Mercy Falls (3 page)

But his backup, too, would come under fire. Cork knew he had to advise them of the situation. And that meant exposing himself one more time to the sniper.

He took aim at the place where he’d seen the flash of sunlight, which was far beyond the effective range of his .38, but he squeezed off a couple of rounds anyway to encourage the sniper to reconsider, should he be thinking about coming down.

He shoved himself backward over the cold earth and came up on all fours beside the front passenger door. He gripped the handle and tried to take a breath, but he was so tense that he could only manage a quick, shallow gasp. He willed himself to move and flung the door open. Lunging toward the radio unit attached to the dash, he wrapped his fingers around the mike dangling on the accordion cord and fell back just as a sniper round slammed through the passenger seat back.

“Unit Three to Unit One. Over.”

“Unit One. Go ahead, Sheriff.”

“We’re still taking fire, Duane. A single shooter, I think, up on a hill due east of our position, directly in front of the cabin. Which way you coming from?”

“South,” Deputy Duane Pender said.

“Approach with extreme caution.”

“Ten-four, Cork.”

“Unit Two to Unit Three. Over.”

“I read you, Cy.”

“I’m coming in from the north. I’ll be a couple of minutes behind Pender.”

“Ten-four. Listen, I want you guys coming with your sirens blasting. Maybe we can scare this guy.”

“We might lose him, Sheriff,” Pender said.

“Right now our job is to get an ambulance in here for Marsha.”

“Dispatch to Unit Three.”

“Go ahead, Patsy.”

“Ambulance estimates another twelve to fifteen minutes, Sheriff. They want to know Marsha’s situation.”

“Single bullet, entry and exit wounds. I’ve got compresses on both. I’ve put a blanket around her and elevated her feet. She’s still losing blood.”

“Ten-four. Also, State Patrol’s responding. They’ve got two cruisers dispatched to assist.”

“I copy that. Out.”

Cork crawled toward Dross. Her face was pale, bloodless.

“A few more minutes, Marsha. Help’s on the way.”

She seemed focused on the sky above them both. She whispered something.

“What?” Cork leaned close.

“
Star light, star bright
…”

Cork lifted his eyes. The sun had finally set and the eastern sky was turning inky. He saw the evening star, a glowing ember caught against the rising wall of night.

From a distance came the thin, welcome howl of a siren.

Cork looked down at his deputy and remembered what she’d said: that he loved this work. At the moment, she couldn’t have been more wrong. Her eyes had closed. He felt at her neck and found the pulse so faint he could barely detect it.

Then her eyes opened slowly. Her lips moved. Cork bent to her again.

“Next time,” she whispered, “you drive.”

“H
E MUST’VE SPLIT
when he heard the sirens.”

Cy Borkmann looked across the road at the hill, which was a dark giant at the threshold of night. Cork, Deputy Duane Pender, and a state trooper named Fitzhugh had just come down from reconnoitering the top. They hadn’t encountered the shooter, but they had found a couple of shell casings in a jumble of rocks overlooking the road and the Tibodeau cabin, in the area where Cork had seen the flash of reflected light off the sniper’s rifle.

“Got word from the ambulance,” Borkmann went on. They were standing beside his cruiser, a Crown Victoria parked a few yards back of the shot-up vehicle Cork had come in. At sixty, Borkmann was the oldest member of the Sheriff’s Department. He was also the most overweight. He’d offered to climb the hill with the others, but Cork had left him behind to monitor the radio transmissions. “Marsha was rushed into surgery as soon as they wheeled her into the hospital.”

“How’s she doing?” Cork asked.

“She was still alive, that’s all they said.”

“Keep on top of it, Cy. Let me know when you hear anything.”

Pender walked over from where he’d been conversing with the state troopers. He was young and brash, and Cork suspected not even experience would moderate his more irksome tendencies. “Christ, what’s that smell? Skunk?”

Cork noticed it again, too, and realized that during the sniper’s attack, he’d forgotten the odor entirely. “It’s from the Land Cruiser,” he said. “Marsha hit it on the way out.”

Pender opened his mouth, probably to make a crack about women drivers, but wisely thought better of it.

Borkmann said to Cork, “I looked around while you were up on the hill. The two dogs you were wondering about? Dead, both of ’em. Rifle shot, looks like. They were carted around back and dumped out of sight. I’m thinking it’s their blood Marsha was looking at.”

“You check the cabin?”

“Quick look.”

“Any sign of Eli or Lucy?”

“No.”

“Let’s hope that blood is from the dogs.”

“Patsy located Larson. He was having dinner with Alice at the Broiler. He’s on his way.”

Borkmann was speaking of Captain Ed Larson, who headed the major-crimes investigations for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

“I want to keep the scene clean until he gets here.”

“You going to call BCA?” Borkmann asked.

“Soon as I’m back at the office.”

It had been an assault on officers. Bringing in the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was standard procedure, not only because of the organization’s expertise and superior resources, but also to ensure that no local prejudice might warp the investigation.

Pender eyed the empty cabin. “Eli can get mean when he’s drunk. Maybe that was him up there on the hill.”

Cork had already considered that possibility. The call that had brought him and Marsha Dross out there had been made by Lucy to keep her from beating Eli ragged. Maybe Eli had retaliated in a big way. Anything was possible when love and hate became a heated jumble. But if Eli had been up there, if he had lashed out at his wife in a deadly way, where was Lucy?

Night was falling fast, flooding into the hollow from a sky salted with stars. Two more cruisers from the Sheriff’s Department pulled up and several deputies got out wearing Kevlar vests and carrying assault rifles. The emergency response team. It had been fifty minutes since Cork’s call for help had first gone out.

“Got here as quick as we could, Sheriff,” Deputy John Singer said. “Took a few minutes to assemble the whole team.” He was apologizing for what probably seemed to him like an inexcusable delay.

“That’s okay, John. I think we’re secure now, but why don’t you post a couple people on the crown of that hill.” Cork pointed toward the rocks where the sniper had taken his position. “I’d hate to have somebody start shooting at us again from up there.”

“Done.” Singer turned to his team and gave the order.

Fitzhugh, the state patrolman, left his vehicle and crossed the road to where the others stood.

“You need us anymore?”

“No,” Cork said. “Appreciate the assistance.”

“Any time, Sheriff. Hope you get the bastard.”

“Thanks.”

Cork watched Fitzhugh walk away.

“Get on the radio, Duane,” Cork said to Deputy Pender. “Have Patsy round up Clay and tell him to bring out a generator and floodlights. He can get them from the fire department.”

Pender nodded and moved away.

“What did you see in the cabin?” Cork said to Borkmann.

“No bodies.”

“You have to break in?”

“It was open.”

“Figures. On the rez, nobody locks their doors. Any sign of violence?”

“Nope. Not the neatest housekeepers, but I’d say the mess in there looks pretty organic.”

“Organic?”

“You know, rising naturally out of the elements of the environment.”

“Organic.” Cork shook his head.

“See for yourself,” Borkmann said.

“I will. I want you to keep everyone away from the scene for now. When Ed Larson gets here, and the generator and lights, we’ll go over the ground carefully. Where’d you say the dogs were, Cy?”

“Behind the woodpile in back.”

“Okay.” Cork turned toward the cabin. He knew he risked contaminating the scene, but he needed to know if there were dead or injured people somewhere.

He lifted a pair of latex gloves from the box Borkmann had in his cruiser. He also borrowed the deputy’s Maglite. Carefully, he skirted the area where blood had turned the dirt to a muddy consistency. He hoped it was only the mutts who’d bled. He made his way around the side of the cabin to the back. Behind a cord of split hardwood stacked between the trunks of a couple of young poplars, he found the dogs. They lay one on top of the other, thrown there, it seemed, with no more thought than tossing out garbage. They’d been shot through the head, both of them, straight on and at close range. Cork wondered if they’d come at their assailant and been killed in their attack, or if they’d sat there bewildered by their fate because whoever shot them was someone they’d trusted. He considered Eli again. Had the man finally gone over the edge, gone into a drunken rage as a result of Lucy’s bullying, done away with his wife, and then killed his dogs? If so, why hide them like this? And where was Lucy?

It didn’t feel right. A man like Eli might get drunk and riled up enough to kill his wife, but he’d never shoot his dogs. A sad statement, but Cork knew it to be true.

He returned to the front of the cabin and pushed the door open. Inside was dark. He located the switch on the wall and turned on the lights.

Eli’s first wife had been a small, quiet woman named Deborah, a true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. She’d been good to her husband, had kept a clean house, and when ovarian cancer took her, Eli had grieved long and hard. His second wife was nothing like Deborah. As Cork stood in the doorway, he could see what Borkmann had meant about organic mess. The room was cluttered with magazines and newspapers, dirty glasses and plates, clothing left lying where it had been shed. The place had a sour, soiled-laundry smell to it.

He wove through the clutter to the kitchen, where he found a sink full of unwashed dishes. On the kitchen table lay a half loaf of dark rye and a butcher knife with a residue of butter on the blade. Next to the bread was a small pile of scratched tickets for the state lottery.

Cork checked the bedroom. It looked as though a struggle had taken place, the bed unmade, clothes tossed everywhere, but he suspected that was probably the norm. A few empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans lay on the floor on the right side of the bed. Eli’s side, he guessed.

The bathroom was in desperate need of a good scrubbing, but nothing struck Cork as particularly noteworthy.

He stood in the main room.

A sniper on the hill across the road. Two dead dogs behind the woodpile. No indication of violence inside the cabin, but no sign of Lucy or Eli, either. What the hell was going on?

“What happened to your ear?”

Cork turned and found Ed Larson standing in the doorway.

Larson wore gold wire-rims, little ovals that made him look bookish. His silver hair was bristle short, his face clean shaven, still a little pink, in fact, from the recent draw of a razor over his long jaw. He was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, burgundy tie. His shoes were Florsheims, polished oxblood. During the brief tenure of the previous sheriff, Arne Soderberg, who’d managed to stay in office only six months, Larson had quit the department and taken a job teaching criminal justice studies at the community college. When the county Board of Commissioners tapped Cork to fill out Soderberg’s term, he’d asked Larson to return, which the man had done in a heartbeat.

Cork touched the gauze he’d taped over his left earlobe to stanch the flow of blood where a sizable chunk of flesh was missing.

“Sniper round.”

“Lucky,” Larson said.

“Luckier than Marsha.” Cork noted the man’s clothing. “Awfully well dressed.”

“Anniversary dinner. Thirty-fifth.”

“Alice mad you had to leave?”

“She knows how it goes.”

“You could’ve taken a few minutes to change clothes.”

“The suit will clean.” Larson looked at the room. “Struggle?”

“I get the feeling this is a natural state.”

Larson walked cautiously into the cabin, watching where he stepped. “I talked to Cy outside, got a thumbnail of what’s going on. I radioed Patsy to double-check the location of the call. Thought maybe it didn’t actually come from here.”

“Did it?”

“From right there.” He pointed toward a phone on a low table next to the sofa, half hidden by a soiled, gray sweatshirt. “You didn’t touch it?”

“Didn’t even see it,” Cork said.

“Door unlocked?”

“Yes.”

Larson didn’t seem surprised. “You check out the other rooms?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything?”

“Not that leaped out at me.”

Larson looked over his shoulder toward one of the windows. “It’s getting pretty dark out there. What do you want to do about the hill?”

Two shell casings. Six, maybe seven shots fired. More casings to locate. Maybe other evidence as well.

Larson went on. “Cy says you’ve got floodlights coming. I hope you’re not thinking of dragging them up that slope tonight.”

Cork didn’t answer. He didn’t want to decide anything until he had an idea of what had become of Eli and Lucy.

“It’s going to be a long night” was all he would say.

Larson turned back toward the front door. “I’ll get my things and get started.”

They both heard the screaming, and they went outside quickly.

An old puke-colored pickup was parked behind Borkmann’s Crown Victoria, and Lucy Tibodeau had climbed out. She was trying to swing at Cy Borkmann while Pender did his best to restrain her. Cork hurried over.

“What’s going on?”

“She wanted to go inside,” Borkmann said.

“It’s my damn house,” Lucy hollered. She kicked at Cy but Pender pulled her back just in time. “What the hell’s going on?” she demanded.

Eli’s first wife had been like a fawn, small, soft, quiet. For his second bride, Eli had chosen a different animal altogether, huge and fierce. Lucy Tibodeau came from Fargo and, when Eli met her, had been dealing blackjack at the casino in Mille Lacs. She was short but big boned, with a lot of meat on those bones. Her hair was copper-colored, wiry like a Brillo pad. Her skin was splashed with huge brown freckles. Her eyes were green fire.

“Take your hands off me,” she warned Pender, “or I’ll bite your thumb off.”

“Take it easy, Lucy,” Cork said.

“Don’t tell me to take it easy. You’re crawling all over my place like a bunch of maggots and this son of a bitch has got his hands everywhere except up my dress. And he looks like he wouldn’t mind going there next.”

“Let her go, Pender.”

The deputy did and stepped back quickly.

“What’s going on?” Lucy asked, only slightly more civil.

“Where’s Eli?” Cork said.

“I left him at Bunyan’s. Last I saw of the little shit, he was kissing the lip of a whiskey glass.”

“When was that?”

“Half an hour ago. What? Did he do something?”

“You’ve got the truck, Lucy. How’s he getting home?”

“He can walk for all I care.”

“Pender, drive over to Bunyan’s. Round up Eli if he’s there.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“What’s going on?” Lucy said again, only this time with genuine concern in her voice.

“I was hoping you could tell me.” It was hard to see the woman’s face clearly. Cork opened the front door of Borkmann’s cruiser and motioned Lucy to where the dome light would illuminate them both. “I’d love to know what happened after you called the Sheriff’s Department.”

“Called you?”

“At six-twenty, a call came from this location from a woman claiming to be you.”

“At six-twenty me and Eli were playing pinochle at Bunyan’s, like we do every Tuesday night. Hell, everybody knows that. We go for the walleye fish fry, then play a couple hours of pinochle.”

A dark blue pickup rolled up and maneuvered alongside the other vehicles that crowded the narrow road. In the back sat a generator and some floodlights.

“You didn’t call?” Cork said.

“Hell no.” Something dawned on her, and she tried to pierce the dark with her eyes. “Where’s our dogs?”

Cork didn’t relish what he had to do, and when he spoke his voice sounded tired. “Somebody shot them, Lucy. I’m sorry.”

All her spit and fire vanished in an instant, and devastation poured in to replace it.

Cork looked to Cy. “Would you see to Ms. Tibodeau. We’ll need a full statement, but go easy.” He turned and walked away.

Larson followed him. “Think she’s lying?”

“Too simple to check. And why would she?”

Larson paused and looked up at the hill that was now a towering black shape hard against a soft night sky. “What’s going on, Cork?”

“I’d say it was a trap.”

“You guys got pulled out here to be shot at?”

“No,” Cork said. “To be shot.”