Blood Hollow

23

Dorothy Winter Moon was in Jo’s office in the Aurora Professional Building. Cork knew this the moment he pulled into the parking lot. The enormous orange International dump truck she drove for the county was there, dwarfing all the other vehicles in the lot.

When he knocked, Jo told him to come in. Dot sat in one of the client chairs. She wore bib overalls with a dusty yellow T-shirt underneath, and the tan on her arms was even darker from the grime of her labor. Her old steel-toed Wolverines looked battle scarred and her face looked worried.

“I was telling Dot about the pubic hairs,” Jo said.

In the autopsy of Charlotte Kane’s body, the medical examiner had combed the pubic area and found hairs that didn’t appear to match the dead girl’s. The evidence had been sent to the lab of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul for DNA testing and to match against a DNA sample from Solemn. The report had come back that morning. The pubic hairs were not Charlotte’s, nor had they come from Solemn.

“That’s good, right?” Dot said.

“It’s a good-news, bad-news thing,” Jo replied.

Cork leaned against a windowsill and crossed his arms.

“The good news is that it indicates the last person to have sex with Charlotte wasn’t Solemn,” Jo said.

“The bad news?”

“Motive. The prosecution could argue that it proves Charlotte was seeing somebody else and that Solemn killed her in a jealous rage.”

“Seeing who?”

Jo looked to Cork.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he said.

“Can’t you tell from the DNA of those pubic hairs?”

“We need a sample to match them against, Dot. And for that we need a suspect and enough evidence to request that a sample be taken.”

“You don’t have a suspect?”

“Not yet.” Cork gave her a sympathetic smile. “How’re you holding up?”

Tough as she was, Dot seemed to soften in her chair. She stared down at her rough hands. “People are out at my place all the time now, reporters, assholes, all the time taking pictures, asking questions. Somebody broke the deer on my lawn. I’ve been keeping Custer locked in the house. All those people around, they’re driving the poor dog crazy.” She looked at Cork, then past him out the window. “It’s hard when I visit Solemn. He’s my son, but he isn’t. It’s like a stranger stepped into his skin. We don’t seem to know what to say.”

“It’s the situation,” Jo said. “It’s put a lot of stress on both of you.”

Dot handed Jo several papers. “Anything else you want me to sign?”

“No, that’s it.”

Dot tugged a pocket watch on a chain from her overalls. “Got to get back to work. Spreading gravel out at the fairgrounds parking lot today.”

“I’ll let you know when there’s anything new,” Jo said.

“Thanks.”

Dot gathered her hair back and jammed a red ball cap over it. Cork could hear the clomp of her heavy boots long after she’d closed the door behind her.

“Coffee?” Jo asked, rising from her chair.

“No thanks.”

She poured a mugful from a stainless steel server. “Well?”

Cork sat in the chair Dot had vacated. “I talked with Tiffany Soderberg. She says Fletcher Kane was creepy when it came to Charlotte. Watched her all the time.”

“Fletcher Kane is creepy, period. Proves nothing.” Jo sat down and sipped her coffee. “Okay, for the sake of argument, suppose there was something between daughter and father, that doesn’t mean he killed her. You’ve read the statement he gave about the night she disappeared. He was home. His sister corroborated his story.”

“And Glory’s conveniently gone now. He claims he doesn’t even know where. I’d love to have his phone records for the past couple of months. I’d bet there’s a good chance we’d find a number for Glory. Have you heard anything about the phone records for Valhalla yet?”

Cork had recommended that Jo subpoena the telephone record of the calls made to and from Valhalla on the day of the fatal New Year’s Eve party. He thought it might be enlightening to know whom Charlotte had talked to on the last day of her life.

“Nothing yet.” She looked at him and he could tell she was mulling something over.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I’m just wondering about due diligence.”

“What about it?”

“You seem to be looking at Kane and no one else. Isn’t that exactly what you accused Arne Soderberg of doing with Solemn?”

Cork pulled a small notepad from the pocket of his shirt. He put it on the desk where Jo could see. Written on it were four notations: Teachers. Doctor. Family Friends. Priest.

Cork said, “According to the academic record I got at the high school, Charlotte had four male teachers while she attended. She talked about one of them in particular. Her English teacher, Alistair Harding. He taught a poetry class she took fall semester last year. Her only official extracurricular activity was the school literary magazine. Harding was the advisor. He probably had a good window on her psyche. I’ll do some follow-up on him today.

“Her family doctor is Fiona Case. I think we can pretty much eliminate her as a suspect, but I’d still like to interview her.”

“Unless I can bring a successful motion to compel her to talk, you won’t get a thing out of her, Cork. Patient/client privilege. And the courts these days are extremely reluctant to allow medical records to be released or testimony to be given in instances where the victim’s sexual past might be an issue.”

“All right, then. We’ll put Dr. Case on the back burner for now. How about family friends? I’ve been thinking a lot about that one. Glory told me that Fletcher didn’t have friends. He had acquaintances, associates, colleagues, but no friends. And Glory, as nearly as I can tell, had only one close friend and that was Rose. We definitely need to talk to her.”

“I already did. She doesn’t know anything that would be useful. Glory was always very careful not to talk about the family.”

“That probably means there was a lot to hide. What about St. Agnes? Were the Kanes involved in the church community other than to attend mass?”

Jo shook her head. “Not in any significant way.”

“So they barricaded themselves in that big house and kept company mostly with one another.”

Jo looked at the final notation on the notepad. Priest. “You’re not serious about Mal.”

“Mendax, Jo. She was angry with him for some reason.”

“But Solemn believes Charlotte was involved with a married man.”

Cork took his notepad back and stood up to leave. “In the eyes of a lot of his parishioners, he is married. Married to the church.”

It was a busy day at Sam’s Place. At a break in the action, Cork turned to Jenny and asked, “Mr. Harding was your teacher for poetry last fall, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about him.”

Jenny put a basket of raw, frozen fries into hot oil. “He’s a good teacher.”

“What’s he like?”

She shrugged. “He’s very sensitive, I think.”

“Sensitive how?”

“Intuitive. Kind.”

“Married?”

“Mr. Harding?” She almost laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Dad, he’s gay.”

“What makes you think so?”

She lifted the basket, shook the fries to rearrange them, set the basket back in the oil. “Aside from being not married, he’s very neat, dresses nicely. And-well, it’s just something you get a feeling about.”

“A feeling,” Cork said. “But no solid evidence?”

“I never asked him, if that’s what you mean. Why all these questions?” She looked at him, and understanding came into her blue eyes. “Oh. Charlotte Kane’s married lover.”

It was sometimes difficult in the O’Connor household not to be overheard.

“You can forget about him, Dad.”

“Because you think he’s gay.”

“He goes home to England every year over the holidays. He was in, like, London or someplace when Charlotte was killed.”

A blue minivan pulled into the parking lot, and a half dozen teenagers piled out. Jenny turned toward the serving window. Cork scraped the grill and went back to this thinking.

Priest.

What did he know about Mal Thorne? What did anyone know? That he’d been in charge of a homeless shelter in Chicago and bore the scars of a knife attack by a couple of would-be thieves. Before that, a blank until his boxing days at Notre Dame. And before that, he’d been a kid from a tough section of Detroit. There were several important unknowns, among them the long period between college and Chicago, the reason a priest as capable as Mal ended up in a backwater place like Aurora, and why Charlotte was so angry with him.

When he had a few minutes, Cork went to the back of the Quonset hut and pulled out an old address book. It was a duplicate of the one he kept at home. He looked up a number, dialed long-distance to Chicago.

“You’ve reached Grabowski Confidential Investigations. I’m out of the office at the moment. Leave me your name and number and a brief message and I’ll get back to you, pronto.”

After the tone, Cork said, “Boomer, it’s Cork O’Connor. Been a long time, buddy. I need your help. Give me a call when you can.” Cork left two numbers, Sam’s Place and home.

He’d just hung up and was about to return to the serving area up front when the phone rang. He figured Boomer had been screening his calls.

It was Jo. She’d just received a fax of the phone records for Valhalla. Cork told her he couldn’t get away, but that he’d call Annie and have her pick them up on her way to work.

Things were busy the rest of the day, and it was late by the time Cork finally sat down at the old birch wood table in the back of the Quonset hut and looked over the phone records Annie had brought him. A lot of young people had known about the party. Several calls had been made from pay phones, so no way of telling who was on the line. The only items on the whole list that stood out for Cork were two calls placed from the home of Wilfred Lipinski, mayor of Aurora, one at 9:57 P.M. and another a 10:41 P.M. If Lipinski had teenagers who knew about the party at Valhalla, the calls would not have been odd, but all the Lipinski children were long ago grown and gone, and so Cork wondered. For a minute or two, he considered the possibility that the mayor might have been Charlotte’s mysterious married lover. But the idea of Wilfred Lipinski, who at sixty-two looked about as kissable as a cod, making love to the young woman was too much for Cork to imagine, and he dismissed it.

When he finally locked up and headed home, it was after ten o’clock. The longest day of the year was only a couple of weeks away, and a bit of light still lingered in the sky, a thin blue memory of day spread along the western horizon. A shaving of silver, all there was of a moon, hung above Iron Lake. The night was warm and liquid, and the color of everything melted toward black.

He took a detour and cruised past the sheriff’s office and jail. Across the street, the park where the believers and the curious gathered was almost empty. A few people still kept vigil. Cork recognized the couple who’d come from Warroad on the chance that Solemn’s touch would heal their wheelchair-bound son. Such desperation, Cork thought. Although he couldn’t bring himself to pray for them, he hoped that their own prayers were somehow answered.

Jo was already in bed when he got home, propped against her pillow with her reading glasses on and a stack of manila folders on Cork’s side of the bed. As he walked into the room, she lowered the papers in her hand.

“Late,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Just going over the phone records.”

He drew the curtains and began to undress. The house was quiet. The air in the room carried the scent of Oil of Olay.

“Find anything?” Jo asked.

“Not what I’d hoped.” Cork hung his pants on a hook in the closet and tossed his shirt and underwear into a wicker hamper. “No calls from Kane’s place that day.”

“Do you still believe Fletcher’s involved?”

“He’s put up a wall around almost every aspect of his life. I can’t help thinking he’s hiding something behind it.”

“He’s not a warm man,” Jo said. She cleared the files from Cork’s side of the bed and set them on the nightstand. “And granted, he’s odd in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t make him capable of the kind of things you want to ascribe to him.”

Cork pulled out a pair of red jogging shorts and put them on. “I haven’t ascribed anything to him. But I don’t think anybody in Aurora really knows Fletcher Kane. I don’t think anybody knows what he is or isn’t capable of doing.”

Jo spoke carefully. “I’m not saying he’s innocent, but I do think that if all you’re looking for is the bad in someone, that’s all you’re going to see.”

The image of the snakes on Fletcher Kane’s lawn that afternoon still haunted Cork. He was sure that what he’d seen was simply a trick of the light as the wind passed through the long grass in the shadows under the cedars, but the unsettling feel of it lingered.

“There was one thing odd about the phone records,” he said. “Two calls were made from Mayor Lipinski’s place.”

“Not so odd,” Jo said. She took off her glasses and set aside the papers in her hand. “Wilfred and Edith had a New Year’s Eve party. We were invited, remember? We declined. The calls were probably a couple of teenagers who’d been dragged to the party at the Lipinskis’ but were more interested in the one at Valhalla.”

“Probably,” Cork said. He eyed the stack of folders Jo had moved to the nightstand. “What’s that?”

“I’m going over all the statements given by the kids who were at Charlotte’s party that night, looking for anything I didn’t catch earlier. This is the umpteenth time. I think I can recite each one word for word by now.”

“See anything?”

She shook her head.

“Going to brush my teeth,” Cork said. “Be right back.”

He went into the bathroom and began brushing. He’d done only half the chore when a thought occurred to him. He hurried back to the bedroom.

“What if it wasn’t a teenager who made those calls?” he said.

Jo looked up from the papers in her hands. “An adult, you mean? What? Calling to check on a child she knew was at an unchaperoned party in the middle of the woods?”

“Not calling as a parent,” Cork said. “Calling as a lover.”

Jo thought about it. “Charlotte’s married man? That might be a stretch.”

“We won’t know unless we pursue it.”

Jo spent a few more moments weighing the possibility. “How do we check it out?”

“We need some information. The names of any teenagers at the Lipinskis’ party, and the guest list. You’re on the library board with Edith. Why don’t you call and ask her?”

“I’ll do it first thing in the morning.”

Cork went back to the bathroom and finished with his toothbrush. He knew Jo was right, that if all you looked for was the bad in someone, that’s all you’d see. Maybe his motive for focusing on Fletcher Kane wasn’t the purest, but that didn’t mean he was wrong in his suspicions.

Cork smiled into the mirror. His teeth, at least, were clean.