Tamarack County (8 page)

Cork could have told him about sick people like Charles Devine, but he chose instead to say, “The world is full of human beings you won’t understand. They’ll do things you find outrageous, repugnant, incomprehensible. But you know, Stephen, it’s been my experience that, more often than not, in their own twisted minds, they see themselves as the good guys.”

They heard a vehicle drive up and park. A moment later the door opened, and Stella Daychild came in. She threw off her quilted parka and let it fall on the floor by the door. She went immediately to her daughter on the couch and put her arms around Marlee and held her tightly.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s been an awful night, Mom.” Once again, Marlee was shedding tears.

“I know, I know.”

“Mom, they killed Dexter.”

“Shhh,” Stella said. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” She looked up at Cork. “Thanks for being here.” Then her eyes shifted to Stephen. “And thank you, Stephen.”

Cork’s son shrugged. “You’re welcome, Stella.”

Stella?
Cork thought.
Not Mrs. Daychild?

Marlee drew away from her mother and wiped her eyes. “What are we going to do? How do we tell Uncle Ray Jay?”

“We’ll figure that out. Let’s just take this one step at a time. I need a cigarette, sweetheart. Cork and I are going to step outside while I smoke. Okay?”

Marlee nodded and looked at Stephen. “Will you sit with me?”

Stephen seemed more than happy to oblige.

From the smell of the house, Cork figured Stella Daychild wasn’t averse to smoking inside. Maybe she did need a cigarette, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the point of asking him to join her on the front porch. They both donned their parkas and stepped outside. Stella dug a pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket along with a Bic lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, put it between her lips, flicked a flame, inhaled, and sent a great plume of smoke toward the stars. She held the pack out to Cork, but he declined with a shake of his head.

Although he didn’t know all the details, he knew that Stella Daychild had not had an easy life. But unlike many women who’d had it tough, she didn’t seem to have the broken, jagged edges that, in Cork’s experience, so often came with the territory of abandonment and adversity. She’d been a beauty when she was young, and she was lovely still. She had the broad face and high cheeks of the Ojibwe. Her skin was the color of honey on wheat bread, her hair as dark as a raven’s wing and worn long. She’d
been born and raised on the rez, by parents who were addicted to alcohol and seemed to love the bottle more than they did their children. She and her two brothers had been taken and placed in foster homes, a series of them. Stella had eventually been adopted by one of the families but had grown up wild. At sixteen, she’d run away and headed to the Twin Cities. This part of her life, Cork knew nothing about. When the Chippewa Grand Casino had opened south of Aurora, Stella, who was in her mid-twenties by then, returned to the rez a single mother with two young children. She came because there was work at the casino and because she wanted to reconnect with her relations and her roots and to raise her children in Tamarack County. That was ten years ago. She’d worked steadily at the casino, and it seemed to Cork that she’d done a pretty good job where her children were concerned. Her son, Hector, was making her proud as a Marine. And because Marlee had been employed at Sam’s Place the previous summer, Cork knew that she was smart and responsible, and he liked her. He didn’t mind at all that she and Stephen “were talking.”

Stella seemed to be taking the current situation rather well, although she drew on her cigarette a little more frequently than was probably necessary.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Has anybody threatened you lately?” Cork replied.

“No.”

“You piss anybody off?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How have your dealings with the folks on the rez been?”

“Okay. Nobody’s threatened to cut off Dexter’s head anyway. You think it was a Shinnob who did this?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Somebody just getting their perverted jollies?”

“I don’t think that either. I followed his tracks from where he left Dexter. They went out to the Loons. He’d left his snowmobile there. Probably didn’t want to alert you or Marlee to his coming. He headed back in the direction of Aurora.”

“A
chimook
?” she said, using the slang, and slightly unkind, Ojibwe term for white people. She blew smoke, a furious billow this time. “I get hit on at the casino bar a lot. I handle most of them pretty well. My livelihood depends on it. But every so often a guy won’t take no. Then I have to get serious. Sometimes I have security escort him out. When he leaves, he leaves pissed. Once in a great while, one of these guys is waiting for me when I get off at the end of a shift.”

This concerned Cork a lot and went beyond what had happened to Dexter. It was the kind of thing that, when he was sheriff, he would have wanted to know. It was about vulnerability, and everything in him cried out to protect. “What do you do when that happens?”

“I talk tough. And I have pepper spray. Do you really think this all might be because of something like that?”

“Best not to discount anything at this point. Whoever it was, he planned it. He knew where you live, knew that you have a dog. It seems most likely that Dexter was killed to send you a message or maybe to punish you. Again, that brings us back to someone off the rez. If it was a Shinnob, he’d have known the dog belonged to Ray Jay and not to you.”

Stella straightened up, and Cork watched her eyes narrow as she went someplace deep in her thinking. “There was a guy,” she said finally. “Maybe a month ago. Came into the bar one night, and there was this look in his eyes. Not drunk. I know drunk. This was different. Intense in a really creepy way. He sat at a table by himself, but his eyes never left me. Whenever he wanted a drink, instead of asking one of the waitresses, he came right up to the bar so he could order directly from me. He drank Maker’s Mark, neat.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. Not really. But that look creeped me out plenty. And then when I got off that night, someone followed me. All the way from the casino out to the rez.”

“The guy?”

“That’s what I figured. I didn’t want him knowing where I live, so I went into Allouette and stopped for some gas. He drove by, disappeared. I waited, but he didn’t come back. I drove home fast, and you better believe I locked all the doors.”

“What did he look like?”

“Thinning red hair. Medium height. Big, though, in his upper body, like he worked out or something. I remember he had a mole on his cheek, right here.” She pointed to a spot just to the left of her nose. “Looked like a fly had landed.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A pickup truck.”

“Color?”

“Maybe green, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“License plate?”

She shook her head. “So I have a stalker now? Great. When he finds out Dexter wasn’t my dog, you think he’ll do something else? Maybe something worse?”

“We don’t know it was that guy. And whoever it was, maybe they’ll consider it done, whatever point they were trying to make.” Or, Cork hoped, would think it too risky now to try something else.

“And if it’s not done?”

“Any of your male relatives willing to hang out at your place for a while?”

“I could tap a cousin or an uncle, I suppose.”

“Until I have a better handle on things, that’s what I’d suggest.”

“You’re staying on this?” She seemed surprised but not at all displeased.

“Tomorrow when it’s light, I’ll see if I can follow the trail of that snowmobile, find out where it leads.”

She stepped to the porch rail, leaned her arms on it, and looked toward the woods and the vulture moon. “Jesus, what am I going to tell Ray Jay?”

“Ray Jay?”

“His dog. We’re just watching Dexter while Ray Jay does his sixty days as a guest of the Tamarack County Jail.”

“Another DWI?”

She shook her head. “He’s been sober almost two years. Probation violation. They caught him poaching.”

“If you’d like, I could ask the sheriff’s people to look into this.”

“No. Like you said, it’s probably done. Just some guy being really shitty and cruel.”

She turned to him. Although it was bitter cold out, she hadn’t buttoned her coat. Under it, she was dressed for her work tending bar at the casino. She wore a tight black sweater and, around her neck, a long gold chain that lay nestled in the valley between her breasts. She had on black slacks that snugged her narrow waist and hugged the admirable curve of her hips.

She caught him looking and said, as if disappointed, “Like what you see?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. And he was. “You probably get stared at a lot.”

“What bothers me is that there’s so much more to me. But guys who stare don’t care about that.”

Cork had never thought of himself as that kind of guy, but here he was, caught dead to rights. It troubled him, and Stella must have seen that on his face.

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice softened. “Forget it.” She snubbed out her cigarette, threw the butt into the snow of the yard, and said, “I’m cold. What say we go back inside before they worry about us?”

Cork held the door for her and followed her into the house. “Time to go, Stephen,” he said.

“I think I should stay,” Stephen replied. “At least until Stella can get someone else to come.”

“I’d feel safer, Mom,” Marlee chimed in.

Cork could see the look of pleasure that put on his son’s face.

“Would it be all right, Cork?” Stella asked. “He can sleep on the sofa. And by tomorrow, I’ll have some family coverage.”

What could he say? It made sense, yet it also worried him.

“Okay, but any sign of trouble, you call me, understand?” he cautioned.

“I understand,” Stephen said.

“No heroics.”

“Dad.”

“All right. Give me the keys to Jenny’s Subaru. I’ll drive it home and leave you the Land Rover. I’ll need it first thing in the morning.”

“Ten-four,” Stephen said. And he gave his dad the kind of smile he usually reserved for an equal and a friend.

Outside, Cork started the Subaru, but he didn’t leave immediately. He sat for a little while thinking about Stephen and Marlee, and remembering the first girl he’d been crazy about. Her name had been Winona Crane, and although Cork had tried his best to win her, she’d given her heart instead to Cork’s best friend. In the end, nothing good had come of it. Cork had hoped that Stephen, when he fell in love, might have an easier, more normal, experience. But given the way things were shaping up at the moment, that prospect looked pretty bleak.

O
n the way back to Aurora, Cork called Marsha Dross on his cell phone. She was still at the Judge’s house.

“We’ve taken blood samples from the knife blade. They’re already on their way to the BCA lab in Bemidji. We also took prints from the knife handle and from the tubing and the gas cans. We dusted the whole garage basically. We’re also dusting her car.”

“How’s the Judge?”

“Rattled. Pissed.”

“Worried about Evelyn?”

“He’s making more of a stink about someone breaking into his house than about his wife still missing. I’m not sure how to read it. Does he not realize that things aren’t looking good for Mrs. Carter? Does he just not care? Or is he not surprised that she may not be coming back?”

“Have you questioned him?”

“Waiting for his lawyer. He’s old and mean as spit, but he’s not stupid. This man’s got the personality of a scorpion. How the hell did he stay on the bench so long?”

“Connections. Political contributions. Entrenched cronyism. Voter apathy. Once judges are elected, they’re hard to unseat, even bad ones. He sat on the bench during a couple of high-profile cases, and that didn’t hurt him any either.”

“Yeah, but one of those was Cecil LaPointe’s conviction.”

A case that Cork knew well and that didn’t make him happy whenever he thought about it.

“The LaPointe case didn’t come back to bite him in the ass until long after he’d retired,” he said. “Although it sure scuttled any kind of legal legacy he might have hoped to leave behind.”

“Okay, tell me about the dog,” Dross said.

“Brutal. Someone lured him with meat, then killed and decapitated him.”

“Some kind of reprisal, you think?”

“Stella Daychild claims she doesn’t know anyone who’s that angry with her, but it may be a customer she wasn’t nice enough to at the bar and who has a very mean and very vindictive streak in him.”

“Christ, if that’s the case, I’ll nail his ass to the wall.”

“You want this one?”

“Does Daychild intend to file a complaint?”

“At the moment, she doesn’t seem inclined.”

“The truth is that with Ed Larson gone I’m going to be stretched pretty thin while we sort out what’s happened to Evelyn Carter. Are you willing to hang in there with the Daychilds?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Cork.”

“But I also want to be kept apprised of what’s going on with your investigation of Evelyn’s disappearance.”

“It’s a deal.”

By the time he parked Jenny’s Forester in the garage on Gooseberry Lane, it was nearing eleven. Inside the house, he found the first floor deserted, though a couple of lights had been left on so he wouldn’t enter in the dark. Trixie greeted him at the kitchen door with a friendly woof, but when he flipped off the lights and headed upstairs, she returned to her dog bed near the patio door. The second-floor hallway was lit by a plug-in night-light shaped like a full moon with a pleasant,
smiling face. In the night, when Waaboo woke and needed comfort, the soft light helped ensure that a sleepy Jenny—or sometimes Cork—didn’t stumble into a wall by mistake. He paused at the open door to his grandson’s room. The little guy was making noises, not happy ones, small whimpers. He’d twisted his sheet and blankets into a snarled heap, which he’d pushed against the wall. Cork stepped in, untangled the mess of bedding, and laid the covers over the child. As he was about to leave, Waaboo gave a sudden cry and sat up. He began sobbing.