Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 7

St. Valentine’s Day, 2007, started off as a frozen, chaotic mess in southeast Michigan. The first blizzard of the winter had swept through overnight, dumping up to eight inches of snow across the region. As the Wednesday-morning rush hour approached, temperatures suddenly dipped into the teens, while winds gusted up to thirty miles an hour. Road crews frantically spread salt on streets and freeways, attempting to melt the ice before Metro Detroit’s hundreds of thousands of commuters hit the roads. But the gale defeated their efforts, blowing the salt away. Swirling snow drifts blinded drivers and obscured slippery patches of pavement, causing dozens of fender benders throughout the tri-county Detroit suburbs.

About twenty-five miles east of downtown Detroit, in the nineteenth-century mineral-bath resort town of Mount Clemens, Deputy William Hughes was among the crew manning the lobby at the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) headquarters. Hughes, a twenty-year veteran, reported for work at 10:00 A.M. and was greeted by a leak in the ceiling of his small office, right over his desk.

Hughes had just finished moving his desk out of the drip’s soggy path when a fellow deputy poked his head in and said someone in the lobby wanted to file a missing persons complaint. Hughes prepared to write his first report of the day.

The visitor, Stephen Grant, was alone. Hughes beckoned him into the cement-block cubicle, apologizing for the messy, wet office. Stephen said he didn’t mind and took a seat. He then pulled out a notebook and consulted it for a moment before commencing his story.

In a jittery voice, the pale, dark-haired, wide-eyed visitor told Hughes he hadn’t heard from his thirty-four-year-old wife, Tara, since the previous Friday night, when she stormed out of their Washington Township home following an argument.

Stephen explained that his wife was an executive with Washington Group International, a construction and engineering company with branches throughout the world. Tara worked in the company’s San Juan, Puerto Rico, office and returned home weekends, her husband said.

The veteran cop took notice of a gash on Stephen’s nose. The inch-long scabbed wound immediately aroused his instincts.

“I was concerned about the scratch—plus, he had waited five days to report his wife missing,” Hughes said. “And he kept looking at his notebook, like he was trying to keep his story straight.”

Macomb County over the past decade has gone from the sparsely populated, semirural home of Michigan’s last remaining military base to one of Metro Detroit’s most prosperous and fast-growing bedroom communities. Still, the missing persons there tend to be drug addicts who drop out for a few days, or ice fishermen who inadvertently float out toward Canada on giant Lake St. Clair—not prosperous businesswomen from the upscale enclave of Washington Township.

“Something wasn’t right here,” Hughes recalled.