Blood Hollow

4

April

When he was twenty-one years old and wild, before he settled down to study law, Oliver Bledsoe cut off half his right foot. He did it with a McCullough chain saw. He was employed at the time on one of Hutch Gunnar’s logging crews operating out of Babbitt, hired to limb and buck, which meant that he carefully walked the felled trees, trimming off their branches and cutting the trunks into sections to be hauled to the mill. In those days, he often showed up for work nursing a hangover. That morning, he showed up drunk. It was late autumn, and a light snow had fallen the night before. A hunter’s snow. Bledsoe, as he mounted the first downed tree, was amazed at the dreamy beauty of the woods around him. He was amazed, too, at his own agility as he scampered down the trunk, cutting to the right and to the left, swinging his McCullough nimbly as if he were some kind of dancer in some kind of dream. So deeply enraptured was he, and numbed from the alcohol, that he didn’t feel at all the cut of the chain saw as it sliced through the steel toe of his Wolverine boots. He didn’t even realize he’d carved off a good chunk of his own flesh and bone until he saw his blood staining the sheet of snow on the ground below him.

The accident turned out to be a wake-up call for Bledsoe, who exchanged his chain saw for a stack of law books and became a damn fine lawyer.

Although he liked to claim he’d cut off half his foot, in truth, it was maybe a tenth-his two smallest toes and a couple of inches north of that. And while he always made it known to his opponents on the basketball court that they were playing against a cripple, he still had the best outside jump shot Cork O’Connor had ever seen.

Cork and Bledsoe sat in the men’s steam room of the Aurora YMCA. Father Mal Thorne was with them, and Randy Gooding, too. They were part of the team officially known as the St. Agnes Saints, but usually they referred to themselves as the Old Martyrs, because on Saturday mornings during basketball season, week after week in the name of the church, they sacrificed themselves on the court. Although Cork’s faith had lapsed, playing with the Old Martyrs was one of the few ties he maintained with St. Agnes. It was something he did for his body; his soul was not an issue. He enjoyed the company of the men, liked how the games brought them together in an easy fellowship. Afterward, the team generally gathered in the steam room to let the wet heat melt the ache out of their weary muscles.

“More steam?” Mal Thorne asked. He got up from his bench and poured a bit of cool water from a bucket over the thermal mechanism mounted on the wall.

Father Mal Thorne’s nose followed a crooked line. It had been broken more times than he could remember during his Golden Gloves boxing days, and later when he was the middleweight intramural champ at Notre Dame. A thin braid of scar tissue crowned his left eyebrow, but there were also two long scars across his chest clearly unrelated to boxing. How they’d happened, no one knew. The priest refused to talk about it. As a cop, Cork had seen a lot of men in holding cells or on their way to prison with similar scars, usually the result of a knife slash. He knew that Mal had run a homeless shelter on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, a tough territory. He’d heard rumors that the scars had been delivered by hoodlums trying to rob the shelter and that Mal had used his pugilist’s skills to dis-abuse them of the notion. Cork had never pushed the priest for an explanation. A man’s past was his own affair, and he dealt with his scars in his own way. Mal Thorne wasn’t tall, but he was fast and aggressive, and a natural leader on the court, so usually he played point guard.

The wall vents began to hiss hot vapor, and Mal sat down.

“Heard you on the radio yesterday, Cork, tearing into Randy’s boss,” Bledsoe said.

He was talking about Sheriff Arne Soderberg who’d taken over the office from Wally Schanno in January.

“Tearing into Arne Soderberg?” Mal laughed. “I’d have loved to hear that. What did you do, Cork?”

It had been during Olaf Gregerson’s weekly call-in radio program All Around Aurora. Sheriff Soderberg was the guest. He’d spent most of the initial interview crowing about his accomplishments in just the few weeks he’d been in office. Once the phone line opened up for calls, Cork seized the opportunity to call and point out some of the cold realities that underlay the sheriff’s glowing assertions.

“I’ll tell you what he did,” Bledsoe said. “Old Arne claims that in the couple months he’s been sheriff, crime in Tamarack County has declined thirty percent over the preceding seven-month period.”

“Not true?” Mal said.

“Probably true,” Cork put in. “What I pointed out was simply that every winter, after the summer tourists and the fall color gawkers have gone, crime in Tamarack County drops, and after the fishing opener in the spring and all the tourists come back, the crime rate climbs back up. Arne’s taking credit for a pattern we’ve seen for years.”

“That was only the beginning,” Bledsoe said. “Cork took him to task for laying off officers and cutting programs in order to look good financially to the electorate when he runs for the state legislature, which everybody knows is his next move.”

Gooding said, “He came back from the radio station ready to draw blood, and he took a bite out of anyone in the department who looked cross-eyed at him. Thanks a lot, Cork.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I mean it. Thanks a lot. Somebody needed to say those things.”

Gooding, who sat next to Cork, stood up and began to stretch. His body was lithe and unmarred. That didn’t mean he had no scars. Cork knew that the wounds people carried didn’t always show on the skin. He was younger than the others, not quite thirty. Before coming to Aurora, he’d been with the FBI, assigned to the Milwaukee field office. He’d told Cork he left because the job turned out to be all paperwork, that he was a small-town boy at heart, and that he liked the idea of serving folks who would know him as a person, not just a badge. He was religious, very Catholic, a little pious maybe, but these days Cork tended to think that of almost anyone who attended church regularly. He sang in the St. Agnes choir and headed the youth program, where the kids adored him. He’d struck up a particularly good friendship with Annie, Cork’s middle child, because at one time he’d been in the seminary, and Annie, for as long as anyone could remember, had dreamed of being a nun. Annie insisted that she connected with him on a spiritual level, but it probably didn’t hurt that he was drop-dead gorgeous. An affable man, still a bachelor, he was considered a catch in Aurora, but so far as Cork knew he was seeing no one. He was the tallest of the Old Martyrs, and he played center.

Cork felt his own scars were insignificant, two bullet holes, an entrance wound the size of a dime on his right shoulder and a slightly larger exit wound on his back just below his right scapula. The bullet had shattered bone and loosed a flood of blood and had almost killed him, but unless someone pointed them out, he usually forgot about them.

Mal Thorne said, “You don’t think much of our new sheriff, Cork?”

Sweat dripped from the end of Cork’s nose. He sat naked on a towel, his back against the tiles of the steam room wall. The other men were all hazy figures through the hot fog. “For him the job’s about politics, not law enforcement.”

“Ever regret your decision not to run?”

“Not for a minute,” Cork said.

The door of the steam room opened. Cool air sifted in.

“Gooding? Deputy Gooding? You in there?”

“Yo, Pender. What’s up?” Gooding said.

“Sheriff wants you,” Pender called back.

“Hey, man. It’s my day off.”

“He says get your ass to the office now.”

“Is there overtime in it?”

“Close the damn door, Pender,” Bledsoe said. “You’re letting the North Pole in.”

“Not until I see Deputy Gooding stepping out.”

“Talk to him, Randy. It’s getting cold in here. I just saw a penguin waddle by.”

“I’m coming, Pender. Close the door.”

Gooding stood up, and the steam swirled as he moved.

“Think I’m done, too,” Cork said. He got up from the cedar bench. “Who do we play next week?”

“Team from the casino,” Bledsoe said. “The Five Card Studs.”

In the locker room, Randy Gooding and Deputy Duane Pender stood huddled in a corner near the showers. Gooding nodded a couple of times and finally said, “I’ll be out of here in ten.” Pender strode quickly out. Gooding went straight to his locker without bothering to shower.

When Soderberg became sheriff, he reorganized the department, cutting out the specialized units that Cork and Wally Schanno had created to focus on particular areas of crime prevention and investigation. That had pissed off a number of veteran officers, including Captain Ed Larson, who’d headed major crimes investigation for years and who, along with several others, had resigned. Now Gooding, because of his FBI training, generally handled the responsibility of investigating serious crimes, but he had no special rank or title and got no extra pay for it. He did it, he said, because he loved the work, something Cork understood.

“What’s up, Randy?” Cork asked. “Pender looked pretty serious.”

Gooding glanced around to confirm that they were alone. “Couple of hikers found a body buried in snow up on Moccasin Creek. Young. Female.”

“Charlotte Kane?”

“Won’t know for certain until we get there. But that’s sure what I’m thinking.”

“Where on Moccasin Creek?”

Gooding started to answer but caught himself. “Unh-uh. No way. I can tell what you’re thinking. Cork, this kind of thing isn’t your business anymore.” He opened his locker and began to dress. “Don’t take this wrong, but when I worked the field office in Milwaukee, we had a couple old agents who’d retired and couldn’t stand it. Those guys were always dropping by the office, adding their two cents to everything. Became a real pain in the ass.”

“I froze for nearly a week trying to find her.”

“Sixty other people did, too. You don’t see them clamoring for a glimpse of the body.”

“Where on Moccasin Creek?”

“Look, you show up and the sheriff’s going to know who clued you in. He’ll ream me.”

“I’ll swear it wasn’t you.”

“He’s not stupid.”

“Jury’s still out on that one. Come on, Randy. Where?”

Gooding stroked his beard, a trim strip of reddish hair that formed a triangle around his mouth. He often said that tolerance of facial hair was one of the things he liked about working on a rural police force. He shook his head and gave in. “Footbridge about a quarter mile north of the trailhead off County Five.”

“I know it.”

The deputy slipped a T-shirt over his head, then bent to put on his boots. When he’d tied them, he straightened and shot Cork a guilty look. “Give us a head start at least.”

As Gooding exited, Mal Thorne came around the corner from the steam room, a towel wrapped around his waist. He glanced at Gooding’s back, then at Cork, who was just beginning to dress. “Neither of you showering? What’s so important?”

“A body’s been found in the snow up on Moccasin Creek.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just east of Valhalla.”

“A woman’s body?”

“Yes.”

“Charlotte Kane?”

“Can’t say for sure. But I don’t know of any other women who’ve disappeared here in the last few months.”

“I’d like to go with you.”

Cork didn’t answer.

“You’re going,” the priest said. “That’s why you’re not showering.”

“It’s a closure thing for me,” Cork said.

“I’ve got plenty of reason, too.”

Cork started to object but realized Mal Thorne had given every bit as much of himself as Cork had in the bitter, cold days during the search for Charlotte Kane. He nodded toward the priest’s locker.

“Better get dressed then. I’m not taking you naked.”