaffe pilot had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Ontario in company with a Wehrmacht captain who was a cousin of the wife in the couple. The Wehrmacht officer was recaptured quite early, but the Luftwaffe pilot made his way to Detroit, where he took the chance that the couple might assist him. They did, out of compassion for a fellow German who was in danger and despair, and perhaps out of fear—they may have simply wanted to move the escapee on down the road, so that he did not imperil their already troubled circumstances.

  It wasn't easy being a German immigrant with a noticeable accent in Detroit in 1944; one kept a low profile. The American public did not distinguish between ordinary Germans and Nazi Party members. For that matter, one didn't even have to be a German to be harassed as a sympathizer, as in the case of a suburban family who found their house surrounded by angry neighbors one night because a baby-sitter had told her parents, who told other neighbors, that there was a well-read copy of Mein Kampf in the house. (The husband, something of a self-styled intellectual, convinced his neighbors, after a long harangue on the porch, that he was “just trying to find out what the hell all this danged Hitler fuss was about.”)

  As it happened, the pilot was never caught, Mulheisen learned. He managed to get to New Orleans and thence onto a freighter that took him to South America. He didn't make it to Germany before the war ended, so one could say that he failed in his duty, but he had certainly tried and he had been brave and nearly successful. The German-American couple, however, was nabbed by the FBI and sent to prison for a good long time, their lives utterly ruined. Perhaps they were lucky not to have been hung, or shot, which surely would have been the fate of their counterparts in Nazi Germany.

  Mulheisen was aware, of course, that his own family was of German origin, having immigrated to America in the mid-nineteenth century. But they made very little of their German heritage, perhaps because of the two world wars, in which their new homeland took sides against the fatherland. There were times when Müllers changed their names to Miller, and towns once called Berlin overnight became Lincoln City. He didn't even really know where in Germany the Mulheisens had come from, although he had a vague idea it was in the central region, perhaps around Erfurt. He wondered if his parents’ interest in this episode had been enhanced by their own Germanness and if they had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, communicated their heightened interest to their child.

  Legends aside, the reason Mulheisen had first come to Pinky's, years ago, was because he had heard that it served an excellent calf's liver. He had since decided that he didn't like calf's liver; indeed, he wondered how he could ever have liked calf's liver. But he still went to Pinky's because it was a comfortable place with an ambience that appealed to him, of homeyness overlaid with a modest and confident elegance. As for the alleged Nazi association, it was interesting to him that even after he had discovered the evident facts about the case, Pinky's still gleamed in his imagination with a mysterious, if dimmed, glamour.

  Pinky's was rather empty today, the post-Christmas lull, perhaps. Mulheisen and his old friend Vito Belk had scooched their chairs together at one of the tables so that they could both look at some pictures that Vito had brought. These pictures looked like photographic prints but were actually computer generated. They were mostly black-and-white, about eight inches square, but some were in color and some looked like infrared. They were aerial shots. Some were of a mountainous terrain seen from several hundred feet, but most were much closer.

  “These pictures are tremendously magnified,” Vito said, “so details tend to be a little fuzzy. She's not fuzzy, though.” Vito was a heavy man, a fuzzy man, with a beard that covered almost his whole face; when he smiled his teeth sparkled through the hedge.

  Mulheisen smiled back at Vito's joke, but his smile didn't exactly sparkle. He was an almost homely man, with a longi
sh face and longish teeth that were slightly separated. This feature had given him the nickname “Sergeant Fang” on the Street.

  Vito's joke was that the woman in the picture was floating on her back in a pool, her arms and legs outspread, and while she had a great mane of black hair drifting about her head, she had no other hair visible on her body. She was gazing upward, seemingly in a state of bliss, as if looking directly into the camera. She was a small woman, slim and almost boyish, except for the mane of black hair. Almost no breasts, no hips. Very pretty face, with large eyes and full lips. The faint line of the vagina was visible.

  “What altitude was this camera?” Mulheisen asked.

  Vito wasn't sure. He looked at the back of the picture and then at the others. There was nothing on the back. “They're from different satellites,” he said. “I'm not, uh . . . I can't say which satellites. You understand. But most of them are about two hundred miles, I think.”

  Mulheisen wasn't interested in which satellites had taken the pictures. He was just interested in what was in them. Each picture had a date-and-time line printed on it, such as “8 September, 1801:05 GMT,” or “18 December, 2145:27 GMT.” This was the instant, in Greenwich Mean Time, when the picture was taken, Vito explained. “Not that it's a snapshot, or something. There's no film involved, just transmitted bits of electronic information that get stored in a computer.” He didn't say where, but Mulheisen could guess.

  “This is a great shot,” Vito said, tapping the one of the naked woman floating on her back. It wasn't clear if he meant that the picture had come out well or that he liked the subject—perhaps both. It seemed to have been taken from a distance of about ten feet above the water. Three accompanying shots of the same instant—the same shot, actually, at different magnifications: say from a hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand feet—revealed that the pool was a hot springs on a mountainside, surrounded by mature evergreen trees.

  The woman in the picture was known to Mulheisen as Helen Sedlacek, and he believed that she had murdered a Detroit crime boss named Dante “Carmine” Busoni. He believed that she did it with the assistance of a man known in the crime world as Joe Service but known in the Butte, Montana, area as Joseph Humann. He believed that Helen had killed Carmine because the latter had ordered the killing of her father, a charming crook known as Big Sid. This hot springs was located on Joseph Humann's property, some forty miles south of Butte.

  “Now here's the same scene about twenty minutes later,” Vito said, regretfully putting aside the nude shot and picking up a new one. “This was taken by a different satellite, coming from a different direction. It doesn't have quite the capability of the first, so we didn't get it down to three meters, but you can see that this is not the girl in the first shot.”

  This one was in color, and while Vito's criticism of the camera's capabilities was accurate, Mulheisen could see that this naked body was not a female at all. This was a dead man with longish hair, lying on his back at nearly the opposite end of the hot springs pool, a flaccid penis clearly visible. He could tell the man was dead, or infer it at least, because of dark spotlike smudges on the chest, which seemed connected to a pinkish cloudiness as of blood around the body, and the disposition of the body: this was not a living person trying to keep afloat. This was a guy who had been shot at least four times. The head lay back and submerged, with the mouth open. The face wasn't very visible.

  Mulheisen looked at it for a long time, then said, “This is as close as you can get it?”

  Vito shrugged. “Maybe one of our guys could get it a little better.”

  “That'd be good,” Mulheisen said. “The face isn't identifiable at this angle, but the disposition of the bullet wounds could be matched to the body we have. If this is who I think it is, and if we can establish that these shots were taken twenty minutes apart, as it indicates . . .”

  Vito shook his head. “I don't think so, Mul. I mean, I can get you—maybe—a better shot of this guy, but if you're thinking you can use this as evidence or something, forget it. These pix don't exist. In fact, if my boss knew that you were looking at them, not only would my job be history, I might become part of the history of Leavenworth.”

  Mulheisen looked at his old high school buddy wistfully. They had shared a bench in chemistry lab and their hall lockers had been across from each other's. They had smoked cigarettes together in the loft above the stage, when both were on stage crew. He wasn't real sure where Vito worked now, but he had an idea. It was either a federal agency or it was under exclusive contract to that agency and, either way, it meant that Vito wasn't supposed to show around pictures that were taken by satellites, at least not without some higher authority. Mulheisen now asked if that authority could be obtained.

  “Possibly,” Vito said. “It depends on the satellite involved. Some of these, maybe this one"—he pointed to the picture of the dead man—"are just geographical survey satellites, mapping. But others have more, ah, special missions. If a need, a greatly pressing need to know could be established. . . . The problem is, even for the public-domain-type pictures, somebody asks ‘How did you find out about this?’ So first, we have to agree that these pix don't exist—yet—and I didn't show them to you. Okay? Okay. Then I have to go to the boss and say something like, Ί was talking to a buddy of mine the other day, a cop, and he was asking me about satellites and I admitted that yeah, there are a lot of satellites and at any given time there might be a chance that one is flying right over where you are standing and if it is mapping or whatever its function, yeah, you could probably retrieve that data somewhere and maybe, just maybe, you might be able to see what was happening at that moment.’ So then my boss would probably ask me why I was blabbing this crap all over town, and then I might convince him that it was essentially harmless and besides, it might be of value to the police and we should always cooperate with the police, et cetera, et cetera. But whether he'd go along with that, I don't know. I kind of doubt it.” He picked up his coffee and sipped it, but he made a face when he realized it was cold, and he set it down. He signaled the bartender and asked for a cognac.

  Mulheisen nodded. “Well, at least I can look now and if it turns out that it would be useful evidence we can worry about that later. But Vito, I would never tell anyone how I got hold of this.”

  “Or even that you got hold of it, is better,” Vito said.

  “So what else do we have?” Mulheisen asked.

  They turned to the other folders, other pictures. A series of scenes of a cabin in the mountains, in December, in snow. Then a picture of that same cabin, or what had been that cabin, lying in a black, smoky ruin amidst the snow. This had been the property of Joseph Humann, a.k.a. Joe Service. It lay approximately two hundred yards over the ridge from the hot springs.

  There were several shots between the first one, of the pristine snow, no tracks leading up to the cabin or the nearby shed/ garage, and the later shot of the burnt-out cabin. These intermediate pictures were murky, obscured for the most part by falling snow or partial cloud cover. But they did show an automobile in the yard, near the shed. And another one showed a female human figure walking through the snow, carrying an armful of firewood. And finally, a shot of two women, one holding wood and another bending over, perhaps to pick up wood to place in the other's arms.

  This was of great interest to Mulheisen because he knew, from the time line on the pictures of the two women, that they were taken at a time when Joseph Humann, otherwise known as Joe Service, was supposed to be in the cabin, attended by his nurse, Cathleen Yoder. Mr. Humann had nearly been killed by a would-be assassin three months earlier, at approximately the time of the pictures of the hot springs, in fact. Humann had made a remarkable recovery. So remarkable that by the time of this picture, just three months later, he had been able to leave the hospital for a day or so, a kind of holiday, to visit his cabin.

  What was interesting in these pictures for Mulheisen was the presence of two women. The pictures were not good. The visibi
lity was bad and this camera hadn't been able to get the resolution to within three meters, as the best of them did, but you could distinguish the one woman from the other. Mulheisen had seen Ms. Yoder, the nurse, before. She was the smaller woman, the one with blond hair cascading from under the woolen hat, whose arms were being loaded with wood. But the other one, that tall one, he didn't know her.

  This was significant because within a few hours the cabin would burn, the propane tank would blow up, and everybody in the building, except for one man, would be killed. But there was no body of Joseph Humann or Cate Yoder or any other woman in that burnt-out hulk. And Yoder's car, the one he could see in the satellite shot, was gone. At the time of the explosion there had been two other cars present, one of them rented by Helen Sedlacek and the other belonging to a local crime figure. So Mulheisen and the other authorities had reasonably concluded that Humann and his nurse had left before the arrival, probably separately, of Helen Sedlacek and six men, known crime figures, five of whose bodies were found there, plus the one who survived. Helen had been apprehended by Mulheisen shortly afterward and was presently in a Butte jail. But there was no sign of any second woman who had been present with Humann and Yoder. Except in this satellite picture. It was definitely not Helen; she was smaller than Yoder.

  Mulheisen was truly puzzled, because he had thought that he had pretty much figured out this whole scenario. Humann and Yoder go to the cabin, then they leave; Helen Sedlacek comes to the cabin, but she flees into the woods on foot when the killers arrive; the killers arrive, invade the empty cabin, a fire starts, the cabin blows up, killing all but one of them; Mulheisen and the other cops arrive; Helen is arrested.

  The cabin pictures were not of much interest, except for the presence of the unknown woman. Mulheisen was almost sorry he had asked Vito to obtain them—he'd been so sure of his interpretation of events. It was practically a closed case, except for the disappearance of Joe Service. But now . . . an unforeseen element had muddied the water. By contrast, the hot springs pictures had clarified that situation. They weren't exactly witnesses to a crime, but they certainly placed Helen on a remote scene within minutes of a homicide.