Purgatory Ridge

2

THE LINDSTROM LUMBER AND PLYWOOD MILL stood within a stone’s throw of the Superior National Forest, on three dozen cleared acres, hard up against the shoreline of a small oval of water called Grindstone Lake. Normally, the only smoke coming from the mill was generated by the kilns and smokestacks. However, as his old red Bronco broke from the pines along County Road 8, Cork could see clearly that the billow of smoke rising above the clearing came from the trailer of a logging rig parked in the mill yard and from the burning remains of a building just beyond.

At the mill gate, Deputy Ed McDermott stopped Cork and leaned against the driver’s-side door.

“Ed,” Cork said to the deputy in greeting.

“Morning, Cork.”

“What’s up?”

“Big propane tank blew, set things on fire. Murray’s men have it pretty well under control now. In this drought, lucky it didn’t spread to the woods.”

“Mind if I go in?”

“Be my guest. Sheriff’s over by that stack of logs there.” He looked past Cork and gave his head a slight nod. “Morning, Ms. O’Connor.”

Cork parked the Bronco next to a Land Cruiser with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door. Jo got out with him.

Sheriff Wally Schanno stood beside a huge stack of pine logs that was awaiting milling. He was a tall man who, in his prime, had been every bit as strong and rigid as those sections of cut timber. But he was over sixty years old now. There was a slight bend to his tall frame, and time had rubbed its hand deeply into his long face, giving him a gaunt and haunted look. When he glanced at Cork and Jo, his gray eyes seemed tired.

“Heard the explosion,” Cork said.

“They heard the explosion in Brazil,” Schanno said. “Morning, Jo.” The sheriff gave her a grim purse of his lips, as near to a smile as he could apparently muster.

“What happened?”

“Ask Murray.”

Alfred Murray, the fire chief for Aurora, and only one of three paid firefighters who manned the station in town, walked toward them from one of the yellow pumpers that was dousing the last of the flames among the logs on the trailer. He wore a black rubberized firefighter’s coat, black boots, and a yellow hat that said CHIEF.

“Looks like we’ll have it all extinguished in a few minutes,” he told Schanno.

“What happened, Alf?” Cork asked.

“Well…” He seemed reluctant to commit. “To tell you the truth, at first I figured the LP tank went up, demolished part of that old equipment shed, and set the rest of it on fire. I figured burning fragments must have jumped to the logs on the trailer, and they went up, too, along with the cab.”

“At first?” Cork said.

“Yeah.”

“Then?”

Instead of answering Cork, Murray watched a dark blue Explorer swing through the mill gate and head toward them. The Explorer moved quickly across the mill yard that was becoming muddy where the water from the fire hoses ran. It stopped next to Cork’s Bronco, and Karl Lindstrom stepped out.

He was technically Karl Magnus Lindstrom III. The mill was his. Had been his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and another generation yet again. At one time, there’d been nearly a dozen mills just like it in the Lindstrom empire that had stretched across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and Minnesota. But declining resources, cheap foreign lumber, and the profligate lifestyle of Karl Magnus Lindstrom II had brought the holdings down to this one.

In his late thirties, Lindstrom was a tall, slender man with thinning blond hair kept short in a sharp military cut. His bearing was stiff and military as well, the legacy of Annapolis and eight years in an officer’s uniform. In the few times he and Cork had exchanged words, Lindstrom had spoken crisply and to the point. The only thing about him that had any look of softness were his eyebrows, so blond and fine they looked like a couple of delicate feathers stuck to his forehead. What kind of man he really was at heart Cork could only guess, for Cork didn’t know Lindstrom well at all. As far as he could gather, no one did. He wasn’t from Aurora. The Lindstroms had always been like absentee landlords, directing the business of the mill from their headquarters in Chicago. Karl Lindstrom had moved his family to a home on Iron Lake only a few months before. All anybody really knew about him was that he’d kept the mill open and kept a lot of people in Tamarack County working.

“Was anybody hurt?” Lindstrom asked.

“Fortunately, no,” Schanno replied. “Only person here was your night watchman, Harold Loomis. He was way over to the other side of the mill when it happened. He called in right away.”

“Did he see anything?”

“Harold?” Schanno asked it seriously. “He’s seventy-two, Mr. Lindstrom. Even when he stays awake, he probably doesn’t see much.”

Lindstrom stepped away from the others and went to a fragment of blackened metal a few feet away. He stooped and reached for it. “Any idea what happened?”

“Don’t touch anything,” Schanno warned him.

Lindstrom shot a look his way. “Still hot?”

“Evidence,” Schanno said.

“Evidence?” Lindstrom stood up quickly. “You never answered me, Sheriff. What happened here?”

“We’re not sure yet.” Schanno looked to Cork. “You ever work a bomb scene? In Chicago maybe?”

“Only crowd control, Wally. You think this was a bomb?”

“Alf sure does. And I’m figuring it probably wasn’t too far from your own way of thinking, else why would you and Jo be here? With all this ballyhoo over logging those old white pines, I’ve been worrying it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

Lindstrom turned to the fire chief. “Was it a bomb?”

Alf Murray looked toward the flame and smoke. “Well, like I said before you came, I thought at first the fire must’ve started with the explosion of the LP tank. That was the big bang we all heard. Blew down the equipment shed like the big bad wolf blowing down a straw house. Seemed possible anyway, the tank going first and everything else following from that. Except those tanks are plenty safe. Never heard of one going up by itself. So I did some more looking around. There’s a small crater in the ground under the cab of the logging rig. Now, when the gas tank on the cab caught fire, it made for some pretty good fireworks, but it wouldn’t account for that little crater. Only thing I can think of would’ve left that kind of scar in the earth’d be an explosive device of some kind, probably attached to the undercarriage of the cab. So if it was a bomb, and I ain’t for a moment saying it necessarily was, then I’d say the cab went up first, and everything else happened because of that.”

It was only a moment before all eyes had turned to Jo. She didn’t say anything, but Cork could feel her harden, prepared to defend.

“‘Course, I ain’t an expert,” the fire chief hastened to add. “Mostly I deal with house fires, grass fires. We won’t know for sure until Wally gets someone up here who knows what the hell they’re doing.”

Schanno rubbed his jaw with his long fingers. “I’ve already got a call in to the BCA,” he said, speaking of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minnesota’s version of the FBI.

Cork saw Hell Hanover on the other side of the demolished shed. Helmuth Hanover was publisher and editor of the weekly Aurora Sentinel. He had lost the lower part of his right leg to a claymore mine in Vietnam, and he dragged that history with him in a gait that was becoming, with time, a dire limp. He’d balded young and had chosen to shave clean what little hair remained to him, so that in the morning sunlight, his bare white skull reminded Cork of something on the desert even the buzzards would ignore. Although his byline read Helm Hanover, to those who liked him not at all-Cork among them-he was known as Hell.

Hanover had been taking photos of the men hosing down the smoking debris, but now he got into his car, a maroon Taurus wagon parked near the far fence, and came around to where the other vehicles sat.

Lindstrom didn’t seem to notice Hanover’s approach. He was intent on Jo.

“We’ve been on opposite sides of this issue, Ms. O’Connor.” Hard eyes looked at her from under those feathery eyebrows. “And I always believed we could reach a peaceful resolution-”

“Karl,” Jo said, interrupting, “before you say anything more, I just want to point out a couple of things. As the fire chief has said, the cause of all this hasn’t been confirmed. He’s only guessing. And if he’s right, there’s currently no evidence that would implicate my clients, or anyone, for that matter, who might be opposed to you on the logging issue.”

Lindstrom held off speaking for a moment. Hell Hanover stood quietly off to the side, a small notebook in his hand, taking notes. Nobody except Cork seemed to be aware of his presence.

“It’s easy for you, isn’t it,” Lindstrom finally said. “Your business hasn’t been threatened. Your livelihood isn’t at stake. In fact, you’re probably the only one who is benefiting from all this.”

“Easy, Karl,” Cork said.

Lindstrom turned on him. “I’m at a loss to understand why, exactly, you’re here. You’re not the sheriff anymore. You’ve got no business here.”

Before Cork or anyone else could reply, the insistent chirp of a cell phone cut among them. Hanover pulled a cellular from his pocket and stepped away. He listened, tried to speak, then terminated the call. He spent a moment scribbling furiously in his little notebook.

Lindstrom went on, addressing himself to Jo again. “If this is the kind of fight your people want, then this is the kind of fight we’ll give them.”

“Mr. Lindstrom,” Schanno said, “I don’t think you want to make that kind of statement.”

“Just whose side are you on, Sheriff?”

Hell Hanover came back, a look of mild satisfaction on his face. “Wally, that was a phone call from someone claiming responsibility for all this mess.”

“Who?” Schanno snapped.

“Calls himself-or herself-the voice was disguised so it was impossible to tell-calls himself Eco-Warrior. Claims to be part of a movement called the Army of the Earth. The statement read”-he glanced down at the notes he’d written-” ‘The desecration of Grandmother Earth must end. Violence toward anything sacred will not be tolerated. I am the arrow of justice.’ “

“That’s it? All of it? You’re sure?” Schanno asked.

“Grandmother Earth.” Lindstrom cast a cold eye on Jo. “That’s how your clients refer to it, Ms. O’Connor.”

“Words are free, Mr. Lindstrom,” Jo replied. “Anyone may use them in any way they wish. Or misuse them.”

“Chief!” One of the men near the burned shed waved furiously. “Bring the sheriff, too!”

They all followed Murray to the shed.

“What is it, Bob?”

“Smell that? Made me think I’d better check the debris here carefully.”

With the head of his ax, he reached into the charred wreckage of the equipment shed, hooked a burned panel, and lifted.

“Jesus,” Schanno said.

Jo turned away.

An upper body had been exposed, most of the skin burned to char, the muscle tissue underneath visible in visceral red and purple. The heat had caused the eyes to bubble away and the brain to explode out the back of the skull. The lips were burned off completely, leaving a skeletal grin that made the corpse look grimly delighted.

“Welp,” Hanover said as he lifted his camera for a shot. “It ain’t just arson anymore.”