Vermilion Drift co-10

by William Kent Krueger

  She stared at him, the cigarette idle in her fingers, a snake of smoke coiling between her and Cork. “Would you really break my heart? I’m asking you-begging you. If someone has to pay for what happened to Lauren Cavanaugh, Corkie, let it be me.”

  He could have played her longer, played her harder, but he didn’t have it in him. He said, “I don’t think Ophelia killed Lauren Cavanaugh, Hattie.”

  She looked startled, then disbelieving. “Is this some kind of trap?”

  “I think the bullet your granddaughter fired only grazed the woman. After Ophelia left for the rez, someone else came to the boathouse.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Did you say anything to the sheriff?”

  “No. It would have required explaining about Ophelia.”

  “When are you going to tell them?”

  “Not until I have a few more answers.”

  “Answers that will keep my granddaughter’s name out of all this?”

  “It’s like how I raised my children, Hattie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Cork left the sheriff’s department and drove back to the Northern Lights Center for the Arts.

  It was just after noon, and the day was growing hot and humid. The gathering had thinned as people began to think about lunch. Each of the artists displaying work had been given a deli box, and they were all relaxing at the moment, eating sandwiches. Derek Huff sat apart from the others, alone on the grass that edged the shoreline of the lake.

  Cork stood between Huff and the sun, in a way that made the young artist squint as he looked up. “Remember me, Derek?”

  Huff smiled, a genuinely friendly gesture, and Cork could see why women would fall for the kid. He was good looking, with blond hair that tickled his shoulders, a deep tan, the build of a swimmer.

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Huff said.

  “My name’s O’Connor. I’m working with the sheriff’s department on the Lauren Cavanaugh murder investigation.”

  Recognition lit Huff’s eyes. “You’re the guy who found Lauren’s body in that mine tunnel.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with her.”

  “I already talked with somebody from the sheriff’s office.”

  “Captain Ed Larson,” Cork said. “I’d like to ask a few questions he didn’t.”

  Huff shrugged easily. “Sure.”

  Cork glanced around, saw an empty folding chair, grabbed it, and set it next to Huff. “Derek-you mind if I call you Derek?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Derek, we know you had a sexual relationship with Lauren Cavanaugh. From what I understand, it wasn’t exactly a healthy kind of thing.”

  Huff looked uncomfortable. “What do you understand?”

  “She did a lot of threatening.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Pissed you off, I understand.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe enough for you to kill her?”

  “Hey, I was drinking with an artist friend when Lauren was shot. Ask that other guy, Larson. He knows.”

  “You left the bar around midnight. What did you do then?”

  “Came back here, went to bed.”

  “You didn’t stop by the boathouse?”

  “Are you kidding? Lauren was in a mood. I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

  “What happened in your relationship?”

  Huff put his half-finished croissant sandwich back in his deli box and set the box on the grass. “Look, I know my way around women, okay? Lauren was like no woman I’d ever come across.”

  “How so?”

  “She was one thing at first, then she turned into something else. You know The Wizard of Oz? She started out all Good Witch of the North, but ended up Queen of the Flying Monkeys.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Huff actually looked pained as he recalled. “At first, it was pretty normal, then things began to get too weird. She’d, like, want to tie me up, which I would have been okay with except I got really uncool vibes from her. Get this, man. A week ago she pulls out a gun, puts the barrel inside her, and tells me to pull the trigger.”

  “By ‘inside her’ you mean…?”

  “I’m not talking about her mouth, dude. But, look, it wasn’t just the strange sex stuff. She was always making promises she had no intention of keeping. She was going to make my name huge in the art world. She was going to introduce me to important gallery owners. She didn’t do any of that. And when I got pissed because of it, she threatened me. And not only that, man, she was really cruel to Ophelia sometimes.”

  “Did she behave bizarrely to anyone else?”

  “Naw, with everybody else she was all sugar and spice.”

  “Did you tell any of this to Captain Larson when he interviewed you?”

  Huff shook his head. “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”

  “I believe you. But I also think you might have killed her.”

  “No way. I told you, I was drinking with Gilroy. Besides, Ophelia’s grandmother confessed.”

  “I don’t think Hattie’s confession is going to stand up, and I don’t think Lauren died when Hattie said she did. I think there was time for you to have come back and visited the boathouse and shot her.”

  The kid looked scared now. “Jesus, I told you. I went straight to bed. Look, I can prove it. I keep a video diary. It’s up in my room. Every night when I go to bed, I record something. I’ll show you.”

  Huff got up and led the way back to the big house and upstairs to his room, which was at the end of the south wing. He went to the desk, where a laptop sat open. He sat down at the desk and worked the touch pad.

  “It’s got a built-in webcam,” he said.

  In a moment he brought up a piece of video that carried a time-date stamp in the lower right-hand corner. The date was the Sunday that Lauren Cavanaugh died, and the time was 12:17 A.M.

  Derek Huff stared out from the screen of the laptop. For a long time he said nothing, just sat looking hollow-eyed and drunk. When he finally spoke, it was three sentences full of despair.

  “Tomorrow I tell Lauren to go to hell. I miss the ocean. And I hate the fucking smell of pine trees.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Although Derek Huff’s video diary proved absolutely nothing, the feel Cork got from the kid-that he didn’t kill Lauren Cavanaugh-was genuine. He was also thinking about the squealing tires Brian Kretsch had reported on North Point Road well before Huff returned to the center. He didn’t write the kid off completely, but when he left Huff’s room, he turned his thinking to other possibilities.

  He drove to his house on Gooseberry Lane, had some lunch, and afterward took Trixie for a midday walk. While he walked, he thought.

  If not Ophelia, if not Hattie, if not Huff, then who?

  He didn’t get much further before a black Tahoe pulled to the curb beside him, with a familiar Shinnob at the wheel. Tom Blessing leaned across the seat and hollered out the passenger window, “Hey, Cork! Somebody on the rez you need to talk to.”

  “Mind if I bring my dog?”

  “No problem. Hop in.”

  Cork opened the passenger door, and Trixie, who hadn’t learned and probably never would learn to distrust strangers, eagerly leaped in ahead of him.

  “I tried your home phone and Sam’s Place,” Blessing said, pulling away from the curb. “Didn’t have your cell number, so I finally decided to come into town and see if I could track you down.”

  “What’s up?” Cork asked.

  “You’ll see when we get to Allouette.”

  Blessing headed out of Aurora, around the southern end of Iron Lake, and back up the eastern shoreline. He drove with the windows down, something Trixie thought was heaven. She sat on Cork’s lap with her head outside, blinking against the wind.

  “Heard that with all the crap that’s happened in the Vermilion One M
ine the government’s going to look elsewhere to store all their nuclear junk,” Blessing said. “True?”

  “As far as I know, all they’ve done is pull the survey team back. They haven’t crossed the mine off their list yet.”

  “But they’re thinking about it?”

  “That’s my hope. A lot of bad publicity so far, and the worst is yet to come. But it’s the government, and you know how deep bureaucratic stupidity can run.”

  “What do you mean the worst is yet to come? What’s worse than a bunch of bodies stuffed in a mine tunnel?”

  What happened to those bodies before they got there was what Cork thought but didn’t say.

  Instead he replied, “I’m just thinking there’s no chance they can spin any of this in a good way, Tom.”

  “Are you kidding? They sold an entire nation of Christian folk on the idea of killing most of us Indians. If there’s a way to make radioactive drinking water sound like Kool-Aid, the federal government’ll find it.”

  A few miles outside Allouette, Blessing got on his cell phone. “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “You still got him? Good.” He snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.

  They entered Allouette, pulled onto Manomin Street, and swung into the parking lot of the community center.

  “How long will this take, Tom? I’m wondering if I should leave Trixie in the truck.”

  “Bring her in. Elgin’ll watch her.”

  Inside the center, they walked down a long hallway, past the open doors to the gym, where Ani Sorenson was running some girls from the rez basketball team, the Iron Lake Loons, through drills. They passed the door to the administrative wing, where all the tribal offices were situated, and they took a right toward the room where Blessing did his work.

  Tom Blessing had been a hard case. He’d been a leader in a gang of Ojibwe youths who’d called themselves the Red Boyz. As a result of a remarkable and deadly firefight on the rez, he’d experienced a radical transformation. Now he was deeply involved in the Wellbriety Movement, helping troubled Ojibwe kids find their way on a healing path using the teachings of elders and based on ancient wisdom and natural principles.

  On his door hung a poster of a white buffalo. Inside his office, the walls were plastered with photographs of Blessing and some of the other former Red Boyz, along with a lot of kids doing a lot of things-learning to make birch bark canoes, harvesting wild rice, boiling down maple sap into syrup, playing softball, serving fry bread at a powwow, preparing for a sweat.

  Elgin Manypenny, who’d also been one of the Red Boyz, sat on Blessing’s desk. In a chair shoved against one of the walls slumped a teenage kid. Cork knew him. Jesse St. Onge. His uncle Leroy stood next to him.

  “Boozhoo, Elgin, Leroy,” Cork said and shook each man’s hand in turn. “Boozhoo, Jesse.”

  “Anin,” the kid replied respectfully.

  “Shake the man’s hand,” St. Onge said.

  The kid reached up and did as he was told.

  “Sit down, Cork,” Blessing said. “Elgin, mind taking Trixie for a walk?”

  “Happy to.” Manypenny slid from the desk. “Come on, girl. Let’s go play.”

  Trixie didn’t hesitate a second.

  Blessing sat in his desk chair and nodded to Leroy St. Onge, who held out a folded piece of paper toward Cork.

  “Found that in my nephew’s coat pocket this morning,” he said.

  Cork unfolded the paper. Printed inside in the bloody From Hell font were the words We Die. U Die.

  “Jesse got one of these threats?” Cork asked.

  “Not exactly,” Leroy St. Onge said. “Go on, Jesse. Tell him.”

  The kid focused on his hands, which were folded in his lap. He didn’t say anything at first.

  “Jesse,” his uncle said.

  The kid gathered himself and mumbled, “Okay, I did the throw up in the Vermilion One Mine.”

  “The throw up?” Cork asked.

  Blessing explained. “When a piece of graffiti art is done fast, it’s called a ‘throw up.’”

  “It was you? How did you get into the mine?”

  “Through the entrance on the rez that the cops got all taped up now.”

  “How’d you know about that entrance, Jesse?”

  The kid got quiet again.

  “Go on,” his uncle said sternly.

  “Isaiah Broom.”

  “Did he go into the mine with you?”

  “No, just showed me the way. He wouldn’t, you know, go in himself.”

  “Why not?”

  Jesse shrugged.

  Everyone waited.

  Finally Jesse said, “I got the feeling he was scared.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “No.” The kid straightened up in a display of bravado.

  “You went in alone?”

  “Yeah. I took a flashlight and my paint cans and this printout Isaiah gave me of what he wanted me to do.”

  “Did you notice anything strange in the mine?”

  “Yeah, the smell. Like something dead. I understand now, but I just thought, you know, that maybe an animal got stuck in there and died. I didn’t think… you know.”

  “Sure, Jesse,” Cork said. “Tell me about being in the mine.”

  “Well, I went in like Isaiah showed me, and it was real dark and spooky. I had a flashlight but it wasn’t much and going into all that dark was like pushing through mud. I went all the way to the end of the tunnel. There was a wall and I couldn’t go any farther. I went back and told Isaiah, and we left and went to his place, and he got some stuff, power tools, you know, and we came back. This time he came in with me.”

  “He went all the way in?”

  “Yeah, but he was all jumpy, like the place was full of ghosts or something. We got to the wall, and Isaiah cut through it, and we crawled in and kept going to where the elevator shaft was. I was going to do my piece there, but Isaiah said we should go down farther so they wouldn’t know how we got in. So we climbed down this ladder that was, you know, next to the elevator. Isaiah showed me where he wanted me to work. Me, I wanted to do something I’d be proud to tag, but he wanted it done just like he’d printed out and he wanted it done fast.”

  “It was Isaiah’s design?”

  “I guess. I’m all like, hey, man, it’s not aesthetic. But it was what he wanted, so I just did the throw up, and we left.”

  “Why?”

  The kid stared at Cork. “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you agree to do what Broom asked?”

  “You mean his design?”

  “No, the whole thing in general. It was pretty risky.”

  “I don’t want all that radioactive stuff here,” Jesse said, as if it should have been perfectly obvious to anyone. “It was a way of fighting back. The warrior’s way,” he added proudly. “Isaiah, he’s been sort of leading the protest, and when I told him I wanted to help, he said The People could use my talent. See, on the rez I’ve got kind of a rep for my work. Isaiah said he had an important job for me.”

  “‘We Die. U Die.’ What did that mean?”

  “Just, you know, that if the junk they put in there leaks, we’re all dead. Even the assholes who are responsible.”

  “Who would those assholes be?”

  “I don’t know. The guys who make the decisions, I guess.”

  “Names?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Max Cavanaugh? Lou Haddad? Eugenia Kufus?”

  “I don’t know who those guys are.”

  “Some of the people making the decisions. They all got notes saying ‘We Die. U Die.’ Do you know anything about that, Jesse?”

  “No, nothing. I just did the throw up in the mine.”

  “We Die. U Die. Who came up with that?”

  “Me, sort of. When I was on the protest line in front of Vermilion One, I said we should have a sign that read something like ‘This won’t kill just us. It will kill everybody.’ Isaiah liked it
, but he shortened it for the throw up.”

  Leroy St. Onge asked, “What kind of trouble is he in, Cork?”

  “Trespass with criminal intent, maybe. Vandalism.” He leveled a long look at Jesse. “His heart was in the right place, and I think even the people who own the mine aren’t excited about the prospect of dumping nuclear waste there, so I’m guessing that, when the whole story’s known, no charges will be brought. That’s certainly the recommendation I’ll make to the mine people and the sheriff.”

  St. Onge said, “I think I need to have a talk with Isaiah Broom.”

  “Get in line, Leroy,” Cork said.

  “Can we go now?” Jesse asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Cork told him. “Look, I’ll do what I can to make things easy for you, Jesse, but the sheriff’s people will want to talk to you.”

  He made a sour face. “Ah, man.”

  “I’ll be there with you,” his uncle said and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Mind giving us a few minutes alone, Cork?” Blessing asked.

  “No. I need to go outside and make a call on my cell phone anyway. Meet you at your truck?”

  “Fine.”

  Cork left the way he’d come. Outside, he could hear Trixie barking in the park next to the marina a block away, and he saw Manypenny throwing a Frisbee, which Trixie was having a great time chasing down. He plucked his cell phone from its belt holster, pulled up the number from which Rainy Bisonette had called two nights earlier, and punched redial. While he waited, he watched Trixie having the best time she’d had since Stephen left for West Texas. He made a mental note: Play more with the dog.

  Rainy answered, her voice distant and impersonal. “Yes, Cork?”

  “Boozhoo,” he said, trying to be cordial.

  “What do you want?”

  All business, this woman. All right then, he thought, and got down to it.

  “What time did Isaiah Broom leave Crow Point yesterday?”

  “Early. Shortly after sunup.”

  “Any idea where he was headed?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Is Henry there?”

  “No. He’s out gathering.”

  Herbs, Cork figured.

  “How did Broom seem when he left?”

  “Hungover. Worried.”