Red Knife Read online

  “Ed walked me through the scene. Your team’s doing a good job.”

  “What do you guys think?” Dross asked.

  Larson nodded toward the garage. “We found blood on the grass over there. Isolated and, as far as we can tell, not related to the shootings themselves. Kingbird had a head wound. Somebody clubbed him pretty good. A lot of bleeding but not much swelling, so looks as if it happened just prior to the killing.”

  Dross glanced at Cork. “How was he last night?”

  “Nobody had clubbed him when I left.”

  Rutledge looked confused. “You were here last night, Cork?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute, Simon,” Dross said. “Go on, Ed.”

  “What it looks like is that Kingbird came outside and was assaulted near the garage. My guess would be that he was drawn out. But he was careful. He left the doors locked behind him. Whoever it was who assaulted him had to break into the house through the door to the utility room. I imagine they were after Rayette. She was probably a witness. Or maybe the assailant had planned all along to make her a victim.”

  “Any 911 calls?” Cork asked.

  Larson shook his head. “The phone line was cut. And we’re too far out for a cell to be able to pick up a signal.”

  “Lucinda Kingbird found the bodies, is that right?”

  Larson nodded.

  “Where is she?”

  “Deputy Minot took her home.”

  “How was she doing?”

  He shrugged. “Soldier’s wife. While I interviewed her, she didn’t shed a tear, just worried about the baby.”

  Rutledge squinted at Cork. “The suspense is killing me.”

  “Suspense?” Cork said.

  “I’m dying to know what you were doing out here last night.”

  Cork explained the circumstances.

  “Buck Reinhardt,” Ed Larson said, as if it made perfect sense.

  “I know about the Reinhardt girl’s death,” Rutledge said. “Tell me about her father. Is he the kind of man who could do something like this?”

  Dross considered his question. “You have a daughter, Simon. If you believed someone was responsible for her death, think you might be capable of something like this?”

  Rutledge glanced at Cork. “You said you didn’t find him last night.”

  “That’s right.”

  Larson took off his wire-rims and carefully cleaned the lenses with a white handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket. “When I’m finished here, I’ll head over to the Reinhardt place, interview Buck.”

  “Might be a good idea if I went along,” Rutledge suggested. “You talk to Reinhardt, I’ll talk to his wife, see if we get the same story.”

  “Who else should we be talking to?” Dross asked.

  Larson said, “DEA’s convinced the Red Boyz are deep into the drug trade. Cold-blooded executions and drugs pretty much go hand in hand.”

  “Match made in hell,” Dross said. “Call DEA, Ed. Run this by them.”

  “What about the Red Boyz themselves?” Rutledge said. “Is it possible there’s a power struggle going on or some kind of ideological rift, anything that might have led to this?”

  They all looked to Cork.

  He held up his hands defensively. “It’s not like there’s a pipeline that runs between me and the Red Boyz. Don’t forget, I hauled some of them in as juveniles.”

  “You know their families,” Dross said.

  “I’ll do what I can, okay?”

  Larson slipped his wire-rims back on. “Marsha, did you tell Cork about the business at the back of the house?”

  “What business?” Cork said.

  “It’s what I wanted to show you.” Dross turned and led the way.

  They walked carefully through the yard, along a path Larson’s people had marked for entry and egress from the scene. In the high grass beyond the mowed edge of the backyard, deputies were still working. The bodies of Alexander and Rayette Kingbird were gone, but the long green blades of wild grass were still splashed with spatters of dark red.

  “Tom Conklin’s already at Nelson’s,” Dross said, speaking of the man contracted as medical examiner for the county. He did his autopsies in one of the prep rooms in the basement of Nelson’s Funeral Home. “He seemed pretty eager to get started. Turn around, Cork.”

  Cork turned and looked back at the house. “Jesus. Is that what I think it is?”

  “We’ve taken samples,” Larson said. “We’ll have them analyzed to be certain. But, yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s blood.”

  Across the wall of the house, painted in large, ragged letters each a foot high and dried now to the color of old rust were the words DED BOYZ.

  SEVEN

  Annie O’Connor had learned how to cook from the best. For the first fifteen years of her life, most meals at the O’Connor house were prepared by her mother’s sister, Aunt Rose. Rose was a cook with an outstanding reputation, and Annie was an apt pupil. Though she preferred sports to most domestic pursuits, cooking appealed to Annie’s sense of order and, in a way, her enjoyment of competition. Since Aunt Rose had left—married and gone to Chicago—Annie regularly took a turn preparing the evening meal. Her father’s schedule was erratic, especially since he’d started his sideline business as a private investigator. He wasn’t an inspired cook, preferring to stick with the staples: mac and cheese, hot dogs, chili, sometimes a passable meat loaf. And once Sam’s Place opened for the season, he wouldn’t be home most evenings until very late. Her mother often worked long hours at her law office and had always been a cook with a reputation for disasters in the kitchen. Although she had improved some since Aunt Rose left, the truth was that almost everyone in the family preferred Annie’s cooking, and Annie liked being the best at things.

  Sunday dinner was always at one. That afternoon the main dish was pot roast, simple but succulent, and the smell of it filled the house. Annie and her mother worked together in the kitchen, both agreeing that Annie was in charge. Stevie’s job was to set the table. It was all a familiar pattern, yet that day felt anything but usual to Annie. Before he’d gone out to the reservation with the sheriff that morning after church, her father shared with them what had happened to the Kingbirds, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the tragedy.

  She knew Rayette Kingbird mostly from visiting with her at St. Agnes. She’d liked Rayette, liked that at first glance she appeared to be a hard woman but in fact was quite kind and very sensible when you got to know her. Alex Kingbird she knew only a little. She’d seen him around town with Rayette. They’d stopped together at Sam’s Place a few times for burgers and shakes. He was quiet, but he seemed to laugh often when he was talking with Rayette. Annie knew the stories about him: kicked out of the marines, an L.A. gang member, prison time, and the Red Boyz. What she saw was a man who seemed to be a good husband and a good father, someone in love with his wife and his child.

  She knew Ulysses Kingbird best. Again, this was through the St. Agnes connection, where music brought them together. At school, he didn’t fit in anywhere. He wasn’t a brain. He wasn’t a jock. He wasn’t a preppie or a stoner. Despite his musical talent, he didn’t hang with the band geeks or the artsy kids. Mostly he was quiet and tried to disappear. Moving down the hallway at school, he reminded her of a piece of driftwood floating, purposeless, down a river.

  He might have been successful at being overlooked if it hadn’t been for the fact that his brother was Alexander Kingbird, head of the Red Boyz. As a result, kids at school hit on Uly for drugs. Teachers made assumptions about him. His asshole classmates—and there were a lot of assholes—tormented him with insults. Since Kristi Reinhardt had died, things had become worse. Uly might never have come right out and said anything, but the music connected him and Annie in a powerful way. When they got together to practice the songs Uly had arranged for Sunday’s service, Annie sometimes got him to talk. Not a lot, but through the crack in the door that opened, Annie saw much.

  Uly’s biggest
problem, it seemed to her, was that his father was Will Kingbird. Him, she didn’t like at all. Mostly she saw him at Mass, where he sat so stiffly he looked as if he’d been carved out of the pew itself. He made her think of the old Louisville Slugger her parents had given her when she started playing softball: hard and perfectly capable of delivering a good, solid smack. Mrs. Kingbird often seemed to have a wary look on her face, and though Uly never talked about abuse, it made Annie wonder.

  Her father came home a few minutes before the potatoes were done. He went upstairs to wash his hands. When he came back down, everything was on the table and ready.

  At first the conversation was about Jenny, Annie’s older sister who was nearing the end of her first year of college at the University of Iowa, and who’d called to check in, as she always did, after the family came home from church. But Annie was dying to know what exactly had happened at the Kingbird place. Her father didn’t want to talk about it, except to say that it was true, Rayette and Alexander Kingbird were dead. They’d been shot.

  Stevie, who seemed not to know better, kept pressing. “Where?”

  “They were found in the meadow behind the house.”

  “I mean where were they shot?”

  Her father looked up from dishing roasted potatoes onto his plate. “In the back,” he replied after a long pause.

  “Was there lots of blood and stuff?”

  “Stephen,” his mother said, “that’s enough.”

  “I was just wondering.” He lingered over his green beans. “Why did they want you there?”

  “Alex and Rayette were Ojibwe. The sheriff thought that because I’m part Ojibwe, I might be able to answer some questions they had.”

  Annie used this as her opening to ask about something that had been on her mind for quite a while. “You and Mr. Kingbird were friends once, right, Dad?”

  “We’re not unfriendly now.”

  “I mean like tight.”

  “We played football together. Because we shared Ojibwe blood, he probably talked to me a little more than other people. Folks saw that as tight, I suppose, but I never really knew him. I don’t think anybody did. He never let anybody that close.”

  Annie said, “I like Uly’s mom better.”

  Her father smiled. “You want to know the truth, so do I.”

  “But she seems, I don’t know, subdued. Like she’s afraid of him.”

  “That might be a cultural issue,” her mother said. “She’s Latina. I believe it’s not unusual to be submissive to your husband, at least in public.”

  “I think Uly’s afraid of him,” Annie said.

  Her father said, “Has he told you that?”

  “Not in so many words. I just get that feeling.”

  Stevie piped in, “Uly sure plays the guitar good.”

  “He’s always seemed a little troubled to me,” her mother said. “Do you ever see him at school, Annie?”

  “He’s only a sophomore, so we don’t have any classes together. But I see him sometimes, yeah. He gets picked on, mostly by guys who’re huge losers and looking for somebody they think might be a bigger loser than them. Allan Richards, for example.”

  “Richards?” Her father looked up from his plate. “That wouldn’t be Cal Richards’s boy, would it?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Cal Richards.” He shook his head. “Now there’s one sick soul. Sounds like the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.”

  “Will you help the sheriff?” Stevie asked.

  “A little bit maybe. I’m going back to the reservation this afternoon to talk to a couple of people.”

  “Oh?” Annie’s mother said. She didn’t sound thrilled.

  “I need to talk to George LeDuc, Jo. And as long as I’m out that way, I might as well drop by the Blessing place and have a word with Tom.”

  “Mom, can Trixie come in?” Stevie asked.

  “Yes, but don’t feed her at the table. I’ve put some scraps aside for her for later.”

  Stevie got up to let the dog in. Annie waited until she thought he couldn’t hear, then asked the question that had most been on her mind.

  “Do the shootings have anything to do with Kristi Reinhardt?”

  “I don’t know, Annie.” Her father stabbed another piece of pot roast, but paused before he put it on his plate. “Buck Reinhardt is a strange man. But, you know, if this is all about his daughter, I can almost understand.”

  He seemed ready to say more, but Stevie came back in with Trixie at his heels, and her father went back to eating.

  What she would remember whenever she thought back on that conversation was the powerful confusion of compassion and anger she saw on her father’s face. That and how much the look scared her.

  EIGHT

  Thomas Blessing lived with his mother, Fanny, in a one-story frame house that, as long as Cork could remember, had been in desperate need of a new coat of paint. The house was a god-awful purple, something out of a psychedelic nightmare, and Cork had often wondered if one reason Fanny didn’t paint it was that nobody was stupid enough to manufacture the color anymore.

  The house stood near a crossroads on the eastern side of the rez. On the other side of the road stood the abandoned ruins of an old gas station, a gray derelict that stared hollow-eyed at the Blessing place. Several years before, a photographer for National Geographic had shot the old place, and the photo appeared in the publication, run with an article about the plight of the rez: the deterioration, the drunkenness, the desperation. It hadn’t been an unfair article, Cork had thought at the time, but it had made the situation on the rez sound hopeless. The Ojibwe may have lacked many things, but they’d never lacked for courage and they’d never lost hope.

  Behind the Blessing house was a marsh full of cattails and red-winged blackbirds. In the summer, the marsh was home to great blue herons that waded among the lily pads with awkward majesty and bent with a formal-looking stiffness to snatch at fish and crawdads.

  It was Fanny Blessing who answered Cork’s knock. She appeared to be headed out. A big black purse hung on her shoulder and a jean jacket was slung over her arm.

  “Boozhoo, Fanny,” he said, offering the familiar Ojibwe greeting.

  “If you’re here to arrest Tommy, I ain’t going to stop you,” she said.

  She was a heavy woman. She was also a smoker, had been since she was a kid, and she was paying the price: emphysema. She wore a tube that ran from her nostrils, over both ears, and down to a small green oxygen tank, which she pulled around beside her on a little wheeled cart. She was a couple of years younger than Cork and had been a wild one in her day. Fanny had loved a good time, loved Wild Turkey with a beer chaser, loved dancing in bars and at powwows, and loved men, no-good men especially. She’d had three children by three different fathers. One had died young, a drowning. The middle one, a girl named Topaz, had run away when she was sixteen and, as far as Cork knew, hadn’t been in touch with Fanny since. Thomas, her youngest, was the only one left with her, but she didn’t seem particularly inclined to want to keep him.

  “I know whatever you’re here for, he probably done,” she said. “All that crazy Red Boyz shit.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Tom Blessing said from somewhere in the room behind her. “And even if I did, he wouldn’t be taking me anywhere, Mom. He’s not the sheriff anymore.”

  “Just here to talk to Tom, if you don’t mind,” Cork said.

  “He’s the one you got to convince.” She waved away her responsibility. “You two go at it. Me, I’m heading to the casino.” She let the screen door slam shut behind her and maneuvered past Cork with her oxygen cart in tow.

  Thomas Blessing stepped into the light that fell through the doorway into the living room. “I keep telling you,” he called after her, “it’s like taking water from a lake and just pouring it back in.”

  Cork figured he was speaking about the checks each registered tribal member received as a share of the profits from the Chippewa Gran
d Casino, south of Aurora. Fanny took the money then gave it right back at the slot machines.

  “What do you want me to do?” she called as she opened the door of her big white Buick, which was parked next to her son’s black Silverado. “Sit around all day listening to the preachers on television? Least at the casino I can smoke without you giving me a lot of crap for it.”

  She settled her oxygen tank in the passenger seat, kicked the engine over, backed onto the road, and shot toward Aurora.

  Blessing looked at Cork coldly through the screen door. “What do you want?”

  “You heard about Alex and Rayette?”

  “Nothing happens on the rez we don’t know about it right away.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Buck Reinhardt just bought himself a ticket to hell.”

  “You think it was Reinhardt?”

  “What are you doing here? What’s with all the questions?”

  “You have any idea why Alex—”

  “His name was Kakaik.”

  “You know why he wanted to see me?”

  “No.”

  “He asked me to arrange a meeting with Reinhardt.”

  That seemed to surprise him. “What for?”

  “Said he wanted to offer Buck justice.”

  “Looks like Reinhardt decided to deliver his own form of justice first.”

  “You have any idea what Kingbird—sorry, Kakaik—might have been thinking of offering Reinhardt?”

  “You mean besides a bullet between the eyes?”

  “I’m wondering if he was thinking of turning in your cousin, Lonnie Thunder.”

  “No way. He wouldn’t do that. He’d never disrespect one of the Red Boyz that way.”

  “Seems to me Lonnie had already betrayed the Red Boyz. He dealt drugs here in Tamarack County. It’s my understanding none of the Red Boyz is allowed to do that.”

  “Where’d you get your information?”

  “It’s what I heard. I want to talk to Thunder.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve got to find him first, Tom.”