Windigo Island

by William Kent Krueger

  “You up for this, Henry?” Cork said.

  “To the end,” the ancient Mide replied, then added with a broad grin, “Even if that end is my own.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen, Henry.”

  The old man weighed Cork’s words. “You made that promise to me once when you were a boy. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “We were hunting medicine herbs, you and me. A storm came on us suddenly, a very bad storm. The lightning was all around us, and the thunder hurt our ears. You told me not to be afraid. You told me that you would let nothing harm me. Do you remember what happened?”

  “No, Henry.”

  “I found a cave to shelter us both.” The old man wryly cocked one feathery white eyebrow. “In this trouble now, I wonder who will save who.”

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  Duluth, Minnesota, has been called the Emerald City, the Zenith City, the Gem of the Freshwater Sea. It’s the world’s largest inland port, at one time surpassing even New York City in the oceangoing tonnage it handled. Built on hills that rise steeply out of the vast, cold water of Lake Superior, it’s a beautiful city in a beautiful setting, but its history is a harsh lesson in the reality of cultural friction.

  The early inhabitants—the Gros Ventre, Menominee, Fox, and Dakota—were driven out by the Anishinaabeg, who found the area rich in resources, including an abundance of fur-bearing animals. The Anishinaabeg, in turn, were overwhelmed by the flood of whites, who were drawn to the area by all the economic possibilities there—the timber of the forests, the fur of the animals, the fish of the lake, the minerals of the earth. When the canal at Sault Sainte Marie opened the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and railroads opened the way to the Pacific, Duluth’s geographic position and its enormous natural harbor made it an ideal transportation center. Vast fortunes were made, and by the turn of the century, Duluth was home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country. With every new enterprise, there arrived a multicultural work force to supply the labor—French, Scandinavians, Finns, Italians, Poles, Irish, African Americans. And with all this unwieldy mix, there came the inevitable clash of culture. In 1918 a group calling itself Knights of Loyalty hauled Olli Kiukkonen, a Finnish immigrant, from his room in a boardinghouse, tarred and feathered and then lynched him, this as a warning to those who, in the opinion of the Knights, were not American enough in their patriotism. Two years later, three black men accused of raping a white woman were dragged from their jail cells by an angry mob, beaten, and lynched from a lamppost in the center of the downtown.

  Cork O’Connor knew about these things. But death and degradation unremarked upon had been occurring on a regular basis in Duluth from the beginning. In this part of the Emerald City’s tarnished history, Cork and those with him were about to get a thorough education.

  They passed over the Duluth–Superior harbor on the Blatnik Bridge. Spread below them along the harbor shoreline were rows of tall grain elevators and squat regiments of storage tanks and the hulking latticework of the iron ore loaders, and alongside these structures were the long fingers of the docks. Many of the docks lay empty, and Cork wondered if this was normal or simply the way it was in these days of economic uncertainty. They stopped for lunch at Grandma’s, a local landmark eatery. Grandma’s stood beside the shipping canal, which was a man-made passage between Lake Superior and the inner harbor large enough to accommodate the great freighters making port there. They sat under a big umbrella on the deck, where they could see both the Lift Bridge over the canal and the open water of the lake. It was a sunny Thursday afternoon. While they ate their walleye sandwiches and burgers, they watched a stream of small boat traffic traverse the canal.

  Because he’d received no real help in his earlier contact with Duluth PD, Cork had called ahead and made arrangements to see an old friend, a homicide detective retired a couple of years from the city’s police force.

  “I’d prefer to talk to Dan alone,” Cork told the others at lunch. “I don’t want him to feel like there’s a mob coming down on him.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” Jenny asked.

  “Why don’t you see what you can find out about Montcalm?” Cork suggested.

  “Any idea how to do that?”

  “Your smart phone,” English suggested to her.

  “Maybe there’s a harbormaster who would know what ships come and go here, or a port authority,” Cork said.

  Jenny shook her head. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. Let’s try the library. This is their territory. They probably have resources we wouldn’t necessarily find on the Internet. And if they don’t have what we need, I’ll bet they know who does.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” English said.

  Louise looked as if she wanted to say something, but then decided to remain silent.

  Cork asked, “You okay with this, Louise?”

  She shrugged. There was something going on with her, Cork could see, but he decided to let it go for the moment. He checked his watch. “I’m meeting Dan at Fitger’s at two. I’ll give you a call when I’m finished, and we can figure out where to go from there. Okay?”

  They agreed, paid their bill, and went their separate ways, Cork alone in his Explorer, and the others with Daniel English in his crew-cab pickup.

  Fitger’s was another Duluth landmark, one perched on a rise above the lake at the north edge of the downtown business district. A brewery for more than a century, it had long ago been converted to a hotel-retail complex with some pretty good restaurants. Cork found a meter out front and walked into the Brewhouse. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark, then he spotted Dan McGinty watching him from a stool at the bar. McGinty stood as Cork approached, and the men shook hands.

  McGinty was compact and had been powerfully built in his days on the Duluth police force, but since his retirement, a lot of that muscle had gone soft. He was mostly bald. When he smiled, which was often, it was a gesture that involved his whole face, and his cheeks squeezed his eyelids nearly shut. His nickname was Squinty McGinty.

  “Long time no see,” McGinty said as he sat back down.

  “You look good, Squinty. Retirement seems to agree with you,” Cork said.

  “Semiretirement,” McGinty countered.

  “Still working the good causes, huh?”

  McGinty, who was an Eagle Scout, had always been deeply involved in that organization. In addition, he donated a lot of time and energy to a relief organization called Feed My Starving Children. Because he was that kind of man, he was also, Cork had always believed, the kind of cop you could trust.

  McGinty smiled. “The hungry will always be with us. You still playing Philip Marlowe?”

  “When a case interests me.”

  “And you’ve got one now?”

  McGinty already had a beer. The barkeep asked Cork what he wanted. Normally Cork would have asked for Leinenkugel’s, but he was in the Fitger’s Brewhouse, so he ordered a pint of their North Country Pale Ale.

  “Not a case so much as doing a favor for a friend,” Cork said when the barkeep had moved away. “Missing person. And probably murder.”

  McGinty’s eyebrows humped like little silver caterpillars. “Tell me about it.”

  Cork gave him the whole history. McGinty listened with the intensity of a guy used to keeping detailed mental notes. In the middle of the story, Cork’s beer arrived, but he didn’t touch it until he’d finished laying things out.

  “You’re about to open a can of worms, my friend,” McGinty said.

  Cork finally took a long pull on his beer. “How so, Squinty?”

  “A lot of economic and political interest tied up in the boat traffic. Always been that way. Publicly, there’s a periodic outcry over the prostitution that goes along with being a port city. But privately, the policy, more or less, is
to look the other way. The department’ll stage a sting now and then, nab a few johns, but they mostly pick up clueless locals. Generally, they don’t touch the guys coming off the boats.”

  “Coming off the boats? I understood that the women went to the clientele, pretty much bunk to bunk on the boats.”

  “I’ve heard it used to be that way, but I can’t really confirm it. Definitely not that way now. Since nine-eleven, harbor security’s become way too tight. Getting women on and off the boats would be difficult. A lot of the prostitution now is done out of apartments near the water.”

  “How do the boat crews find the women?”

  “They just walk the streets of downtown. Or they find them on Backpage or Craigslist. Or they go to a strip club.”

  “But Duluth PD doesn’t touch them?”

  “That’s probably putting it a little strong. But think about it. These guys, a lot of them, come off salties. They’re foreign citizens.”

  “Salties?”

  “That’s what we call the boats that come all the way up from the Atlantic through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. They’re built different, designed, as I understand it, to take the beating the ocean can give a ship. All the other big boats are lakers, built specially to operate only on the Great Lakes. Those are domestic or Canadian. So imagine the red tape involved in arresting a bunch of sailors from places all over the globe. And imagine the ruckus. So there’s a lot of pressure from above just to look the other way. I mean, prostitution’s the oldest profession, right? Practically part of being human. So where’s the harm?”

  “The harm, Squinty, is that girls get used and knocked around pretty badly and sometimes killed.”

  McGinty shook his head. “You always were a backwoods cop at heart, Cork. The realities of urban life are different. In the grand scheme, prostitution is a fly, something circling around all the real shit you have to deal with as a cop, and you can’t waste a lot of effort trying to get that fly because the honest-to-God truth is that you know it’s never going away.”

  “I won’t argue the big picture with you, Squinty. Right now, I just want to find one girl.”

  “Got a photo?”

  Cork took it from his wallet and slid it across the bar.

  McGinty looked at it. “Jesus, she’s just a kid.”

  “Yeah, Squinty. But probably a prostitute, so who cares, right?”

  “Okay, okay,” McGinty said in a tone of contrition. “Can I keep this?”

  “And do what with it?”

  “I know the guy who heads up the Special Investigations Unit. They deal with vice, among other things. Let me show him, see if he can make an ID. Can I call you back at the number you called me from?”

  “Yeah, that’s my cell.”

  McGinty reached for his wallet.

  “On me,” Cork said.

  The ex-cop nodded. “Tell you what. This crusade of yours pays off, I’ll buy the next round.”

  They shook hands and McGinty left. Cork signaled the bartender for the tab, laid down payment, and walked away.

  Instead of heading directly back to his Explorer, he strolled along the deck behind the big complex, which overlooked Lake Superior. Three great freighters, each longer than two football fields, all of them dark against the blue water, lay anchored outside the harbor. Cork had no idea if they were waiting for permission to enter, or waiting for some dock facility inside the harbor to become free, or simply idling for reasons only sailors would know. He watched a white yacht, large by most standards, glide past the nearest freighter, and the craft was dwarfed by the great monster. Despite what McGinty had told him, he couldn’t help imagining Mariah on an enormous boat like that, a small child in the belly of a huge beast, and his gut fisted in an angry way.

  His cell phone rang, Jenny calling.

  “We came up empty, Dad,” she said. “The librarian suggested we check the Duluth News Tribune. The paper reports all the comings and goings of the freighters every day. And not just here but in all the local commercial ports in the area. We checked issues as far back as the beginning of the shipping season and, like I said, came up with nothing. How’d you do?”

  “Not much better. Why don’t we regroup and figure what next?”

  “Where?”

  “I suppose the library’s as good a place as any. I’ll meet you there in ten.”

  Cork took one last look at the lake. The sun in its afternoon decline was at his back, and there was no wind that he could feel. A high, white haze hung on the horizon. Against it, the surface of Superior looked hard and cold as a sheet of steel. He couldn’t help wondering if the body of a young girl lay somewhere below that unyielding surface, waiting for the spirits of Kitchigami to decide if she would remain there forever.

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  The Duluth Public Library had been built in the shape of a great ore boat, a grand nod to the commerce that had helped establish the Zenith City. Cork found the others waiting in the shade of the enormous portico in front. Vertically down the huge central column that supported the portico roof were painted the spines of a quirky selection of literary offerings, from Charlotte’s Web to The Great Scandinavian Baking Book. Jenny, Meloux, Louise, and English were all gathered in the shade in front of the spine for The Catcher in the Rye.

  It was going on four o’clock, and Cork could see weariness in all their faces. They’d been on the road since well before dawn, and as nearly as he could tell, they were at a dead end. Until he heard from McGinty, he didn’t have a good suggestion what to do next. He considered the possibility of simply waiting until dark, when according to McGinty, the girls came out on the streets near the harbor to sell themselves. If he showed Mariah’s photo around or Raven’s, maybe one of the girls would recognize them. Or maybe it would be better to hit the strip joints, wherever they were, and do the same. He suspected it would prove useless, and he was tired, too, and out of ideas at the moment. Reluctantly, he told the others so.

  “If we offered the girls money for information, would that make a difference?” English asked.

  Cork said, “There’s no guarantee what they told us would be the truth. The other problem is that word’ll get around, and if Mariah is being trafficked, whoever is handling her will make sure she disappears.”

  “Shelters?” Jenny suggested.

  “Maybe,” Cork said, but he had trouble being hopeful there, too.

  “Corcoran O’Connor,” Meloux said. “I think you should listen to her.” The old man nodded toward Louise Arceneaux, who stood leaning her bulk wearily against the great painted spine of J. D. Salinger’s classic story of a lost youth.

  “Is there something you want to say, Louise?” Cork asked.

  The woman’s face, normally the color of wet sand, was red from all the exertion of the day, the struggle to move her large body on one leg and a wooden peg. But looking at Meloux, she seemed to gather strength. “Yes.” She pushed herself from the column. “But I don’t know if it will help.”

  “Go ahead, Louise,” Jenny urged her gently.

  “Forget about your cops, Cork,” Louise told him bluntly. “All I ever got from them was trouble. And if you just go putting questions to the girls on the street, you’re going to get nowhere. Don’t take this wrong, but you look and sound and smell like a cop.” She eyed English. “You both do.”

  “Okay,” Cork said. “So what do we do?”

  Louise said, “I’ve been thinking for a while now about something else. See, there used to be an organization here when I worked the boats. It was called Nishiime House. The people there helped women like me. Well, those who wanted help back then. I wasn’t one of them, but some of the other girls went there. I heard they were very understanding and kept everything confidential and kept the cops out of it. Those people might have an idea how we can find Mariah. If they’re still around.”

 
“Let’s find out.” Jenny pulled out her iPhone and spent a couple of minutes accessing the Internet. “They’re still here. On Fourth Street, at the edge of downtown.”

  Louise nodded and said, “Then we should go.”

  She turned toward English’s pickup, which was parked at a meter along the curb. Using a single crutch and with Jenny at her side, she made her way there.

  Cork shrugged and said to English and Meloux, “I’m in. Let’s go.”

  They drove a few blocks from the library and parked in front of an old brownstone on a block of old brick and brownstone buildings. A small sign on a wrought-iron stand set in the front yard bore the name Nishiime House. Nishiime, in Ojibwemowin, meant “little sister.” Below that was a single word: zahgidiwin. It meant “love.”

  They entered through a heavy wooden door. Inside was a large room whose scuffed wooden floor was overlaid with a braided area rug. There were armchairs, a love seat, a table and a lamp, all looking like thrift store purchases. The windows were leaded glass, recalling a day when the building might have been the residence of an upper-class business family, before the Iron Range mines closed and the flow of ore stopped and the number of ships making port in Duluth dwindled to a fraction of what it had once been. A hallway angled to the right, and just beyond that was a stairway. A woman sat at a reception desk, typing into a computer. She was thin and young and had short hair the color of cotton candy. She looked up and smiled when Louise and Jenny came in. Her eyes flicked down to the carved wooden peg below Louise’s right knee, but her expression didn’t change. This was clearly a young woman who had seen much. But her smile faded when she caught sight of the men entering behind them.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  Cork and English hung back, but Meloux went forward and stood with the others. He said to Louise, “Go on, Niece.”

  Louise said, “I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for my daughter.”