Iron Lake

by William Kent Krueger

  He felt as if he’d stood there forever, though in truth it was but a moment. Jo whispered behind him, “Oh, God, Cork.”

  He moved then, moved although he knew with a cold, empty certainty that it was useless. He knelt at her side, felt at her throat for a pulse in her carotid artery. Her skin was encased in a thin sheathing of ice and seemed almost brittle to his fingertips. He finally took his hand away and looked at Jo.

  “Call the sheriff’s office,” he said quietly.

  Jo backed away and turned without a word toward the cabin.

  “And bring a blanket,” he asked her.

  He tried to lift Molly’s head, to cradle her in his lap, but her hair, frozen solid, held her prisoner to the ice.

  “The phone’s not working.”

  Jo handed him the blanket.

  He covered Molly, except her face. Then he dug into his pocket and brought out the keys to the Bronco.

  “Find a phone,” he said.

  She took the keys but didn’t move.

  “Cork.” She touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  She stepped back, turned, and left. Cork heard the Bronco start up, the gears grind as Jo struggled to find reverse, then she was gone and he was alone with Molly.

  The sun had fallen behind the trees, and an orange glow, as if from a distant fire, spread out from the west across the whole sky. The evening star glimmered brilliantly above the dark eastern horizon. Not a sound, not even the faintest breath of wind disturbed the silence.

  Molly’s gray-green eyes looked to the sky and Cork looked there, too, into a distance no man could measure.

  “Please, God,” he whispered, praying for the first time in years, “take care of her.”

  He bent his head and he wept, and although he didn’t see, where the tears fell onto Molly’s soft blue cheek, for just a moment, the ice there melted.

  43

  WALLY SCHANNO looked about as bad as Jo had ever seen a man look. Hobbling on his crutches, a grimace of pain at every step, he made his way up from the lake to Molly Nurmi’s cabin. The whole way he kept a few yards behind the men who bore the covered stretcher to the ambulance. Although he was a tall man and not particularly old, he seemed small and ancient, bent under the weight of the work of that evening.

  In contrast, Cork was like some hard piece of wood, carved into the shape of a man. Nothing showed on his face. He sat at the table in Molly Nurmi’s kitchen and he had not moved since he’d placed himself there shortly after the sheriff’s arrival. Jo had fixed coffee, fumbling in the kitchen cabinets and drawers for filters and a coffee tin and measuring spoon. Cork hadn’t said a word. He’d barely spoken at all in response to the questioning of Captain Ed Larson, into whose hands Schanno had placed the investigation, while he leaned on his crutches and listened. Sigurd Nelson came, waddling down to the ice in his heavy coat, voicing his displeasure at having to be called yet again to do the work of his elected—and underpaid—office. Under the spotlights Schanno’s people had set up, Sigurd pointed out the blue lips, as in carbon monoxide poisoning, the effect of prolonged decreased oxygen flow in hypothermia. The limbs were rigid as well, and the skin hard as ice from deep frostbite, all definite indications of death by hypothermia. She probably fell on her way from the sauna, he speculated, hit her head on the ice, and froze to death. Jo waited, expecting Cork to scream out his protest, to alter that hasty judgment, but he didn’t say a thing as Molly Nurmi’s body was worked loose from the ice, warm water carefully used to melt the link between her frozen skin and the frozen lake water. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle. Nothing to indicate anything other than what it appeared to be—a terrible, terrible accident.

  “Go on up to the cabin,” Schanno suggested to Cork as the woman’s body was being freed. “Wait for me there. We’ll talk.”

  Now Cork sat rigid, the coffee Jo had poured for him untouched on the table. Jo stood at the sink, watching the mobile spotlights go off down at the lake as the last of Schanno’s people packed it up and the silent column made its way into the bright yard light behind the cabin where their vehicles were parked.

  “They’re taking her to the ambulance,” Jo said, thinking it might be something Cork would want to know.

  He didn’t respond, although he flinched at the muffled thump-thump of the ambulance doors closing.

  “Where’s Wally?” Cork finally asked.

  “Talking with Ed Larson. They’re looking at some papers. Ed’s going now. Here comes Wally.”

  Schanno came in on his crutches. He moved to the table where Cork sat, slipped the crutches from under his arms, leaned them against the table, and sat down in a chair so suddenly and heavily it looked as if the pull of gravity had just increased on him tenfold.

  “Coffee, Sheriff?” Jo asked.

  Schanno waved it off. He pulled off his gloves, grunting from the effort. He looked at Cork, then at Jo, and thought for a moment before he spoke.

  “Her clothes were folded neatly on the bench in the changing room. The sauna was still warm. No sign of a struggle. The ice down that ramp is treacherous. I nearly lost two men there myself. So, is there any reason I ought to think this wasn’t just a terrible accident?”

  Jo waited. She figured if Cork was going to say anything about the bag and Sandy, this was it. But Cork finally said, “No.”

  “Ah.” Schanno nodded, but didn’t look convinced. “You told Ed you were both out here to help her get a Christmas tree. That right?”

  “You were down there, Wally. You heard me say it,” Cork told him. Cork was staring down at his untouched coffee. “She didn’t have a tree. Take a look.” He made a brief motion with his head toward the main room through the kitchen door.

  The sheriff considered this awhile, eyeing Jo most of the time. She returned his gaze steadily.

  “The two of you. Together. You were both going to help?” Schanno asked.

  “Yes,” Jo replied. She turned away from Schanno’s skeptical look, went to the coffeemaker, and topped off the coffee in her cup.

  “Word is you’re working on a divorce. But here you are together way out here just to help this girl get a tree.”

  Cork said, “Christmas is like that.”

  “Jo,” Wally finally said, “mind if I speak with your husband alone for a few minutes?”

  “Forgive me for asking, Sheriff, but is it something he might want an attorney present for?”

  Schanno swung his tired eyes to Cork. “You want an attorney here while we talk?”

  “No,” Cork said quietly.

  Jo put on her coat. “I’ll wait outside, then.”

  When she was gone, Schanno said sincerely, “I’m sorry, Cork.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cork . . .” Schanno faltered. “Cork, I got to ask. Does Jo know about you and Molly Nurmi?”

  “Why?” Cork stared at him, hollow-eyed. “Oh, Christ, Wally, Jo didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Then you tell me what is going on.”

  “What’s it look like is going on?”

  “It looks like that poor girl had a bad accident. But you and I both know that looks don’t count for much around here anymore.” The sheriff sat back and ran his hand through his thin gray hair. “Hell’s bells, I remember a time when I thought I knew this town pretty well. I look at people now, people I’ve known most of my life, and I wonder what they’re hiding. It’s like that, isn’t it, Cork? You stuff your own closet full of skeletons and you wonder what kind of bones everyone else has stuffed away.” He looked at Cork. His eyes were baggy with exhaustion and full of hesitation. “Was it an accident?”

  Cork said, “I haven’t got any evidence to the contrary.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Let me rephrase it. Does what happened here tonight have any connection to everything else that’s gone on lately?”

  “Wally,” Cork said, leaning earnestly toward the man with the bum leg. “Go home. Go home to Arletta. Go
home and hold her while you still can. There’s nothing more to find out here tonight.”

  Schanno stared at Cork and finally seemed to accept that he would get nowhere. He closed his eyes. His lids were spiderwebbed with red veins. “I’m so tired my brain feels like it’s swimming around in molasses.” He rubbed his face and sighed through his hands. “I’ll want to talk with you some more tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Cork said. He stood up, gathered Schanno’s crutches, and handed them to the man. “Good night, Wally.”

  The sheriff tugged his gloves on and slipped the crutches under his armpits, leaning on them heavily. “Everything’s getting away, Cork. Everything’s falling apart, and I can’t seem to do a thing about it.”

  “Not your fault, Wally,” Cork said.

  Schanno grunted, then headed for the door. Outside he said something to Jo that Cork couldn’t hear. Then he hobbled to his car, where a deputy was waiting to drive him back to town. The car pulled away. Except for Jo, the yard was empty. She turned and came back into the cabin. Cork was standing at the sink, looking out the window.

  “What now?” Jo asked.

  “Now comes justice,” Cork said. He walked to the coffeemaker and hit the off switch. He turned out the lamp in the main room. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “To Sandy’s? Is that why you kept quiet? So you could—what?—kill him?”

  “I said let’s go.”

  “No.”

  Cork thought it over a second. “All right. Stay. You can’t go anywhere. Phone’s dead, so you can’t warn him.”

  He started toward the back door. Jo moved to block his way.

  “You don’t have any proof, Cork,” she argued. “If you’ve made a mistake in your thinking and you do something terrible, where will you be? Everything you’ve told me about Sandy, everything you know is circumstantial. For Chris’ sake think like a lawman. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Stupid?” Cork leveled his cold, determined eyes on her. “I’ll tell you what stupid is, Jo. It’s thinking that the law could ever take care of anything, thinking that the law matters at all. Out of my way, Jo.”

  He shoved her roughly away and went outside to the Bronco. He took the cartridges he’d ejected from his Winchester after he left the mission and fed them back into the rifle. He slid behind the steering wheel as Jo climbed into the passenger side.

  “Get out,” he ordered.

  “Or what?” she challenged him with an angry look. “You’ll shoot me?”

  Cork fixed her with his own angry eyes. “Get in my way and I might.”

  44

  AFTER THEY’D DRIVEN SEVERAL MINUTES in cold, bitter silence, Jo said, “I’ll help you. But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Cork told her.

  They were nearing Aurora. The long corrugated fence of Johannsen’s Auto Salvage flashed by on their right at the edge of the headlight beam. Ahead on the left, red Christmas bells hung from the yellow marquee of the Iron Lake Inn. Across the road in a halogen glare stood the twelve pumps of the brand-new Food-N-Fuel. It was all bland, familiar territory to Jo, but she felt frighteningly disoriented, as if it were all dangerous, unknown ground, and there was no help no matter where she turned.

  “What are you going to do,” she argued. “Go in there with that rifle blazing? What if he does have the bag, but he’s hidden it? If you do something rash, you might never find it.”

  Cork drove through town, past the Pinewood Broiler with its neon flame still burning, past the open shops on Oak Street, where the display windows were hung with garland and tinsel and strings of lights, past the turnoff onto Gooseberry Lane. Jo glanced down the street, saw her own house with the lights blinking around the front door and framing the picture window. She wished she were home with Rose and the kids and that she didn’t know what she knew and wasn’t scared for them all the way she was.

  Cork finally said, “I’m listening.”

  “When we get to Sandy’s, I want you to leave the rifle in the car. It can only lead to trouble.”

  “Go on,” he said, not sounding exactly convinced.

  “Let me do the questioning. It’s what I’m good at.”

  “You?” Cork nearly drove off the road. “You love the son of a bitch.”

  “And you hate his guts,” she pressed on. “Look at you. You’re so upset you can hardly talk. If you don’t like what I’m asking or how I’m asking it, you can interject whatever you want. If he’s done these things you claim—and I’m not saying for one minute that I believe he has—I want to know as much as you do.”

  “No, you don’t.” Cork gave her a withering look not lost on her in the dark.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. But it’s something I need to know.”

  They passed the city limits of Aurora and the road to the casino. Another couple of minutes and Cork turned onto the long drive that led through the trees to Sandy’s big house.

  “You haven’t responded to my proposal,” Jo pointed out.

  “No, I haven’t,” Cork said.

  He parked in front of the double garage that was built below the main section of the house. He turned off the engine and nodded once.

  “All right,” he said.

  “You agree?”

  “I’ll let you do the questioning. But I take the rifle as incentive for him to answer.” He reached over the seat and grabbed the Winchester.

  “He won’t,” she insisted. “Because he knows, and I know, that you wouldn’t use it. Cork, you know it, too. In a negotiation, never make a threat you don’t intend to carry out.”

  “I’d blow his fucking heart out in a minute.”

  “If he gave you cause, maybe. He won’t. Cork, leave it. Just leave it.”

  Cork held the rifle in both hands, studying its long, sleek lines. He pumped the cartidges out of the chamber and put them on the seat.

  “The rifle still goes,” he said. “I like the way it looks in my hands. Parrant will appreciate that, too.”

  Lights were on inside. Jo rang the bell, but no one answered. Cork knocked hard and got no better response. He stepped back, looked the house over, then returned to the garage. There was a digital opener affixed to the frame of the door. He looked at Jo.

  “Do you know the code?”

  She stepped up, lifted the cover, and punched in four numbers. The door slid upward. Cork saw Sandy Parrant’s two vehicles parked inside, the white BMW and a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. He opened the door of the BMW, reached under the dash, and popped the hood. He laid his hand on the engine.

  “What are you doing?” Jo asked.

  “Checking to see if the engine’s warm. I want to know if your friend’s been out lately.”

  “Well?”

  “This one’s cold,” he said.

  He did the same with the Cherokee. He looked puzzled. “Cold, too.”

  “Satisfied? Can we go now?”

  “Does he own a snowmobile?”

  “No. He thinks they’re a travesty in the quiet of the woods.” She could tell he was disappointed, but he didn’t look at all ready to quit.

  “I want to talk to the son of a bitch.”

  “I think I know where he’ll be,” Jo said.

  She pushed the button on the garage door mechanism that lowered the door behind them, and she started to the left around the house. A wide roadway had been plowed there, angling off the drive toward the boathouse and the lake.

  “He takes the Cherokee down this way when he wants to go ice fishing,” Jo explained.

  “You know a hell of a lot about him,” Cork noted bitterly.

  Jo didn’t bother to reply. At the back side of the house, she left the plowed area and waded into the snow of the backyard. She made her way to the steps that led up to the decks. Cork heard the sound of water surging in the hot tub on the first level of the deck. When they reached the landing, they found Sandy Parrant lying back in the big redwood hot tub, steaming water swirling aro
und him, his eyes open toward the sky as if hypnotized. A glass of wine sat on the rim of the tub, along with an ashtray that held a lit cigar. He didn’t seem to notice their approach.

  “Sandy,” Jo said quietly.

  “Jo,” he greeted her in a relaxed way. Then he saw Cork and looked amused. “Cork? I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t rise to greet you. I’m not wearing anything. I wasn’t expecting visitors.” He waved a dripping hand toward the sky. “I was just admiring the northern lights.”

  Jo glanced across the lake and saw that Sandy was right. A display had begun, a shifting curtain of red and green with yellow streaks shooting through like searchlights.

  “It’s only just starting,” Parrant said. “It will get better.” He sat up, sloshing water over the rim of the tub. The water splashed onto the deck, steaming as it hit ice that had formed on the wood planking from previous spills. The overhang of the roof above him was thick with frost where the water vapor rose up and froze. “You’re welcome to join me, if you’d like.”

  “You bastard,” Cork said, “you know why we’re here.”

  “Cork!” Jo snapped, stepping between them.

  Parrant looked at the rifle gripped in Cork’s hands. “Maybe I should change my position on gun control.” He reached for his wineglass and took a sip. “I assume you’re here so that we can finally sit down and discuss like adults the situation between me and Jo. I’m guessing she told you about the photographs I shared with her.”

  “Sandy, where’d you get those photographs?” Jo asked. “You told me Bob gave them to you.”

  “He did.”

  “You’re a liar,” Cork accused. “You got them from a file cabinet you moved to Harlan Lytton’s shed at the Aurora U-Store.”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “GameTech. Your father. The Minnesota Civilian Brigade. Murder, you son of a bitch. I’m talking about murder.”

  “That’s enough, Cork.” Jo turned to him and looked at him steadily until he backed away. She faced Parrant again and explained what Cork had found at the office in Duluth.