Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  Cork scanned the other documents, all contracts for consulting services from various individuals in Tamarack County, including—for consulting on the issues of security—Wally Schanno. He made a print of Schanno’s contract, then he said, “Let’s get out of here. The smell of this stuff is making me sick.”

  They were quiet a long time on the way back to Molly’s cabin. It was late and the roads were empty.

  “Why?” Molly finally asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought Joe John was back. But he couldn’t have been, could he?”

  “I’m pretty sure those pictures were taken months ago when Joe John disappeared. My guess is Harlan dumped the body somewhere. Probably in one of the bogs on his land. Nobody would go snooping there with Jack the Ripper roaming around loose. Then he crashed the truck somewhere else so there’d be no evidence of the murder.”

  “Which brings us back to why.”

  “I’m so tired right now I can’t think straight.” He pulled into Molly’s lane and parked in front of the cabin. “I need a cigarette and a beer. And I need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can figure in the why department.”

  “Where do you plan on sleeping?”

  “Right now, I’d take a bed of nails if it were offered.”

  “How about the left side of my mattress? It’s not a bed of nails, but it is a little lumpy.”

  Cork smiled wearily. “Best offer I’ve had in ages.”

  36

  HE WOKE WITH HER ARM OVER HIM, her cheek against his back, and the warm morning smell of her all around him. He’d never slept with Molly before. Before, the bed had been a place of brief coming together and of leaving. It felt good to lie beside her with the early sun beyond the window and the cabin full of quiet. It was peaceful and healing to be with her and not be cut apart by guilt.

  He lay very still, reluctant to move even the least bit, to do anything that would wake her. There was something protective in the way her arm lay over him, the way her breath warmed his back. Then he felt the light, deliberate touch of her lips on his shoulder.

  “You awake?” she asked softly.

  “Still dreaming,” he answered. “The sun’s up. I thought you had to be at the Pinewood Broiler early.”

  She brushed a kiss across his back. “I called Johnny and told him I’d be late.”

  “When?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “I didn’t feel you leave.”

  “You were sleeping soundly.”

  He kissed her hand. She made a pleased sound in her throat and snuggled more firmly against him. “Let’s stay in bed, Cork. Let’s stay here the whole day.”

  “What’ll Johnny say?”

  “Screw him. I’ve never once missed a day. I’ve never even been late.”

  “Tempting,” Cork admitted.

  “But?”

  He didn’t reply. She drew away just a little.

  “You’re going to stick your nose into things, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Know what I’d like?” he said, trying to hold onto the brightness. “I’d like to take a shower with you, then fix you breakfast. It’s been a long time since I made breakfast for anyone but myself.”

  “Cork, promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “You won’t do anything that’ll get you hurt.”

  “I’m not what you’d call a brave man,” he assured her.

  She sighed, her breath making the hair at the back of his neck shiver. “Maybe not, but you’re stubborn, and that’s just as bad.”

  After they’d showered, Cork bounced downstairs ahead of Molly and made two telephone calls. He was just hanging up when she came down the stairs.

  “Who’re you calling?” she asked.

  “First I called the number on the GameTech letterhead.”

  “And?”

  “A recording. Leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you. So I called Ed Larson at the sheriff’s office. Asked him to track down an address for that number. He owes me a favor or two.” Cork stepped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. “Perfect,” he said, taking out three leftover boiled potatoes. “Hash browns à la O’Connor. How’s that sound?”

  “Delicious. I’ll get the coffee going.” Molly headed to the coffeemaker. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Fry up a few potatoes, cut up some onion and green pepper, throw on a little—”

  “I mean about Joe John.”

  Cork pulled out the cutting board and a knife and began dicing the potatoes, skin and all. “I’ve been thinking about it. The only thing that makes sense is he was killed because he knew something about the brigade or about the casino or both. He cleaned the offices of Great North every night, so maybe he saw or heard or stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have. I’d guess, given what I know about the judge and Lytton, that the judge arranged to have Lytton take care of things.” Cork shrugged. “It’s all speculation. But one thing seems sure. Joe John was killed in cold blood.”

  Cork took a small green pepper and an onion from the crisper and set them on the cutting board.

  When the coffeemaker stopped dripping, Molly got a mug from the cupboard and filled it for Cork.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Aren’t you going to have some?”

  “I’ll fix a little herbal tea later.” She leaned her hip against the counter, crossed her arms, and looked sad. “It’s hard to believe. All of this is hard to believe in Aurora.”

  “Happens everywhere,” Cork said. “Nature of the beast. Ouch!”

  “What?”

  “Cut myself.” He jammed his finger into his mouth and sucked.

  “Bad?”

  “No.”

  “Wash it off in the sink. I’ll finish cutting.”

  Molly took the knife. Cork ran water over his finger and saw a small clean slice near his nail. He pressed it with his thumb and in a moment the bleeding had stopped.

  “I’ll live.” He smiled. “But I could sure use a cigarette. Mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He plucked the pack from his shirt pocket. “You know,” he said apologetically, “you put up with a lot from me. Why?”

  “I thought I made that clear last night.” She tossed him a smile over her shoulder.

  Cork looked at the cigarettes. Impulsively he crumpled the pack and dropped it in the wastebasket under the sink.

  Molly paused with the knife in her hand. “Is that for real?”

  “There are a lot of things that will be different about me from now on. I promise.”

  He moved behind her, and as he held her, his face against her hair that was still damp from the shower, he gazed out the window above the sink. He could see the cabins that lined the way down to the lake. They were old cabins, but sturdy. Molly’s father had built them himself not long after Molly was born and only a short time before his wife ran off and left him to raise the baby girl alone. Cork supposed the old man had done his best as a parent. But he had a reputation as a drinker, and the girl he raised had had a reputation for wildness.

  “Do you ever think of fixing up the cabins, opening up this place again as a resort?” Cork asked.

  “Almost never,” she said. “I like the solitude. And besides, it’s something I’d never want to tackle alone.”

  “Maybe I could help,” Cork said.

  She turned in his arms, turned to face him, and she looked up seriously into his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to run the place alone either.”

  Cork gathered himself together and came as near as he’d ever come to saying he loved her. He said, “Maybe you wouldn’t have to.”

  Molly kissed him and held him for a long time in the sunlight through her window.

  “You know, you don’t have a Christmas tree yet,” he pointed out.

  “I never get a tree,” she said, pulling away gently and turning back to the cutting board.

  “Why not?”

  “When I was a
kid my father used to promise all kinds of things at Christmas. He never came through with anything. Christmas means mostly disappointment to me.”

  “Let me finish those potatoes,” Cork said.

  “Finish your coffee,” Molly told him. “I can see the general direction you were taking.”

  Cork sipped from his mug. “Would you get a tree if we went together?”

  “I’d consider it.” She looked out the window a moment. “But only if we made our own decorations. You know, popcorn and cranberries on strings, paper chains, that kind of thing. I don’t want all the commercial crap. Blinking lights and shiny ornaments and that stringy, glittery stuff.”

  “Icicles?”

  “Yeah, those.”

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “Let’s get it today.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you’re off work.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “And tonight we’ll make decorations.”

  The telephone rang. Cork answered. He listened a minute, said thanks, and hung up.

  “So?” Molly asked. She placed the cast iron skillet on the stove over a medium flame and dropped in a bit of butter.

  Cork sat back and sipped his coffee. It was black and strong and good. A cigarette would have made it perfect.

  “Ed says the address is the judge’s house,” Cork told her. “Makes sense. The judge signed all the documents, and I don’t imagine, given the probable nature of the enterprise, that he operated out of his Great North offices. Too much chance of someone stumbling onto something.”

  “But I thought you said his house had been searched thoroughly by Schanno and his men.”

  “Maybe they missed something,” Cork said hopefully. “I don’t know if there’s a connection between this GameTech business and Joe John’s murder, but it might go a long way toward explaining the odd behavior of a certain county sheriff lately. Sometimes an investigation’s like pulling on the loose threads of a sweater. Grab the right one and the whole thing unravels.”

  “Will you talk to Schanno?”

  “If I don’t find anything at the judge’s house, I may have to fall back on the direct approach—with Wally or one of the other consultants.”

  “What about St. Kawasaki and—what did you call it?—Lazarus?”

  “I intend absolutely to have a talk with him. He’s got a lot to explain. Also, I need to pick up a cassette player so I can hear what those tapes have to tell me.”

  “Busy day,” she noted. “Sure you’ll have time to hunt down a Christmas tree with me?”

  Cork watched her at the counter in her red robe, with her damp red hair. He watched her carry the cutting board to the stove and he smiled at the way her thick red wool socks had bunched around her ankles. As she spilled the diced vegetables and potatoes into the hot skillet, he said to her, “I love you, Molly.”

  But the sizzle from the skillet was loud and she didn’t seem to hear.

  37

  CORK MADE HIS WAY THROUGH THE SNOW, up the long slope of the judge’s estate. The broken pane on the side door had been covered with a bit of plywood that Cork easily pried loose. He reached in, unlocked the door, stepped inside. The cans he’d knocked over the night Russell Blackwater died still lay strewn across the kitchen floor. The smell of rotting garbage had grown worse. Cork made his way back to the judge’s study, where all the evidence of what the shotgun had done to the judge’s head still remained splattered on the map behind the desk, brownish now, more like mud than rivers of red. Cork started with the desk. He checked the telephone, a complicated thing with lots of buttons. Beside two of the buttons numbers were listed, one of which belonged to GameTech. He checked the drawers but found nothing that seemed relevant. He went through the judge’s mahogany secretary and came up blank there, too. He removed the books from the shelves, as Schanno had done, and, probably like Schanno, found nothing.

  Including the bathroom, there were seven rooms on the first floor. Cork went through them all. If the judge kept any GameTech-related documents at his home, they weren’t downstairs. Cork headed up to the second floor. As he reached the top of the landing, he heard the front door open and quietly close. A shadow passed through a bar of sunlight across the floor, but he couldn’t see the figure who’d cast it. Carefully, he descended the stairway. From the kitchen came the squeak of a hinge like that of a little mouse. Cork crossed the bare wood floor, hoping the complaint of an old board wouldn’t give him away. He hadn’t thought to bring his Winchester, so he picked up a black metal sculpture of a perched hawk and cradled the heavy piece in his hand as he edged toward the kitchen doorway.

  Hannah Mueller screamed as she stepped from the kitchen and saw Cork with the heavy black hawk drawn back ready to strike.

  “Christ, Hannah, I’m sorry.” Cork let his hand drop immediately.

  “Sheriff O’Connor!” the woman said breathlessly. Her eyes were huge with fright.

  “It’s all right, Hannah. I didn’t know it was you.”

  Hannah Mueller was a woman about forty, small, heavy, with dull gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and bound with a rubber band. She had a plain face, and in her blue eyes was an innocence much younger than her forty years, for Hannah was mildly retarded. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt and sneakers. She carried a mop and a bucket.

  “I came to clean,” she said, as if she needed to defend her presence. “Mr. Parrant called me and said it was okay for me to clean. I didn’t clean my regular days.”

  “That’s fine, Hannah,” Cork assured her. “That’s just fine.”

  Hannah looked at him, her gaze full of question.

  “I’m investigating, Hannah.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said, as if that explained it just fine. She looked past Cork toward the hallway that led to the judge’s study. “I heard it’s bad.”

  “It’s not pleasant,” Cork acknowledged. “Hannah, what are your regular days?”

  “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes I clean on Sunday if the judge has a party or something. He leaves me a note.”

  “He doesn’t speak with you?”

  “I don’t ever see him. He’s always gone.”

  Cork looked at his watch. “You always come at nine?”

  “Nine.” Hannah nodded. “Always at nine.”

  “And the judge is always gone.”

  “Always gone.” Hannah nodded.

  “What if you needed to talk to him? Could you call him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “At the numbers.”

  “What numbers?”

  Hannah reached into her back pocket and drew out an old leather wallet with a nicely tooled design. She extracted a worn piece of paper and handed it to Cork. Two telephone numbers were written on the paper. Beside one Hannah had noted “Monday & Friday.” Beside the other she’d written, “Wensday.” The “Wensday” number was preceded by the digit 1. Long distance, same area code as Aurora.

  “Wait just a minute, Hannah.” Cork put the hawk back on its stand, stepped to the phone near the stairs, and dialed the Monday/Friday number.

  “Good morning. Great North. How may I direct your call?”

  Cork smiled. “Joyce. Cork O’Connor.”

  “Yes, Cork. Hi.”

  “Could I ask you a question?”

  “You can. Doesn’t mean I can answer it.”

  “Did the judge work at Great North on Wednesdays?”

  “No. For the last year or so Wednesday has been his day off.”

  “Thanks, Joyce. You’re wonderful.”

  “Tell Albert that.”

  Cork hung up. He tried the Wednesday number. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He called Ed Larson and asked for one last favor. Could he track down a long distance number?

  “I have to wait for someone to call me back,” he explained to Hannah, who’d stood patiently, mop and bucket in hand, while he called.

  “Sure, okay,” she shrugged. She looked ag
ain, not with great enthusiasm, toward the back hallway.

  “You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” Cork said.

  “It’s Christmas,” she explained. “The money.”

  “Then let me do it,” Cork offered.

  “No.” She shook her head vigorously, her dull ponytail swishing across her blue collar. “It wouldn’t be right. Mr. Parrant said he’d pay me.”

  “Mr. Parrant doesn’t have to know.”

  “It wouldn’t be right,” she insisted. She looked at Cork gratefully. “But it’s sure nice of you to offer, Sheriff.”

  “At least let me help.”

  “No. It’s my job.”

  The phone rang. Cork picked it up. He listened. “Just a minute. Let me write this down.” There was a notepad by the phone but nothing to write with. Cork checked his pockets for a pen, then glanced at Hannah, who’d put down her bucket and was holding out to him a stubby pencil that looked as if the point had been sharpened with a knife. Cork smiled gratefully. He wrote down the address, thanked Ed, and hung up.

  “Thanks, Hannah.”

  “You’re welcome.” She picked up her bucket, took a deep breath, and started toward the back room.

  It seemed to Cork the good people were always cleaning up the messes.

  Not surprisingly, the address of the Wednesday number was in Duluth. It fit. As Cork made the two-hour drive to the port city on Lake Superior, he thought about the judge making the same trip once a week, retrieving GameTech mail from the post office box, and sitting in an anonymous office somewhere taking care of business. Cork wasn’t exactly sure what the business was, but the more he’d learned the more certain he was that it was a less than honorable enterprise.

  He found the address near the harbor bridge. A small office building—square, red brick—that had probably once been busy when the ore ships ran regularly, but it looked as if it was mostly abandoned now. A big sign in one of the first-floor windows advertised office space for rent. Parked in front was a white van that had “Mosely Remodeling” printed on the sides. The directory just inside the front door had as many gaps as a Minnesota street had potholes. GameTech didn’t appear at all.

  From somewhere above came the whine of a power saw. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped, but was repeated as Cork started up the stairway. The stairs were gritty from the sand and dirt tracked in on the bottom of snowy shoes and boots. Cork climbed to the second floor and walked down the hallway, which was uncarpeted brown tile long in need of a good waxing. Only a few of the office doors carried logos on their translucent glass, and fewer still seemed currently occupied. Cork heard a phone ring in an office somewhere ahead and the laughter of a woman involved in one side of the conversation that followed.