William Krueger: Iron Lake

Darla brightened a moment. “Sometimes Paul stops there a while. The judge seems to like him. Tells him stories and things. Paul hates it, but I’ve told him to be polite.”

“I suppose it’s possible Paul’s stranded there and because of the problem with the telephone lines, he has no way of letting you know. Maybe I ought to head over to the judge’s house. At least I’d be able to tell if Paul finished delivering his papers.”

“I want to go with you,” Darla said.

Cork shook his head. “You need to stay here by the phone just in case Paul calls. I’m sure he’s fine, Darla. He’s a good, responsible kid who knows how to take care of himself, okay?”

“What if he’s not there?”

“Then he’s somewhere else and he’s okay and we’ll find him,” Cork assured her. At the front door, Cork said, “Call someone. It isn’t good for you to be here alone. Call someone you can talk to. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She put her hand on Cork’s arm. “Find him, Cork. Please.”

The judge’s estate wasn’t easy to reach. The plows hadn’t touched any of the outlying roads yet, and Cork went slowly, with the front bumper of the Bronco nosing through drifts. The estate occupied the whole tip of the finger of land called North Point. The house itself was a huge stone affair, more than a century old, surrounded by gardens in summer and a sea of snow in winter. In its way it was like the man who owned it. Isolated.

The judge had once been a powerful figure in the politics of Minnesota. The scion of a family grown rich from clear-cutting the great white pines of the North Woods, he viewed himself as a rugged individualist and stubbornly clung to the view, as had those Parrants before him, that a man became what he made of himself. Only the hand of God-not an interfering government-should direct men’s destinies. In the Iron Range, an area noted for its independent, unpredictable, and generally cantankerous population, his message was well received.

His personal influence had reached its zenith more than two decades earlier when he made a nearly successful bid for the governor’s mansion. Five days before the election, with the judge carrying a slight edge in the polls, the St. Paul Pioneer Press published photographs of him leaving a motel room in the company of the wife of the chair of the party’s central committee. Minnesota may have been liberal in its politics, but it was pretty Lutheran in its morality. The judge lost by a landslide.

He retired from the state political arena after that, but he still maintained his influence in the Iron Range. Except for the election of Cork as sheriff, which the judge had opposed, no one in Tamarack County was elected without the judge’s benediction.

As sheriff, Cork had occasionally found it necessary to call on the judge at his estate on North Point Road. But it was never a duty with any pleasure in it.

Cork parked on the long circular drive and waded through the snow to the front door. No one answered the bell. He took off his glove and knocked hard. He tried to look through the windows downstairs, but the curtains were drawn and melted snow had turned to ice plastered across the windows. He went back to the Bronco, grabbed a flashlight, and worked his way around to the back of the house. Stepping onto the big terrace, he rubbed a spot clear on the sliding glass door. The curtains were only partially drawn, and through the gap Cork could see a glass of wine sitting on the coffee table in the living room, a little thread of gray smoke curling up from the ashes of the fireplace, but no sign of the judge.

The wind pushed snow across the open ground in a tide that seemed liquid as water. Cork made his way to the garage, cleared a small side window, and poked the flashlight beam through. Both of the judge’s vehicles-a black Lincoln Mark IV and a new red Ford pickup-were parked inside. He trudged back toward the front door and kicked around the snow in the big entryway, looking for a paper. Finally he tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He swung it open and stepped in.

“Judge Parrant?” he called. “Judge, it’s Corcoran O’Connor!”

He felt uneasy being in the house uninvited. No search warrant. Criminal trespass. Things he still cared about. He knew there was no justification for entering this way. Except a boy who should have been home and wasn’t.

“Judge?” he called again, moving into the living room.

There were still embers in the fireplace. The wineglass on the coffee table was less than half full. The upstairs was dark. The only other light came from a room down the hall. Cork headed that way.

The door was well ajar, but gave only a partial view of what looked like the judge’s study, a room full of books. Cork pushed the door open all the way. At first he didn’t see the judge. He saw the big desk, the map of Minnesota on the wall behind it, and the splatters of blood that ran down the map like red rivers. He put his gloves back on and stepped around the desk. The force of the blast had thrown the judge over in his chair and the shotgun lay fallen beside him. Cork didn’t look long at the body. He’d seen men dead this way before, but it was never easy. And the raw smell of so much blood was something you never forgot.

Wally Schanno was an honest man and well thought of in Tamarack County. In his mid-fifties, he was tall and lean, had hollow cheeks, thick pale lips, and a nose like a big ragged chunk of granite shoved into his face. His hands were large. His enormous feet required shoes factory-ordered straight from Red Wing, Minnesota. So far as Cork knew, he had no bad habits. Didn’t drink, smoke, or gamble. He was a practicing Lutheran, Missouri Synod. He had a penchant for suspenders-nothing wild, just plain red, or black, or gray-and he almost never sported a tie. He was not a politician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d managed to get himself elected sheriff after the recall vote that forced Cork from office. Before that Schanno had been chief of police for the village of Green Lake just half a dozen miles southwest of Aurora. He was a decent man, had done his job in Green Lake well for fifteen years. Cork had nothing against Schanno. He’d always had an admiration for the character of the man. But after Schanno replaced him, Cork’s admiration took on a grudging edge. To his shame, he found himself looking forward to the day when Wally Schanno would screw up big-time.

Schanno looked at his watch for the third time in five minutes.

“Got a date, Wally?” Cork asked.

“Arletta’s home alone,” Schanno said.

“Ah,” Cork replied.

Arletta was Schanno’s wife. She was a woman of rare beauty. Long black hair with flares of brilliant silver, blue-summer-sky eyes, and the most perfect smile Cork had ever seen. She also had Alzheimer’s.

“I called her sister. She said she’d try to get over there as fast as she could. I expected to hear from her by now,” Schanno said.

“You didn’t have to come yourself, Wally,” Cork pointed out. “Your men know what they’re doing.”

“I’m the sheriff,” Schanno said, and cast a hard eye on Cork.

Ed Larson, the only man with the rank of captain in the department and the man in charge of the most serious of Tamarack County’s crimes, came down the hallway from the judge’s study. “I’m finished in there, Wally. But I don’t want to bag him until we have a good time of death. Are you sure Sigurd’s on the way over?”

“I’m sure. Storm’s held him up, most likely.”

At the window, Cork watched the wind drive snow against the pane, where it collected in the corners of the mullions, melted, and froze into a thickening glaze.

Schanno hooked his thumb under his black suspenders and ran it up and down thoughtfully for a moment. “Gotta admit, the judge was probably the last man I’d’ve suspected of suicide. Still, who knows? People fool you all the time.”