Tamarack County (19 page)
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.
LaPointe had already served more than half that sentence when Ray Jay Wakemup had come forward with a story that cast a good deal of doubt on LaPointe’s guilt.
The summer before last, as a result of the work the AA program required of him, Wakemup had visited LaPointe in the Stillwater Prison, just outside the Twin Cities. After the visit, Wakemup went to see Corrine Heine, who’d been the public defender for LaPointe in the murder trial. The story that he told Heine, and that Heine subsequently told the media, made
headlines across the country. It was a story of the justice system gone terribly wrong.
The day Karyn Bowen died, Ray Jay Wakemup turned sixteen. He was living with a foster family, the fourth since he’d entered the system seven years earlier. His older brother, Harmon, lived on his own and was enrolled in a criminal justice program at Aurora Community College. He was going to be a cop. Harmon had promised his little brother a very special sixteenth birthday present. He picked him up that evening, and they headed to a house outside Aurora, which Ray Jay knew was rented by Harmon’s best friend, Otter LaPointe. There was a red Corvette parked outside the house, and at first Ray Jay had thought the impossible, that Harmon was giving him the sports car as a present. Inside the house, he was greeted by the smell of frying hamburger. The table had been set for four, and there was a cake in the middle of it with sixteen candles. And there was a pretty blond woman standing beside LaPointe, smiling like she knew some important secret, and they all cried, “Happy birthday, Ray Jay!”
They ate hamburgers and coleslaw. They drank beer, and music played on LaPointe’s tape deck. From her purse, the blonde, whose name was Karyn, took out cocaine, a mirror, and a razor blade, and they all snorted lines. She also brought out a hand-rolled joint, and they passed it around. And then Harmon said maybe it was time for Ray Jay’s birthday present. Ray Jay was feeling pretty unstable at this point, a little sick, in fact, but he said yeah, it was time. The blond woman gave him that smile again, the one that told him she knew absolutely something important, and she stood up, held out her hand, and said, “Ray Jay, honey, you come with me.”
He tried to stand up but fell right over. Then he began to feel really sick to his stomach. His brother helped him into LaPointe’s bathroom, where he proceeded to throw up his dinner and his birthday cake. He sat down beside the toilet and, because he felt like there was still more to come, was afraid to move far from the bowl.
Harmon left him there, and Ray Jay drifted off. He came to a while later, when Harmon and LaPointe lifted him off the bathroom floor and took him to the living room, where they laid him out on the couch. He remembered the blond woman sitting beside him, stroking his cheek, saying, “Poor baby.” He remembered the music went on and on, all night it seemed, and whenever he opened his eyes, he saw them dancing, all of them together, the woman rubbing herself against both men. He remembered that the music finally stopped, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the living room. Later, he got up to pee, and when he laid back down on the sofa, LaPointe stumbled in from another room and slumped into a chair. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and he looked like he’d just run a marathon. His head fell back, and Ray Jay heard him begin to snore.
A little while later, Ray Jay woke again, this time to the sound of the toilet flushing, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the woman walking, stark naked, from the bathroom. She disappeared through a door to another room, and Ray Jay heard Harmon laugh from inside. Ray Jay had a pretty good sense of what he’d missed out on, but he was in no shape to try to remedy the situation.
The next time he woke up, he heard the birds singing, though it was still too dark to see anything outside the windows. What woke him was Harmon bending over Otter LaPointe, slapping his face and telling him to wake up, they had a problem. LaPointe was out cold, and despite Harmon’s best efforts, he didn’t stir. Harmon saw that Ray Jay was awake and told him to give a hand. Together they lifted LaPointe and dragged him to the other room, which turned out to be a bedroom. They laid him on the bed next to the woman who was naked and, Ray Jay thought, sound asleep. Harmon told him to go back out into the living room, and Ray Jay went. A little while later—Ray Jay had gone back to sleep—Harmon shook him roughly awake and told him it was time to go. There was light in the sky then, the first flush of dawn. Harmon drove Ray Jay to his foster home. But he didn’t
drop him off immediately. They sat in the car and Harmon talked to him, told him a story that scared the crap out of him. The woman at LaPointe’s place, Harmon said, was dead. Otter had killed her. He told Ray Jay that if he said anything to anyone, they were all going to jail. Ray Jay was old enough to be tried as an adult, Harmon informed him, and even though he hadn’t killed the woman himself, he was there and any white jury would send him to prison for his part in it. Did he understand? Ray Jay was so scared and his mouth was so dry that he couldn’t talk, so he just nodded. Harmon told him he would take care of things, but if Ray Jay ever opened his mouth, they were all dead men.
Ray Jay had lived in terror for days, and then LaPointe was arrested and admitted he’d killed the woman and said nothing at all about Harmon and Ray Jay Wakemup having been there. Ray Jay didn’t know the why of it, but he was greatly relieved.
He followed the story in the papers—it was all over the North Country news—and many of the things he read bothered him. What bothered him most was that, besides LaPointe’s own admission of guilt, the most damning evidence seemed to be the skin found under the dead woman’s fingernails, and the fact that LaPointe had scratches down his cheek. And the reason this bothered him so much was that Ray Jay remembered no scratches being there at all when he and his brother had picked Otter LaPointe up from the chair in the living room and dragged him into the bedroom and laid him out on the bed beside the woman who had seemed to be merely sleeping but, he’d come to understand, was already dead.
And when he thought more about it, he realized that LaPointe had been sacked out in the living room chair in a stoned and drunken stupor when the woman had gone to the bathroom, naked, and then returned to the bedroom, after which the sound of Harmon’s laughter had been clear.
And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it hadn’t been LaPointe who’d killed Karyn Bowen.
He kept all this in his heart. He didn’t dare speak to Harmon, who was prone to fits of rage. And then LaPointe was convicted and sentenced to forty years, a lifetime, it seemed to Ray Jay, and the truth became like razor blades in his heart. He had to tell someone.
He’d been raised Catholic, more or less—probably less than more—and hadn’t been to confession in forever. But having no one else to advise him, he went to confession at St. Agnes. Ray Jay spoke to the priest there in vagaries about knowing a terrible truth that might get him into trouble if he shared it. The priest tried to pry out of him the exact nature of this truth, but Ray Jay didn’t cough it up. In the end, the priest’s advice was to unburden himself. Until he did this, Ray Jay’s conscience wouldn’t give him rest and his soul would carry a stain.