Iron Lake

26

THE JUDGE’S ESTATE occupied the whole tip of North Point. The property was shaped roughly like a fingernail, and along the shoreline grew a wall of tall pines. Cork guided the Bronco off the ice through a gap between the boathouse and the trees and parked where the vehicle couldn’t be seen. He got out and waded up the steep slope of the grounds toward the house. In the stillness he could hear the steady whine of a snowmobile cutting across the ice, heading back toward Aurora from one of the many ice huts on the lake. He looked back, but the darkness and the gentle snowfall kept him from seeing anything.

The patio doors were locked, but Cork was surprised to discover that a small pane in the mullioned window of the kitchen door had been broken and the door was unlocked. Carefully he pushed it open. From inside came a startling clatter. He stepped hurriedly into the kitchen and found that he’d knocked over a brown paper bag full of empty aluminum cans that appeared to have been saved for recycling.

The kitchen smelled of garbage souring somewhere out of sight. In the living room, the curtains were open, letting in a pale white light from the snow outside. The house was absolutely still and very cool.

He had only a vague idea of what he was looking for. The judge hadn’t been a tremendously charismatic or beloved man, but he had nonetheless been a powerful political figure in the Iron Range. Power had many sources besides charisma. Money was one. Although Robert Parrant had been a wealthy man, Cork figured it would have taken a hell of a lot more than even the judge had to maintain his hold on a population as independent as that of the Iron Range. Power also came from leverage. The bloody folder with the judge’s doodling all over the cover, the folder that held such graphic evidence of Jo’s infidelity, that was one kind of leverage, and was certainly in keeping with the character of the judge. It was entirely possible that the judge’s death had something to do with that kind of leverage.

Cork crept down the short hallway to the study. The curtains were closed and the room quite dark. He made his way to the desk and fumbled to turn on the lamp. When the light came on, he heard a discreet cough behind him. He turned quickly and found himself staring across the room at Wally Schanno, who stood in front of a wall lined with bookshelves.

“Evening, Cork,” Schanno said. In one hand he held a flashlight. In the other was a gun pointed directly at Cork. Stacks of books pulled from the shelves lay on the floor at Schanno’s feet.

“Library closed?” Cork asked.

Schanno glanced down at the books, but didn’t smile.

Cork jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. “Window’s broken. Wasn’t me.”

“I know,” Schanno said.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“It’s been a tough week. Not much surprises me now.”

“What are you doing here, Wally?”

“Police quarantine. I’m allowed here. The real question is what are you doing here?”

Cork glanced around the room. “Lights off. Bookshelves ransacked. And you even have a thermos of coffee. What’s going on, Wally?”

Schanno narrowed his eyes severely. “I look at things on the surface and what I see is you, Cork. The judge is dead and there you are. Lytton’s killed and there you are again. On the surface, looks like I ought to suspect you like hell.”

“Do you really think I killed those men?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. A man can always be wrong in his thinking. I try to look at the facts.” He holstered his gun. “I sent Ed out this afternoon to check on your story about Henry Meloux and that—what did you call it?”

“Windigo.”

“Yeah, that. Old Meloux told Ed he didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.”

Cork relaxed against the judge’s big desk. “That doesn’t surprise me. Ed’s white.”

“The old man lied?”

“Sure. If you were crazy enough to indict me, he’d tell the truth. In the meantime, there’s no reason. He knows you’d just look at him like he was goofy.”

“Or like maybe he had something to do with killing Lytton,” Schanno suggested.

“I’d consider a lot of other people before I’d consider him,” Cork replied.

Schanno took a deep breath, then reached down toward the floor for his steel thermos and poured himself some hot coffee. “You told me a lot of stories without much of anything to back them up. The break-in at your place. The condition of the judge’s body. Somebody shooting at you out at Lytton’s.”

“They weren’t stories, Wally.”

Schanno took a sip of his coffee, drawing his throat tight against the heat. “You’re a hard man to disbelieve.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “I came here the night after the judge died to look things over for myself, see if I could find anything we missed. I surprised somebody coming in the side door. Don’t know who. They got away. I’ve been here a lot since then, checking to make sure things stay secure, and still looking for anything that might support your claim about the judge’s body being moved.”

Cork looked down at the books pulled from the shelves. “Find anything there?”

Schanno set his coffee on an empty shelf and walked to the big desk. The mess of the judge’s death hadn’t been cleaned away. The Minnesota map on the wall was still splattered with blood and bits of what once been a complex—and devious—brain. Traces of blood streaked the wall toward a pooling on the floor. It had all gone brown now, clotted over. Schanno stepped carefully. He slid open and then shut drawer after drawer in frustration.

“I’m just about down to checking the cobwebs in the corners. Nothing, Cork. Not a goll darn thing anywhere. If someone moved the judge, they did a pretty good job of covering up after themselves and covering up the reason why.” He arched his back, stretching in a tired way. “I got my hands so full at the moment, I can’t sleep at all. I’ve posted Cy Borkmann over to Harlan Lytton’s cabin nights to make sure nothing’s disturbed there. He’s pissed about that. Arletta’s staying with her sister. She’s got it in her head I’ve deserted her and taken the kids somewhere. Hell Hanover’s on my ass. Says I’m just another example of incompetent, interfering law enforcement. It strikes me that man just doesn’t like cops. Cork, I know there’s something going on in Aurora. I just can’t get a handle on what it is.” Wally Schanno looked straight at him with his honest gray eyes that were sunk deep with exhaustion. “And you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

Cork heard the sound of a snowmobile again, closer this time, cutting along the ice around North Point. It sounded small and distant, like a pesky mosquito. He thought about the folder with Jo’s name on it, the one that had first belonged to the judge, and didn’t know how to tell a man—Schanno or anybody else—what was in it. He couldn’t even be sure there was any significance in the folder having been in the judge’s hands at one time. Finally, he said, “Pretty much the same reason you are, Wally. To see about the judge’s body being moved.”

“You’re sure that’s it?”

“As sure as I am of anything.”

Schanno grunted unhappily. “You’d best leave this to me. I’m the one on the payroll.”

Cork left the study and headed down the hallway with Schanno following. At the staircase, Schanno halted and said, “Better go out the front. Sounds like you already made a mess of the kitchen back there. Close the door on your way out. Me, I’ve got to take a good long piss.”

Cork took in the empty house, where the feel of death was as real as any of the furnishings. “Be careful, Wally,” he cautioned.

“Nothing to it. I been pissing all my life.” Schanno managed a grin.

Cork stepped out the front door. The snow was falling harder, and he could barely see beyond the hedges that edged the front of the estate. Slowly he made his way around the house down the slope of the grounds to the Bronco, but he didn’t get in right away. The air was still, the snow tumbling straight down in huge beautiful flakes. He lit a cigarette and turned his face upward so that the snow settled cold on his forehead and cheeks and melted there.

He smoked and thought about truth.

He’d learned early not to invest a lot of emotion in thinking about the truth in a crime. As a cop, he’d gathered evidence that had been used to guess at the truth, but in the end responsibility for assembling the pieces and nailing truth to the wall was in the hands of others—lawyers, judges, and juries. Truth became a democratic process, the will of twelve. He’d been burned when he cared too deeply. As a result, he’d trained himself to remain a little distant in his emotional involvement on a case. In the end, the outcome was out of his hands, and to allow himself to believe too strongly in the absoluteness of a thing he couldn’t control was useless. He felt different now. Desperate in a way. This time he had to hold the truth in his own hands like a beating heart.

In the stillness, two gunshots came from the house, two clear pops like kernels of corn. Cork threw down his cigarette, reached into the glove box of his Bronco, and drew out the revolver he’d picked up earlier at the sheriff’s office. He started around the boathouse and up the backyard at a dead run, stumbling in the deep snow. When he reached the door to the kitchen, he stopped. It was wide open. He hesitated before plunging into the dark of the house and he listened.

Deep inside, someone swore painfully.

“Wally?” he called.

“Damn it, Cork!” Schanno hollered.

Cork ran in, knocking cans across the kitchen floor.

Schanno sat at the bottom of the stairs holding his right thigh with both hands. Cork could see the dark blood welling up, spilling between Schanno’s fingers.

“Bastard sneaked up,” Schanno said through clenched teeth.

“I’ll call you in.” Cork turned quickly to the phone on the stand beside the banister.

“No! Go after him! I’ll call myself in. Go on before he’s away clean.”

Cork hesitated a moment.

“Go on, damn you, I’m not dying!”

Cork dashed back out the kitchen door. Tracks in the snow led toward the row of pine trees that lined the northern shore of the estate. Before he could follow, the rough cough of a snowmobile engine trying to turn over came from beyond the trees. Cork ran for the Bronco. As he opened the door, he heard the engine of the snowmobile leap into a steady whine. He didn’t have much time. If the snowmobile headed north across the lake toward national forest land, he’d probably lose it. It would have too great a headstart and once it hit the trails in the woods, he wouldn’t be able to follow anyway.

But he was lucky. Just as he turned the key in the Bronco, the dark shape of the little machine shot past on the ice behind the boathouse, heading toward Aurora.

The snowmobile was running with its headlights on, but Cork drove the Bronco dark. The snowmobile headed straight for town with Cork less than fifty yards behind and gaining. If his luck held, he could close the gap completely before the driver of the snowmobile was even aware he was being followed.

His luck didn’t hold. When he was within thirty yards, the headlights of the little machine went dark and the snowmobile suddenly tunneled into the snowy night and was lost to him. He switched on his own headlights, but it was too late. The snowmobile was nowhere to be seen. He braked and the Bronco spun on the ice. It did a full 360 degrees before it came to a stop. Cork rolled his window down and listened. He heard the whine of the snowmobile cutting east, heading toward the reservation, the nearest forest land, where thick woods would swallow it quickly. Cork turned the Bronco in that direction.

He kicked his lights up to high beam. The flurry of snowflakes flew at him like a swarm of white moths. He wanted to floor the accelerator, but he was heading into a section of the lake popular with ice fisherman and he didn’t want to risk a collision with a shanty. He kept his window rolled down and leaned his head out. Although the wind rushed at him with a dull roar, he could still hear ahead of him the persistent high pitch of the snowmobile feverishly speeding away.

Then he heard something else. The sound of impact. Splintering wood followed by the thumping of heavy metal, and finally silence. He slowed and listened. The night on the lake had become still again, deceptively peaceful.

He crept the Bronco ahead. Within a minute his lights picked up the wreckage of a small shanty that lay on its side amid fragments of splintered boards. One wall was caved in, a ragged hole torn open. Cork couldn’t see the snowmobile, but from the line of scattered debris, he could guess the trajectory it must have taken after glancing off the shanty. He turned the Bronco slowly until the headlights swung onto the snowmobile. It was standing upright, as if it had simply been parked. Vehicular accidents were like that sometimes. A car could flip two or three times and come to rest on its wheels as if nothing had happened. The driver of the snow-mobile was nowhere to be seen.

Cork gripped the .38 and stepped out. He looked carefully around, saw no one, listened, and heard only the distant, steady thrum behind him of a freight train moving slowly through Aurora. He’d taken a few cautious steps toward the snowmobile when a figure in goggles and a green parka popped up from behind the machine, laid an arm across the hood, and pulled off two rounds before Cork could move. The headlight beside him exploded and he felt a numbing blow to his right hand. He hit the snow and rolled under the Bronco. His hand had no feeling and it no longer held the revolver. The green parka let loose another round. Cork heard the bullet chisel into the ice near the rear tire. He reached out and swept through the snow with his left hand, desperately searching for the gun.

Illuminated in the beam of the remaining headlight, the green parka straddled the snowmobile again. The engine kicked over twice, then caught. The machine swung out of the light, following an arc into the darkness that would take it back toward Aurora.

Cork scrambled from under the Bronco. He wanted to find his gun, but knew it would take precious time. He jumped back in behind the wheel and cried out when he wrapped his right hand around the knob of the gear shift. In the glow from his dashboard lights, he could see something protruding from the glove on his hand between his thumb and index finger. He gave a quick, agonizing jerk and pulled out a jagged piece of glass two inches long. He hadn’t been hit by the round, but by a chunk of the shattered headlight. Although his glove was soaked with blood, he found he could manage with the glass fragment out. Using the heel of his hand he pushed the Bronco into gear, swung the vehicle around and headed in pursuit of the green parka.

In the chaos of the chase Cork had lost a feel for exactly where on the lake he was. The snow curtained the shoreline and he had nothing from which to get his bearings. He knew he was headed in the direction of Aurora, but he had only a general sense of distance. Although he wanted desperately to catch the snowmobile, he resisted the temptation to bear down on the accelerator. The near disaster with the ice hut had been a resounding caution against blind speed. Also, his luck had returned in a way. In the collision, the snowmobile had sprung an oil leak and was leaving a clear, black trail for Cork to follow across the lake.

He was intent on the trail of oil when out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of orange at the far right fringe of his headlight beam. He realized it was one of the signs warning of open water ahead, and he pumped his brakes, fighting to keep from sliding into an uncontrolled spin as he attempted to turn the Bronco. He felt the wheels drift over the ice as the vehicle slid sideways. A brief, panicked vision came to him of the Bronco gliding unchecked off the ice and plunging into the black depths of Iron Lake. He eased the wheel into the spin and managed to regain control. From behind the curtain of falling snow ahead, the blackness of the open water came at him like a gaping mouth. He continued to slow and to bring the Bronco around. Then he heard the ice groan and crack beneath him. Steadily he pushed down on the accelerator, running parallel for a moment to the open water, trying to keep the weight of the Bronco moving ahead of the breaking ice. His right hand ached, but he held tight and carefully brought the wheel around until he was moving back to safety. He made a wide full circle. When he came across the black train of oil, he centered it in the beam of the headlight, illuminating the stretch of ice between him and the open water. He killed the engine and got out. He could hear wild flailing in the water ahead. From the glove compartment he grabbed a flashlight.

He stopped well back from the edge of the ice. Using the flashlight, he located the snowmobile that appeared to have skipped twenty yards over the surface of the water before it stopped and began to sink. The hood was still above water, the green parka clinging to it desperately. Cork spun around and began to run, cutting the darkness right and left with the beam of his flashlight. He found what he was looking for, a safety station. He pulled the white life ring loose and the loops of yellow rope, then he ran back. The green parka was still holding to the hood of the snowmobile, although there was not much left above water. Cork unlooped the rope. He tried grasping the ring with his right hand, but the wound from the glass chunk hurt too much. He switched it to his left, brought it back, and heaved it. This time the pain was in his ribs. The ring fell several yards short and to the right.

“Swim for it!” Cork yelled.

The green parka started for the ring but stopped inexplicably and grabbed again for the snowmobile.

Cork hauled in the rope. He held the ring in his right hand this time and chucked it underhand, crying out as the pain knifed into him. The ring arched and fell within easy reach of the figure in the water. The green parka grabbed the ring just as the snowmobile slid from sight.

Cork began to draw in the rope hand over hand. But something was wrong. Although it hurt like hell to pull, he shouldn’t have felt much resistance. Yet tug as he might, he couldn’t budge the green parka from the spot where the snowmobile had gone under. Then to his shock, he felt the line slipping from his grasp. Despite his tortured ribs, he looped the rope around his own body. The pull at the other end began to drag him toward the water. He was confused. The life ring should have come easily, but it was as if Cork were in a battle with something that wanted the green parka more than he did. Vainly he dug at the ice with his heels. When he looked up, he saw that the green parka was grasping the ring desperately, beating at the water, and was still being dragged inexorably under. Cork strained against the rope as he was inched nearer and nearer the edge. He heard the thin ice crack under his weight and knew that in a moment the water would have him, too.

He let go. The green parka slid from sight, swallowed by the lake as if by a hungry giant. The rope continued to jerk for another minute, and then it was still.

Cork’s right hand throbbed. His ribs hurt so much that he could barely breathe. He realized he was shivering, although he wasn’t cold. He could hear the wail of sirens somewhere off to his right. Wally Schanno was getting help. He stared at the black water. White flakes of snow drifted down onto the surface and melted. The lake looked so calm, so peaceful, as if swallowing a man was nothing.

The flashing lights brought out a lot of spectators from town. They gathered along the shoreline and watched as if it were an event. Cork spotted Sandy Parrant speaking with some of the deputies and nodding authoritatively as they gestured toward the open water. Their eyes met briefly, coldly, then Parrant left. Cork refused to leave until the divers from the fire department had brought the body up. Near midnight, they hauled it dripping onto the ice and laid it in the glare of the flood-lights that had been set up a safe distance from the perimeter of the water. The divers said they had to cut a shoe free; the lace had become entangled in the track of the snowmobile. Although the body had been in the water more than an hour, standard procedure required the paramedics to attempt revival. They pumped on his chest and tried administering oxygen, but even a blind man could see that their efforts were useless.

The face of the man in the green parka was a lighter color than Cork had ever believed it could be. And maybe more peaceful. Russell Blackwater, the man with the hungry hunter’s eyes, would hunt the earth no more.