Trickster's Point
( Cork O'Connor - 11 )
William Kent Krueger
William Kent Krueger
Trickster's Point
PROLOGUE
The dying don’t easily become the dead.
Even with an arrow in his heart, Jubal Little took three hours to die. Politician that he was, most of that time he couldn’t stop talking. At first, he talked about the arrow. Not how it got there-he believed he knew the answer to that-but arguing with Cork over whether to try to pull it out or push it through. Corcoran O’Connor did neither. Then he talked about the past, a long and convoluted rambling punctuated by moments of astonishing self-awareness. He admitted he’d made mistakes. He told Cork things he swore he’d never told anyone else, told them in a way that made Cork feel uncomfortably like Jubal’s confessor. Finally he talked about what lay ahead. He wasn’t afraid to die, he said. And he said that he understood the situation, understood why Cork had put that arrow in his heart.
He died sitting up, his back against hard rock, his big body gray in the long shadow cast by the imposing monolith known as Trickster’s Point. If the political polls were correct, in just a few days Jubal Little would have won a landslide victory as the new governor of Minnesota. Cork had known Jubal Little all his life and, for some of those years, had thought of him as a best friend. Even so, he’d planned to mark his ballot for another man on election day. Partly it was because Jubal wanted different things for Minnesota and the North Country and the Ojibwe than Cork wanted. But mostly it was because Jubal Little was absolutely capable of murder, and Cork O’Connor was the only one who knew it.
CHAPTER 1
The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plain wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.
Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.
The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.
The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions-more of them this time and more probing-and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.
While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.
Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.
“On the table,” Larson told him, and the deputy set the tray down and left. “Go ahead and eat, Cork,” Larson said. “I just want to look over a few of my notes.”
He pulled a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sport coat. Larson always looked and dressed more like a college professor than a cop. He had gold wire-rim glasses and wore honest to God tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. He was nearing sixty, more than a half dozen years older than Cork, and still had an enviable head of hair that was a distinguished silver-black. He was already on the force when Cork first joined as a deputy more than twenty years before. They’d become friends, and Cork had a great deal of respect for him and his abilities. As soon as Cork was elected sheriff, he’d put Larson in charge of investigating major crimes.
While Cork sat at the table and ate, Larson pretended to go over his notes. Cork knew that, in reality, Larson was more interested in his appetite, knew that people who’d committed a violent crime were often so troubled by what they’d done that they couldn’t eat. So Cork made as if he hadn’t had a bite of food in a month and rammed down every crumb of his cheeseburger and gulped every drop of coffee.
“Thanks,” he said when he’d finished.
Larson looked up from his notepad and, with his index finger, eased his glasses a quarter of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture he sometimes made unconsciously when he was about to do something that was uncomfortable for him. “Cork, I know you know the drill. I’ve got to make sure that you understand your rights.”
“Miranda,” Cork said.
“Miranda,” Larson acknowledged and went through the litany.
“It’s official then?” Cork said.
“What’s official?”
“I’m officially a suspect.”
Larson squinted, a look of pain. “In my shoes, how would you see it?”
“I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how I’d see it, Ed. If our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you’d killed Jubal Little.”
“Tell me why, if I were in your shoes, I would have waited three hours before trying to get him some help.”
“I wasn’t trying to get him help. He was already dead when I left him.”
“Okay, so why didn’t you go for help as soon as you understood the seriousness of the situation?”
“I’ve told you. Jubal asked me to stay.”
“Because he was afraid?”
“Jubal?” Cork shook his head. “No, not Jubal. Never Jubal.”
“You were his only hope of surviving, and yet he insisted that you stay. I don’t understand.”
“He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.”
“You couldn’t have carried him out?”
“He hurt whenever I tried to move him, hurt a lot. It was that broadhead arrow tip tearing him up inside. I didn’t want to give him any more pain. If I’d tried to carry him out, he would simply have died sooner.”
“So you just sat there and watched him go?”
“No. I listened to him. I think that was the main reason he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. You know how politicians are.”
Larson gave a startled look that quickly turned critical. “There’s nothing humorous in this situation, Cork.”
“I’m not sure Jubal saw it that way. The last thing he did on this earth was smile, Ed.”
He could see that Larson didn’t believe him. Probably he didn’t believe a lot of what Cork had sa
id so far.
“Did you have your cell phone with you?”
Cork shook his head. “We were out there to get away from a world of phone calls. But even if I’d taken my cell phone, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Why?”
“Coverage is hit and miss up there. But around Trickster’s Point, especially, nothing gets through.”
“And why’s that?”
Cork shrugged. “Ask the Ojibwe, and they’d tell you it’s just Nanaboozhoo messing with you.”
“Nanaboozhoo?”
“The Trickster. That’s his territory.”
Larson stared at him. His face reminded Cork of a ceramic doll with all the features painted on and none of them capable of moving. Larson looked down at his notes. “You had breakfast at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler before you headed out. You had a cheese omelet, and Jubal Little had cakes and eggs over easy. When you left, you both spent a few minutes standing out on the sidewalk, arguing.”
Cork said, “Did you find Heidi or did she come looking for you?”
He was talking about Heidi Steger, their waitress at the Broiler that morning.
Larson didn’t answer but said instead, “What did you argue about?”
“We didn’t argue. It was more like a heated discussion.”
“What did you discuss, then, so heatedly?”
“Politics, Ed. Just politics.”
Larson maintained his ceramic doll face for a long moment, and Cork, in that same long moment, returned his steady gaze.
“Okay,” Larson finally went on. “You said he talked a lot as he was dying. What did he talk about?”
“First he talked about that arrow, whether to try to remove it. Jubal wanted to, I didn’t. Then I tried to leave to get help. Jubal wanted me to stay. After that, he talked about life. Or I should say his life. It was so Jubal of him, but understandable under the circumstances. He had a lot of regrets. Toward the end, he was in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he mostly rambled. It was hard to make much sense of anything.”
“Did he say who’d shot him?”
“He didn’t have to. We both knew who he believed it was.”
“Who was that?”
“He thought it was me.”
“He thought you were trying to kill him?”
“He thought I’d shot him by accident.” Which was the only lie Cork had told in any of the interviews that day.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“You meant to shoot him with that arrow?”
Cork refrained from smiling at the obvious and shallow trap and told him once again, “It wasn’t me who shot Jubal.”
“Who then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see anyone else?”
“No.”
“Hear anyone else?”
“No.”
“So, as far as you know, you were both alone out there?”
“Clearly not. Whoever shot that arrow was out there with us.”
In the beginning, Larson had positioned his chair near to Cork, making the interrogation a more intimate affair, just between the two of them. Between friends, maybe. Now he backed off a couple of feet and asked, rather indifferently, “Do you consider yourself a good bow hunter, Cork?”
“Fair to middling.”
“When you hunt, you’re a purist, right? You do still-stalking. No deer blind. You actually track the animal on foot.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m guessing you’d have to be tuned in to all the sounds around you, wouldn’t you? Reading all the signs?”
Cork understood the thrust of Larson’s questions. If there was someone else at Trickster’s Point with them, why didn’t Cork know it?
“Must take incredible stealth,” Larson said.
“That all depends on what you’re after,” Cork replied.
“You were after white-tail deer, weren’t you?”
Cork said, “Ed, what I was really after is something you can’t understand, and if I say it, you’ll misconstrue my meaning.”
“I’ll do my best to understand.” He promised with such earnest appeal that Cork knew he was telling the truth.
So Cork offered his own truth in return. He said, “I was hunting Jubal Little.”
CHAPTER 2
Violence took Jubal Little out of Cork’s life, but violence was also the way he’d entered it.
Nearly forty years earlier, when Cork was twelve years old and in the sixth grade, the baby boom in Aurora, as it probably had everywhere, resulted in the overcrowding of the town’s elementary school. To deal with the situation on a temporary basis, the school board arranged for a couple of annex trailers to be placed on the grounds of the junior high, which was the only school-owned property with space available. The annexes were used to house the two sixth-grade classes. As a result, those kids who normally would have been the cocks of the walk in that final elementary year became, instead, the focus of abuse by many of the older junior high students, with whom the sixth graders shared the cafeteria, gymnasium, restrooms, and playing field. Worst among the tormentors was Donner Bigby, whom everyone called Bigs because of his size. He was a strawberry blond and had a massive upper torso. His intimidating physique came from both genes and working summers with the logging crews his father sent into the Superior National Forest to cut timber on tracts leased from the federal government. Bigby chewed tobacco, drank beer, and swore like a lumberjack. When he strutted down the hallways or across the school grounds, most kids-Cork included-gave him a judiciously wide berth.
The children of the Iron Lake Ojibwe attended school in Aurora and were bused in from the reservation. Three of the reservation kids were in the sixth grade with Cork. Because his grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe and he spent a lot of time on the rez, Cork was acquainted with them: Peter LaPointe, Winona Crane, and her twin brother, Willie. He knew Winona especially well, because he’d had a crush on her forever. She was smart and pretty and a little wild. She played the guitar and made up her own songs and sang beautifully. She had long black hair and eyes like shiny chips of wet flint that, if she wanted, could cut you with a glance. She was fiercely protective of Willie, who’d been born with cerebral palsy and who walked with a slow, awkward gait and spoke with some difficulty.
It wasn’t at all surprising that Willie turned out to be a perfect target for the abuse of Donner Bigby.
Most days after school, Winona and her brother hopped on the bus and rode the fifteen miles to the rez, where they lived with a variety of relatives. Their father was dead, killed in a car wreck caused by a drunken driver-him. Their mother was an unreliable caregiver at best, and very often gone. Just gone. For weeks or even months. Sometimes they stayed with their grandmother, sometimes with an aunt or uncle. Their uncle Leonard Killdeer worked at the BearPaw Brewery, which sat next to Sam’s Place, the Quonset hut turned burger joint on Iron Lake. Whenever they stayed with Leonard, they would walk to the brewery after school to meet him when his shift ended. On those days, Cork often accompanied them on the pretext of visiting his family’s good friend Sam Winter Moon, who owned Sam’s Place. Though he liked Willie just fine-they both shared a passion for Marvel Comics-Winona was the real reason Cork went along.
A couple of weeks after the start of school that fall, as the trio passed through Grant Park on their way to the brewery, Willie haltingly detailing the exploits of the Hulk in a recent issue and Winona quiet and distant and beautiful at his side, three figures materialized from the picnic pavilion and blocked their way.
“Well if it isn’t the spaz and his keepers,” Donner Bigby said. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth in a kind of perverted homage, perhaps, to James Dean. The two kids with him Cork knew, but distantly. Vinnie Mariucci was tall and as thin as jerky, and everyone called him Specs because he wore glasses. Ray Novak was almost as huge as Bigby. They were high school guys, and they hung with Bigby because he was, in fact, their age. He was
in the seventh grade because he’d been held back twice over the years. Academically and socially, he was a mess. In a later, more enlightened day, he might have been diagnosed as dyslexic and having ADD, but at that time he was just seen as unteachable, both disinterested in education and defiant of authority.
Cork smelled beer, though he saw no evidence of their drinking. He felt his stomach tighten, and he tried to speak in a calm voice. “Come on, we’re not bothering you.”
“Look, O’Connor, just being on the same planet with Spaz here bugs me. I don’t like watching him walk.”
“Fine,” Cork said. “We’re leaving and you won’t have to watch.”
“Don’t call him Spaz,” Winona said, low and threatening.
“Winona,” Cork cautioned.
“How about Retard then?” Bigby offered and laughed. His cohorts laughed, too.
“I’m… not… retarded,” Willie managed to get out. His speech, normally a little difficult, was further strained and was hard even for Cork to understand.
“Inotarded,” Bigby said, mimicking Willie.
As the son of the Tamarack County sheriff, Cork felt on his shoulders the onerous weight of doing the right thing. Which meant taking on Donner Bigby, who was a head taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier and who probably knew more about how to beat the living crap out of a kid than anyone Cork could think of. He considered simply trying to talk his way past Bigby, and hustling Willie and Winona along with him, but Winona killed any hope of an easy escape. She stepped up to Bigby and slugged him. She caught him in the ribs, and he made a little ooph sound, but he didn’t budge an inch. Before she could withdraw her hand, he caught her arm by the wrist and twisted. Winona cried out and went down on her knees. Willie tried to go after Bigby, but Specs stepped in and shoved him, and Willie went sprawling.
Beyond thought now, Cork lowered his shoulder and barreled into Bigby. He knocked the kid off balance, and they both went down. He attempted to wrestle the bigger boy under him, but it was like trying to get the best of a rhino. Bigby was on top in the blink of an eye, sitting astraddle Cork and pinning him to the ground, helpless. Cork saw the big right fist, an agate-colored ball of bony knuckle, draw back, and then he saw stars.
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