Tamarack County: A Novel Part 18

"From what you've told me, it seems like Marlee ran herself off the road."

"That pickup was definitely following us, Dad."

"I believe you. But the question is what was his motive. Did he really intend Marlee harm?"

Stephen's eyes went to the window. Outside, only the thin, bare tree branches seemed to be holding the sun above the horizon. "It'll be dark soon," he said. "Is somebody staying with Marlee and her mom tonight?"

"That would be me."

His son's face clearly showed the deep desire for the night's watch to fall to him, but Stephen only nodded and said, "Good." Then he said, "It's your turn to fix dinner. What were you planning?"

Cork reached into his back pocket, drew out his wallet, and pulled from it a twenty and a ten. "I was planning on ordering pizza. Why don't you give Skye a call and ask if she'd like to join you?"

Stephen seemed reluctant.

"That's okay, isn't it?" Cork said.

"Yeah, sure, I guess."

"Good. I'm going to put a few things together for tonight."

Cork went upstairs, threw a change of clothing into a gym bag, tossed in a toothbrush and toothpaste. Back in the kitchen, he found Stephen on the floor spinning pan lids like tops, much to Waaboo's delight. Cork kissed the top of his grandson's head. "You be good," he said. He walked to the door, pulled on his boots, and took his coat from the peg.

"Dad, there's something else," Stephen said.

"What is it?"

Stephen seemed to wrestle with himself a moment, then shrugged. "Forget it. It can wait."

Cork snugged on his gloves and reached for the doork.n.o.b. "Call me if you need me."

He walked back into the steel blue light of that cold winter evening. The first stars were visible, and Cork headed quickly out of Aurora. As he drove, he tried to put events together in a way that made some sense. It was clear that someone wanted to send Ray Jay Wakemup a message, a brutal one. If it was the same person who'd followed Marlee and Stephen in the green, mud-spattered pickup, had he intended to use Marlee to send Ray Jay another message, one even more brutal? If so, why? Cork didn't know Wakemup well. He knew what most folks on the rez knew. Wakemup's life had been the kind that white people pointed to when they said Indians were hopeless. Like a lot of Shinn.o.bs, he'd grown up in foster care, shuffled from one family to another. At seventeen, he'd gone into juvie for boosting a car. He'd been high on alcohol and angel dust. After that, he was in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, though nothing so heinous that he did hard time. He wasn't dangerous. He was just someone who white folks-and most Ojibwe-thought of as shiftless.

His older brother, Harmon Wakemup, was a stark contrast. Harmon, who'd also graduated from the foster care system, had become a cop. He'd worked his way up and had been hired as chief of police in Bovey, west on the Iron Range. A few years later, he'd been tragically killed while helping a motorist who'd spun off the road one icy night. Another vehicle hit that same patch of ice and slid into Harmon, pinning him against the other car and crushing the life out of him almost instantly. His memorial service had been well attended by both whites and the Anishinaabeg.

Ray Jay was often compared to his older brother, and never in a good way.

Then there was their younger sister, Stella, who'd been adopted by a childless Ojibwe couple, Peter and Aurelia Daychild, owners of a small resort on Lake Vermilion. Despite their best efforts to raise her well, Stella ended up a wild one. She'd run away at sixteen, lived, by her own admission, a hard life in the Twin Cities, and had come back to Tamarack County the single mother of two children. Although in Cork's opinion, she'd come back a much wiser woman, the jury on the rez was still out on Stella Daychild. She'd been back nearly a decade, but that hadn't been long enough. On the rez, she was still trouble waiting to happen. Which, Cork thought, was probably why Carson Manydeeds had pa.s.sed along his friendly warning.

And Ray Jay? Had he grown any wiser with time? What Cork knew was that Wakemup had finally pulled himself together almost two years ago, joined AA, gone to some Wellbriety meetings on the Bois Forte Reservation, and been clean and sober since. What was, perhaps, even more important was that, as the result of Step 8 in the 12-step process, the step that required seeking out those you'd wronged in order to make amends, Ray Jay had come forward with information about an old murder in Tamarack County. If the story Ray Jay told was true, the legal system had sentenced an innocent man to prison for forty years.

And if it was true that such an injustice had been done, Cork O'Connor had been part of the broken system responsible for that travesty. It had happened this way.

He'd been a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff's Department for five years when Gerald and Babette Bowen reported their daughter missing. Karyn Bowen was a twenty-year-old college student home for the summer. The day she disappeared she'd told her parents she was heading to the Twin Cities for a rock concert and planned to stay the night at a hotel there. She never came home. Cork was well acquainted with Karyn Bowen. Twice that summer, he'd pulled her over in her red Corvette, once to deliver a warning about speeding and the next time to ticket her for the same offense. Roy Arneson, the Tamarack County sheriff at the time, was a good friend of Gerald Bowen, who'd made a fortune paving roads in the North Country. Arneson had taken care of the ticket, much to Cork's displeasure. In Cork's opinion, Karyn Bowen was a spoiled child and could have used a lesson in consequences.

After her parents reported her missing, two days pa.s.sed before Karyn's red Corvette was found parked on an old logging road south of Aurora. Karyn's nude body was in the trunk.

Along with his other duties, Cork was in charge of major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff's Department. He oversaw the processing of the scene, handling most of the responsibilities himself. There were bruises on Karyn Bowen's neck, and later the coroner confirmed that she'd been killed by manual strangulation. The coroner also found evidence of significant s.e.xual activity. There was skin under the fingernails of her right hand, which may have indicated she'd fought her a.s.sailant. In the glove box of the Corvette, Cork discovered a small amount of cocaine and several marijuana cigarettes that later a.n.a.lysis showed were laced with PCP, better known as angel dust. He found no fingerprints at all in the obvious places-door handles, steering wheel, seat belts, trunk-and understood that the car had been wiped clean.

In the course of his investigation, Cork learned that although Karyn had told her parents she was driving to the Twin Cities, she'd told one of her friends a different story, that she was planning to party all night, although she didn't say with whom. When Cork asked if Karyn had been dating anyone in Tamarack County, the girl's friend told him that she'd been seeing an Indian guy, but on the sly, since Karyn knew her parents wouldn't be too happy about it. The friend didn't know the ident.i.ty of the guy. She indicated that it was just like Karyn to do something that would p.i.s.s off her parents if they knew. Karyn liked doing things they would find objectionable, and although she was surrept.i.tious at first, at some point, she usually made sure they found out. She enjoyed tormenting them, her friend said.

Cork talked to a lot of folks on the rez, but no one could tell him anything. Roy Arneson was under a lot of pressure from Karyn's father-who contributed significantly to Arneson's reelection campaigns-and the sheriff rode Cork hard. Cork appealed to the community at large for any information that might help. His break came when Grady Lynde, a grease monkey at the Tomahawk Truckstop, called and told him that he'd seen the girl in the red Corvette come in a while ago. Lynde said she'd talked a long time and in a real friendly way with Otter LaPointe. LaPointe was one of the mechanics at the Tomahawk. His given name was Cecil, a name he hated and which no one who knew him used. He'd always been easygoing and on the playful side; Otter was what he preferred to be called. He was twenty-five, remarkably handsome, single, and full-blood Indian, a mix of Ojibwe and Cree.

The moment Cork walked into the service garage of the truck stop and saw LaPointe, the man's face pretty much gave away his guilt. There were scratch marks down his left cheek, the kind that came from fingernails. When he asked LaPointe if they could talk, the man's eyes became dark wells full of guilt. It was an easy initial interview. They moved outside and stood beside Cork's cruiser, LaPointe wiping his oily hands on a dirty rag, eyes riveted on his grease-caked fingernails, and without much prompting at all, LaPointe said simply, "Yeah, I killed her, and I'm sorry as h.e.l.l."

The story Otter LaPointe told was pretty simple. He'd fixed her car, given her some advice on how to take care of it, thrown her a pickup line while he was at it-something he often did with the attractive female customers-and she'd bit. They'd gone out a few times. They usually got a little high, partied at his place, and that was it. Nothing involving, just a good time. The night he'd killed her, they'd smoked what he thought was gra.s.s, but it had affected him differently. A lot of the night he didn't remember, but when he woke up in the morning, there she was beside him in bed, dead. He had no recollection of what had happened. He'd panicked, put her in the trunk of her car, driven out into the woods, parked the Corvette, and hiked back to Aurora. He said he'd kind of known that somebody with a badge would come for him, and in a way, he was glad that the waiting was over. He'd been afforded a speedy trial, very high profile in the North Country, and had been found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite the fact that Karyn Bowen had supplied the cocaine and the PCP-laced marijuana cigarettes, something Cork believed was a mitigating circ.u.mstance, LaPointe had been given the maximum allowable sentence under the law, forty years.

LaPointe had already served more than half that sentence when Ray Jay Wakemup had come forward with a story that cast a good deal of doubt on LaPointe's guilt.

The summer before last, as a result of the work the AA program required of him, Wakemup had visited LaPointe in the Stillwater Prison, just outside the Twin Cities. After the visit, Wakemup went to see Corrine Heine, who'd been the public defender for LaPointe in the murder trial. The story that he told Heine, and that Heine subsequently told the media, made headlines across the country. It was a story of the justice system gone terribly wrong.

The day Karyn Bowen died, Ray Jay Wakemup turned sixteen. He was living with a foster family, the fourth since he'd entered the system seven years earlier. His older brother, Harmon, lived on his own and was enrolled in a criminal justice program at Aurora Community College. He was going to be a cop. Harmon had promised his little brother a very special sixteenth birthday present. He picked him up that evening, and they headed to a house outside Aurora, which Ray Jay knew was rented by Harmon's best friend, Otter LaPointe. There was a red Corvette parked outside the house, and at first Ray Jay had thought the impossible, that Harmon was giving him the sports car as a present. Inside the house, he was greeted by the smell of frying hamburger. The table had been set for four, and there was a cake in the middle of it with sixteen candles. And there was a pretty blond woman standing beside LaPointe, smiling like she knew some important secret, and they all cried, "Happy birthday, Ray Jay!"

They ate hamburgers and coleslaw. They drank beer, and music played on LaPointe's tape deck. From her purse, the blonde, whose name was Karyn, took out cocaine, a mirror, and a razor blade, and they all snorted lines. She also brought out a hand-rolled joint, and they pa.s.sed it around. And then Harmon said maybe it was time for Ray Jay's birthday present. Ray Jay was feeling pretty unstable at this point, a little sick, in fact, but he said yeah, it was time. The blond woman gave him that smile again, the one that told him she knew absolutely something important, and she stood up, held out her hand, and said, "Ray Jay, honey, you come with me."

He tried to stand up but fell right over. Then he began to feel really sick to his stomach. His brother helped him into LaPointe's bathroom, where he proceeded to throw up his dinner and his birthday cake. He sat down beside the toilet and, because he felt like there was still more to come, was afraid to move far from the bowl.

Harmon left him there, and Ray Jay drifted off. He came to a while later, when Harmon and LaPointe lifted him off the bathroom floor and took him to the living room, where they laid him out on the couch. He remembered the blond woman sitting beside him, stroking his cheek, saying, "Poor baby." He remembered the music went on and on, all night it seemed, and whenever he opened his eyes, he saw them dancing, all of them together, the woman rubbing herself against both men. He remembered that the music finally stopped, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the living room. Later, he got up to pee, and when he laid back down on the sofa, LaPointe stumbled in from another room and slumped into a chair. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and he looked like he'd just run a marathon. His head fell back, and Ray Jay heard him begin to snore.

A little while later, Ray Jay woke again, this time to the sound of the toilet flushing, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the woman walking, stark naked, from the bathroom. She disappeared through a door to another room, and Ray Jay heard Harmon laugh from inside. Ray Jay had a pretty good sense of what he'd missed out on, but he was in no shape to try to remedy the situation.

The next time he woke up, he heard the birds singing, though it was still too dark to see anything outside the windows. What woke him was Harmon bending over Otter LaPointe, slapping his face and telling him to wake up, they had a problem. LaPointe was out cold, and despite Harmon's best efforts, he didn't stir. Harmon saw that Ray Jay was awake and told him to give a hand. Together they lifted LaPointe and dragged him to the other room, which turned out to be a bedroom. They laid him on the bed next to the woman who was naked and, Ray Jay thought, sound asleep. Harmon told him to go back out into the living room, and Ray Jay went. A little while later-Ray Jay had gone back to sleep-Harmon shook him roughly awake and told him it was time to go. There was light in the sky then, the first flush of dawn. Harmon drove Ray Jay to his foster home. But he didn't drop him off immediately. They sat in the car and Harmon talked to him, told him a story that scared the c.r.a.p out of him. The woman at LaPointe's place, Harmon said, was dead. Otter had killed her. He told Ray Jay that if he said anything to anyone, they were all going to jail. Ray Jay was old enough to be tried as an adult, Harmon informed him, and even though he hadn't killed the woman himself, he was there and any white jury would send him to prison for his part in it. Did he understand? Ray Jay was so scared and his mouth was so dry that he couldn't talk, so he just nodded. Harmon told him he would take care of things, but if Ray Jay ever opened his mouth, they were all dead men.

Ray Jay had lived in terror for days, and then LaPointe was arrested and admitted he'd killed the woman and said nothing at all about Harmon and Ray Jay Wakemup having been there. Ray Jay didn't know the why of it, but he was greatly relieved.

He followed the story in the papers-it was all over the North Country news-and many of the things he read bothered him. What bothered him most was that, besides LaPointe's own admission of guilt, the most d.a.m.ning evidence seemed to be the skin found under the dead woman's fingernails, and the fact that LaPointe had scratches down his cheek. And the reason this bothered him so much was that Ray Jay remembered no scratches being there at all when he and his brother had picked Otter LaPointe up from the chair in the living room and dragged him into the bedroom and laid him out on the bed beside the woman who had seemed to be merely sleeping but, he'd come to understand, was already dead.

And when he thought more about it, he realized that LaPointe had been sacked out in the living room chair in a stoned and drunken stupor when the woman had gone to the bathroom, naked, and then returned to the bedroom, after which the sound of Harmon's laughter had been clear.

And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it hadn't been LaPointe who'd killed Karyn Bowen.

He kept all this in his heart. He didn't dare speak to Harmon, who was p.r.o.ne to fits of rage. And then LaPointe was convicted and sentenced to forty years, a lifetime, it seemed to Ray Jay, and the truth became like razor blades in his heart. He had to tell someone.

He'd been raised Catholic, more or less-probably less than more-and hadn't been to confession in forever. But having no one else to advise him, he went to confession at St. Agnes. Ray Jay spoke to the priest there in vagaries about knowing a terrible truth that might get him into trouble if he shared it. The priest tried to pry out of him the exact nature of this truth, but Ray Jay didn't cough it up. In the end, the priest's advice was to unburden himself. Until he did this, Ray Jay's conscience wouldn't give him rest and his soul would carry a stain.

So, alone and more scared than he'd ever been, he went to the Tamarack County sheriff's office and asked to speak to the only cop he knew, Cork O'Connor, who was a breed, a man with Ojibwe blood in him. But O'Connor wasn't there, and the man who came out instead was big and red faced and smelled of cigars. He looked at Ray Jay in the way a lot of white people looked at Indians. He took Ray Jay back to his office and explained that he was the sheriff and whatever Ray Jay had to say to Deputy O'Connor could be said to him. So Ray Jay spilled his story. The sheriff listened and told him to wait and went outside for a very long time, and when he came back in, he brought with him two other men, neither of whom was Cork O'Connor. One man said he was Judge Carter, and he introduced the other as Sullivan Becker, the Tamarack County attorney. Judge Carter asked Ray Jay to repeat the story he'd told the sheriff, and Ray Jay did.

Afterward, all the men went back out and left Ray Jay alone. He had to pee, and he sat uncomfortable and fidgeting. He'd become sorry, very sorry, that he'd said anything to anyone, and he knew that Harmon would kill him when he found out, and all he wanted to do was run away. Finally, the men returned. The judge stood in front of him and looked down, and Ray Jay thought that G.o.d, when he sent someone to h.e.l.l, probably looked exactly like that. The judge told him that no one believed his story. The judge told him that if they did believe it, it would mean that Ray Jay would go to prison for the rest of his life. Did Ray Jay know what happened to boys who went to prison? They were sodomized. Did Ray Jay know what that meant? Ray Jay did, and Ray Jay didn't want that to happen to him. The judge told him to go home and to say nothing to anyone about this, ever. If he did, the judge would see to it that Ray Jay ended up behind bars, bent over and with someone's d.i.c.k up his a.s.s.

Ray Jay never said a word of this, not to anyone, until, at thirty-six years of age, he entered AA and tried to make amends.

When Corrine Heine made the whole thing public, a media circus had followed. Everyone a.s.sociated with the case was interviewed, including Cork, who maintained he'd known nothing about Ray Jay's story. Sheriff Roy Arneson had died of cancer several years earlier, so he couldn't shed any light. Judge Ralph Carter denied everything, as did Sullivan Becker, who, at the urging of an old law school cla.s.smate, had moved to Florida not long after the LaPointe case and gone to work for the Dade County DA, where he made a name for himself prosecuting organized crime.

The kicker was that LaPointe continued to insist that he had, in fact, committed the crime for which he'd been sentenced over twenty years earlier. When Heine vowed to get the case reviewed based on Ray Jay's account, LaPointe would not agree to be a party to it, and he'd stayed in jail.

After the story broke, Cork talked with Ray Jay Wakemup, who swore that every word of what he'd said was true. Cork had tried to see LaPointe, but the man was refusing visitors. In the end, as they always do, things settled down. The media moved on to other stories, and the questions surrounding the truth of Karyn Bowen's death became subjects of idle speculation, mostly over beer in the taverns of Tamarack County.

At the time, Cork had spent a good many restless nights considering his own culpability in all this. What he understood was that Ray Jay had not actually seen who committed the murder, and his perceptions, impaired by drugs, probably couldn't be trusted. There was LaPointe's continued insistence that justice had, in fact, been meted out correctly. And finally there was Roy Arneson, d.a.m.n him, who'd left Cork totally in the dark about Ray Jay's confession. Were it not for all these factors, Cork might yet have been plagued with guilt. But after a while he, too, let go of constantly mulling over the questions about that ancient case.

Eventually, the whole affair had faded away, even in the barrooms of Tamarack County.

Now someone had killed Ray Jay Wakemup's dog and left his head as . . . what? There'd been nothing to indicate the reason, no note except "Welcome Home, Ray Jay!" Yet, as he drove toward Allouette to make sure of the Daychilds' safety that night, Cork began to wonder if someone was finally calling Ray Jay to account for the sins of the past, sins still unforgiven.

CHAPTER 24.

When the doorbell rang, Stephen didn't respond immediately. He thought, This is what it's like here. Colder than you could ever imagine. Hope you enjoy it, Skye.

The bell rang again, and from upstairs, Jenny called, "Stephen, get the door."

He crossed the living room in no hurry, took hold of the doork.n.o.b, but gave himself another few seconds before opening up.

Skye Edwards stood in the light from the porch lamp, smiling at him out of the oval frame her parka hood created around her face. In one hand, she carried a big plastic bag with "Four Seasons" printed in elegant script across the side.

"Hi," Stephen said, with no great enthusiasm. He stood aside so that she could enter.

She brought the cold. It not only came in the air that entered with her but poured off her clothing. She made a brrrrr sound and stamped her feet and said, "Oh, G.o.d, I think my toes are going to fall off." She flipped the parka off her head. "Boozhoo, Stephen. Did I say that right?"

"Close enough," Stephen replied.

She shed her parka and glanced around. "Where should I put this?"

"I'll take it." He nodded toward her boots, which had carried in snow on their soles. "Leave those on the mat by the door." He hung the parka in the closet in the hallway.

Skye put down the plastic bag she carried, knelt and undid her laces. "Where's Jenny?"

"Putting Waaboo down."

"Oh, I'd hoped I could spend some time with him."

"Past his bedtime already."

"Next time," she said brightly and put her boots together on the mat. "Would you give this to him when he's awake?" She reached into the bag she'd brought and lifted out a stuffed orangutan two feet tall. "I picked it up in the gift shop at the hotel. I hope he likes stuffed animals."

"I'll give it to him," Stephen said.

He figured he should invite her into the living room, but instead he stood more or less blocking her entrance to the rest of the house. She kept on smiling, and her eyes went past him, taking in the living room and dining room.

"You have a lovely home here," she said.

"Yeah, well, I didn't have anything to do with that. I was kind of born into it."

"Lucky you," she said.

Jenny came down the stairs. "h.e.l.lo, Skye."

The two women embraced warmly, and Stephen felt something go hard in him, like a fist.

"Annie's told me so much about you, I almost feel like we're sisters," Skye said, holding both of Jenny's hands in her own.

"Do you have siblings?"

"A mean, older stepsister straight out of Cinderella. And a brother who's nowhere near as nice as Stephen." She threw him an easy smile.

"Come in, won't you?" Jenny invited and led the way into the living room. "Can we get you something to drink? Beer, wine, soda?"

"Red wine?"

"We have merlot."

"Perfect."

Jenny looked at the stuffed orangutan in Stephen's hands. "Where'd you get that?" she asked.

Skye answered, "I brought it. A present for Waaboo. I hope it's okay."

Jenny laughed. "It's perfect. Thank you. I'll give it to him when he's awake in the morning." She took the orangutan from Stephen and said to him, "You know where the wine is. And could you pour a gla.s.s for me, too? And one for yourself, if you'd like."

"Not of legal age yet," Stephen pointed out dourly.

"Special occasion," Jenny replied. "And just one gla.s.s. But only if you'd like."

What he'd like, he thought, was to get drunk, something he'd never done before. He went to the kitchen, got out three winegla.s.ses and the bottle, already opened, and poured wine for them all. When he came back to the living room, Jenny and Skye were on the sofa, laughing together.

"Before she wanted to be a nun, she was dead set on becoming the first female quarterback for Notre Dame," Jenny said.

"On the softball field, I've never seen a better pitching arm. She's amazing. Thanks, Stephen." Skye took the gla.s.s he offered. "What about you?" she asked Jenny. "Do you play softball?"

"Annie and Stephen got all the athletic genes."

Skye watched Stephen slump into an easy chair. "You play sports, Stephen?"

"I run."

"Cross-country," Jenny said. "He's good."

Skye said, "Annie's a runner, too. I admire the endurance it takes. Me, I like fast action."

Stephen hated this, the pointlessness of this kind of conversation. He wanted to say, "Why? Why Annie?" No, he wanted to shout it. And he wanted to shout, "Get out of Annie's life and leave her alone!" Instead, he sat and sulked while the two women carried on like old friends.

In a few minutes, the pizza arrived. Stephen had the dining room table already set, and Jenny had thrown a tossed salad together before she put Waaboo to bed. They ate, and Jenny and Skye drank more wine, and Stephen brooded.