William Krueger - Trickster's Point

He disconnected his cell phone from the car charger and slipped it into the little holster on his belt. He got out and checked the garage. Empty. He knocked on the front door. No answer. He went inside, where the heat was on, but only enough to keep the cold at bay. He wandered to the kitchen and discovered that the broken glass from the frame Camilla had shattered the night before had been cleaned up. In the bedroom, he found the bed neatly made. In the bathroom, there were clean towels hanging on the rack and the bloodied towels in the hamper were gone. It was clear to him that Winona Crane had returned, but she wasn’t there now. He wondered why she’d come back, and why she’d run again.

Then his eyes fell on the little table beside the claw-footed tub, with its candle and the portable CD player and the single CD case, all of which he’d seen the night before. Now he saw something he’d overlooked in the dark. He picked up the plastic CD case, which was empty. Along the edge, someone-Winona probably-had put a little strip of white tape and had written the title of the disc the case held: Fleetwood Mac. Cork lifted the top of the portable player. The CD was inside. He picked it up and read the label, the list of the tunes he remembered well: “Monday Morning,” “Warm Ways,” “Blue Letter.” At the fourth song, he stopped scanning. “Rhiannon.”

It was no coincidence. He was holding a key. He knew it absolutely. But he had no idea what door it opened. What was the connection between Rhiannon and Winona and Jubal? And why was it, apparently, such a deadly one?

He’d only just begun to consider this when his cell phone chirped. He pulled it from the little holster on his belt. Caller ID told him it was Lester Bigby.

“O’Connor, will you meet me?” Bigby asked as soon as Cork answered.

“Where?”

“At my resort complex. Something I want to say to you.”

“You can’t tell me over the phone?”

“You want to know who killed Jubal Little, you’ll come.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Cork said.

Bigby hung up without a word of good-bye.

The Crown Lake Resort was ten miles southwest of Aurora, nestled among rugged hills whose slopes were thick with pine trees and spruce and stands of aspens and birch. The shoreline was undeveloped because it had, for a very long time, belonged to the Arrowhead Mining Corporation. The mine, one of the smaller open pits on the Iron Range, had shut down operations more than a dozen years earlier, but Arrowhead Mining had held on to the property, until Lester Bigby made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The resort had the lake all to itself. Which would have been perfect, except that, within the last year, a Canadian corporation had purchased mineral rights to land two miles east, from which they hoped to be given permission to extract base ore-copper-nickel and platinum. Sulfide mining would be the extraction process. Several streams ran through the mine area and emptied into Crown Lake. If the environmental watchdogs were right, the mining would eventually turn the water of the lake to sulfuric acid.

Cork drove his Land Rover down the single paved road, which had been built at the behest and expense of Lester Bigby. The road ended near the lakeshore, where an area had been cleared and preliminary construction on some buildings had begun. There was no activity at the moment, had been none for some time, not since news of the possibility of nearby sulfide mining had become public.

Lester Bigby’s Karmann Ghia was parked in tall, dead grass ten yards from the lake. Bigby sat on a big slab of gray rock that jutted into the lake. Cork parked next to the little car, got out, and walked onto the slab. Bigby had his back to Cork and was staring at the lake. Cork crossed the flat rock, which was tilted at a slight angle toward the water. As soon as he came abreast of Bigby, Cork saw the firearm in Bigby’s right hand. Ruger, his mind told him without being prodded, 22 caliber.

“Beautiful, don’t you think?” Bigby said.

“Lovely,” Cork replied, not taking his eyes off the Ruger.

“You ski?”

“No.”

“Me neither. But a lot of people in Minnesota do. That slope over there would have held one of the best runs in the state.”

“Would have?”

“It’s not going to happen. Ever.” He nudged the barrel of the handgun in Cork’s direction. “Sit down.” An order, not an invitation.

Cork sat. The clouds hung heavy over the hills and the lake. There was a slight breeze across the water, a cool November wind that already presaged winter, and Cork felt the chill of it against his face. The other chill he felt came from the threat in Bigby’s hand.

“What are you going to leave your kids, O’Connor?”

“A lot of good memories, and Sam’s Place,” he said without hesitation.

Bigby nodded. “Me, I was going to leave my son this. Do you know what I have to leave him now? Nothing. I’ve lost everything.”

“Jubal’s dead. The polls are saying our governor will be re-elected. Champion of the environment.”

“As long as there’s money to be made in the ground up here, the risk will always be there. If it wasn’t Jubal Little, it would have been someone else. Those people, they always find a way to get what they want.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All my promised backers have pulled out. I put another mortgage on my house. The third. Sold all my stocks and bonds a while ago. Borrowed against my life insurance. None of it enough to save this dream. You want to know what I was doing on Saturday? I spent the day out here, planning for it to be my last day on earth. I was going to kill myself. I knew I couldn’t do it at home and have Emily and Lance find me there. I couldn’t do that to them. In the end, I couldn’t do it at all. Coward. Just like my father always said.”

“I don’t think so,” Cork offered.

“You don’t know me,” Bigby shot back with sudden viciousness.

“I know your father, and you’re nothing like him.”

“Is that so? You’re ready to believe I killed Jubal Little.” He looked at Cork with a kind of grim curiosity. “Why exactly do you think I would do that?”

“Because of the sulfide mining.”

“I’d kill myself over that, not someone else.”

“I also thought maybe it might have something to do with wanting your father’s approval. For some sons, that would be important enough to kill for.”

Bigby laughed, a bitter sound. “Christ, are you barking up the wrong tree. My father’s a cruel man. He was cruel to my mother. He was cruel to me. And he was cruel to Donner. I grew up knowing what people thought of my brother, but I loved him. He stood up to my father, stood between Buzz and my mother, between Buzz and me. When Donner died, there was no one to stand up for us. Hell, if I killed anybody it would be my old man.”

“I also thought maybe it was because of Donner.”

Bigby looked confused. “I don’t understand.”

“Your father blamed Jubal for Donner’s death.”

“He blamed you, too.”

“My point, more or less. By putting an arrow into Jubal Little and making it look like I did it, you’d kill two birds with one stone.”

“You give me more credit for planning than I’m capable of.”

“It’s been a tough investigation. Any port in a storm,” Cork said, putting a little smile on his face while still eyeing the barrel of the Ruger.

“You think it’s funny? You sent cops to my house. My wife was there, and my son, and I had to explain to them why the police came into our home. My family looked at me as if they didn’t know me. You have any idea how that feels?”

“Did you tell them about Saturday?”