Purgatory Ridge

by William Kent Krueger

  “I’ll get the stuff.” He looked at Jo O’Connor. “You want a drink before I go?”

  “No, thanks.”

  When LePere returned, Scott Fitzgerald was awake. “I’m going to cut your hands free so you can give him the shot,” LePere said to the boy’s mother. He severed the tape and pulled it off her wrists, then put the packaged syringe and the medicine into her hands. He stood back and watched. The boy took the shot without flinching. LePere reached out for the syringe so he could dispose of it.

  As she put it in his hands, the Fitzgerald woman said, “If ten million could have saved Edward, I’d have given it.”

  LePere was caught by surprise and it took him a moment to place the reference. “Your first husband, right? The lake got him. I read your book. He sounded like a stand-up guy.”

  LePere put the syringe down a small slot in a metal box on the wall that had been a repository for old razor blades in the days when his father sometimes used the basin in the fish house to shave. “Do you remember him?” he asked her son.

  “Not really,” the boy said.

  “Maybe you’re lucky. It hurts a lot if you do.”

  “You move on with your life, Mr. LePere,” the Fitzgerald woman said.

  “Yes.” He tapped the metal box to make sure the syringe had dropped. “But you never forget, do you?” He turned and looked down at her. “I watched you a long time on the cove. You’re different from the person I thought I saw.”

  “Different how?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I was way off base.” He picked up the roll of duct tape. “I need to bind your hands again.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “It won’t be much longer. I’m sorry.” He bound her, then asked her son, “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about a banana?”

  “Okay.”

  He cut the boy free and waited while he ate. “What about your son?” he asked the O’Connor woman.

  “Mostly, he needs to sleep.”

  He tossed the banana peel outside and taped the boy’s wrists again. “I’m tired. I need some sleep, too. I’ll check back in a while. The windows are open and the breeze is up. You should stay cool.”

  LePere locked the fish house and drifted down to the rocks that separated the cove from the lake. He sat down, trying to take it all in, trying to memorize every detail. In another day, he would be looking at bare walls and iron bars, and he wanted to remember home. He gazed up at the great ancient lava flow called Purgatory Ridge, the dark, striated cliffs that were the backdrop for his best memories. He closed his eyes, and the silver-blue circle of water that was the cove was there, bright in his mind, and hard beside it, the little house. The popple and aspen along the shoreline were green now, but he could remember them aflame in fall, their autumn leaves scattered across the water like shavings of gold. Last, he turned and looked at the lake that had been there for a thousand lifetimes before his and would be there a thousand lifetimes after. He’d often hated the lake, blamed it for what had been taken from him. But the truth, he knew, was that the lake was simply what it was, vast and indifferent. It asked nothing and yielded to no one, and if you journeyed on its back, you accepted the risk. In its way, it mirrored life exactly.

  Facing the prospect of prison, John LePere felt free and alive for the first time in more than a dozen years.

  The sound of a powerful inboard motor woke him. He lay on his bed, listening as the thrum grew louder and entered the cove. He jumped from his bed, went to the window, and watched as Wesley Bridger cut the engine and guided a sleek motor launch up to the dock. LePere put on his shoes and headed down to the water.

  Bridger tossed him a line. “Tie her up.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Borrowed her. Just for tonight. They’ll never miss her, believe me.”

  “What for?”

  Bridger jumped from the boat. He held his ski mask in one hand and a heavy-looking metal flashlight in the other. As soon as his feet were squarely on the dock, he slipped the mask over his head. “Let’s go up and talk to our guests.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll give ‘em the good news.” He put his arm around LePere’s shoulders in the way of comrades. “Everything’s set for the exchange. Don’t you think they’ll want to know? Also, I owe them an apology, Chief. I was pretty hard on them.”

  It was early evening. LePere realized he’d slept much longer than he’d expected. The air felt good, cooler. Something in the wind had changed.

  At the fish house, as LePere undid the lock, Bridger asked, “Chief, I just want to check. Are you sure about all this? I mean, taking the whole responsibility on your shoulders while I’m free as a bird with a two-million-dollar nest?”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been as certain of anything, Wes.”

  LePere opened the door and took a step inside. He didn’t even feel the blow to the back of his head. He simply dropped into darkness.

  38

  THE GIRLS LOOKED BATTERED, tired beyond weeping, and older by far than their years. And Rose, for all her courage and faith, looked ready to yield to despair.

  “When you give them the money, they’ll give Mom and Stevie back, right?” Jenny pressed him.

  Cork chewed on a ham-and-cheese sandwich that Rose had put together for him. He barely tasted the food, and he ate only because he knew he had to keep his own strength up. “Yes, Jen,” he said. “I believe they will.” He glanced at Deputy Marsha Dross, who leaned against the wall near the kitchen doorway. She was a slender woman of medium height, had short brown hair, and was as smart as any law enforcement officer Cork had ever known. He saw her eyes shift away because she knew the true uncertainty of the situation. He saw, too, how tired she was. Like all the law officers involved, she’d put in long hours with little sleep. She didn’t do it because it was her job, Cork knew. She did it because it was the right thing to do and because it might help. Cork was truly grateful.

  “How will you give them the money?” Annie asked. She sat at the kitchen table with her father and Jenny. Rose stood at the kitchen sink, washing a few dishes. Wet silverware in the dish drainer caught the rays of the early evening sun and scattered flames of reflected light across the walls and ceiling.

  “I don’t know, Annie. We’ll have to wait for the call this evening. At nine-thirty.”

  “Can’t they, like, trace the phone call and catch him?” Jenny asked.

  “They’ve tried. Whoever it is, he’s smart.”

  “But he’ll give them back, right?”

  “I told you, Jen. I believe he will.” Cork pulled himself back from the anger that her persistent question and his persistent lie drove him toward. “We have every reason to believe he’ll do just what he’s promised.”

  “The FBI deals with these situations all the time,” Rose offered. “They have things well in hand, I’m sure.”

  The girls looked to their father for confirmation. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and stood up. “I need to get back out to Grace Cove.”

  “The coffee’s almost ready.” There was a subtle plea in Rose’s voice. Don’t leave, she seemed to say. Cork understood how heavy was the weight she carried, holding up the hopes of the girls while she suspected the true gravity of things, isolated in the house on Gooseberry Lane, besieged by reporters, with nothing but her faith to sustain her.

  “I have to go, Rose,” he told her. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  She gave him a silent nod.

  Cork hugged and kissed his daughters.

  “When we see you again, you’ll have Mom and Stevie, right?” Jenny asked.

  “We’ll be a family again,” he promised.

  Cork headed out of Aurora and around the southern end of Iron Lake. There had been a breeze earlier, a hot one. Now the air was still and sitting heavy on the North Country. Something was ready to break. Cork felt it like an ache in his bones.

  He’d tried all afternoon t
o put everything together in a different way, hoping to see something he hadn’t seen before. With Hell Hanover out of the picture, and with Joan of Arc and Isaiah Broom in jail, the most obvious possibility lay in Brett Hamilton, the son of Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. As far as Cork knew, he was still at large. If what Meloux had intimated was true, if the kid really was Eco-Warrior, then he’d killed once already. What more did he have to lose in kidnapping?

  Yet the feel was all wrong. Meloux believed a man who’d kidnap women and children had to have a black heart and the balls of a warrior. The kid had balls. Cork had seen that in the way he’d faced Erskine Ellroy in the parking lot at Sam’s Place, ready to take a beating for his beliefs. But the same incident seemed to demonstrate both a selflessness of spirit and a concern for the sanctity of life that was incompatible with a heart black enough to put women and children in jeopardy.

  He couldn’t say why exactly, but Cork’s thinking kept coming back to John LePere. Part of it was that he wasn’t convinced LePere was the drunk he’d appeared to be, and part of it was that LePere’s land on Grace Cove would have been the perfect area from which to observe Lindstrom’s home in planning an abduction. The problem was that LePere, like the Hamilton kid, seemed a different kind of man than would be involved in kidnapping. In his days as sheriff, Cork had prided himself on knowing the people of Tamarack County. He believed he’d learned to take the measure of a man pretty accurately. LePere had been a heavy drinker once. Sometimes when he was drunk he argued. Once in a while, he fought. But it was the booze that did that, and probably the disappointment life had handed him. He was no saint, but neither was he a devil who’d steal a man’s wife and child for money. Or so he’d seemed to Cork.

  Still, Cork felt strongly that LePere knew more than he was telling, and if so, two obvious questions presented themselves: What did LePere know, and why was he silent?

  Gil Singer was the deputy now posted at the turnoff to Grace Cove. Cork pulled over and called out to him, “Still a zoo at Lindstrom’s?”

  “Only the hearty remain, Cork. Heat drove the rest of them back to their hotel rooms. You doing okay?”

  “Holding my own, Gil. Have you seen John LePere lately?”

  “Cy told me LePere took off earlier, complaining cops were all over his place like flies on shit. Haven’t seen him since.”

  Cork started to pull away, but Singer hailed him down.

  “By the way, the sheriff had me out on the rez this morning checking out that break-in at the clinic. All that was missing was some insulin and syringes.”

  “A diabetic burglar?”

  “Strange world, Cork.”

  “Thanks, Gil.”

  He parked on LePere’s property, but instead of hiking directly to Lindstrom’s, he walked to LePere’s cabin. The man’s pickup was gone. The place looked deserted. Cork headed around in back and to an outbuilding that was just large enough to hold LePere’s truck. The door was locked. Cork peered through a dusty window. Hand tools—a shovel, a pick, a long-handled ax, a couple of kinds of rakes—hung on the walls. A stack of old tires stood in a corner. Mostly, the shed was empty. He checked the dock, stepped down into a rowboat tied there, bent, and looked for anything that might have been left by someone taken against their will. The boat appeared clean.

  “O’Connor.”

  Cork turned, fast enough that he almost lost his balance and fell into the lake. Agent David Earl stood on the dock looking down at him.

  “I already checked the boat,” Earl said. “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I imagine.” Earl reached out a hand and helped Cork back onto the dock. “I came out after I heard the news.”

  “What news?”

  “You don’t know?” Earl pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and tapped out a cigarette. He started to offer the pack to Cork, but drew it back. “That’s right. You gave them up.” Earl lit the cigarette with a Bic lighter and blew smoke over the dock. “Brett Hamilton’s dead.”

  The news jolted Cork. “How?”

  “It seems that after he eluded the FBI, he made a beeline back to the tent city on the reservation, recruited a dozen other activists, and they headed out to stop the fire burning Our Grandfathers. They got there before any firefighters and didn’t know what the hell they were doing. One of them got himself trapped under a falling tree full of fire. Hamilton put himself in danger cutting the guy free. The guy got out. Hamilton didn’t.” He pursed his lips and sent out a stream of smoke. “Just when you think you’ve got someone pegged.”

  Cork thought about Joan Hamilton, Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. She was a hard woman, shaped even in her crippled walk by her choice of wars. But she was still a mother, a parent who’d tried to sacrifice herself for her son, her only child who was dead now. Cork looked up at the sky, and he let a moment of deep sorrow pierce the armor of his own concerns.

  “How does that bring you here?” he finally asked Earl.

  “I’ve been thinking—who’s left? I stand in Lindstrom’s big log house and all there is to see is this place. Now, that doesn’t mean John LePere has any connection with the abduction, but it’s odd that he saw nothing. If not that night, then before. He strikes me as a man extremely protective of his privacy. I’m guessing he’d know if someone were out here who shouldn’t have been.”

  “I talked with him. He denied it.”

  “He’s an alcoholic. Denial is everything.”

  “Alcoholic?” Cork said. “Follow me.” He led Earl to the garbage can near the shed, lifted the lid, and released a cloud of black flies. “What do you see?”

  “Besides garbage?”

  “Booze doesn’t flow from the tap in the kitchen sink. Where are the bottles?”

  “Why pretend to be drunk?”

  “Good cover, especially if people are predisposed to believing it. I’ve known John LePere a long time. Not especially well, but enough to wonder how he’d get himself mixed up in something like this.”

  “Two million dollars is a lot of incentive.”

  “At great risk. That’s the thing. Whoever did this is risking everything. John LePere’s got a good job at the casino. And a nice place here, for a man who likes to live alone. He has a place on the north shore, too. Kidnapping just doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “Maybe because we don’t have all the pieces.” Earl dropped his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. He glanced at the cabin. “I can’t go in there. I can’t even be aware of someone going in there.”

  “Maybe it’s time you left,” Cork suggested.

  “I think I’ve seen everything here I want to see.”

  After Earl had gone, Cork tried the back door of the cabin. As he expected, it was locked. He returned to his Bronco and took a heavy-handled screwdriver and a pair of cotton gloves from the tool kit he kept in back. He put the gloves on and used the handle of the screwdriver to break a pane in the back-door window. It was simple, then, to reach in and undo the lock on the door handle.

  LePere’s place surprised him. In his experience, bachelors were generally sloppy housekeepers, especially if they were heavy drinkers. LePere kept a clean home. Cork wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for. Whatever it was, the tidy kitchen—where not even a crumb lay on the counter—seemed unpromising. He stepped into the main room. It was furnished sparely, in the way of a man who seldom had to accommodate visitors. An easy chair with a standing lamp for reading, a small dining table with two chairs, a Franklin stove, a four-shelf bookcase—full. A tasteful, braided area rug in shades of brown covered the old floorboards in front of the stove. On the walls, LePere had hung several framed photographs, all black and white. Cork checked the only bedroom, went through LePere’s small closet and chest of drawers. In the bathroom, he looked inside a little Hoover portable washer. Back in the living room, he stood a while, hoping to be struck by something that felt out of place, but nothing hit him. He crossed to the nearest photograph on the
wall. It was of a man and boy standing in front of a cabin under construction. Written in white in the lower right-hand corner were the words SYLVAN COVE, 1971. The boy looked to Cork to be a very young John LePere. He assumed the man, who had his arm proudly around the boy’s shoulders, was LePere’s father.

  Cork moved to the next mounted photograph. A teenage John LePere stood on a dock alongside a boy a few years younger. Behind them lay a curve of silver-gray water backed by a huge ridge of solid, dark rock. The boys were smiling broadly. In the corner, in white, had been written PURGATORY COVE, 1979.

  The photograph that hung nearest the stove showed John LePere in a peacoat and wearing a watch cap. He stood in a crow’s nest, his hand shielding his eyes, as if he were intent on scanning the horizon. On the mast below him was a gigantic letter F illuminated by huge electric bulbs. In the corner of the photograph, the penned explanation read “When the radar fails. Teasdale, 1985.” A grin played across LePere’s face, and it was clear he was clowning for the camera. Cork knew LePere’s tragic history—sole survivor of the wreck that took the lives of the rest of the crew on the Teasdale. He tried to place the year, and believed it probably wasn’t long after the picture had been taken. He considered for a moment what the big lighted F on the mast below LePere might be all about, but he quickly let go of his wondering because it had nothing to do with the reason he was in the cabin.

  He went over everything once more, and once more he came up empty-handed. He left the cabin by the same door he’d entered. Outside, the sun was resting on the tops of the trees along the western shore of the cove. Cork checked his watch. Eight-thirty. In another hour, the kidnappers would call, and what now seemed like the only hope for saving Jo and Stevie and Grace and Scott would present itself.

  39

  JOHN LEPERE CAME OUT of a dream of his father holding him tightly. His father’s clothes smelled of fish, a smell LePere loved. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was inside the old fish house and he was bound with rope. The air was hot and close and filled with a fish odor that ghosted up from every board.