The William Kent Krueger Collection 2

by William Kent Krueger

  Charlie, who was standing beside Ren, said, “Most of the time he’s pretty lame. But once in a while he gets it right.”

  Dina kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Oh Jesus. Now he’s never going to wash his face.” Charlie laughed and playfully punched Ren’s arm.

  Cork signaled Hodder away from the others and spoke to him quietly. “Ned, I’m worried about someone else showing up before I’ve taken care of Jacoby. Also, this place will be crawling with reporters by tomorrow.”

  “Until I get the word from you that things are squared, I’m not leaving here,” Hodder replied. “I may not carry a handgun, but I’m good with a rifle, believe me. And I’ve got a part-time deputy constable I’ll call in to help. We’ll keep things covered, and I’ll give Jewell a hand dealing with reporters.”

  “Thanks.”

  Hodder offered him an easy smile. “I’m not doing this for your peace of mind.”

  “That makes it even better.” They shook hands.

  Cork spent a few final moments in the porch light with Jewell and Ren. Their three shadows stretched away and merged into one form just this side of the dark.

  “You have a long way to go,” she said, and hugged him. “I’ll be praying.”

  Cork turned to Ren and laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

  “You, too.”

  Cork got into the Pathfinder. Dina drove down the bumpy lane and turned onto the main road. The moon was up, the sleepless eye of night. As they crossed the bridge over the Copper River, Cork stared at the water, a long sweep of silver that ran to the great lake. The river had carried the body of the dead girl far, carried it right under the noses of Ren and his friends. An accident? There was spirit in all things, Cork believed, knowledge in every molecule of creation. Nothing ever went truly unnoticed, from the fall of a single leaf to the death of a child.

  “Long night ahead,” Dina observed.

  “God willing, we’ll find daylight at the end,” Cork replied.

  He settled back and closed his eyes to rest and to plan.

  50

  The call came when they were south of Green Bay, in the dead of night. It was Captain Ed Larson calling from Aurora, Minnesota. Dina gave the phone to Cork. Larson told him that Gabriella Jacoby, Lou Jacoby’s daughter-in-law, had been picked up by the Winnetka police and questioned about the death of her husband. They had a lot on her and she’d rolled over and given them her brother, Tony Salguero. She claimed he planned the whole thing and that he was the one who killed Jacoby’s other son, Ben. The Winnetka police were looking for Salguero. He’d disappeared.

  “Anybody tell Lou Jacoby this?”

  “He knows.”

  “Thanks, Ed.”

  Cork ended the call.

  “So,” Dina said, “that’s it?” She looked straight ahead, eyeing the highway, black and empty in the headlights. Nothing in her voice gave away what she might be thinking.

  “No, that’s not it.” Cork tossed the cell phone into the Pathfinder’s glove box. “I want to see Lou Jacoby. I want to get right up in his face.”

  Dina shot him a look that might have been approval. “Whatever you say.”

  A little before seven A.M., they stopped a hundred yards south of Jacoby’s estate on the shoreline in the exclusive community of Lake Forest. The predawn sky above Lake Michigan was streaked with veins of angry red. They got out and began to walk. The air was cool and still and smelled of autumn and the lake. Their shoes crunched on the loose gravel at the edge of the road with a sound like someone chewing ice. They passed through the front gate onto the circular drive. Jacoby’s house looked like an Italian villa. The windows were dark.

  “Motion sensors?” Cork asked quietly.

  Dina shook her head. “Not outside. Security system is all internal.”

  She led the way to the rear corner, where Cork could see the back lawn, big as a polo field, stretching down to a tall hedge. Beyond the hedge lay Lake Michigan reflecting the red dawn. Dina stopped at a door on the side of the house and took from her jacket the pouch with her picklocks.

  “Will you trip the alarm?” Cork asked.

  “Relax. I designed the system for him.”

  They were inside quickly, staring at a large kitchen hung with enough pots and pans and shiny cooking utensils that it could have served a fine restaurant. Dina tapped a code into the alarm box beside the door. She signaled for Cork to follow her.

  They crept down a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and up a narrow set of stairs at the far end of the house, and came out onto a long corridor with doors opening off either side. Dina moved to the first door on the left. She reached down and carefully turned the knob. The door slid open silently. She stepped in.

  They found themselves in an anteroom that opened onto an enormous bedroom. The place smelled heavily of cigar smoke. The drapes in the anteroom were drawn against the dawn, but the bedroom was lit with the fire of a sun about to rise. Dina stepped silently through the far door. She turned to her right and spoke. “Up early, Lou.”

  Cork heard Jacoby reply without surprise, “No, Dina. I’m just not sleeping these days. I thought you were with . . .” He paused as Cork limped into the room. “. . . O’Connor.”

  Lou Jacoby stood framed against the window. He wore a dressing gown and slippers, and smoke rose from a lit cigar in his right hand. He was nearing eighty. In the light through the window—the only light in the room—he looked pale and hard, more like the plaster cast of a man.

  “Our business is finished,” the old man said.

  “You put a contract out on me,” Cork replied.

  Jacoby waved it off. “That’s been taken care of.”

  “An eye for an eye, you said. You threatened my boy. Another kid I’m fond of was kidnapped by someone looking to collect on that half-million-dollar bounty you put on my head. A lot of other innocent people stood to get hurt.”

  Jacoby looked unimpressed. “And you’re here to what?”

  “Maybe start by beating the living shit out of you,” Cork said.

  “Bloody an old man?” Jacoby opened his arms in invitation.

  “I told you it wasn’t me who killed your son,” Cork spit out.

  Jacoby almost laughed. “And I was supposed to take your word for it? Hell, I know my garbageman better than I know you.”

  “How does it feel having to accept that it was family killing family—your family? And by the way, Salguero’s disappeared. Doesn’t that leave your coffer of vengeance a little empty?”

  Jacoby lifted his cigar, took a draw, and said through the smoke, “Does it?”

  Dina gave a short, hollow laugh. “They’ll never find Tony Salguero, will they, Lou? You had him taken care of.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jacoby said.

  “There’s still Gabriella,” Cork pointed out. “With a good lawyer—”

  “She’ll use the lawyer I pay for,” Jacoby said. “And he’ll make sure she rots in prison.”

  Jacoby moved away from the window to the side of the great bed. He reached out and pressed a button on the wall.

  “And her two boys?” Dina looked at the old man with a kind of sickened awe. “You’ll take them from her, won’t you, Lou?”

  “I’ll raise my grandsons to be the men my sons never were.”

  Cork went for Jacoby and grabbed a handful of his soft robe. Somebody needed to take this son of a bitch down. Jacoby dropped his cigar and looked startled, then afraid. Cork pinned him to the wall. The old man seemed flimsy as cardboard.

  Cork felt Dina’s hand on his arm, gently restraining. She moved up beside him. He looked into her eyes and their calm brought him back to his senses. It would be easy enough to beat the old man to a pulp, and probably not hard to go further. But to what end? His own family was safe. Giving in to anger would only start the trouble all over again.

  Sometimes a man had to swallow hard and accept what he could not
change.

  He nodded to Dina, and she dropped her hand. He let go of his grip on Jacoby and stepped back. The old man smoothed his robe and bent to retrieve his cigar.

  Shuffling came from the hallway. A moment later, Evers, the houseman, appeared at the bedroom door. He was almost as old as Jacoby and, like his employer, wore a robe and slippers. His white hair was mussed from sleep. He looked at Dina and Cork with surprise but said nothing.

  “See them out,” Jacoby said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell Mrs. Portman I’m hungry. I’d like breakfast.”

  “Very good, sir.” Evers stood aside so that Cork and Dina could go before him.

  * * *

  They drove to Evanston, to the duplex that belonged to Cork’s sister-in-law and her husband. He’d used Dina’s cell phone to call ahead and let them know he was coming. Dina parked on the street in front but left the motor running.

  “I guess this is it,” she said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go home, get a little sleep, then head back to Bodine.”

  “Charlie?” he asked.

  “Charlie,” she answered.

  “You’ve only known her a couple of days, Dina.”

  She shook her head. “Her, I’ve known my whole life.”

  “Back there at Jacoby’s, I was ready to kill him. Thanks for stopping me.”

  “You were about to make a mistake I knew you’d regret. And I’d hate to lose you to the Illinois state penal system. It’s a harsh world, and men like Lou Jacoby will always be in it. What keeps things balanced is men like you.”

  “Yeah?” He turned to her. Her face in the rising light of morning was soft and bright. “Seems to me not long ago you accused me of being a lot of things that aren’t good. What was that all about?”

  She reached out and cupped his cheek with her hand. “Mostly this: You always struggle so hard to do the right thing. Nobody always does the right thing, Cork, not even you. Be easy on people when they disappoint you. And be a little easier on yourself while you’re at it.”

  She leaned to him and kissed his cheek.

  “Go on.” She nudged him gently. “Time for you to go.”

  He got out, walked around the car, and leaned in her window. One last time he looked into her eyes, which were as green as new leaves.

  “Let me know how it goes with Charlie, okay?” he said.

  “The truth is I’m a little scared.”

  “You? That’s a first.”

  “Good-bye, Cork.”

  She slipped the car into gear and drove away. He watched until she turned the corner and was gone.

  He stood on the sidewalk of a street still deep in the quiet of early morning. Behind closed curtains, men and women shared their beds, their fortunes, their lives, and their dreams, and their children were the sum of all these things made flesh. To rise in the morning and watch his sons and daughters stumble sleepy-eyed into the day, to send them out into the world on wings of love, to lie down at night and draw over himself the comforting quilt of the memories he shared with them—batting practice on a softball field or wrestling in the living room after dinner—what more could a man ask for or want?

  Cork looked up and a seven-year-old boy appeared in the upstairs window of the duplex. Stevie’s face lit up as if the sun had just risen after a very long, dark night. He smiled beautifully and his lips formed a single word that Cork could not hear but understood absolutely.

  Daddy.

  ATRIA BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  HEAVEN’S KEEP

  WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  In the weeks after the tragedy, as he accumulates pieces of information, he continues to replay that morning in his mind. More times than he can count, more ways than he can remember, he juggles the elements. He imagines details. Changes details. Struggles desperately to alter the outcome. It never works. The end is always the same, so abysmally far beyond his control. Usually it goes something like this:

  She waits alone outside the hotel in the early gray of a cloudy dawn. Her suitcase is beside her. In her hand is a disposable cup half-filled with bad coffee. A tumbleweed rolls across the parking lot, pushed by a cold November wind coming off the High Plains.

  This is one of the details that changes. Sometimes he imagines an empty plastic bag or a loose page of newspaper drifting across the asphalt. They’re all clichés, but that’s how he sees it.

  She stares down the hill toward Casper, Wyoming, a dismal little city spread across the base of a dark mountain like debris swept up by the wind and dumped there. As she watches, a tongue of dirty-looking cloud descends from the overcast to lick the stone face of the mountain.

  She thinks, I should have called him. She thinks, I should have told him I’m sorry.

  She sips from her hotel coffee, wishing, as she sometimes does when she’s stressed or troubled, that she still smoked.

  George LeDuc pushes out through the hotel door. He’s wearing a jean jacket with sheepskin lining that he bought in a store in downtown Casper the day before. “Makes me look like a cowboy,” he’d said with an ironic grin. LeDuc is full-blood Ojibwe. He’s seventy, with long white hair. He rolls his suitcase to where she stands and parks it beside hers.

  “You look like you didn’t sleep too good,” he says. “Did you call him?”

  She stares at the bleak city, the black mountain, the gray sky. “No.”

  “Call him, Jo. It’ll save you both a whole lot of heartache.”

  “He’s gone by now.”

  “Leave him a message. You’ll feel better.”

  “He could have called me,” she points out.

  “Could have. Didn’t. Mexican standoff. Is it making you happy?” He rests those warm brown Anishinaabe eyes on her. “Call Cork,” he says.

  Behind them the others stumble out the hotel doorway, four men looking sleepy, appraising the low gray sky with concern. One of them is being led by another, as if blind.

  “Still no glasses?” LeDuc asks.

  “Can’t find the bastards anywhere,” Edgar Little Bear replies. “Ellyn says she’ll send me a pair in Seattle.” The gray-haired man lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Smells like snow.”

  “Weather Channel claims a storm’s moving in,” Oliver Washington, who’s guiding Little Bear, offers.

  LeDuc nods. “I heard that, too. I talked to the pilot. He says no problem.”

  “Hope you trust this guy,” Little Bear says.

  “He told me yesterday he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass.”

  Little Bear’s eyes swim, unfocused as he looks toward LeDuc. “Lady Liberty’s wearing a dress, George.”

  “You ever hear of hyperbole, Edgar?” LeDuc turns back to Jo and says in a low voice, “Call him.”

  “The airport van will be here any minute.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  She puts enough distance between herself and the others for privacy, draws her cell phone from her purse, and turns it on. When it’s powered up, she punches in the number of her home telephone. No one answers. Voice mail kicks in, and she leaves this: “Cork, it’s me.” There’s a long pause as she considers what to say next. Finally: “I’ll call you later.”

  In his imagining, this is a detail that never changes. It’s one of the few elements of the whole tragic incident that’s set in stone. Her recorded voice, the empty silence of her long hesitation.

  “Any luck?” LeDuc asks when she rejoins the others.

  She shakes her head. “He didn’t answer. I’ll try again in Seattle.”

  The van pulls into the lot and stops in front of the hotel. The small gathering of passengers lift their luggage and clamber aboard. They all help Little Bear, for whom everything is a blur.

  “Heard snow’s moving in,” Oliver Washington tells the driver.

  “Yep. Real ass kicker they’re saying. You folks’re getting ou
t just in time.” The driver swings the van door closed and pulls away.

  It’s no more than ten minutes to the airport where the charter plane is waiting. The pilot helps them aboard and gets them seated.

  “Bad weather coming in, we heard,” Scott No Day tells him.

  The pilot’s wearing a white shirt with gold and black epaulets, a black cap with gold braid across the crown. “A storm front’s moving into the Rockies. There’s a break west of Cody. We ought to be able to fly through before she closes.”

  Except for Jo, all those aboard have a tribal affiliation. No Day is Eastern Shoshone. Little Bear is Northern Arapaho. Oliver Washington and Bob Tall Grass are both Cheyenne. The pilot, like LeDuc, is Ojibwe, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band out of Wisconsin.

  The pilot gives them the same preflight speech he delivered to Jo and LeDuc the day before at the regional airport outside Aurora. It’s rote, but he throws in a few funny lines that get his passengers smiling and comfortable. Then he turns and takes his seat at the controls up front.

  They taxi, lift off, and almost immediately plow into clouds thick as mud. The windows streak with moisture. The plane shivers, and the metal seems to twist in the grip of the powerful air currents. They rattle upward at a steep angle for a few minutes, then suddenly they’ve broken into blue sky with the morning sun at their backs and below them a mattress of white cloud. Like magic, the ride smoothes out.

  Her thinking goes back to Aurora, to her husband. They’ve always had a rule: Never go to bed mad. There should be a corollary, she thinks: Never separate for a long trip with anger still between you.

  In the seat opposite, Edgar Little Bear, not a young man, closes his purblind eyes and lays his head back to rest. Next to him, No Day, slender and with a fondness for turquoise and silver, opens a dog-eared paperback and begins to read. In the seats directly ahead of Jo and LeDuc, Washington and Tall Grass continue a discussion begun the night before, comparing the merits of the casinos on the Vegas strip to those on Fremont Street. Jo pulls a folder from the briefcase at her feet and opens it on her lap.