Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel Read online

  “You must have talked to a dozen people that night. So, yeah.”

  “I think Bradley’s a fine name. Maybe that’s why I remembered it.”

  “Um, okay. Thanks?” He was looking more rattled by the second.

  “Good, strong name. Bradley. It’s distinctive. Don’t you agree?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” I leaned in for the kill. “Is Bradley your real name?”

  “Yes.” He said it without blinking, and he looked genuinely surprised at the question.

  “Where’d you get that poster?” Time to switch gears.

  “A poster shop. I know it’s kinda dumb.”

  “Not the girl and the car. The other one.”

  “What, the movie poster?”

  “Yes, the movie poster.”

  “RJ left it here.”

  “RJ?”

  “Our other roommate. You met him. He left it here so I figured I could just take it. Is that a big problem? If you don’t think I should have taken it, why don’t you just—”

  “Bradley,” I said. “Shut up a second. Where’s RJ?”

  “I told you, he left.”

  “When?”

  “Like a few weeks ago. Three weeks? Four weeks?”

  “Okay, wait, stop.” I had ten questions in my mind and I had to take a moment to put them in order. “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say where he was going.”

  “He just left? Without saying a word?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. It was kinda weird.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. RJ. Yeah, I remember him now. Tall guy, dark hair?”

  “Yeah…”

  “And those initials. RJ…”

  I stopped dead. I didn’t even have to ask him, but he told me anyway.

  “Robert James,” he said. “Everybody called him RJ.”

  “His last name?”

  “Bergman.”

  “Son of a bitch.” I slapped the table loud enough to make him jump.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was right here. Right in this apartment. I talked to him. I asked him questions.”

  “You’re starting to scare me here. What’s going on?”

  “This is very important,” I said. “You have to help me figure out where RJ is right now.”

  “I told you, he left. He just didn’t come back one day.”

  “Come back from where?”

  “Well, he was always leaving for a few days at a time. He said he was going to the cottage for a while.”

  “The cottage?”

  “Well, that’s just it. He said he was watching a house for a professor of his who retired and moved down south, but he’d never say where the cottage was. I asked him about it once and he said he didn’t want all of us going up there and trying to have a big party or something. He was kind of a strange guy sometimes—have I said that yet?”

  “I believe you, but get back to that cottage. Do you think he could be up there right now?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just weird because I haven’t seen him around at all since what, the beginning of the month? Like right after you came out here. But how do you just ditch all your classes like that?”

  “I got news for you,” I said. “RJ left school last year.”

  “That’s impossible. He lived here. He was going to school. He went to class every day.”

  “Did you have him in any of your classes?”

  “No. I’m electrical engineering. He was video production or something like that.”

  “So you never actually saw him attending an actual class.”

  “No—but wait, that’s just weird, then. What kind of person would pretend to be in college and not go to any classes?”

  “Let me ask you something else,” I said. “How come RJ doesn’t have this place listed as his official address?”

  “Well, technically, we’re only supposed to have three people in this apartment,” he said, looking a little sheepish. “When RJ moved in, he offered to double up with me in my room, even though it only had the one desk.”

  “And you guys agreed to that?”

  “He was paying the same amount of money, even though he didn’t have a desk or much room for anything really. So it made everybody’s rent lower. I know we probably shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “How did RJ and Charlie meet, anyway? Were you here then?”

  “No, but it sounds like they went way back, to like freshman year. Funny, though, they never seemed to have that much in common. I’m not sure how they ever decided to live together.”

  Maybe one of them just had way too much motivation, I thought.

  “One last thing,” I said. “RJ’s got a cousin named Sean Wiley. He lives down in Bad Axe. You ever see him up here?”

  “No, but I think I’ve heard RJ talking to him on the phone.”

  “How often did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. Once every couple of months, maybe? I’d answer the phone sometimes when he called. He always seemed like a nice guy.”

  “Yeah, he is,” I said. “There’s a good chance he’s with RJ right now. So is there any way we can figure out where that cottage is? You said he was looking after it for a retired professor. Do you know which one?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “We’d have to go through his records and find out all the classes he took. Then we’d have to get hold of those professors…” I was working it through in my mind, talking it out, trying to find an angle.

  “I think it’s on a lake,” he said. “Does that help?”

  “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 least. A closed-up cottage meaning no vehicle most of the time. Although whenever I saw a garage, my heart sank, because that meant there was no way to know for sure unless I drove all the way down, got out of the truck, and peeked inside.

  It was 1:30 in the morning now. I was starting to lose steam. I kept telling myself one more driveway, one more driveway. This next one could be it.

  When I’d circled Rice Lake, I dropped down to Mud Lake. It was tiny and only a mile away, with a handful of cottages on the northern shore. I ran through those in a matter of minutes. Then I doubled back up through Calumet and left Houghton County. I was in Keweenaw County now, the end of the line, the only piece of land left, surrounded on three sides by Lake Superior. I started wondering where Agent Long was, whether she was close or still an hour away. But when I looked at my cell phone there was absolutely no signal at all.

  It was two in the morning when I turned onto the long road to Lake Gratiot. I knew the lakeshores would be less and less populated now, which meant fewer cottages to check but more distance to drive between them. One thing I knew for sure—if you owned a cottage on one of these lakes, it was definitely up on a lake.

  The cottages on Lake Gratiot were concentrated on the western shoreline, but I had to keep driving down separate access roads to get to them. I was halfway through the lake when I pulled down a driveway and saw an old black Subaru parked right next to a small cottage.

  This is the one, I thought. As I got out and walked slowly down the rest of the driveway, it occurred to me that I had come this far with no good idea about what I’d actually do when I found the place. Another typical genius move on my part.

  The car was unlocked, of course, because who locks a car at a cottage on a remote lake in the Upper Peninsula? It’s not like somebody’s going to drive up and break into it, even though that’s exactly what I was thinking I’d need to do. It was either that or go look in the windows. I figured if it was me sleeping away in my cottage, I’d prefer the first choice over the second.

  I opened up the passenger’s side door and hit the button for the glove compartment. I found the registration and held it up to read the name in the interior light. Here’s where the owner could come out shooting, I thought, if he happened to be going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and noticed the light coming from his car.

  The car was registered to someone named Patricia Curry. I put the registration back in the glove compartment, closed the door, got back in my truck, and then got the hell out of there.

  I kept working my way through the rest of the cottages on that lake, and when I was done it was going on three o’clock in the morning. The little voice in my head saying just one more, just one more had apparently gone to bed, so I stopped there on the side of that little road in the middle of absolute nothingness and I put my head down on the steering wheel. Just a few minutes to rest my eyes, I thought.

  Then from out of nowhere a horrible insight came to me and I was jolted awake.

  I flashed back to that day in the apartment, talking to Rebecca and Wayne and Bradley and RJ. All of us sitting there at the end of the night, drinking beer and thinking about Charlie. Rebecca asked me if she could talk to Charlie’s father, and I told her that he was staying at his old friend’s house in Sault Ste. Marie. She didn’t end up calling him, but at that point I’d already given all of them the information. Charles Razniewski Sr. wasn’t in Detroit, surrounded
by fellow U.S. marshals, he was right across the UP, in a normal house in a normal neighborhood. If you could guess who his old friend was—which you obviously could if you already knew so much about his history—then you could find out exactly where that house was. You could go out to Sault Ste. Marie the very next day, when you knew that he’d probably be alone. If you went early enough, you could beat me there with hours to spare.

  I sat there gripping the steering wheel and trying to find a hole in my logic, but I couldn’t. I was the one who made it so easy for RJ to go to Sault Ste. Marie and to find Razniewski all alone in that house. I’m the one who made it happen.

  Then the second insight, almost as bad as the first. RJ could have gone right to the door and said, “Hey, I’m Charlie’s apartment-mate. Maybe he mentioned me? So sorry about what happened. Can I come in and talk to you about Charlie?” He could have sat down with him at the kitchen table, put the man at ease. When the knife finally came out, Raz never would have seen it coming.

  I pounded the steering wheel until my hand went numb. Then I put the truck back into gear and drove to the next lake.

  * * *

  There were two more interior lakes just to the east. The tiny Deer Lake and then the much larger Lac La Belle. On the map, the roads leading to them were nameless and so thin I could hardly trace their routes in the dim light of my truck’s interior. I made my way on whatever road I could find leading through the trees, guessing my way here and there and just trying to stay pointed east. I eventually found Deer Lake, with one single access road that led down to a boat launch. I didn’t see any cottages at all.

  I cut back to Lac La Belle. It was after three in the morning now, and I worked my way around the lake—it was probably eight miles or so, but it might have been eighty or eight hundred. I nosed down every driveway, painting every cottage with a double beam of light. Back out and go to the next, do it all over again. Keep going, keep going.

  It was after four in the morning when I finished that lake. I had come up empty. As I drove back to the main road, I saw a police car flash by at high speed. I thought it might be a Michigan State Police car, but I was honestly too exhausted to see straight. If it was the state police, I thought, then they had come up here from the nearest post, in Calumet. Otherwise, it was a county car from Eagle River. They’re out looking for me or they’re looking for the cottage based on whatever information the FBI may have relayed to them. Probably both. It surprised me a little, just how much I didn’t want to be found yet, and how much I wanted to find that cottage first. They had all the guns and manpower and everything else to do this right, but at that moment in the cold early hours I had an absolute physical hunger to finish what I had started.