Boundary Waters (32 page)

“Hey, counselor.”

George LeDuc was not only an elder but also a member of the tribal executive council, and Jo knew him well. He was nearing seventy, had thick white hair, white teeth, a broad face, and a strong, broad build. He’d outlived two wives already and was on his third. He wore a gray sweatshirt that had printed across the front
KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY
.

Francine, George’s wife, a woman in her midthirties and seven months pregnant, stepped in from the back room. “Hi, Jo.”

“Francine, you look wonderful.”

“That’s what George says, too.” She laughed, and covered her mouth.

“Like a garden getting close to harvest.” George put his arm around her and smiled.

“I’m looking for Sarah Two Knives,” Jo said.

“I figured,” George replied. “We heard there’s bad shit going down in the Boundary Waters.
Majimanidoo,
the old ones are saying.”

“You’re one of the old ones,” Francine said.

“Young enough still.” George patted her swollen belly.

“It’s not good,” Jo said.

“Federal agents is what we heard.” George looked as if he’d taken a drink of vinegar. “That’s never a good sign.”

“Do you know where I can find Sarah?”

“At the community center,” Francine said. “She and Lydia are working on the Iron Lake Initiative.”

“Migwech,”
Jo said.
Thanks.

The community center was a new brick building constructed with profits from the Chippewa Grand Casino. It housed the reservation administration offices, a clinic, a gym, and a day-care. Jo found Sarah Two Knives and her mother, Lydia Champoux, in a conference room set up with computer equipment. Sarah was at the computer. Lydia was scanning a sheet coming off the printer. The Iron Lake Initiative, a program to which many men and women on the reservation gave time, was an effort to consolidate reservation land. Like many reservations in Minnesota, Iron Lake was a patchwork of holdings—tribal trust land, land allotted to tribal members, land that had been sold or leased to non-Indians, and land belonging to the county, state, or federal forest service. The purpose of the initiative was to buy back land wherever possible in the hope that ultimately the reservation would exist again in the configuration spelled out in the original treaty of 1854. Jo had supplied legal counsel when the initiative was first being established, but since then, the Iron Lake Anishinaabe had carried on the work entirely on their own.

Men, Jo had noted long before, tended to smoke or drink or pace when they were worried, feeding their bodies to the anxiety. Women were more likely to find something to occupy themselves. It didn’t surprise her that Sarah and Lydia were working on the initiative.

“
Anin,
Lydia.
Anin,
Sarah,” Jo said in greeting.

“
Anin,
Jo.”

Lydia Champoux taught Native American studies at Aurora Community College, and her courses were among the most popular of the college’s offerings. She was a small woman with braided silver hair and light brown eyes. She was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt. Tiny blue ceramic feathers dangled from her ears. Normally, Lydia—a woman of refreshing intelligence and wit—would have smiled, but Sarah had no doubt informed her of the situation, and Lydia, like Sarah, appeared braced for the worst.

“It’s bad, isn’t it,” Sarah said. She swiveled in her chair and the bearings squealed.

“I wish it were better,” Jo admitted. She sat near Sarah and explained the situation.

“So they’ve found no sign of Louis and Stormy,” Lydia summed up darkly.

“Not exactly. They found trail signs left where the first dead man was discovered. Sheriff Schanno believes they’re the kind Boy Scouts use.”

“Wendell’s doing,” Lydia speculated. “He was always teaching Louis the old ways. The Boy Scouts learned everything from Indians.”

Jo said, “The search plane and helicopter are concentrating on Wilderness Lake now. Sheriff Schanno’s pretty sure that’s a good bet.”

“Wilderness is a very big lake,” Lydia observed. “Although they are big in our hearts, as far as that country is concerned, Louis and Stormy and Cork are quite small.” She took an unhappy look at the sky outside the conference room window. “And there isn’t a lot of daylight left.”

“I’m sorry to have to bring you such bad news,” Jo said.

“Thank you,” Sarah Two Knives told her. “It’s more than those
majimanidoog
would offer us.”

“Have you seen any sign of Wendell?” Jo asked.

Lydia shook her head. “I watch the stovepipe on his trailer home. When there’s smoke, I visit. There’s been no smoke for a long time. Let’s hope he’s burning a fire somewhere else.”

“I’m going back to Aurora, back to the men who’re responsible for all this. Would you like to come?”

“What for?” Sarah said. “It won’t change what’s happening out there. Will you let me know when you get any news?”

“Absolutely.”

“Jo.” Lydia reached out and laid a hand on Jo’s arm, an unusual thing for an Anishinaabe. “I’ve seen alcohol and despair cause men to kill one another senselessly. That’s a sad, sad thing. But this is different. This feels like a battle.”

“I think probably it is.”

“Then we should pray for our men to be strong and cunning and ruthless in destroying whatever evil is out there against them.”

Jo nodded and said, “Amen.”

The sun, as it set, struck fire to the trees along the shoreline of Iron Lake. High above the water, a flight of Canada geese, late in migrating, pointed themselves south in a long dark finger, and fled the North Woods. The lake surface was still and empty. Across it lay the reflection of the low sun, like a long fiery crack, as if the placid surface were only a thin shell over a molten sea beginning to break through. As she passed the trailer of Wendell Two Knives, Jo checked the stovepipe. No smoke.

Driving back to Aurora, she considered the situation as it stood. Fifteen years earlier, Marais Grand had been murdered. Now people associated with her daughter had died—two in California and at least one in the Boundary Waters, the man named Grimes. Benedetti and Jackson and Harris had all thought the recent deaths were tied to the old murder, the result of someone trying to cover tracks. But the death of Marais Grand had been explored and explained, so what was the motive for these other killings?

Cork had once told her that in his opinion most murders occurred for one of three reasons—fear, anger, or greed. She wasn’t entirely certain she agreed with him, but for the sake of argument, she decided to start there.

If fear was the motive, what was there about Shiloh that would generate enough fear in someone to drive them to murder, not once but several times? Benedetti and Jackson had believed it was a fear of the memories Shiloh’s therapist had dredged up. That would have explained everything nicely, including the death of the therapist. The only problem was that they all now knew the truth of the murder of Marais Grand. With Theresa Benedetti dead, there seemed nothing significant left to fear about that incident.

So maybe fear wasn’t the motive. What about anger, then?

She dismissed it almost immediately. Anger was an emotion of the moment, a flare of destructive passion. Everything about the current situation felt too well planned, too carefully executed. For the time being at least, she would put aside the consideration of anger.

Which left Jo, as she entered Aurora, wondering about greed.

She made a stop at her office. Fran had left a stack of phone messages and notes on her desk, most dealing with rescheduled appointments. Jo glanced over them but couldn’t make herself concentrate. She called the sheriff’s office. Deputy Marsha Dross answered and told her Schanno wanted her to call the cabin at the Quetico. She gave Jo the number. Metcalf answered when Jo called. She asked to speak with Schanno.

“I think you should come over. Now. Interesting news,” Schanno said.

They were all at the Quetico. Harris, Jackson, Metcalf, Schanno, and the two Benedettis. The place smelled of fried food. On the table sat a nearly empty tub of broasted chicken from the Pinewood Broiler and a greasy sack of fries.

Harris wiped his mouth with a napkin when Jo walked in. “Ms. O’Connor, we have some information.” He sounded more cautious than Wally Schanno had on the phone.

“Here.” Angelo Benedetti stepped forward to help her with her coat.

“What have I been missing?”

“An information exchange,” Jackson said. He held a bottle of Leinenkugel beer in his hand. “We’ve come a distance.”

“What kind of information?”

“The name of the man we found in the Boundary Waters, for starters,” Harris replied. “Have a seat.” He waved his hand toward an empty wing chair near the fire. When Jo was seated, he went on. “The prints match those of a man known as Papa Bear. Real name’s Albert Lowell Bearman. He’s a former marine, saw action in Grenada and the Gulf War. Since then, he’s gone into business for himself. Soldier of fortune kind of thing. As nearly as we can tell, he’s been involved in insurrections in Africa and South America. Now he’s plying his skills domestically.”

“I made some calls as soon as we knew his name,” Angelo Benedetti explained. “This guy’s not our kind. He’s got no loyalty except to himself. No family ethic, no accountability. He’s more the kind the government would use.” He gave a cordial nod to Harris, who paid him no heed. “Still, people I know know about him. He usually works alone, but the word is he’s out on a big contract and he’s teamed with a guy nobody knows from nobody except he calls himself Milwaukee.”

“We checked out this Milwaukee,” Harris broke in. “Nothing on the NCIC computer about a man with that name or using that alias. In any event, it appears that somebody has put a contract out on Shiloh. The question is why.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Harris said. “I think we’ve been wearing blinders that have kept us looking too much at the past. Maybe this has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the future.”

Jackson looked at his brother, confused. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh, but I do,” Jo said. She eyed Harris. “Because I’ve been thinking along those lines myself. I think it would be very interesting to know who would benefit financially from Shiloh’s death.”

Harris cocked a finger at her and fired off an imaginary round. “Bull’s-eye.”

Jackson squinted a moment, rolling things around in his head. Then the light came on in the attic. “Oh.”

“Family usually benefits, don’t they?” Vincent Benedetti said. “She doesn’t have any family she knows about except Arkansas Willie Raye.”

Jo tapped her fingernail on the arm of her chair as she considered this information. “Raye owns Ozark Records, is that correct?”

“No,” Benedetti replied. “Shiloh owns the company. He just runs it. When I loaned Marais the money to start Ozark, I insisted that Shiloh be the sole beneficiary should Marais die. I wanted my daughter well taken care of. It turned out Marais was way ahead of me on that. But when Marais died, Raye did become executor of the estate and took charge of running Ozark Records. He’s done a good job, I gotta give him that. Built the best label in the industry, they tell me. But Shiloh owns it all.”

“If Arkansas Willie Raye is Shiloh’s beneficiary, I’d say you have a pretty good motive. But how would Raye contact a man like Papa Bear?”

“I can answer that,” Metcalf said, “if you’ll step over here a minute, Ms. O’Connor.”

Jo walked to the table and looked over Metcalf’s shoulder as his fingers flew across the keys of his laptop. He accessed the Internet and went to a bookmark called Papa Bear’s Lair. A moment later, a home page appeared complete with a cozy photo of Papa Bear himself—a huge man with a shaved head, dressed in military fatigues, holding an assault rifle in his hands, and sporting a wicked combat knife hung from his belt. The header on the text read
DISCREET ENFORCEMENT. I’M SO DAMN GOOD IT’S SCARY
. His résumé read like a ticket through hell, with time spent in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and Bosnia. Foreign and domestic service, the text indicated. Every reasonable offer considered. The final page of the web site was an e-mail form readers could use to communicate with Papa Bear.

“Hired over the ’net?” Jo said.

“Or at least this was where contact was probably initially made.”

“It’s legal?” She looked at Jackson.

“Not much governance over what’s on the Internet,” Jackson said.

“Arkansas Willie Raye.” All the muscles on Vincent Benedetti’s body seemed to ripple—whether from anger or disease was hard to tell. “I’ll tear his heart out.”

“You don’t know for certain that he’s responsible,” Jo warned. “It’s only speculation at this point.”

“Fucking good speculation.” Benedetti narrowed his eyes on her. “I hate lawyers. But you, I like.”

Harris said, “I’ll get someone working on a check of Raye. It seems as reasonable a lead as any.”

“What good does it do us?” Jo asked. “We still don’t know what’s going on out there. Has there been any more word?”

“It’s dark now,” Schanno said. “The search plane’s landed, but the helicopter’s still in the air, looking for campfires, anything. Mostly we wait now until morning. The good thing is this: If the information from Benedetti’s contacts is accurate, we have only Raye and one other man to worry about out there. The odds are getting better.”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Harris said. He held up a rolled copy of a tabloid, chewed and ragged as an old bone. “Tomorrow this piece of shit that calls itself a newspaper hits the stands with a front-page story about Shiloh. Every asshole who’s got nothing better to do will be up here making this a hell of a lot harder than it already is.”

“There are going to be reporters. What are you going to tell them?” Vincent Benedetti asked Nathan Jackson.

Jackson lifted a poker and rearranged the burning logs in the fireplace. He worked carefully, positioning the logs so that hot flames rose up, climbing into the chimney. “If Shiloh is my daughter,” he asked Benedetti, “would you still care?”

“I suppose I’ve cared too long to stop now.”