Vermilion Drift

by William Kent Krueger

  They wanted to keep him overnight for observation; he told them no, he had things to do. They argued, but in the end sent him home with lots of Tylenol and a printed sheet of symptoms that might indicate more serious developments later. He stripped his clothes off and showered the dirt from his body, fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and, against medical advice, popped the cap on a cold bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer.

  He sat on the patio, where he tossed a tennis ball for Trixie to chase, nibbled on his sandwich, drank his beer, and tried to figure who’d blindsided him.

  When Jo was alive, he’d often consulted with her, tossed questions and speculations her way to get her response. She’d had a fine mind and was somehow able to think logically without losing sight of the human element and its unpredictability and to remember always the need for compassion in any of Cork’s considerations. Left to himself, Cork tended to be easily influenced by his prejudices and selfish concerns, and he wasn’t certain he could trust any of his own conclusions.

  But there was no other option, so he thought alone through the things that troubled him.

  Someone had been there ahead of him. The boot tracks inside the smaller foundation told him that. How long before his own arrival, he couldn’t say, but it was entirely possible that, whoever it was, his coming had surprised them, and they’d slipped into the trees and simply waited for their chance to bushwhack him. He’d seen no other vehicles on Waagikomaan. Did that mean they’d hiked in, or they’d parked somewhere out of sight? And what were they after? Cork hadn’t known exactly what he’d find, but his assailant had brought a rake and so must have had a pretty good idea of what was there. Bones and teeth. They could have been from additional victims of Broom’s savagery, or they could have been the remains of Broom himself. Because he hadn’t learned of anyone else who’d gone missing over forty years earlier except those discovered in the Vermilion Drift, and because the burning of the cabin coincided with the disappearance of Indigo Broom, Cork was inclined to think they belonged to the man Millie Joseph had darkly referred to as “Mr. Windigo.”

  Who would have known about Broom’s death?

  Sam Winter Moon must have known because the story he’d spread about Broom leaving the rez to be with relatives somewhere else had clearly been a lie.

  Did Cork’s mother know? His father? Henry Meloux? And if they knew, what had been their part in getting rid of Broom?

  The night before, after the nightmare of his father dying, he’d lain awake thinking about what Meloux had said, that Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had behaved like Windigos, cannibalizing their victims. Which was probably the reason for the cuts Agent Upchurch had found on the bones from the Vermilion Drift. But something that gruesome had to be well hidden, carried out in great secrecy, and where could that have been? Which had got Cork to wondering about where Indigo Broom had lived. When Millie Joseph told him it was a cursed place, he’d been almost certain he had the answer he was seeking. And when he’d found the manacles, he knew absolutely it was a place of horrific incident.

  Cork sipped his beer and watched Trixie romping in the afternoon sun, and he puzzled over Broom and Monique Cavanaugh, who came from two very different worlds but in the darkness of their souls were united. How did they connect? How did evil find evil?

  The Internet might have been a way, but 1964 was decades too early. A personal ad in the Aurora Sentinel? Cork could just imagine: MWF with bloodlust seeks like companion. Finally Cork decided there might have been another way, an age-old way of connecting.

  He went inside and looked up a telephone number in his address book, then dialed.

  He ordered Leinie’s for them both, and when the beers came, he slid one of the frosted mugs over to Cy Borkman.

  “Thanks, Cork. Been too long since we tipped brews together.” Borkman tapped Cork’s mug, then took a long draw from his own and wiped foam from his upper lip. “How’s the investigation going?”

  “Plodding along,” Cork said.

  “Yeah, after you talked to me, Simon Rutledge looked me up, covered the same ground about the priest. You guys really ought to coordinate better.”

  “We’re trying, Cy. Which is one reason I called.”

  “I figured.” Borkman smiled. “What do you need?”

  They sat at the bar of the Four Seasons with a view of the marina through a long bank of windows off to their right. When Cork was a kid, the Four Seasons hadn’t been there and the marina had been a simple affair with three short docks where maybe a dozen boats were tied up at any given time. Now it was a forest of masts with sailboats too numerous to count, a summer port to ostentatious powerboats and small yachts that often sat idle in the water for weeks on end, playthings for the rich who looked on Aurora as a place of diversion and looked with thinly veiled disdain on those who called the town home.

  Cork said, “Back in your early days with the department, was there a bar somewhere that had a particularly unsavory reputation? Someplace that catered to, I don’t know, a clientele like the Hells Angels maybe? The kind of place prone to trouble but the owner maybe preferred to handle it on his own.”

  “Here in Aurora?”

  “Probably not. Maybe not even in Tamarack County, but close enough that someone from Aurora could patronize it if they wanted to.”

  “Oh, sure. Used to be a place like that in Yellow Lake. Jacque’s. Christ, there was a dive. Story was that the guy who built it was descended from one of the Voyageurs and his ancestor’s name was Jacque something or other. Pretty quiet in the winter, but come summer that place really jumped. Full of loggers and miners, big guys who could get pretty mean when they were drinking. A magnet for lowlifes, too, troublemakers of every kind. Bikers. Indians. Prostitutes. The joint had a little postage stamp of a stage and a strip show. Guy who owned it last, let’s see, his name was Fredricks or Fredrickson, something like that, he used to keep a loaded Mossberg behind the bar. Discharged that bad boy on a number of occasions, never at anyone, just to, you know, get everybody’s attention. That was when Hal Sluicer was chief of police in Yellow Lake. He never seemed to take much notice of what went on down at Jacque’s. Turned out Fredrickson, or whatever his name was, was paying Sluicer off. Eventually Sluicer got his ass fired. Yellow Lake went for a spell without a regular police presence and contracted with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement during that time.”

  “You ever get a call down there?”

  “Oh, yeah. That place kept us plenty busy.”

  “Ever run into an Indian there name of Indigo Broom?”

  “Broom? From the rez? Sure, Broom was right at home.”

  “How about Monique Cavanaugh?”

  Borkman seemed surprised. “What would a woman like her be doing in a place like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That lady had class. No way she’d be caught dead in a joint like that.”

  “Maybe if she wore a wig and called herself something else?”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know. Forget it.”

  “Naw, you asked. Why?”

  “The truth is, Cy, that I’m thinking there was some connection between Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom. But they moved in such different circles, I can’t figure out how they would have stumbled onto each other. I thought a place like Jacque’s might have provided the opportunity.”

  “A woman like her with a guy like Broom? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t. Forget I said anything.”

  Borkman sat quietly for some time sipping his beer. Cork watched a sailboat back from its slip, come around, and head out into the lake under the power of its engine. When it cleared the marina, a sail went up, an explosion of white against the blue of the sky, and the vessel tilted in the grip of the wind and glided east across the water.

  “Jesus,” Borkman said. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Cork turned on his stool. “What?”

  Borkma
n looked at him, and his eyes were big circles of wonderment.

  “What is it, Cy?”

  Borkman didn’t answer immediately. Cork could tell he was working through something in his head.

  “Your father was a good man,” Borkman finally said, but so softly that Cork had to lean to him. “But he wasn’t a perfect man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Christ, I shouldn’t be telling you this, you of all people.”

  “Don’t crap out on me now, Cy.”

  “It was decades ago, so I suppose …” Borkman gripped his beer with both hands, as if the mug was all that anchored him. “Look, your father was seeing another woman.”

  “What?”

  Borkman said, “It wasn’t that he didn’t love your mother. It’s just that sometimes a man, well, you understand.”

  “No, Cy, I don’t. Enlighten me.”

  “Look, the Vanishings had him all twisted up. He was going crazy. And frankly, your mother was riding him hard, because it looked like her people were the ones being targeted. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t particularly eager to go home at night. And, hell, you were being a little shit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were a teenager, and, hell, teenagers are always difficult. And because the investigation took your dad away a lot those days, I suppose you were the one helping your mother through what she was dealing with and saw mostly her side of things. Anyway, you did nothing but give him grief and push him away, and I got the sense your mother was doing the same. He ended up getting pushed into the arms of a woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “I didn’t know who it was, but he met her at Jacque’s. And it wasn’t about love, Cork, I can tell you that.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Look, it happened like this. We got a disturbance call. Your father and me, we both responded, arrived in our cruisers about the same time. A couple of guys in the parking lot were beating the hell out of each other over a woman. A skanky looking thing, a peroxide blonde in a skirt that barely covered her ass. We broke up the fight. Didn’t book anybody, but the woman claimed she was afraid, so your father offered to give her a ride. He was gone a long time, longer than necessary, and when he came back into the department, there was something different about him. The kind of different easy to spot. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. None of my business, so I didn’t push him. We were in the middle of the investigation of the Vanishings, so he was out a lot anyway, but after that, sometimes when he was gone, I figured it had nothing to do with the job.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “A feeling. I knew your old man pretty well. Anyway, after the Cavanaugh woman disappeared, I didn’t see any more of that behavior from him.”

  “And you’re saying what?”

  “You were the one who said the Cavanaugh woman could’ve worn a wig and called herself something else. It’s pretty coincidental that after Monique Cavanaugh disappeared, your old man settled back down. And you know as well as I do that coincidence is never coincidence.”

  Cork looked outside at the lake and tried to think clearly through a spin of unpleasant images.

  Borkman said, “You asked about Monique Cavanaugh and Indigo Broom, so you must know something about her I don’t. Was she the kind of woman who could’ve got her jollies disguising herself and slumming it at Jacque’s? And if she was, was she the kind of woman who’d make your old man the kind of offer he couldn’t refuse?”

  Before Cork could answer, his cell phone rang. Sheriff Dross.

  “Cork, I wanted to let you know. That bloody fingerprint we found in Lauren Cavanaugh’s boathouse? We finally got a match.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Hattie Stillday. We just brought her in.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Sheriff Marsha Dross looked tired but relieved. She wore her khaki uniform, something she usually did only when she had to face the media and wanted to be certain that the impact of her authority came through in every way possible. Agent Simon Rutledge sat in a chair in a corner of the office. He wore a tan sport coat, white shirt, and yellow tie. The knot on his tie was pulled down a comfortable few inches, and the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned. He was working a Rubik’s Cube and seemed to be paying very little attention to the conversation between Cork and the sheriff.

  “When we showed up at her home to interview her, she took one look at us and told us everything,” Dross said. “We brought her back to the department. She refused an attorney and then repeated everything on videotape for us. She seemed happy to get it off her chest.”

  “You believe her confession?” Cork sat on the far side of the sheriff’s desk, trying not to pay too much attention to the pounding in his head, which, despite the Tylenol, threatened to crack his skull wide open.

  “The evidence is all there,” Dross said. “In the back of her pickup we found a canvas ground cloth with bloodstains on it. She claims she wrapped Cavanaugh’s body in it. Simon’s people are taking it down to Bemidji to analyze the stains. And she certainly knows things about the murder that we haven’t made public.”

  “Like what?”

  “That Cavanaugh was killed with a thirty-eight.”

  “Does she have the weapon?”

  “She claims she threw it into the lake.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere along the eastern shoreline, near the rez. She doesn’t remember exactly where.”

  “What about the details of the shooting itself? Lauren Cavanaugh was shot twice, right? The graze and the fatal wound. What did Hattie have to say about that?”

  “She was unclear about the number of shots she fired.”

  “Unclear?”

  “She said she fired once. I didn’t press the issue. But she told us other things only the killer would know.”

  “Like what?”

  “She claimed to know precisely the location of Lauren Cavanaugh’s car.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Sunk in a bog half a mile from the entrance you and Haddad found to the Vermilion Drift. Ed Larson and his crew are out there right now checking on it.”

  “What was her motive for the killing?”

  “She argued with Lauren Cavanaugh over payment for some photographs. She didn’t mean to kill her, just to threaten her. Things went south. An accident.”

  “What was the deal with the photos?”

  “Cavanaugh bought them but kept sidestepping the issue of payment. Finally Stillday demanded they be paid for or be returned. Cavanaugh flat-out refused, so Stillday confronted her in the boathouse with the gun. Bang.”

  A diseased place, Cork thought. Meloux had been right.

  Dross glanced at Rutledge, intent on his Rubik’s Cube, then said, “It makes sense, Cork. People get crazy when money’s involved.”

  “And she put the body with the others already in the mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she know about the Vermilion Drift?”

  “On that subject, she’s saying nothing.”

  “For now,” Rutledge said without looking up.

  Cork thought that before too long Hattie Stillday would be “Simonized.”

  “Did she say where she got the murder weapon?”

  “Claims she’s had it for years. Came down to her from some dead relative on the reservation.”

  “Does she know the thirty-eight was also the weapon that killed Monique Cavanaugh?”

  “She didn’t offer any information that would indicate she did. Like I said, she wasn’t inclined to talk about the Vanishings.”

  “What about the threatening notes Max Cavanaugh and the others have received?”

  “She says she doesn’t know anything about those. And she finally refused to answer any more questions without an attorney.”

  “Has she retained one?”

  “She called Oliver Bledsoe’s office.”

  Bledsoe ran the Office of Legal Affairs for the Iron Lake Ojibwe. />
  “The counselor was down in Duluth for a hearing, but he’s on his way back,” Dross continued. “Should be here in an hour or so.”

  “Did she say when the killing took place?”

  “A week ago Sunday.”

  “That’s right in keeping with the M.E.’s assessment,” Cork agreed. “Did she give you a time?”

  “Apparently there was some kind of meeting at the center that night. Hattie says she waited outside until it was over and Lauren Cavanaugh went to the boathouse, where she confronted and shot her.”

  “Mind if I talk to Hattie?”

  “I guess not. Provided she’s willing. Okay with you, Simon?”

  “Sure,” Rutledge said in a distracted way.

  “I’ll have her brought to the interview room,” Dross offered.

  “Thanks.”

  Rutledge held up the Rubik’s Cube, solved. “I hear you’ve got yourself quite a headache, Cork.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around. What happened?”

  “My best guess is that someone on the rez isn’t particularly happy with my investigation.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Still working that one out, Simon.”

  “And you’ll be sure to let us know when you do?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Rutledge gave Cork a Mona Lisa smile and started undoing the puzzle he’d just solved.

  Hattie Stillday sat with her old hands folded on the tabletop in the interview room.

  “This is serious, Hattie,” Cork said from across the table.

  “I know that, Corkie.”

  “Have you ever been in jail before?”

  “Hell, yes. In Youngstown, Ohio, back in ’fifty-two when I was shooting photos of the steelworkers’ strike. And again in Pittsburgh a few days later. Now that was a fine time in labor history. And two years ago during the vigil at Fort Benning. I’ve always been rather proud of my incarcerations.”

  “That’s good, Hattie, because if your confession stands up, you’ll very likely finish your life in prison.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill that woman, Corkie.”

  “But kill her you did.”

  “Intent matters,” she said, as if she knew the law. “And what do you mean if my confession stands up?”