Trickster's Point (30 page)

“You realize how moronic that sounds, Ed?”

“Yeah.” Larson gave a boyish kind of shrug. “But keep it in mind. So, an hour?”

“I’ll be there,” Cork said.

H
e drove through Aurora, a town he knew so well he could have walked it blind and not been lost for a moment, a town he loved as much as he loved anything outside his family. But he drove angry. He was pissed at Jubal Little. Pissed at Jubal for dying, pissed at Jubal for the way he’d died, and pissed at what, with his final breaths, Jubal had left behind, a mystery that threatened Cork and his family: Rhiannon.

“Who are you? What am I supposed to know?” he shouted at the hole in his windshield. He slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamn you, Jubal. Why couldn’t you keep your goddamn trap shut, just this once.”

He headed to Sam’s Place and was relieved to see the parking lot empty but for Jenny’s Subaru. He was just about to go inside when his daughter came out with Waaboo toddling beside her. His grandson smiled, and Cork’s mood changed instantly. Anger drained away; love flooded in; but with it came rushing back his fear for the safety of his family.

Jenny let Waaboo run, if you could call it that, to Cork, who swept him up. The little boy’s black hair smelled of French fries.

“You timed it well,” Jenny said to him. “The last reporter got discouraged an hour ago and left. Ever since word got out about the search of our house this morning, we’ve been fighting them off like mosquitoes.”

“Sorry,” Cork said. “Did you call Leon Papakee?”

“Yes. He said he’d see what he could do.”

“Good.” That, at least, was a little relief. “Is Stephen inside?”

“Yeah. He and Judy are holding down the fort, such as it is.” She swept her hand across the empty lot. “The good thing about all the reporters, we sold a lot of burgers this afternoon.”

Waaboo squirmed in his arms, wanting to get down, and Cork released him. Waaboo toddled toward the lakeshore, but Jenny caught him before he’d gone far and picked him up. “Are you sticking around?”

“No. I’m meeting Ed Larson out on County Sixteen.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Yeah, take a look at this.” He walked her to the front of the Land Rover.

“Is that a bullet hole?” she asked, horrified.

“From a deer slug.”

“Somebody tried to shoot you?”

“Not necessarily, according to Agent Phil Holter. I may have shot my own windshield.”

“Why would he think that?”

“Because he’s covering all the possibilities, which include me being responsible for Jubal Little’s death and trying to make it look like I’m not.”

“He can’t believe that.”

Waaboo was straining to get free and making unhappy noises.

“I honestly don’t know what he believes. Look, Jenny, I want you to close up Sam’s Place. Close it up now, and go home. Shut the curtains and don’t open the door for anyone.”

She looked at the windshield. “Because one of those may come our way?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not taking any chances. And I’m going to give Cy Borkman a call, have him come over and hang out with you guys.”

Borkman had retired from the sheriff’s department a couple
of years earlier, but he still moonlighted in private security. Cork was pretty sure that, when Cy knew the gravity of the situation, he’d give a hand in a heartbeat.

“Do you really think we’re in danger?”

Cork nodded toward Waaboo. “Do you want to take a chance?”

Jenny had been in that kind of danger before. Only a year earlier, she’d risked her life, faced down a cadre of crazy religious zealots armed to the teeth, in order to save the life of the child in her arms. In a sad way, it had armored her against just the sort of brutal potential that Cork was afraid she might be facing again. Her look went hard, and she put her cheek against her son’s head. “I understand.”

“I may be home late tonight, so don’t worry about me.”

Again, she eyed the hole left by the slug. “That’s probably not possible.”

*   *   *

Larson was at the bridge ahead of him, and he wasn’t alone. John Berglund, from the Border Patrol, was there, too. Both men stood at the base of the ridge from which Cork believed the shot through his windshield had been fired.

Cork shook Berglund’s hand and said, “Seeing a lot of you these days.”

“Back at you.”

“Is this what you do on your time off?”

Berglund smiled. “Been doing this pretty much since I was a Boy Scout. Lot of years now. Not much I like better than reading trail.”

“You guys ready?” Larson said.

“For what?” Cork asked.

Larson lifted a hand toward the top of the ridge. “Let’s see about that shooter.”

It was late afternoon. The sun was an emptying orange balloon
caught in the branches of the trees. The temperature was dropping noticeably.

Berglund hesitated, eyeing the ridge, the sun, and finally the far side of the bridge Cork had been approaching when the shot was fired.

“How long ago did it happen?” he asked.

“A little over two hours,” Cork said.

“The sun would have been about there in the sky?” Berglund pointed to a spot about sixty degrees west of zenith.

“About,” Cork agreed.

“Glare on your windshield?”

“Yeah. Tough to see clearly.”

Berglund considered the ridge again. “Probably a blessing. You couldn’t see the shooter because of it, but the reflection off the windshield probably also made it tough for the shooter to see you clearly. Missed by a hair, Ed told me.”

“A little more than that, but close enough it scared the hell out of me.”

Berglund seemed satisfied. “All right, let’s go.”

They climbed the ridge, which was bare rock until very near the top, where scrub undergrowth had taken root among the crags. Above that, a stand of tenacious poplar saplings capped the rock outcrop. The men separated by a dozen feet and began to go over the ground carefully. The light was fading quickly, and Cork wasn’t sure they’d be able to see anything.

It was Berglund who said, “Over here.”

Cork and Larson joined him, and he pointed to a spot behind one of the larger saplings where there was an indentation in the thin topsoil.

“From a knee,” he said. “Somebody knelt here, probably in a firing position.” He walked away, toward the back of the ridge, his eyes reading the ground. “He left this way.”

Cork had always considered himself to be a pretty good tracker, but whatever the signs Berglund saw Cork was blind to.

He and Larson followed the Border Patrol agent down the
backside of the ridge, where Ahsayma Creek ran. In the language of the Anishinaabeg,
ahsayma
meant “tobacco.” The creek was named for the color of the water, a tobacco-spit brown, the result of bog seepage, from which much of the flow had come. They trekked through a gully heavily lined with popple, and Cork finally saw tracks pressed into the leaves underfoot. The trail led back to the road, to a pull-off a quarter mile south of the bridge. In the soft earth there, they found tire indentations.

“You might want to get people out here to get impressions, Ed. You got good tire tracks, and look here.” Berglund crouched and put his finger to the ground where the perfect imprint of a boot sole had been left. “Not a common-looking pattern,” he noted. “Might not be too hard to identify the brand.” He gazed back in the direction of the bridge. “This guy picked a pretty good spot to take a shot at you, and it was probably only the angle of the sun and the reflection off your windshield that saved you. If, in fact, he was trying to take you out. So he’s somebody who has a sense of what it takes to hunt. What do you think, Ed?”

“I think that’s a lot of conjecture, John, but I’ve got nothing better to offer. When we get these tire impressions evaluated and that boot imprint, we’ll know a hell of a lot more. And, Cork? I’ll tell Phil Holter he can let go of thinking you might have done this yourself. I’m looking forward to seeing the disappointed expression on his face.”

*   *   *

Cork filled his tank at the Food ’N Fuel in Allouette. It was getting late and he was hungry, so he grabbed a bowl of chicken wild rice soup and a cup of coffee at the Mocha Moose. He glanced at the headline on that day’s copy of the
Duluth News Tribune,
which had been left on one of the tables. The dam collapse was the lead. The death toll in Colorado was rising dramatically. The pictures of the towns in the canyon below the dam were devastating,
all rubble and mud. Jubal Little was still front-page news, but his death, which was still officially being called a hunting accident, had taken a backseat to the greater loss. Cork wondered how Jubal would have felt about that.

He called home and talked with Jenny and then with Cy Borkman, who was breathing hard from wrestling with little Waaboo. “It’s under control here, Cork,” Cy told him, wheezing a bit. “No reporters. No visible threats. But I’m not leaving until I see you walk in the door.”

“Thanks, Cy. I owe you.”

“It’s what friends do,” Cy said.

A simple understanding, Cork thought, but one that Jubal Little had forgotten long ago.

He left the Mocha Moose. It was dark outside. The moon was up in the eastern sky, and the air was cool and damp enough that he could see the silver clouds his breath made when he exhaled. As he opened the door of his Land Rover, his cell phone rang.

“Hello, Cork. This is Camilla Little. I need your help. I want to talk to Winona Crane.”

T
he Escalade was parked in front of the Tamarack County courthouse. When Cork pulled up behind it, Kenny Yates stepped from the driver’s side to meet him. The man was dressed in black and, under the streetlamp, looked like the kind of huge form that might emerge from the closet in a child’s nightmare.

“Couldn’t do this at Jubal’s place?” Cork asked.

“I just drive,” Yates said. “I don’t ask.”

He opened the back door, Camilla Little swung her long legs into the light on the street, and Yates offered his hand to help her out. She seemed unsteady, maybe a little drunk.

“Thank you, Kenny.”

“No problem.” Yates spoke in a voice that was gentle and assuring.

Cork walked her to the passenger side of his Land Rover and helped her in. As he came back around, he saw that Yates had moved forward to study the hole in the windshield.

“We heard about this,” Yates said.

Cork didn’t ask how they’d heard. He figured the Jaegers were probably keyed in to every aspect of the investigation, through one of Holter’s people or someone in the sheriff’s department. There weren’t many doors that money and political power couldn’t open.

“I told Mrs. Little that I’m real uncomfortable with this,” Yates said. “I’d like to follow you, if that’s all right.”

Cork shook his head. “Where we’re going, I’d rather go alone.”

Yates reached inside his leather jacket and drew out a small handgun, a Beretta Tomcat. He held it out toward Cork. “Jubal told me you don’t carry. I’d rather you did on this trip.”

Once again Cork gave his head a shake. “We’ll be fine.”

The pupils of Yates’s eyes were as dark as bullet holes. “Anything happens to her, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

“That’ll make two of us,” Cork said.

“I’ll be waiting right here,” Yates told him.

“We may be a while.”

“I said I’ll be waiting.”

Cork got into his Land Rover and drove away.

Camilla stared ahead, offering him mostly profile, lit by streetlamps, in light, then in shadow. Her hands lay clasped on her lap in a way that made it clear to Cork how pensive she was. That and her silence. Which he didn’t mind. It was, after all, Winona Crane to whom she wanted to speak.

In his own mind, he remarked again on what a lovely woman she was, in a grand and stately way. She’d been raised in the political arena, trained in the etiquette of diplomacy and the nuance of statesmanship. She’d attended National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., along with the daughters of presidents and diplomats. For college she’d chosen Mills, and law school at Stanford, specializing in environmental issues. She’d been an attorney for the Nature Conservancy when she met Jubal Little at that cancer fund-raiser in Saint Paul. She had, as Jubal once told Cork, a brain, a body, and a beautifully broad view of the world. Which meant, apparently, that she understood about Winona Crane.