Authors: William Kent Krueger
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you deny you spoke with Theresa Benedetti in the church?”
“I was involved in a homicide investigation.”
“In a church?” Nathan Jackson cried. “Bullshit, Booker. Look at me. I said look at me, God damn it.” He studied his brother’s face, then his own face opened up in horror. “My God. Oh, my God. It’s true.” He looked as if he were going to fall over. “Why, Booker?”
“Why? Because you’re my brother. Because I’ve spent my whole life covering your ass, Nathan. It just came naturally.” He turned away from Jackson and bent to a table where the coffee server and cups had been set out. He poured coffee, took a sip, and seemed disappointed. “Cold,” he said. He put the cup down and looked at Jo. “We grew up in Watts, Ms. O’Connor. A lot of people never make it out of Watts, and a lot of those who do never look back. We were lucky, Nathan and me. We had a mother—she was a seventh-grade history teacher—who believed fiercely in ideals and in us. Dwight, he was lucky, too. When his own mother abandoned him, we took him in. Mom raised him like her own.” Harris glanced at his brother. “Christ, she believed in you, Nathan. Believed you were destined for greatness. Believed you could do something for black people. Dwight and me, we grew up covering your thoughtless antics. Covering you for her sake. Feels like we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action all our lives. You surely do know how to talk the talk. And you even do a damn good job of making it look like you walk the walk. But I know you, brother. And I know you got all the substance of a soap bubble. You want to know why we did it? I’ll tell you. Family, that’s why. In the end, that’s all that matters. Not ideas—they change. Not justice—hell, I don’t even know what that is. Family, Nathan. In the end, family’s all that abides.”
“What did you have on Theresa Benedetti?” Jo asked.
Harris took a deep breath and plunged in. “MURs for starters. Phone records. A call had been placed to Marais Grand from the Benedetti residence a few hours before she was killed. I knew Benedetti was in L.A. at the time. A little investigation made it clear that Mrs. Benedetti had been home alone that night. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”
“Why did you approach her in church?” Jo asked.
“I wanted the meeting in private and in a place where the truth might matter to her.”
“I don’t like the way this is going,” Vincent Benedetti said.
Jo ignored him. “What did you say to her?”
“I told her about the phone call. I told her it seemed an odd thing that Marais Grand had been killed but the little girl, who was a potential witness, hadn’t been harmed. I told her I thought it was touching, something a mother might have done. I told her I wouldn’t blame a woman for trying to keep her family together, whatever it took. I also told her we had a bloody fingerprint pulled from the girl’s closet door.”
“Did she confess to killing Marais Grand?”
“She claimed it was in self-defense. I told myself that, in a way, it probably was. She also revealed to me that her husband had fathered Shiloh.”
“Did that surprise you?”
“Yes. I knew Nathan believed Shiloh was
his
daughter.”
“You struck a deal with Theresa Benedetti, didn’t you? Silence for silence.”
He nodded. “If she guaranteed that her husband would never say a word about the child, never lay a claim to Shiloh, I’d make sure the investigation didn’t touch her. She was safe.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nathan Jackson whispered.
“I did it to save your political ass, Nathan. I was sure if you knew that Benedetti believed the child was his, if he made any claim to her, you’d spill everything. Son of a bitch, you were on your way. You had it all ahead of you. You had looks, brains, a golden tongue, and more luck than any man had a right to. But I knew you, and I knew you’d throw it all away to lay your own claim to that child.” He gave his brother a cold look. “So yeah, I crossed the line. Kept everything clean, kept your name from ever coming up. Like I’d done a hundred times before. And I’d have done it again, here. All you had to do was stay away and let me handle this.”
“What about the other men involved in the investigation?” Jo went on. “Dwight Sloane, Grimes, Mr. Metcalf over there? They would have known, wouldn’t they?”
Harris nodded. “They knew.”
“I understand Dwight Sloane.” Jo looked toward Metcalf. “What did it take for you?”
Metcalf offered her only an enigmatic smile.
“The promise of a better salary than they’d ever have as cops,” Harris answered for him. “As consultants, the business that comes their way from the state and the feds has been more than generous. Dwight and I have seen to that.”
“I didn’t know,” Nathan Jackson said, as if pleading his case to Jo.
Harris shook his head angrily. “No, you only chose not to see.”
Vincent Benedetti wore a strange expression, somewhere between confusion and amusement. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying my wife, my Theresa, killed Marais?” The idea seemed to take hold and not displease him especially. “She had the guts for it, God rest her soul.”
Nathan Jackson sat down. “All these years,” he said, but he didn’t go on.
The fire in the room crackled and no one spoke. Hard silence, Jo had observed, often followed hard truths.
Harris walked to the window and stared out at the lake, an icy blue in the sunlight. “It’s beautiful out there,” he finally said. “God’s country. How does the saying go? Where God builds a church, the Devil builds a chapel.”
The telephone rang. Metcalf answered it. “Sheriff Schanno, it’s for you.”
Wally Schanno took the phone and said, “Yeah?” He listened a moment, said, “I’ll be there,” and hung up.
“What is it?” Jo asked when she saw the dark countenance of his face.
Schanno said, “They’ve found another body.”
A big man, the word finally came. Caucasian. Thirty to thirty-five years of age. Shaved head. Dressed in camouflage military fatigues. Three gunshot wounds in the upper torso.
It wasn’t Cork or Louis or Stormy. Not any of the men who’d gone into the Boundary Waters together to look for Shiloh.
Harris accompanied a sheriff’s deputy in the helicopter. Two hours later, they were back, the body delivered to the morgue at Aurora Community Hospital, where it kept company with the corpse of Virgil Grimes. Harris had a full set of fingerprints that Metcalf relayed via the computer to the Los Angeles field office. In the meantime, Wally Schanno had ordered the search-and-rescue teams to head to Wilderness Lake with all due speed. He requested the U.S. Forest Service have their De Havilland Beaver begin flying over the lake where it would be joined soon by the helicopter.
It was early afternoon. Jo knew there was nothing more she could do at that point. She told Schanno she was heading to the Iron Lake Reservation to talk to Sarah Two Knives.
First, she stopped by the house on Gooseberry Lane. She’d called Rose early that morning when she knew the first body wasn’t Cork. Now the children were all at school. The house smelled of baking bread. So normal. But at the moment, nothing felt normal to Jo. Dead men were being hauled out of the Boundary Waters like cut wood. Cork and Louis and Stormy were still unaccounted for.
“My God,” Rose gasped when Jo told her the situation. “No wonder you look like hell. Does Sarah know?”
“I’m on my way there now.”
“She may already have heard something,” Rose said cautiously. “Word’s leaked out about the man they found this morning. People have been calling all day to see if I know something.”
“I hope nobody’s said anything to the kids. Listen, Rose, if they ask, just let them know their dad’s all right.”
“Is he?” Rose asked.
“It’s what they should hear right now,” Jo said. She sat down in a kitchen chair, feeling quite weak.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not a bite all day.”
“Let me put something together. A sandwich, at least.” Rose pulled out bread, roast beef, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and mayonnaise and went to work. “It’s a good sign in a way, isn’t it?”
“What?” Jo asked.
“That the man they just found isn’t one of . . . the good guys.”
“I honestly don’t know what it means, Rose.” She laid her head in her hands. “I never thought I’d be happy to see a dead man, but twice now I’ve been almost ecstatic when they brought out the bodies and neither of them was Cork. I suppose that’s wrong.”
“That’s just human. Let it go. Here.” She handed Jo the sandwich in a Baggie. “I don’t suppose we should plan on you for dinner.”
“No.” She stood up and gave her sister a hug. Rose smelled of the baking bread, and Jo wished she could take that smell with her wherever she went. “Thanks for covering here on the home front.”
Rose smiled sympathetically. “I’ve got it easy. You have to tell Sarah Two Knives that it looks like her son and husband have stumbled into hell.”
A
FTER THEY HIT THE
D
EERTAIL
, they made a plan and then they talked no more. The sky stayed nearly cloudless. Although the air was crisp, by early afternoon the sun began to melt the snow, and all along the riverbank, trees dripped glittering pearls.
The wind blew directly upriver. Although normally that would have made the journey more difficult, in a way it was good. If they were lucky and the man they were after was careless, the wind might bring to them his sound. Cork found himself listening so intently that the sudden cry and flap of an osprey in an overhanging spruce made him jerk hard and he nearly dropped his paddle.
His jacket hung heavily to the right from the weight of the .38 in the pocket. Willie Raye had his .22 stuffed in his belt. Sloane, in the bow of the canoe with Stormy and Louis, kept the rifle propped against the gunwale. Stormy had the nine-millimeter Glock in his down vest. They’d agreed that as soon as they spotted the man, they would drop Louis on the riverbank and pick up the pursuit.
By the time Cork heard the dull distant roar he knew to be Hell’s Playground, he was concerned. He’d believed they would overtake the man before the rapids. If the footprints in the snow had been a true indication, he hadn’t been that far ahead. They’d paddled hard but hadn’t been given even a glimpse of their quarry.
Hell’s Playground was clear from a distance. It lay in the middle of a long, narrow valley—almost a canyon—where the water was deep. An old lava flow that had at one time blocked the river formed two tall palisades of dark rock on either bank. Beneath the cool October sun, they looked like the black wings of a fallen angel. The closer the canoes came, the louder was the sound of the water crashing through. Cork hadn’t been on the Deertail in years, but the portage around Hell’s Playground was a thing you didn’t forget. He spotted the landing, ahead fifty yards on the right. As he turned to signal the second canoe, he saw Sloane pitch back and left as if he’d been hit by a bus. The canoe flipped, plunging Sloane, Stormy, and Louis into the river. For a moment, it made no sense to Cork; then the sound of the shot reached him. In the next instant, Willie Raye seemed to mirror Sloane. He flew back as if kicked, and as he toppled into the river, he tipped the canoe, taking Cork along with him into the swift, cold current of the Deertail.
Cork surfaced, spitting water. Over the sound of thrashing men, he heard the report of more shots. He didn’t wait to see where they were hitting. He dove. In the sunlight, the river water was clear and golden. He tried to move to help Willie Raye, but his clothes soaked up the river and he felt heavy and awkward in the current. Raye was swept out of his reach. Again he rose, broke the surface like a leaping trout. In the glimpse he got of the river around him, he didn’t see the others, and he realized he was being drawn inexorably toward the rapids.
He swam hard for the nearest riverbank. Grasping the gnarled white root of a birch at the river’s edge, he pulled himself out and rolled immediately to the cover of the trees. He felt for his .38. The gun was still in his coat pocket. He drew it out and peered around a tree trunk. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked southwest, directly into the glare of the sun. As he watched, the canoes swept between the palisades and vanished in the white water there. He didn’t see Stormy or Louis or Sloane or Raye.
In his mind, he tried to fix where the sound of the shots had come from. He remembered both Sloane and Raye had pitched back and left, which meant the shots had come from ahead and to the right, somewhere on the opposite side of the river from where he now crouched. The bank looked peaceful, unbroken forest all the way to Hell’s Playground. He eyed the wall of rock through which the river had carved its course. The flat top on the far side would have been an ideal location from which to fire. Good field of vision, and hidden in the glare with the sun behind it.
Cork kept to the woods along the eastern bank and worked his way downriver. He’d covered thirty yards when he heard Stormy call softly, “Cork.”
Stormy was hunched behind the cover of a loose curl of big moss-covered boulders next to the river. Louis was with him. Sloane lay on the ground between them, the thin blanket of snow beneath him staining a deep crimson. As Cork knelt, Sloane looked at him.
“In the rocks,” he said quietly. “Other side.”
“That’s what I figure, too,” Cork said.
“Lost the rifle.”
“I’ve got my thirty-eight.” Cork held it where Sloane could see. To Stormy, he said, “Did you see Arkansas Willie?”
“No.”
“You still have your Glock?”
“Here.” Stormy pulled it from his vest.
“The shooter’s on the other side. If he’s coming for us, he’ll have to cross. Probably downriver from Hell’s Playground. I’m going to do my best to discourage him. I think you should stay here, cover Louis, and . . .” He glanced down at Sloane who’d closed his eyes. “Do whatever you can.”
Louis was on both knees beside the wounded man. He took Sloane’s hand. “He’s real cold.” Louis looked grim and a lot older than a boy his age ought to have looked.
“I know,” Stormy said. “We’ll build a fire as soon as we can.”