William Krueger: Mercy Falls

Larson considered it while he scratched the silver bristle of his hair. “Whoever, they knew what they were doing. Two dead dogs, tracks erased, a well-chosen vantage point from which to fire.”

“Why didn’t he…she…set up a crossfire?” Cork said.

“That probably means the number of people involved is limited. Maybe just the shooter. Or the shooter and the woman he used to get you out here.”

“A lot of speculation,” Cork said.

“Without a lot of hard evidence to go on, you’ve got to begin your thinking somewhere. I’m guessing it’s someone who knows the rez. They knew that Lucy and Eli would be gone, anyway. They were pretty sure it would be you who’d respond. Cork, this wasn’t some sort of random violence. It was well planned and you were the target.”

Borkmann strolled over. In the glare, his bulk cast a huge shadow before him. “We still got two men on that hill.”

The moon wasn’t up yet, but it was on the rise. “Might as well bring them down,” Cork said. “I don’t think we’ll have to worry any more tonight. Maybe we should all call it a night. What do you think, Ed? Come back in the morning? BCA’ll be here then. In the meantime, we can post a couple of men to keep the scene secure, and we’ll send everyone else home. That bullet you’re hoping to dig out of the ground’ll still be there tomorrow.”

“Cork?” Borkmann called from his cruiser. “Just got word from Patsy via Bos. Marsha’s out of surgery and doing well.”

Cork felt something begin to break inside him, a wall behind which an ocean of emotion was at risk of flooding through.

Ed put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take care of getting things packed up here. You go on home and get some rest. We’ll have a go at it again tomorrow.”

He went back to the department and filled out an incident report, then stopped by the hospital one last time. Patsy had gone, but he found Charlie Annala asleep on the sofa in the waiting area of the recovery room. Someone had put a thin blanket over him. Shortly after midnight, Cork headed home.

By the time he turned onto Gooseberry Lane, the moon had risen high in the sky, a waxing gibbous moon, a silver teardrop on the cheek of night. His home was an old two-story frame affair with a wonderful front porch and a big elm in the yard. The whole town knew it as the O’Connor place. With the exception of college and a few years when he was a cop in Chicago, he’d lived in that house his whole life. In a way, it contained his life. He stood on the lawn a few moments, in the shadow the elm cast in the moonlight, trying to draw to himself the feel of all that was familiar. A light in his bedroom upstairs told him Jo had waited up for him. A soft glow drizzled through the window of his son’s room, Stevie’s night-light. His daughters’ rooms were on the backside of the house, but it was late and a school night and he figured they would be asleep by now. He listened to the creak of the chains on their metal hooks as the porch swing rocked slowly in the breeze. He put his hand against the rough bark of the big tree that was as old as he and took in the dry smell of autumn.

Jo had left a light on in the living room so that he wouldn’t walk into a dark house. He turned it off and headed upstairs, where he checked the children’s rooms. Stevie was snoring softly. Jenny lay asleep with the headphones of her Discman still over her ears. Annie’s pillow was over her head, and her right leg was off the bed. Cork took a moment and carefully settled her back in.

In his own room, he found Jo sitting up but asleep, a manila file folder open on her lap; her reading glasses had slipped to the end of her nose. She was a lawyer and she often brought her work to bed, one way or another. Cork decided not to wake her. He wasn’t quite ready for sleep yet, anyway. Too much going on inside.

He went back downstairs and stood in the dark living room, feeling oddly alien in the quiet of the house, as if he’d been gone a long time and had lost touch with the details that created the mosaic of a normal day. He felt adrift, stranded in a place he didn’t quite know or understand.

In the kitchen, he latched onto the cookie jar, an icon of familiarity. It was Ernie from Sesame Street, and it had been in the O’Connor house for more than a decade. Cork dipped into Ernie’s head and brought out a chocolate chip cookie, which he put on the kitchen table while he took a glass tumbler from the cupboard next to the sink. From the refrigerator, he grabbed a plastic gallon jug of milk and filled the tumbler halfway.

As he turned back to the refrigerator, the shatter of glass exploded the quiet of the kitchen. He hit the floor, let go of the jug, reached automatically for his. 38. He scrambled across the linoleum and pressed his back to the cabinet doors below the sink, clutching his gun. One of the windows? he wondered. But a quick glance told him no bullet had come through any of the panes.

Then he saw the broken tumbler on the floor, the puddle of milk around the shards, and he realized he’d knocked the glass off the table. A simple accident due to his own carelessness, a small incident in a day full of enormous event. Still, it felt as if something had finally snapped inside him, the cord that had kept him from taking a long fall.

Finally alone, he drew his legs up, laid his arms across his knees, cradled his head, and with a violent quaking gave himself up to the dark emotions-terror, rage, regret-that had stalked him all night.

Boston was still on duty when Cork rolled in at first light.

She glanced at her watch. “You didn’t sleep much,” she said. “And you don’t mind me saying so, you still look like hell.”

“What’s the word from Morgan and Schilling?” he asked, referring to the two deputies who’d been posted overnight at the Tibodeau cabin.

“Checked in every hour; nothing to report.”

Cork poured himself some coffee from the pot in the common area before going to his office. He spent a few minutes typing a memo on his computer, printed thirty copies, and handed them to the dispatcher. Bos lifted the top copy, read it, and looked up.

“Everybody wears armor on duty now?”

“No exceptions,” Cork said. “I want this memo posted on the board and I want every deputy to check off with initials so I know they’ve read it.” He handed her another sheet on which he’d printed some instructions. “Give this to Cy when he comes in. I want him to brief everyone about last night. Duty assignments remain the same except for Larson’s evidence team, who’ll be out at the cabin. I’m taking a cruiser and heading to the rez.”

She eyed him with maternal concern but said nothing.

He drove a Pathfinder that had been confiscated in a raid on a meth lab near Yellow Lake in August. It had since been fitted with a radio and was now an official part of the vehicle pool. He’d taken only a couple of sips of the coffee he’d poured himself earlier, so he stopped at the all night Food ’N Fuel and bought three coffees and several granola bars.

As he headed north out of town, a red sun inched above the ragged tree line on the far side of Iron Lake. In an autumn in which the whole earth had seemed the color of a raw wound, the water itself appeared to be a well of blood. Cork couldn’t look at it without thinking of all the blood that had soaked the blouse of Marsha Dross’s uniform. As much as possible he kept his eyes on the road and considered the question of who might want him dead.

He’d been sheriff of Tamarack County before, for a period of seven years. Things had happened near the end of that tenure, terrible things that had torn him apart and nearly shattered his family as well. His badge had been taken from him. He’d spent the next three years running Sam’s Place and putting himself back together. Over time he’d begun to feel whole again and to believe that his life still had promise. In those first seven years as sheriff, he’d been responsible for a lot of people going to jail. On many occasions, he’d been threatened with reprisal, idle threats for the most part. Or so he’d thought.