Mercy Falls Read online

  “Done.” Singer turned to his team and gave the order.

  Fitzhugh, the state patrolman, left his vehicle and crossed the road to where the others stood.

  “You need us anymore?”

  “No,” Cork said. “Appreciate the assistance.”

  “Any time, Sheriff. Hope you get the bastard.”

  “Thanks.”

  Cork watched Fitzhugh walk away.

  “Get on the radio, Duane,” Cork said to Deputy Pender. “Have Patsy round up Clay and tell him to bring out a generator and floodlights. He can get them from the fire department.”

  Pender nodded and moved away.

  “What did you see in the cabin?” Cork said to Borkmann.

  “No bodies.”

  “You have to break in?”

  “It was open.”

  “Figures. On the rez, nobody locks their doors. Any sign of violence?”

  “Nope. Not the neatest housekeepers, but I’d say the mess in there looks pretty organic.”

  “Organic?”

  “You know, rising naturally out of the elements of the environment.”

  “Organic.” Cork shook his head.

  “See for yourself,” Borkmann said.

  “I will. I want you to keep everyone away from the scene for now. When Ed Larson gets here, and the generator and lights, we’ll go over the ground carefully. Where’d you say the dogs were, Cy?”

  “Behind the woodpile in back.”

  “Okay.” Cork turned toward the cabin. He knew he risked contaminating the scene, but he needed to know if there were dead or injured people somewhere.

  He lifted a pair of latex gloves from the box Borkmann had in his cruiser. He also borrowed the deputy’s Maglite. Carefully, he skirted the area where blood had turned the dirt to a muddy consistency. He hoped it was only the mutts who’d bled. He made his way around the side of the cabin to the back. Behind a cord of split hardwood stacked between the trunks of a couple of young poplars, he found the dogs. They lay one on top of the other, thrown there, it seemed, with no more thought than tossing out garbage. They’d been shot through the head, both of them, straight on and at close range. Cork wondered if they’d come at their assailant and been killed in their attack, or if they’d sat there bewildered by their fate because whoever shot them was someone they’d trusted. He considered Eli again. Had the man finally gone over the edge, gone into a drunken rage as a result of Lucy’s bullying, done away with his wife, and then killed his dogs? If so, why hide them like this? And where was Lucy?

  It didn’t feel right. A man like Eli might get drunk and riled up enough to kill his wife, but he’d never shoot his dogs. A sad statement, but Cork knew it to be true.

  He returned to the front of the cabin and pushed the door open. Inside was dark. He located the switch on the wall and turned on the lights.

  Eli’s first wife had been a small, quiet woman named Deborah, a true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. She’d been good to her husband, had kept a clean house, and when ovarian cancer took her, Eli had grieved long and hard. His second wife was nothing like Deborah. As Cork stood in the doorway, he could see what Borkmann had meant about organic mess. The room was cluttered with magazines and newspapers, dirty glasses and plates, clothing left lying where it had been shed. The place had a sour, soiled-laundry smell to it.

  He wove through the clutter to the kitchen, where he found a sink full of unwashed dishes. On the kitchen table lay a half loaf of dark rye and a butcher knife with a residue of butter on the blade. Next to the bread was a small pile of scratched tickets for the state lottery.

  Cork checked the bedroom. It looked as though a struggle had taken place, the bed unmade, clothes tossed everywhere, but he suspected that was probably the norm. A few empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans lay on the floor on the right side of the bed. Eli’s side, he guessed.

  The bathroom was in desperate need of a good scrubbing, but nothing struck Cork as particularly noteworthy.

  He stood in the main room.

  A sniper on the hill across the road. Two dead dogs behind the woodpile. No indication of violence inside the cabin, but no sign of Lucy or Eli, either. What the hell was going on?

  “What happened to your ear?”

  Cork turned and found Ed Larson standing in the doorway.

  Larson wore gold wire-rims, little ovals that made him look bookish. His silver hair was bristle short, his face clean shaven, still a little pink, in fact, from the recent draw of a razor over his long jaw. He was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, burgundy tie. His shoes were Florsheims, polished oxblood. During the brief tenure of the previous sheriff, Arne Soderberg, who’d managed to stay in office only six months, Larson had quit the department and taken a job teaching criminal justice studies at the community college. When the county Board of Commissioners tapped Cork to fill out Soderberg’s term, he’d asked Larson to return, which the man had done in a heartbeat.

  Cork touched the gauze he’d taped over his left earlobe to stanch the flow of blood where a sizable chunk of flesh was missing.

  “Sniper round.”

  “Lucky,” Larson said.

  “Luckier than Marsha.” Cork noted the man’s clothing. “Awfully well dressed.”

  “Anniversary dinner. Thirty-fifth.”

  “Alice mad you had to leave?”

  “She knows how it goes.”

  “You could’ve taken a few minutes to change clothes.”

  “The suit will clean.” Larson looked at the room. “Struggle?”

  “I get the feeling this is a natural state.”

  Larson walked cautiously into the cabin, watching where he stepped. “I talked to Cy outside, got a thumbnail of what’s going on. I radioed Patsy to double-check the location of the call. Thought maybe it didn’t actually come from here.”

  “Did it?”

  “From right there.” He pointed toward a phone on a low table next to the sofa, half hidden by a soiled, gray sweatshirt. “You didn’t touch it?”

  “Didn’t even see it,” Cork said.

  “Door unlocked?”

  “Yes.”

  Larson didn’t seem surprised. “You check out the other rooms?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything?”

  “Not that leaped out at me.”

  Larson looked over his shoulder toward one of the windows. “It’s getting pretty dark out there. What do you want to do about the hill?”

  Two shell casings. Six, maybe seven shots fired. More casings to locate. Maybe other evidence as well.

  Larson went on. “Cy says you’ve got floodlights coming. I hope you’re not thinking of dragging them up that slope tonight.”

  Cork didn’t answer. He didn’t want to decide anything until he had an idea of what had become of Eli and Lucy.

  “It’s going to be a long night” was all he would say.

  Larson turned back toward the front door. “I’ll get my things and get started.”

  They both heard the screaming, and they went outside quickly.

  An old puke-colored pickup was parked behind Borkmann’s Crown Victoria, and Lucy Tibodeau had climbed out. She was trying to swing at Cy Borkmann while Pender did his best to restrain her. Cork hurried over.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She wanted to go inside,” Borkmann said.

  “It’s my damn house,” Lucy hollered. She kicked at Cy but Pender pulled her back just in time. “What the hell’s going on?” she demanded.

  Eli’s first wife had been like a fawn, small, soft, quiet. For his second bride, Eli had chosen a different animal altogether, huge and fierce. Lucy Tibodeau came from Fargo and, when Eli met her, had been dealing blackjack at the casino in Mille Lacs. She was short but big boned, with a lot of meat on those bones. Her hair was copper-colored, wiry like a Brillo pad. Her skin was splashed with huge brown freckles. Her eyes were green fire.

  “Take your hands off me,” she warned Pender, “or I’ll bite your thumb off.”

>   “Take it easy, Lucy,” Cork said.

  “Don’t tell me to take it easy. You’re crawling all over my place like a bunch of maggots and this son of a bitch has got his hands everywhere except up my dress. And he looks like he wouldn’t mind going there next.”

  “Let her go, Pender.”

  The deputy did and stepped back quickly.

  “What’s going on?” Lucy asked, only slightly more civil.

  “Where’s Eli?” Cork said.

  “I left him at Bunyan’s. Last I saw of the little shit, he was kissing the lip of a whiskey glass.”

  “When was that?”

  “Half an hour ago. What? Did he do something?”

  “You’ve got the truck, Lucy. How’s he getting home?”

  “He can walk for all I care.”

  “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.<
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  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 gave 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.