Trickster's Point co-11

by William Kent Krueger

  “No.”

  “Ken Hildebrandt told us that Winona Crane was involved in the altercation with Bigby. Is that correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Bigby make any threats against her?”

  “Not directly, but she was scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “That he might do something.”

  “Because of something he said?”

  “No, he’s just that kind of guy.”

  “Did he make threats against anyone?”

  Cork thought back and couldn’t remember Bigs saying anything that was actually threatening. “He called Winona a bitch.”

  “But he didn’t threaten her, or anyone else?”

  Cork was forced to shake his head no.

  Borkman stood up. “All right, Cork. Thanks for your help.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’ve got a few more people I’m supposed to talk to. The sheriff’s out interviewing people, too. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”

  After the deputy left, Cork called Jubal’s house. No answer. He ran upstairs, changed his clothes, wrote a note to his mother explaining that something had come up and he’d miss dinner and not to worry about him. He was just opening the front door when Jubal pulled up in his mother’s rusted Pontiac. He got out and met Cork on the sidewalk.

  “You hear?” he asked.

  “Yeah. A deputy was just here.”

  “The sheriff himself came to my house,” Jubal said. “I told him it was Donner. He said Donner had an alibi.”

  “Gloria Agostino.”

  “I told him she was lying,” Jubal said.

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Who knows? But I’m not waiting. I’m going to find Bigby now.”

  “I’m going with you,” Cork said.

  They piled into the Pontiac and headed to Donner Bigby’s house, which was a mile or so outside of town on the Old Soudan Road. It was a big place, perched on a slight hill, surrounded by woods. There were a couple of ceramic deer in the front yard and a nice flower bed that had already been cleared down to the topsoil in preparation for winter. Bigby’s mother opened the door. She was older than the mothers of most of Cork’s friends. She looked frail and worried and wary.

  Jubal took the lead and lied his ass off, telling the woman that they were Donner’s friends from school, and they were trying to put together a game of touch football at Grant Park that afternoon. She seemed relieved and told him that Donner was gone.

  “Rock climbing,” she said.

  “That’s right.” Jubal nodded as if he should have known. “He’s a Crag Rat.” That was an organization in Aurora made up of guys who liked to climb. Bigs aside, they were an okay bunch.

  “You don’t happen to know where he’s climbing,” Jubal said, smooth as ice cream.

  “Someplace that sounds like…” She thought a moment. “Tracker’s Point, I think.”

  “Trickster’s Point?” Cork said.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jubal said with a parting smile.

  They went back to the Pontiac, and Cork said, “She didn’t seem so bad. Bigs must’ve got all his asshole genes from his old man.”

  The day was sunny and warm, and the air was heavy with moisture that still lingered from the storm two days earlier. They went in the long way, hiking five miles on the trail off the county road. There was only one car parked at the trailhead, and they both recognized the silver Karmann Ghia that Bigby had been driving since he got it as a present on his sixteenth birthday. They double-timed it along the trail, where Cork saw boot prints that had been left not long before. They arrived at Trickster’s Point to find Bigby already halfway up the formation, working without the aid of ropes or pitons, in the full light of the sun, which had climbed nearly straight overhead. They had to shade their eyes against the glare when they looked up at him and hollered his name.

  Bigby secured his position with both feet and the firm grip of his right hand, then hung out a bit from the rock and looked down at them with a shit-eating grin.

  “What do you know? It’s Chip and Dale. Looking for acorns?”

  “Looking for you, you son of a bitch,” Cork spit out.

  Bigby shrugged. “Found me. Now what?”

  “Now you come down, and we talk about Winona.”

  “Winona? The squaw girl? Why talk about her?”

  “You know why,” Cork said. “Come on down. Or is it just girls you like to beat on?”

  “Whoa, O’Connor. How about you come up here and we talk.”

  “All right.”

  Cork started for the rock, but Jubal held him back.

  “You ever climb before?” he asked Cork.

  “No.”

  “Then I’m going up.”

  “Do you know how to climb?”

  “No. But I’m better at it than you.”

  Which was probably true. Jubal was better at everything. Still, it stung.

  “You stay here,” Jubal said.

  “And do what?”

  “If I chase him down off there, I don’t want him running away.” He looked up, as if contemplating the difficulty of the task ahead. “And if I fall, you think he’s going to go get help? I need you down here.”

  Without waiting to confer further, Jubal stepped up to the rugged face of Trickster’s Point and began to climb after Donner Bigby.

  CHAPTER 12

  J ubal was a spider, nimble on the rock. He climbed with a swiftness that astonished Cork, and Bigby was clearly alarmed. The big kid turned back to his own task and continued up the face of Trickster’s Point, heading for the top, which was still a good seventy feet above him. Jubal relentlessly closed the gap between them, and by the time Bigby had topped the monolith, fifteen minutes later, Jubal was only a dozen feet below him. Bigby stood and caught the full light of the sun, and bright yellow flickered all over his body as if he were electric or on fire. He bent over the edge of the rock and called down to Jubal, “Gee, Little, it’d be a shame if you lost your grip and fell.”

  “You let him come up there,” Cork hollered.

  Bigby laughed. “Or what?”

  Cork shielded his eyes against the midday sun and watched helplessly as Jubal approached the top with Bigby towering above him, showing his teeth in a kind of hungry grin. Cork was truly afraid that when Jubal’s hands made their final reach, Bigby would stomp on them and send Jubal plummeting. He was furious with himself for not going up along with his best friend or going up in his stead. He felt twisted and helpless watching from the ground as the drama played out a hundred and fifty feet above him.

  Bigby finally stepped back and disappeared from Cork’s view. Jubal crawled onto the flat crown of Trickster’s Point unimpeded, and he, too, was lost from sight. Cork became aware again of the oppressive humidity of the day. Each breath felt heavy in his lungs, and his nostrils seemed clogged with the dank smell of wet earth. He realized that a deep stillness had fallen over the area. There wasn’t a whisper of wind or the call of a single bird, and above him came no sound from the two kids facing off atop the great pillar.

  “Jubal! Bigs! What’s going on?”

  The minutes passed, and Cork’s concern grew. He remembered advice Sam Winter Moon had given him about hunting. “The most important skill of all, and the most difficult to master, is patience.” Why hadn’t they been patient? They could simply have waited on the ground, because Donner Bigby would have had to come down sometime. Cork knew the answer. Anger. It had clouded all their thinking. He looked up, unable to swallow and barely able to breathe.

  That’s when he heard the sound, one that made his blood turn to ice. From the top of Trickster’s Point, but from the far side, came a brief, terrible scream. It hit the stillness like a rock might hit a big lake, with only a moment’s impression, then it was gone and what was left was simply the vast stillness.

  “Jubal?” Cork cried toward the sky. “
Jubal?”

  He received no answer. He thought for a second of climbing Trickster’s Point but had no idea what good that would do. Instead, he ran around the base of the formation, toward the side from which the scream had come.

  The body lay on its back, bent at an abnormally acute angle across a rock slab that had, ages ago, splintered from the flank of the pillar and toppled to the earth. The sight stopped Cork instantly. His legs, for a moment, refused to move him forward, and his brain refused to believe the image his eyes delivered to it. Slowly he lifted his gaze and saw, high above, a head and shoulders, silhouetted against the sun as they bent over the edge of the pillar’s crown to face the scene on the ground below.

  Cork finally willed himself forward.

  Donner Bigby’s eyes were wide open and his mouth, too, as if he was looking up at something that absolutely astonished him. Cork stared at the body, searching for any movement of those eyes, for any faint rise and fall of the massive chest, for any sign, no matter how feeble, that there might still be life in Donner Bigby. He knew he should touch Bigby, check for a pulse, speak to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do any of those things.

  He glanced back up and saw that Jubal was easing his way over the lip at the top of Trickster’s Point. Jubal moved more slowly, more carefully than he had when ascending. Cork figured that might have been because coming down was harder, but he also thought the reason could simply have been that Jubal was in no hurry to face what awaited him at the bottom. Knowing it would be quite a while before Jubal joined him, Cork finally forced himself to do what duty demanded.

  He leaned close, and his shadow fell over the kid’s face. “Donner? Can you hear me?” He gingerly touched Bigby’s neck with his fingertips, feeling for even a ghost of a pulse. He laid his ear against Bigby’s chest. Nothing came to him, except the smell of Bigby’s emptied bowels. Cork stood and moved far enough away that he couldn’t smell the stench of death.

  The full weight of the situation fell on him, and his legs would no longer hold him up. He dropped into a sitting position on the wet ground and went, for a little while, into a kind of daze.

  “Cork?” It was Jubal’s voice cutting through the haze.

  Cork snapped back to the terrible reality of the moment.

  “You okay?” Jubal asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  Jubal’s face was ghost white, and he sat down heavily beside Cork. “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  Jubal was quiet a long time, and the voice that finally spoke was smaller than Cork had ever heard from his friend. “He stumbled. He just stumbled and fell.”

  Cork tried to look into Jubal’s eyes, to find some clue there about the truth of that explanation, but Jubal averted his face.

  “I want to know everything,” Cork said.

  “There’s nothing to know,” Jubal insisted, almost desperately. “I accused him of what happened to Winona. He didn’t deny it, just told me to go fuck myself.”

  “And then he… just fell?”

  “He swung at me. He started it. So I swung at him. Next thing I know, he’s stumbling back and falling. It was an accident, I swear. Cork, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to say about this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We both have to tell the same story.”

  “It was an accident. We just tell them that.”

  Jubal shook his head furiously. “We can’t tell anyone I went up there with him. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t intentionally push him?”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Of course not. But nobody’s going to believe me. I’m an Indian. That’ll come out now. Think white people are going to take an Indian’s side in something like this?”

  “You’re Jubal Little,” Cork said, amazed that his friend had no idea how much weight that carried.

  “Jubal Littlewolf. With a father in prison for manslaughter. Like father, like son. That’s how they’ll play it.” He took Cork by the shoulders and leaned toward him until their faces were only inches apart. “You’re my brother. I’m counting on you.”

  A breeze had finally come up, cooling against his face. Cork was suddenly deeply aware of how much he loved his friend. He had a choice. He could believe Jubal or not. If he believed him, there was only one thing he could do.

  “What do we tell them?” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  P hillip Holter, the agent in charge of the BCA team that had been sent to help with the investigation of Jubal Little’s death, was a tall, good-looking guy somewhere in his forties. He had a build that made it clear he and a barbell were intimate friends. His hair was black and thick and held in place with a shellacking of mousse. He wore stylish glasses that had no framing around the lenses, so there was nothing to detract from one’s view and appreciation of his deep baby blues. His gaze was studied; he seemed never to blink. There was a crispness in his actions and in the way he spoke that suggested he was a man who knew his abilities and was pretty sure others appreciated them as much as he did. Cork took an immediate dislike to him, a rare experience in all his own years as a cop, but he figured he’d take a dislike to anyone who eyed him as if he were the Son of Sam.

  They interviewed Cork and Stephen separately. Holter took the father, and Ed Larson questioned the son. Under the circumstances, Cork couldn’t very well insist that he be with Stephen while Larson conducted that interview, but he wasn’t greatly concerned. The truth that Stephen would tell-and that Cork told as well-didn’t incriminate either of them. This most recent body, they’d simply stumbled upon. When Holter pointed out that the arrow was identical to the one that had killed Jubal Little and also to the arrows Cork had carried in his own quiver, Cork simply replied, “If they are my arrows, then it would be just as easy to steal two as one. Same thing would be true if someone decided to manufacture an arrow identical to mine.”

  Cork and Stephen stood well out of the way while the crime scene techs-deputies whom Larson had sent to the BCA for special training-did their jobs. The dead man’s wallet had yielded a driver’s license bearing the name William Graham Chester, a resident of Red Wing, Minnesota. When he was asked, Cork replied that the name meant nothing to him and reiterated that he’d never seen the man before. A search of the area offered no other immediate evidence, except for the tracks that the officer from the Border Patrol had been following when he left.

  After a while, among the bare aspen trees, Holter convened a conference with Sheriff Dross and Captain Ed Larson. In the time since her discussion with Cork that morning, Dross had changed into her uniform, over which she wore a yellow down vest. Though the day continued to threaten precipitation, she sported no hat on her short hair, which was the brown of otter fur.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” Stephen asked.

  “They’re probably trying to figure what all this has to do with Jubal Little’s killing.”

  “Are the two definitely related?”

  “What do you think?” Cork asked. It wasn’t rhetorical.

  Stephen said, “That’s what I was thinking about all the way to Allouette. It could have been that, whoever he was, he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the more I thought about that, it just seemed too big a coincidence.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “So if they’re related, how?”

  Cork had been watching the three cops in discussion. Holter had said something that caused Larson to look in Cork’s direction and furiously shake his head.

  “Any speculation?” Cork asked his son.

  Stephen seemed surprised to be asked, and he furrowed his brow for a while before he answered.

  “It might make sense that they were in on it together and something went bad between them up here.”

  “In on it together?”

  “Like, well, they wanted to be sure that Mr. Little was dead, and they meant to do it in a way that would throw the blame on you. So the arr
ow. But you’ve always talked about how hard it is to hit a moving target, especially from a distance, so they brought the rifle along, too, as sort of backup. If the arrow missed, they were going to shoot Mr. Little with the rifle.”

  Cork smiled at the beauty of the logic, which was different from his own, and better. He’d been thinking that it was two separate men with two separate agendas, but he couldn’t quite put it together in an understandable way. Stephen’s scenario, on the other hand, made good sense.

  Stephen was almost as tall as his father, and he looked almost directly into his father’s eyes as he went on. “But if the first plan didn’t work, and they couldn’t pin the murder on you, then…” He faltered. Traditionally, the Ojibwe were a people who ably hid their emotions behind a stolid mask, and Stephen was the O’Connor in whom the Ojibwe blood was most apparent. But he didn’t bother to try to hide his horror. “If they hadn’t killed Mr. Little with the arrow and had to shoot him, they’d probably have to get rid of the only witness. So you’d be dead, too.”

  Cork put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “But I’m not dead.” He nodded toward the great stone monolith that stood dark against the gray sky. “Nanaboozhoo, that old trickster, must have something else in mind for me.”

  “It’s not funny, Dad.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Stephen. I’ve always believed that things happen for a reason, and the reason is always part of some greater design. And so the question here is, What’s the big picture?”

  “You sound like Henry Meloux.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. And the question still stands.”

  Cork spotted a lone figure threading his way among the aspens on the crown of the ridge, and he quickly recognized John Berglund. Dross saw the officer, too, said something to Holter and Larson, and they all turned to watch him come.

  Cork said to Stephen, “Let’s mosey over and see what he has to say.”

  No one tried to stop them as they crossed the ridgetop, and they reached the sheriff and other officers just as Berglund arrived.

  “Agent Berglund, I’m Agent Holter, BCA.” Holter extended his hand. “This is Captain Ed Larson. Sheriff Dross, of course, you know. She’s already filled us in.”