William Krueger - Tamarack County

She took a spoon from the drawer, opened her yogurt, tossed the lid into the garbage pail under the sink, started out of the kitchen, then turned back and said, “I’ll go there tomorrow.”

“After church?”

Anne thought about that and finally said, “I don’t go to church anymore.”

She left the room, left Stephen standing thunderstruck, left him suddenly afraid that the wall that stood between what was evil in the world and what was good had begun to crumble.

The investigation of Evelyn Carter’s disappearance had pulled a number of deputies out of the office, leaving the sheriff’s department shorthanded. As a result, Mary Lou Wolsey, who normally just worked dispatch, was also covering the contact desk. When she buzzed Cork through the secure door, she said, “In her office. She’s expecting you.”

“Thanks, Mary Lou.”

Although the sheriff’s office had been occupied by three other people since Cork had left the uniform behind, it was still a little surreal to him whenever he walked into the room that had been his for many years. The truth was he didn’t much miss being sheriff-the politics had been nothing but a headache-but he often missed wearing a badge. Dross had redone the place as soon as she’d taken over the position and had managed to make the room feel somehow more welcoming without losing the professional atmosphere. It had to do with the color she’d chosen for the walls, maybe, a placid hue that reminded Cork of soft desert sand. Or the photographs she’d hung, very personal. Or maybe the plants that she managed to keep looking enviably healthy. There were still file cabinets, and her computer, and bookshelves full of law enforcement manuals and volumes of regulations, but she’d made it a room where, Cork figured, she could spend a lot of time without feeling the onerous grind of the wheels of justice.

Dross sat at her desk. Justine Belsen, the daughter of Evelyn and Ralph Carter, sat in a chair near one of the windows. Through the panes behind her, the snow and glaring sunlight framed her in a harsh brilliance. Justine was tall and, in Cork’s opinion, cadaverously thin. She was blond, her hair cut in a flip that brushed against her neck whenever she moved her head. She’d grown up in Aurora; he knew her, but not well. She was a few years younger than he, and they’d run in different circles. He’d graduated from Aurora High the year she’d entered as a freshman, and when he came back with his family to take a job as a sheriff’s deputy, she was married and living in New York City. Over the years, he’d seen her occasionally at St. Agnes when she was home for a visit and attended church with her parents, but aside from perfunctory greetings, they’d had little to say to each other. Now here she was, a woman of fifty, who looked whittled down by life to not much more than a matchstick.

“Hello, Cork,” she said dryly when he walked in.

“Hello, Justine. It’s been a while.” He shed his coat, draped it over the back of the office’s unoccupied chair, took a moment to shake her hand, then sat down.

“I don’t come back to Aurora much these days,” Justine said. “I wish I didn’t have to be here now.”

“I’m sorry about the circumstances,” he offered.

“Thank you.”

Dross said, “I’ve told Justine that we’ve pretty much exhausted our search of the area where we found her mother’s car and that our investigation has taken a turn toward possible foul play in her mother’s disappearance.”

Cork glanced at Justine. She’d had a couple of days already to deal with the fact that her mother was missing, but he could see from the muscles tensed across the bone of her face that this new turn of events had been especially hard on her.

“Would you mind telling Cork what you told me?” Dross said.

Justine looked at him, frowning just a little, the hollows in her cheeks deepening. “I thought you weren’t in law enforcement anymore.”

“He’s a licensed private investigator now, and he’s agreed to consult on this case,” Dross told her, saying it quickly but casually, as if it was quite an ordinary occurrence in the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

Justine gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, a little gesture of whatever. She said, “My mother was seriously considering leaving my father.”

“Why?” Cork asked. Although knowing the kind of man the Judge had always been, he understood that it was, in a way, a silly question. “I mean, why now?”

Justine rubbed one hand over the other, her long fingers idly feeling the prominent knuckles. “I’ve been trying to get her to leave him for years. Devout Catholic that she is, she believes that a marriage is forever. Fine, I’ve always told her. You don’t have to divorce him. Just leave. But she’s spent her life under his thumb. It’s hard for her to change.”

“So why has she been thinking of leaving now?”

“It really began when all that crap came out about the LaPointe case years ago. I think it drove home to her what a morally corrupt man my father really is. That’s something I’ve known all my life, but Mom has always made excuses for him.”

She was talking about a situation that had come to light nearly two years earlier. A man named Cecil LaPointe was serving a forty-year sentence in Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison for the killing of a young woman twenty years earlier. LaPointe was a Shinnob, an Ojibwe, living in Tamarack County. He’d been tried and sentenced in the court of Judge Ralph Carter. It had been a brief but sensational trial. The evidence against LaPointe had been overwhelming. In the end, the deliberation of the jury-all white males-had been swift, LaPointe had been found guilty, and Judge Carter had delivered a sentence of forty years’ imprisonment, the maximum allowable under Minnesota law.

But nearly two years ago, Ray Jay Wakemup, who’d been little more than a kid at the time of the trial, had come forward with information about the crime, information that had been withheld from the jury and that cast significant doubt on LaPointe’s guilt. Ray Jay claimed that while the trial was under way, he’d shared this information with Judge Ralph Carter and also with the prosecution and the sheriff’s department. Yet none of those officers of the court or officers of the law had bothered to share the information with the defense.

“When it became public that Dad had been a part of all that-I don’t know what you’d call it, conspiracy against justice, maybe-I phoned Mom. She was terribly upset. I told her to come out and visit, and we could talk it over. It took her a year-she had to work up the courage to tell him she was going on her own-but she finally did last October. When she left to return to Aurora after her visit, I thought she was pretty well set in her decision. But once she got here, well, Dad can be formidable. She was afraid of him, plain and simple, afraid to stand up to him. I had offered to come out, to be with her when she told him. Actually, I begged her to let me come out, and we would tell him together. She agreed to it, tentatively, but asked me to wait until after the holidays. It seemed to her an awful thing to do to him over Christmas.”

“Do you think he might have known she was seriously considering leaving, even if she’d said nothing to him?” Cork asked.

“It’s possible. I don’t really know what my father’s capable of these days, mentally. And that’s what got me to thinking about the other thing.”

“Other thing?”

“Go ahead,” Dross said. “You can tell him.”

Justine mindlessly began toying with the gold band on her ring finger. “It’s something that might be important, I don’t know. A long time ago, my mother had an affair, and I don’t think my father ever forgave her.”