Red Knife (3 page)

L
ucinda Kingbird was happy and that made her afraid. Though she had struggled all her life, all forty-four years, in the pursuit of real happiness, it had eluded her. So many people seemed happy that Lucinda had to accept on faith that it was a true thing. In a way, it was like the story of the Blessed Virgin and the conception of Jesus: illogical, irrational, a circumstance she had never experienced—never would experience—yet a whole world, a whole history of people, most far smarter than she, had believed and defended it, so how could it not be true? Happiness for her had always been a question of faith, not experience.

Lately, however, miraculously, she’d been happy. But having discovered happiness, she was terrified that it might be snatched from her.

That Sunday morning as she drove up the eastern shoreline of Iron Lake, all around her shafts of sunlight shot through the pines like gold arrows from heaven. She was a small, pretty woman with dark eyes and the light tan skin of a Latina. Her hair, long and black, still showed no hint of gray. She sang softly to herself, an old song from her childhood, one that her grandmother had crooned to her.

Until recently, she’d forgotten the sweet little lullaby. Now she often sang it to her granddaughter as she held the baby in her arms and felt, deep in her heart, a warmth she knew must be happiness.

As soon as she crossed onto the reservation, she took Pike Road east and followed it until she came to the gravel lane that cut off to the right through a stand of red pines that hid the house of her son Alejandro. She parked near the front door and waited. She was expected. Every Sunday morning, she drove from Aurora to pick up her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter and take them with her to Mass at St. Agnes.

She genuinely liked her daughter-in-law. Rayette was a smart cookie, tough, devoted to her husband and her child. Rayette often told Lucinda how much she appreciated her help with the baby. She seemed to enjoy as much as Lucinda did the Sunday drives to St. Agnes. Much of the time on the way there and back, they talked family, talked motherhood, even talked sometimes about deep things, things like God, which Lucinda never discussed with anyone else. She thought of her daughter-in-law as a friend and felt blessed.

There was so much now that made her happy.

The front door didn’t open, and Rayette didn’t appear with Misty in the car-seat carrier. Running late, Lucinda decided. With a baby, it was understandable. She got out, went to the door, and rang the bell. From inside came the sound of voices and the baby’s incessant crying.

Pobrecita,
thought Lucinda. Poor little one.

She rang the bell again, then knocked long and hard to be heard above the baby’s wail. Finally she tried the knob. The door was locked, but she had a key, which she used.

“Rayette? Alejandro?” she called.

She knew that using her son’s Christian name—or the Spanish version of it, which was how she’d always addressed him—didn’t please him these days, but she refused to use any other. Alejandro was a good name. It would still be his long after this Red Boyz business had passed.

The talk, she discovered, came from the television, tuned to an infomercial hyping a revolutionary piece of exercise equipment. Except for the crying from the baby’s room, the house felt empty. Lucinda slipped her shoes off and left them beside the others already on the mat by the front door. She found her granddaughter in the crib, tangled up in her pink blanket.

“Oh, sweet one,” she cooed. She untangled the blanket, lifted the child, and held Misty against her breast. “Shhhhh. Shhhhh. It’s all right,
niña.
Grandma’s here.”

But where were Rayette and Alejandro?

The baby continued to scream while Lucinda checked the bedroom, where the bed was still neatly made. Had it been slept in at all? She returned to the baby’s room and changed Misty’s diaper, trying to keep her mounting sense of dread at bay. In the kitchen, she made a bottle of the formula Rayette kept in the cupboard. She settled in the rocker in the living room with Misty in her arms. The baby greedily sucked the bottle dry. Lucinda burped her and little Misty fell asleep almost immediately.

Now Lucinda allowed the worry to overwhelm her. No mother would willingly desert her child this way. And Alejandro, for all his macho posturing, was a good father and husband. He, too, would not be absent if he could help it.

She stood slowly and tried to return Misty to her crib, but the baby began to wake and Lucinda decided it was best to hold her a bit longer. Once again she checked the rooms of the house. Nothing seemed out of place, nothing amiss, though she wondered at the shoes on the mat beside the front door. In addition to her own, there were a pair of Skechers she knew belonged to Rayette, and a pair of Red Wing boots that were probably Alejandro’s. It seemed odd that these items were still there. Rayette usually picked up before she retired for the night. And if they’d gone out this morning, why hadn’t they put on their shoes?

She grabbed the soiled diaper she’d left on the changing table and took it to the utility room off the kitchen to dispose of it in the trash bin. The room had a door to the outside, facing the garage. The door frame was splintered, as if by a powerful blow, and the door itself stood open.

“Madre de Dios,”
Lucinda whispered, hoarse with fear.

With the child still in her arms, she stumbled outside through the open door and gulped in the cool, pine-scented air. She hurried to the garage and peered in a window. Both her son’s Explorer and the Toyota Corolla that Rayette drove were parked inside. She stepped back, stepped into something slippery, and she looked down. She stood in the middle of a dark, irregular shape that might have been spilled oil, but looked more like blood.

Her legs went shaky. Misty felt too heavy in her arms. Something had happened, she knew it absolutely. Something bad.

“Call Will,” she said, speaking aloud to give herself courage. Her husband would know what to do.

The backyard had been carved out of a meadow, and tall wild grasses grew up against Alejandro’s neatly mowed lawn. A gathering of crows, noisy and contentious, fluttered about in the high grass a few yards into the meadow. She wanted to ignore their greedy cries, but crows were scavengers, she knew, and she found herself drawn toward them, pulled slowly across the yard by the dark need to know what it was they fought over. As she drew nearer, she saw an outline pressed down in the meadow grass where the birds had gathered. The sun had climbed above the pines along the east side of the meadow, and grass shimmered with drops of yellow dew and beads of a garnet color.

At her approach, the crows lifted, a black curtain rising, and they flew away.

When Lucinda saw the prize that had drawn them there, she screamed. The baby woke and echoed her.

O
ccasionally on Sunday mornings in church, Cork just wasn’t there. His butt was in the pew but his mind was a million miles away. That was a blessing of ritual: Some Sundays you could fake it. This was one of those Sundays, and Cork went through Mass without thinking about it. In his head, he was going over the talk he would have with Buck Reinhardt afterward. It would be tricky, but he liked the challenge of bringing Buck and Kingbird together. The truth was that he was dying to know what the leader of the Red Boyz had to say. What was it he was willing to offer Reinhardt? Giving up Lonnie Thunder, turning him over to the sheriff, didn’t feel right. A gang—any brotherhood—was strong because of the integrity of the whole. Solidarity was the foundation, and its erosion was the end. Giving up Thunder would be too great a risk. Kingbird had to understand that. So what do you offer as justice, Cork wondered, when justice was impossible to offer?

He was pulled from his reverie when his daughter, seventeen-year-old Annie, left the choir loft and joined another teenager—Ulysses Kingbird—in front of the chancel rail for the offertory. Annie sang a medieval hymn that the young Kingbird had arranged. Ulysses accompanied her on guitar. They’d been practicing for weeks. Cork had heard Annie singing in the bathroom, in her bedroom, humming on the stairs. This was the first time he’d heard her with the accompaniment and he was moved. It was extraordinary.

After the service, Cork and Jo caught up with Ulysses Kingbird in the common room in the church basement. This was where the congregation usually gathered to socialize. Refreshments were kept simple: juice or punch for the children, coffee for adults, cookies for all. The kitchen abutted the common room, and there were always several women visible through the wide serving windows, bustling around in an important way.

Ulysses stood in a corner with his father, Will Kingbird, who had a cell phone to his ear. Ulysses was sixteen—barely. His skin had the shadowy cast of the Ojibwe, courtesy of his father, but his features were sharp, his face narrow, his lips thin and soft, all evidence of the Hispanic blood on his mother’s side. In a couple of years, he might grow handsome, but at the moment he was awkward and pimpled. Standing beside his father, he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

“Ulysses,” Jo said, approaching him with a warm smile. “That was an absolutely beautiful piece you played.”

“Thanks.” His dark eyes dropped to the linoleum. “It was Annie, you know. She’s got the voice.”

“Don’t go selling yourself short. You play the guitar wonderfully. And that arrangement was extraordinary.”

He shrugged off her compliment. It was clear that if there had been a way, he would have disappeared.

“Where’s your mother?” Jo asked. “I can’t believe Lucinda would miss this.”

His father flipped his cell phone closed. “That’s what I was just trying to find out.” Will Kingbird was full-blood Ojibwe. Powerfully built, he stood well over six feet tall. He was Cork’s age, staring fifty in the face, and his black hair, which he kept military short, was salted with gray. He held himself impossibly rigid, the result, Cork figured, of thirty years in the marines. “She was supposed to pick up Rayette and Misty and bring them to church like she always does. Can’t get her cell phone and nobody answers at Alex’s place.”

“Car trouble maybe,” Cork suggested. “If they’re on the rez, it’s hard to get a cell phone signal.”

“Or baby trouble,” Jo said. “They can be a handful.”

Kingbird frowned at their casual suggestions. “I think Uly and me’ll head out there, see what’s going on.”

Annie worked her way toward them through the post-Mass gathering. When she reached Ulysses, she playfully punched his arm. “Awesome, dude.”

A smile slid briefly across his lips. “No, you were.”

“Oh, like you and your guitar were totally not there.” She put her arm around him in the way Cork had seen her do with her softball teammates. She glanced at Will Kingbird, cordial but not friendly. “Morning, Mr. Kingbird.”

“Morning.”

“Wasn’t he incredible?”

“You both did a nice job.”

“Dude,” she said to Ulysses, “your mother would have loved it. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re about to find out,” Will Kingbird said. He gave them all a nod in parting. “Let’s go, Uly.”

Cork watched them weave their way across the basement. Halfway to the door, the parish priest, Father Ted Green, met them and spoke to Kingbird for a moment. They followed the priest toward another door where Cy Borkman, in his deputy’s uniform, was waiting. They all went upstairs.

“What was that about?” Annie said.

“No idea,” Cork replied. But it didn’t look good.

Jo turned to head away. “I’m going to find Stevie. I’ll be right back.”

A few minutes later, Father Ted returned to the common room. He approached Cork, a look of anguish on his youthful face. “There’s someone in my office who wants to see you.”

“Who is it?” Cork said.

“The sheriff.”

“What’s up, Ted?”

“I think you’d better talk to the sheriff.”

Cork turned to Annie. “Tell your mom I’m upstairs.”

He followed the priest to his office. Inside, Sheriff Marsha Dross was waiting, standing at a window, looking out at the sunny May morning. She turned when she heard them enter.

“Mind, Father?” she said.

“No, I’ll be happy to wait outside.”

“And would you close the door?”

When they were alone, Cork said, “What’s going on, Marsha?”

“Alexander and Rayette Kingbird were killed last night.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Lucinda Kingbird found their bodies this morning.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Before I answer that, I need to ask you a few questions, Cork.”

“Go ahead.”

“What was the nature of your relationship with Kingbird?”

“Until last night I had no relationship with him to speak of.”

“What changed last night?”

“He asked me to come and see him. I went to his place and we talked.”

“What time?”

“I got there about eight thirty, left maybe twenty minutes later.”

“He was alive when you left?”

“Of course he was alive. Haven’t you got a time of death yet?”

She lifted her hand to hold back his questions. “In a minute. What did you talk about?”

“He wanted me to arrange a meeting with Buck Reinhardt.”

“Why?”

“To keep things from getting out of hand. Kingbird told me Buck and some of his men threatened one of the Red Boyz.”

“Did you arrange a meeting?”

“I couldn’t find Buck.”

“Where’d you look?”

“His house first, then four or five bars. I gave up a little before eleven and went home.”

Dross was thirty-five, not a pretty woman exactly—big bones, broad face, hair kept short. She was wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back. She pulled a paper evidence sack from the breast pocket of her shirt and handed it to Cork. He opened it and saw that it held one of the business cards he gave out for the work he sometimes did as a private investigator. There was dried blood on the card. He closed the sack and handed it back.

“We found this on Kingbird,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.” Her eyes were brown and, at the moment, edged with a look that might have been anger. “It was an execution, Cork. Their hands were taped. They were shot in the back, close range, a shotgun. Preliminary estimate of time of death is between eleven
P.M.
and one
A.M.
Ed and his team are working the scene. BCA’s on the way. Would you mind going out there with me? Something I’d like you to take a look at.”

“Sure. Just let me tell Jo.”

Father Ted was outside, staring down the hallway toward the open door to the sanctuary, where sunlight through the stained-glass windows fell on the pews in colorful, broken pieces.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked. He was not quite thirty, had been the priest at St. Agnes for a little over two years, and was full of a naive and vibrant energy that Cork sometimes found exhausting.

Cork put a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “You know any prayers for peace, Ted, now’s the time to haul ’em out.”