Iron Lake

6

WALLY SCHANNO WAS AN HONEST MAN and well thought of in Tamarack County. In his mid-fifties, he was tall and lean, had hollow cheeks, thick pale lips, and a nose like a big ragged chunk of granite shoved into his face. His hands were large. His enormous feet required shoes factory-ordered straight from Red Wing, Minnesota. So far as Cork knew, he had no bad habits. Didn’t drink, smoke, or gamble. He was a practicing Lutheran, Missouri Synod. He had a penchant for suspenders—nothing wild, just plain red, or black, or gray—and he almost never sported a tie. He was not a politician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d managed to get himself elected sheriff after the recall vote that forced Cork from office. Before that Schanno had been chief of police for the village of Green Lake just half a dozen miles southwest of Aurora. He was a decent man, had done his job in Green Lake well for fifteen years. Cork had nothing against Schanno. He’d always had an admiration for the character of the man. But after Schanno replaced him, Cork’s admiration took on a grudging edge. To his shame, he found himself looking forward to the day when Wally Schanno would screw up big-time.

Schanno looked at his watch for the third time in five minutes.

“Got a date, Wally?” Cork asked.

“Arletta’s home alone,” Schanno said.

“Ah,” Cork replied.

Arletta was Schanno’s wife. She was a woman of rare beauty. Long black hair with flares of brilliant silver, blue-summer-sky eyes, and the most perfect smile Cork had ever seen. She also had Alzheimer’s.

“I called her sister. She said she’d try to get over there as fast as she could. I expected to hear from her by now,” Schanno said.

“You didn’t have to come yourself, Wally,” Cork pointed out. “Your men know what they’re doing.”

“I’m the sheriff,” Schanno said, and cast a hard eye on Cork.

Ed Larson, the only man with the rank of captain in the department and the man in charge of the most serious of Tamarack County’s crimes, came down the hallway from the judge’s study. “I’m finished in there, Wally. But I don’t want to bag him until we have a good time of death. Are you sure Sigurd’s on the way over?”

“I’m sure. Storm’s held him up, most likely.”

At the window, Cork watched the wind drive snow against the pane, where it collected in the corners of the mullions, melted, and froze into a thickening glaze.

Schanno hooked his thumb under his black suspenders and ran it up and down thoughtfully for a moment. “Gotta admit, the judge was probably the last man I’d’ve suspected of suicide. Still, who knows? People fool you all the time.”

Cy Borkmann, one of Schanno’s deputies, stepped in from the kitchen. “Didn’t find any sign of forced entry, Wally, but I dusted all the doorknobs and window casings.”

“How about upstairs? See if you can find anything looks broken into.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Thought you said it was suicide,” Cork commented.

“Just making sure. Wouldn’t you?” Schanno shoved his huge hands into his pocket and walked around the room a moment, looking things over. “Tell me again about the boy.”

“Set off to deliver his papers around two. Never came back. Didn’t call. Judge’s house was the last stop on the route.”

“And no paper here,” Schanno said.

“None that I could see.”

“You check around outside? Kid may have thrown it in the snow somewhere.”

“I looked some. Didn’t find anything.”

“What about the other customers? They all get papers?”

“South of the tracks. I don’t know about out here.“

Cork took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t light it. Although he wanted a smoke pretty bad, he knew better than to take a chance on contaminating the scene.

Schanno said, “You say Darla thinks it’s Joe John. What do you think?”

“Maybe.” Cork shrugged.

“Joe John used to run off pretty regular when he was drinking. Could be the boy’s just taking after him.”

“The boy’s not like that.”

Schanno didn’t appear to be as convinced of that as Cork. “Maybe we’ll know something more when we talk to the neighbors.”

Cork glanced out the window. The porch light was on, but the wind had risen so fiercely and was blowing the snow so hard the only thing illuminated was a blinding curtain of white that hid even the cedars only a dozen yards away. “A brass band could’ve marched in and out of here this evening without anyone noticing a thing.”

The front door opened.

“Our coroner’s finally arrived,” Schanno said, and headed to the entryway.

The sheriff was wrong. It wasn’t Sigurd Nelson.

“Sandy?” Cork heard Schanno say with surprise.

“Where is he?” Sandy Parrant stepped out of the entryway where Cork could see him. The shoulders of his camel-hair coat were dusted with snow. His eyes took in the room, then swung toward the study down the hall. “In there?”

He looked as if he were going to head that way when Schanno moved to block him. “I think you’d better sit down.”

Parrant glanced at Cork, and somewhere within all the concern that darkened his face, a mild surprise registered. “Cork?”

“Hello, Sandy,” Cork greeted him somberly.

Sandy was a large, powerfully built man, just as the judge had been before the frailty of age had withered him. Both had strong, square faces, huge brown eyes, and long, sharp jawbones. Before the judge’s hair had turned white, it had been the same color as Sandy’s—a red-blond, like honey mixed with a few drops of blood.

Beyond the physical, similarities in the two men were few. In politics they might as well have been from different planets. Where the judge had been bitterly conservative, Sandy was fiercely liberal. The difference in the men’s philosophies might have been explained by Sandy’s upbringing in Boston. He’d moved there at age twelve when, following the scandal that killed his father’s run for governor, his mother had divorced the judge. More than a dozen years later, he returned to make Aurora his home again. Despite their political differences, he and his father had worked well together in business and had created the Great North Development Company. In an area beset by economic chaos as a result of the closing of the great iron mines of the Mesabi and Vermilion Ranges, the developments financed by the Great North were a godsend.

On the campaign trail during his successful bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate, Sandy Parrant had been indefatigably upbeat and assured. The man standing in the entryway of the judge’s home looked pretty well devastated.

“I want to see him,” he said.

“No, you don’t, Sandy,” Schanno advised.

“He’s my father. I want to see him.”

“He’s dead, Sandy. Seeing him like he is now won’t do any good.”

Parrant stood firm, and for a moment Cork thought he was going to ignore the sheriff’s advice, which Cork understood was a veiled order. In other circumstances, a man of Parrant’s stature might have prevailed. But Sandy finally nodded, moved to the sofa in the living room, and sat down heavily.

“My god,” he said in disbelief. “He was such a tough old bastard.”

“I know,” Schanno agreed.

“I was afraid of something like this.”

“Why?” Schanno asked.

“Cancer. It’s everywhere.”

“I didn’t know,” Schanno said.

“He didn’t want people to know.”

“Prognosis?” Cork asked.

“He didn’t have more than six months to live.” Parrant shrugged. “Talk to Doc Gunnar.”

Schanno wrote something on a notepad he took from his shirt pocket.

“What are you doing here, Cork?” Parrant asked.

“I found your father’s body,” Cork explained. “I was looking for Paul LeBeau.”

“Joe John’s boy?”

“He went to deliver newspapers this afternoon and never came back.”

“What’s my father got to do with that?”

“Last house on the route. It was a long shot,” Cork admitted.

“You just walked right in?” Parrant gave him a look of alarm.

“Door was unlocked.”

“Nothing unusual about that, Sandy,” Schanno pointed out. “Lots of folks in Aurora don’t lock their doors. It’s that kind of town.”

“Or used to be,” Cork said.

There was a furious pounding at the front door. Schanno hurried to the entryway. Cork heard the angry voice of Sigurd Nelson. “You got any idea how tough it is getting around out there, Wally?”

“Special case, Sigurd,” Cork heard the sheriff reply.

“Special my ass. What’s so special it couldn’t wait until tomorrow? Old man like the judge dies at home, he probably died of a heart attack or a stroke like most men his age.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack, Sigurd,” Schanno said, bringing the coroner into the living room. “Didn’t the office say anything?”

“Just to get out here pronto.”

The coroner was a bald man in his late fifties with a comfortable potbelly. A mortician by profession, he’d been the assistant coroner under Dr. Daniel Bergen until Bergen died of a heart attack while fishing the Rainy River. Sigurd Nelson filled in until a special election could be held, then he’d been officially voted into the position. Once or twice a year, he was called to look at someone who’d died unexpectedly. Cork, while he was sheriff, had lobbied the board of commissioners for a change to a medical examiner, someone with some expertise, hired instead of elected, but in that effort he’d been unsuccessful. Judge Robert Parrant had wanted a coroner who was elected. It was another position he could keep under his thumb.

Nelson put down his black bag, removed his heavy black overcoat, and shook it out. He looked around for a place to put it, finally threw it over the back of a chair.

“I can tell you from experience that when a man that old dies suddenly, odds are ten to one it’s either a heart attack or a stroke.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack, Sigurd,” Schanno said again.

“No? Well, let’s just go and see.” He noticed Cork and Sandy Parrant. “Oh. Sandy. I’m sorry.”

Parrant lifted his hand in a halfhearted pardon. “That’s okay.”

“Where is he?” the coroner asked.

“That way,” Schanno said, and nodded down the hall.

Sandy Parrant stayed on the sofa, watching them as they moved down the hallway. Sigurd Nelson stepped into the study and stopped dead in his tracks. “Great God Almighty,” he whispered when he saw the blood streaking the map on the wall behind the desk.

“He’s all yours, Sigurd,” Schanno said.

Thirty minutes later they were back in the living room. As Sigurd Nelson put on his coat, he said, “I’ll be able to tell you some more after I work on him tomorrow. But like I said, if it’s time of death you’re worried about right now, the judge hasn’t been dead more than four or five hours.”

“Thanks for coming, Sigurd,” Schanno told him.

“I’m sorry, Sandy,” the coroner said, offering his condolences. “But the judge.” He shook his head. “Who would’ve figured?” He opened the door and pushed into the storm.

Cork began to put on his own coat.

“Where you headed?” Schanno asked.

“Darla LeBeau’s.”

“Tell her I’ll have a man over soon. I’ll put a notice about the boy out on the NCIC computer.” Schanno took a deep, tired breath and looked at his watch.

“Call home and check on Arletta, Wally,” Cork suggested as he pulled on his gloves. “Home ought to be every man’s first concern.” He glanced at Sandy Parrant, whose face was drawn and colorless and who, for a politician, was unusually quiet. “Want a lift, Sandy?”

Parrant shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” Cork said.

“Yeah.” Parrant gave him a brief smile of thanks. But he was a man way on the other side of something terrible, and the look in his eyes came from far, far away.