Mercy Falls (15 page)

C
ORK WAS SURPRISED
to find Dina Willner with Larson and Rutledge in his office. He’d seen her among the crowd on Gooseberry Lane, but they hadn’t spoken. She wore black jeans, a white turtleneck sweater, sneakers. She held a disposable cup from the Gas Pump Grill, an old gas station on Oak Street that had been redone as a gourmet coffee shop. Larson and Rutledge had cups, too. Several cream cheese
kolaches
lay on a paper plate on Cork’s desk, next to another cup from the Gas Pump Grill. The aromas of the coffee and the pastries were wonderful, the first good thing that whole morning.

“Do you mind if I sit in?” she asked.

Cork glanced at Larson and Rutledge. “Any objections?”

“Fine by me,” Rutledge said. Ed Larson nodded his agreement.

“I brought you some coffee,” Dina said. “French roast, black, but there’s cream and sugar if you’d like.”

“Thanks.” Cork sat down, took the coffee, put in half-and-half from a tiny container and a couple of packets of sugar lying next to the
kolaches
.

“What do you think?” he said.

“A dead blasting cap. My first guess would be somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing,” Larson said.

Rutledge pursed his lips skeptically. “They got everything else right. Maybe it was a bomb never meant to go off.”

Cork put his coffee down. “Why try so hard to kill me at the Tibodeau cabin, only to give me some kind of bullshit scare now?”

They were quiet a moment. Then Larson said, “A stupid prank?”

Rutledge scratched the back of his neck and didn’t look happy with that possibility. “If it was, it’s one that could land the prankster in jail for a good long time. He’d have to be way off the impulsive scale. Way too risky. There’s substance here.”

Dina sat forward, just a little, but the men’s eyes turned to her. She spoke quietly. “Remember, you have two major investigations under way. Is it possible this incident has nothing to do with what happened on the reservation?”

“Are you saying it’s related to the Jacoby murder?” Larson inched his wire-rimmed glasses higher on the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t know. I’m just suggesting it’s a possibility.”

“Somebody warning me off the investigation?” Cork sat back, considering.

“You said yesterday that there are people on the reservation who might have been blackmailed by Jacoby. Maybe one of them is afraid of what you might discover. They don’t want to kill you—maybe they’re not that kind, or maybe because of your blood connection, I don’t know—but they’re trying to dissuade you from looking too closely.”

“If it was meant as a warning, why no note?” Rutledge said.

“To whoever planted it, maybe what it related to was obvious. They’re not seeing any of this from Cork’s perspective, which is much broader.” She lifted her cup but paused before sipping. “On the other hand, I suppose it could just be somebody who really wanted you dead but doesn’t have the brains God gave a caterpillar.”

“Who has access to that kind of explosive?” Rutledge said.

“Up here, lots of folks,” Larson replied. “Mining, logging, and we’ve got a hell of a lot of construction going on, new roads. It wouldn’t be difficult to steal.”

Rutledge looked at Cork. “Maybe you should think about getting your family out of Aurora for a while.”

“I’ve already taken care of that. Jo and the kids are going to Chicago to stay with her sister and husband.”

“Good. So what now? Any ideas?” Rutledge took a bite of his
kolache
and chewed quietly.

Cork said, “I’ll hit the reservation, talk to some people out there. If Dina’s right—if it’s somebody trying to scare me off the Jacoby investigation—maybe I can get a handle on that.”

Larson nodded. “We’ll do a complete canvass of your neighbors, find out if anybody saw anything helpful. While that’s going on, I’m going to do a couple interviews related to the Jacoby murder.”

“Who?”

“The night clerk at the Four Seasons. He’s been gone camping the last couple of days, but I understand he’s back. I’m hoping he might be able to shed some light on Jacoby’s comings and goings the night he was killed. And we’re still looking for Arlo.”

“Arlo?” Dina said.

“Arlo Knuth,” Cork explained. “A local character, lives out of his truck and sometimes sleeps in the county parks. He was at Mercy Falls earlier on the night Jacoby was killed. One of my deputies ran him off, but we should talk to him. Good luck tracking him down, Ed.”

“I’ll find him.”

There was a knock at the door. Deputy Duane Pender stepped in. “Here’s the information you asked for, Cork.” Pender handed over a sheet of paper. “And we’ve got a gaggle of reporters gathering out there.”

“Thanks, Duane. Keep them at bay awhile, and then I’ll talk to them.”

Pender left and Cork glanced at the sheet he’d delivered.

“I asked Duane to run a DMV check on Harmon LaRusse.”

“Moose LaRusse?” Larson said. “Why?”

“He followed me yesterday when I was on the rez.”

“Moose? I didn’t know he was back in these parts.”

“Neither did I. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, he isn’t. He’s got a Minneapolis address.”

“Tell me about this Moose,” Rutledge said.

“A Shinnob from the rez. Big guy, big troublemaker,” Cork said. “Five, six years ago, we busted him for a series of burglaries in the county. Judge gave him five years in Stillwater.”

“Why would he be following you?”

“I have no idea, but I’m going to make a few inquiries today, see if I can find out. But the first thing, Simon, you and I should talk to the media. We’ll need to cover both investigations. Then what I’m going to do is see if I can get to the bottom of those bruises on Lizzie Fineday’s face, find out if Eddie Jacoby had anything to do with it.”

Dina put her coffee down. “You said I could be there when you talked to her.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

Rutledge stood up. “I’m going to try to have that talk with Lydell Cramer’s sister this afternoon, see if anything shakes loose there.”

“Everyone stay in touch,” Cork said.

T
HEY HEADED TOWARD
the North Star Bar, driving between stands of aspen with leaves yellow as the sun. They turned onto Waagikomaan Road, a shortcut across the rez paved with oil and crushed stone. Cork drove into marshland where cattails bent under the weight of idle red-winged blackbirds.

“Waagikomaan?” Dina said.

“Not wag like a dog’s tail. It’s a soft
a
. Like in father.”

She tried again, more successfully.

“It means crooked knife,” Cork said. “See how the road cuts back and forth, trying to keep to dry, solid ground.”

They moved out of the marsh and into a series of low, rocky hills covered with red sumac, balsam, and more aspen.

“Interesting country,” Dina said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

He could have told her. How the Canadian Shield, the stone mass that underlay everything there and broke through the thin topsoil in jagged outcroppings, was the oldest exposed rock on earth. How the glaciers two miles thick had crept across this land over the centuries, scraping everything down to that obdurate rock and leaving, as they receded, lakes as numerous and glittering as the stars in the night sky. How the land was still lifting itself up, released from the weight of that continent of ice, rebounding, a living thing unimaginably patient and enduring.

“It’s pretty,” Dina said. “If you like trees.”

“You don’t?”

“A city girl. I spent a lot of summers at Camp Wah-kee-shah, though. That’s Wah with a soft
a
.”

The windows were open, and the wind ruffled her hair, loose strands drumming her cheeks like tanned, restless fingers. Cork thought again what a remarkably pretty woman she was.

“Me and a bunch of kids like me, Jewish mostly, sent to camp to be out of our parents’ hair.”

“You didn’t come away with an appreciation of nature?” he asked.

“Not at all. But I can braid a pretty mean lanyard. You were a Chicago cop for a while. What brought you back here?”

“This is my home.”

“A lot of people leave home at the first opportunity and never look back.”

“You, for one?”

He waited but she never replied. The wind smelled of pine sap and of the yellow dust the Pathfinder kicked up. The road cut through an open area blanketed with purple fireweed, the first thing to grow after a burn. Ahead of them, the sky filled in the gaps between the trees like blue water. Except for the road, the land felt untouched.

“There are problems in a small town, sure,” Cork said. “You can’t have a thought without everybody knowing it. If your family doesn’t go back a few generations, you can spend your whole life here and still feel like an outsider. The nearest foreign film is five hours away. And yeah, the kids leave as soon as they can, go to college, into the service, whatever. But a lot of them come back eventually. Why? It’s a good place to raise a family, a good place for kids to grow up.”

“And that’s important?”

“Are you married?”

“I was. At the moment, no.”

“Any kids?”

“Just little old me.”

“It might be tough for you to understand.”

Dina was quiet for a bit, then said, “I understand.”

They came out on County 33, half a mile south of the North Star Bar. Cork turned onto the asphalt road.

“I’m going to stay with the car,” Dina said. “I’d just as soon keep our relationship out of the limelight. Out here anyway.”

“Don’t want to kill the potential of the push-up bra?”

“Or any of my other tricks,” she said.

“Other tricks?”

“Don’t ask.” It sounded like a wisecrack, but she didn’t smile. “If Lizzie’s there, let me know. Maybe I’ll come in anyway.”

Cork pulled into the dirt lot and parked away from the half dozen vehicles already there, dusty in the morning sunlight. Inside, it felt like a dark cave. Johnny Cash was on the jukebox. Cork didn’t see Lizzie Fineday or her father. Leonard Trueur was tending bar. He was a heavy man, slow, with fat hands and fingers, a shuffle for a walk. It was still early in the day and the bar wasn’t crowded. A couple of Shinnobs Cork didn’t recognize sat at a table under an old neon sign that said
Hamm’s
. They weren’t talking. Maybe they fell silent when Cork came in, but they also had the look of men who didn’t say much anyway. Three others played pool in the corner, ball caps shading their faces. They glanced at Cork. He knew them. They went on with their game.

“
Boozhoo,
Leonard,” Cork said, stepping up to the bar.

Leonard wiped the bar, a needless thing because at the moment no one sat there. In fact, the rag looked more in need of a good cleaning than the bar top.

“I’m looking for Will.”

Leonard watched his fat hand moving the dirty rag and shrugged.

“Is he around?”

“Nope.”

“Where is he?”

“Dunno.”

“Lizzie here?”

“Dunno.”

“Think I’ll go up and knock,” Cork said.

Leonard didn’t offer an objection, and Cork headed toward a door to the left of the bar that opened onto a steep stairway leading to the second story. At the top of the stairs was a small landing and another door, this one closed. Behind it were the rooms where Will Fineday lived with his daughter. Cork knocked, put his ear to the wood, knocked once more, very hard. Finally he turned away and went back down.

The music had stopped. The men under the Hamm’s sign hadn’t moved. At the pool table, two men held their cues while the third hunched and lined up a shot.

“You guys seen Will or Lizzie?” Cork asked.

“Ain’t seen shit, cousin,” said Dennis Finn, the one bent over the green felt.

“How about Moose LaRusse?”

“The Moose? Thought you had him doing a stretch in Stillwater.”

“He was here yesterday.”

“News to me, cousin.”

Cork looked to the other men, but no one met his gaze.

“Migwech,”
Cork said to Leonard, who was still working the rag over the bar.
Thanks
. He walked back out into the sun.

He stood with his back to the bar, thinking. A couple of crows hopped around the Dumpster at the side of the building, looking for a way to an easy meal. A moment later, the door behind him opened, and Ernie Champoux, one of the men at the pool table, stepped out. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke into the windless air. Champoux was a hard man, but his dealings with Cork had always been reasonable.

“Stone,” Champoux said. Then he said, “Moose, him I ain’t seen.”

That was all. He went back inside.

Cork walked to his vehicle and got in.

“Lizzie not there?” Dina said.

“No.”

“You find out where?”

“Maybe.” Cork started the car and pulled away from the bar. “We’re going to see Stone.”

They drove awhile before Dina asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“An investigation on the reservation.”

“I do most of the law enforcement work on the rez myself.”

“Why?”

“My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Things tend to go a little smoother because of that.”

“What I mean is, I thought reservations were under federal jurisdiction.”

He explained about Public Law 280.

“Lucky they have a sheriff who’s part Ojibwe.”

“Not everybody thinks it’s such a good idea.”

He turned north onto County Road 17.

“This Stone,” Dina said. “What’s he like?”

“Smart like a wolf. Balls of a grizzly bear.”

“I don’t know about bear balls. Is that good?”

“He’s stripped himself of most everything you think of as common goodness. A lot of men like him are just plain stupid, and they’re also afraid, which limits their impact. Stone’s sharp, and if there’s something he’s afraid of, I don’t know what it is. On the rez, there’s the legitimate authority, the tribal council. If you want something that’s less than legitimate, Stone is who you go to.”

“I like a man who’s a challenge.”

“This guy’s a land mine.”

“As in ‘Watch your step’?”

“Exactly.”

“What about the noble red man?”

“Stone’s real father was a decent guy. A Shinnob poet, actually. Got himself killed in a car accident on his way back from the Twin Cities when Stone was just learning to walk. His mother remarried, a white man named Chester Dorset, owned a string of Dairy Queens, had money. He was also a drunk, a brutal drunk, and I mean to tell you, Stone had it tough as a kid. One night, Dorset’s loaded, lays into Stone’s mother. Stone splits his stepfather’s head with an ax.”

“Sounds justified to me.”

“Problem was, he waited to do it until his stepfather had gone to sleep. He was sixteen and certified to stand trial as an adult. Convicted of manslaughter one. Got eighty-six months and served every day of it in the prison at St. Cloud. That’s where he got his name: Stone. His real name is Byron St. Onge, but his papers got screwed up. Somehow they dropped the
g
from his name and missed the period after Saint. He went in as Byron Stone instead of St. Onge. Stone stuck.” Cork swerved to avoid hitting a red squirrel that scampered across the road. “While he was in prison, his mother died, destitute, because Chester Dorset’s kids from his first marriage got all his money. Stone’s had a clean record since he got out of prison, but I’m certain he’s been involved in an enormous amount of illegal activity. Smuggling for sure. Drugs, arms, cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes?”

“Back in the nineties. The Canadian tax on cigarettes was high and Canucks were paying through the nose for a smoke. They could buy smuggled cigarettes for a song. A lot of evidence suggested the tobacco companies were complicit in the smuggling. I worked with ATF for months trying to get something on Stone. Nothing. Same with DEA and Customs. Stone was way too smart to get himself caught. Knows the woods along the border better than any man I can think of. And he intimidates the hell out of anyone who might be inclined to testify against him.”

They’d been driving half an hour and were approaching the northern edge of the Iron Lake Reservation where it butted against the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Cork turned off onto a road that was barely wide enough for the Pathfinder. A few hundred yards farther, the road skirted a long narrow lake that ended at the base of a ridge covered with jack pine. A ragged thread of wood smoke climbed the face of the ridge.

“Stone built his cabin himself, where he could see anyone approaching from a good distance away,” Cork said. “The land on either side is mostly marsh, so it’s almost impossible to come at it on foot. And directly beyond that ridge is the Boundary Waters. He’s got himself a decent stronghold.”

“Boundary Waters?”

“The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Over a million acres of forest along the Canadian border. On the other side is the Quetico, another wilderness just as large. Easy place for a man to lose himself, on purpose or not.”

Cork pulled into the clearing where Stone’s cabin stood, and he saw Will Fineday’s old Dodge pickup parked behind Stone’s new Land Rover. Both vehicles were covered with a thick coat of red dust.

The two men faced each other in the open in front of the cabin. Fineday gripped a tire iron in his huge hands. Stone, shirtless, held an ax. Fineday didn’t look when Cork pulled up, but Stone’s dark eyes flicked away for an instant.

Stone was smaller, but where Fineday had gone to fat, Stone was smooth rock under taut flesh. He wore his hair long, tied back with a folded red bandanna that ran across his forehead. He was handsome, and there was a certainty in his face, particularly his eyes, that most men found intimidating and women, Cork had heard, found exciting.

Near Stone was a flat-topped stump that he used as a chopping block, and around the stump lay sections of split birch waiting to be gathered and stacked. Stone’s chest glistened, and the bandanna was stained dark with sweat. It looked as if Fineday had interrupted preparation for a winter supply of wood.

Cork walked to the men slowly.

“Will, Stone, what’s going on?”

“None of your business, O’Connor,” Fineday said.

“Looks to me like you’re both ready to let a little blood, and that
is
my business. This have anything to do with Lizzie?”

Fineday didn’t answer, but he said to Stone, “Let her go, or I swear I’ll kill you.”

“You think I’m keeping her here against her will, Will?” Stone laughed at that, the ax held easy in his hands, the split wood on the ground around him like killed things. “Why don’t I just call her out here, then, and let’s see.” He yelled her name over his shoulder.

They all waited. The sun was high and unusually hot. The drone of blackflies, an oddity for so late in the season, filled the quiet. The insects lit on Stone’s bare, salty skin and crawled over his hairless chest and shoulders. He seemed not to notice, although blackflies were vicious biting insects, one of the worst scourges of the north country.

“Lizzie,” he called again, more harshly this time. “Get your ass out here, girl.”

The door opened slowly and Lizzie Fineday stepped out. She wore a bright blue knit sweater and wrinkled khakis. Her hair snaked across her face, wild. She hung back in the shadow of the cabin, smoking a cigarette. She stared at her father, then at Cork, as if she didn’t quite understand their presence.

“Lizzie, you come on over here. I’m taking you home,” Fineday hollered.

He took a step toward his daughter, but Stone moved to block his way.

“Ask her, Will,” Stone said. “Stay right where you are and ask her if she wants to leave.”

Fineday gave him a killing look. “Lizzie, you come home with me. You come home now. You hear?”

“You want to go home with him, Lizzie?” Stone asked.

The young woman smoked her cigarette, finally shook her head.

“See?” Stone said to Fineday. “If that’s what you needed, you have it. You, too, O’Connor. She’s not a minor. She makes up her own mind. She wants to stay, she stays.” He finally shifted his gaze from Fineday and spoke to Cork directly. “Unless you have a warrant of some kind, it’s my right to ask you to leave.”