Tamarack County (7 page)

Cork was listening, but he was also slowly walking the room, studying the decor. He’d lived among firearms and weapons most of his life, but except for the inventory of a gun shop or a police station, he’d seldom seen such a large collection of weaponry in a single room. The Judge had two mahogany gun cabinets, one that held ten rifles and the other eight shotguns. In addition, he had a smaller wall-mounted cabinet that displayed a
variety of handguns. He was also a collector of knives, and two beautifully carved cherrywood boxes with glass fronts lay on tables on either side of the fireplace.

“You restless?” the Judge finally asked him.

“Just interested in your collections,” Cork replied. “You have some fine-looking pieces here.”

“A lot of money tied up in my guns,” the Judge said proudly.

“And your knives, too.” Cork leaned over one of the boxes. “You have some beautiful old Barlows here. And a mighty fine-looking Green River.”

“You know knives?” the Judge asked.

“I know a bit,” Cork said. He turned to the Judge. “You’ve got an empty space. Looks like one of your knives is missing.”

The Judge seemed perturbed. He put his pipe down, rose from his chair, and crossed the room to where Cork stood. “Hell’s bells,” he said with what appeared to be genuine alarm. “I’ve been robbed.”

What was missing, he told them, was a bowie knife with an ivory handle and a Damascus steel blade. It had been made by J. R. Cook and had cost him nearly a thousand dollars. Although the gun cases were all secured, the boxes that held his knife collection had no locks. He didn’t remember when he’d last looked at them.

“Who would have had access?” Dross asked.

“Besides me, that would be Evelyn. And Irene, the woman who cleans.”

“Ralph,” the priest said quietly. “Irene Simek no longer works for you. Evelyn told me at church on Sunday that she was hoping to be able to find someone to replace her soon.”

“Well, there you go. That woman took it just to spite me because I told her she smelled like a garbage pail that needed emptying. I’d talk to her if I was you.”

“We’ll do that,” Dross said. “But let’s consider other possibilities. Do you ever have visitors, Judge?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “People say we live too far out.”

“Do you lock your doors at night and when you’re gone?”

“My doors are always locked.”

Cork said, “Mind if I have a look around for any sign of a break-in?”

“You’re not charging me, you said,” the Judge reminded him.

“Just consider it being neighborly,” Cork said, though he wasn’t certain if the Judge understood that term at all.

He checked the windows and external doors on the first level of the house and found no sign that any had been jimmied. He reported this to the others, then asked, “Do you keep an extra house key somewhere, Ralph?”

“In the garage, on a nail by the door to the kitchen.”

“Be right back,” Cork said.

He went through the kitchen to the garage door, which was secured with a dead bolt. He flipped the dead bolt open and stepped into the attached garage. It was insulated and much warmer than the subzero temperatures outside. He found the nail the Judge had mentioned, hammered into the doorframe, and hanging from it was a key, which Cork presumed was the extra house key. He didn’t return to the others immediately but spent a few minutes in the garage, poking about, because that was pretty much the kind of thing he’d been doing for most of his adult life, in and out of uniform. The Carters had only one vehicle, apparently, because the Buick was still in the custody of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department and the garage was empty. At one end, a face cord of cut wood stood stacked against the wall, probably the supply that fed the fire in the Judge’s den. There was a worktable, and above it a big square of Peg-Board from which hand tools hung. Standing upright in a large ceramic urn in one corner were gardening tools—rake, shovel, hoe, and the like. There was a big plastic garbage bin on rollers, a power mower, and a gas-powered electric generator, backup, Cork figured, in the event the Judge lost power, which was not an uncommon occurrence in rural Tamarack County. He checked the windows and also the door that opened onto the backyard and found no sign of forced entry.

He stood a moment, looking the garage over for anything that made his eyes pause. They settled on two ten-gallon gas cans that stood next to the generator. He crossed the garage and lifted them. One was full, the other just over half. A few paces away stood a tall storage cabinet. He strolled to it and opened the doors. Inside were four shelves, filled with containers of oil and brake fluid and power-steering fluid. There were containers of pesticides, garden fertilizers, weed killer. There were terra-cotta pots and a couple of bags of potting soil. What surprised Cork, however, was that the overwhelming odor emanating from the cabinet was the smell of gasoline. The odor seemed to be coming from a few feet of rubber tubing coiled on the top shelf. He leaned close and confirmed this. Then something almost hidden behind the tubing caught his eye. He slid the coil to the left a few inches and spent a long moment staring at what was revealed.

He returned to the den, where Dross and the priest still kept company with the Judge.

“Anything?” Dross asked.

“There’s something I think you should see,” he replied. “I think you should take a look at this, too, Ralph.”

“What is it?” the Judge asked, clearly not excited about budging from his comfortable den with its comfortable fire.

“Evidence, I’d say.”

“Of what?” Dross asked.

“I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”

They followed him to the garage. At the opened storage cabinet, he stopped and held out his hand toward the top shelf.

“Is that your missing knife, Ralph?”

The Judge took a quick look and said, “Yes, but what the hell is it doing out here?” He sounded truly astonished.

“A more interesting question,” Cork said, “is whose blood is that on the blade?”

The Judge reached toward the knife, but Dross caught his arm.

“Don’t touch it,” she ordered. “Ted, would you mind taking the Judge back to his den? I need to make some phone calls.”

“Hell, I’m staying right here,” the Judge insisted.

“Ralph,” the priest said, “come with me. It’ll be all right. She’s got a job to do.”

He took the Judge’s arm and gently tried to turn him away, but the old man shook off his hand.

“I want to see that knife.” His words were pitched high and loud.

Cork moved his body between the Judge and the cabinet. “Go back inside, Ralph,” he said. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but in his days as a cop, he’d learned to speak with a voice of towering authority. The Judge stared at him, stared out of a face old and withered and suddenly empty of fight. Then the Judge turned away and went back into the house, accompanied by the priest.

Dross reached into her coat and drew out her cell phone. “I’ll have Azevedo round up the crime scene team.”

Before she punched in a number, Cork said, “Something else, Marsha. That coil of tubing there in front of the knife. It reeks of gas.”

“So?”

“Those gas cans next to the generator? One’s full, the other about half. Maybe sixteen gallons of fuel in all.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m just thinking about the empty tank on Evelyn’s car. She filled up the day before she went missing and, according to the Judge, didn’t drive much. It could be she drove four gallons’ worth.”

“And the rest was . . .” Dross’s gaze returned to the coil of rubber hose on the shelf. She leaned to it and sniffed. “Siphoned?”

Cork shrugged. “Would explain a lot.”

She glanced toward the door where the Judge had just disappeared. “Why?”

“You won’t know until you ask him.”

“Another long night ahead,” she said, though not in a tired way.

A cell phone rang, but it wasn’t Dross’s. Cork reached to the little belt holster that held his own phone. The call was from his son.

“Yeah, buddy, what is it?”

“Dad, you need to get out here.” Stephen’s voice was on the razor edge of panic.

“Where are you? What’s wrong?”

“I’m at Marlee’s place. Someone—” Stephen broke off.

“Stephen? Stephen, are you all right?”

His son’s voice returned. “Sorry. Marlee’s really upset. Dad, someone killed her dog.” There was quiet on the line. Then Stephen’s voice again. “They didn’t just kill him, Dad. They cut off his head.”

S
tephen opened the door to his father, who asked immediately, “You’re okay? And Marlee?”

“Fine, Dad. We’re fine.”

He stood back and let his father in. Marlee was in the room behind him, sitting on the sofa, hugging herself for comfort. She wasn’t crying anymore, but the tears had taken forever to subside. All Stephen had been able to do was hold her, and although she let him, it hadn’t felt to him as if he was doing enough.

“Where is he?” Cork asked.

“Out by the lake.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

So Stephen told him about letting Dexter out to do his business, about the barking, the quiet, the yelp, and the sudden silence that had ended it all. He didn’t say anything about having been prone on the couch with Marlee at the time. It seemed . . . irrelevant.

“Then you went out and found the dog?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anybody?”

“No.”

“What about before?”

“Before?”

“When you first got here.”

“I wasn’t really looking for anyone.” It sounded feeble to Stephen, and he wondered if his father, in his place, might have noticed more.

“You didn’t hear anything along with the barking? Or after? A snowmobile maybe?”

“Nothing.”

Marlee was crying again, very softly. Stephen turned from his father, went back to her on the sofa, and put his arm around her.

“It’ll be okay,” he said gently.

“No, it won’t,” she said. “It will never be all right.”

“I’m going to have a look,” his father said.

“I’ll go with you.”

Stephen started to get up, but Marlee grabbed his arm. “I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“And I don’t want to be alone either.”

Stephen looked to his father, who said, “Why don’t you stay here? How do I find the dog?”

“In back, there’s a trail through the trees to the lake. Just follow our tracks. Thanks, Dad.”

His father opened the door, then turned back. “Keep this locked.”

Alone again with Marlee, Stephen thought, not for the first time, how the night had not gone at all as he’d imagined. He was glad his father had come, but he was also, to his own surprise, resentful. He wished he’d had the presence of mind, the experience, the knowledge to have handled this on his own. He wondered how he must look in Marlee’s eyes, running to his father for help.

But she laid her head on his shoulder and whispered, “Thank you,” and Stephen felt better, felt necessary.

*  *  *

Cork found the trail and followed it west toward Iron Lake. He’d taken the Maglite from his Land Rover and had no trouble seeing his way. The sky was clear, with a vast splatter of stars, and the quarter moon perched among the bare branches of the birch trees like a silver vulture. Except for Cork’s footsteps crunching through the snow cover, the night was quiet. Far away in the direction of Allouette, the largest town on the Iron Lake Reservation, he could hear the whine of a snowmobile, which reminded him of the irritating buzz of a mosquito.

He broke from the trees, and the beam of his Maglite followed the clear line of tracks left by Marlee and Stephen and, before them, the dog. The tracks headed directly onto the lake ice, which in some places, the wind had blown clean of snow and in others had piled it in drifts, like a capricious child. Winter had already been long and the temperatures so consistently in the single digits or lower that he didn’t worry about breaking through the ice.

Ten yards out from the shoreline, he found the dog. It was a large animal, shaggy, with cocoa-colored spots on a dirty white background. Its paws were big as dust mitts. Its head was missing. The snow and ice all around it were splashed with its blood. Cork knelt and studied the body. He found no wounds, except for the amputation, which had been a ragged, hurried job. In the way of his thinking, of his imagining as a result of a lifetime of criminal investigation, he tried to reconstruct how it happened. The barking: the dog had seen its killer. The quiet: the dog had been placated. The yelp: the dog had been attacked, most probably its throat cut. The silence: the dog was dead and was being decapitated. Cork wondered about the placation. He scoured the area with his flashlight beam and discovered a raw steak half-buried under kicked-up snow. He searched in an arc and didn’t find what he was looking for next, which was the dog’s head. He did find two sets of tracks, one leading in to shore from farther out on the lake, and the other returning along that same line. He followed the tracks.

They led him to the closest of the cluster of small islands
known to the Ojibwe as Maangwag and to the white population as the Loons. Same name, different languages. The tracks ended at a spot where a snowmobile had been parked. Whoever rode the machine had climbed back onto it, spun it in a tight arc, and headed southwest, toward the glow on the horizon that rose from the town of Aurora.

*  *  *

When Cork returned, Stephen stood to meet him and asked, “You found him?”

“Yeah,” Cork said.

“Aren’t dogs supposed to be, like, suspicious of strangers?” Marlee said, not really speaking to anyone.

“Assuming it was a stranger,” Cork said. “Whoever it was, they used a piece of steak to entice Dexter.”

“Probably wouldn’t have mattered,” she said, hopelessly. “That big, dumb dog, he was just so friendly with everyone. Why would anyone do something like that?”

“I don’t know, Marlee. Have you called your mom?”

She nodded. “They had to get someone to cover for her. She said she’d be here as soon as she could.”

“That was a good question Marlee asked,” Stephen said. “Why would someone do something like that?”