William Krueger: Trickster's Point

The dying don’t easily become the dead.

Even with an arrow in his heart, Jubal Little took three hours to die. Politician that he was, most of that time he couldn’t stop talking. At first, he talked about the arrow. Not how it got there-he believed he knew the answer to that-but arguing with Cork over whether to try to pull it out or push it through. Corcoran O’Connor did neither. Then he talked about the past, a long and convoluted rambling punctuated by moments of astonishing self-awareness. He admitted he’d made mistakes. He told Cork things he swore he’d never told anyone else, told them in a way that made Cork feel uncomfortably like Jubal’s confessor. Finally he talked about what lay ahead. He wasn’t afraid to die, he said. And he said that he understood the situation, understood why Cork had put that arrow in his heart.

He died sitting up, his back against hard rock, his big body gray in the long shadow cast by the imposing monolith known as Trickster’s Point. If the political polls were correct, in just a few days Jubal Little would have won a landslide victory as the new governor of Minnesota. Cork had known Jubal Little all his life and, for some of those years, had thought of him as a best friend. Even so, he’d planned to mark his ballot for another man on election day. Partly it was because Jubal wanted different things for Minnesota and the North Country and the Ojibwe than Cork wanted. But mostly it was because Jubal Little was absolutely capable of murder, and Cork O’Connor was the only one who knew it.

The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.

Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.

The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.

The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions-more of them this time and more probing-and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.

While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.

Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.

“On the table,” Larson told him, and the deputy set the tray down and left. “Go ahead and eat, Cork,” Larson said. “I just want to look over a few of my notes.”

He pulled a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sport coat. Larson always looked and dressed more like a college professor than a cop. He had gold wire-rim glasses and wore honest to God tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. He was nearing sixty, more than a half dozen years older than Cork, and still had an enviable head of hair that was a distinguished silver-black. He was already on the force when Cork first joined as a deputy more than twenty years before. They’d become friends, and Cork had a great deal of respect for him and his abilities. As soon as Cork was elected sheriff, he’d put Larson in charge of investigating major crimes.

While Cork sat at the table and ate, Larson pretended to go over his notes. Cork knew that, in reality, Larson was more interested in his appetite, knew that people who’d committed a violent crime were often so troubled by what they’d done that they couldn’t eat. So Cork made as if he hadn’t had a bite of food in a month and rammed down every crumb of his cheeseburger and gulped every drop of coffee.

“Thanks,” he said when he’d finished.

Larson looked up from his notepad and, with his index finger, eased his glasses a quarter of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture he sometimes made unconsciously when he was about to do something that was uncomfortable for him. “Cork, I know you know the drill. I’ve got to make sure that you understand your rights.”

“Miranda,” Cork said.

“Miranda,” Larson acknowledged and went through the litany.

“It’s official then?” Cork said.

“What’s official?”

“I’m officially a suspect.”

Larson squinted, a look of pain. “In my shoes, how would you see it?”

“I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how I’d see it, Ed. If our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you’d killed Jubal Little.”

“Tell me why, if I were in your shoes, I would have waited three hours before trying to get him some help.”

“I wasn’t trying to get him help. He was already dead when I left him.”

“Okay, so why didn’t you go for help as soon as you understood the seriousness of the situation?”

“I’ve told you. Jubal asked me to stay.”

“Because he was afraid?”

“Jubal?” Cork shook his head. “No, not Jubal. Never Jubal.”

“You were his only hope of surviving, and yet he insisted that you stay. I don’t understand.”

“He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.”

“You couldn’t have carried him out?”

“He hurt whenever I tried to move him, hurt a lot. It was that broadhead arrow tip tearing him up inside. I didn’t want to give him any more pain. If I’d tried to carry him out, he would simply have died sooner.”

“So you just sat there and watched him go?”

“No. I listened to him. I think that was the main reason he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. You know how politicians are.”

Larson gave a startled look that quickly turned critical. “There’s nothing humorous in this situation, Cork.”

“I’m not sure Jubal saw it that way. The last thing he did on this earth was smile, Ed.”