Isaiah Broom’s star was on the rise because of his ability to find, in a great chunk of wood, the spirit inside it that sought form. That was Broom’s explanation for his art, anyway, which amounted to taking large sections of tree trunk and, using mostly a chain saw, creating remarkable sculptures. He’d begun this art because his tree and stump removal business gave him easy access to the raw material, and he’d never married and so had a lot of time on his hands. Even after he’d made a name for himself, he still cut trees, but he did so only for those who wanted a part of the tree left standing and hewn into an image. On the front lawns of a number of the finer homes in Tamarack County what had once been an oak or elm or linden tree a hundred feet tall was now a ten-foot bear or an Ojibwe maiden or eagles standing guard over an aerie or a winged serpent, courtesy of the skilled hands of Isaiah Broom.
Willie Crane was pretty much directly responsible for the recent widening recognition of Broom’s art. He showed the sculptures at the Iron Lake Center for Native Art, and also at the gallery he owned in Saint Paul, and he’d introduced Broom to influential patrons. Thanks to Willie, those hands and arms, which most of his life had so confounded Isaiah Broom, had become not only the way he expressed what was deepest in him but also the manner in which he earned his living.
Cork walked across a patch of ground covered with wood chips and sawdust where, in the summer, Broom plied his art. He knocked at the front door of the cabin, but no one answered. He went to the other building and peered in a window. The space where Broom’s Explorer would have been parked stood empty. Through the panes, Cork could see the area that, in winter, Broom used for his carving. He looked around to be sure he was still alone, then went to the door and tried the knob. It was unlocked—not surprising; on the rez, no one locked their doors—and he stepped inside.
The place was a jumble of smells, all battling for dominance. There was the sweet aroma of cut pine; the sharp petroleum bite of lacquers and mineral spirits and gasoline; the heavy, metallic smell of cutting oil and engine oil; and the underlying mustiness of the dirt floor. A workbench ran along most of the length of the back wall, and it was a mess of tools—chisels, hammers, hacksaws, coping saws, planes, knives with straight blades and knives whose blades curved oddly, rasps, sandpaper, and utensils with points so delicate-looking that they reminded Cork of a dentist’s picks. Broom’s chain saws, three of them of varying size and horsepower, sat side by side at the far end of the bench.
There was a smaller worktable against the far wall. On it, Cork saw all the tools necessary for arrow making—fletching stripper and jig, arrow saw, nocking pliers. He walked to the table, where several dark gray commercial carbon arrows lay next to the tools. He picked up a can of white paint that was also on the table, and he was pretty certain he knew who’d fired the arrow into the door of Rainy’s cabin, though the why of it was still a mystery. On the upper corner of the table sat a handmade pine box. When he lifted the lid, Cork found feathers that would be used for fletching. They were turkey feathers in two colors, red and green, the same colors he used for his own arrows. Above the table, hung on hooks screwed into the wall, were the items that had drawn him into the structure in the first place: a recurve hunting bow and a belt quiver full of arrows. He drew out an arrow. It was tipped with a Braxe broadhead, the same kind Cork used. But that mattered less than the fletching. The pattern of red and green spliced turkey feathers, round-back and with a left-wing offset, matched exactly what Cork used. It was the same pattern that had been on the arrows that killed both Jubal Little and the John Doe.
CHAPTER 27
Cork didn’t like it. He didn’t like the feel of the idea that Isaiah Broom was deeply involved in the cold-blooded killing of another human being—maybe two. He wasn’t fond of the man, but he didn’t think of him as a murderer. On the other hand, there were certainly good reasons to suspect Broom. First of all, on the gaming issue, Jubal Little had sold out the Native population of Minnesota; second, and maybe even more important, with Jubal Little dead, Broom might yet have a shot at winning the heart of Winona Crane; finally, whoever had given the map to the dead man on the ridge knew the back ways and old logging roads that ran through the reservation. It was someone who’d spent time in that neck of the woods. Like most Shinnobs on the rez, Isaiah Broom knew the area well.
Still, given Broom’s distaste for and distrust of white people in general, it was odd that he would have brought in a chimook to back him up in a plan to kill Jubal Little. If that, in fact, was the role the dead man on the ridge had been meant to play. It was much more likely that one white man would trust another, which brought Cork back to Lester Bigby. In the days when Bigby’s family logged timber, they’d cut trees from a lot of leased tracts north of the rez in the area of Trickster’s Point, so Lester Bigby was no stranger to that territory. But was either money or a son’s hopeless desire for his father’s love enough motivation for murder? Maybe neither one separately, but what about both together, each feeding the dark, depthless hunger of the other?
Cork was driving south from the Iron Lake Reservation, along County 16, which shadowed the lakeshore. The road had been built in the 1930s by state highway engineers to replace the old, meandering dirt track to the rez that ran well east of the lake through a lot of sloppy bogland. For the new road, sections of great rock outcrops had to be blasted away and then evened into sheer walls. In two places, bridges spanned narrow gorges, through which streams ran in tumbles of white water. The sun was sliding down the southwestern sky and was a blinding glare against Cork’s windshield as he approached the second bridge, which crossed the gorge over Ahsayma Creek.
He was thinking about the nature of human beings, the darker nature. Which was the part of the human spirit involved in killing, wasn’t it? Cork had killed. He’d killed for what, in his own mind, were the best of reasons, but he’d still had to give himself over to a side of his nature that scared him, that spoke to him mostly in his nightmares, that was the reason for laws, political and religious, and that made wars, just or otherwise, possible. Henry Meloux had told him once that in every human being two wolves battled, one dark and one light, and in the end, the victor was always the one you chose to feed.
Cork understood and accepted that both Broom and Bigby were capable of killing Jubal Little, but, given the right circumstances, so was every other human being who walked the earth.
Not much help, he told himself.
The bullet, when it hit his windshield, drilled a small hole with a spiderweb of hairline cracks around it. It made a sound like a rock hitting the glass and, at almost the same instant, another sound like someone giving an angry thump to the headrest on the passenger side. Cork slammed his foot on the brake pedal and swerved, and as he left the pavement, the shadows of the red pines that lined the road made a pattern of dark and light stripes across his vision. The chasm crossed by the bridge rushed at him, and he spun the steering wheel hard to the right. The nose of the Land Rover swung away from the precipice, but the rear wheels slid across the soft bed of pine needles, the left tire hit thin air, and for a brief moment, Cork felt the vehicle tilt backward in a drop toward the white water below. The other three tires grabbed and held, and the Land Rover skidded back onto solid ground. He finally came to a stop a foot shy of the trunk of a great pine, and he thanked God for the guy who invented four-wheel drive.
He jerked the door handle and rolled free from the Land Rover, then crouched in the lee of its body. In his mind, he re-created the moment the bullet had hit the windshield and smacked beside him into the headrest. The bullet hole was well above eye level and to his left. The round had followed a downward trajectory to the headrest. He peered around the front end of the Land Rover toward a bare ridge on the far side of the little gorge where the stream ran. There were a dozen places along the top of the ridge that would have provided both a good view of the road approaching the bridge and ample cover from which to shoot.
The shot had missed its mark, but was the
shooter still there?
Cork had long ago given up carrying a firearm, but that didn’t mean he didn’t miss the comfort it might have offered in just this kind of situation. He tried to come up with a plan for what he would do if the shooter came off the ridge to hunt him in the open. He couldn’t run. A good hunter with a decent scope would bring him down easily. Maybe he could make it to the gorge, climb down, and hide among the rocks. The shooter would have to come down to him, and that proximity might even the odds a little.
Cork didn’t like having to expose himself to keep an eye on the ridge, and he went flat on his belly and slithered under the Land Rover. In the shadow there, with the left front wheel masking him, he kept a sharp eye to the far side of the bridge.
He lay that way for a good ten minutes and saw no movement on the ridge. He’d just about decided that the shooter had fled when he heard a vehicle approaching on the road. A few moments later, a dusty white pickup swung into view, coming from the south. It crossed the bridge, slowed, pulled onto the shoulder, and stopped. A Shinnob, Hooty Nelson, got out and walked toward where Cork lay. He looked startled when Cork slithered from beneath the Land Rover.
“Car trouble?” Hooty asked.
He was tall and lean and wore his hair in a crew cut. There were deep creases at the corners of his mouth, because he smiled a lot. But the thing that anyone who dealt with Hooty noticed most was his left eye, which was lazy. Sometimes, because of that wandering eye, it seemed as if Hooty was talking to someone over your right shoulder. He was a mechanic at the Tomahawk Truckstop on Highway 1 and must have been heading home from work. He wore oil-spotted Carhartt coveralls, and although his hands were clean, under every fingernail lay a crescent of black engine grease.
“Not exactly. Take a look at that windshield,” Cork said.
Hooty eyed the bullet hole and whistled. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Hooty looked at the place under the Land Rover where Cork had lain for protection, and he said, “Checking the oil pan to see if it got hit, too?” He grinned, an expression that came and went quickly, and he ended with a philosophic shake of his head. “Hunting season. Them damn hunters from the Cities, they’ll shoot anything that moves. Last year, my cousin Glory, she was just sittin’ in her trailer watchin’ TV. Damn bullet comes through the wall, whizzes right past her, not a foot from her nose, goes out the other side of the trailer. She’s more mad than scared, and she goes outside and spots three white guys in brand-new blaze orange outfits runnin’ off into the trees like kids scared cuz they broke a window or something. Come huntin’ season, I don’t let my kids outta my sight.”3
Cork chose not to disabuse Hooty of the notion that it was an accident. He thanked the man for stopping, and both went their separate ways.
* * *
Sheriff Marsha Dross looked at the slug Cork had put in the palm of her hand.
“I dug that out of my backseat,” he told her.
“You think somebody was actually shooting at you?” she asked.
He sat in her office at the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Agent Phil Holter was there, too, and Ed Larson. Dross and the BCA agent had given a press conference shortly after noon. To avoid any lingering reporters, Cork had parked a block from the building and had managed to slip inside unseen.
“Or was it just a stray hunter’s round, as your friend on the rez suggested?” Holter said.
“A huge coincidence that somebody would be shooting at a buck and almost hit me instead, don’t you think?”
Holter took off his rimless glasses, pulled a clean handkerchief from his back pocket, huffed a breath onto each lens, and began to wipe. “Why would somebody be shooting at you, O’Connor?”
Rhiannon was what he thought, but what he said was “Maybe because I’m asking questions.”
“Questions we should be asking?”
“Not necessarily.”
“But important enough, apparently, that somebody wants you to stop asking them.”
Dross entered the questioning. “What were you doing on the reservation, Cork?”
“I wanted to talk to Isaiah Broom.”
“About what?”
“Bow hunting.”
“Is he a bow hunter?”
Cork nodded. “He hunts like Jubal and I did, still-stalking.”
“You think he had something to do with Jubal Little’s death?” Dross continued.
“It was a possibility I wanted to check out.”
“What did you find?”
“In his hunting, he uses arrows identical to mine.”
“Meaning the arrow that killed Jubal Little might have come from him? Why would Isaiah Broom want Jubal Little dead?”
“Casinos.” It was Ed Larson who answered. He was wearing one of his tweed sport coats with suede elbow patches, and he’d been sitting quietly in a corner, tugging on a loose thread hanging from the sleeve. He’d seemed to be paying very little attention, but Cork knew that brain of his was working at light speed. “Jubal Little’s proposal for six state-run casinos. That’s a political hot potato none of the other candidates would touch. Little could because he was Indian. Take him out of the election and the problem goes away.”
“Thin,” Holter said.
“But worth checking,” Larson insisted.
“There’s another possibility you might want to look into,” Cork said. “Talk to Lester Bigby.”
“Bigby?” Dross looked bewildered. “What’s the connection?”
“Lester bow-hunts, too, and he has a long-standing personal grudge against Jubal. Tie that to the fact that Bigby’s heavily invested in preserving the environmental status quo of our area, while Jubal Little’s on the bandwagon for new mining operations, and I think you’ve got a couple of good reasons for him to want Jubal dead. If you talk to him, ask him where he was on the day Jubal was killed.”
“Why?”
“Because when I talked to him, he danced all around that question.”
“You’ve talked to him already?” Holter had put his glasses back on, and from behind those clear lenses his eyes shot fire at Cork. “Jesus, this is our investigation, O’Connor, and I don’t appreciate you mucking around in it.”
“Last time I looked, Agent Holter, it was a free country. A man can still ask questions.”
The office was filled with afternoon sunlight that came through the window facing west. Where the direct rays hit the floor, the old oak boards looked as if they were made of crystallized honey. That same window overlooked the department’s parking lot. In the stillness that followed Cork’s retort, he could hear the grumble of an engine from one of the media trucks leaving. He heard a reporter shout an unintelligible question, to whom, he couldn’t say.
“Okay,” Holter said, shifting his body as if squaring off against Cork. “Let me tell you what I think about this slug of yours. Seems to me there are three possibilities.”
“Love to hear them,” Cork said.
“One: Someone did try to shoot you and missed. Two: The slug was a stray from a hunter, as your Ojibwe friend suggested. And three: The slug was fired to make it look as if someone was trying to shoot you.”
“A phony attempt on my life, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Why would someone do that?” Dross asked the agent.
“To make O’Connor here look less guilty,” Holter replied.
“Someone risked blowing my head off just to make me look innocent?” Cork actually laughed.
“Not someone,” Holter said and pointedly eyed Cork.
“Me? You think I shot that slug through my window?” Cork glanced at Dross and Larson to see if they were reacting with the same disbelief, but their faces gave away nothing of what they were thinking. “That’s just ridiculous.”
“We’ll follow up on the leads you’ve given us, Cork,” Larson promised. “In the meantime, it would be best if you stepped back and let us handle t
he investigation. For your own sake.”
Anger made everything inside him burn. Cork wanted to hit someone, Holter especially. But he held himself in check. “One question before I leave. Have you got anything more on the dead man on the ridge?”
Larson replied, “We’re still looking into it. Let me walk you to your car, Cork.”
They went out a side door and made their way unnoticed to Cork’s Land Rover, parked a block away. Neither man had spoken, but at the vehicle Larson said, “In an hour, can you be at the spot where you say the shot was fired?”
“Why? You want to take a shot at me, too?”
Larson smiled. “Not easy being on your side of all this, I’m sure. But it’s not easy on our side either, Cork. We’re trying to be thorough and impartial. It’s best if you can refrain from taking this investigation personally.”
“You realize how moronic that sounds, Ed?”
“Yeah.” Larson gave a boyish kind of shrug. “But keep it in mind. So, an hour?”
“I’ll be there,” Cork said.
CHAPTER 28
He drove through Aurora, a town he knew so well he could have walked it blind and not been lost for a moment, a town he loved as much as he loved anything outside his family. But he drove angry. He was pissed at Jubal Little. Pissed at Jubal for dying, pissed at Jubal for the way he’d died, and pissed at what, with his final breaths, Jubal had left behind, a mystery that threatened Cork and his family: Rhiannon.
“Who are you? What am I supposed to know?” he shouted at the hole in his windshield. He slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamn you, Jubal. Why couldn’t you keep your goddamn trap shut, just this once.”
He headed to Sam’s Place and was relieved to see the parking lot empty but for Jenny’s Subaru. He was just about to go inside when his daughter came out with Waaboo toddling beside her. His grandson smiled, and Cork’s mood changed instantly. Anger drained away; love flooded in; but with it came rushing back his fear for the safety of his family.
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