William Krueger - Tamarack County

Cork snugged on his gloves and reached for the doorknob. “Call me if you need me.”

He walked back into the steel blue light of that cold winter evening. The first stars were visible, and Cork headed quickly out of Aurora. As he drove, he tried to put events together in a way that made some sense. It was clear that someone wanted to send Ray Jay Wakemup a message, a brutal one. If it was the same person who’d followed Marlee and Stephen in the green, mud-spattered pickup, had he intended to use Marlee to send Ray Jay another message, one even more brutal? If so, why? Cork didn’t know Wakemup well. He knew what most folks on the rez knew. Wakemup’s life had been the kind that white people pointed to when they said Indians were hopeless. Like a lot of Shinnobs, he’d grown up in foster care, shuffled from one family to another. At seventeen, he’d gone into juvie for boosting a car. He’d been high on alcohol and angel dust. After that, he was in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, though nothing so heinous that he did hard time. He wasn’t dangerous. He was just someone who white folks-and most Ojibwe-thought of as shiftless.

His older brother, Harmon Wakemup, was a stark contrast. Harmon, who’d also graduated from the foster care system, had become a cop. He’d worked his way up and had been hired as chief of police in Bovey, west on the Iron Range. A few years later, he’d been tragically killed while helping a motorist who’d spun off the road one icy night. Another vehicle hit that same patch of ice and slid into Harmon, pinning him against the other car and crushing the life out of him almost instantly. His memorial service had been well attended by both whites and the Anishinaabeg.

Ray Jay was often compared to his older brother, and never in a good way.

Then there was their younger sister, Stella, who’d been adopted by a childless Ojibwe couple, Peter and Aurelia Daychild, owners of a small resort on Lake Vermilion. Despite their best efforts to raise her well, Stella ended up a wild one. She’d run away at sixteen, lived, by her own admission, a hard life in the Twin Cities, and had come back to Tamarack County the single mother of two children. Although in Cork’s opinion, she’d come back a much wiser woman, the jury on the rez was still out on Stella Daychild. She’d been back nearly a decade, but that hadn’t been long enough. On the rez, she was still trouble waiting to happen. Which, Cork thought, was probably why Carson Manydeeds had passed along his friendly warning.

And Ray Jay? Had he grown any wiser with time? What Cork knew was that Wakemup had finally pulled himself together almost two years ago, joined AA, gone to some Wellbriety meetings on the Bois Forte Reservation, and been clean and sober since. What was, perhaps, even more important was that, as the result of Step 8 in the 12-step process, the step that required seeking out those you’d wronged in order to make amends, Ray Jay had come forward with information about an old murder in Tamarack County. If the story Ray Jay told was true, the legal system had sentenced an innocent man to prison for forty years.

And if it was true that such an injustice had been done, Cork O’Connor had been part of the broken system responsible for that travesty. It had happened this way.

He’d been a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for five years when Gerald and Babette Bowen reported their daughter missing. Karyn Bowen was a twenty-year-old college student home for the summer. The day she disappeared she’d told her parents she was heading to the Twin Cities for a rock concert and planned to stay the night at a hotel there. She never came home. Cork was well acquainted with Karyn Bowen. Twice that summer, he’d pulled her over in her red Corvette, once to deliver a warning about speeding and the next time to ticket her for the same offense. Roy Arneson, the Tamarack County sheriff at the time, was a good friend of Gerald Bowen, who’d made a fortune paving roads in the North Country. Arneson had taken care of the ticket, much to Cork’s displeasure. In Cork’s opinion, Karyn Bowen was a spoiled child and could have used a lesson in consequences.

After her parents reported her missing, two days passed before Karyn’s red Corvette was found parked on an old logging road south of Aurora. Karyn’s nude body was in the trunk.

Along with his other duties, Cork was in charge of major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He oversaw the processing of the scene, handling most of the responsibilities himself. There were bruises on Karyn Bowen’s neck, and later the coroner confirmed that she’d been killed by manual strangulation. The coroner also found evidence of significant sexual activity. There was skin under the fingernails of her right hand, which may have indicated she’d fought her assailant. In the glove box of the Corvette, Cork discovered a small amount of cocaine and several marijuana cigarettes that later analysis showed were laced with PCP, better known as angel dust. He found no fingerprints at all in the obvious places-door handles, steering wheel, seat belts, trunk-and understood that the car had been wiped clean.

In the course of his investigation, Cork learned that although Karyn had told her parents she was driving to the Twin Cities, she’d told one of her friends a different story, that she was planning to party all night, although she didn’t say with whom. When Cork asked if Karyn had been dating anyone in Tamarack County, the girl’s friend told him that she’d been seeing an Indian guy, but on the sly, since Karyn knew her parents wouldn’t be too happy about it. The friend didn’t know the identity of the guy. She indicated that it was just like Karyn to do something that would piss off her parents if they knew. Karyn liked doing things they would find objectionable, and although she was surreptitious at first, at some point, she usually made sure they found out. She enjoyed tormenting them, her friend said.

Cork talked to a lot of folks on the rez, but no one could tell him anything. Roy Arneson was under a lot of pressure from Karyn’s father-who contributed significantly to Arneson’s reelection campaigns-and the sheriff rode Cork hard. Cork appealed to the community at large for any information that might help. His break came when Grady Lynde, a grease monkey at the Tomahawk Truckstop, called and told him that he’d seen the girl in the red Corvette come in a while ago. Lynde said she’d talked a long time and in a real friendly way with Otter LaPointe. LaPointe was one of the mechanics at the Tomahawk. His given name was Cecil, a name he hated and which no one who knew him used. He’d always been easygoing and on the playful side; Otter was what he preferred to be called. He was twenty-five, remarkably handsome, single, and full-blood Indian, a mix of Ojibwe and Cree.

The moment Cork walked into the service garage of the truck stop and saw LaPointe, the man’s face pretty much gave away his guilt. There were scratch marks down his left cheek, the kind that came from fingernails. When he asked LaPointe if they could talk, the man’s eyes became dark wells full of guilt. It was an easy initial interview. They moved outside and stood beside Cork’s cruiser, LaPointe wiping his oily hands on a dirty rag, eyes riveted on his grease-caked fingernails, and without much prompting at all, LaPointe said simply, “Yeah, I killed her, and I’m sorry as hell.”

The story Otter LaPointe told was pretty simple. He’d fixed her car, given her some advice on how to take care of it, thrown her a pickup line while he was at it-something he often did with the attractive female customers-and she’d bit. They’d gone out a few times. They usually got a little high, partied at his place, and that was it. Nothing involving, just a good time. The night he’d killed her, they’d smoked what he thought was grass, but it had affected him differently. A lot of the night he didn’t remember, but when he woke up in the morning, there she was beside him in bed, dead. He had no recollection of what had happened. He’d panicked, put her in the trunk of her car, driven out into the woods, parked the Corvette, and hiked back to Aurora. He said he’d kind of known that somebody with a badge would come for him, and in a way, he was glad that the waiting was over. He’d been afforded a speedy trial, very high profile in the North Country, and had been found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite the fact that Karyn Bowen had supplied the cocaine and the PCP-laced marijuana cigarettes, something Cork believed was a mitigating circumstance, LaPointe had been given the maximum allowable sentence under the law, forty years.