Boundary waters

30

The Tamarack County Courthouse was built in 1896 with timber money. Constructed of honey-colored blocks quarried in the Minnesota town of Sandstone a hundred miles south, the courthouse stood three stories high and was crowned by a beautiful clock tower. If the passage of time were truly marked by the tower clock, the town of Aurora would have been standing still for thirty years. For three decades, time had been frozen at twelve twenty-seven. The story was that the hands had stopped at the exact moment Corcoran O’Connor’s father died. It might have been true. Both the clock and William O’Connor were hit during a wild exchange of gunfire between officers of the sheriff’s department and two escapees from the state prison in St. Cloud. The men had paused in Aurora on their flight to the Canadian border in order to rob the Citizen’s National Bank. Sheriff William O’Connor and two deputies responded to the silent alarm. Cork’s father put himself between a round from a stolen deer rifle and Louise Gregory, a short-tempered old woman deaf as a brick, who’d walked unknowingly into the melee. Every few years, the town council debated fixing the clock-debated renovating a lot of the old courthouse-but they always balked. Partly this was because the clock was seen as a kind of monument to something noble and heroic, and partly it was due to the fact that the repair would have cost a small fortune. So, like much in Aurora, things stayed pretty much the way they were. However, there were new names on the roster of the town council and new revenues coming in from business generated by the casino, and people seemed more willing-eager, even-to put a new face on the town. There was talk of a whole new county court complex that would house the sheriff’s department and county jail as well.

All this was possible, Jo O’Connor granted, but as she sat in court that gray October morning listening to the ancient heating pipes cough and grumble, passing gas and water like old men, she knew nothing changed very quickly in Aurora. And, she was surprised to realize, she liked it that way.

The pipes, Judge Frank Dziedzic had warned after he convened the proceedings, were going to be distracting. He apologized and promised that the heating system was being worked on and urged all parties to be patient and make the best of it. By the time Wally Schanno appeared in the back of the courtroom shortly before noon and signaled to her, Jo was more than ready to request a recess. She didn’t have to. Opposing counsel Earl Nordstrom, while attempting to introduce into evidence a waiver of easement rights signed by the Iron Lake Reservation tribal council, was finally drowned out in a clatter of rattling metal that made him crush the document in his hands. Judge Dziedzic was favorably disposed to granting his request for a continuance until the heating was fixed.

Jo gathered her papers and turned as Schanno approached the plaintiff’s table.

“Got some interesting news,” he told her. “The Bureau people I know did some checking for me. At least some of what you were told is true. Special Agent in Charge Booker T. Harris of the Los Angeles field office is officially on personal leave. There’s not, at this time, any official Bureau involvement in the investigation of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Dr. Patricia Sutpen. And there are currently no Bureau personnel with the names of Virgil Grimes or Dwight Sloane.”

Jo snapped her briefcase shut. “Special Agent in Charge Harris didn’t go into the Boundary Waters, did he?”

“No, he’s out at the Quetico.”

“I think we should pay him a visit, don’t you, Wally?”

Schanno drove them out in a sheriff’s department cruiser. The wind that had come the night before, bringing the clouds and the cold, had stripped the color from the trees. Wet leaves plastered the roadways. The limbs of the birch and aspen that lined the shore of Iron Lake were absolutely bare. Jo stared at the trees as they passed, and the bared branches made the world look fractured.

Like all the cabins at the big new resort called the Quetico, Harris’s cabin stood on the very shore of Iron Lake, surrounded by hardwoods and evergreen in a way that made it feel completely isolated. It was a beautiful pine log structure, two stories, with a screened porch in front and wide glass windows all around. Smoke poured from the stone chimney. All the curtains were drawn.

Jo opened the porch door and stepped in. Schanno followed. The porch was furnished with cane chairs and table, a bentwood rocker, and a standing brass lamp. The wood burning in the fireplace inside the cabin scented the air. Jo knocked on the door, waited a five count, then knocked again. As she raised her fist a third time, the door opened. Booker T. Harris filled the doorway.

“Agent Harris,” Schanno said. “We need to talk.” Harris didn’t reply. His eyes shifted toward Jo.

“This is Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor is her husband,” Schanno told him.

“Ms. O’Connor.” He nodded politely, but his courtesy had a grim edge.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Jo said.

“I’m afraid that will have to wait. I’m busy at the moment.” His gaze shifted again to Schanno. “Couldn’t we arrange to speak in your office later, Sheriff? Say in an hour?”

“The answers we need can’t wait,” Schanno replied.

“It’s impossible for me to talk to you now.”

“Impossible?” Jo said. “I’ll tell you what’s impossible. To believe anything that you tell us is the truth, that’s what’s impossible. So far, you’ve misrepresented facts, framed an innocent man, and may very well have put in jeopardy the lives of several people, including a child.”

Schanno said, “We talk now, here, or I’ll place you under arrest and we’ll all go down to my office and talk there.”

“Arrest me for what?” Harris asked.

“Something along the lines of criminal misconduct, pending an investigation by the Bureau’s OPR. I called the resident agents in Duluth. They contacted the L.A. field office. There is no official investigation here.”

“Ah.” Harris looked behind him and to his left. “Just a moment.” He waited, his eyes tracking something neither Jo nor Schanno could see. “Maybe you’d better come in,” he finally said.

Harris pushed the door open wide and moved away. Inside, the cabin was plush. Wormwood paneling on the walls, thick beige carpeting, brown leather sofa and love seat facing a big fireplace made of brown stone. The far wall was mostly glass looking onto a scene in which the gray water of Iron Lake and the gray drip of the sky merged in a dismal, seamless curtain. The room was lit with lamplight and the flicker from logs burning in the fireplace.

Harris wasn’t alone in the cabin. The other man was slender, early fifties, his hair long and silver and pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a hooded gray sweatshirt, the hood thrown back, with STANFORD printed in red across the chest. His jeans were neatly creased and he wore expensive Reeboks. He stood near the fireplace, beside a map-a topographical map of a section of the Boundary Waters-taped to the wormwood paneling. On a table near the long glass windows sat a large radio transmitter, a laptop computer, and several other pieces of electronic equipment.

Although the room was full of the smell of the burning pine logs, there was another odor in the room, less appealing to Jo. Cigar smoke.

“Jerome Metcalf,” Harris said, introducing the man with the silver hair.

“Another agent?” Schanno said skeptically.

“A consultant,” Harris clarified. “Communications, electronics, that kind of thing. Jerry, this is Sheriff Wally Schanno and Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor’s wife.”

“How do you do?” Metcalf made a slight, gracious bow with his head.

“Not too well, thanks,” Schanno said. “I feel like a trout being jerked around on a line. I need some straight answers.”

“We’ll see what we can do, Sheriff,” Harris said.

His brown skin wore a sheen of perspiration that glistened in the firelight. His blue work shirt was wet at the collar. The room was warm, Jo thought, but not that warm. The man was scared.

“Why don’t we start with a simple question,” Jo suggested. “There is no official FBI involvement in the investigations of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Patricia Sutpen. So why are you here?”

Harris opened his hands as if to show the sand-colored palms concealed nothing. “I assure you, we’re here at the request of the California authorities.”

“Which authorities?” Jo asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Isn’t it true that your involvement is at the request of one authority? Your half brother, Nathan Jackson?”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Is it true?”

“I’m not prepared to answer-” Harris began to say.

“And isn’t it true that your involvement in the investigation of the murder of Marais Grand fifteen years ago was also because of your brother? Were you trying to cover up your brother’s relationship with Marais Grand, Agent Harris? To save his political career? Maybe even to help him get away with murder? And is that why you’re here now?”

She was out on a limb, and she knew it. One of the first tenets she’d ever learned in cross-examining was never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

“These are serious accusations,” Harris cautioned.

“I don’t hear you denying them,” Schanno said.

Harris walked to the window. Against the gray outside, he looked like a shadow as he stood considering. But Jo’s attention was momentarily captured by a slice of light that appeared at the top of the stairs, as if someone down a hallway there had opened and closed a door very quickly.

“You have a reputation as a strong advocate of civil rights, Ms. O’Connor.” Harris didn’t turn, speaking instead as if Jo were beyond the glass he faced. “You’ve got an impressive history of helping the Chippewa people here.”

“They prefer to be called Anishinaabe,” she told him. “Or Ojibwe. Chippewa is a white term.”

“Whatever.” He slowly turned around. “My point is that you understand the importance of the issue of civil rights.”

“Actually, I’m having trouble understanding your point.”

“Sheriff, do you mind if Ms. O’Connor and I have a word alone?”

“I mind,” Schanno replied.

“Ms. O’Connor, I’d rather speak to you in private. It’s important. And I promise, your questions will be answered.”

Jo figured what the hell. “Wally?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Please,” Harris said. And he seemed sincere.

“You want me to leave?” Schanno asked.

“No. We’ll just step upstairs. Jerry, get the sheriff some coffee or whatever he’d like. Ms. O’Connor, if you’ll follow me.”

Harris led the way up the stairs, turned down the hallway, and knocked at the second door. Inside, someone called out evenly, “Come in.”

He was over six feet tall, the man who waited in the bedroom. Early fifties, trim and fit. He wore indigo jeans, a yellow lamb’s wool sweater, and a gold chain. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, appraising her as if he were an officer gauging a new recruit. His eyes were quick and intelligent in a face so lightly colored and softly featured that he could have passed for a beachcomber instead of an African American. Except for the gray that salted his hair, he looked no different from the first time Jo had seen him many years before in Chicago.

“Ms. O’Connor,” Nathan Jackson said, “I suspected it was only a matter of time before we met.”

Harris offered her a chair, but Jo preferred to stand.

“Then it’s true,” she said. “You were involved with Marais Grand.”

Nathan Jackson held a cigar in his left hand and gestured with it as he talked so that he seemed to write in the air with smoke. “Marais and I were lovers for a time, yes. But I certainly didn’t have anything to do with her murder. Nor would I ask my brother to compromise himself by participating in a cover-up of any kind. I’d be very interested in knowing how you came to make these accusations.”

“I had a visit this morning from Vincent Benedetti.”

Jackson froze and cast his brother a cold look. “Here? He’s here?”

“That explains a lot,” Harris said grimly.

“Explains what?” Jo asked.

“What did Benedetti say?” Harris pressed her.

Jo eyed them both. For brothers, they were not much alike. Harris was small, dark, broad in the features of his face. Jackson was tall, light as a chamois cloth, and as smooth. But then, they’d had different fathers. However, they were both the same in how they regarded her, with eagerness and concern.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Jo told them. “You tell me why you’re here, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

Harris gave his brother a quick shake of his head. But Nathan Jackson said, “I don’t think we have much choice, Booker. Ms. O’Connor, I’ll put a condition on this. What I tell you doesn’t leave this room. I’ll be perfectly candid, but I want your promise-your word-that you’ll keep this information confidential.”

“I don’t think I can agree to that.”

“The lives of people we both care about are at stake here,” Jackson said. “For you, your husband.”

“And for you?” she asked.

Jackson collected himself before he spoke, as if he’d been holding this in for a long time. “My daughter. Shiloh.”

“Your daughter?” Jo knew surprise lit her face like a flare, but the statement caught her so off guard.

The sky had darkened more. Against the bedroom windows, the drizzle began to mix with flakes of snow. Harris turned on a lamp on the stand beside the bed.

Nathan Jackson settled his cigar in an ashtray on the stand by the bed and offered Jo a photograph from his wallet. The photo was old but protected by a vinyl cover.

“It’s the only picture of Marais and me together. That was in the old days before she was famous and we both had to be so careful about everything.”

They were young and smiling. Marais Grand wore a white summer dress. Her long black hair hung over her right shoulder in a single braid. Her skin looked deeply tanned, but Jo guessed it was the evening light and Marais’s Ojibwe heritage. They stood in front of a white picket fence. Beyond that, a cypress tree partially blocked a dark blue ocean descending into night. They were holding hands.

“When was it taken?”

“The summer of 1970. I met her at a fund-raising rally for Angela Davis. We ran into each other at a lot of gatherings like that. I’d be there to speak, Marais to sing. The difference in us was that I believed in what I was saying.”

Harris made a sound like a blast of steam from a broken pipe. He didn’t bother to hide the derisive look on his face. “Cut the bullshit, Nathan. No voters here.”

Jackson went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “Marais, she’d sing anything people wanted to hear. Just so they’d listen and remember her. My God, she was good. And so beautiful. And so damn certain she was going to make it. I’m not sure I’ve ever known any body who had a better sense of exactly what they wanted.”

“That’s when you were lovers?”

“The first time.” Jackson took the photo back. He squinted at it as if he were trying to read the faded etching on a gravestone. “We went separate ways after that. Marais got an offer in Vegas along with Willie Raye, whom she’d hooked up with professionally. I defended the Watts Eight, and that was my ticket up.” He put the photo back into his wallet.

“I didn’t see her again until the Williams Commission hearings three or four years later. She came to see me because her name was on the witness list and I was chief counsel for the commission. She was worried that if she testified it would ruin a television deal in the works for her and Arkansas Willie. She asked me to take her name off the list.”

“And you did,” Jo said.

He nodded, with a faint smile. “The commission was bogus anyway. Congressman James Jay Williams’s version of the McCarthy hearings. Made him famous for a while. And gave me a foothold in politics. Marais and I became lovers again, briefly and very secretly. Then she told me she was pregnant. But she didn’t want anything from me. She told me she was leaving for Nashville to film her television show and that she was going to marry Arkansas Willie so the baby would have a name. She asked me if I minded. What was I going to say? To marry her was out of the question. We were going in such different directions. And to make public our liaison in that way and at that time would have ruined me. I said I didn’t mind. Didn’t mind,” he said with loathing. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He rolled the cigar between his fingers, studying the long ash, shaking his head faintly. “She was true to her word. She never asked me for anything. But she sent me pictures of little Shiloh once in a while. Here. This was the first. In over twenty years, it’s never left my person.”

He took out another photograph protected in clear vinyl. Shiloh at eighteen months in a white dress in a photographer’s studio. Jo had seen one exactly like it before in the trembling hands of Vincent Benedetti. She turned it over. The words on the back were in the same handwriting as those that had appeared on the photo in Benedetti’s possession.

Nathan-she barrels around like a fullback, knocking over everything. She has your nose and intelligence. My skin. My mother’s eyes. Marais.

“Shortly before her murder,” Jackson went on, “Marais moved to Palm Springs. She was tired of television and eager to do something different. I think she and Willie Raye were ready to call it quits. They’d played out the charade of their marriage long enough for both of them. Marais wanted to embark on a new enterprise. A recording company. She was smart. She’d investigated the angles and knew there were lots of incentives in California for minority businesses, many of them programs I’d championed. She came to see me. Told me she was prepared to do whatever was necessary to make sure she qualified. She didn’t need to do anything and she knew it. She was just testing. She brought Shiloh. It was the first time I’d ever seen my daughter, ever touched her hand. You can’t imagine what that felt like.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“It was as if from the moment Marais let me know that Shiloh was born and I couldn’t share that, I’d been living with a shattered heart. But suddenly all the pieces had been brought back together. I’d have done anything Marais asked just to be able to be with Shiloh again. Then Marais was murdered.”

“Why didn’t you come forward about your relationship to Shiloh?”

“I was afraid. It was a very confusing time.”

“And you were on a political express that might have been derailed,” Jo said.

“I know it sounds callous. I had Dwight Sloane assigned to the case. Dwight and I go way back to the old days in Watts. Practically like brothers. And I pulled a lot of strings to get Booker assigned by the Bureau. Because of Benedetti’s suspected ties to organized crime, they were willing to come in under the RICO statute. I had to know what was going on.”

“What was going on?” She looked directly at Harris.

“A lengthy, ultimately fruitless investigation,” Harris said.

“It was Benedetti,” Jackson insisted. “We just couldn’t prove it.”

“His motive?” Jo asked.

“They’d been lovers once. He wanted to start again. She told me she’d borrowed a hefty sum from him to start Ozark Records and he’d indicated he’d be willing to accept sex in lieu of interest. She wanted it strictly business. They argued-in public, in front of witnesses-the day before she was killed. Her murder was a hit, Ms. O’Connor. And it was Benedetti who arranged it. We just weren’t able to prove anything. If Benedetti’s here now, it’s to silence Shiloh, to keep whatever she remembers about that night from being told.”

Jo said, “The men who are here with you, they were all involved in the original investigation. Why are they here now?”

“They know the case. They owe me favors, and I wanted this done quietly. As soon as the tabloids get hold of this information, every lunatic this side of the Atlantic will be here trying to spot Shiloh. We hoped to do it so that Benedetti wouldn’t know either. I guess we blew that.

“If Benedetti’s men are out there, your husband, the boy, the others, they’re all in danger.” He held out his hands, empty. “That’s everything. I swear. Now you.”

“I spoke with Benedetti this morning,” Jo said. “He told me a story every bit as interesting as the one you’ve just told. Only in his version, he’s Shiloh’s father and you’re the man who killed Marais Grand.”

“What?”

Jo recapped Benedetti’s version of Shiloh’s origin and Marais Grand’s demise. Nathan Jackson listened with his jaws working back and forth like a silent engine powered by rage.

“The lying bastard. His daughter?”

“His story sounds no less plausible to me than yours.”

Jackson thrust the photograph of Shiloh at her. “Just look at her. She looks like me.”

“Vincent Benedetti is convinced she looks like him. We believe what we want to believe.”

“If Benedetti’s here, Nathan, we need to talk to him,” Harris said. “Maybe we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on out there.”

“What do you mean, what’s going on out there?” Jo looked from one to the other. “Don’t you know?”

The two brothers exchanged a glance. Harris said, “There’s a problem.”

“What problem?” Jo demanded.

“I think we should go downstairs.” Harris moved toward the door. “Metcalf can explain this. And Nathan, it’s time we brought the sheriff in, don’t you think?”

Jackson’s eyes fed on the photograph of Shiloh. He looked like a man worried it would be his last meal.

Downstairs, Schanno and Metcalf were at the map. Schanno saw Nathan Jackson, but probably didn’t recognize him. He looked unhappy and he looked at Jo.

“Got a problem, Jo,” he said.

“So I understand.”

“You told him?” Harris asked Metcalf.

“The essentials,” Metcalf replied.

“Will someone please tell me?” Jo said.

Metcalf beckoned Jo to the wall map.

“The last communication we had with Dwight Sloane was yesterday. Five-oh-eight P.M. Here.” He put his finger on a lake called Embarrass. “He should have checked in four hours later. He didn’t. At first light this morning, I went out in a helicopter to their last known coordinates. They weren’t there. I circled the area, but unfortunately with this weather, I couldn’t see much.”

“So the situation is, you’ve been out of touch with them since almost the beginning,” Schanno said unhappily.

“Essentially, that’s correct,” Metcalf admitted. “Probably it’s an equipment failure. The fact that we found no trace of them at the last coordinates indicates that they’re still moving.”

“But you have no idea where,” Schanno said.

“No,” Metcalf admitted.

Schanno rubbed his jaw and slowly shook his head. “Embarrass Lake. Not good.”

“Why?” Harris asked.

“The lake’s roughly circular,” Schanno explained. “There are easily half a dozen trails that lead off from various points around the shoreline.”

Harris said, “Then we do an aerial search along each trail until we spot them.”

“In that?” Schanno indicated the weather visible through the glass doors. “You couldn’t find the Eiffel Tower in that.”

“Suggestions?” Harris continued, unfazed.

“We get the Tamarack Search and Rescue Team to put men on every trail,” Schanno said.

“How soon?” Nathan Jackson asked.

Schanno looked at him and must have decided that whoever he was, he was in it as thick as the rest. “They could be on the ground at Embarrass Lake in a couple of hours. We should get them started right away. With this cloud cover, dark’ll come early. They won’t have much daylight left.”

“It’s better than sitting around waiting,” Metcalf put in.

“Have it done.” Jackson turned to Jo. “I want to talk to Benedetti.”

“I can arrange that,” she replied.