The Mackinac Incident by Len McDougall

Author:Len McDougall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

PARADISE

Colyer had driven back to the Betsy River after Shannon dropped him at his car. He’d spent the entire night at the grisly murder scene with state police forensic investigators, trying to piece together what had happened.

He’d decided not to let local and state police agencies know anything more than they already knew; not yet. He’d put together what he thought was a pretty feasible theory, but it would sound crazy to cops who were used to nothing much ever happening in their neck of the woods. And even if local authorities did believe him, there was a real likelihood that they’d do something to tip off the men he was after.

What if the submarine that had been scuttled by its own crew off the east coast of Canada had delivered the four men that Shannon had tracked for him? The Eyes-Only report from the US sub had claimed that the diesel submarine had discharged four men. If these were the same men, where had they come from, and who were they? Money was apparently no object; an undocumented submarine, by itself, denoted millions of dollars spent to achieve an objective that had obviously been deemed worth the expense. Discarding a new Zodiac on the shore of Lake Superior would have been an insignificant expense compared to the money that had already been spent to reach Canada.

Whatever their objective was, it was worth murdering people as well. In fact, the deaths of the people at Betsy River seemed to have been merely peripheral to the main objective. They were acts of convenience rather than an end in themselves. The thought that murder and torture would be committed as easily as it appeared to have been indicated an important goal for the perpetrators, and a potential catastrophe for the United States.

But were the people who’d been killed been an active part of the scheme, or had they simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time? It had been easy to determine the identities of the dead woman and two of the men—they appeared to be who Shannon said they were. The third man, the one who’d been more or less decapitated, was a ghost. Colyer hoped that his DNA might reveal who he was, but a cursory search so far had come up with zilch. Fingerprints, face . . . so far the CODIS system had turned up nothing, and INTERPOL was still looking for a match.

When Colyer reached the village of Paradise, within sight of a cell tower, he pulled over and checked the reception of his cell phone. The bar graph was solid. He dialed up Lieutenant Perkins at the state police post in Sault Sainte Marie.

“Hello Tom,” Perkins answered. “Are you at your office?”

“No, I’m in beautiful downtown Paradise.” The sarcasm was thick in his voice—for Colyer, this collection of decaying buildings was pretty far from living up to its name. From where he sat in his car, he could see the entire village. If

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