Red Knife (7 page)

T
hat Sunday night Annie sat in front of her computer, trying to work on the final paper for her lit class. She was asking the question: Was it really William Shakespeare who’d penned the plays that all the world loved? She’d constructed the paper to be a kind of whodunit, presenting evidence that pointed toward various suspects: Marlowe, Raleigh, Bacon, Johnson. She needed to begin wrapping it up, but she sat staring at the screen, dreadfully aware that she didn’t care who’d written the plays, didn’t care about the paper, didn’t care about school at all. She was finished. All the seniors were finished. For the next few weeks, they were just going through the motions.

A message appeared on her screen. From Uly Kingbird. They’d IM’ed a lot while they were practicing the music they’d played that morning at church.

thanks

what4,
she IM’ed back.

thought i wanted to be alone this afternoon but i didn’t. the dark is no place for children and children we all are.

more dylan

more mine

pretty

pretty words don’t change anything.

the worlds still an ugly place. the words come from somewhere beautiful inside you. your music comes from the same place.

He didn’t respond for a minute. She wondered if he was still online.

Then another message:
i used to believe…

what,
she replied.

nothing. late. good night.

She sat back and stared at the screen. She was about to turn her own computer off when a final message from Uly appeared.

that every day is a chance for something better. but the truth is every day is a hole you try to climb out of. and one day you won’t.

Misty took forever going to sleep. By the time Lucinda laid the baby in the crib that she’d put up in Alejandro’s old room, she was exhausted. She went to her own bedroom and found Will sleeping deeply. She stood looking down at her husband and realized she was exhausted with him, too. It wasn’t that he was an awful man, a bad man, he was just a difficult man, a man hard to love. Even after more than a quarter century together, he was like a foreigner to her, speaking from a sensibility she couldn’t understand, following rituals she couldn’t appreciate. More than anything else, it was his silence that kept him a stranger. He spoke, yes, but often in a way that felt to her like silence. Years before, she’d thought of leaving him, but she had no way of supporting herself or her boys. And it wasn’t as if he was cruel to her, abused her, beat her. He never did.

When she was a girl in Los Angeles, in the backyard of her stepfather’s home there was a carob tree. It had been a beautiful thing, huge and shady. Under it her mother had put a little grotto, a bathtub virgin. Lucinda spent much time under the carob, daydreaming or praying to the Virgin Mary. Then one day the tree fell apart, just fell apart. The inside, it turned out, was completely rotten. As it collapsed, a huge section of the carob tree smashed the bathtub and its virgin. These days, Lucinda often thought of her marriage as being like that carob tree: something that was rotting from the inside and would someday simply crumble.

She took a blanket from the linen closet and stretched out on the sofa in the living room. From there, she could easily hear if the baby woke and began to cry. She’d always been a light sleeper.

She closed her eyes. Against the darkness splashed the image of Alejandro and Rayette, tangled in the meadow grass, their bodies torn open by the shotgun blasts. She sat up and stared at the curtains, drawn closed over the picture window. The curtains were new. Rayette had helped choose them, and while they considered fabric she had talked to Lucinda about her childhood.

When Rayette was seven, her mother had left her with her grandparents and gone to Minneapolis with a man named Douglas Bear. She’d promised to come back for Rayette when they were settled. That never happened. Her mother and Bear were killed in a head-on collision north of Cloquet. Her grandparents raised her, but they were not young and both were dead by the time Rayette hit fourteen. She was passed from relative to relative, giving them all trouble. At sixteen she chose to make her own way. It was her luck, she told Lucinda, that the way had led to Alejandro. It felt like finding God, she confided. She didn’t mean it in a sacrilegious way. It was just that she’d never known such hope before. Such happiness. He wasn’t a perfect man, but he loved her, and that made all the difference in the world.

Lucinda opened the curtains and looked out the window. The house stood just beyond the town limits of Aurora. It was a one-story rambler on a large lot with two young maples in front, near the road. The backyard abutted a stand of mixed spruce and poplar. Will had given her a small section of the property for her garden, but most of the yard was grass that, thanks to her husband, was thick and velvety all summer. He kept everything perfect and orderly. It had been the same at every place they’d lived, from Camp Pendleton to Camp Lejeune, with a dozen postings, foreign and domestic, in between. He was hard on the boys in that respect. No bikes left lying in the yard. No digging to China the way boys sometimes did. They both had their part in helping with the tasks, a strict duty roster that Will kept posted on the refrigerator and oversaw as rigidly as if the boys were part of his command rather than part of his family. When he retired from the military and opened his gun shop, Will had expected the boys to help out there as well. Alejandro had finally mutinied; he and Will began a battle that had seen an occasional truce but never an ending. Uly, on the other hand, never fought back. He bent beneath the weight of his father’s expectations, and it hurt Lucinda to see him burdened so.

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.

M
onday 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?”