The William Kent Krueger Collection 2

by William Kent Krueger

  LeDuc says, “Hell, if we’re not prepared now, we never will be.”

  “It helps me relax,” she tells him.

  He smiles. “Whatever.” And like his old contemporary Edgar Little Bear, he lays his head back and closes his eyes.

  They’re all part of a committee tasked with drafting recommendations for oversight of Indian gaming casinos, recommendations they’re scheduled to present at the annual conference of the National Congress of American Indians. Her mind isn’t at all on the documents in her hands. She keeps returning to the argument the day before, to her final exchange with Cork just before she boarded the flight.

  “Look, I promise I won’t make any decisions until you’re home and we can talk,” he’d said.

  “Not true,” she’d replied. “Your mind’s already made up.”

  “Oh? You can read my mind now?”

  She’d used the blue needles of her eyes to respond.

  “For Christ sake, Jo, I haven’t even talked to Marsha yet.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t know what you want.”

  “Well, I sure as hell know what you want.”

  “And it doesn’t matter to you in the least, does it?”

  “It’s my life, Jo.”

  “Our life, Cork.”

  She’d turned, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and rolled it away without even a good-bye.

  She’s always said good-bye, always with a kiss. But not this time. And the moment of that heated separation haunts her. It would have been so easy, she thinks now, to turn back. To say “I’m sorry. I love you. Good-bye.” To leave without the barbed wire of their anger between them.

  They’ve been in the air forty-five minutes when the first sign of trouble comes. The plane jolts as if struck by a huge fist. LeDuc, who’s been sleeping, comes instantly awake. Washington and Tall Grass, who’ve been talking constantly, stop in midsentence. They all wait.

  From up front, the pilot calls back to them in an easy voice, “Air pocket. Nothing to worry about.”

  They relax. The men return to their conversation. LeDuc closes his eyes. Jo focuses on the presentation she’s put together for Seattle.

  With the next jolt a few minutes later, the sound of the engines changes and the plane begins to descend, losing altitude rapidly. Very quickly they plunge into the dense cloud cover below.

  “Hey!” No Day shouts toward the pilot. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Fasten your seat belts!” the pilot calls over his shoulder. He grips the radio mic with his right hand. “Salt Lake, this is King Air N7723X. We have a problem. I’m descending out of eighteen thousand feet.”

  The folder that was on Jo’s lap has been thrown to the floor, the pages of her careful presentation scattered. She grips the arms of her seat and stares out at the gray clouds screaming past. The plane rattles and thumps, and she’s afraid the seams of rivets will pop.

  “Goddamn!” No Day cries out. “Shit!”

  LeDuc’s hand covers her own. She looks into his brown eyes. The left wing dips precariously, and the plane begins to roll. As they start an irrevocable slide toward earth, they both know the outcome. With this knowledge, a sense of peaceful acceptance descends, and they hold hands, these old friends.

  Her greatest regret as she accepts the inevitable—Cork imagines this, because it is his greatest regret as well—is that they didn’t say to each other, “I’m sorry.” Didn’t say, “I love you.” Didn’t say good-bye.

  ONE

  * * *

  Day One

  After Stevie took off for school that morning, Cork O’Connor left the house. He headed to the sheriff’s department on Oak Street, parked in the visitors’ area, and went inside. Jim Pendergast was on the contact desk, and he buzzed Cork through the security door.

  “Sheriff’s expecting you,” Pendergast said. “Good luck.”

  Cork crossed the common area and approached the office that not many years before had been his. The door was open. Sheriff Marsha Dross sat at her desk. The sky outside her windows was oddly blue for November, and sunlight poured through the panes with a cheery energy. He knocked on the doorframe. Dross looked up from the documents in front of her and smiled.

  “Morning, Cork. Come on in. Shut the door behind you.”

  “Mind if I hang it?” Cork asked, shedding his leather jacket.

  “No, go right ahead.”

  Dross had an antique coat tree beside the door, one of the many nice touches she’d brought to the place. A few plants, well tended. Photos on the walls, gorgeous North Country shots she’d taken herself and had framed. She’d had the office painted a soft desert tan, a color Cork would never have chosen, but it worked.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  He took the old maple armchair that Dross had picked up at an estate sale and refinished herself. “Thanks for seeing me so early.”

  “No problem. Jo get off okay?”

  “Yeah, yesterday. She and LeDuc flew out together. They stayed in Casper last night. Due in Seattle today.”

  “You and Stevie are bachelors for a few days, then?”

  “We’ll manage.”

  Dross folded her hands on her desk. “I don’t have an application from you yet, so I can’t really consider this a formal interview.”

  “You know those exploratory committees they form for presidential candidates? This is more like that.”

  Cork had hired her years ago when he was sheriff, and she’d become the first woman ever to wear the uniform of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. She’d proven to be a good law officer, and when the opportunity had come her way, she’d put her hat in the ring, run for sheriff, and won easily. In Cork’s estimation, she’d filled that office well. She was in her late thirties, with red-brown hair, which she wore short, no makeup.

  “Okay,” she said. “So explore.”

  “Would you consider me seriously for the position?”

  “If you apply, you’ll be the most experienced applicant.”

  “And the oldest.”

  “We don’t discriminate on the basis of age.”

  “I’ll be fifty-one this year.”

  “And the man you’d replace is sixty-three. Cy Borkman’s been a fine deputy right up to the end. So I’m guessing you might have a few good years left in you, too.” She smiled, paused. “How would you feel taking orders from an officer you trained?”

  “I trained that officer pretty well. So no problem there. How would you feel giving orders to the guy who trained you?”

  “Let me worry about that one.” She lost her smile and leveled at him a straight look that lasted an uncomfortably long time. “You told me a year and a half ago, after the shootings at the high school, that you would never carry a firearm again.”

  “No. I told you I would never fire one at another human being.”

  “Does that mean you’d be willing to carry?”

  “If required.”

  “The job definitely requires it.”

  “In England the cops don’t carry.”

  “This isn’t England. And you carry with the understanding that someday you might have to use your firearm. That’s why all our deputies certify on the range once a year. Your rule, remember?”

  “How many times since you put on that badge have you cleared your holster and fired?”

  “Yesterday is no predictor of tomorrow. And, Cork, the officers you work with need to believe you’re willing to cover their backs, whatever it takes. Christ, you know that.” She sat back, looking frankly puzzled. “Why do you want this job? Is it the litigation?”

  “The lawsuit’s draining me,” he admitted.

  “You’ve built a good reputation here as a PI.”

  “Can’t spend a reputation. I need a job that brings in a regular income.”

  “What’ll you do about Sam’s Place?”

  “Unless I win the litigation, there won’t be a Sam’s Place. And unless I can pay for it, there won’t be a litigati
on.”

  “And if you win the lawsuit, are you out of here again? I’ve got to tell you, Cork, you’ve been in and out of uniform more times than a kid playing dress-up.”

  “I was never playing.”

  She looked away, out her window at the gorgeous November sky and the liquid sun that made everything drip yellow. “I’ve got a dozen qualified applicants wanting Cy’s job, young guys itching for experience. I hire one of them, he’ll be with me for years. I can start him out at a salary that’ll be healthy for my budget. I can assign him the worst shifts and he won’t complain.”

  “Did I ever complain?”

  “Let me finish. The feeling around here is that I ought to hire you. You’re clearly the popular choice. Hell, you brought most of our officers into the department yourself. These guys love you. But I have to look beyond the question of how well you’d fit in here. I have to think about the future of this force. And I also have to think about the welfare of the officer I hire.” She gave him another long, direct look. “What’s Jo think about this?”

  “That it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had.”

  “An understatement on her part, I’m sure.”

  “This is between you and me, Marsha.”

  “Until I run into Jo in the produce aisle at the IGA. I can’t imagine that would be pretty.”

  “You’re saying you wouldn’t be inclined to hire me?”

  “I’m saying we both probably have better options.”

  It was Cork’s turn to eye the promising blue sky. “I don’t know anything but law enforcement.”

  “I heard the new casino management firm might be looking for someone to head up security.”

  “All paperwork,” Cork said.

  “Sixty percent of what we do here is paperwork.”

  “I guess I have my answer.” Cork stood up. “Thanks for seeing me, Marsha.”

  They shook hands without another word. Cork headed out, passed the contact desk, where Pendergast gave him a thumbs-up.

  ATRIA BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  VERMILION DRIFT

  WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Some nights, Corcoran O’Connor dreams his father’s death.

  Although the dream differs in the details, it always follows the same general pattern: His father falls from a great height. Sometimes he stumbles backward over a precipice, his face an explosion of surprise. Or he’s climbing a high, flat face of rock and, just as he reaches for the top, loses his grip and, in falling, appears both perplexed and angry. Or he steps into an empty elevator shaft, expecting a floor that is not there, and looks skyward with astonishment as the darkness swallows him.

  In the dream Cork is always a boy. He’s always very near and reaches out to save his father, but his arm is too short, his hand too small. Always, his father is lost to him, and Cork stands alone and heartbroken.

  If that was all of it, if that was the end of the nightmare, it probably wouldn’t haunt him in quite the way that it does. But the true end is a horrific vision that jars Cork awake every time. In the dream, he relives the dream, and in that dream revisited something changes. Not only is he near his father as the end occurs but he also stands outside the dream watching it unfold, a distanced witness to himself and to all that unfolds. And what he sees from that uninvolved perspective delivers a horrible shock. For his hand, in reaching out, not only fails to save his father. It is his small hand, in fact, that shoves him to his death.

  ONE

  * * *

  That early June day began with one of the worst wounds Cork O’Connor had ever seen. It was nearly three miles long, a mile wide, and more than five hundred feet deep. It bled iron.

  From behind the window glass of the fourth-floor conference room in the Great North Mining Company’s office complex, Cork looked down at the Ladyslipper Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore excavations in the world. It was a landscape of devastation, of wide plateaus and steep terraces and broad canyons, all of it the color of coagulating blood. He watched as far below him the jaws of an electric power shovel gobbled eighty tons of rock and spit the rubble into a dump truck the size of a house and with wheels twice as tall as a man. The gargantuan machine crawled away up an incline that cut along the side of the pit, and immediately another just like it took its place, waiting to be filled. The work reminded him of insects feeding on the cavity of a dead body.

  At the distant end of the mine, poised at the very lip of the pit itself, stood the town of Granger. The new town of Granger. Thirty years earlier, Great North had moved the entire community, buildings and all, a mile south in order to take the ore from beneath the original town site. Just outside Granger stood the immense structures of the taconite plant, where the rock was crushed and processed into iron pellets for shipping. Clouds of steam billowed upward hundreds of feet, huge white pillars holding up the gray overcast of the sky.

  Although he’d viewed the mine and the work that went on deep inside many times, the sight never ceased to amaze and sadden him. The Ojibwe part of his thinking couldn’t help but look on the enterprise as a great injury delivered to Grandmother Earth.

  “Cork. Good. You’re here.”

  Cork turned as Max Cavanaugh closed the door. Cavanaugh was tall and agreeable, a man who easily caught a lady’s eye. In his early forties, he was younger than Cork by a decade. He was almost the last of the Cavanaughs, a family whose name had been associated with mining since 1887, when Richard Frankton Cavanaugh, a railroad man from St. Paul, had founded the Great North Mining Company and had sunk one of the first shafts in Minnesota’s great Iron Range. Cork saw Max Cavanaugh at Mass every Sunday, and in winter they both played basketball for St. Agnes Catholic Church—the team was officially called the St. Agnes Saints, but all the players referred to themselves as “the old martyrs”—so they knew each other pretty well. Cavanaugh was normally a guy with an easy smile, but not today. Today his face was troubled, and with good reason. One of his holdings, the Vermilion One Mine, was at the center of a controversy that threatened at any moment to break into violence.

  The two men shook hands.

  “Where are the others?” Cork asked.

  “They’re already headed to Vermilion One. I wanted to talk to you alone first. Have a seat?”

  Cork took a chair at the conference table, and Cavanaugh took another.

  “Do you find missing people, Cork?”

  The question caught him by surprise. Cork had been expecting some discussion about Vermilion One. But it was also a question with some sting to it, because the most important missing person case he’d ever handled had been the disappearance of his own wife, and that had ended tragically.

  “On occasion I’ve been hired to do just that,” he replied cautiously.

  “Can you find someone for me?”

  “I could try. Who is it?”

  The window at Cavanaugh’s back framed his face, which seemed as gray as the sky above the mine that morning. “My sister.”

  Lauren Cavanaugh. Well known in Tamarack County for her unflagging efforts to bring artistic enlightenment to the North Country. Two years earlier, she’d founded the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, an artists’ retreat in Aurora that had, in a very short time, acquired a national reputation.

  “I thought I read in the Sentinel that Lauren was in Chicago,” Cork said.

  “She might be. I don’t know. Or she might be in New York or San Francisco or Paris.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Is what I tell you confidential?”

  “I consider it so, Max.”

  Cavanaugh folded his hands atop his reflection in the shiny table-top. “My sister does this sometimes. Just takes off. But she’s always kept in touch with me, let me know where she’s gone.”

  “Not this time?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Nothing before she left?”

  “No. But that’s not unusual.
When she gets it into her head to go, she’s gone, just like that.”

  “What about Chicago?”

  He shook his head. “A smoke screen. I put that story out there.”

  “Is her car gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last hear from her?”

  “A week ago. We spoke on the phone.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “Like she always sounds. Like sunshine if it had a voice.”

  Cork took out the little notebook and pen that he generally carried in his shirt pocket when he was working a case. He flipped the cover and found the first empty page.

  “She drives a Mercedes, right?”

  “A CLK coupe, two-door. Silver-gray.”

  “Do you know the license plate number?”

  “No, but I can get it.”

  “So can I. Don’t bother.”

  “She hasn’t charged any gas since she left.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I oversee all her finances. She also hasn’t charged any hotel rooms, any meals, anything.”

  “Any substantial withdrawals from her bank account before she left?”

  “Nothing extraordinary.”

  “Is it possible she’s staying with a friend?”

  “I’ve checked with everyone I can think of.”

  “Have you talked to the police?”

  “No. I’d rather handle this quietly.”

  “You said she does this periodically. Why?”

  Cavanaugh looked at Cork, his eyes staring out of a mist of confusion. “I don’t know exactly. She claims she needs to get away from her life.”

  As far as Cork knew, her life consisted of lots of money and lots of adulation. What was there to run from?

  “Is there someplace she usually goes?”

  “Since she moved here, it’s generally the Twin Cities or Chicago. In the past, it’s been New York City, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires, Rome.”