William Krueger - Tamarack County

“I did. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and told me, and I quote, ‘I got one car, woman, and my wife was driving it that night. Where the hell do you think I was?’ I asked him if there was any way he could prove that, and his lawyer-”

“Abramson?”

“Yeah, Al Abramson.”

“A good man.”

“And a good lawyer. He said it sounded very much like the kind of question one might ask a suspect. Was the Judge a suspect? And if so, what, in my mind, made him so?”

“Did you tell him you thought the Judge was feeding you a lot of bullshit and that in itself was reason enough?”

She smiled. Although she wore no makeup, she was still, in her straightforward way, attractive. She was wearing her uniform, something she rarely did. He figured she was going to do a lot of official investigating that day and wanted the force of her authority evident.

“So, where do you go from here?” he asked.

She looked at her watch. “The Judge’s daughter arrived this morning. I’ve already spoken with her on the phone and asked if she’d mind coming in today so that I could talk to her about her mother and our investigation.”

“She said yes?”

“In a heartbeat. She seems a good deal more worried about Evelyn than her father is.”

The mug Dross had given him was almost empty. Cork stared at the last mouthful, which was full of grounds. “I believe Ralph’s the kind of man who, given the right circumstances, might kill his wife, but we come back to motive.” He gave her a questioning look, to which she offered only a shrug in reply. “We also have the issue of how that feeble old goat would even be able to manage siphoning the gas tank and hauling around the heavy cans.”

“Maybe he had help.”

“Who?”

She said in a voice that was a very good imitation of the Judge, “I don’t know.”

Cork laughed and stood up. “After you’ve talked to Justine, will you let me know what you found out, if anything?”

“All right. And you’ll let me know how your snowmobile expedition goes, okay?”

* * *

He drove to the reservation of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and parked at the deserted marina. He backed the snowmobile off the trailer and headed out onto the frozen lake toward the Loons, a little more than a mile distant. The sun off the snow was a blinding hammer, and Cork wore his tinted goggles against the glare. The temperature was double digits below zero and expected to rise only a few degrees that day. It was pretty typical weather in the North Country in the dead of winter, and Cork loved it. He loved how the deep cold cleaned the air and how everything he looked at seemed more clearly defined. In summer, the heat and the humidity that often accompanied it made things seem to melt into one another like the images of an oil painting in which the colors had run. In winter, a cold winter especially, each thing brought into being by God or the Great Mystery or Kitchimanidoo or whatever you chose to call the force of creation stood out separately from every other thing in an almost mystical way. Half a mile out, he looked toward the shoreline southeast and found the break in the birch trees that marked the trail to the Daychilds’ old prefab home. Half a minute later, he was following the tracks that he and whoever had killed the dog had left going to and from the Loons the night before. He quickly arrived at the place where the dog killer’s snowmobile had come and gone, and he set his Bearcat into that track and followed southwest toward the open lake and Aurora.

Long before the details of the far shoreline became clear to him, he could see smoke from the chimneys of town rising straight into the air like erect white feathers pressed against the powdery blue sky. As he drew nearer, a small village of ice fishing houses appeared on the lake. He figured the track of the dog killer’s snowmobile would head through that gathering and be lost among the maze of tracks left by other snowmobiles. To his surprise, however, the killer’s track veered north and stayed well clear of the fishing shanties. Cork wondered if the killer had been concerned about being seen and identified, even in the dead of night. He followed the track easily for a few more minutes, drawing very near to the western shore of Iron Lake a couple of miles north of town. There the killer had entered an area crisscrossed by dozens of other snowmobiles, and the track became impossible to follow. But that area in itself was interesting, because it was near the mouth of the White Iron River. Although it was not the safest route, the broad river was often used by snowmobilers to access the lake. The system of snowmobile trails in Tamarack County was like a spiderweb with threads reaching into every corner of the county, even the most remote. Many of those threads crossed the White Iron River. Whoever had killed the Daychilds’ dog could have come from just about anywhere.

It didn’t leave Cork with much except that he was almost certain the killer was, as Stella Daychild had said, a chimook . And because the killer had come a distance and gone out of his way to avoid being seen, the killing of the dog had not been just a random act of violence. Someone wanted to punish the Daychilds or to send them a terrible and frightening message. Cork thought about the guy Stella had described, the one she believed had followed her to the rez from the casino, the man with a mole like a fly on his cheek. She’d said that just his look had been enough to make her nervous. Whoever he was, was he the kind of man who, for whatever reason, would behead a dog that was too trusting for its own good?

But in the way he’d trained himself to think over a lifetime of looking beyond the obvious, Cork wondered if it was something else. Maybe Stella Daychild knew more than she was telling. Maybe, in fact, she’d made up the man from the casino because he would deflect Cork from poking his nose somewhere she didn’t want it poked. People had played him that way before. So as much as he wanted to trust that the Daychilds had been up front with him, he held in the back of his mind a measure of healthy doubt.

He turned his snowmobile, intending to head back to Allouette, but, instead of going there directly, veered far to the north. He traveled at an even thirty-five miles an hour, cutting across frozen, open lake, weaving between islands, and after fifteen minutes, he’d reached his destination.

Crow Point was a finger of land fringed with aspen trees. Most of it was meadowland, with two cabins set in the wild grass near the end of the point. One cabin belonged to Henry Meloux, the ancient Ojibwe Mide, who had been to Cork a mentor, a spiritual adviser, a surrogate father, and always a friend. The other cabin belonged to Rainy Bisonette, Meloux’s great-niece, a public nurse who’d come two years earlier to help the old man through illness. She’d stayed on beyond that time of need, both because she hoped to learn Meloux’s secrets of healing and because she and Cork had fallen in love. On Crow Point, there was neither electricity nor running water. It was a tough existence, but Rainy, like her great-uncle, had found that the benefits outweighed the difficulties.

Cork guided his snowmobile to a stop in front of Rainy’s cabin and killed the engine. Wood, cut and split for burning, stood neatly stacked against the cabin’s south wall. The woodpile wore a covering of snow that made it look like a great animal, humped and hibernating in the cabin’s lee. Snow lay drifted three feet deep against the door.

He remembered the day Rainy and Meloux had left Crow Point. They’d gone together, near the end of October. Cork had ridden his Bearcat out to help haul baggage to Rainy’s truck, which was parked at the nearest access, a gravel county road a mile and a half east. Nearly a foot of snow already lay on the ground.