Vermilion Drift

VERMILION DRIFT

ALSO BY WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

Heaven’s Keep

Red Knife

Thunder Bay

Copper River

Mercy Falls

Blood Hollow

The Devil’s Bed

Purgatory Ridge

Boundary Waters

Iron Lake

For Sarah Branham, my champion

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the

mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to

destroy the planet.

—Russell Means

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Vermilion One Mine and the Ladyslipper Mine, which appear in this work, are fictitious. There are, however, real mines that are very similar in their design, scope, and history, and I’ve used elements of these actual places in the construction of this story. But I want to stress to anyone familiar with the remarkable area we call the Iron Range that I have taken liberties with fact in both geography and geology.

I’m extremely grateful to James Pointer of the Soudan Underground Mine State Park for the gift of his time and his knowledge. The morning I spent with him half a mile underground continues to be a remarkable memory for me. I’ve done my best to give readers the same sense of admiration that he gave me for the enterprise of the men who spent their lives working in near dark conditions to wrest iron from the earth. If you’re ever in northern Minnesota, I can’t recommend highly enough a tour of the Soudan Mine, which is operated by the state of Minnesota. I guarantee you’ll never take fresh air and sunlight for granted again.

I also want to thank the staff of the Minnesota Discovery Center (formerly known as Ironworld), particularly those in the Research Center, who helped me locate a wealth of information in the archives. This resource is invaluable to all of us for a continued understanding and appreciation of the rich culture and history of the Iron Range.

I’m indebted to Dr. Garry Peterson, Chief Medical Examiner Emeritus of Hennepin County, Minnesota, for his help in understanding death, its aftermath, and the clues that bodies, no matter how ancient, can offer in unraveling the mystery of murder.

Finally, for their warm hospitality, a big thanks to all the staff at the wonderful little coffee shop called The Java Train, where the bulk of this novel was written.

VERMILION DRIFT

PROLOGUE

Some nights, Corcoran O’Connor dreams his father’s death.

Although the dream differs in the details, it always follows the same general pattern: His father falls from a great height. Sometimes he stumbles backward over a precipice, his face an explosion of surprise. Or he’s climbing a high, flat face of rock and, just as he reaches for the top, loses his grip and, in falling, appears both perplexed and angry. Or he steps into an empty elevator shaft, expecting a floor that is not there, and looks skyward with astonishment as the darkness swallows him.

In the dream Cork is always a boy. He’s always very near and reaches out to save his father, but his arm is too short, his hand too small. Always, his father is lost to him, and Cork stands alone and heartbroken.

If that was all of it, if that was the end of the nightmare, it probably wouldn’t haunt him in quite the way that it does. But the true end is a horrific vision that jars Cork awake every time. In the dream, he relives the dream, and in that dream revisited something changes. Not only is he near his father as the end occurs but he also stands outside the dream watching it unfold, a distanced witness to himself and to all that unfolds. And what he sees from that uninvolved perspective delivers a horrible shock. For his hand, in reaching out, not only fails to save his father. It is his small hand, in fact, that shoves him to his death.

ONE

That early June day began with one of the worst wounds Cork O’Connor had ever seen. It was nearly three miles long, a mile wide, and more than five hundred feet deep. It bled iron.

From behind the window glass of the fourth-floor conference room in the Great North Mining Company’s office complex, Cork looked down at the Ladyslipper Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore excavations in the world. It was a landscape of devastation, of wide plateaus and steep terraces and broad canyons, all of it the color of coagulating blood. He watched as far below him the jaws of an electric power shovel gobbled eighty tons of rock and spit the rubble into a dump truck the size of a house and with wheels twice as tall as a man. The gargantuan machine crawled away up an incline that cut along the side of the pit, and immediately another just like it took its place, waiting to be filled. The work reminded him of insects feeding on the cavity of a dead body.

At the distant end of the mine, poised at the very lip of the pit itself, stood the town of Granger. The new town of Granger. Thirty years earlier, Great North had moved the entire community, buildings and all, a mile south in order to take the ore from beneath the original town site. Just outside Granger stood the immense structures of the taconite plant, where the rock was crushed and processed into iron pellets for shipping. Clouds of steam billowed upward hundreds of feet, huge white pillars holding up the gray overcast of the sky.

Although he’d viewed the mine and the work that went on deep inside many times, the sight never ceased to amaze and sadden him. The Ojibwe part of his thinking couldn’t help but look on the enterprise as a great injury delivered to Grandmother Earth.

“Cork. Good. You’re here.”

Cork turned as Max Cavanaugh closed the door. Cavanaugh was tall and agreeable, a man who easily caught a lady’s eye. In his early forties, he was younger than Cork by a decade. He was almost the last of the Cavanaughs, a family whose name had been associated with mining since 1887, when Richard Frankton Cavanaugh, a railroad man from St. Paul, had founded the Great North Mining Company and had sunk one of the first shafts in Minnesota’s great Iron Range. Cork saw Max Cavanaugh at Mass every Sunday, and in winter they both played basketball for St. Agnes Catholic Church—the team was officially called the St. Agnes Saints, but all the players referred to themselves as “the old martyrs”—so they knew each other pretty well. Cavanaugh was normally a guy with an easy smile, but not today. Today his face was troubled, and with good reason. One of his holdings, the Vermilion One Mine, was at the center of a controversy that threatened at any moment to break into violence.

The two men shook hands.

“Where are the others?” Cork asked.

“They’re already headed to Vermilion One. I wanted to talk to you alone first. Have a seat?”

Cork took a chair at the conference table, and Cavanaugh took another.

“Do you find missing people, Cork?”

The question caught him by surprise. Cork had been expecting some discussion about Vermilion One. But it was also a question with some sting to it, because the most important missing person case he’d ever handled had been the disappearance of his own wife, and that had ended tragically.

“On occasion I’ve been hired to do just that,” he replied cautiously.

“Can you find someone for me?”

“I could try. Who is it?”

The window at Cavanaugh’s back framed his face, which seemed as gray as the sky above the mine that morning. “My sister.”

Lauren Cavanaugh. Well known in Tamarack County for her unflagging efforts to bring artistic enlightenment to the North Country. Two years earlier, she’d founded the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, an artists’ retreat in Aurora that had, in a very short time, acquired a national reputation.

“I thought I read in the Sentinel that Lauren was in Chicago,” Cork said.

“She might be. I don’t know. Or she might be in New York or San Francisco or Paris.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Is what I tell you confidential?”

“I consider it so, Max.”

Cavanaugh folded his hands atop his reflection in the shiny tabletop. “My sister does this sometimes. Just takes off. But she’s always kept in touch with me, let me know where she’s gone.”

“Not this time?”

“Not a word.”

“Nothing before she left?”

“No. But that’s not unusual. When she gets it into her head to go, she’s gone, just like that.”

“What about Chicago?”

He shook his head. “A smoke screen. I put that story out there.”

“Is her car gone?”

“Yes.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“A week ago. We spoke on the phone.”

“How did she sound?”

“Like she always sounds. Like sunshine if it had a voice.”

Cork took out the little notebook and pen that he generally carried in his shirt pocket when he was working a case. He flipped the cover and found the first empty page.

“She drives a Mercedes, right?”

“A CLK coupe, two-door. Silver-gray.”

“Do you know the license plate number?”

“No, but I can get it.”

“So can I. Don’t bother.”

“She hasn’t charged any gas since she left.”

“How do you know?”

“I oversee all her finances. She also hasn’t charged any hotel rooms, any meals, anything.”

“Any substantial withdrawals from her bank account before she left?”

“Nothing extraordinary.”

“Is it possible she’s staying with a friend?”

“I’ve checked with everyone I can think of.”

“Have you talked to the police?”

“No. I’d rather handle this quietly.”

“You said she does this periodically. Why?”

Cavanaugh looked at Cork, his eyes staring out of a mist of confusion. “I don’t know exactly. She claims she needs to get away from her life.”

As far as Cork knew, her life consisted of lots of money and lots of adulation. What was there to run from?

“Is there someplace she usually goes?”

“Since she moved here, it’s generally the Twin Cities or Chicago. In the past, it’s been New York City, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires, Rome.”

“For the museums?”

He frowned. “Not amusing, Cork.”

“My point is what does she do there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ask. Can you find her?”

“From what you’ve told me, she could be anywhere in the world.”

He shook his head. “She left her passport.”

“Well, that narrows it down to a couple of million square miles here in the U.S.”

“I don’t need your sarcasm, Cork. I need your help.”

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“Of course. I’ve been calling her number since she left.”

“We can get her cell phone records, see if she’s called anyone or taken calls from anyone. Did she pack a suitcase?”

“No, but sometimes when she takes off, she just goes and buys whatever she needs along the way.”

“According to her credit card records, not this time?”

“Not this time.”

“Does she use a computer? Have an e-mail account?”

“Yes.”

“Any way to check her e-mails?”

“I already have. There’s been no activity since last Sunday, and nothing in the communication before that that seems relevant.”

“Is it possible she has an account you don’t know about?”

“It’s possible but not probable.”

“How did you manage to get her e-mail password?”

“We’re close,” he said, and left it at that.

“Look, Max, there’s something I need to say.”

“Say it.”

“I have two grown daughters and a teenage son. It strikes me that I have less control, less access to their private lives than you have with your sister. Frankly, it seems odd.”

Cavanaugh stared at him. His eyes were the hard green-brown of turtle shells. Cork waited.

“My sister is flamboyant,” Cavanaugh finally said. “She inspires. She walks into a room and the place becomes electric, brighter and more exciting. People fall in love with her easily, and they’ll follow her anywhere. In this way, she’s charmed. But she has no concept of how to handle money. The truth is that financially she’s a walking disaster. Consequently, for most of her life, I’ve overseen her finances. It hasn’t been easy. There have been issues.”

“Recently?”

He hesitated. “This arts center of hers. She gifted it significantly from her own resources—our resources. The idea was that other avenues of financing would then be found. They haven’t materialized. I’ve been bleeding money into this project for some time now.”

“Do you have the ability to bleed?”

“There’s plenty of money. That’s not the point.”

“The point is her unreliability?”

He considered Cork’s question, as if searching for a better answer, then reluctantly nodded.

“One more question. Has your sister received any threats related to the situation at Vermilion One?”

“No. She’s not associated with this at all. The mine is my business.”

“All right.” Cork quoted his usual daily rate, then added, “A five-thousand-dollar bonus if I find her.”

“I don’t care what it takes. Will this interfere with your investigation of the mine threats?”

“I’m sure I can handle them both. I’ll prepare the paperwork. Will you be around this afternoon?”

“I have a meeting until four, but I’ll be at my home this evening.”

Cork said, “I’ll drop by. Say around six?”

“Thanks, Cork. But I’m hoping you’ll begin this investigation immediately.”

“I’m already on the clock.”

TWO

Corcoran Liam O’Connor had lived in Tamarack County, Minnesota, most of his life. He’d grown up there, had gone away for a while and been a cop in Chicago, then returned to the great Northwoods to raise his family. Several years earlier he’d been the county’s sheriff, but hard things had happened and he’d left official law enforcement and now ran what he called “a confidential investigation and security consulting business.” He was a PI. He operated his business alone, which was pretty much the way he did everything these days. He’d been a widower for a little over a year, recently enough still to feel the loss deeply; a father, but that summer his children were gone; what was left to him at the moment was the big, empty house on Gooseberry Lane and a family dog constantly in need of walking.

He followed Cavanaugh’s black Escalade east ten miles to Aurora, then along the shoreline of Iron Lake. Rain had begun to fall, and the lake was pewter gray and empty. It was Monday, June 13. Spring had come late that year, and so far June had been cool enough that it had everyone in Tamarack County talking about summers they swore they remembered snow clear into July. Cavanaugh turned off Highway 1 and headed south into a low range of wooded hills capped with clouds and dripping with rainwater. Fifteen minutes later, they entered Gresham, a small town that had been built in the early days of mining on the Iron Range. The Vermilion One Mine had been the town’s economic base, and, until the mine closed in the mid-1960s, Gresham had bustled. Now the streets were deserted; the buildings looked old and ignored. Every other storefront on the single block of the business district seemed long vacant, and yellowed signs bearing the names of realty companies leaned against the glass in otherwise empty windows. Lucy’s, which was a small café, was brightly lit inside, and as Cork passed, he could see a couple of customers at the counter and Lucy Knutson at the grill, but no one seemed to be talking. It reminded him of an Edward Hopper work, Nighthawks, and he felt the way he always did whenever he looked at that painting: sad and alone.

Which brought back to him the dream he’d had the night before: his father’s death. He could never predict when the nightmare would visit him, but it inevitably left him feeling broken and empty and unsure. He looked through the windshield streaked with rain and wondered, Christ, could the day get any worse?

Cavanaugh had sped through Gresham and was so far ahead that Cork couldn’t see the Escalade anymore. Less than a mile outside town, he began to encounter the protesters. They wore ponchos and rain slickers and sat on canvas chairs and held their placards up as he passed.

No Nukes Here!

Stop the Madness!

Not in Our Backyards!

Washington—Go Radiate Yourself!

At the moment, there were maybe twenty protesters, which, considering the rain, seemed like a lot. They were an earnest and committed body.

A legal order restrained anyone from interfering with entry to the Vermilion One Mine, but as Cork approached the gate, a tall, broad figure in a green poncho stepped into the road and blocked his way. Cork was going slowly enough that it was no problem to brake, but he wasn’t happy with the aggressiveness of the move. When the Land Rover had stopped, the figure came around to the driver’s side, lifted a hand, and drew back the poncho hood, revealing the scowl of Isaiah Broom.

Cork rolled his window down. With as much cheer as he could muster, he said, “Morning, Isaiah.”

Broom looked at him, then at the closed gate of the mine entrance, then at Cork again. He had eyes like pecans, and he had the high, proud cheekbones that were characteristic of the Anishinaabeg. He was roughly Cork’s age, just past fifty. Cork had known him all his life. They’d traveled many of the same roads, though never together. They were not at all what anyone would call friends.

“You going in there?” Broom asked.

“That’s my intent, Isaiah.”

“You know, a lot of us Shinnobs are wondering about your allegiance these days.”

“My allegiance, Isaiah, is to my own conscience. So far, I haven’t done anything that worries me in that regard.”

“These people,” he said, nodding toward the mine operation, “they don’t worry you?”

“These people are my neighbors. Yours, too, Isaiah.”

“They’re chimook, Cork,” he said, using the Ojibwe slang for white people. “Are you chimook, too? Or are you one of The People?”

Broom had called himself Shinnob. That was shorthand for Anishinaabe, which was the true name of the Ojibwe nation. Roughly translated, it meant The People, or The Original People. Cork supposed that in this way the Anishinaabeg—as they were known collectively—like every human community, thought of themselves as special. Broom and the others were there because the southern boundary of the Iron Lake Reservation abutted the land holdings of the Vermilion One Mine.

“At the moment, Isaiah, I’m just a man trying to do a job. I’d be obliged if you’d step back and let me be on my way.”

“‘In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet.’ Russell Means said that.”

Broom was fond of quoting Russell Means, who was Lakota, and also Dennis Banks, who was a Shinnob. In the early seventies, these men had been among the founders of the American Indian Movement. Broom had known them both and had himself been present at the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties march in Washington, D.C., which had ended in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office. He’d continued to be a voice for activism in the Ojibwe community. He’d run several times for the position of chair of the Iron Lake tribal council but never won. He spoke hard truths frankly, but for most Shinnobs on the rez, his voice was too loud and too harsh to lead them.

“I’m not here to destroy the planet, Isaiah, that’s a promise.”

Broom looked skeptical but stepped back. Cork rolled up his window and went ahead.

At the gate, he signed in with Tommy Martelli. Martelli’s family had been in mining for generations, and Tommy had himself worked the Vermilion One straight out of high school and after that the Ladyslipper until his age and hip problems made him become, as he put it, “a damn desk jockey.” He wore a short-sleeve khaki shirt and nothing on his head, and, as he stood at the window of the Land Rover, warm summer rain dripped down his face from the silver bristle on the crown of his skull.

“Mr. Cavanaugh said you’d be right behind him,” he told Cork. “Got us a real puzzler here. Haddad chewed our asses good, like it was our fault.”

“What’s going on, Tommy?”

“Nobody told you?”

“When he called me, Lou said some threats had been made.”

“There’s more to it than that, Cork. But if the boss didn’t tell you, I’d best keep my mouth shut.” He reached out for the clipboard Cork had signed, flashed a smile not altogether friendly, and said, “Love to see you figure this one out.” He moved back to his little guardhouse, and Cork drove through the gate.

For a hundred yards, the pavement cut through a stand of aspen mixed with mature spruce. The road climbed up a steep slope, rounded a curve, broke from the trees, and suddenly the old mine buildings stood before him. They were dominated by the headframe, a steel tower a hundred feet high and covered with rust, which stood above shaft Number Six and supported the hoist for the mine elevator. The largest of the buildings, Cork knew, was the engine house. The other buildings, most in disrepair, had served other functions during the sixty years the mine had been in operation: a single-story office complex; the wet room, where the miners had peeled off their muddy clothing at the end of their shifts; the dry house; the drill shop; the crusher house. The buildings were backed by a towering ridge of loose glacial drift where a small forest of pines had taken root. To one side of the office building entrance stood a tall flagpole that pointed like an accusing finger at the dripping summer sky, and from which a soaked Old Glory fluttered limply in the breeze.

The potholed parking lot was nearly empty. Cork pulled next to Cavanaugh’s Escalade, killed the engine, and got out. The air was an odd mix of scents: rainwater and sharp spruce and the flat mineral smell that came up from deep in the mine. He walked to the front door of the office and went inside, where he found a small reception desk, sans receptionist. There was a corridor running lengthwise, lined with closed doors. The place had the feel of one of those storefronts he’d passed in Gresham, a business long abandoned. He listened for the sound of activity or voices. Except for a newly mounted wall clock that noted the passing of each second with a brittle little tick, the place was dead quiet.

The phone at the reception desk rang. No one came running to answer it. Finally Cork leaned over and lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” he said.

“Margie?”

Cork recognized Lou Haddad’s voice. “Nope. It’s O’Connor.”

“Cork? Where’s Margie?”

“Got me, Lou.”

“Well, come on down. We’re waiting for you.”

“Where?”

“End of the hallway, last office on your right.”

As he hung up, Cork heard the flush of a toilet, and a door halfway down the hall swung open and Margie Renn hurried toward him.

“Just powdering my nose,” she said, smoothing her silver hair and her blue skirt. “Tommy was supposed to call and let me know you’d arrived.”

“Ta-da,” Cork said with a little dance step. Margie didn’t seem to appreciate his humor.

“Let me call Mr. Haddad,” she said.

“I already talked to him, Margie. I’m on my way there now.”

“Let me show you.”

“End of the hall, last door on the right. Right?”

She seemed disappointed that he didn’t need her assistance, and Cork figured that, in the limbo that was the Vermilion One Mine these days, there must not be much for her to do except sit in the empty corridor and listen to the damn wall clock chopping seconds off her day.

THREE

The Iron Range was a great melting pot of humanity, and Lou Haddad’s Lebanese family was not at all unusual. They’d come to the Range several generations back and had, for as long as Cork could remember, run a grocery store on the corner of Oak and Seventh Street. Lou’s father had been different from the rest of his family, however. He’d chosen to work in the mine, the Vermilion One.

When they were kids, Cork—and just about everybody else—had called Lou Haddad Louie Potatoes. This because the guys who delivered the store’s produce and who were reputed to have had mob connections once spotted Lou munching on a slice of raw potato. They’d given him the name jokingly—everyone in the mob had a nickname—but it had stuck. Growing up, Cork and Louie Potatoes had been good friends. They went to the same church—St. Agnes—were in the same grade, and their families’ houses were only two blocks apart. They both loved fishing, ran around with the same group of kids, double-dated. After graduation, Haddad had gone to a Jesuit college, Fairfield University in Connecticut, and become an engineer. Cork had gone to Chicago and become a cop. And when they were ready to raise families, they’d both come back home. They’d often done things together with their wives as couples—gone to movies, played bridge, picnicked on the lake. But after his wife died, Cork found himself turning down the overtures and spending his time alone.

Haddad stood at the open door. He was Cork’s height, missing six feet by an inch, with thin gray-brown hair and, normally, a ready grin. At the moment, however, he looked like a man chewing ground glass.

He shook Cork’s hand, said, “Thanks for coming,” and stood back so that Cork could enter.

It was a small conference room and smelled musty with disuse. It held a central table surrounded by half a dozen folding chairs. There were already three other people waiting. Two of them Cork knew: Marsha Dross, sheriff of Tamarack County, and Max Cavanaugh. The stranger was a woman in jeans and a light blue sweater. Cork greeted Dross, and Haddad introduced him to the woman.

“Genie, this is Cork O’Connor. Cork, Genie Kufus, from the Department of Energy.”

“Actually I’m a consultant for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management,” Kufus clarified.

Eugenia Kufus was lovely and small, and her eyes sparkled in a way that reminded Cork of the bounce of sunlight off water. Her smile was delightful and disarming, and, because it seemed very personally directed at him, Cork was momentarily flustered. Was she flirting? He thought it ridiculous that he even wondered, and absurd that he couldn’t tell, but since Jo had died, he’d found himself on very uncertain ground where women were involved.

“Long time since this place saw any business,” Cork said, trying to regain composure.

Max Cavanaugh said, “For the last year, we’ve been focusing mostly on getting the mine prepared for inspection. A lot of work necessary in the power house and lift operation. Lou has overseen most of that process. We opened the offices here just a couple of weeks ago to accommodate Genie and her people. Lou has an office down the hall, and so do I. And we’ve upped security, of course.”

“Any trouble getting through the gate?” Haddad asked.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Cork said.

“Good.”

They gathered around the table, and Dross passed Cork three sheets of paper, each with creases showing that the sheets had been folded into thirds, as if to fit into envelopes. Centered on each sheet was a single line of text, the same line: We die. U die. All the notes had been printed using a red font that made the words look as if they dripped blood.

“I received one,” Haddad said, “Max received one, and Genie received one.”

“Mailed?” Cork asked.

“No,” Haddad replied. “We found them in various places. Mine was on my car seat when I came out of Nestor’s hardware store in Aurora. I never lock my door when I’m in town.”

Cavanaugh said, “Mine was inside my morning paper.”

“And mine had been slipped under the door of my hotel room,” Kufus said.

“No fingerprints on them or on the envelopes,” Dross told him. “We’ve checked.”

“When did you get them?” Cork asked.

“Two days ago,” Lou said.

Cork looked at the woman from the DOE. “You’re here to survey the mine, is that right, Ms. Kufus?”

“It’s Genie, and yes. I’m heading up the team that’s been sent to assess the geologic integrity of the Vermilion One site.”

“Geologic integrity?”

“Its suitability for long-term storage of nuclear waste.”

“Ah.” Cork studied the sheets. “Ink-jet printed.” He held one of them to the light, checking for a watermark. There was none. He shook his head at the bloody-looking print. “I don’t think I have this particular font on my computer.”

“It’s called ‘From Hell.’ Free download off the Internet,” Dross said. “Big around Halloween, I understand.”

“Have any of you received any other threats?”

“No,” Haddad said, then looked to the others for confirmation. No one contradicted him.

“Has anyone else received one of these?”

“Not that we know of,” Haddad replied. “Just us lucky three.”

“Did anyone see the envelopes being delivered?”

Dross shook her head. “My guys canvassed the areas, came up with nothing.”

“Is there any reason to believe that it’s not just part of the general anger that the DOE’s proposal has generated, that it’s not some crackpot letting off steam?”

“Do you want to take that chance?” Dross asked.

Cavanaugh said, “Cork, if you wouldn’t mind accompanying Lou, there’s something else you need to see.”

It was raining harder now, coming down in warm, gray sheets. Haddad, Dross, and Cork huddled in the old Mine Rescue Room next to the headframe. There was a guard on duty in the Rescue Room, a big guy who wasn’t familiar to Cork. The name tag on his company uniform read “Plott.” He sat in front of a bank of monitors, each showing a view of a different area of the property: the front gate, the mine office, the engine house, the other mine shaft openings. He had an FM radio going, but he’d turned it low when they came in so that it was barely audible. He watched the screens with a dedication that Cork was pretty certain was mostly show for those who’d intruded on his territory.

“What do you know about Vermilion One?” Haddad asked his companions.

“Among the oldest and deepest of the underground mines on the Iron Range,” Cork replied. “Closed when we were both kids. What, thirteen?”

“Thirteen,” Haddad confirmed with a nod. “Summer of nineteen sixty-four. My father was laid off. Sad day for a lot of folks. Do either of you understand Vermilion One, geologically?”

“I’m not from the North Country, Lou,” Dross replied. “All I know is that there’s iron in them thar hills.”

“That’s okay. Most people who aren’t Rangers don’t know much beyond that.” He pronounced the word “Ranger” as “Rain-cher,” which was how the old-timers on the Iron Range often referred to themselves.

While they waited for the cage to be lifted to the surface, Haddad explained a few things. The area in northern Minnesota known generally as the Iron Range was actually composed of three distinct ranges: the Vermilion, the Mesabi, and the Cuyuna. Because the Vermilion Range contained hematite, iron in nearly perfect concentration, it was the first area to be mined. The Vermilion One had begun as a pit mine—several pit mines, actually—then had gone to underground excavation. The first shaft had been sunk in 1900. By the time the mine was abandoned, it had reached a depth of nearly half a mile.

“Why abandoned?” Dross asked.

“New methods of mining and processing made taconite—that’s the low-grade form of iron ore that runs like a great river through the range—more profitable, and digging enormous pits became the way. The Hull Rust Mine outside Hibbing is the largest open-pit iron mine in the world.”

“Grand Canyon of the North,” Cork said.

“That’s what they call it,” Haddad confirmed.

“The depth of Vermilion One, is that the reason the DOE is interested in storing nuclear waste here?” Dross asked.

“One of the reasons. The other is the geologic stability. We’re standing on an extension of the Canadian Shield, the oldest exposed rock formation in the Northern Hemisphere and one of the most stable. The chance of seismic activity here is next to nothing. Compared with the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage site, which experiences several hundred seismic events every year, this place is about as dull as a nun’s sex life. When you’re thinking long-term safety of the nuclear waste we’ve generated, this is an attractive site. Plus the fact that there’s fifty miles of tunnel already excavated, so the storage areas have pretty much already been created. A significant cost reduction.”

“But if it does leak, it could contaminate the headwaters of a couple of the largest river systems in North America,” Cork pointed out.

Haddad said, “There’s that.”

“What do you think of all this, Lou?” Dross asked.

Haddad glanced toward the security guard, whose eyes were glued to the monitors, and didn’t reply.

Through the open window of the Rescue Room came the sound of the cage rattling up. They stepped outside, put on the hard hats Haddad had distributed, and stood next to the shaft. The cage arrived in a rush of cool air that smelled of deep, wet rock. Haddad threw back the gate. After they were in, Haddad reached to a button mounted on the framework and gave it three rings.

“Connects to the hoist operator in the engine house,” he explained. “We communicate everything with the rings.”

“What if we get stuck down there and the ringer fails?” Cork asked.

“The shaft has an antenna that runs from the lowest level all the way to the top. I just give a signal with this.” He tapped a pager that hung on his belt.

They began a rattling descend. There was a single lightbulb in a fixture at the top of the cage, and, as they dropped, Cork could see the hard face of the rock that had been cut for the shaft. The walls were streaked red, as if a great flow of blood had run there.

“You never answered Marsha’s question, Lou,” Cork said above the noise of the cage rattle. “What do you think about using Vermilion One to store nuclear waste?”

“A while back, Germany went with the idea of a waste isolation facility, which they created in a deep abandoned salt mine,” Haddad said. “They’ve discovered that it leaks. It’s been leaking for years.” He shook his head dismally. “The plan at the moment is to use the Yucca Mountain facility, but because of some of the potential difficulties there, other sites need to be considered. The question remains: What do we do with the nuclear waste we’ve created? Nobody in their right mind wants it in their backyard.”

It took a couple of minutes to reach the third level. When the cage stopped, Haddad threw back the gate and led Cork and Dross out. They were in a large excavation where two tunnels, each ten feet high and ten feet wide, led off to the left and to the right. The area around the cage station was lit with electric lights strung along the ceiling, but the tunnels were black. Up top the temperature was in the low seventies, but in the mine the air was twenty degrees cooler and Cork wished he’d brought a sweater. Dross was hugging herself for warmth.

“Over here,” Haddad said. He moved to a wall not far from the cage. Spray-painted in red across the old mining scars were the words “We die. U die.” The message had been carefully done so that it looked very much like the printed messages Haddad and the others had received. The words seemed to drip blood.

“When did you discover this?” Cork asked.

“I didn’t,” Haddad replied. “It was Genie Kufus, yesterday. She came down to inspect this level, and there it was.”

“She was alone?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time anyone was down here before that?”

“On this level specifically, a week ago. I sent a couple of men down to make sure the pumps were working. They checked every level except the last five.”

“Pumps?”

“Water. It leaks into the mine and has to be removed. The lowest levels are still flooded. It’ll be a while before we get those cleared for inspection.”

“They didn’t report anything?” Dross asked.

“No.”

“Could they have simply missed it?”

“Would you miss that?” Haddad replied.

Cork said, “So this was done sometime between last Sunday and yesterday. How would they have gotten access to this level?”

“Coming down the Number Six shaft is the only way.”

“There are seven other shafts, though, right?”

“All of them have been capped and sealed. I checked them myself yesterday after Genie reported what she’d found. None of them have been monkeyed with. Besides, none of the other shafts connect with the drifts that run off Number Six.”

“Was anyone else in the mine at all during that time, on any level?”

“Yes. Mike Chernokov and Freddie Brink. They’ve been working on the ventilation and the water pumps. And we had a small tour group in from the state legislature on Friday. They wanted to see for themselves what the DOE found so attractive about this site. I led it myself.”

“Did you visit Level Three?”

“No, I confined the tour to Level One, the Vermilion Drift.”

“Vermilion Drift?”

“In a mine, a vertical excavation is called a sink. An excavation that runs horizontally off a sink is called a drift.”

“So mine shafts are sinks and tunnels are drifts?” Cork said.

“That’s right. The Vermilion Drift was the first underground mining done in this location, and I thought it was appropriate for the group.”

“Your two guys and the legislature group, that’s it?”

“And Genie.”

“Did you talk to your guys?” Dross asked.

“Believe me, I talked.”

“What did they say?”

“That they went down, completed their work, came back up. They didn’t do anything, they didn’t see anything.”

“Do you trust them?” Cork asked.

“Listen, good-paying jobs on the Range aren’t that plentiful. Those guys are family men. They’d have to be stupid, which they’re not, or ideologically fanatic, which they also are not, to jeopardize their employment that way.”

“Okay,” Cork said. “I saw a ladder running down the framework on the side of the shaft. Is it possible somebody from your tour group slipped away and climbed down here?”

“There were only five in the group. All of them were in my sight the entire time.”

“What about Kufus?” Dross threw out.

Haddad looked surprised, then looked as if he was about to laugh. “Why would she do it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You said she was alone when she found this. When she reported it, how did she seem?”

“Disturbed. If you’re looking at storing nuclear waste in Vermilion One, the issue of security is going to be huge. She seemed genuinely surprised and upset.”

“Okay, let’s work on the premise that no one who was down here legitimately is responsible,” Cork said. “That would mean someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be.”

“No way someone who wasn’t authorized could get down here,” Haddad replied.

“If you accept my premise, that’s not true.”

“Which means what?” Haddad asked.

Dross eyed Cork and smiled with perfect understanding. “There’s got to be another way in.”

FOUR

Up top, Haddad separated and went to his office, while Cork and Dross returned to the conference room. Cavanaugh and Kufus were deep in a conversation that stopped the moment Cork and the sheriff walked in. From the looks on their faces and the abruptness with which the conversation ended, Cork had the distinct impression that it wasn’t business they were discussing.

Haddad came in a few moments later and dropped a book in the middle of the table. The tome—nearly a foot wide, eighteen inches long, eight inches thick, and bound in heavy material that looked a lot like leather—hit with the thump of a fallen body.

He said, “These are the schematics for every level of the mine, all twenty-seven. Every shaft, every drift, every foot of the fifty-four miles of excavation. I’ve gone over them so many times they visit me in my nightmares. I’m telling you, aside from Number Six, which is the only shaft still open, there is no other way in. Why would there be?”

“I don’t know,” Cork said. “Enlighten me.”

“I just did. Another entrance would mean another sink, and, believe me, cutting a shaft into rock is no Sunday drive in the country. It requires equipment, explosives, time, money. We’d know if someone did that. For one thing, they’d make a hell of a racket.”

Cork opened the book. The pages were made of a thin, waxy material. The drawings on them reminded Cork of town plats, precise lines and corridors with lots of numbers indicating sizes and distances. All this was laid against a background that showed the county section lines for the ground above. In the lower right-hand corner was a legend that contained the scale and explained the markings on the map: stopes, raises, drifts, shafts, drill holes. Under the legend was a notation: “Prepared by Engineers Office, Granger, MN.” Beneath that was a date.

“These are recent,” he said.

“I requested them as soon as I knew about the DOE inspection,” Cavanaugh said. He nodded toward Kufus. “I wanted Genie and her people to have the most accurate information possible.”

“How were they prepared?”

Haddad said, “I took the last full set of schematics—they’re in pretty bad shape—and had them redone.”

“When was the last set created?”

“Just before the mine closed in the sixties.”

“Any chance something was missed in the update?”

Haddad shook his head. “I checked the old schematics against the new set myself. They’re identical.”

Cork thought a moment. “Do you have anything before the sixties?”

“Yes. Archived at the Ladyslipper Mine. When Vermilion One closed, everything was moved there for storage.”

“Were they the basis for the schematics done when the mine closed?”

“No. A complete and independent survey was carried out at that time. They wanted an accurate blueprint of the mine as it existed then.”

“Have you looked at the earlier schematics?”

“What would be the point?”

“To be thorough,” Cork said. “It seems to me that there are three obvious possibilities for how someone managed to put graffiti on Level Three. One, it was someone who was down there officially and did something unofficial. But you tell me you’re certain that didn’t happen. Two, it was someone who accessed the mine unofficially through one of the known entrances, but you also say that’s impossible. And three, someone came into the mine another way, a way unknown to you and that doesn’t show on the recent schematics. Because there are earlier schematics that still haven’t been checked, this strikes me as the best possibility at the moment. I think it would be prudent to go over them, just to be thorough. You want to be thorough, don’t you, Lou?”

“And if this possibility doesn’t pan out?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

They stepped back from the table, and Haddad said, “I’ll head to Ladyslipper right now. If I find something, I’ll let everyone know, and we can decide how we want to proceed. In the meantime, Marsha, what about the threats?”

Dross looked a little uneasy. “The truth is that they’re rather vague and unspecific. They don’t threaten you by name. And the graffiti in the mine tends to support the general nature of the statement. It could be argued that ‘we’ is the population at large, and if storage of radioactive waste here results in the death of that population, you, as a part of that population, die too.”

“You sound like a lawyer,” Cavanaugh said.

Dross shrugged. “I’m not sure what more I can do at this point, especially because, as I say, the threat is so vague. And, Max, most people in Tamarack County aren’t thrilled with the idea of Vermilion One being used for nuclear waste storage, so the pool of suspects is rather large. But until we know how someone got into the mine, my recommendation is that no one goes down there alone.”

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Haddad assured her.

Dross said, “Let me know what you come up with after looking at the old schematics, Lou, and maybe we can figure something then. I’ll stay in touch.”

The sheriff bid them good-bye and left.

“I have work I can do back at my hotel room,” Kufus said. “Then I think I’ll do a mile in the lake.”

She looks like a swimmer, Cork thought, nicely toned. “The water’s still pretty cold,” he cautioned.

“I warm up easily.” She gave Cork that disarming smile, and he thought, Christ, she is flirting? But she turned the same smile immediately on Cavanaugh. “Still on for lunch, Max?”

“Looking forward to it,” he replied.

She left the room and left Cork feeling awkward and uncertain, stupid in his understanding of women.

After Genie Kufus had gone, Haddad said, “Thanks for agreeing to help, Cork. As soon as I’ve had a chance to go over the old schematics, I’ll let you know what I’ve found.”

They shook hands, and Cork turned to Max Cavanaugh to take his leave.

“Sure you can handle … everything?” Cavanaugh asked.

“I’m sure. And I’ll stay in touch.”

Outside the gate to the Vermilion One Mine, the number of protesters didn’t appear to have increased. Only the hard-core dedicated were willing to endure the discomfort of the steady rain. He understood and sympathized with their cause. Tamarack County was his home, too, and he didn’t want a radioactive dump there any more than they did. Isaiah Broom was still a hulking presence, along with a number of other Shinnobs Cork knew from the rez. Broom flipped him the bird as he passed. The others just eyed him with looks of betrayal.

He’d almost reached the end of the gathering when he saw a photographer’s tripod up at the side of the road and covered with a rain hood. Bent to the eyepiece was an old woman with long, black hair, wet as a well-used mop. Cork pulled off the asphalt and stopped. He got out and walked to the photographer, who was so intent on her work that she didn’t realize she had company.

“Boozhoo, Hattie,” Cork said, using the familiar Ojibwe greeting.

She rose slowly from her camera, not because of her age, which was well over seven decades, but because she was a woman unconcerned with time. She smiled, sunshine in the middle of the rain. Her eyes were light almond and warm when she saw him.

“Anin, Corkie,” she replied. She was one of only a few people who ever called him Corkie. She and all the others who used the name had been his mother’s good friends. There were few of them still alive. She glanced down the line of protesters, many of whom were eyeing the exchange suspiciously. “Taking a chance, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think they’ll jump me, Hattie. But I expect they won’t be including me in their prayers tonight.”

She reached inside her yellow rain jacket, pulled out a pack of Newports, plucked a cigarette, and fed it to the corner of her mouth, where it dangled while she struck a match.

“Love the gray of this day,” she said. “The pall it casts. My film’s going to love it, too. Just look at that composition.”

She pointed toward the stretch of road that led to the gate: the protesters huddled on one side, the mine fence on the other, and between them the no-man’s-land of wet asphalt. To Cork it was just a dreary scene, but to Hattie Stillday it was dramatic composition. Hers was the eye to trust. For longer than Cork had been alive, she’d been framing the nation in black-and-white stills. The main thrust of her work had been those moments when cultures collide. She’d photographed steelworkers’ strikes in Pennsylvania in the early fifties. She’d been on all three marches from Selma to Montgomery in the sixties. She’d chronicled on film the White Night gay riots in San Francisco in ’79. Every November, she was a part of the peace vigil held before the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the training of Latin American soldiers by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the organization that for years had been known as the notorious School of the Americas. This was one activity that moved her to do more than snap photos. She’d been arrested a couple of times, fingerprinted, booked. Only her age and reputation had saved her from actual prosecution. Her work hung in the Guggenheim and the Getty and the Art Institute, and had been reproduced in beautifully bound volumes. Hattie Stillday was famous, but to look at her on that wet morning, an old woman with black strands of hair plastered to her cheeks and mud caking her hiking boots and a cigarette dancing in the corner of her mouth as she talked, you’d never know it.

“So the poop is true? You’re working for the mine people?”

“ ‘Fraid so, Hattie.”

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and flicked ash onto the wet ground. “I think your grandmother just turned in her grave, Corkie. But I suppose everybody’s got to make their buck.”

There was a great deal more to it than that. Like the power of the composition Cork didn’t quite see, there were elements of this situation to which Hattie was undoubtedly blind. He could have tried to explain, but Corkie didn’t feel like arguing with this fine, old woman.

“Care to pose for a famous photo?” she asked.

“Infamous you mean. And no thanks. I’ve got business to attend to. Actually, I’m on my way to talk to your granddaughter.”

“Ophelia?” Her eyes turned cold. “What the hell for?”

“I can’t say.”

“This mine business? She’s got nothing to do with it. You go dragging her name into this, Corkie, and get her into trouble, you’ll answer to me, do you understand?”

“I’m always discreet, Hattie.”

“Discreet like brass knuckles. You’re just like your father.”

Cork spotted Isaiah Broom coming their way. He’d already had all the conversation with the man that he wanted for the day. He leaned and kissed the old woman on her cheek and tasted the rain there. “I’ll be gentle with her, Hattie. I give you my word.” He turned, crossed the road, got back into his Land Rover, and drove away. Behind him the protest vanished into the gray curtain of the rain.

FIVE

He headed first to Sam’s Place, the burger stand he owned in Aurora.

Sam’s Place was, in a way, the vault of his heart. It held good memories, treasures that reached back over forty years. It had been bequeathed to him by the man who’d built the business, a Shinnob named Sam Winter Moon, who’d been his father’s good friend and then Cork’s. With the help of his children and their friends, Cork had managed the business by himself for years. But his older daughter, Jenny, was gone now, maybe for good. She’d graduated from the University of Iowa and had been accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the graduate program there. In Iowa City, she’d met a young man who was both a poet and a farmer. No matter how Cork looked at Jenny’s future, coming back to Aurora didn’t seem part of it.

His second daughter, Anne, was in El Salvador, on a mission program sponsored by St. Ansgar College, where she’d just finished her sophomore year. After St. Ansgar, it was his daughter’s intention to become a preaffiliate with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and to prepare to become a nun, a path Cork was pretty certain would not lead back to the North Country of Minnesota.

His youngest child, Stephen, who was fourteen, had gone away for the summer to work on a cattle operation, courtesy of Hugh Parmer, an exorbitantly wealthy man from West Texas whom Cork had befriended and who had, in return, befriended the O’Connors. In the infrequent communications Cork had received from his son, Stephen’s response to the world outside Aurora was nothing short of an intoxicating romance. Cork could see the writing on the wall.

His wife, Jo, had died—been murdered—a little over a year and a half earlier, and it seemed to Cork that more and more the time he’d spent as husband and father had begun to recede from him, a train departing the station, leaving him alone on the platform.

Financially, Cork was set these days. He’d sold land along the lakeshore to Hugh Parmer, who’d intended to build a tasteful condominium community surrounding Sam’s Place. But Parmer had chosen instead to donate the land to the town of Aurora, with the stipulation that the area be kept in its natural state in perpetuity. He’d done this in honor of Jo O’Connor. Cork was grateful to his friend, because every time he looked from Sam’s Place down the wild and beautiful shoreline of Iron Lake, in a way, he saw Jo.

His PI business had succeeded beyond all his expectations and took up so much of his time that he couldn’t effectively operate Sam’s Place on his own. So he’d hired a woman named Judy Madsen, a retired school administrator who knew how to handle kids, to run the business.

He parked in the gravel lot, went inside, and opened the door to the serving area. “How’s it going, Judy?”

Without turning from the prep table where she was slicing tomatoes, Madsen said, “We need change. And we’re low on chips. Driesbach”—the route man who delivered most of the packaged food items—“called and said he’s sick as a dog and won’t be by today.”

“All right. I’ll hit the IGA and pick up some chips. Anything else?”

“Yeah. When are you going to sell me this place?”

A chronic question. And not asked in jest. Judy wanted Sam’s Place, and she wanted it bad.

“It’s my legacy to my children, Judy.”

“I’m the one wearing an apron.”

“They’ll be back,” he said.

She straightened up from the prep table and gave him a level look. “If you say so.”

It wasn’t until a few minutes before noon that Cork walked into the Northern Lights Center for the Arts. The organization occupied the old Parrant estate on North Point Road, a prime piece of property situated just outside the town limits, at the end of a pine-covered peninsula that stuck like a crooked thumb into Iron Lake. The house was an enormous brick affair with two wings, mullioned windows, and dark wood framing, which gave it the look of a country place an English baron might have maintained. It was separated from the road by a tall wall constructed of the same brick as the house. The lawn was a football field of manicured grass that sloped down to the lakeshore, where a boathouse stood. A sailboat was tied to the boathouse dock, its mast a bare white cross against the deep blue of the lake.

Judge Robert Parrant was long dead. There had been other occupants before and after the judge, but because of the man’s infamy and unseemly demise, the people of Tamarack County still tied his name to the property.

Cork had an unpleasant history with the place. Ten years earlier, he’d found Judge Parrant dead in his office there, brains splattered across the wall, the victim of a murder that had been made to look like a suicide. In that same office four years later, Cork had found two more dead men, a murder-suicide committed with a shotgun. There were other deaths, and although they occurred elsewhere, they occurred somehow in the shadow cast over Tamarack County by that cursed place.

There was a word in the language of the Ojibwe. Mudjimushkeeki. It meant “bad medicine.” To Cork’s mind, that acre at the end of North Point Road, regardless of its beauty, was a place of mudjimushkeeki.

He walked in without knocking and found himself in the foyer of what had once been a living room but was now a large common area for the artists in residence at the center. A lot of clatter came from the dining room, where Emma Crane, the cook, was setting the table for lunch. Cork went to the center’s office, which was the same room where, years before, all the blood had been spilled. The door was open, and Ophelia Stillday was at her desk. She looked up, and, like everyone else Cork had seen that day, she looked gray.

“Hey, kiddo, why the long face?” he asked.

He’d known Ophelia her whole life. She’d been raised by her grandmother Hattie after her own mother had died of a drug overdose in a crack house in L.A. Ophelia and his daughter Jenny had been best friends, and there’d been so many sleepovers at the O’Connor house that she’d become like another member of the family. She’d gone on camping trips with them and joined them for a long cross-country drive one year to Disneyland. Hattie Stillday needn’t have warned him about treating her kindly; he felt almost as much affection for her as he did for his own children.

“Business.” It was clear that was all she would say on the subject.

“Running the place alone since Lauren’s gone, that’s got to be tough.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. O.C.?”

It was what she’d always called him. O.C. for O’Connor.

Ophelia was full-blood Ojibwe, a young woman with intense eyes and graceful movements. All her life she’d been a dancer, both traditional and modern. She’d performed the Jingle Dance at powwows and knew many dances from other tribes. She’d also studied dance at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, and her dream had been to create original choreography that combined the elements of native dance with more modern movement. Unfortunately, her dream had been cut short by a car that had run a stoplight in Minneapolis, broadsided Ophelia’s little Vespa, and crushed her right leg. Ophelia, the doctors predicted with surety, would never dance again.

“Actually I came about Lauren.”

“She’s gone.”

“She’s not just gone, Ophelia. She’s gone missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mind if I sit?”

She gestured toward a chair near her desk, a piece that looked like it had been made in the days of Louis XIV.

“It appears that no one knows her true whereabouts,” he said, after he was seated. “When did you last see her?”

Ophelia sat back, folded her arms across her chest in a move that Cork, as a trained observer, might have taken as unconsciously defensive. He chose to ignore it.

“A cocktail gathering,” she said. “Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The center was empty, and we met late into the evening with some of our volunteers in her private dining room to go over the roster of new artists and instructors coming Monday morning for the next residency.”

“How does that work?”

“Most of our artists come for a week. With each group we try to focus on the medium they’re most interested in. Watercolor, for example, or multimedia or photography. We bring in well-known working artists as instructors. It’s an intense program. We have room enough here for only seven artists and two instructors. Admission is very competitive. We do have one residency that’s different. It’s longer for one thing, anywhere from one month to three months, and it’s designed to highlight an artist Lauren feels is on the verge of a big career breakout and to help with that process. Currently, our long-term resident artist is Derek Huff. Very talented.”

“How did Lauren seem that last night?”

“Excited. She’s always excited at the prospect of a new group. She was positively ecstatic.”

“Ecstatic?”

“Effervescent. Ebullient,” she added.

Which made Cork smile. Being around artists, he decided, was bound to rub off on you.

Above the fireplace mantel hung a painting of Lauren Cavanaugh. It showed a beautiful woman in her early forties, with ash blond hair, green eyes, and flawless skin carefully drawn over the fine bones of a narrow face. Her lips seemed to hint at a smile, very Mona Lisaesque. She was stunning, but it was hard to tell what lay behind that beauty.

When Cork was young, the Cavanaugh name had been synonymous with iron mining and with wealth. Both Max and his sister, Lauren, had been born in Aurora, but neither had been raised there. Their father had taken them away when they were quite young. When her brother returned to Aurora two years earlier, Lauren had followed. Because Max attended St. Agnes regularly, Cork knew him pretty well. But Lauren Cavanaugh didn’t go to church, and to Cork she was an enigma. She’d bought the Parrant estate, which had been empty for some time, and had established the Northern Lights Center for the Arts. She came with a cultural vision, a whirlwind of ideas that swept up a lot of people in Tamarack County. She proved to be a true patron of the arts. She’d organized and funded a lecture series that had brought in artists and thinkers with a broad range of interests. From what Cork understood, the size of the audiences that turned out for the events had been remarkable. According to things he’d read in the local paper, plans were being drawn for a complex that would include lofts, a gallery, and a theater for performing arts. Lauren Cavanaugh’s passion and conviction regarding the importance of art, even in a wilderness outpost like Aurora, was inspiring to a lot of Cork’s fellow citizens, and clearly to Ophelia.

But what Cork saw in the painting above the mantel was a woman who looked down on him, and her hinted smile could easily have been one of contempt.

“Did she ever talk to you about why she came back to Aurora?” he asked.

“Simplicity,” Ophelia replied.

“Where was she before?”

“Where wasn’t she? Europe, Australia, India, South America.”

“And now Aurora. For the sake of simplicity. It seems to me that what she’s set out to accomplish here is far from simple.”

Ophelia gave a brief laugh. “Lauren isn’t a woman who can sit still. She’s a fountain of ideas and inspiration. She keeps a tape recorder with her all the time so that, whenever a new idea strikes her, she can record it and not risk forgetting. I’d love to listen to one of her tapes.”

“So would I. Is that possible?”

Ophelia looked taken aback. Offended even. “Absolutely not.”

A delicate bell rang in the dining room.

“Lunch,” Ophelia said. She stood up and reached for the cane that hung from the back of her chair.

“Just a few more questions,” Cork said.

“Why are you asking?”

“I’ve been hired.”

“Who?” Then it became clear to her. “Max.”

“I’m not confirming that,” Cork said.

She sat back down.

“When you last spoke with Lauren, did she mention a trip at all?”

“No,” Ophelia replied.

“Did she talk about visiting someone, a friend?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Does she have friends? A special friend maybe?”

“She has lots of friends.” She’d answered the last few questions with a look of impatience, but now she frowned and thought carefully. “No, she has lots of acquaintances. Her life is filled with people, but she doesn’t seem to have anyone especially close. At least not that she’s ever talked about.”

“What about men?”

“You mean like dating?”

“Or whatever it’s called these days.”

Ophelia laughed. “She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s rich. Men make fools of themselves over her all the time.”

“But does she date?”

“Mr. O.C., I’m her colleague. Actually, I’m her employee. She doesn’t share every intimate detail of her life with me.”

“Just asking.” Cork heard footsteps, lots of them, outside Ophelia’s office. Artists who’d worked up an appetite. “It’s my understanding that she hasn’t contacted anyone since she left. No e-mails from her personal account. Does she have an e-mail account she uses for business?”

“Yes, but if you’re hoping to look at it, you’re out of luck. It’s password protected, and I don’t have the password. Are you always this pushy?”

Cork smiled. “This is just inquisitive, kiddo. When I’m pushy, believe me, you’ll know it. Could I see her living quarters?”

“Living quarters? This isn’t a barracks, Mr. O.C. But I suppose it wouldn’t be a problem for you to see her residence.”

Ophelia’s cane was of beautiful design, polished hickory with an eagle’s head carved into the handle. She leaned on it heavily as they left her office and turned down the hallway, which was blocked by a door that hadn’t been there the last time Cork was in the house. Ophelia used the crook handle of her cane to knock. She tried the knob, which turned, and she pushed the door open. Beyond lay the first floor of the north wing, several rooms that had become the private residence of Lauren Cavanaugh: a study, a parlor, a small dining room, a bedroom, a bathroom. She hadn’t carved out a lot of the house for her own use, but what she occupied she’d done in style. Every room was beautifully furnished and impeccably cleaned. The parlor was decorated with stunning artwork—paintings and photographs—of the area, taken by a variety of the North Country’s finest artists.

“Your grandmother’s work,” Cork said, pointing toward a series of framed photographs.

“And mine, too,” Ophelia said proudly, pointing to some images that hung near her grandmother’s.

Fate having taken away from her the chance to dance, Ophelia had turned to her grandmother’s art. Cork didn’t know a lot about photography as an art form, but he thought—and did not say—that Ophelia had a distance to go before her work approached the quality of her grandmother’s.

The bedroom looked in perfect order, the bed neatly made.

“Does someone clean for her, make up her bed?” he asked.

“Our housekeeper, yes. But Joyce hasn’t been in here for several days. There’s been no need.”

The closet was a large walk-in hung with so many outfits that it was impossible to tell if anything was missing.

“She likes shoes,” Cork said, noting what seemed to him to be an inordinate number of pairs.

“She has a weakness for expensive Italian footwear,” Lauren said, with only the slightest note of censure.

Cork checked her dresser. Sachet in the drawer that held her delicates, and everything was neatly—obsessively—folded.

“Who does her laundry?” he asked.

“Joyce.”

“Does Joyce fold the laundry?”

“Lauren is particular.”

“Clearly.”

Outside the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to break. Through the broad bedroom window, Cork could see Iron Lake. Here and there, the gray surface was splashed with pools of glittering sunlight.

“I heard that she had the boathouse remodeled,” he said.

“Yes. A little retreat where she can get away from all that goes on in the big house here.”

“May I take a look?”

Ophelia glanced at her watch.

“It’ll take just a minute,” Cork said. “Promise.”

She accompanied him out a side door and along a path constructed of flagstone. She walked awkwardly, relying heavily on her cane. It was a painful thing to see, especially when Cork recalled the grace with which she’d moved before her accident. Ophelia knocked on the boathouse door. No one answered and she tried the knob. The door was unlocked and she opened it.

“Lauren?” she called, but clearly only for the sake of propriety.

It was a comfortable little nest Lauren Cavanaugh had created for herself, one very large room that included a small sitting area and a bed. Through an opened door in the far corner, Cork saw a tidy little bathroom with a shower. The place was done in rustic tones and had a very intimate feel to it, even more so than her private residence in the large house. It struck Cork as the kind of retreat that might be perfect for trysting.

“Look, Mr. O.C., I’m really uncomfortable with this.”

Cork walked to the bed and pushed down on the mattress. His hand sunk into the bedding and disappeared.

“God, I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Ophelia said, “but I’d like you to leave.”

“Why? I haven’t taken any of her silver.” Cork gave her his most serious look. “The woman is missing, Ophelia. I’ve been hired to find her. If I’m going to do that, I’ll need your help. And your discretion. It would be best if everything we’ve discussed here today stays between us.” Cork started for the boathouse door. “I think I saw a computer in her study back in the house. I’d like to have a look at it.”

“No. I think it’s time you left.”

He smiled, pleased, despite himself, at the iron in her will. Before he could move or speak, someone outside called, “Lauren!”

A moment later, a young man stepped into the doorway.

“What is it, Derek?” Ophelia said.

“I saw the open door and thought maybe. … Any word from Lauren when she might be back from Chicago?”

Derek was tall, athletic, good looking. His blond hair was sun bleached nearly white. He had a tan, too deep to have come from the North Country, and carried himself with the easy grace Cork associated with California surfers. Cork’s and Ophelia’s presence in Lauren Cavanaugh’s little retreat was obviously a surprise to him.

Ophelia said, “No word yet.”

He looked Cork over, his ocean blue eyes lazy and sure. “If you hear anything, will you let me know?”

“Of course,” Ophelia said.

Derek flashed them a smile made of perfect white teeth and left.

“One of the new residents?” Cork asked.

“One of the old ones. Derek is here for three months. He’s nearing the end of his residency.”

“Nice looking kid.”

“I suppose.”

“He seemed pretty familiar with the boathouse.”

“He’s a little relaxed with protocol. It’s a California thing, I think.”

“Maybe.”

But Cork, ever the detective, wondered if there might be more to it than that.

SIX

Ophelia saw Cork to the front gate, where she said, “I got an e-mail from Jenny yesterday. She sounds happy.”

“Ecstatic? Effervescent? Ebullient?”

She laughed. “Aaron seems like a nice guy.” She was speaking of the farmer-poet whom Jenny was dating. “I’m envious.”

“There are good men here, too,” Cork said.

Her eyes dropped briefly to her ruined leg. “Guys here want a girl who can dance at the wedding.”

Cork’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from the belt holster and checked the display to see who was calling. It was Lou Haddad.

“Gotta go, Ophelia,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

“If I get into trouble, Mr. O.C., there will be hell to pay.” She shook her finger at him playfully, waved good-bye, and closed the gate behind him.

Cork took the call on the way to his Land Rover.

“I’ve had a chance to look at the old schematics,” Haddad said. “I’ve found something.”

“What?”

“Can you meet me at the Vermilion One Mine in an hour?”

“I’ll be there.”

It was two o’clock when Cork drove through Gresham again, and the sky overhead had cleared. The clouds had drifted east toward the Sawbill Mountains, beyond which lay the vast, icy blue of Lake Superior. A few chairs had been placed on the sidewalk outside Lucy’s. They were all occupied by folks drinking coffee or Cokes in the shade of a green awning. A couple of protest placards leaned against the wall, and Cork recognized a few of the faces from the gathering outside Vermilion One that morning. As he passed, several pairs of eyes turned his way, and he felt the hostility directed at him as solidly as if they’d thrown rocks.

He knew the sentiments of the residents of Gresham, knew that, despite the money that might come their way from a new mine enterprise, the townspeople were no more eager than the Iron Lake Ojibwe or anyone else in Tamarack County to have a nuclear waste dump in their backyard.

When he approached Vermilion One, he saw that Isaiah Broom and most of the other protesters were still there, but Hattie Stillday had gone. Tommy Martelli logged him in, and Cork headed to the office building. Haddad’s Explorer wasn’t in the lot. Cork walked inside, gave Margie Renn at the reception desk a brief wave in passing, and went immediately to the conference room, which was empty.

In a corner near one of the windows sat a small easy chair, an end table, and a standing lamp. On the table lay a large book titled Vermilion One: The Rise of Iron on the Range, written by a man named Darius Holmes. Cork sat in the chair and took up the book. A good deal of text filled the pages, the history of Vermilion One and of mining on the Range in general, but Holmes had included a lot of photographs. Cork knew roughly the history and geology of the area. It was taught proudly to every kid in school in Minnesota. Although a large stretch of the North Country was referred to as the Iron Range, there were, as Haddad had pointed out earlier that day, three ranges: the Vermilion, the Mesabi, and the Cuyuna. Aurora lay hard against the Vermilion, the easternmost of the ranges, where the earliest mining had taken place.

In the book, the photographs of the early years showed tough little men in shirts and overalls caked with mud, wearing leather mining caps, pushing ore cars. These, Cork knew, were muckers, the unskilled workers. They were Welsh or Slavic or Irish or Finn or Swede or German and came, many of them, directly from their homelands to work the mines. Others had come earlier, lured by the wealth of timber in the great north wilderness, and, as the forests retreated, had turned to mining. The towns they built—Chisholm, Hibbing, Eveleth, Coleraine, Winton, Kinney, Crosby, Mountain Iron, Bovey—were a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods: Swedes on one side of the street, Finns on the other, Italians a block to the south, Welsh a block to the north. They were friendly in their work together, but in their neighborhoods, in their marriages, in their religions, they clung to the language and traditions of their own homelands and were suspicious of the others.

The mines grew in number and wealth, and the towns grew with them. Ore from the Range was carried by rail to harbors on Lake Superior and shipped all over the world. The Range became famous, the greatest supplier of iron ore on earth. The money from the mines built excellent hospitals in the communities and fine civic structures, and the Iron Range was known to have some of the best school systems in the nation.

To every blessing there was, Cork supposed, a dark side. The mine pits ate at the earth, ugly as cancers, and the tailings rose in red mountains that sullied the rivers and streams. And in the end, the demand for ore declined and the mines began to close one by one, leaving a population without recourse. The men were miners, bred from generations of miners, and the work they’d prepared for all their lives had vanished, with nothing at all promising on the horizon. A lot of people simply left, and life went out of the towns. Aurora had gone through this. When Cork was a teenager, after the Vermilion One closed, the town struggled to redefine itself. Iron Lake and the proximity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness helped. The town began to court and to cater to the tourist trade and slowly reshaped itself around the heart of that new economy. Other towns didn’t fare as well and stood nearly deserted in the shadow of the great red mountains of ore tailings.

Cork closed the book and stared out the window. He could see the rugged, forested hills of the North Country stretching away like a beautiful, turbulent sea. With all his heart, he loved that place, which had been his home for most of his life. Although he couldn’t see the protesters beyond the trees that walled off the Vermilion One complex, his heart was with them. He told himself that what he was doing wasn’t about helping the mine become a nuclear waste dump. It was about ensuring the safety of the people who worked there, people he knew, and so was a different issue. Still, a part of him felt like a traitor.

He heard footfalls in the hallway, and Lou Haddad walked in, carrying a briefcase, which he set on the conference table and opened. He slid from it a single schematic, very old looking, drawn on material that had the feel of canvas.

“What did you find?” Cork asked, joining him.

Haddad said, “This is a map for Level One. This”—he put his finger on a tunnel outlined on the page—“is the Vermilion Drift, the first of the excavations dug when the mine went underground, in 1900. Everything looks normal until you get here.” His finger followed the lines of the tunnel drawing until it came to a place where the solid lines ended and were replaced with dotted lines.

“Why the change in how the lines are drawn?”

“Officially, the Vermilion Drift was closed back in the early part of the last century. A cave-in. The dotted lines show where the tunnel used to run.”

“So the tunnel’s blocked?”

“That’s what the map says, but I’ve been thinking about that. Some of the underground mines had real problems with cave-ins, but not Vermilion One. The rock here is simply too stable, one of the reasons for the DOE’s interest. And something else isn’t right, this drift beyond the cave-in. According to the schematic, it takes a sharp turn and heads east.”

“So?”

“The ore deposit runs the other way.”

“So the drift goes away from the iron?”

“That’s what the map shows.”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Not for a minute. Take a look at this, right here.” Haddad tapped the paper at a point a short distance beyond where the tunnel veered east. “That’s where the Iron Lake Reservation begins. The ore deposit runs directly under reservation land, I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think that, in those early years, they mined ore that didn’t belong to them.”

“How could they get away with it?”

“Probably just went about it quietly.”

“And when they were finished, they sealed the tunnel to hide what they’d done, claimed there’d been a cave-in, and altered the maps?”

“That’s my speculation.”

“This extension doesn’t appear on any of the more recent schematics?”

Haddad shook his head. “When the last survey was done, just before the mine shut down, the tunnel had been sealed for years.”

“Sealed how?” Cork asked.

“Timbered off. Which would explain why the newer maps simply show the tunnel ending. As far as anyone knew, it did.”

“But maybe it doesn’t?”

Haddad straightened up. “Let’s go see.”

On his way to Vermilion One, Cork had stopped at his house and picked up a sweater to wear in the mine, a cardigan his kids had given him for Christmas six or seven years earlier. It was red, with a white reindeer embroidered on the left side. He put it on in the cage as they descended. When Haddad saw it, he laughed and said, “Ho, ho, ho.” He wore a fleece-lined windbreaker. They both wore hard hats, each with a light mounted in front. For backup, Cork had brought the Maglite he kept in his Land Rover. Plott, the security guard on duty in the Rescue Room next to the framehead, had given Haddad a Coleman electric lantern.

It took no time at all to reach Level One. They stepped into the cage station area, which was only dimly lit. Haddad indicated the dark tunnel directly ahead. “The Vermilion Drift,” he said.

Bright sun, blue sky, green trees, sweet air, abundant life—all this was only a hundred feet above his head—but the solidness of the chill rock around him made Cork feel completely cut off from the world he knew. As he stood facing the dark throat of the Vermilion Drift, everything human in him cried out to back away, to return to the light, and for a moment he couldn’t make himself go forward.

“Claustrophobic?” Haddad asked with real concern.

“No,” Cork said. “It’s not that.”

“Alien, isn’t it?”

“Like I’m on another planet.”

“Imagine spending your whole life in a place like this, Cork. A lot of men did, my old man among them.”

In that moment, Cork felt a greater respect for Lou’s father and the men like him than he ever had before.

“You okay going on?” Haddad asked.

“Yeah. I’m right behind you.”

They walked slowly into a dark that, if their lights failed, would swallow them completely. The floor was flat, the tunnel itself a ten-by-ten-foot bore whose walls showed every scar of its creation. Cork had expected the rock to be red here, but it was dull gray-green.

“Ely greenstone,” Haddad explained. “Waste rock. They had to get through this to reach the ore. That’s what this drift is for. And see that?” Haddad pointed toward a short tunnel that cut off to their right. “A crosscut. The ore deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”

Haddad turned off the Vermilion Drift into the crosscut tunnel. Near the end of the crosscut, which was only a dozen yards long, he stopped and shined a light toward the ceiling, illuminating a wide hole there.

“This is a raise,” he told Cork. “In the mining here, they used a technique called undercutting. They tunneled beneath the deposits and blasted raises, these short upward accesses into the ore itself. They’d mine the ore, creating rooms called stopes, and send the ore down the raises into cars waiting on the rails below here in the drift. The cars would take the ore back to the main shaft, where it was lifted up to the framehead and dumped for crushing.”

Cork looked down at the bare rock under his feet. “What happened to the rails?”

“Recycled,” Haddad said. “Whenever they finished mining a drift, they pulled up the rails and used them somewhere else.” He stared upward into the raise above his head, and, when he spoke, his voice was full of admiration. “The men in charge of a crew, they were called captains. These were guys who’d spent their lives in mines in Wales and Slovakia and Germany. They were tough cusses, proud men. They knew rock and how to mine it.”

“What did your father do?”

“He started out as a mucker, worked his way up until he had his own crew. Damn near broke his heart when they closed the mine.”

Cork knew that afterward Haddad’s father had gone to work in the family grocery store, but his heart was never in it.

“I don’t know,” Lou said. “Maybe it was a good thing, having to leave the mine. A lot of miners at the end were suffering. Arthritis, lung problems. Hell, in the old days, because of the ungodly noise in the stopes, most of the miners were hard of hearing.”

Cork remembered something his own father used to tell him: You always knew when you were passing the house of a guy who’d worked the Vermilion One. You could hear his radio or television blasting all the way out to the street.

They returned to the main drift and kept going.

A few minutes later, their headlamps illuminated a sudden wall ahead, the official end of the tunnel, a construct of dark timbers that completely blocked the passage.

“Do all tunnels end this way?” Cork asked.

“Normally they just end in rock. This is unusual.”

“Has Genie Kufus finished her survey of Level One?”

“Yes.”

“She say anything about this to you?”

“She hasn’t shared any of her thoughts yet. She probably won’t until she’s completed the survey of the entire mine.”

They stood before the wall, which had been constructed of six-by-six timbers laid horizontally, one atop the other. They’d been secured to the wall of the tunnel with bolted metal L plates. The wood had fared well in the dry cool of the mine. Then Cork noticed something.

“Look here.” He knelt and ran his hand along a seam cut into several of the timbers a couple of feet from the right side of the wall. There was another seam cut two feet nearer the center. “These are fresh.”

“Yeah,” Haddad agreed. He knelt beside Cork and gave the top cut section a push. It yielded and fell back into the dark on the other side of the timbers. He reached in and pulled the next section toward him, and, when it was out, Cork saw that an eyebolt had been screwed into the backside, which would allow it to be removed easily from the other side of the wall. One by one, Haddad cleared the next four sections of cut timber, which created an opening two feet high and two feet wide, large enough for a man to crawl through.

Cork shot the beam of his Maglite into the dark on the other side, revealing a continuation of the Vermilion Drift. He saw no indication of a cave-in. He looked at Haddad. “You were right. Somebody lied in that official report a long time ago.”

“Somebody who didn’t want it known that ore belonging to the Ojibwe had been taken.”

“You game?”

“Are you kidding?” Haddad crawled ahead through the gap.

Cork followed and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The air on the other side reeked of animal decay. He stood up and shot his light into the darkness ahead. “Something died in here, Lou. And not long ago.”

“Probably some animal came in and couldn’t find its way out. Which means you’re right. There’s another entrance. And do you feel that?”

“What?” Cork said.

“The temperature. It’s much warmer here than on the other side of that timbered wall. There’s air coming in from somewhere up ahead.”

Haddad went forward with the Coleman lantern. They had to walk carefully because on this side of the wall the tunnel floor was littered with blocks of stone big as an ice chest.

Cork glanced uneasily at the ceiling above him. “Any chance of a cave-in?”

“I wouldn’t worry.”

“What about all these rocks on the floor?”

Haddad shook his head. “Should have been cleared during the mining. Poor workmanship.”

They seemed to have walked forever in the dark, and Cork was uncomfortably aware how far behind them was the way out. He’d never been claustrophobic before, but now he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Maybe it was just the utter black around them and the fact that he didn’t really know where they were headed. The foulness of the air he breathed might also have had something to do with it.

Haddad stopped suddenly, and Cork nearly ran into him. Haddad turned off his Coleman. “Kill your light,” he said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Turn it off, Cork. And your headlamp, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just do it.”

Cork didn’t like the idea. But when the lights were off, he understood what Haddad was getting at. It was pitch dark around them but not absolute, as it should have been. Far ahead, the dark was broken by a diffuse paleness.

Haddad switched his lantern on again, and for a moment the light was a knife in Cork’s eyes. “Come on,” Haddad said and started ahead, this time walking much faster despite the great stones littering the way.

Before Cork could follow, he heard something scurry to his right. He swung the beam of his Maglite in that direction, but whatever critter had been there had vanished. It gave him the creeps knowing that there were living things that could see him but that he could not see.

The tunnel ahead grew brighter, though still dark enough that artificial light was needed to navigate. At last they came to a jumble of what looked to Cork to be dynamite-blasted rock. There was a ragged passage into the tumble of debris where light came through. Haddad put down the lantern, knelt, and crawled into the opening.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

“What is this?”

“My guess would be a bit of wildcat mining. It happened in the early days on the Range, when no one was paying enough attention to property and mineral rights. The problem with open pits in this particular area was that the loose glacial deposits on the surface kept collapsing into the pit. That’s one of the reasons mining went underground on this part of the Range. I’d bet whoever blasted this sink finally said to hell with it. But I’d also bet that the guys in charge of the Vermilion One back then knew exactly where the ore was that the wildcatters were trying to get at and ran the Vermilion Drift all the way to the pit. Then maybe they had another landslide, or maybe they even blasted the side of the pit themselves to try to hide what they’d done. But they didn’t quite succeed. Come on, let’s see what’s up top.”

He didn’t wait for Cork to weigh in on the plan’s advisability but quickly disappeared into the mouth of the passage, which angled upward and was easily wide enough for his body to squeeze into. Cork didn’t follow right away, thinking it prudent to wait a bit to be sure they both didn’t get stuck somewhere they couldn’t get out of.

As he waited, he heard something move behind him. He spun and searched the darkness, sensing a watcher he couldn’t see. He stabbed the flashlight beam into the black throat of the tunnel. Deep inside the Vermilion Drift, two yellow eyes glowed back at him.

“You coming?” Haddad shouted down.

“Just a minute!”

Cork crept toward the eyes, which didn’t move. He reached down and picked up a rock from the tunnel floor. As he approached, a hiss came from the darkness, then an angry snort. Cork kept moving, the rock firmly in his grip. When he was fifteen feet away, the creature turned to flee and, in turning, showed its fat, furry body and bushy tail. A raccoon. Cork figured the tunnel would be a pretty good place to make a den for the winter months, and probably the coon had young somewhere. He was just about to return to the rock mess at the bottom of the test pit when the Maglite beam swept across a broken area in the wall that he’d overlooked as he’d passed through earlier. It appeared as if rocks had been loosely piled to close off a crosscut tunnel. He stepped around the rubble on the floor and worked one of the stones away from the makeshift wall. Behind was a well of darkness, and from that well flowed the stench that fouled the air in the tunnel. He shined his Maglite inside.

Cork had always thought that as a cop he’d seen the worst of everything. When his flashlight revealed what the stone wall had hidden, he realized how wrong he’d been.

SEVEN

The sink, which Haddad had identified as most probably a wildcat operation, was in the middle of a small clearing a quarter mile north of the headframe for the Number Six shaft of the Vermilion One Mine. The sheriff’s people had been able to reach it by driving carefully among the pines that lay between the sink and the mine buildings.

It was nearing seven in the evening, and Cork stood with Sheriff Marsha Dross and Captain Ed Larson near the edge of the sink. Dross had put in a call to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office in Bemidji, and they were waiting for the agents to arrive. The drive would have taken a good three hours, and enough time had already passed that Cork and the others were watching their watches. Alf Murray, the chief of the Aurora Volunteer Fire Department, stood with Cork and the others, using a walkie-talkie to communicate with his men below. The firemen had brought out mobile lights and a generator, and a power cable snaked out of sight down the passage that led eventually to the Vermilion Drift. They’d set up the lights in the tunnel, but only as far as the gruesome discovery Cork had made. Ed Larson, who was in charge of major crimes for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, had overseen the dismantling of the makeshift stone wall. Some of Dross’s people had done a flashlight search of the tunnel from that point to the timber construction where Haddad and Cork had crawled through. Dross had put others to work doing a quadrant search of the area surrounding the surface opening of the sink for anything that might prove to be evidence. She’d hoped for maybe a footprint or tire track, but the ground had yielded nothing.

Someone had gone to Lucy’s in Gresham and brought back a big container of coffee, and Cork stood sipping from a white foam cup as he waited. The sun had shifted to the far west, and the shadows of the pines had begun to creep across the clearing.

“Ever deal with anything like this when you were sheriff?” Dross asked.

“Nope,” Cork replied. “I can’t imagine many sheriffs do.”

“Jesus, I hope not.”

Cork heard the sound of a vehicle engine approaching gradually through the pines. The sun was in his eyes, and it was hard to see into the deep shade among the evergreens. A minute later, a white Suburban entered the clearing and rolled slowly toward them. It stopped beside the sheriff’s pickup truck, and the two occupants got out. One of them Cork knew well: Simon Rutledge, with whom he’d worked in the past, both when he was sheriff of Tamarack County and in the time since. Cork liked him immensely and had great respect for his ability. Rutledge’s companion was a stranger. She was of medium height, early fifties, hair the color of a cirrus cloud and with the same wispy appeal.

“Marsha, Ed, Cork,” Rutledge said in greeting, and they all shook hands.

“Thanks for coming, Simon,” Dross replied.

Rutledge gestured to his companion. “Agent Susan Upchurch. Her specialty is forensic anthropology.”

“The truth is we’re so short-staffed these days that I do everything.” Upchurch laughed. “Damn budget cuts.” Her accent was southern.

“Alabama?” Cork guessed.

“Birmingham,” she said.

“Long way from home.”

“I went to graduate school at the U of M. Found I didn’t mind the snow, and then the BCA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Here I am.”

“And we’re lucky to have her,” Rutledge threw in. “Fill me in. What have you done so far?”

Dross replied, “We’ve dismantled the wall that blocked off the crosscut tunnel. We’ve gone over the main tunnel all the way to the timbers. Not easy. Most of the drift is still without lights, so it’s pitch dark.”

“Did you videotape the dismantling?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“We shot video and stills of everything inside the crosscut, but haven’t gone in yet. Our M.E.’s the only one who’s been inside, and just to certify death.”

“Is he still here?”

“No, he left to prepare for the autopsy.”

“He didn’t disturb anything down there?”

“No.”

“Who else has been in the tunnel?”

“Besides Ed’s crime scene team, only Lou Haddad, one of the officials from the mine. He was with Cork.”

“Where is he now?”

“At the mine office. We can bring him back if you want him.”

“Not necessary at the moment.” Rutledge glanced around the perimeter of the sink. “Did you go over the area up here?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

“Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

They gathered at the edge of the sink. It was a five-foot drop to the opening in the rubble where the passage began. Although there were natural hand- and footholds in the side of the pit that could have been used to climb in and out, the firemen had placed an aluminum ladder against the wall. Dross went first, Rutledge next, Upchurch after him, and finally Larson. Cork brought up the rear. He wasn’t eager to return to the hardness and the darkness of the Vermilion Drift, but the tunnel was full of questions, horrifying questions, and he was a man trained his whole life in mining answers. He hesitated in the evening light, watched Larson disappear into the narrow throat of the opening in the rubble, took a good, deep breath of pine-scented air, and descended.

The passage was a snaking affair, lit by daylight that slipped through gaps in the blasted rock. It was big enough throughout its length to accommodate the body of even a large person, but the ragged rock edges and the constant twisting made the journey a slow one. Those who reached the bottom first waited for the others to arrive. In the passage itself, the air was fine, but in the tunnel where the cool mine air pooled, the nauseating smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming.

Lights supplied by the fire department illuminated the drift. Cork and the others walked a path cleared and marked with yellow tape by the crime scene team. The nearer they came to the room, the stronger became the putrid odor of decomposition. Mingled with the foulness of the air was the aroma of eucalyptus, which some of the deputies and firemen had applied to the area below their noses to deal with the stench.

The place where the wall had been dismantled was guarded by a couple of deputies. The crosscut tunnel that had been revealed was not at all deep, less than ten feet. The striations from the drill bits made the walls look like rust-colored corduroy.

There were six bodies in all. Five were nothing more than skeletal remains with a few rotted, parchment-like remnants of clothing still clinging to the bones. Four of the skeletons were arranged in a sitting position against the walls, placed in a way that put their backs to each of the four points of a compass—north, south, east, and west. A fifth skeleton lay in the center, and next to it the sixth body had been placed. That body was fully clothed. It hadn’t been there long enough to be skeletal, but it had been there long enough so that the bloat of the gases from decomposition had distended the abdominal cavity, and the thin material of the black cocktail dress the corpse wore had been stretched and ripped along the seams. The neck and face were swollen like those of an overfilled blow-up doll. The corpse’s tongue had turned black and grown huge, and it protruded between puffed lips. The skin was a sickly yellow-orange and translucent so that the vessels that ran beneath were visible. Cork had seen all this earlier with Dross and Larson, and they stood back while Rutledge and Upchurch both knelt and studied the scene.

“How long you figure the skeletons have been here?” Rutledge asked his colleague.

“I won’t have any idea until I examine the remains,” she replied.

“Well, this one,” Rutledge said, pointing toward the corpse prostrate in the center, “hasn’t been here more than a week.” Over his shoulder, he said, “Has anyone reported a missing woman, Marsha?”

“No,” she answered.

“Yes,” Cork said.

Dross shot him a puzzled look. Rutledge turned and eyed him as well.

“I think the corpse might be Lauren Cavanaugh,” Cork said. “She’s been missing since last Sunday.”

“How do you know that?” Dross asked.

“Because I was hired this morning to find her.”

George Azevedo, one of the deputies guarding the scene, said, “Fast work, Cork.” He laughed, but no one else joined him.

“How come you didn’t tell me this earlier?” Dross said.

“Because I wasn’t sure.”

“What makes you sure now?”

“Two things. Those shoes on her feet. They’re expensive Italian jobs. There’s a whole closet full of their cousins at her residence in the old Parrant estate. And that big ring on her left hand. She’s wearing it in a portrait I saw today.”

“Who hired you to find her?”

“Her brother.”

“Did he say when she’d gone missing?”

“A week ago.”

“And he didn’t report it?”

“He wanted the matter looked into discreetly,” Cork said.

“If it is her, there won’t be anything discreet about this now,” Rutledge said.

Dross said to no one in particular, “How did she come to be here with these older remains?”

“Maybe when we identify the remains we’ll have our answer,” Ed Larson responded.

“How soon might that be?” Dross addressed her question to Upchurch.

“I’d like everything in here documented in detail with photographs and video,” the BCA agent replied. “Once that’s done, I’ll examine each of the remains in situ, then remove them to my lab in Bemidji, where I can study them more carefully.”

“That’ll take a while.”

“Quite a while,” Upchurch said.

“When will you have results?”

“I’ll get started as soon as the first remains are in the lab. Tomorrow maybe, and then I’ll have something preliminary to offer.”

“What about the new body?” Rutledge asked Dross.

“I told Tom Conklin that I’ll need the autopsy done ASAP.” Dross was speaking of the medical examiner.

“Handle the corpse carefully,” Rutledge advised. “It’s at a delicate stage. The skin’ll shift around. And be especially vigilant with the head. The hair will come off easily.”

“We’ll be careful, Simon.”

During all this exchange, Cork had noticed something in the crosscut—small metal cones that littered the floor around one of the skeletons—and his mind made a very old connection. “Agent Upchurch, is there any possibility that these corpses are over forty years old?”

“They may well be. I can’t really tell yet. Why do you ask?”

“The remains in the corner to the right. See those items littering the floor around it?”

“The things that look like little rusted cones?”

“Yeah, those. I think they’re jingles.”

“Jingles?”

“From a jingle dress. It’s traditionally worn for a healing dance.”

“Jingles,” Larson said. He gave Cork a pointed look. “The Vanishings, you think?”

“That’s exactly what I think,” Cork said. “The Vanishings.”

EIGHT

Naomi Stonedeer was the first to vanish. Cork had known her well. She was seventeen, with black hair that hung to her waist and hazel eyes. She was bright and lovely and an accomplished Jingle Dancer.

The Jingle Dance was an Ojibwe healing ritual performed by women in long dresses adorned with a couple of hundred jingles sewn closely together and attached in rows. The jingles were traditionally made from snuff can lids or tin can lids rolled into cones. When the dancers performed their steps, the jingles brushed together and created the unique sound that gave the ritual its name. Though it continued to be one of the most esteemed and sacred of the Ojibwe ceremonies, it was also a dance performed competitively at powwows.

In the summer of 1964, Naomi lived near Cork’s grandmother in Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the Iron Lake Reservation. Cork was thirteen and had a terrible crush on her. Whenever he visited Grandma Dilsey, he always found a way to pass the little BIA-built house where Naomi lived with her mother and her aunt. He concocted scenarios in which he played the hero and saved her from a dozen iterations of doom. But when the real thing occurred, he was powerless.

She disappeared in late June. She’d gone to the old community center in Allouette, which had once been the schoolhouse where Cork’s grandfather and his grandma Dilsey taught the children of the rez. Naomi had joined a lot of other women to practice the Jingle Dance in preparation for a powwow that was to be held in Winnipeg in July. She left the community center around 9:00 P.M., wearing her jingle dress. It was still daylight, and her house was only a quarter mile away, but she never made it home. Her mother called everyone in Allouette, and, when no one knew Naomi’s whereabouts, she called Cork’s mother, who was her good friend. Cork’s mother enlisted his father, who was sheriff of Tamarack County.

His father’s first reaction was that probably the girl had simply run away, something a lot of Ojibwe kids did. Poverty was not an unusual circumstance on the rez, nor were the unpleasant domestic situations that frequently resulted. Kids often took off, heading to the safety of a relative who lived somewhere else, or to Duluth or the Twin Cities, looking for a different—they hoped better—life. Naomi’s home life was just fine, Cork’s mother insisted. The young woman had no reason to run.

Cork’s father went to Allouette and that night began a fruitless investigation, which lasted for weeks. He contacted relatives, authorities on other reservations and in the Indian communities in Duluth and the Twin Cities. Word went out to teen shelters all across the Upper Midwest.

Naomi’s father, who’d long ago abandoned his family, lived in Crosby, a good eighty miles from Aurora, where he worked as an auto mechanic. Cork’s father questioned him repeatedly. Although the man couldn’t supply a decent alibi for the night Naomi went missing, there was no evidence that he’d been anywhere near Allouette at the time, and eventually Cork’s father stopped badgering him.

In the end, the search was abandoned, and no trace of Naomi Stonedeer was ever found.

The next vanishing occurred later that summer, in August. Cork remembered it well because it was a great tragedy in his family.

His mother’s sister, Ellie Grand, lived with Grandma Dilsey. Ellie had two daughters. Marais, the elder daughter, had already left home to seek her fortune in country music. That left Fawn at home, and Fawn was special. She was a gentle spirit, a girl who smiled all the time and would probably never grow sophisticated in her understanding of the world. Cork’s grandmother once told him that Fawn offered the Iron Lake Ojibwe a gift. The gift was her simplicity. It was her acceptance, with inexhaustible delight, of the everyday blessings that Kitchimanidoo showered on The People. Fawn laughed at snowflakes, was delighted when a dandelion puff exploded on the wind, cried with excitement when a fish leaped from Iron Lake and sent a spray of water into the air like pearls thrown against the sky. The Ojibwe on the rez watched over her. But even their protectiveness failed to keep her safe that summer day.

Shortly after lunch, she’d told her mother that she was going for a swim in Iron Lake. Fawn was a good swimmer and often went into the lake alone. She left in her swimsuit, carrying a towel, and her feet were bare.

Allouette had a small beach area next to the old dock where men who gillnetted and spearfished kept their boats. Jon Bruneau was at the dock that day, working on his Evinrude outboard. He swore that he never saw Fawn at the beach the whole afternoon.

Fawn’s disappearance was a blow that knocked the breath out of Cork’s family. Over the next few weeks, his mother spent much of her time with Aunt Ellie and Grandma Dilsey. Other Ojibwe women visited as well. As had often been the case in its turbulent history, the reservation came together around tragedy.

His father exhausted himself in the search for Fawn. He sent divers into the lake off the shore at Allouette, just in case Jon Bruneau had been wrong. He also had divers in the water at Sunset Cove, which was south of Allouette and a place that Shinnobs sometimes went for a swim. He grilled Bruneau mercilessly. He pressed his own good friend Sam Winter Moon to question the whole Ojibwe community. He thought maybe the Anishinaabeg would be more responsive to questions coming from one of their own than from a uniformed white man, even though he was considered a friend of the rez. No one saw anything. No one knew anything. Fawn, like Naomi Stonedeer, had simply dropped off the face of the earth.

The last vanishing was different. It was a white woman. A rich white woman. A woman who attended Mass at St. Agnes. Who volunteered her time on the library board. Who saw to it that her husband contributed lavishly to the campaign to build a new community hospital in Aurora. Who walked down the streets of town recognized, admired, and envied.

She disappeared on Labor Day weekend, when the sumac in Tamarack County had turned blood red and gold was beginning to drive out green along the branches of the aspen trees, and the air of late evening and early morning carried a chill bite. That Monday morning her husband reported to the sheriff’s office that she was missing. She’d been missing nearly two days by then. Her husband said she’d driven to Duluth for a fund-raiser. She’d intended to come home directly, but she’d been gone two nights. This wasn’t unusual. Sometimes she got it in her head to drive places, a kind of wanderlust, but he hadn’t heard from her, and he’d grown worried. The search went on until almost October, but no trace of her could be found, not even her car. Like the other women, she seemed to have been swallowed by the air itself.

Her name was Monique Cavanaugh. She was the mother of the woman who, forty years later, lay decomposing on the cool stone floor of the Vermilion Drift.

When Cork finished his story, Dross said, “But if these are the women who vanished in nineteen sixty-four, that would account for only three of the older victims. What about the other two here?”

“I don’t know,” Cork said. He looked to Upchurch. “How soon can you tell the age of the bones?”

“Not until after I get them into the lab to examine them.”

“Will you be able to tell if they’re white or Ojibwe?” he asked.

“Once I’ve done scans of the skulls, my computer ought to give me pretty accurate facial reconstructions. But I’ll tell you this right now. I’m pretty sure they’re all female.”

Larson asked, “How do you know?”

“The pelvis. Much larger in the female. Also some of the cranial features. The ridge above the brow, for example. It’s much larger in males. Same with the jawbone. Sometimes race can make a sexual determination difficult; from what I’m seeing, that’s not a problem.”

“Ed, do you think it’s possible whoever put the other bodies here also dumped Lauren Cavanaugh’s?” Dross asked.

Larson shrugged. “Anything’s possible. We’ll know a lot more after we’ve processed the scene.”

“Then we should get started,” Rutledge said.

Cork stepped back. He’d forced himself to return to that wretched place, and he’d stood it as long as he could, and now he felt desperate to get out. “This will take you a while,” he said. “I’m headed up top.”

Dross said, “I’ll go with you. Ed, keep me informed.”

“Will do,” Larson replied.

Dross and Cork walked back to the sink and crawled their way up the passage to the clearing. As they approached the top, Cork heard a loud, familiar voice, clearly in the midst of an argument. When he pulled himself out of the sink, there stood Isaiah Broom looming like an angry bear over Guy Simpson, one of Dross’s smaller deputies. As soon as Broom saw Dross emerge from the hole in the ground, he stormed in her direction.

“I want to know what you’re doing on our land,” he said.

Dross planted herself between Broom and the sink and gave him an iron reply. “We’re here conducting a lawful investigation, Mr. Broom.”

“You’re on Ojibwe land.”

“This is a crime scene, and we’re the law, even on the rez.”

Which was true. Public Law 280, passed in 1953, gave all reservations in the United States the right to choose the agency that would provide them with law enforcement regarding major crimes. Many reservations had gone with federal law enforcement. The Iron Lake Ojibwe had chosen the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

Broom pointed toward the sink. “Whatever that is, it’s on our land. I have the right to go down there.”

“When it’s no longer a crime scene, you may do so. I don’t know when that will be.”

“The People have a right to know what’s going on.”

“They will. In due time.”

He glared at Cork. “Chimook,” he said, as if he was spitting phlegm. He turned and stormed away across the clearing.

Dross said to Cork, “I think we’ll need a twenty-four-hour watch on this scene until we’re finished processing it.”

Cork stared at the huge retreating form of Broom and said, “I think what you’ll need is a bazooka.”

NINE

Marsha Dross offered Cork a ride to his Land Rover, which was still parked in the lot at the mine office. The traffic from all the official vehicles had broken a clear path through the underbrush, which Dross followed to the perimeter fence. She drove the fence line to a gate that opened onto an old mining road on the west side of the complex and that was guarded by one of the Vermilion One security guys, who gave a two-finger salute as they passed through.

When they reached the Land Rover, Dross killed the engine of her pickup and sat a moment staring through her windshield.

“We’ll need a positive ID of the body,” she said without looking at him.

“Max Cavanaugh,” Cork said. “I was supposed to see him tonight, have him sign an agreement for my investigation.”

“Where?”

“His place.”

“What time?”

“Six.”

She looked at her watch. “It’s almost six now.”

“Guess I won’t make it.”

“I hate this part of the job.”

“What? Talking to me?”

She smiled. Finally.

“Have one of your deputies do it,” he suggested.

“Is that how you handled things?”

“No.” He stared through the windshield, too. “So I guess you don’t want me talking to Max until after you’re finished with him?”

“Yeah,” she said. Then: “Have you ever dealt with anything like this?”

“Possible multiple homicides spread over nearly half a century? Hell, probably nobody has.”

“Five women and now a sixth.”

“If it is the Vanishings, only four are female for sure.”

“Agent Upchurch seemed pretty certain they’re all women, Cork. I’m sure she’s right.”

“And you know this how?”

Instead of answering, she said, “That sink you found is on Ojibwe land.” She swung her gaze toward him, and he knew without her saying a word what she wanted and why she’d offered him the lift. “I’ll need to talk to folks on the reservation,” she said. “I could use your help.”

Although he’d helped with investigations in the past, had done so ever since leaving the department, this time he balked, and for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. There was something about the situation beyond its complete bizarreness that dug at him, and he wasn’t sure at all what that was.

“I’ll think about it and give you a call. Right now, I need to get something to eat.”

“Two of those women were Ojibwe,” she said.

“Probably more,” he said.

“How do you know?”

He pulled the door handle and let himself out. “We’ll talk,” he said.

He drove home to Gooseberry Lane. His house was a simple two-story place that, with his wife and the kids and the dog, had always felt comfortably full. Now there was only him and the dog. Trixie had spent the day in the backyard, tethered to a line that was connected to her own little doghouse and that let her roam without running loose. When she saw Cork, she greeted him with barking and eager leaps and a tail that beat like a metronome gone wild.

“Hey, girl,” he said, “bet you’re famished. Makes two of us. Let’s see what we can rustle up.”

He poured dry dog food into a bowl, and Trixie plunged her muzzle in and chomped away greedily. Cork opened a can of tuna taken from the pantry shelf, mixed in some mayo and pickle relish. He sliced a tomato and washed a large leaf of lettuce. He pulled a slice of Swiss cheese from a package in the refrigerator and layered all the ingredients between a couple of pieces of wheat bread. A handful of potato chips and a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s finished the preparations. He sat on the patio as evening settled over Aurora, and he ate alone and tasted nothing.

It was twilight when he finished, and he took Trixie for a walk. He passed houses he was almost as familiar with as his own, where people lived whom he’d known his whole life. He walked to the business district of Aurora, two square blocks of storefronts and enterprises. Gerten’s Travel, Bonnie’s Salon, The Enigmatic Gnome, the Tamarack County Courthouse, Pflugleman’s Rexall Drugs, Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler. It was early summer, and the town was full of tourists. Unlike that of Gresham, Aurora’s economy was solid, booming even. Five decades he’d walked these streets. Now they felt different to him. With Jo gone and the kids away, what held him to this place was history. And what was history but memory? And of what value, in the end, was a memory? A man’s life needed to be made of stuff more immediate and substantial. Cork wondered what that was for him now.

“Mr. O.C.!”

He turned and found Ophelia Stillday limping toward him from the door of Pflugleman’s drugstore. In the blue light of dusk, her face was dark and serious.

“What’s wrong?” Cork said.

“I’m glad I caught you.” She petted Trixie, who danced all over the sidewalk at the attention. “I’ve been thinking about Lauren,” she said. “I know I gave you a hard time this morning, but I’m worried about her. Have you found out anything?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Really? What?”

He nodded toward the steps of the courthouse half a block away. “Let’s sit down.” When they had, he said, “I’m going to tell you something, but you need to promise me that you’ll keep it to yourself for a while.”

“Sure.”

“I mean this absolutely.”

“Cross my heart,” she said, and did.

He told her what he’d found that day in the Vermilion Drift. He didn’t describe the state of Lauren Cavanaugh’s body, but Ophelia looked stricken nonetheless. Her mouth hung open in a silent O of surprise and shock. Her eyes were full of horror.

“I’m sure the body we found is Lauren Cavanaugh’s, but it hasn’t been officially identified yet, and that’s why it’s imperative that you keep this to yourself. Do you understand, Ophelia?”

“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.” Then she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Christ.” She dropped her hands and looked at him, confused but also, he thought, angry. “Who would do that?”

“I don’t know. And the reason I’ve told you about this is that I’m hoping you might have an idea who.”

“Me? No. Why would I?”

“Someone from the investigation will interview you and ask that same question. So take a while to think about it. Is there anything important you know that might help?”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head. “No.” But even as she said it, Cork saw a light come into those brown Ojibwe eyes.

“What?” he said.

She frowned and struggled a moment with her conscience. “We’re in trouble financially.”

“The center?”

She nodded. “Since Lauren’s been gone, I’ve had to tackle some areas that typically she handles. Mr. O.C., we owe a lot of money to people. Money that, as nearly as I can tell, we don’t have.”

“Her brother tells me that he’s been picking up the bills for the center.”

She looked down, troubled. “Not for a while. Lauren was supposed to find her own support for the center. She hasn’t been successful. Some of the correspondence I’ve gone through in the last couple of days has been from creditors. Some pretty threatening letters.”

“That’s important, but I’m not sure it’s enough to kill for.”

“What would be?” she asked. She was serious.

“Murder, generally speaking, is a crime of passion. It can be about money, but not usually about money owed. Unless the mob’s involved. If it’s money, it’s usually about greed. If it’s not money, then it’s love or anger or revenge. Do any of those fit?”

She thought for a while, shaking her head the whole time. “She was so loved by everyone. She was such a remarkable person. I don’t know why anyone would want her dead.”

“Probably there’s a lot about her you didn’t know. People hide things. Think for a minute. Anything come to mind? Derek, for example.”

“Derek?”

“That handsome young artist at the center.”

“I know who Derek is.”

“I got strange vibes from him today. Is it possible there was something between him and Lauren?”

The features of her face squeezed up, as if Cork had offered her something foul. “That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” Cork asked. “Lauren was a beautiful woman, unattached, as nearly as I can tell. Derek’s a nice looking kid. And he didn’t strike me as the shy type.”

Ophelia shook her head adamantly. “What happened to Lauren definitely has nothing to do with Derek.”

There was no reason for Cork to convince her otherwise, so he said, “All right, let’s try something else. She has her own wing at the Parrant estate. Sorry, the center. It has an entrance of its own?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s created that little getaway for herself in the boathouse. Have you ever seen anyone come or go using her private entrance, or visit her at the boathouse, particularly at night?”

“No.” She raised an eyebrow. “But I’m not usually there at night.”

“Which is when someone who didn’t want to be seen visiting would probably visit. Who is there at night?”

“Joyce, our housekeeper. She has a room down the hall from my office, but she’s never at the center on weekends.”

“Still, someone should talk to her.”

“Why not you?”

“Because I’m not part of the official investigation.”

Although he could be, if he wanted. All he had to do was accept the sheriff’s offer. The idea was beginning to have its attractions.

Ophelia said, “Jenny told me once that her mom hated you being sheriff.”

“With good reason.”

“But you could help out this one time, couldn’t you? I mean, this is in a good cause, right?”

“That’s exactly what I used to tell Jo,” Cork said. “And her response was always that, when the bullets start flying, a good cause is a poor shield.”

“You think there could be flying bullets?” She seemed caught by surprise.

“That’s the problem with business like this, Ophelia. You never know.” Cork pointed to the courthouse behind them. “The clock on that tower. The hands are stuck.”

“I know this story,” she said.

Hell, everyone in Aurora probably knew the story, but Cork repeated it anyway.

“That clock was hit by bullets during an exchange of gunfire between my father and some men who’d just robbed the bank. My dad was fatally shot during that exchange. The hands of the clock haven’t moved since. People around here think of it as a kind of fitting memorial. For me, it’s a reminder that, when guns are involved, people you love can be lost forever.”

“Jenny told me you stopped carrying a gun. So, if bullets start flying, what do you do?”

“Duck and run, Ophelia. Duck and run.”

TEN

A few minutes before ten, Cork headed to Sam’s Place to give a hand with closing. Judy Madsen was a terrific manager, but she never closed. She didn’t like being out after dark, so Cork usually made sure he was there to supervise.

It was a Monday night, not particularly busy. Judy had put Kate Buker and Jodi Bollendorf, two great kids, on the schedule. They were Anne’s friends, who’d worked for Cork during their high school years and who, home from college for the summer, were putting in time again. They both wanted to be lawyers. Just what the world needs, Cork thought dismally, more lawyers. But everyone had to have a dream, no matter how misguided.

He’d parked his Land Rover and was just about to head inside when Max Cavanaugh pulled up in his Escalade and got out.

“Got a minute, Cork?” he said.

“Sure, Max.”

Mounted on a tall pole above the parking lot was a yard light so bright it made the gravel look like dirty snow. Cavanaugh stood in the glare, clearly troubled. He glanced toward Sam’s Place, then at the dark along the shoreline of Iron Lake.

“Over there,” he said.

Cork followed to the old dock he maintained for boaters who wanted to come off the lake for a burger and needed a place to tie up. Cavanaugh strolled to the end. Another step and he would have been in the water. He stood looking down the shoreline toward the lights of town. In the right mood, he might have understood, as Cork did, how lovely it was: the black surface where the lights danced; the sky above salted with stars and hung with a crescent moon thin as a clipped fingernail; the quiet in which, if Cork listened closely, he was sure he could hear the earth breathe.

“I just came from Nelson’s Funeral Home,” Cavanaugh said, his back to Cork.

Nelson’s was where the autopsies for Tamarack County were performed. For a long time, Sigurd Nelson had been the coroner and did the job himself. In one of his last battles as sheriff, Cork had convinced the county commissioners to hire a certified medical examiner. Now Dr. Tom Conklin, a retired surgeon, handled the function. But the funeral home was still where the job was done.

Cork said, “I’m sorry, Max.”

Cavanaugh hunched his shoulders, dark against the broader dark of the water. “The sheriff wanted me to identify my sister’s body. How could I identify that? Christ, how could anyone?”

There wasn’t much to say to that. Rhetorical, Cork figured. Frustrated, angry, devastated, and rhetorical.

Cavanaugh turned back to Cork. “You found her.” It sounded a little like an accusation.

“Lou Haddad and I.”

“The authorities don’t know anything. Or wouldn’t tell me. Which is it?”

“A little of both, I suspect,” Cork replied.

Cavanaugh took a step. Not threatening. “What do you know?”

“That I can tell you?”

“You’re working for me, remember?”

“Technically, Max, my job is finished. Your sister’s been found.”

Cork didn’t have to see the man’s face to sense his rage.

“I want to know everything you know,” Cavanaugh said. “God damn it, I’ll pay you.”

“It’s not about money, Max. In a situation like this, there are good reasons for not making everything public.”

“My sister’s dead. I have a right to know things.”

“And you will. It’ll just take some time.”

Cavanaugh was silent. Although Cork considered the man his friend, he knew that Max was used to being obeyed. Perhaps in a mine or in a boardroom his silence might have had the desired effect, but Cork simply held his ground and matched Cavanaugh’s silence.

Cavanaugh broke first. “They asked me questions, as if I was a suspect. Am I a suspect, Cork?”

“More likely a person of interest. At this point, pretty much everyone in Tamarack County who knew her is a person of interest. It’s not personal, Max. Did you give them a formal statement?”

“No. I’ll go in tomorrow morning.”

“I’d advise you to take legal counsel with you. I know how it will look, but it’s the prudent thing to do.”

Cavanaugh turned slowly, like a windmill adjusting to a change in the direction of the wind. He stared across the empty lake, where the distant shore was marked by solitary pinpricks of light from cabins hidden among the pines.

“You had someone you loved die this way, Cork. You’ve got to understand what I’m feeling.”

Cavanaugh was probably talking about Cork’s wife, Jo. But he might also have been speaking of Cork’s father. Either way, the answer was yes, Cork understood.

For the briefest moment, he thought about telling Cavanaugh that it was likely one of the old bodies in the Vermilion Drift was his mother. And that he knew what that was like, too, having someone you love disappear and a very long time later learning their true end.

Instead he waited and listened in vain to hear the earth breathe.

Cavanaugh straightened. “I’d like you to continue working for me.”

“In what capacity?”

“I want to know who killed my sister.”

“There are a lot of very capable law enforcement personnel who’ll be investigating.”

“I want someone working on it just for me.”

“Believe me, Max, the resources they have available to them are light-years beyond anything I could bring to the table.”

“You know this town, the people in it. You don’t have to walk a thin legal line and go by the book.”

“You mean I can twist arms and bust faces? I don’t work that way. The sheriff’s people and the BCA are the best there is. I’ve worked with them for years.”

“And if you were me, would you trust them or you?”

A complicated question, not just because of the convoluted syntax. Cork thought a lot of his own abilities, and the truth was that in an investigation he had certain advantages over those who were uniformed and badged. Which was one of the reasons Marsha Dross had already sought his help. And that was part of the complication. If Cork agreed to hire on with Cavanaugh, he couldn’t also agree to sign on with the sheriff. Conflict of interest.

He felt for Max Cavanaugh. He understood the man’s grief, his confusion, his frustration, his desire to rip away the veil of mystery surrounding his sister’s death and, although Cavanaugh didn’t yet know it, his mother’s death as well. Because Cork thought he had a better chance of making that happen working with the sheriff and the BCA, he said, “No, thanks, Max. But if you’re bound and determined, I can recommend a couple of good investigators.”

The old dock groaned under Cavanaugh’s weight as he brushed past Cork, wordless, and returned to his Escalade. In the quiet by the lake, Cork could hear the angry growl of the engine for a long time after it had disappeared into the night.

ELEVEN

The next morning Cork was up before sunrise and running.

Years earlier, he’d been a smoker and enough overweight to worry about it. When he hit forty-two, his life went into a meltdown. He lost his job as sheriff, lost a lot of his self-respect, nearly lost his family. Part of pulling himself together involved getting comfortable in his own skin, and running helped him do that. He discovered that when he ran all the tight screws in his head loosened, and he seemed to think a little clearer.

That morning he had a lot to think about.

He jogged easily to Grant Park, which was situated along the shoreline of Iron Lake, a quarter mile south of Sam’s Place. He spent ten minutes stretching, then began his run in earnest. He headed north along a trail that followed the shoreline, past the poplars that hid the old foundry, past Sam’s Place, past the abandoned BearPaw Brewery. He curved into town and then out again, to the end of North Point Road, where the old Parrant estate stood. This was a halfway point, and he stopped to watch the sun rise over the lake.

In Cork’s experience there was nothing to compare with sunrise in the North Country. Across any lake on a calm morning, the crawl of the sun played out twice: first in the vault of heaven and again on the surface of the water, which was like a window opened onto another heaven at his feet. Five decades of life and he could still be stunned to silence by such a dawn.

The old Parrant estate sloped down to the shore. As Cork stood and watched the sun bubble red out of the horizon, something startling occurred. The brick from which that great house was built turned scarlet, and the walls began to melt, and rivulets of blood ran red across the emerald lawn. Cork stood mesmerized and amazed, but it wasn’t the first time he’d had a discomforting vision involving this particularly cursed piece of real estate. Half a dozen years earlier, shortly before he’d discovered the murder-suicide there, he’d observed a sea of black snakes churning in the yard, snakes seen by no one but him.

He blinked his eyes, and the morning was again as it had been, and the Parrant estate was solid brick, and its broad lawn was clean and green.

Mudjimushkeeki, he thought. Bad medicine.

The tall, lean figure of Derek Huff came from the back of the big house. He was dressed only in a bathing suit. As he headed toward the lake, he cast a shadow that followed him, long and black, like one of those snakes in Cork’s vision years before. He reached the dock, dropped the towel he’d carried over his shoulder, and dove into the lake.

Cork drank water from the bottle he carried, and he stretched some. His muscles were a little sore. Lately he hadn’t been running as regularly as he would have liked. Despite his best intentions, life often got in the way.

As he prepared to resume his run, he looked back at the lake, where Derek Huff stroked easily away from shore, leaving a wide, undulating wake behind him that rattled the reflection of heaven.

When he’d finished the run and had showered and dressed, Cork composed and sent e-mails to his children. He didn’t tell them about what he’d found in the Vermilion Drift. He told them he was busy, happy, missed them. The Vermilion Drift would come up sooner or later, he knew. He wanted it to be later.

He headed to Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler for some breakfast. He could have eaten at home, but he needed to talk to Cy Borkman, and Borkman always breakfasted at the Broiler.

He found Borkman sitting on a stool at the counter, already doing major damage to a platter of eggs over easy, link sausage, hash browns, and toast. An empty juice glass sat off to one side, and coffee steamed in a cup within easy reach. Borkman had been hired as a deputy when Cork’s father was sheriff of Tamarack County, and he was still a deputy when Cork held that office thirty years later. He’d always been a big man, always overweight, but with retirement from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department he’d edged more and more toward the girth of a walrus, and the little stool he sat on seemed hard put to keep from buckling.

“Morning, Cy,” Cork said and gave Borkman a hearty slap on the back as he sat down beside him.

“Hey, Cork.” Borkman spoke around a mouthful of breakfast, and it came out something like, “Hey, Hork.”

It was a busy morning at the Broiler. Kathy Lehman was waitressing the counter. She was blond, fortyish, a transplant from Wisconsin, but nice as they came. She stopped as she hurried past with three plates balanced on her right hand and forearm, shot Cork a smile, and said, “Coffee, hon?”

“Thanks, Kathy.”

“Be right back.” And she was gone.

Borkman put down his fork. He grabbed his napkin and, with a quick swipe, cleaned hash browns and ketchup from his chin. “Say, what was all that commotion at the Vermilion One yesterday? Everybody’s talking about a convoy of official vehicles that trucked in there. The protest getting out of hand?”

“Nothing like that, Cy.”

“Me, I didn’t have these bum legs, I’d be walking that protest line myself. Say, heard you’re working for the mine.” It wasn’t the most friendly tone he’d ever used.

“Security consult,” Cork said. “Some threats have been made.”

“Now that’s a shocker.” Borkman laughed and gulped coffee.

“Cy, you remember the Vanishings? Back in ’sixty-four?”

“Hell, yes. Strangest damn case my whole time on the force. We never solved that one.”

“Three women, right?”

“Yep. Two from the reservation and Mrs. Peter Cavanaugh. Now there was a looker. That daughter of hers?” He shook his head and lifted his fork again. “Like I’m staring at a picture of the mother.”

“You never had a suspect in the case, right?”

“Not officially.”

“How about unofficially?”

He grinned and his face was all folded flesh. “The priest.”

“Priest?”

“Yeah. The priest at St. Agnes. Your church.”

“Why him?”

“For one thing, he was a young guy. Macho for a priest. Weight lifter. Big muscles. Me, I like my clergy kind of soft like bread dough, you know?”

“What else?”

“We got an anonymous tip about him. Said he—” Cy broke off and eyed Cork suspiciously. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this. It’s a cold case. File’s still open.”

“As a favor between old friends?”

He thought a moment. “What the hell. It’ll never be solved. This tip said that the priest liked to masturbate while listening to confessions.”

“Jesus.”

“Tell me about it.”

Kathy Lehman breezed up with a cup of coffee in one hand and her order pad in the other. She slid the coffee onto the counter in front of Cork, snatched a pencil from where she’d stuck it in the hair above her ear, and said, “What’ll it be, hon?”

“Oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar.”

“Coming up.” She whirled and was gone again.

“Did you follow up on it?” Cork asked.

“Yep. Priest denied everything. But guess what we found stuffed behind the confessional. Delicates.”

“Delicates?”

“Women’s underwear, stained with semen.”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

He shrugged. “It was never made public. That was your dad’s doing. The confessional was open to anyone. No way to prove the priest put those things there. No way in those days to prove the stains were his. We didn’t have anything else on the guy. Your father was able to keep it all out of the papers. We could do that back then. But the bishop got involved and yanked the priest, sent him off to Siberia or someplace. And then Mrs. Cavanaugh disappeared. Because the priest was long gone, we pretty much wrote him off as a suspect. And after that the Vanishings stopped. End of case.”

“FBI and BCA involved?”

“Yep. Baffled them, too.”

“Was there ever any word on other missing women?”

“We watched things in the county and adjacent counties pretty carefully. Followed up real seriously when we got a report of a runaway or missing person. Nothing ever came of it.”

“Any speculation on disappearances that came before the first victim was reported and that might have been related?”

Borkman chewed thoughtfully and finally shook his head. “Not that I recall. What’s the big interest in an old case?”

“Just wondering. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah. I like retirement, but I miss being involved in the action. I think about old cases a lot. It was a good job, a good life. And your old man, he was a hell of a cop to work for.”

TWELVE

Cork found Marsha Dross in her office at the sheriff’s department. She looked ragged at the edges, and it was clear she hadn’t slept much. She cradled a cup of coffee and eyed him over the rim as he sat down on the other side of her desk. It was a lovely morning, and her office windows were open. Cork could hear a cardinal calling in the maple tree outside. Sunlight plunged through the eastern window like a gold sword stuck in the floor.

“All right,” he said. “Count me in.”

She put her coffee down. “In?”

“I’ll consult on the case. I’ll interview anyone on the rez you’d like me to interview. I’ll also interview anyone else I think might be able to help. I’ll keep you apprised of everything I learn. But I want something in return.”

“And that would be?”

“I want to know everything you know about the bodies in the Vermilion Drift.”

“Everything I know now?”

“Now and as it’s revealed.”

“Full access to everything?”

“That’s the deal.”

She frowned, thinking. “All right. But I want two more things from you.”

“Name them.”

“First of all absolute silence. Whatever you learn on the reservation, whatever you learn from me, it stays between us.”

Cork opened his mouth to say fine, but she held up her hand.

“I know you, Cork. I know that being part Ojibwe sometimes pulls you in a direction counter to the interests of this department. I have to believe absolutely that in this you’re with me. You understand?”

“I understand. And the second thing?”

“Everything you find out that pertains to the case you share with me. You don’t hold anything back. You don’t protect anyone. This goes right back to my concern about your Ojibwe ties.”

Dross was right. This had been a problem in the past, and so Cork had to think before he answered.

“It’s a deal,” he finally said. “What do you know about the bodies so far?”

“Not much. We got all the skeletal remains bagged and they’ve been taken to the BCA lab in Bemidji. Agent Upchurch is working on them now. The preliminary autopsy report on Lauren Cavanaugh indicates death from a single gunshot wound to the chest. The bullet pierced her heart. Luckily, it stayed in the body, and wasn’t badly deformed, so Simon’s people can run ballistics on it.”

“Any indication of sexual assault?”

“No.”

“Okay, go on.”

“One of the skeletons also shows evidence of a gunshot wound, probable cause of death.”

“What evidence?”

“Agent Upchurch found a bullet lodged in the spine,” Dross replied. “She’s not able at the moment to say anything about the other victims. Our crime scene techs did a good job of clearing the area. We have clothing fabric still intact. We’ll get good dental impressions. If some of the remains are from the Vanishings, we’ll know.”

“Time of death for Lauren Cavanaugh?”

“Tom Conklin’s put that at approximately a week ago. He’s still trying to nail it down more specifically. The last recorded call on the victim’s cell phone was Sunday night at eleven-eleven P.M. Nobody’s seen her since that night. In their canvass of the neighborhood, one of Ed’s guys talked to Brian Kretsch.”

“Lives in that sprawling house across the road from the Parrant estate, right?” Cork asked.

“That’s him,” Dross said. “He recalled hearing squealing tires a little before midnight. Odd, because North Point Road is usually so quiet. He was just locking up for the night and looked out his picture window, but he was too late to see anything. We haven’t found anyone who saw Lauren Cavanaugh the next day or anytime after. So at the moment, we’re operating on the theory that she was killed that Sunday night sometime after eleven-eleven P.M. and before midnight.”

“Did Kretsch hear a shot?”

“Nope. Apparently he was watching a Jackie Chan DVD. Lots of gunplay and explosions, I guess.”

“What about the two bodies we can’t account for, what do we know about them?”

“Not much. You seem to think they’re Ojibwe. Any way you can be certain?”

“I’m headed out to check on that now. What about you?”

“At the moment, I’m trying to keep a lid on what we’ve found. I’d like to get a few more answers before we have the media hopping all over this.”

“All right.” He stood up and started out.

“Cork?” Dross called.

He turned back. She had pushed away from her desk, and the sun through the window had settled on her lap like a sleepy yellow dog. She was as fine a woman as he’d ever known and as skilled a cop as he’d ever worked with. “It’s good to have you on the team again,” she said.

He nodded, and, though he didn’t tell her so, he liked being there.

Cork broke from the thick pine of the Superior National Forest and stepped onto Crow Point. On the far side of the meadow, smoke rose from the stovepipe atop the cabin of Henry Meloux, and even at a distance Cork could smell cinnamon and baking dough, which made him realize he was hungry. He had no idea what the old man was cooking up, but whatever it was, he knew Meloux would share, and his mouth watered in anticipation.

Crow Point was an isolated finger of land that poked into Iron Lake many miles north of Aurora. Meloux lived there alone, his only companion an old yellow mutt named Walleye. He had no running water, no electricity, and did his business in an outhouse thirty yards from the cabin. He was a member of the Grand Medicine Society, one of the Midewiwin, a Mide. He was old, well past ninety. He’d been a friend as far back as Cork had memory. Twice Meloux had saved his life. On more occasions than Cork could recall, Meloux had advised him in a way that untwisted a knot Cork could not undo himself. Meloux offered this gift to many people, not just to Cork, and not just to the Ojibwe.

It had been a long winter and a cool spring. The green of the poplars and birch that edged the shoreline of Crow Point was so new it was still thin and pale. Many of the wildflowers that should have been in bold color were only just now peeking out from the tall meadow grass. Under the warm morning sun of that June day, Cork threaded his way along the narrow path to the cabin door, drawn both by his desire to talk with his old friend and by the tantalizing aroma wafting from the cabin. He knocked and was surprised when the door opened, for it was not Meloux’s face that appeared there.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Right back at you,” the woman in the doorway said.

“Where’s Henry?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name’s Cork O’Connor. Henry’s a friend.”

She looked him up and down and seemed disappointed. She appeared to be Cork’s age, more or less. Her hair was long and black but with a wide gray streak running through like a glacial stream. White flour smudged her left cheek, and, as she stood there, she wiped flour from her hands with a dish towel. She might have been pretty, Cork decided, if she’d smiled, even a little.

“So you’re the famous Cork O’Connor,” she said.

“I don’t know about famous.”

“I’ve been hearing stories about you for years from my uncle.”

“That would be Henry?”

“He’s my great-uncle actually. My grandmother’s brother.”

“You must be Rainy Bisonette. I’ve heard about you, too.” But not from Henry. Other people on the rez with relatives who were Lac Court Oreilles in Wisconsin talked about her. “You’re visiting?”

“Learning.”

“The way of the Midewiwin?”

She didn’t deny this, but neither did she confirm it.

“Is Henry here?”

“Not at the moment. But he’s expecting you.”

This didn’t surprise Cork. Meloux had a way of knowing these things. Over all the years of their friendship, Cork had come to take it for granted.

“He’s waiting for you,” she said.

“Where?”

“I don’t really know. He said to tell you to follow the blood. Do you understand what that means?”

“I think so.”

He looked past her into Meloux’s one-room cabin. “Smells good.”

“Enjoy your visit,” she said, stepped back inside, and closed the door.

Cork returned the way he’d come, through the long meadow and into the pines, and soon came to a small stream that flowed west toward Iron Lake. Because of its color, white folks called it Wine Creek, but the Ojibwe called it Miskwi, which meant “blood.” He turned east and followed upstream. It took him only a little while to see that he was on the right track. He found the imprint of a dog’s paw in the soft earth at the edge of the stream. It was a recent print he suspected had been left by Walleye, pausing to lap from the cool water. For nearly half an hour more he shadowed the creek, finally squeezing through a narrow cleft in a rock ridge and emerging into a clearing that lay in the bottom of a natural bowl formed by rugged hills.

Though it had no real name, Cork thought of it as Blood Hollow.

A remarkable event had taken place there several years earlier. A young man accused of murder, a man named Solemn Winter Moon, had received a vision of Jesus. Although many people knew about the vision, only Meloux and Cork knew the location of its occurrence, a remarkable place, filled with an abundance of wildflowers, which were much larger and bolder in color than those on Crow Point and which Meloux often gathered for the healings he offered.

The old Mide was there all right. Cork spotted him sitting next to the stream near the center of the hollow, his back against a tree stump, almost invisible amid the tall grass and the flowers. His eyes were closed as if in sleep, and he didn’t seem to be aware of Cork’s approach. Walleye lay at his side, his forepaws pillowing his old yellow head.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Meloux said without opening his eyes. “Sit down.” He sounded irritated, as if Cork had missed an appointment.

Cork did as he’d been told, but for a minute or more Meloux seemed to pay him no heed. Finally the old Mide opened his eyes and, much to Cork’s relief, smiled. Cork pulled out the tobacco pouch he’d brought as an offering. He gave it to Meloux, who opened it, pinched tobacco from inside, sprinkled a little to the four corners of the earth, and then let some fall in the center. From a pocket of his overalls, he pulled a book of matches and a small pipe carved of red stone. He filled the pipe, struck a flame, set an ember burning, and drew on the pipe stem. He passed the pipe to Cork. They sat a long time in this way, smoking silently.

Meloux’s hair was long and white and fine as spider silk. His face looked as if it held a line for every year he’d lived. His eyes were warm and inviting, little brown suns. He wore a blue denim shirt, old denim overalls, and moccasins he’d sewn himself. He wore no hat, and the breeze in the hollow ran through his hair. The long white filaments quivered and glowed as if electrified. Cork noticed that the old man’s hands, whenever they held the pipe to his lips, trembled, something Cork had never seen before, and though he mentioned nothing to his friend, he was concerned.

Finally Meloux said, “Isaiah Broom has you in his sights.”

“Isaiah and I have been exchanging fire since we were kids.”

“An angry wind, that man. From a child.”

“Has he ever come to you asking help?”

Meloux shook his head. “His anger blinds him.”

Walleye lifted his head briefly, blinked at them, then went back to resting.

“When he was a boy too young to remember, he was brought to me,” Meloux said. “His father was dead in Korea, his mother gone in the night. He was a child abandoned and wrapped in a blanket of pain. I tried to help him, but he was not ready for what I offered. In his anger, he has been a strong voice for The People. So maybe that was what was meant for him all along.”

“Henry,” Cork said, changing the subject, “I had a vision today.”

The old man looked at him closely. “Your face is troubled.”

Cork described the blood running from the house across the lawn of the Parrant estate. “It’s the second vision I’ve had there, Henry. The second disturbing one.”

Meloux’s eyes took in the sky. “Everything is alive, Corcoran O’Connor. And everything alive can become ill. That is a diseased place, I think.”

“Can it infect those who live there?”

“That is the nature of disease.”

Cork thought about Ophelia Stillday working at the center, and the situation concerned him.

“This vision is not the cause of the trouble I see in your face,” Meloux said.

“No, there’s something else.”

Cork told him about the grisly discovery in the Vermilion Drift. “If it’s the Vanishings, Henry, then two of the unidentified bodies are definitely Ojibwe. One of the others is probably Monique Cavanaugh. But that leaves two we don’t know about. I’m wondering if there were any other disappearances of women from the rez back then. Someone gone but never reported.”

“Not all The People love this land, Corcoran O’Connor. There have always been those who abandon it, and sometimes they do not say a word to anyone. They just go.”

“That’s not an answer, Henry.”

The old man looked down where his hands quivered on his lap. “Talk to Millie Joseph.”

“Because her memory is better than yours?”

“Because you are a man who is happy asking questions and she is a woman happy to answer. Go to Millie. Ask questions. It will make you both happy.”

“Henry, did you know about the wildcat mine pit sunk on rez land?”

“There’s not much about this reservation I do not know.”

“Who else knew?”

“A long time ago, probably many. Now?” He gave a shrug.

“Henry—”

“It is time you talk to Millie Joseph.”

It was clear to Cork that was all Meloux was going to say on the subject. He stood up to leave. “By the way, I met Rainy. She says she’s here to learn from you.”

“That’s not the only reason she’s here,” the old man said unhappily.

Cork glanced toward Meloux’s trembling hands. “You’ll get back to your cabin okay?”

“Walleye and me, we’ll take our time. That is something we both still know how to do well.”

“Migwech, Henry,” Cork said. It meant “thank you.”

Cork started away through the tall meadow grass, but Meloux called his name and he turned back.

“I will say one thing, and then I will say no more.” The sun was behind the old man, and his face lay in shadow. “Your father was one of those who knew about that pit. Your father knew there was another way into that mine.”

THIRTEEN

Millie Joseph had a room in the Nokomis Home, which was an assisted living facility that had been built by the Iron Lake Ojibwe in the town of Allouette, on the reservation. She’d been married three times and had outlived all her husbands. From these marriages, she had eight children. Six were still alive. Only one resided on the rez. The others had scattered to the four winds.

Millie Joseph had been Cork’s mother’s best friend. She’d also functioned as a kind of unofficial historian for the rez. She’d kept papers and documents and had recorded oral histories. Most of her collection had gone to the Iron Lake Historical Society, which she had helped form. Now she suffered from dementia. Although she was still gifted with periods of extreme lucidity, particularly about details of her past, about other things her mind was often as clean as a freshly laundered sheet. She’d always been a pleasant woman, and her dementia had not yet changed that. When Cork found her in the dayroom of Nokomis Home, she was sitting alone in her wheelchair, staring through the window at the blue stretch of Iron Lake. She was smiling and seemed lost in reverie.

“Boozhoo, Aunt,” Cork said, using the familiar Ojibwe greeting and calling her by the relational name he used for most reservation women her age, regardless of actual blood connection. He leaned and kissed her wrinkled cheek.

“Hello, there,” she replied, as if Cork were a stranger, but a welcome one.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Cork said, looking with her through the window.

“When I was a girl, I used to swim in that lake every morning.”

“You were a good swimmer, I’ve been told. Better than most boys.”

She laughed. “My mother told me it wasn’t good for a girl to beat boys, but I didn’t care. I was fast as an otter.”

Cork knelt beside the wheelchair. “Millie, there’s something I want to ask you.”

She smiled at him, expectantly.

“Many years ago my cousin Fawn disappeared. Do you remember that?”

Her smiled melted, and a wariness came into her eyes.

“Another young Ojibwe woman also vanished. Naomi Stonedeer. Do you remember?”

She looked away from him, and although her eyes settled again on the lake, Cork suspected it was a different vision she was seeing. “Fawn liked to swim, too.”

“I know,” Cork said. “She was a good swimmer, like you.”

“They said the lake took her.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t the lake.”

“Did others disappear, Millie?”

“Naomi Stonedeer and Fawn.”

“Yes. I know about them. But were there others?”

She frowned, thinking, and her eyes seemed more focused. When she spoke, there was gravity in her words. “Hattie’s girl ran away about that time. Seems to me Hattie never heard from her again. A wild child, that one. Didn’t surprise me that she’d run off without a word.”

“Hattie’s girl?”

“Abbie.”

“Anyone else?”

She thought a moment. “Yes, seems to me before that Leonora Broom had took off. She just up and left her boy. Now that was a shame.”

“Isaiah?”

She nodded. “Oh, he was an angry little boy.”

“So, Leonora Broom first and then Abbie Stillday. Anyone else?”

She thought some more, and while she thought, her tongue lapped idly over her lower lip. “Not then.”

“What do you remember about then?”

She turned her face to him and she smiled. “It was so long ago. But sometimes, when I read your mother’s poems, I remember. Your mother, she was a beautiful writer.”

“Yes.”

“She wrote the loveliest poems. She could have been famous, I bet, if she’d wanted to be. And her journals. She gave them to me before she died. I used to read them. I don’t read much anymore.”

He had forgotten about his mother’s writing. “Did you pass them on to the historical society?”

She shook her head. “Kept those for myself.”

“Where are they?”

“In my room. Push me?”

He wheeled her out of the dayroom, past two old Shinnob men playing checkers and an old woman nodding in front of the television. Her room was on the first floor. It was small but pleasant. She pointed to the closet. “In there.”

Inside, Cork found an old steamer trunk taking up much of the floor space. Beside it were stacked four cardboard boxes. One was marked “Allouette” and one “Brandywine,” the names of the two communities on the rez. On the other two were written his mother’s name: Colleen O’Connor. He lifted the first two boxes, set them on the trunk, and pulled free those below that bore his mother’s name. They were sealed with tape.

“Take them,” Millie Joseph said at his back. “I don’t need them now. I can’t read anymore.”

“Migwech, Millie,” Cork said.

“She could have been a famous author, I bet,” she said again. “Are there any famous Ojibwe authors?”

“A few,” Cork said.

“Good,” Millie Joseph said and smiled.

* * *

He’d loaded the boxes in his Land Rover and was heading back toward Aurora when his cell phone rang. It was the sheriff’s office.

“We have some preliminary information from the crime scene if you want to stop by,” Dross said.

“I’m on my way. I’ve got some information for you, too.”

She was in her office, with Ed Larson and Simon Rutledge. They appeared to have been waiting for him.

“What did you find out?” Larson asked.

“And good morning to you, too, Ed,” Cork said.

“Sorry,” Larson said. “A little eager.”

There were no chairs available, so Cork leaned against one of the file cabinets. “I’ve got two possible names for the additional bodies in Vermilion One.”

Larson had his small notebook out in an instant, pen poised above a clean page.

“Hattie Stillday’s elder daughter, Abigail, who was believed to be a runaway. And Leonora Broom, Isaiah Broom’s mother, who everybody thought simply abandoned him. Check the community clinic in Allouette. There may be dental records for both women available through the Indian Health Service.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Larson said.

Dross asked, “Did you find out if anyone knew about the sink on reservation land?”

“I didn’t get a satisfactory answer to that particular question,” Cork replied. He knew he was spinning out the thinnest thread of truth, but at least it wasn’t a lie. “What did you get from the crime scene?”

“Something we don’t understand,” Rutledge said with a wistful, unruffled look. Not much ruffled Rutledge. It was one of the things Cork liked about him. “The bullet pulled from Lauren Cavanaugh during the autopsy and the bullet Upchurch found lodged in Monique Cavanaugh’s spine were both thirty-eight caliber. Although they were deformed by impact, both stayed in one piece and our techs were able to examine the rifling impressions pretty clearly. Get this, Cork. Both bullets were fired from the same weapon.”

“What kind of firearm?” Cork asked.

“Because of the right-hand twist to the striations, we’re thinking Smith and Wesson, a thirty-eight.”

A .38 Smith & Wesson was a firearm with which Cork was eminently familiar. He owned one himself and had worn it when he was sheriff of Tamarack County. Forty years before that, the gun had belonged to his father.

It wasn’t an uncommon weapon, yet the coincidence made Cork uncomfortable, and he knew that, as soon as the meeting was over, there was something he had to do.

“Anything else from the mine?” he asked.

Larson glanced up from his notebook. “Yes. Beneath the older victim with the bullet in the spine we found a gold wedding band. There was an inscription on the inside surface. ‘My Unique Monique.’”

“Monique Cavanaugh,” Cork said.

“We can’t say a hundred percent at this point, but it’s sure looking that way.”

“Anything useful on the other victims?”

“Clothing remnants still clinging to bone on three of the victims, which may indicate that the other two were nude when they were put there. I can’t imagine the clothing will be much help with IDs at this point. We’ll check dental records at the Indian Health Service, and if the victims are the other vanished women, maybe we’ll get lucky and find matches.”

“It’s the Vanishings, Ed. I’m sure.”

He could see that Larson was certain, too, but the opinion of the sheriff’s chief investigator would be an official and quoted one, and so, good cop always, Captain Ed Larson was cautious in his speculations. “We’ll see.”

Rutledge eyed Cork with arched interest and asked, “What do people on the reservation remember about the Vanishings, Cork?”

“I’ve only talked to one person, Simon. An old woman named Millie Joseph. Her memory’s pretty hit-and-miss.”

“But you’ll talk to others?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Rutledge said and smiled enigmatically.

Cork shoved away from the file cabinet, preparing to leave.

Dross stood up. “Cork, we’ve been able to contain most of the information about what we found in the mine. But as soon as this story breaks, it’s going to break big and the media will descend like locusts.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” he replied.

“How do you mean?”

“The Vanishings are decades old, probably as cold a case as you’re likely to find here. Maybe someone will come forward with new information. It happens.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.

FOURTEEN

Cork’s father had left a legacy that included a lot of intangibles. The idea that justice was an imperative. That you made commitments in life and, come hell or high water, you stood fast by them. That loyalty was the lifeblood of friendship. That the love of family was the deepest root that tapped your heart.

But he’d also left material things, among them, the house on Gooseberry Lane, his sheriff’s uniform with its bloody bullet hole through the pocket over the heart, a fine basket weave holster, and a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Police Special revolver.

In his own time as sheriff, Cork had proudly worn his father’s sidearm. He’d kept it cleaned and well oiled, and it fired perfectly. Three years earlier, after a bloody incident that had turned his stomach against their mindless potential, he’d divested himself of his firearms and had given them into the keeping of Henry Meloux. What the old Mide had done with the firearms, he’d never said. Cork had never asked. But as he sped north along the back roads of Tamarack County toward Crow Point with mounting concern, that’s exactly what he intended to do.

He parked his Land Rover near the double-trunk birch that marked the trail to the old man’s cabin. He walked quickly, going over and over in his head thoughts and questions that plagued him.

Meloux, in his parting words the last time they’d met, had revealed that Liam O’Connor knew about the sink on reservation land, about the other way into the mine. Cork’s father, better than anyone, was in a position to thwart a criminal investigation. His father owned the same kind of weapon that had killed Monique Cavanaugh. What the hell had gone on forty years ago? And what the hell was going on now?

With an angry bound, he leaped Wine Creek and, a few minutes later, broke from the pine trees into the meadow, where he fixed his eyes on the solitary cabin ahead.

“Stop!”

He spun to his right, startled by the woman’s voice.

She knelt among the wildflowers and, like them, seemed to grow up out of the earth itself. She wore a straw hat with a wide brim that shaded her face. She’d braided her long hair, and it hung over her left shoulder and fell between her breasts. She glared at him from the shadow of her hat.

“My uncle is resting. He shouldn’t be disturbed,” she said.

“I’ll talk with Henry,” Cork replied and started forward again.

“Are you always this rude?”

“Visiting your uncle was a hell of a lot easier before you arrived.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

Cork altered his course and waded through the meadow grass to the place where she knelt. Despite the rising heat of the summer day, she wore a long-sleeved shirt of thin cotton embroidered with tiny flowers around the cuffs and collar.

“What exactly is going on with Henry?” he asked. “Is he sick?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t either.”

“The shaking?”

“It began a month ago. It’s getting worse.”

“Parkinson’s?”

“Maybe. Without tests, it’s hard to know.”

“And he won’t be tested?”

“No.” She looked toward the cabin. “He tires easily these days.”

“He’s within a stone’s throw of having lived a hundred years. Maybe he’s entitled to a little fatigue.”

“This isn’t just age,” she said. “This is something else.”

“Did he ask you here?”

She plucked a wildflower, a touch-me-not, and dropped it in a basket woven of reeds. “I came under the guise of wanting to learn more about his healing techniques. The family sent me. We’re all worried.”

Cork almost smiled. “And you think Henry hasn’t seen through you?”

“I’m sure he has. But he hasn’t objected.”

“He wouldn’t.” Cork glanced toward the cabin. “I need to talk to him. It’s important.”

She considered him and finally stood. She lifted the basket, which contained many gathered wildflowers. “Very well,” she said and led the way.

She quietly opened the door. In the cool inside, Meloux lay on his bunk. Walleye was sprawled on the floor nearby. They both turned their heads as Cork entered with Rainy. Walleye’s tail wagged sluggishly across the floorboards. Meloux simply smiled.

“Two visits in one day. I am a blessed man, Corcoran O’Connor.” The old Mide rose slowly and swung his feet over the side of the bunk. “My niece is going to make blackberry leaf tea, I think. Will you have some?”

“Migwech, Henry.”

Rainy went to the old stove, opened the door, and threw in a few sticks of wood to stoke the fire. The old man stood up and said to his niece, “We will be by the lake.”

Cork walked beside his old friend down a path that threaded between two great rock outcroppings. On the far side, very close to the shoreline of the lake, lay a circle of stones that contained the deep black char of many fires. Sectioned tree trunks had been placed around the circle for seating. Meloux eased his old, narrow butt onto one of these, and Cork sat next to him. Meloux’s breathing was rapid and shallow, and he seemed exhausted. Cork thought about commenting on this but figured if Henry wanted to discuss it he would.

Meloux stared at Iron Lake. There was no breeze, and the surface of the water lay flat and silver. The air near the fire circle smelled of the ritual burning that was often a part of the old Mide’s work.

It was a long time before Meloux spoke. “You visited Millie Joseph?”

“Yes,” Cork replied. “She was helpful.”

The old man nodded.

“Henry, I need to know what you did with my revolver.”

Meloux turned his face to Cork. His eyes were brown and watchful. “I put it with your rifle in a safe and sacred place.”

“Where?”

“A place I do not think even you know, Corcoran O’Connor. It is a place remembered by only the oldest of The People, a place of bimaadiziwin.”

Bimaadiziwin. Cork translated the word in his mind: a healthy way of life.

“It is a place where things that have blocked the way of our people, the path toward wholeness, have been put aside for good.”

“I want to see the revolver, Henry.”

The old man seemed puzzled. “Do you need it?”

“No, I just need to know that it’s still there.”

“Why would it move?”

“Humor me, Henry. Just tell me how to find it.”

While Meloux considered this request, Rainy appeared, carrying three white ceramic mugs, which she brought to the stone circle. She handed one to Meloux, one to Cork, and kept the other.

“Shall I stay?” she asked her uncle.

Which seemed to Cork clearly her intention, considering the cup she’d brought for herself.

“For a few minutes,” the old man said. “Then you will show our guest something.”

Cork glanced up at her. She seemed as surprised by this as he.

She sat down. Her presence felt awkward, and Cork was reluctant to continue the discussion. But perhaps as far as Meloux was concerned the discussion was finished anyway. They sat for several minutes in an ill-fitting silence. Cork was used to silence; the Ojibwe were quite comfortable with saying nothing for a long time. But the woman struck an alien chord in him. He wanted to be rid of her. Meloux seemed blithely clueless. He drank the tea, which smelled both sweet and pungent, and contemplated the silver lake. For her part, Rainy did the same.

“The home of Judge Parrant,” Meloux finally said. “It is a place of bad medicine. There are many diseased places, but there are also those places of healing, places of bimaadiziwin.”

“Bimaadiziwin,” Rainy responded. “The healthy life.”

“Do you remember where the blackberry bushes grow? I showed you.”

“Of course. East along the lakeshore about a mile. On top of a cliff.”

The old man gave a nod. “There is a cave in that cliff. The opening is small and hidden by blackberry brambles. What Corcoran O’Connor is looking for, he will find in that cave. Will you take him there?”

“Of course, Uncle.”

“I would go myself, but I am tired.”

“Would you like to walk back to the cabin?” she asked.

“No. I will stay here and finish my tea. You go with Cork. Go now. I think today he is a man in a hurry.”

She stood up, walked to where the path threaded between the outcroppings, and glanced back impatiently, as if she were the eager one and Cork the laggard. He pulled his butt off the stump and said to Meloux, “Migwech, Henry.”

At the cabin, Rainy paused only long enough to put their mugs inside, then walked briskly east. She led him through a dense stand of paper birch, then across a small marsh on a narrow spine of solid ground he would never have found on his own. He followed her up a face of rock colored and lined like a turtle shell and topped with aspens. They wove among the aspens, which were pale green with new leaves, and when they broke from the trees they stood atop a cliff with Iron Lake stretching below them. All along the edge of the cliff grew blackberry bushes. “This must be it,” Cork said. “Where is this place of health?”

“You know as much as I do. Uncle Henry asked me to bring you to the top of the cliff, and here we are.”

Cork eased his way between the thorny blackberry brambles and carefully peered over the side of the precipice. The lake lay a good hundred feet below. The water was clear, and he could see perfectly the dark contours of the rock that had broken from the cliff face and now lay jagged on the lake bottom. Just above the waterline, seeming to cling to the very rock itself, was another long line of blackberry bramble.

“I can’t see any way down,” he said.

“Maybe down isn’t the best way to approach,” Rainy suggested. “Maybe up from the water.”

“Henry didn’t offer us a canoe.”

“You can’t swim?”

He gave her a cold look and walked farther east, where the land sloped in a gentle fold. At the bottom was a small creek that fed into the lake. Cork followed the creek to its mouth, where he sat on the trunk of a cedar that had long ago toppled. He untied his laces and removed his boots. He pulled off his socks and stuffed them into the boots. He unbuttoned his blue denim shirt and shrugged it off. He tugged off his T-shirt. Finally he began to unbuckle his belt.

Rainy, who’d followed him, watched all this with deep, silent interest.

“The pants are coming off,” he warned her.

“Boxers or briefs?” she said.

He hesitated. “It’s been a long time since I took off my pants in front of a woman. I’m not real comfortable with this.”

“For heaven’s sake, I’m a public health nurse. Believe me, I’ve seen it all.”

He skinned the jeans from his hips and drew them off.

“Black boxers,” she said. “Interesting.”

He ignored her, folded his pants, and laid them atop his other things.

“Are those bullet holes?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to believe they didn’t kill you.”

“At the time, I was pretty sure they would.”

“Luck?”

“Henry, I think, would say destiny. You coming?”

“Are you kidding? That water’s freezing. I’ll wait here, make sure no one steals your clothes. Enjoy your swim.” She smiled with wicked delight.

She was right. Although it was mid-June, the lake water was still frigid. In the North Country, the cool nights would keep the water temperature challenging until well into July. Cork plunged in, and the icy water gripped him like a fierce, angry hand. He considered with amazement the mining engineer, Genie Kufus, who claimed to swim in the lake regularly. You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din, he thought as he swam feverishly away from shore and circled back to the cliff.

In the middle of the gray face of rock, beginning just at the waterline, he found natural steps. He quickly climbed from the lake and immediately the sun began to warm him. Barefooted, he carefully mounted the rock, working his way toward the line of blackberry bushes. Although from the lake the opening of the cave couldn’t be seen, from his current vantage, Cork could clearly make out the small black hole Meloux had mentioned. He eased behind the bramble, knelt in the mouth of the cave, crawled inside, and waited while his eyes adjusted slowly to the dim light.

It was cool and dry. The floor sloped toward the entrance, so that any water that might have found its way in would have quickly drained. The chamber was small, the size of a five-man tent, and edged with rock shelves. On the shelves lay many items, some looking quite ancient. Cork could see no rhyme or reason to what had been placed there: a bow made of hard maple with a deer-hide quiver full of arrow shafts whose featherings had long ago turned to dust; a colorfully beaded bandolier bag; a rag doll; a muzzle-loader with a rotted stock and beside it a powder horn, still in good condition; a woven blanket; a coil of rope. There were knives and a tomahawk and what looked to be a collection of human scalps. And there was a bearskin that belonged to Cork, in which he’d wrapped his Winchester rifle and his .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special when he’d handed them over to Henry Meloux. He pulled the bearskin from the shelf, set it on the floor, and unrolled it. The Winchester was still there. The .38 was gone.

FIFTEEN

Meloux seemed puzzled but not disturbed.

Cork strained to control his anger. “Henry, why didn’t you keep it here with you? Why put it somewhere someone might find it?”

“I do not lock my door, Corcoran O’Connor.” The old man shrugged. “Here, too, someone might find it.”

“Don’t blame my uncle,” Rainy said. “Why didn’t you disable the weapon before you gave it to him? Remove the firing pin or something? You can do that, right?”

It was late afternoon. They sat at the table in the cabin on Crow Point, Cork on one side and Meloux and his niece on the other. Rainy angled her body toward Cork in a threatening way, and, if her eyes had been fists, his face would have been bloody.

“You come here, ask my uncle for help, and when he gives it to you, all you can do is criticize. He’s told me of your good friendship. Frankly, from what I’ve seen so far, I have trouble believing it.”

“Niece,” Meloux said gently. “Your tongue is a knife. If I need a knife, I have my own.”

Cork said, “Henry, you know things you’re not telling me.”

“What I know is that you are looking for a truth I cannot give you now.”

Cork bent toward the old Mide. “A woman is dead, shot with the same gun that over forty years ago killed her mother. It’s the same kind of gun you put in the cave and is now missing. I’m hoping against hope that they’re not the same weapon. I can’t even guess how that could be possible. But I gotta tell you, Henry, I don’t like the feel of it, not one bit. I need to know everything you know.”

Meloux’s face was a blanket of compassion, but there was no hint that he was going to offer Cork anything more.

“Do you know if it was my father’s revolver that killed Monique Cavanaugh?”

Meloux’s expression changed not at all, and again he didn’t reply.

“At least tell me this,” Cork said, his voice pitched with frustration. “Who else knows about this place of bimaadiziwin?”

Meloux thought a moment. “It has always been a secret and sacred place. The Mide have always known, but most have walked the Path of Souls. I do not know who knows and has not yet walked that path.”

“So only you and the dead know? Christ, Henry, that’s not true. Someone very much alive and kicking took that gun.” Cork rose and towered over the old man. “If you know who that is, Henry, for God sake tell me.”

But it was like throwing punches at the wind. The old Mide looked up at him and said quietly, “You are a man on a journey. And all the while you stand here, your feet are idle.”

Fire flared in Cork’s brain. “God damn it,” he said and spun away and headed toward the door.

Rainy followed him outside. “When you come again, if you ever do, will you bring something with you?”

“What?” he snapped at her.

“Manners.” She turned, went back inside, and shut the door.

His only food that day had been the oatmeal he’d ordered for breakfast at the Pinewood Broiler when he talked with Cy Borkman. He was starved, and he headed to Sam’s Place. He parked in the lot, went into the old Quonset hut, and apologized to Judy Madsen for having been absent all day. She glanced at his face, and what she saw there caused her obvious concern. “You look like you swallowed a cockroach. The kids and me, we’ve got this covered. You worry about your other business.”

Judy fixed him a Sam’s Super with the works and a large basket of fries. He took his meal in the rear of the Quonset hut.

Sam’s Super was the hallmark of Sam’s Place. It had been Sam Winter Moon’s pride. Sam had believed in a quality burger. He never used frozen patties. Every day, first thing in the morning, he took twenty pounds of lean ground beef and rolled it in his hands into quarter-pound balls, which, order by order, he placed on the hot grill, pressed flat with his spatula, and seared to juicy perfection. The patty was topped with good Wisconsin cheddar, freshly sliced tomato, a large frond of leaf lettuce, a thin slice of Walla Walla sweet onion, and Sam’s own special sauce, whose recipe was a closely guarded secret. Every time Cork bit into a Sam’s Super, he tasted a heaven of memories.

He was almost finished eating when his cell phone chirped. “O’Connor,” he answered.

“It’s Marsha Dross, Cork. We have a situation here. Can you come to my office right away?”

The instant he walked into Dross’s office, he could feel the tension in the air. Dross was at her desk. Rutledge was standing at the window. Ed Larson was sitting with Lou Haddad and his wife. All eyes swung toward Cork.

“Come in,” Dross said, rising. “You know Sheri?”

“Of course. How are you?” he asked.

Haddad’s wife smiled bravely, and her hand lifted a little in a halfhearted greeting.

“Sheri got a note,” Dross said. “Same message Lou and the others received, but with a twist.”

Dross indicated a sheet of paper on her desk. Cork walked over and took a look but didn’t touch. There was a trifold, just as there’d been with the others. The note had been printed on paper that Cork was pretty sure had no identifying watermark, and the same blood-dripping font—From Hell—had been used. The message was almost the same as before, but, as Dross had indicated, it was different and in a terrifying way: We die, U die. Just like her.

“Just like her?” Cork said.

“We’re assuming it refers to Lauren Cavanaugh,” Ed Larson said. “Which is interesting. As far as we know, only those of us associated with the investigation knew that Lauren Cavanaugh was one of the victims in the mine.”

“Not true,” Cork said. “The person who put her there knew.”

“Exactly,” Larson said. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

“Where did you get this, Sheri?”

“It was under the windshield wiper of my car.”

“Have Max Cavanaugh or Genie Kufus received anything more?” Cork asked Dross.

“We contacted Cavanaugh at his house this afternoon. He’s got nothing more.”

“And Kufus?”

For a moment, they all appeared to be frozen, a tableau of awkward concern. Then Dross said, “She seems to be missing.”

SIXTEEN

Genie Kufus wasn’t at her hotel, nor was she answering her cell phone. Her car was gone. None of her team from the DOE knew where she was.

“When was the last time anyone saw her?” Cork asked.

“She met with her team over lunch, then she returned to her room to work. None of them have heard from her since, and none of them saw her leave the hotel.”

“Have you checked her room?”

“Of course,” Dross said. “She’s not there.”

“You went in?”

“Yes. With the manager.”

“Any sign of a struggle?”

“No.”

“Anything appear to be missing?”

“That’s hard to say without knowing what should be there.”

“You put out a BOLO?” Which was shorthand for Be on the Lookout.

Dross nodded. “She’s driving a rented cherry red Explorer. Not easy to miss.”

“You mind if I have a look at her hotel room?”

Dross shot glances toward Larson and Rutledge. They both gave nods. “Under the circumstances, I’m going to say okay. But I’d like to be there with you.”

“Of course.” Cork stood up and smiled at Haddad and his wife. “I think you should go somewhere safe. When was the last time you two took a vacation together?”

* * *

The room Genie Kufus occupied at the Four Seasons overlooked Iron Lake and the marina. It was a lovely view of white-masted sloops and powerboats set against dark blue water.

Dross said, “My guys have already been here, Cork. What are you looking for that they didn’t see?”

“I hope I’ll know it when I see it.”

He turned from the windows and scanned the room. Kufus was neat, well organized. Either she traveled a great deal and had the process down or this was who she was all the time. Nothing looked out of place, and that was helpful to Cork. He walked to the desk. Her laptop was closed. He opened it.

“Don’t turn that on,” Dross warned. “Until I’ve determined that she’s officially missing, we’re on thin ice just being here.”

She was right. Cork glanced through the documents that lay stacked next to the computer. They all appeared to be technical papers dealing with the mine and mining in general. He went to the closet. Dresses and slacks were hung with care; shoes had been set on the floor like soldiers in formation. He went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Lingerie, scented with lilac from a little pouch of sachet. Which seemed odd for a woman in town on business. The rest of the drawers held other, less interesting, clothing: folded tops, sweaters, shorts.

He entered the bathroom, where he found the towels racked with measured precision. Not even an errant hair on the sink.

“Interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“Kufus is a swimmer, but I don’t see a bathing suit anywhere. Why don’t you call the front desk, make sure none of the staff saw her go out for a swim this afternoon.”

“We already did that.”

“Never hurts to double check.”

She looked ready to offer a reply, probably not a pleasant one, but instead moved to the phone to make the call.

Cork went back to the desk. The charging cord for the woman’s cell phone was still plugged in, but the phone was gone. Next to the cord was a small pad of notepaper supplied by the hotel. There was a clear indentation from a note that had been written and then torn from the pad. Cork lifted and turned it so that the white paper caught the light through the window just right, and the faint grooving of Kufus’s handwriting was legible. He put the pad back down as Dross hung up the phone.

“She usually takes a swim in the afternoon, but, as we’ve already been told, no one saw her go out today,” Dross reported.

“All right,” Cork said. “I’m finished here.”

“Wasted trip,” she said.

Cork chose not to contradict her.

It was dusk when he headed out of Aurora, south along the shoreline of Iron Lake. He passed the Chippewa Grand Casino just outside of town, where the parking lot was three-quarters filled and still filling. The casino had been a godsend to the Iron Lake Ojibwe, whose profits had underwritten more improvements on the rez than Cork could count. Over the years, however, the casino had also delivered its share of difficulties, but that evening when he passed, he wasn’t thinking about the pros and cons of Indian gaming. He was thinking about the words Kufus had written on the sheet of notepaper she’d torn from the pad in her room: Moon Haven Cove.