Tamarack County: A Novel Part 7

"A pickup truck."

"Color?"

"Maybe green, but I wouldn't swear to it."

"License plate?"

She shook her head. "So I have a stalker now? Great. When he finds out Dexter wasn't my dog, you think he'll do something else? Maybe something worse?"

"We don't know it was that guy. And whoever it was, maybe they'll consider it done, whatever point they were trying to make." Or, Cork hoped, would think it too risky now to try something else.

"And if it's not done?"

"Any of your male relatives willing to hang out at your place for a while?"

"I could tap a cousin or an uncle, I suppose."

"Until I have a better handle on things, that's what I'd suggest."

"You're staying on this?" She seemed surprised but not at all displeased.

"Tomorrow when it's light, I'll see if I can follow the trail of that snowmobile, find out where it leads."

She stepped to the porch rail, leaned her arms on it, and looked toward the woods and the vulture moon. "Jesus, what am I going to tell Ray Jay?"

"Ray Jay?"

"His dog. We're just watching Dexter while Ray Jay does his sixty days as a guest of the Tamarack County Jail."

"Another DWI?"

She shook her head. "He's been sober almost two years. Probation violation. They caught him poaching."

"If you'd like, I could ask the sheriff's people to look into this."

"No. Like you said, it's probably done. Just some guy being really s.h.i.tty and cruel."

She turned to him. Although it was bitter cold out, she hadn't b.u.t.toned her coat. Under it, she was dressed for her work tending bar at the casino. She wore a tight black sweater and, around her neck, a long gold chain that lay nestled in the valley between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She had on black slacks that snugged her narrow waist and hugged the admirable curve of her hips.

She caught him looking and said, as if disappointed, "Like what you see?"

"I'm sorry," he said. And he was. "You probably get stared at a lot."

"What bothers me is that there's so much more to me. But guys who stare don't care about that."

Cork had never thought of himself as that kind of guy, but here he was, caught dead to rights. It troubled him, and Stella must have seen that on his face.

"It's okay," she said, her voice softened. "Forget it." She snubbed out her cigarette, threw the b.u.t.t into the snow of the yard, and said, "I'm cold. What say we go back inside before they worry about us?"

Cork held the door for her and followed her into the house. "Time to go, Stephen," he said.

"I think I should stay," Stephen replied. "At least until Stella can get someone else to come."

"I'd feel safer, Mom," Marlee chimed in.

Cork could see the look of pleasure that put on his son's face.

"Would it be all right, Cork?" Stella asked. "He can sleep on the sofa. And by tomorrow, I'll have some family coverage."

What could he say? It made sense, yet it also worried him.

"Okay, but any sign of trouble, you call me, understand?" he cautioned.

"I understand," Stephen said.

"No heroics."

"Dad."

"All right. Give me the keys to Jenny's Subaru. I'll drive it home and leave you the Land Rover. I'll need it first thing in the morning."

"Ten-four," Stephen said. And he gave his dad the kind of smile he usually reserved for an equal and a friend.

Outside, Cork started the Subaru, but he didn't leave immediately. He sat for a little while thinking about Stephen and Marlee, and remembering the first girl he'd been crazy about. Her name had been Winona Crane, and although Cork had tried his best to win her, she'd given her heart instead to Cork's best friend. In the end, nothing good had come of it. Cork had hoped that Stephen, when he fell in love, might have an easier, more normal, experience. But given the way things were shaping up at the moment, that prospect looked pretty bleak.

CHAPTER 11.

On the way back to Aurora, Cork called Marsha Dross on his cell phone. She was still at the Judge's house.

"We've taken blood samples from the knife blade. They're already on their way to the BCA lab in Bemidji. We also took prints from the knife handle and from the tubing and the gas cans. We dusted the whole garage basically. We're also dusting her car."

"How's the Judge?"

"Rattled. p.i.s.sed."

"Worried about Evelyn?"

"He's making more of a stink about someone breaking into his house than about his wife still missing. I'm not sure how to read it. Does he not realize that things aren't looking good for Mrs. Carter? Does he just not care? Or is he not surprised that she may not be coming back?"

"Have you questioned him?"

"Waiting for his lawyer. He's old and mean as spit, but he's not stupid. This man's got the personality of a scorpion. How the h.e.l.l did he stay on the bench so long?"

"Connections. Political contributions. Entrenched cronyism. Voter apathy. Once judges are elected, they're hard to unseat, even bad ones. He sat on the bench during a couple of high-profile cases, and that didn't hurt him any either."

"Yeah, but one of those was Cecil LaPointe's conviction."

A case that Cork knew well and that didn't make him happy whenever he thought about it.

"The LaPointe case didn't come back to bite him in the a.s.s until long after he'd retired," he said. "Although it sure scuttled any kind of legal legacy he might have hoped to leave behind."

"Okay, tell me about the dog," Dross said.

"Brutal. Someone lured him with meat, then killed and decapitated him."

"Some kind of reprisal, you think?"

"Stella Daychild claims she doesn't know anyone who's that angry with her, but it may be a customer she wasn't nice enough to at the bar and who has a very mean and very vindictive streak in him."

"Christ, if that's the case, I'll nail his a.s.s to the wall."

"You want this one?"

"Does Daychild intend to file a complaint?"

"At the moment, she doesn't seem inclined."

"The truth is that with Ed Larson gone I'm going to be stretched pretty thin while we sort out what's happened to Evelyn Carter. Are you willing to hang in there with the Daychilds?"

"I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks, Cork."

"But I also want to be kept apprised of what's going on with your investigation of Evelyn's disappearance."

"It's a deal."

By the time he parked Jenny's Forester in the garage on Gooseberry Lane, it was nearing eleven. Inside the house, he found the first floor deserted, though a couple of lights had been left on so he wouldn't enter in the dark. Trixie greeted him at the kitchen door with a friendly woof, but when he flipped off the lights and headed upstairs, she returned to her dog bed near the patio door. The second-floor hallway was lit by a plug-in night-light shaped like a full moon with a pleasant, smiling face. In the night, when Waaboo woke and needed comfort, the soft light helped ensure that a sleepy Jenny-or sometimes Cork-didn't stumble into a wall by mistake. He paused at the open door to his grandson's room. The little guy was making noises, not happy ones, small whimpers. He'd twisted his sheet and blankets into a snarled heap, which he'd pushed against the wall. Cork stepped in, untangled the mess of bedding, and laid the covers over the child. As he was about to leave, Waaboo gave a sudden cry and sat up. He began sobbing.

Cork quickly picked him up. "It's okay, buddy. It's okay. Grandpa's here."

Waaboo wrapped his little arms around Cork's neck. "Dream," he said. "Bad dream."

"It's over," Cork told him. "All gone."

"Cared," Waaboo said.

"Scared of what?" Cork asked.

"Monter. Eat me."

Cork said, "I won't let any monster eat you, I promise."

It was clear that Waaboo was still upset, so Cork sat in the rocker in the corner near the window. His grandson lay against his chest, his head against Cork's cheek, his little heart to Cork's big heart. Cork rocked him gently, and in a few minutes, Waaboo was asleep again. Cork could have put him back to bed, but he liked the feel of the small body holding on to him.

Above him, Cork heard Anne pacing in the attic room. The floorboards creaked where she walked, and he could follow her from one side of the room to the other. His middle child had never been a worrier. Her faith had made her strong. But clearly, she'd lost something-that faith?-and with it had gone her certainty. He wished he could hold her, as he held his grandson, and a.s.sure her that what she'd lost wasn't lost forever, but she didn't seem to want that from him. Didn't seem to need that from him.

Cork felt weary, tired from the events of the day, but tired in another way as well. His children were grown or, in Stephen's case, almost grown. What they needed from him seemed only a thimbleful of what he'd once been asked to give. Long ago, looking toward the time when he might be free from all the demands made on a father, he'd thought it would be a relief, a great weight off his shoulders. But the truth was that it sometimes felt more like abandonment.

Anne's steps finally crossed the room to the set of narrow stairs that led down to the second floor. A moment later, she pa.s.sed Waaboo's door on her way to the bathroom. She caught sight of her father in the rocker, stopped, and gave him a questioning look.

"He's afraid of monsters," he told her quietly.

Anne stared a long time at her nephew, and in the dim drizzle from the night-light in the hallway, her face seemed inconsolably sad. She said, "Who isn't?"

CHAPTER 12.

The next morning, Stephen came home early, as promised, to deliver the Land Rover his father had left at the Daychilds'. He looked tired. He said he'd stayed up half the night talking with Marlee, trying to get her calmed down enough so that she could sleep. Cork wondered if talking was the only technique his son had employed. Stephen offered to go with him back out to the rez, but Cork told him to get some sleep, and Stephen was fine with that. He helped Cork hook the trailer with its snowmobile to the hitch on the Land Rover, then dragged himself inside.

On his way to the Daychilds' home, Cork stopped at the sheriff's department. Over coffee in her office, Dross told him what she knew.

Deputies Azevedo and Pender had spent the night running the prints they'd taken from the Judge's garage and his wife's car. There were lots of prints on the big Buick, but only one set matched those on the knife blade, the rubber tubing, and the gas cans. That one set belonged to the Judge. It would be natural, of course, to expect the Judge's prints to be all over the things he owned, so that in itself wasn't necessarily telling. What was telling, Dross said, was the interview she'd conducted with Ralph Carter once his attorney had arrived.

"He totally clammed up, Cork. Except for 'I don't know,' I couldn't get a word out of him. Did he have any idea why his wife might have gone to Saint Paul on Tuesday? Any idea why she didn't tell him? Any idea why, in fact, she'd lied to him about it? 'I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.' Broken record."

"Maybe he doesn't know."

"That's the thing. He's not a good liar. It was all over his face and in his body language. There's a lot he's not telling."

"Any word from the BCA lab on that blood sample you sent them?"

"I called Simon Rutledge, asked him to put a stat on it. He's seeing what he can do. It'll be a while."

"In the meantime?"

"If someone really did empty the tank on the car Evelyn Carter was driving, I'd like to understand how they got the cans out of and back into the garage." She sipped her coffee and said, as if offhand, "Of course, if it was the Judge, that wouldn't have been a problem."

"You ask him where he was the evening his wife went missing?"

"I did. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and told me, and I quote, 'I got one car, woman, and my wife was driving it that night. Where the h.e.l.l do you think I was?' I asked him if there was any way he could prove that, and his lawyer-"

"Abramson?"