Mercy Falls co-5 Read online

  “Pender, drive over to Bunyan’s. Round up Eli if he’s there.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  “What’s going on?” Lucy said again, only this time with genuine concern in her voice.

  “I was hoping you could tell me.” It was hard to see the woman’s face clearly. Cork opened the front door of Borkmann’s cruiser and motioned Lucy to where the dome light would illuminate them both. “I’d love to know what happened after you called the Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Called you?”

  “At six-twenty, a call came from this location from a woman claiming to be you.”

  “At six-twenty me and Eli were playing pinochle at Bunyan’s, like we do every Tuesday night. Hell, everybody knows that. We go for the walleye fish fry, then play a couple hours of pinochle.”

  A dark blue pickup rolled up and maneuvered alongside the other vehicles that crowded the narrow road. In the back sat a generator and some floodlights.

  “You didn’t call?” Cork said.

  “Hell no.” Something dawned on her, and she tried to pierce the dark with her eyes. “Where’s our dogs?”

  Cork didn’t relish what he had to do, and when he spoke his voice sounded tired. “Somebody shot them, Lucy. I’m sorry.”

  All her spit and fire vanished in an instant, and devastation poured in to replace it.

  Cork looked to Cy. “Would you see to Ms. Tibodeau. We’ll need a full statement, but go easy.” He turned and walked away.

  Larson followed him. “Think she’s lying?”

  “Too simple to check. And why would she?”

  Larson paused and looked up at the hill that was now a towering black shape hard against a soft night sky. “What’s going on, Cork?”

  “I’d say it was a trap.”

  “You guys got pulled out here to be shot at?”

  “No,” Cork said. “To be shot.”

  3

  Cork left Ed Larson in charge with Borkmann backing him up. He intended to drive himself to the Aurora community hospital so that he could check on Marsha and have his ear tended to, but Larson stopped him.

  “You shouldn’t drive.”

  “It’s just my damn earlobe,” Cork said.

  “It’s a bullet wound and your body knows it and any minute may decide to overrule your stubborn brain. If that happens, I’d just as soon you weren’t behind the wheel. Collins,” he called to a deputy who was taking digital photos of the bullet-riddled Land Cruiser, “take the sheriff to the hospital. Radio ahead and let them know he’s coming.” He turned back to Cork. “You want us to call Jo?”

  “No, I’ll do that from the hospital. And I’ll take care of contacting the BCA, too.”

  At the hospital, Cork told the deputy not to wait, that he’d have Jo give him a lift from there. Collins headed back to the rez.

  In the emergency room, Cork ignored the admitting clerk and walked directly to the main hallway. As he approached the reception desk to ask about Marsha, he ran into his dispatcher Patsy Gilman, who was asking the same question.

  Cork had hired Patsy during his first stint as sheriff. She was not quite forty, bright and funny, with deep laugh lines on either side of her mouth, and small intense eyes that noticed everything. She was good in Dispatch because she kept her head and her humor. As two of the only three women in the department, she and Marsha Dross had formed a tight friendship, so much so that Patsy was to be the bridesmaid at Marsha’s wedding, which was scheduled for the day after Halloween. Marsha was engaged to a big Finn named Charlie Annala.

  “As soon as I knew they were bringing Marsha in, I called Charlie.” She walked with Cork toward the surgery waiting area. “Then I called Bos and asked her to relieve me early. I didn’t want Charlie to have to wait alone. You mind?”

  She was still wearing her uniform, and there were dark stains under the arms. It had been a tough evening all around.

  “Makes good sense,” he said.

  Cork knew he shouldn’t feel this way, but he hated hospitals. They were places that did people good, that cured the sick and healed the injured, but it was also a place completely outside his control. He’d watched both his parents die in hospital rooms, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do about it. Rationally, he knew that hospitals weren’t about death, but whenever he entered the glass doors and caught the unnatural, antiseptic smell in the corridors, his heart told him differently.

  They found Charlie Annala in the waiting room. He was sandy-haired, heavy, with a face made babylike from soft fat. He wore a forest green work shirt, dirty jeans, and scuffed boots. Cork figured he’d come straight from his job at the DNR’s Pine Lake Fish Hatchery. He stood with his big, fat hands stuffed in his jean pockets, his head down, staring at the beige carpeting. There was a television on a shelf in a corner, tuned to one of the new reality shows. Cork figured Annala wouldn’t have minded dealing with somebody else’s reality at that moment. When he heard them coming, Annala looked up, not a happy man.

  Charlie Annala was the protective type. Marsha didn’t need that, but apparently she didn’t mind, either. Maybe she appreciated that Charlie saw her in a different way than her male colleagues: saw the woman who liked, off duty, to show a little leg, line dance, and wear jewelry and cologne. Cork knew that her job was a sore point with Charlie, who was worried about her safety, a worry that, until this evening, Cork hadn’t particularly shared.

  Patsy rushed forward and threw her arms around the big man. “Oh, Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked over her shoulder at Cork.

  “Any word?” Cork said.

  “Nothing since she went in. I haven’t called her dad yet. I won’t until I know how it’s gone. What happened?” Charlie’s eyes were full of unspoken accusations.

  Patsy stood back, and let the two men talk.

  “We’re still trying to piece it together.”

  “What do you mean, ‘piece it together’? You were there.”

  “At the moment, all I know is somebody shot her.”

  “Who?” He’d leaned closer with each exchange, putting his face very near to Cork’s. There were deep pits across his cheeks from adolescent acne.

  “I don’t know,” Cork said.

  “Why not?”

  “He was too far away, hidden in some rocks.”

  “Why her?”

  Cork figured what he really meant was Why not you?

  “When I understand that, Charlie, I’ll let you know. I honestly will.”

  Patsy put her arm around Annala just as a nurse entered the waiting area. “There you are,” the nurse said to Cork. “We’ve been expecting you in the ER.” When he turned to her, she said with surprise, “Oh, my.”

  The shot that grazed his ear had opened a spigot of blood that had poured all over his shirt, and he looked like hell, as if he’d sustained an injury far worse.

  “Keep me posted,” he said to Patsy.

  “You know I will.”

  Cork followed the nurse. He was beginning to feel his strength ebbing, and thought about what Larson had said. Maybe his wounded body was finally overtaking his stubborn brain. He hoped not. There was still so much to do.

  He called Jo from a phone in the ER and asked her to pick him up, then he let them sew his earlobe closed.

  She was waiting for him when he came out. She looked with alarm and sympathy at the gauze and tape on his ear. “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  Two blocks from the hospital, Jo pulled her Camry to the side of the street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and listened. He told it calmly, almost blandly, but her face registered the horror of the scene.

  “Oh God, Cork. How’s Marsha?”

  “She’s still in surgery. We won’t know for a while.”

  She gently lifted a hand toward the side of his face. “How’s your poor ear?”

  “Smaller.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “They g
ave it a shot. Can’t feel much now.”

  She stared through the windshield. It was night and quiet and they sat in the warm glow of a street lamp. She put a hand to her forehead as if pressing some thought into her brain. “Why, Cork?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She leaned to him suddenly and held him tightly, and the good smell of spaghetti came to him from her hair and clothing. It was a quick dinner and a favorite of their children.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ll get you home and you can relax.”

  “No. I need to go to the department. I want to listen to the tape of Lucy’s call.”

  It was a little before nine on a Tuesday night. Aurora, Minnesota, was winding down. Many of the shops had already closed. A good crowd was still visible through the windows of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, and the air on Center Street was full of the tantalizing aroma of fried food. In front of the display window of Lost Lake Outfitters, against the buttery glow of a neon sign, stood old Alf Pedersen, who’d started the outfitting company fifty years earlier. Alf knew the most beautiful and fragile parts of the Boundary Waters, the great wilderness area north of Aurora, and although he’d guided hundreds of tourists in, he kept those places secret. In the next block, the door of Wolf Den Books and Gifts opened and a plank of light fell across the sidewalk as Naomi Pierce stepped out to close up. He couldn’t hear it, but Cork knew that the opening of the door had caused a small bell above the threshold to jingle. He thought about the show that had been on television at the hospital. He didn’t know whose reality that was, but his own reality lay in the details of this place, his hometown, details an outsider might not even notice. A tinkling bell, a familiar silhouette, the comfortable and alluring smell of deep-fry.

  There was another reality for him as well. It was grounded in a maple leaf of blood on Marsha’s uniform, the sound of glass shattered by a bullet capable of exploding his head like a melon, and the long, terrifying moments when he’d scrambled desperately to make sense of the absolutely senseless.

  “You okay?” Jo asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he answered.

  She accompanied him into the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Bos Swain, who’d relieved Patsy as dispatcher, buzzed them through the security door.

  Bos was short for Boston, which was the name by which Henrietta Swain was known. As a young woman, she’d dreamed of going to college, specifically to Boston College, for reasons which she’d never divulged. Instead, she’d married her high school sweetheart, who went off to Vietnam and came back messed up psychologically. Bos had worked to support them and the two girls who were born to them, and although she never went to college herself, she sent both girls east, one to Barnard and the other to Boston College. When the girls were gone, she divorced her first husband and remarried, a good man named Tim Johnson who had a solid job stringing wire for the phone company. Although she didn’t need to work to support herself anymore, she kept on as a dispatcher, drawing a county paycheck every two weeks, which she deposited in trust funds for her grandchildren’s education. She was a fleshy woman, unusually good-humored, but the events of that evening had put her in a somber mood.

  “I thought you were going to the hospital,” she said to Cork in a scolding tone.

  “I just came from there.”

  “How’s Marsha?”

  “Still in surgery when I left. Thanks for coming early so Patsy could be there.”

  “She seemed to be holding up real good, but I know it’s tough for her. How’s Charlie taking it?”

  “Hard.”

  “Well, sure.” She eyed his uniform and shook her head. “Jo, you ought to take him home so he can change those clothes. He’s not exactly a walking advertisement for law enforcement.”

  Cork said, “I want to listen to the recording of the call that came from the Tibodeau cabin.”

  “Lucy’s call?”

  “That’s what I want to know. Lucy claims it wasn’t her.”

  Bos went to the Dispatch area, where the radio, at the moment, was silent. The public contact phone was linked to two different recording systems. The first recorded date, time, and the number of the phone from which the call had been made. The other system was a Sony automatic telephone tape recorder. It wasn’t top-of-the-line-it had actually been donated to the department by the Chippewa Grand Casino when they’d upgraded to a digital recorder voice bank that fed directly into a computer-but it was a workhorse of a unit. Bos rewound the tape to the call that had purportedly come from Lucy. She played it, and they all listened. Then she played it again.

  Patsy: Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

  The caller: I’m telling you, if you don’t get somebody out here, I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

  Patsy: Who is this?

  The caller: Lucy Tibodeau.

  Patsy: Where are you, Lucy?

  The caller: At my goddamn cabin. And I’m telling you, you better get someone out here pronto, or I swear I’ll kill him.

  Patsy: Kill who?

  The caller: That son of a bitch husband of mine.

  Patsy: Eli?

  The caller: You think I got another husband stashed in the woodpile, sweetie? Well, I wish to god I did, ’cuz the one I got ain’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

  Patsy: Where is Eli?

  The caller: Outside, pounding on the door, hollering to let him in.

  Patsy: You just stay put, Lucy. Take a few deep breaths. We’ll have someone out there right away.

  The caller: I’m warning you, the sheriff better get here real fast, he wants to avoid bloodshed.

  Patsy: He’s on his way, Lucy. You just relax, and don’t you let that husband of yours rankle you, understand?

  The caller: I ain’t making any promises.

  The caller hung up.

  Jo was the first to respond. “If someone’s trying to sound like Lucy, they did a pretty fair job.”

  Bos nodded. “If I hadn’t been leery, I’d have been fooled. I can see why Patsy didn’t give it a second thought. Whoever it is, she’s got Lucy’s speech down pat. But it’s someone younger, I’d say.”

  Cork had Bos play the tape once more. “Hear that?” he said, midway through.

  “What?”

  “Rewind it a bit.” He waited. “Listen.” He held up a finger, then dropped it suddenly. “Now. Did you hear it? A door closing in the background.”

  “Somebody came in?” Bos said.

  “Or went out.” Jo looked at Cork. “Either way, she wasn’t alone.”

  “Pull that tape, Bos. We’ll give it to BCA to analyze.”

  He went into his office and made the call to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office in Bemidji, explained the situation to the voice mail, then pulled out the clean uniform he kept in the closet. When he stepped back into the department common area, Jo looked at the uniform.

  “You’re not coming home,” she said.

  “No. I’ll shower downstairs, change, and then I’m going back out to the rez.”

  “I wish you’d come home. You’ve got people who can handle the investigation.”

  “I need to be there. Don’t wait up.”

  She kissed him and he could feel her restraint, her irritation.

  “Be careful,” she said, and left.

  As he showered, he was conscious of his wound. The local anesthetic was wearing off, and a dull ache crept in behind it. He put on the clean uniform and went back upstairs.

  “I’m taking my Bronco,” he told Bos. “Let Ed know I’m on my way.”

  “You really ought to get a radio in that vehicle.”

  He started for the door, but Bos called him back.

  “Sheriff?”

  He turned around.

  “Somebody lured you out there.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “They wanted you dead. Or maybe Marsha.”

  “That’s generally the reason they use bullets.”

  “My point is this,” she said.
“They didn’t succeed. Does that mean they’ll try again?”

  4

  Floodlights lit the hollow with an unnatural glare, and the poplar trees around the Tibodeau cabin looked like a crowd of gawkers gone white with shock. Cork pulled up behind Cy Borkmann’s cruiser and got out.

  Ed Larson stood in the doorway of the cabin. He wasn’t wearing the latex gloves anymore and looked as if he’d gathered evidence and was weighing the meaning. Or at least, that’s what Cork hoped his look meant.

  “Where’s Lucy?” Cork asked.

  “She and Eli went into Allouette to stay with his uncle. We took statements from both of them. They were pretty broken up over the dogs.”

  Cork glanced inside the cabin. “So, what did you find?”

  Larson adjusted his wire-rims, not a good sign. Then he said, “Well,” which nailed the coffin shut.

  “Nothing?” Cork said.

  “Not down here. Whoever it was, they actually wiped out the tracks leading back to the woodpile where they threw the dogs. Looks like they used a pine branch or something. I took prints off the phone, but I’m betting they’re just latents from Eli and Lucy. Nothing on the shell casings you found earlier. We pulled the slugs out of the Land Cruiser but they’re too mashed up to be of any use for ballistics. We’re still looking for the round that went through Marsha. Doing a quadrant search of the ground surface right now, then I’ll have the guys start digging. Come morning, we’ll go over every inch of the hilltop where the shooter was. We bagged the dogs. If you think it’ll be of any value, we can have them autopsied.”

  Duane Pender, who was working on the search of the ground, hollered.

  “What is it?” Larson said.

  Pender picked up something and held it up in the light. “It’s a bell. A little jingly Christmas bell.”

  Larson walked carefully to the deputy and took the bell from him. It was a silver ball with a little metal bead inside that jingled when the ball moved. “It’s new. Not dirty, so it hasn’t been on the ground long. What do you make of it, Cork?”

  Cork walked over. “Could be from a Christmas ornament.”

  “In October?”

  “Or maybe from a jingle dress.”