William Krueger - Purgatory Ridge

“It won’t be much longer. I’m sorry.” He bound her, then asked her son, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“How about a banana?”

“Okay.”

He cut the boy free and waited while he ate. “What about your son?” he asked the O’Connor woman.

“Mostly, he needs to sleep.”

He tossed the banana peel outside and taped the boy’s wrists again. “I’m tired. I need some sleep, too. I’ll check back in a while. The windows are open and the breeze is up. You should stay cool.”

LePere locked the fish house and drifted down to the rocks that separated the cove from the lake. He sat down, trying to take it all in, trying to memorize every detail. In another day, he would be looking at bare walls and iron bars, and he wanted to remember home. He gazed up at the great ancient lava flow called Purgatory Ridge, the dark, striated cliffs that were the backdrop for his best memories. He closed his eyes, and the silver-blue circle of water that was the cove was there, bright in his mind, and hard beside it, the little house. The popple and aspen along the shoreline were green now, but he could remember them aflame in fall, their autumn leaves scattered across the water like shavings of gold. Last, he turned and looked at the lake that had been there for a thousand lifetimes before his and would be there a thousand lifetimes after. He’d often hated the lake, blamed it for what had been taken from him. But the truth, he knew, was that the lake was simply what it was, vast and indifferent. It asked nothing and yielded to no one, and if you journeyed on its back, you accepted the risk. In its way, it mirrored life exactly.

Facing the prospect of prison, John LePere felt free and alive for the first time in more than a dozen years.

The sound of a powerful inboard motor woke him. He lay on his bed, listening as the thrum grew louder and entered the cove. He jumped from his bed, went to the window, and watched as Wesley Bridger cut the engine and guided a sleek motor launch up to the dock. LePere put on his shoes and headed down to the water.

Bridger tossed him a line. “Tie her up.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“Borrowed her. Just for tonight. They’ll never miss her, believe me.”

“What for?”

Bridger jumped from the boat. He held his ski mask in one hand and a heavy-looking metal flashlight in the other. As soon as his feet were squarely on the dock, he slipped the mask over his head. “Let’s go up and talk to our guests.”

“Why?”

“We’ll give ‘em the good news.” He put his arm around LePere’s shoulders in the way of comrades. “Everything’s set for the exchange. Don’t you think they’ll want to know? Also, I owe them an apology, Chief. I was pretty hard on them.”

It was early evening. LePere realized he’d slept much longer than he’d expected. The air felt good, cooler. Something in the wind had changed.

At the fish house, as LePere undid the lock, Bridger asked, “Chief, I just want to check. Are you sure about all this? I mean, taking the whole responsibility on your shoulders while I’m free as a bird with a two-million-dollar nest?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been as certain of anything, Wes.”

LePere opened the door and took a step inside. He didn’t even feel the blow to the back of his head. He simply dropped into darkness.

THE GIRLS LOOKED BATTERED, tired beyond weeping, and older by far than their years. And Rose, for all her courage and faith, looked ready to yield to despair.

“When you give them the money, they’ll give Mom and Stevie back, right?” Jenny pressed him.

Cork chewed on a ham-and-cheese sandwich that Rose had put together for him. He barely tasted the food, and he ate only because he knew he had to keep his own strength up. “Yes, Jen,” he said. “I believe they will.” He glanced at Deputy Marsha Dross, who leaned against the wall near the kitchen doorway. She was a slender woman of medium height, had short brown hair, and was as smart as any law enforcement officer Cork had ever known. He saw her eyes shift away because she knew the true uncertainty of the situation. He saw, too, how tired she was. Like all the law officers involved, she’d put in long hours with little sleep. She didn’t do it because it was her job, Cork knew. She did it because it was the right thing to do and because it might help. Cork was truly grateful.

“How will you give them the money?” Annie asked. She sat at the kitchen table with her father and Jenny. Rose stood at the kitchen sink, washing a few dishes. Wet silverware in the dish drainer caught the rays of the early evening sun and scattered flames of reflected light across the walls and ceiling.

“I don’t know, Annie. We’ll have to wait for the call this evening. At nine-thirty.”

“Can’t they, like, trace the phone call and catch him?” Jenny asked.

“They’ve tried. Whoever it is, he’s smart.”

“But he’ll give them back, right?”

“I told you, Jen. I believe he will.” Cork pulled himself back from the anger that her persistent question and his persistent lie drove him toward. “We have every reason to believe he’ll do just what he’s promised.”

“The FBI deals with these situations all the time,” Rose offered. “They have things well in hand, I’m sure.”

The girls looked to their father for confirmation. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and stood up. “I need to get back out to Grace Cove.”

“The coffee’s almost ready.” There was a subtle plea in Rose’s voice. Don’t leave, she seemed to say. Cork understood how heavy was the weight she carried, holding up the hopes of the girls while she suspected the true gravity of things, isolated in the house on Gooseberry Lane, besieged by reporters, with nothing but her faith to sustain her.

“I have to go, Rose,” he told her. “I’ll keep you posted.”

She gave him a silent nod.

Cork hugged and kissed his daughters.

“When we see you again, you’ll have Mom and Stevie, right?” Jenny asked.

“We’ll be a family again,” he promised.

Cork headed out of Aurora and around the southern end of Iron Lake. There had been a breeze earlier, a hot one. Now the air was still and sitting heavy on the North Country. Something was ready to break. Cork felt it like an ache in his bones.

He’d tried all afternoon to put everything together in a different way, hoping to see something he hadn’t seen before. With Hell Hanover out of the picture, and with Joan of Arc and Isaiah Broom in jail, the most obvious possibility lay in Brett Hamilton, the son of Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. As far as Cork knew, he was still at large. If what Meloux had intimated was true, if the kid really was Eco-Warrior, then he’d killed once already. What more did he have to lose in kidnapping?

Yet the feel was all wrong. Meloux believed a man who’d kidnap women and children had to have a black heart and the balls of a warrior. The kid had balls. Cork had seen that in the way he’d faced Erskine Ellroy in the parking lot at Sam’s Place, ready to take a beating for his beliefs. But the same incident seemed to demonstrate both a selflessness of spirit and a concern for the sanctity of life that was incompatible with a heart black enough to put women and children in jeopardy.

He couldn’t say why exactly, but Cork’s thinking kept coming back to John LePere. Part of it was that he wasn’t convinced LePere was the drunk he’d appeared to be, and part of it was that LePere’s land on Grace Cove would have been the perfect area from which to observe Lindstrom’s home in planning an abduction. The problem was that LePere, like the Hamilton kid, seemed a different kind of man than would be involved in kidnapping. In his days as sheriff, Cork had prided himself on knowing the people of Tamarack County. He believed he’d learned to take the measure of a man pretty accurately. LePere had been a heavy drinker once. Sometimes when he was drunk he argued. Once in a while, he fought. But it was the booze that did that, and probably the disappointment life had handed him. He was no saint, but neither was he a devil who’d steal a man’s wife and child for money. Or so he’d seemed to Cork.