Tamarack County: A Novel

by William Kent Krueger

  “If that’s true, why did they go after Marlee?” Cork asked. “Until we know for sure what’s going on, I think it’s a good idea for you not to be here alone at night.”

  She was shivering now, and Cork’s instinct was to draw her close and warm her.

  “I’d be willing to come back and stay,” he offered.

  She looked toward the low sun, and there was a little flame reflected in her dark eyes. “Folks on the rez are already talking.”

  “Talk’s never bothered me much.”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Me neither. The truth is that I’d feel a lot safer with you here.”

  “I’ll be back before dark,” he promised. “In the meantime, keep your door locked, okay?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she drew her arms from across her chest, reached out, took his face gently in her hands, which were frigid, leaned to him, and kissed his cheek. “You really are unbelievable, you know that?”

  Cork said, “Better get inside before you freeze.”

  She turned and mounted the steps. Before she disappeared inside, she gave him one long, last, enigmatic look.

  Cork walked back to the Forester and paused with his gloved hand on the door handle. He stared at his shadow, which lay across the snow next to the vehicle like a supine man quite comfortable on that icy white mattress. He knew it was a good idea for someone to stay with the Daychilds that night. He knew Shorty was unreliable in that regard. He knew that if he didn’t stay and something were to happen, he’d blame himself. But he also knew that, deep down, Stella’s safety was only part of the reason he would be coming back. The rest of it had to do with how he felt when her cold hands cupped his face and her warm lips pressed his cheek. It had to do with a moment the night before, which he’d chosen to let pass but couldn’t help hoping might come again. Maybe Stella was, as Carson Manydeeds had observed, something dangerous in a very pretty package. Against his better judgment, Cork found himself wanting very much to unwrap that package and find out for himself.

  CHAPTER 23

  When Cork parked Jenny’s Forester in the driveway and saw that the Land Rover and Bearcat were still gone, a worm of concern began to crawl through his belly. Why hadn’t Stephen returned yet? He hurried into the house through the side door to the kitchen and was relieved to find his son sitting at the table. Waaboo was on the floor surrounded by pots and pans, having a great time trying to fit lids on them and making a hell of a racket while doing so. Stephen looked up glumly when his father entered and said nothing.

  “Where’s your sister?” Cork asked.

  “Jenny?”

  “Yeah, that sister.”

  “With the other sister. Crow Point.” Stephen went back to watching Waaboo.

  “I thought Annie wanted to be alone.”

  “Guess not.”

  Cork hung his coat on a wall peg near the door, removed his boots, and left them on the doormat. He went to Waaboo, who stood up and offered his grandfather a lid. Cork accepted it, sat down, picked up another lid, and used them as cymbals, banging out a beat as he sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Delighted, Waaboo dropped onto his bottom and joined him. To Stephen, Cork said, “Everything go okay with Skye?”

  “Got her out there and back.”

  Cork put his lids down and studied Stephen, who wouldn’t look at him. “You okay?”

  Stephen didn’t answer that one. He said, “How’s Marlee?”

  Waaboo went on playing, but Cork got up and took a chair at the table. “Pretty beat up,” he replied. “She wants to see you, but she doesn’t want you to see her, not the way she looks right now. Here’s something that might interest you, though. I took her and her mom out to Ray Jay Wakemup’s place, so they could get it cleaned before he gets released tomorrow. Somebody left Dexter’s head in a cake box on the kitchen table.”

  Stephen’s demeanor changed in an instant. He looked like a guard dog on alert. “Who?”

  “The only person who saw anything was Carson Manydeeds, and he didn’t see enough to be very helpful. Did say that whoever it was drove a pickup.”

  “The guy who went after us?”

  “That’s where my money is at the moment.”

  “So if it’s Mr. Wakemup he’s after, why did he try to run Marlee off the road?”

  “From what you’ve told me, it seems like Marlee ran herself off the road.”

  “That pickup was definitely following us, Dad.”

  “I believe you. But the question is what was his motive. Did he really intend Marlee harm?”

  Stephen’s eyes went to the window. Outside, only the thin, bare tree branches seemed to be holding the sun above the horizon. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “Is somebody staying with Marlee and her mom tonight?”

  “That would be me.”

  His son’s face clearly showed the deep desire for the night’s watch to fall to him, but Stephen only nodded and said, “Good.” Then he said, “It’s your turn to fix dinner. What were you planning?”

  Cork reached into his back pocket, drew out his wallet, and pulled from it a twenty and a ten. “I was planning on ordering pizza. Why don’t you give Skye a call and ask if she’d like to join you?”

  Stephen seemed reluctant.

  “That’s okay, isn’t it?” Cork said.

  “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  “Good. I’m going to put a few things together for tonight.”

  Cork went upstairs, threw a change of clothing into a gym bag, tossed in a toothbrush and toothpaste. Back in the kitchen, he found Stephen on the floor spinning pan lids like tops, much to Waaboo’s delight. Cork kissed the top of his grandson’s head. “You be good,” he said. He walked to the door, pulled on his boots, and took his coat from the peg.

  “Dad, there’s something else,” Stephen said.

  “What is it?”

  Stephen seemed to wrestle with himself a moment, then shrugged. “Forget it. It can wait.”

  Cork snugged on his gloves and reached for the doorknob. “Call me if you need me.”

  He walked back into the steel blue light of that cold winter evening. The first stars were visible, and Cork headed quickly out of Aurora. As he drove, he tried to put events together in a way that made some sense. It was clear that someone wanted to send Ray Jay Wakemup a message, a brutal one. If it was the same person who’d followed Marlee and Stephen in the green, mud-spattered pickup, had he intended to use Marlee to send Ray Jay another message, one even more brutal? If so, why? Cork didn’t know Wakemup well. He knew what most folks on the rez knew. Wakemup’s life had been the kind that white people pointed to when they said Indians were hopeless. Like a lot of Shinnobs, he’d grown up in foster care, shuffled from one family to another. At seventeen, he’d gone into juvie for boosting a car. He’d been high on alcohol and angel dust. After that, he was in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, though nothing so heinous that he did hard time. He wasn’t dangerous. He was just someone who white folks—and most Ojibwe—thought of as shiftless.

  His older brother, Harmon Wakemup, was a stark contrast. Harmon, who’d also graduated from the foster care system, had become a cop. He’d worked his way up and had been hired as chief of police in Bovey, west on the Iron Range. A few years later, he’d been tragically killed while helping a motorist who’d spun off the road one icy night. Another vehicle hit that same patch of ice and slid into Harmon, pinning him against the other car and crushing the life out of him almost instantly. His memorial service had been well attended by both whites and the Anishinaabeg.

  Ray Jay was often compared to his older brother, and never in a good way.

  Then there was their younger sister, Stella, who’d been adopted by a childless Ojibwe couple, Peter and Aurelia Daychild, owners of a small resort on Lake Vermilion. Despite their best efforts to raise her well, Stella ended up a wild one. She’d run away at sixteen, lived, by her own admission, a hard life in the Twin Cities, and had come back to Tamarack County the single mother
of two children. Although in Cork’s opinion, she’d come back a much wiser woman, the jury on the rez was still out on Stella Daychild. She’d been back nearly a decade, but that hadn’t been long enough. On the rez, she was still trouble waiting to happen. Which, Cork thought, was probably why Carson Manydeeds had passed along his friendly warning.

  And Ray Jay? Had he grown any wiser with time? What Cork knew was that Wakemup had finally pulled himself together almost two years ago, joined AA, gone to some Wellbriety meetings on the Bois Forte Reservation, and been clean and sober since. What was, perhaps, even more important was that, as the result of Step 8 in the 12-step process, the step that required seeking out those you’d wronged in order to make amends, Ray Jay had come forward with information about an old murder in Tamarack County. If the story Ray Jay told was true, the legal system had sentenced an innocent man to prison for forty years.

  And if it was true that such an injustice had been done, Cork O’Connor had been part of the broken system responsible for that travesty. It had happened this way.

  He’d been a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for five years when Gerald and Babette Bowen reported their daughter missing. Karyn Bowen was a twenty-year-old college student home for the summer. The day she disappeared she’d told her parents she was heading to the Twin Cities for a rock concert and planned to stay the night at a hotel there. She never came home. Cork was well acquainted with Karyn Bowen. Twice that summer, he’d pulled her over in her red Corvette, once to deliver a warning about speeding and the next time to ticket her for the same offense. Roy Arneson, the Tamarack County sheriff at the time, was a good friend of Gerald Bowen, who’d made a fortune paving roads in the North Country. Arneson had taken care of the ticket, much to Cork’s displeasure. In Cork’s opinion, Karyn Bowen was a spoiled child and could have used a lesson in consequences.

  After her parents reported her missing, two days passed before Karyn’s red Corvette was found parked on an old logging road south of Aurora. Karyn’s nude body was in the trunk.

  Along with his other duties, Cork was in charge of major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He oversaw the processing of the scene, handling most of the responsibilities himself. There were bruises on Karyn Bowen’s neck, and later the coroner confirmed that she’d been killed by manual strangulation. The coroner also found evidence of significant sexual activity. There was skin under the fingernails of her right hand, which may have indicated she’d fought her assailant. In the glove box of the Corvette, Cork discovered a small amount of cocaine and several marijuana cigarettes that later analysis showed were laced with PCP, better known as angel dust. He found no fingerprints at all in the obvious places—door handles, steering wheel, seat belts, trunk—and understood that the car had been wiped clean.

  In the course of his investigation, Cork learned that although Karyn had told her parents she was driving to the Twin Cities, she’d told one of her friends a different story, that she was planning to party all night, although she didn’t say with whom. When Cork asked if Karyn had been dating anyone in Tamarack County, the girl’s friend told him that she’d been seeing an Indian guy, but on the sly, since Karyn knew her parents wouldn’t be too happy about it. The friend didn’t know the identity of the guy. She indicated that it was just like Karyn to do something that would piss off her parents if they knew. Karyn liked doing things they would find objectionable, and although she was surreptitious at first, at some point, she usually made sure they found out. She enjoyed tormenting them, her friend said.

  Cork talked to a lot of folks on the rez, but no one could tell him anything. Roy Arneson was under a lot of pressure from Karyn’s father—who contributed significantly to Arneson’s reelection campaigns—and the sheriff rode Cork hard. Cork appealed to the community at large for any information that might help. His break came when Grady Lynde, a grease monkey at the Tomahawk Truckstop, called and told him that he’d seen the girl in the red Corvette come in a while ago. Lynde said she’d talked a long time and in a real friendly way with Otter LaPointe. LaPointe was one of the mechanics at the Tomahawk. His given name was Cecil, a name he hated and which no one who knew him used. He’d always been easygoing and on the playful side; Otter was what he preferred to be called. He was twenty-five, remarkably handsome, single, and full-blood Indian, a mix of Ojibwe and Cree.

  The moment Cork walked into the service garage of the truck stop and saw LaPointe, the man’s face pretty much gave away his guilt. There were scratch marks down his left cheek, the kind that came from fingernails. When he asked LaPointe if they could talk, the man’s eyes became dark wells full of guilt. It was an easy initial interview. They moved outside and stood beside Cork’s cruiser, LaPointe wiping his oily hands on a dirty rag, eyes riveted on his grease-caked fingernails, and without much prompting at all, LaPointe said simply, “Yeah, I killed her, and I’m sorry as hell.”

  The story Otter LaPointe told was pretty simple. He’d fixed her car, given her some advice on how to take care of it, thrown her a pickup line while he was at it—something he often did with the attractive female customers—and she’d bit. They’d gone out a few times. They usually got a little high, partied at his place, and that was it. Nothing involving, just a good time. The night he’d killed her, they’d smoked what he thought was grass, but it had affected him differently. A lot of the night he didn’t remember, but when he woke up in the morning, there she was beside him in bed, dead. He had no recollection of what had happened. He’d panicked, put her in the trunk of her car, driven out into the woods, parked the Corvette, and hiked back to Aurora. He said he’d kind of known that somebody with a badge would come for him, and in a way, he was glad that the waiting was over. He’d been afforded a speedy trial, very high profile in the North Country, and had been found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite the fact that Karyn Bowen had supplied the cocaine and the PCP-laced marijuana cigarettes, something Cork believed was a mitigating circumstance, LaPointe had been given the maximum allowable sentence under the law, forty years.

  LaPointe had already served more than half that sentence when Ray Jay Wakemup had come forward with a story that cast a good deal of doubt on LaPointe’s guilt.

  The summer before last, as a result of the work the AA program required of him, Wakemup had visited LaPointe in the Stillwater Prison, just outside the Twin Cities. After the visit, Wakemup went to see Corrine Heine, who’d been the public defender for LaPointe in the murder trial. The story that he told Heine, and that Heine subsequently told the media, made headlines across the country. It was a story of the justice system gone terribly wrong.

  The day Karyn Bowen died, Ray Jay Wakemup turned sixteen. He was living with a foster family, the fourth since he’d entered the system seven years earlier. His older brother, Harmon, lived on his own and was enrolled in a criminal justice program at Aurora Community College. He was going to be a cop. Harmon had promised his little brother a very special sixteenth birthday present. He picked him up that evening, and they headed to a house outside Aurora, which Ray Jay knew was rented by Harmon’s best friend, Otter LaPointe. There was a red Corvette parked outside the house, and at first Ray Jay had thought the impossible, that Harmon was giving him the sports car as a present. Inside the house, he was greeted by the smell of frying hamburger. The table had been set for four, and there was a cake in the middle of it with sixteen candles. And there was a pretty blond woman standing beside LaPointe, smiling like she knew some important secret, and they all cried, “Happy birthday, Ray Jay!”

  They ate hamburgers and coleslaw. They drank beer, and music played on LaPointe’s tape deck. From her purse, the blonde, whose name was Karyn, took out cocaine, a mirror, and a razor blade, and they all snorted lines. She also brought out a hand-rolled joint, and they passed it around. And then Harmon said maybe it was time for Ray Jay’s birthday present. Ray Jay was feeling pretty unstable at this point, a little sick, in fact, but he said yeah, it was time
. The blond woman gave him that smile again, the one that told him she knew absolutely something important, and she stood up, held out her hand, and said, “Ray Jay, honey, you come with me.”

  He tried to stand up but fell right over. Then he began to feel really sick to his stomach. His brother helped him into LaPointe’s bathroom, where he proceeded to throw up his dinner and his birthday cake. He sat down beside the toilet and, because he felt like there was still more to come, was afraid to move far from the bowl.

  Harmon left him there, and Ray Jay drifted off. He came to a while later, when Harmon and LaPointe lifted him off the bathroom floor and took him to the living room, where they laid him out on the couch. He remembered the blond woman sitting beside him, stroking his cheek, saying, “Poor baby.” He remembered the music went on and on, all night it seemed, and whenever he opened his eyes, he saw them dancing, all of them together, the woman rubbing herself against both men. He remembered that the music finally stopped, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the living room. Later, he got up to pee, and when he laid back down on the sofa, LaPointe stumbled in from another room and slumped into a chair. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and he looked like he’d just run a marathon. His head fell back, and Ray Jay heard him begin to snore.

  A little while later, Ray Jay woke again, this time to the sound of the toilet flushing, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the woman walking, stark naked, from the bathroom. She disappeared through a door to another room, and Ray Jay heard Harmon laugh from inside. Ray Jay had a pretty good sense of what he’d missed out on, but he was in no shape to try to remedy the situation.

  The next time he woke up, he heard the birds singing, though it was still too dark to see anything outside the windows. What woke him was Harmon bending over Otter LaPointe, slapping his face and telling him to wake up, they had a problem. LaPointe was out cold, and despite Harmon’s best efforts, he didn’t stir. Harmon saw that Ray Jay was awake and told him to give a hand. Together they lifted LaPointe and dragged him to the other room, which turned out to be a bedroom. They laid him on the bed next to the woman who was naked and, Ray Jay thought, sound asleep. Harmon told him to go back out into the living room, and Ray Jay went. A little while later—Ray Jay had gone back to sleep—Harmon shook him roughly awake and told him it was time to go. There was light in the sky then, the first flush of dawn. Harmon drove Ray Jay to his foster home. But he didn’t drop him off immediately. They sat in the car and Harmon talked to him, told him a story that scared the crap out of him. The woman at LaPointe’s place, Harmon said, was dead. Otter had killed her. He told Ray Jay that if he said anything to anyone, they were all going to jail. Ray Jay was old enough to be tried as an adult, Harmon informed him, and even though he hadn’t killed the woman himself, he was there and any white jury would send him to prison for his part in it. Did he understand? Ray Jay was so scared and his mouth was so dry that he couldn’t talk, so he just nodded. Harmon told him he would take care of things, but if Ray Jay ever opened his mouth, they were all dead men.