Iron Lake (28 page)

Cork sat down feeling heavy and tired and so tortured by his body that he could barely think. But he didn’t have to think to know whose snowmobile it was that had been there. A big black oil stain marked the spot where the machine had been parked. Only one machine he knew of leaked oil that badly. It was called Lazarus.

C
ORK LET HIMSELF INTO
M
OLLY
’
S CABIN
with the key under the back steps. After he hung his coat by the back door, he went upstairs and took four Advil from the container in the bathroom cabinet. He hurt all over. There was a large, blood-oozing, purple lump on his forehead and a headache that made him see white. His ribs felt as if Parrant had just given them another healthy beating. He’d torn the stitches in his hand.

He wanted to look carefully through the contents of the black bag, but he knew in his present condition he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. He had to lie down for a while. He looked for a place to hide the bag and finally made room under the logs in the woodbox next to the fireplace. Then he made his way upstairs and lay down on Molly’s bed and promptly went to sleep.

When he woke, he smelled wood smoke. He sat up, pleased to find that the headache was gone although the lump on his head was still tender and so were his ribs. There was blood on the sheets from his hand and the ooze from the lump on his forehead had stained the pillowcase, but he was no longer bleeding. Outside Molly’s bedroom window, the sky was nearly dark. Cork realized he’d slept for hours.

Downstairs he found Molly sitting in the main room, reading. A blaze in the fireplace made the corners of the room flicker with shadow. Cork hesitated near the kitchen door, where the tantalizing aroma of potato soup was strong. Molly sat in her easy chair, in the small circle of lamplight. She wore jeans and a red wool sweater and red wool socks. Her red hair was done in a long braid that hung loosely over her shoulder. She glanced up and eyed Cork, who stood uncertainly in the quivering light on the far side of the room.

“Smells good,” he said.

Molly closed her book, marking her place with a playing card, the ace of spades. Cork saw she was reading
The Road Less Traveled.
She folded her hands on the book and waited for an explanation.

“I need you,” he said. “I haven’t been able to breathe since I left you. I need you, Molly. As much as I need air.”

“Cork,” she whispered, and rose from the chair.

He stepped toward her, into the stronger light of the lamp.

When she saw his forehead, her face mirrored his hurt. “Oh, Cork, what happened?”

“A log. I don’t for the life of me know why they call fir a softwood.”

Molly reached up and touched the lump.

“Ouch!”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s not bleeding, but I think I should put something on it. Maybe ice.”

“It’s fine.” He looked down uneasily at the braided rug under his stockinged feet. “I’m sorry, Molly. I’m sorry for everything.”

“I know.” She touched his cheek. “Let’s talk about that later. Right now I’ll get some hot soup into you.”

Cork put his arms around her waist. “I don’t deserve you,” he said. “I never did.”

“You’ve got a lot of time to work on it,” she answered.

After they’d eaten, Molly went out to lay a fire in the sauna.

“It’s a beautiful night out there,” she said when she swept back in. “Let’s go, Cork.”

The moon was rising, turning the vast flat of the lake a ghostly blue-white. A few isolated pinpoints of light marked the far shore, but Cork felt as if the night belonged to Molly and him alone. They stepped into the small dressing room of the sauna. Molly had lighted a Coleman lantern and turned it low. The heat from the stove just beyond the inner door made the temperature in the room pleasant. Molly eased off his coat, then removed her own. She undid the buttons of his shirt and kissed his chest.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

Cork lifted the bottom of her sweater, and she raised her arms to let him slide it off her. She wore no bra. He gently touched her breasts with his palms, then bent and kissed them. Her skin was moist and smelled faintly of the smoke from laying the fire. Cork appreciated the scent.

“I’ve missed you, too,” he said.

He kissed her fingers, every one. She pulled her hands away and moved them to the brass button of her jeans. Cork watched her hands as they opened the jeans with a soft sizzle of the zipper. She eased the jeans past her hips, her thighs, her calves, until they were a puddle of denim at her feet. She pulled them off and kicked them free. Reaching back, she undid her braid, and shook out her red hair. The room seemed terribly warm to Cork.

“I don’t deserve this,” he said.

“What life gives us, good or bad, we seldom deserve.” She took a blanket that had been folded on a bench behind her and arranged it on the floor. She knelt on it and watched as he undressed to his red-plaid flannel boxers. She laughed. “New?”

“They’re warm.” He shrugged.

Then Molly saw something that made her give a little cry.

He looked down at the deep bruising over his ribs. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? Come here.”

He stepped near her on the blanket. She put her lips to the bruise. “Better?” she asked.

“Much,” he said.

She stood and pressed her breasts against him and gave him a long kiss. Then she slipped her fingers into the elastic of his flannel boxers and began to draw them down. Looking at him through a whisp of her red hair, she promised, “I’ll be gentle.”

“Not too,” he replied hoarsely.

“You didn’t see who hit you?” Molly asked.

Cork shook his head. “It happened too fast.”

“I don’t understand. If they were after the bag, why didn’t they just take it?”

“That’s something I don’t understand either,” Cork said.

Molly stepped down from the high seat in the sauna, took a dipper from a bucket, and threw water over the hot stones. The water hissed and steam shot up into the air, and Cork felt the sweat pour from him. It felt good to sweat so freely. Cleansing. Molly sat back down beside him.

“Unless,” she said.

“Unless what?”

“Unless they managed to take what they wanted while you were unconscious.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Cork said.

“How long were you out?”

“I don’t know. Not long, I think.” He wiped his face with his hands, then ran his fingers through his hair, which was as wet as if he were in the shower. “There’s something else, though. When I was out, I dreamed I heard a couple of gunshots. And when I found the rifle in the blackberry bramble, I could tell it had just been fired.”

“At you?”

Cork made a show of feeling himself. “No new holes.”

“Shooting at who, then?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’ll all be clearer once I’ve had a look in that bag.”

“Do you think the oil stain in the snow means it’s Tom Griffin?”

“I’ll definitely have a talk with St. Kawasaki.”

“But you don’t really want it to be him, do you?”

Cork glanced at her. Her face ran with sweat. Her red hair clung to her flushed cheeks.

“You want it to be Sandy Parrant,” she said.

“Yes,” Cork admitted. “I want it to be Parrant.”

“I’m worried,” she told him, and touched his shoulder. “I wonder what knowing the kinds of secrets that are in that bag might do to a person. Not just you. Anyone. I wonder if Wally Schanno didn’t have the right idea.”

“Schanno destroyed evidence,” Cork said.

“And maybe he saved a lot of good people needless pain.”

“Was that his motive?” Cork asked her pointedly. “Look, I don’t know how to get to the truth without going through that bag. If you have a better idea, I’m willing to listen.”

Molly stared into the grating of the stove, where the fire blazed with a searing red-orange flame.

“You see?” Cork said.

“Where’s the bag?” Molly asked.

“Hidden.”

“Here?”

“In the woodbox. It was just a precaution. Probably not even necessary. Even so, I don’t want to stay here with it. After I’ve had a chance to look through it, I’ll take that bag somewhere else.”

“No,” Molly said. “If you’re off somewhere in the night, I’ll worry. As long as we’re together, I’m not afraid for you.”

He listened to the crackle of the fire as it heated the stove, the rocks, the air all around him. He glanced at Molly. It was weak of him, he knew, but he didn’t want to leave.

“All right,” he agreed. “As long as we’re together.”

She leaned to him and kissed him. “Time to cool off. I cleared the hole in the ice. The water will feel wonderful. Here.” She handed him socks she’d laid out earlier so that his wet feet wouldn’t stick to the ice.

They ran together out of the sauna. The deck was slippery with ice, and Cork had to catch himself on the railing to keep from falling. Molly ran ahead, surefooted and graceful, and dropped into the hole with a frigid splash. She came up quickly and Cork helped her out.

“Your turn.” She laughed, steaming in the moonlight.

T
HE BLOOD
from Jack the Ripper’s carcass was no longer frozen on the bag. It had thawed, making an unpleasant mess of the canvas. Molly eyed the bag grimly as Cork lifted it from the woodbox and carried it to the kitchen.

“Here,” she said. She took some newspapers from a stack by the kitchen door and laid them out on the floor.

Cork set the messy canvas on the papers, opened it, and took out the plastic bag inside.

“Can I get rid of that?” Molly asked nodding at the canvas.

“I’ll toss it,” Cork said.

He carried the canvas bag wrapped in newspaper outside to the garbage bin, a lidded wooden crate that held two metal garbage cans. There was a latch on the crate lid to discourage raccoons. Cork dropped the bloody canvas into one of the cans and returned to the kitchen.

“Want some help?” Molly asked without enthusiasm.

“Do you really want to?”

“No. Do you mind?”

Cork was almost certain the truth was there among the contents in the plastic bag. Or at least the guideposts that would lead him to the truth. But Molly was probably right. There was sure to be more in the bag than he needed to know, than anyone needed to know.

“I’d best do it alone,” he answered.

“I’ll make you some coffee.” And she did. Then she walked to him and kissed the top of his head where his hair was thinning. “I’ll be upstairs in bed if you need me. Should I wait up?”

He shook his head. “This will take a while.”

She stood at his back, her arms around his neck. “I’ve never told you, Cork, but I love you.”

She didn’t wait for a reply. She went through the kitchen door, and Cork heard her creak up the old stairs.

When Cork was a boy and still believed in God and the Church and heaven, the ringing of the morning Angelus had always had a strange effect on him. It was a sound that filled him with hope, no matter what his mood. Molly’s words—“I love you”—had the same effect, dropping hope into a hopeless place. Cork wanted to hold to the feeling, to believe in the possibility of some other greater power that would make all things right.

But he looked down at the black jumble of negatives bound up in plastic, and he knew it was never so simple.

Onto Molly’s kitchen table, he dumped the contents of the bag, a mess of dozens of strips of black-and-white negatives mixed with several audiocassette tapes. He checked the tapes first. Each was identified only by number, nothing else. He took a strip of negatives at random, lifted it toward the ceiling light, and saw immediately that unraveling any secrets they held would be far more difficult than he’d expected. Looking at a print was simple. A print was a reflection, more or less, of what the eye naturally saw. Trying to decipher the inverted lighting of a negative in which shadow is light and light is shadow was going to be no easy task. The small size of the negative was another stumbling block.

Cork squinted at the images on the strip in his hand. The first photograph, like the one of Jo and Parrant, had been shot at night. Lytton seemed fond of night shots, of using the night vision lens, an apparatus that could magnify small sources of light hundreds of times to illuminate night images. But then, night was the best time for activities people preferred kept secret. The photograph appeared to have been shot from a distance. Several people sat around a table in a room that looked to be on the upper floor of a building. A telescopic lens brought the next photos much closer. The room itself had a picture on the wall, much too small for Cork to make out details, and a bookcase. But that was really all he could tell. He turned the strip over, hoping that a reversed view might help. It didn’t. Who they were, where they were, and why Harlan Lytton saw fit to capture them on film remained a mystery.

It was clear to him that he would need to enlarge the image. He looked in the drawers of Molly’s kitchen for a magnifying glass, but found nothing. He trudged upstairs, where Molly lay reading in bed. She took off her glasses and gave him a smile.

“Done so soon? Or is it just that you couldn’t resist the temptation of my bed?”

“No and yes,” Cork said, crossing to her. “No, not done by a long sight, and yes, the temptation of your bed is mighty.” He sat beside her, leaned where she lay propped on her pillow, and kissed her. “I need something that will magnify the negatives. Do you have a magnifying glass or a loupe hidden away somewhere?”

She thought a moment. “I don’t think so. The only time I need to magnify anything is when I read.” She looked down at the glasses she’d set on the bed. “Will these help?”

Cork took them and experimented with enlarging the print in the book Molly had been reading. “Not perfect, but they’ll do. Sure you don’t mind?”

“If they’ll bring you to bed sooner, you have my blessing.”

“One more thing. Do you have a tape player?”

“You mean like for cassettes?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head regretfully. “I’m a CD person, Cork. What about the tape player in your Bronco?”

“Broken.”

“Is it important?”

“It’ll keep until tomorrow.”

She gave him a kiss before he rose and headed to the door.

On his way to the kitchen he took a small lamp from the living room. He set it by the jumble of negatives on the table, plugged it in, and removed the shade. He held the strip of negatives to the bare bulb and, using Molly’s glasses to enlarge the image, studied each negative in the strip carefully. After five minutes his head had begun to ache, and he still had no clue who the people were or why Lytton had photographed them.

One after another he studied the strips of negatives, but he found nothing he understood. He was beginning to feel discouraged when he picked up a strip and recognized immediately a familar structure. The mission building on the rez. The first shot showed the mission from a distance. The next was much closer and centered on St. Kawasaki’s old motorcycle, which was parked near the cemetery fence. The subsequent shots in the series seemed to have been taken through a crack between the bottom of a window shade and the sill. Two bodies by candlelight, a man and woman in a naked embrace. They were standing amid the disarray of construction—sawhorses and two-by-fours. Who they were was unclear because the shade cut off their heads. The middle shots in the sequence were unusual, close-ups of a rib cage. Looking closely, Cork could discern long scars across the ribs. The final photograph focused on a hand caressing a breast. Spilling out on the skin beneath the hand was an image—a tattoo of the Wisdom Tree.

Cork’s head throbbed. This wasn’t what he wanted, expected. Still, it did explain why Tom Griffin might have attacked him at Harlan Lytton’s cabin. And although St. Kawasaki didn’t seem like a man given to that kind of violence, God alone knew the true limits of desperate people.

He kept at it, and a few minutes later came across another strip that was different from the others. They weren’t photographs of people but of documents. Cork adjusted the right lens of Molly’s glasses until he could just make out the words of the letterhead that appeared on each document: GameTech. He sat back a moment, thinking. GameTech. Where had he heard that name before? He looked at the negatives again. Everything with the exception of the bold name on the letterhead was too small to make out. GameTech. It sounded so familiar. He got up, walked to Molly’s cupboard, took down a cup, and filled it from the faucet at the kitchen sink. GameTech. He took a sip, then put the cup down, turned the faucet back on, and splashed a little water on his face. He dabbed it off with a hand towel and looked out the dark window over the sink. GameTech.

And it came to him. That was the logo Ernie Meloux had been twirling on the countertop when Cork spoke with him at the casino the day after the judge died. He didn’t know what the connection was, but he put the strip aside.

A few strips later he came upon a figure easy to identify even in the reverse world of a negative. Hell Hanover. His white bald head was like a black carbuncle grown up from his shoulders. He was dressed in clothing with an odd pattern. Cork finally realized they were army fatigues. In the first negative, Hanover stood alone, framed by a large American flag that hung between two trees behind him. The second shot, still set against the background of the flag, captured him shaking hands with another man. They were turned to the camera. Posed. Cork adjusted Molly’s glasses and looked closely. Then he smiled.

“Shake hands with the devil,” he whispered.

For the man who’d joined Hell Hanover was none other than Judge Robert Parrant.

The other shots showed the two men reviewing several lines of what appeared to be armed soldiers in fatigues. Although the clothing bore no identifying insignia, even an idiot could guess that the photographs documented a gathering of the Minnesota Civilian Brigade.

Cork kept digging. As midnight approached, he was dog tired. He’d found nothing more that seemed significant. Mostly a lot of people caught in the act of things better left between them and their own consciences. Infidelity, recreational drugs, homosexuality. In a city these were things as ordinary as catching a bus. In Aurora, they could obliterate a life.

His back hurt. His neck and shoulders were tied in knots. His head was pounding. He’d developed a tick in one eye that was beginning to drive him crazy. He was about to call it a night when he pulled out a strip of negatives that made him feel suddenly empty and afraid.

He held them to the bulb and looked over each negative carefully. In the first, a man stood with a rifle cradled in his arms, his foot atop an animal that had been killed. A trophy shot.

Looking closer, Cork realized that the animal was human.

The next shot, a close-up, showed a face wearing what looked like a black-and-white mask. In the inverted world of the negative, Cork knew the black was skin. And the white? That had to be blood. So much of it the face was all but obliterated. But there was an unusual aspect of the hair that was quite clear. It was braided.

The other shots were more of the same, as if an artist were documenting his work from several angles. Cork still couldn’t be sure who’d been killed or who’d done the killing. What he needed was a print. Or, better yet, an enlargement.

Molly stirred, waking slowly as he sat on the bed.

“I’ve got to leave for a while,” he told her.

She was instantly awake. “What time is it?”

“Going on midnight.”

“Where are you heading at this time of night?” She slid upright, her back against the headboard.

“Harlan Lytton’s.”

“Why in heaven’s name would you want to go back there?”

“I need to use his equipment.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“No. There are things I have to know.”

“Bad things?”

“Yes.”

She threw the covers off. “I’m coming with you.”

Molly dressed quickly while Cork selected the negatives he wanted to take. He separated the others into two piles—those he’d already looked at and the larger jumble that still remained. He put the negatives he hadn’t yet scanned and the cassette tapes in the plastic bag, then put everything into a large paper sack, and placed it all carefully back under the logs in the woodbox.

On the way to Lytton’s, he told Molly she’d been right. Most of what he’d seen he was probably better off not knowing.

“You said what you found was bad. How bad?”

Cork told her about the photo that looked like a trophy shot. He told her about the man with braided hair and a mask of blood.