Red Knife

by William Kent Krueger

  She looked toward the lights of town, which she sometimes thought of as the campfires of strangers. She left the window, returned to the sofa, and lay down. She was afraid to close her eyes, afraid of what she would see in the darkness there. Almost immediately, however, her exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep.

  She woke suddenly. It was still dark, still night. Had she heard Misty crying? She listened carefully and realized that what had waked her was the tiny squeak of the platform rocker in the corner of the living room. In the drift of light through the picture window, she saw Will’s face. He looked at peace. In his arms lay the baby, asleep against his chest.

  It was the only moment of beauty in that whole brutal day, but it was almost enough.

  The light on Stevie’s nightstand stayed on late, and when Cork went to bed, he poked his head in his son’s room. The little guy was wide awake, fingers laced behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Lights out,” Cork said.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it always wrong to kill?”

  Cork walked in and sat on the edge of Stevie’s bed. “Why are you asking?”

  “Zip Downey told me that the Kingbirds sold drugs to kids. So maybe whoever killed them didn’t think it was wrong.”

  “Killing somebody is never the right thing to do,” Cork said.

  “You killed people,” Stevie said. It wasn’t an accusation.

  “And I pray all the time to be forgiven.”

  “Did you think it was wrong?”

  He hesitated, then answered truthfully. “I don’t remember thinking about right and wrong when it happened. But I suppose somewhere in my head I must have believed it was the right thing to do.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I know. Stevie, I hope you never find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether to kill someone. I hope that with all my heart. Whatever people thought of the Kingbirds and whatever the Kingbirds may have done, killing them wasn’t the answer. It was calculated, cold-blooded murder. It was wrong, absolutely wrong, and that’s all there is to it.”

  The troubled look didn’t leave Stevie’s face. Cork had watched his son play at killing, using a stick or a golf club or an old curtain rod as a rifle. He’d never stepped in to stop it. When Cork was a boy—raised on John Wayne westerns—he’d played the same games. He believed that the real killing for which he was responsible as a man didn’t come from the games of his childhood, and taking a stick away from Stevie or any other boy who fought make-believe battles wouldn’t solve a thing.

  “Do you understand?” he finally asked his son.

  Stevie said, “If somebody killed you, I’d kill them back.”

  “Then I guess I’d better do everything I can to make sure I stay alive, huh?”

  He ruffled his son’s hair. Stevie didn’t smile.

  “Promise?” Stevie said.

  “I promise. Going to read for a while?”

  “I guess so.”

  Cork handed him the book on the nightstand, The Indian in the Cupboard. “See you in the morning.” He kissed Stevie’s forehead and went to his own bedroom.

  Jo was almost asleep, nodding over one of her legal files that she’d brought to bed to study. Cork stood in the doorway, thinking Jo had twice asked him to promise that he wouldn’t put himself at risk in whatever trouble seemed to be coming to Tamarack County. He hadn’t been able to do that for her. Yet he hadn’t hesitated in making that same promise to his son. What was the difference, he wondered, and if he told her, would Jo understand?

  Hell, why should she? He wasn’t certain he did.

  Worse, he wasn’t certain it was a promise he could keep.

  FOURTEEN

  Monday morning, Sheriff Marsha Dross was in the common area making coffee when Cy Borkman buzzed Cork through the department’s security door.

  “Go on ahead to my office,” she called to him with an empty pot in her hand.

  Cork walked into the office that twice before had been his. The first time around, he’d served nearly two terms. The second time, several years later, he’d occupied it for a brief but tumultuous three months. He liked what Dross had done to the place. She’d had the walls painted a soft sand color that reminded him of the desert and provided a pleasant backdrop for all the leafy green of her plants. She’d hung a couple of photographs on the wall. The one behind her desk showed her standing beside her father on a boat dock, both of them grinning wide. Her father had been a cop himself, down in Rochester. In the other photograph, Dross stood with her arm around Ann Bancroft, a Minnesota native and one of the world’s great polar explorers. The photo was signed and was inscribed: “To another sister who braved the ice.”

  He stood at the window. The morning was overcast, promising much needed rain. Across the street was a park, a nice square of grass with a playground dead center. The playground was empty, but a small cluster of teenagers was making its way among the swings and slides, carrying book bags and packs, bumping and shoving each other in a playful way as they headed toward the high school on the far side of town.

  “Coffee’ll be ready in a minute,” Dross said as she swept in. “Have a seat.” She sat behind her desk, while Cork grabbed one of the two no-nonsense tan plastic chairs available for visitors. “What have you got on Lonnie Thunder?” she asked.

  “Nothing at the moment,” Cork said. “But I’m going to see Henry Meloux this morning. Seems Kingbird had been talking to him, so maybe Henry knows something. I figure it’s worth a try.” He hesitated before going on. “But I’m thinking, Marsha, that after I talk to Meloux, I’m finished helping with this investigation.”

  She sat back slowly, her face a blank of waiting.

  He could have told her about his promise to Stevie and the promise he should have made to Jo. Instead all he offered was, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re under no obligation.”

  “Where are you with Reinhardt?”

  She shrugged. “He swears he was home at the time of the murders. His wife says the same thing.”

  “What do you think?”

  “At the moment, I don’t have anything that contradicts them.”

  “Try this on for size.”

  He explained about not seeing Reinhardt on the road to Skinner Lake the night of the murders. She didn’t seem impressed.

  “It’s possible you just missed him,” she said. “It was dark.”

  “That roof rack of lights is hard to miss.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” she said dully.

  She’d pulled back on him, probably disappointed that the help he’d promised wouldn’t be coming. Maybe even more than a little disappointed.

  “One more thing,” he said before getting up to leave. “Just something else to consider. I’d been thinking that if Elise lied, it was done to protect Buck. But it’s also possible that it’s Buck who’s lying to protect Elise. She’s no stranger to firearms, and she has access to that arsenal Buck keeps. Lord knows she had just as much motivation as he did. She could have gone out to Kingbird’s place as soon as I left.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind, too.”

  Deputy Borkman poked his head in the office. “Coffee’s ready, Sheriff.”

  Cork stood up. “I’ll pass on the coffee, Marsha.”

  Dross stayed seated and watched without comment as he left the room.

  He drove down Oak Street heading north, out of town. As he passed the Pinewood Broiler, he glanced at the parking lot and saw Buck Reinhardt’s truck alongside a couple of company trucks. He should have let it go, just kept on driving. Not only had he promised to step back from the aftermath of the Kingbird killings, what he was contemplating at the moment—pressing Buck Reinhardt for answers—was none of his business at all.

  On the other hand, he still hadn’t had his morning coffee.

  “Hey, Cork.” Johnny Papp, who owned the Broiler, greeted him from behind the counter with one of
his cordial Greek smiles.

  “How’s it going, Johnny?”

  “I’d complain, but it never does any good. Coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Menu?”

  “Just the coffee.”

  Johnny turned away and headed into the kitchen.

  It looked as if there were two or three of Reinhardt’s crews having breakfast that morning, two full tables of men with T-shirts bearing the Reinhardt logo. Cal Richards, father of Allan Richards, the kid Annie had said was giving Uly Kingbird such a hard time, was among them. He was a man difficult to miss. His arms were covered with enough tattoos so that, at a distance, he appeared to have the skin of an alligator. He’d been employed for a good many years by the county to do its tree trimming, but he’d been fired for cussing out his supervisor one too many times. Buck had hired him the next day.

  Dave Reinhardt sat beside his father. Dave was in uniform, the Yellow Lake Police Department patch on his right shoulder. He was talking low and hard to his father, but Buck wasn’t paying any attention. Buck’s eyes were full of Cork.

  Reinhardt was in his midsixties. There was a story that had floated around Aurora since Cork was a kid, about when Reinhardt was a young man working for a logging outfit contracting for Weyerhaeuser. The story was that Buck could lift a McCulloch chainsaw in each hand and attack a trunk from two directions at once, so that he felled a tree in half the time it took anyone else. As a kid, Cork had believed it. When he was older, as a result of his summers in college during which he logged timber to earn tuition money, he realized how ridiculous the story was. He figured Reinhardt had started it and kept it going. He didn’t doubt, however, that Buck had the strength and the balls to give it a try. Reinhardt still had the body of a man twenty years younger. His hair was white and he wore it in a long ponytail. He was handsome, knew it, and was an incurable—often offensive—flirt.

  Buck Reinhardt stood up. His son put a hand on his arm, but the man shook it off. He reached Cork at the same time that Johnny Papp returned with the coffeepot.

  “Put his breakfast on my tab, Johnny,” Reinhardt said.

  “Just having coffee, Buck,” Cork told him.

  “A man ought to start the day with more’n that.”

  “I had breakfast at home.”

  “But no coffee?”

  “Not today.”

  “Something interrupt?”

  “Not really.”

  “I thought maybe, like some of us, you had a son of a bitch pounding on your door at all hours, bothering your wife.”

  There were other folks eating breakfast. They’d been carrying on their own conversations, but as Reinhardt’s voice rose, the other voices fell silent.

  Reinhardt wore an unbuttoned shirt with the sleeves cut away and the tail hanging out of his pants. Cork nodded toward the gun belt visible across Reinhardt’s waist. “What’s with the hardware, Buck? Planning on shooting your scrambled eggs if they try to make a break for it? Or do you carry all the time these days?”

  Reinhardt swept his shirttail back, revealing a strong side holster that nestled what looked to be a Glock, maybe a 19.

  “I do when I think some crazy Indian might get it in his head to take a shot at me.”

  “Probably a lot of folks besides the Ojibwe wouldn’t mind doing that, Buck.”

  Reinhardt let his shirttail fall back into place. “Why are you sniffing around my house, O’Connor? What are you after?”

  “Mostly I wanted to be sure you knew that before he died, Alex Kingbird asked me to arrange a meeting between you and him.”

  “Elise told me. Said you didn’t tell her what for.”

  “He felt bad about what happened to Kristi. He wanted to make things right.”

  “All he had to do was give me Lonnie Thunder.”

  “That may have been exactly what he had in mind.”

  “Lot of fucking good that does me now.”

  “I just thought you might want to know.”

  “That Kingbird’s dead doesn’t bother me at all. If I had a whiskey right now, I’d drink to the son of a bitch who killed him. That he died before he could give me Thunder, now that’s a pisser. And, listen, I don’t appreciate you going around telling people I’ve been lying about that night.”

  “I never said you were lying, Buck. Only said I didn’t see you on the road you should’ve been on.”

  Dave Reinhardt left the table and walked to the counter. “Take it easy, Dad.”

  “Fuck if I will. This man’s harassing me and my family.”

  “I don’t think it’s gone that far,” the younger Reinhardt said.

  “You taking his side?”

  “I’m just advising a little restraint here, Dad.”

  “Or what? You’ll arrest me?” Buck laughed cruelly. “You don’t have jurisdiction, Davy. And though it grieves me to say so, boy, you don’t have the balls neither.”

  Buck spun away and returned to the table. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Time’s a wastin’ and we got trees beggin’ to be trimmed.”

  He dropped a fistful of greenbacks on the table and led the way out, his crew following without complaint or comment. His son watched him go, then turned to Cork.

  “He doesn’t mean most of what he says. Buck’s ninety percent bluster.”

  “And ten percent bullshit. Doesn’t leave much for a person to cozy up to, does it, Dave?”

  Reinhardt said nothing more. He headed outside, following where his father had gone. Cork turned back to the counter. “Johnny, mind putting this coffee in a cup to go?”

  FIFTEEN

  Henry Meloux lived on an isolated peninsula called Crow Point that jutted into an inlet far north on Iron Lake. There were two ways to get to Meloux’s cabin: You used a paddle or you used your feet. Cork guided his Bronco along the paved county road north, then turned east onto gravel. He drove until he came to a tall, double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Meloux’s. He parked and began to walk. For almost a mile, the trail cut through national forest land, then it crossed onto the reservation. Cork had walked the trail many times. If what George LeDuc said was true, Alex Kingbird had recently done the same.

  When he broke from the trees, Cork saw the small cedar-log cabin perched at the far end of the point, set against a sky full of sluggish gray clouds. He was upwind, and in a few moments Walleye, Meloux’s old dog, had his scent and let out a couple of lazy, requisite barks.

  Meloux had just brewed a pot of coffee and he offered Cork a cup. Though he was an old man, in his early nineties, it was clear from everything about him that he still had a lot of road ahead before he found his way onto the Path of Souls. He walked slowly, but that was less the result of age than patience. Meloux was a member of the Grand Medicine Society, one of the Midewiwins, a Mide. His life had been engaged with healing the bodies and spirits of those who sought him out. He’d helped Cork on many occasions and, in one significant miracle of healing, he’d brought a traumatized Stevie O’Connor back to a wholeness of soul. Not long ago, Cork had been of significant help to Meloux, locating a son lost to the old man for decades, healing a wound so painful to the old Mide that it had nearly killed him. The threads that bound these two men together were many and long and ran deep.

  Meloux’s hair was like a long breath of white wind. He wore overalls, a flannel shirt, and scuffed boots. Cork sat with him at the table in the old man’s one-room cabin, a place that felt as welcoming as home. It was furnished simply: a bunk, a table and three chairs handmade from birch, a cast-iron stove, a small chest of drawers. Meloux used kerosene lanterns. He drew his water from the lake. Twenty yards toward the trees stood an outhouse.

  “Alex Kingbird,” the old man said. “Kakaik. A name to be proud of.”

  “You called him Kakaik?”

  “That was his name.”

  “Not legally.”

  “Legally?” Meloux laughed. “A man is who he wants to be.”

  “Who was Kakaik?”

  �
��To me, someone who asked questions. In that, he was like you.” The old Mide smiled.

  “Did he come for healing?”

  “I think that was not in his mind. But probably it was in his heart. He wanted to be a man of clear thought. He did a lot of cleansing.”

  “Sweats?”

  “And other things.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  Meloux had brewed the coffee in a dented aluminum pot on his stove. Like Cork, he drank from an old, blue-speckled enamel cup.

  “If I lived in the days of my ancestors,” he said, “he would have been a man I wanted as a war chief.”

  Walleye had settled himself in a corner of the cabin. He’d stayed alert for a few minutes, but when it was clear the men were going to pay him no attention, he dropped his head on his paws and closed his eyes.

  “Henry, did Kingbird say anything to you about Lonnie Thunder?”

  “Thunder. He took the name Obwandiyag.” The old man didn’t seem pleased with the choice. “You know about Obwandiyag of long ago?”

  “No.”

  “He was an Odawa war chief. To most white people he is known as Pontiac.”

  “Pontiac. Big name for someone with a heart as small as Thunder’s. Did Kingbird talk about him?”

  “Obwandiyag weighed on Kakaik.”

  “Did you advise Kingbird?”