“It’s not enough you kill my son,” Jacoby spat out. “You slander my grandson, too, with your lies.”
“I understand your grief,” Cork said. “But don’t let it blind you to the truth.”
With difficulty, Jacoby rose from his chair. “I’m not a man of idle threats. An eye for an eye. You hear me?”
“Mercy,” Jo said, speaking softly into the dark of the room. “It falls like the gentle rain from heaven, Mr. Jacoby.”
“Not in this house, woman.” He said to Gabriella, “Get them out.”
Gabriella came forward and placed herself between the O’Connors and the old man. “It’s time for you to go.”
“We’ve done nothing to you,” Jo said.
“You’ve done everything short of killing me. Get out.”
Jo turned away, then Cork. Gabriella followed them out and led them toward the front door.
“I warned you,” she said.
“Have you even tried to help him understand?” Cork said.
“You saw him. When he’s ready to listen to reason, I will reason.”
As they neared the door, they saw Evers blocking the way, arguing with someone standing just outside.
“What is it?” Gabriella said.
Evers stepped aside, and Jo saw Rae Bly framed in the doorway.
“I was trying to explain that I have my instructions.”
“To keep me out?” Rae’s voice was a sharp blade of indignation. “I don’t believe it.”
“That’s all right. I will take care of it,” Gabriella said.
Evers stepped back, turned, and walked away, stiff as a zombie.
Gabriella addressed her sister-in-law. “It is true. He does not want to see you.”
“Does he even know I’m here?”
“I told him that you called. He won’t see you. If you try to talk to him now, you will only be hurt by him. When he is ready, I will let you know.”
“I’m his daughter, Gabby.”
“As am I now. And we must think of him. Later he will see you. It will be all right, I promise, pobrecito. Now, good day to you all.”
Cork and Jo stepped outside.
Rae stared at the door that had closed against her. She wilted and then she wept. “Ben, Ben. Oh, Benny.”
Jo put her arms around her. After a minute, Rae pulled herself together.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“I didn’t get all the details, but enough to say I’m sorry for what happened to you, Jo. It’s shameful, but that’s the Jacobys. Did Lou see you?”
“Only long enough to threaten us,” Jo said.
“Don’t take him lightly.”
“This is Cork, my husband.”
“I figured.”
“Rae is Ben’s sister.”
“I was sure he’d see me. We’re all we have now, each other.”
“Apparently, he thinks he has Gabriella, too,” Cork said.
“Will you be all right?” Jo asked.
“No, but that’s not your concern. You have your own problems. And the Jacobys,” she said bitterly, “we take care of our own affairs.”
They left her, a small figure standing alone in the shadow of her father’s great house.
50
From Rose and Mal’s duplex, he called the number on the card Dina Willner had given him.
“I just came from Lou Jacoby’s,” he told her.
“And you’re still alive?”
“Not for long, from the way he’s talking.”
“Cork, Lou doesn’t just talk.”
“Gabriella Jacoby says you’ve been silent on what happened at Ben’s place.”
“Silent? I’ve been trying to reach Lou but Gabriella is screening everything. I can’t get through to him.”
Cork heard the frustration in her voice, a rare emotion in his experience. He realized how tired she must be, too.
“How’s Jo?” she asked.
“Doing remarkably well, considering.”
“Strong woman. How about you? Are you all right?”
“Jo’s safe. I can handle everything else.”
“I’ll get to Lou somehow, explain things, Cork. That’s a promise.”
He was exhausted, but he spent the afternoon at a park on the lake with his family, pushing Stevie on the swings, talking with his daughters about Northwestern and Notre Dame, watching Jo-who seemed, in spite of what she’d been through, calm as the water on the lake that day. Twenty years before, he had proposed to her on Lake Michigan, on a dinner cruise, an evening that had changed his life and taken it in the best of directions.
He sent Jenny and Annie off to play with their brother while he sat on a blanket with Jo.
“I’ve been thinking about Gabriella,” he said. “And her brother. And about an angel who spoke to Lizzie Fineday.”
“An angel?”
“In Lizzie’s confused recollection anyway. What was it that Gabriella called Rae this morning? Pobrecito? What does that mean?”
“If I recall my college Spanish, it means something like ‘poor little one.’”
“Lizzie said her angel called her ‘poor vaceeto.’ Could it be that the angel spoke Spanish and what she really said was pobrecito?”
“You think Gabriella was Lizzie’s angel?”
“When I called Edward Jacoby’s home the morning after he was murdered, his housekeeper told me that Mrs. Jacoby wasn’t there. She was on a boat. Tony Salguero told me he was sailing on Lake Michigan. Because I didn’t know there was a connection between them, I didn’t put it together at the time, but what do you want to bet they were on the same boat? How difficult would it be to anchor somewhere not far from an airfield, fly to Aurora, take care of some pretty gruesome business, and get back to the boat in time for Lou Jacoby’s call the morning after Eddie was murdered?”
“I don’t know. How would you prove something like that?”
“They had to leave a trail. Dock somewhere, file a flight plan, gas up, land and park a plane. If they tailed Eddie out to Mercy Falls, they had to have a vehicle of some kind. A rental, maybe? There’s got to be documentation for some of this somewhere. It should just be a question of tracking it down.”
He stood up and called to the children. He hated to end the picnic, but there was work to be done.
First he called Ed Larson, who had already spoken with the Winnetka police and knew about what had happened to Jo.
“Christ, Cork. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d love to get that Jacoby kid alone somewhere.”
“Won’t happen, Ed.”
“How’s Jo doing?”
“Holding her own.”
“Look, I do have two pieces of good news.”
“I could use some about now,” Cork said.
“First, Simon Rutledge was finally able to talk to Carl Berger. Looks like we’ll be amending the complaint against Lydell Cramer to include conspiracy to commit murder. Berger says that Cramer used his sister and LaRusse to arrange to have Stone do the hit at the Tibodeau cabin. The motive was revenge, pure and simple.
“Now for the second piece of good news. We finally found Arlo Knuth. He’d gone on a bender and wound up in the drunk tank in Hibbing. I talked to him. He says that after Schilling ran him off, he parked behind the blockhouse on the lower level at Mercy Falls. Around midnight, he saw two vehicles head to the upper lot near the overlook. Right behind them came a third vehicle that parked in the lower lot. Two people got out and hiked up the stairs toward the overlook. They came back down half an hour later and left. Arlo says he left right after that. The place was getting too busy.”
“Was he able to give you a description?”
“No, but he did give us something very interesting. Whoever those two people were, they spoke Spanish.”
“ Pobrecito, Ed.”
“What?”
Cork told him about Gabriella Jacoby and Antonio Salguero, and explain
ed his thinking about Eddie’s murder.
“The Salgueros lost everything in Argentina. Marrying Eddie Jacoby gave Gabriella a handle on another fortune. With her husband dead, she probably stands to get her hands on a significant chunk of change. Insurance, at the very least. Maybe she even moves up a notch in the old man’s will.”
“They’d been married for years. Why kill Eddie now?” Larson asked.
“Maybe she waited until she was solid with his father. She’s given Lou grandchildren, weaseled her way next to his heart. I’d bet she and Tony have been thinking about it for a while. Could be that Aurora’s isolation seemed to offer the opportunity they’d been hoping for.”
“And the hick cops they figured would do the investigating.”
“Probably that, too. Look, it’s a lot of speculation, I know.”
“Makes sense, though.”
“When Dina gave Ben her report on our questioning of Lizzie Fineday, Jacoby must have known what ‘poor vaceeto’ was really all about. He took Dina off the case in the hope of keeping her ignorant, and I’ll bet he canceled his rendezvous with Jo because he went to see Gabriella or Salguero, to confront them.”
“Didn’t want the police involved?”
“Exactly. A family matter. The family name at stake. Something like that. There’s a lot of digging to do, Ed.”
“I’m on it, Cork,” Larson said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
The next call was to Dina Willner’s cell phone.
“Tell me what you know about Tony Salguero,” he said when she answered.
“Handsome. Educated. Refined. Daring.”
“Daring? What do you mean?”
“He flies. He sails. Like his father, he’s a world-class big-game hunter. He was in the Argentine military for a long time, an officer.”
“Special training?”
“I could find out. Why?”
“I want to know if he’s the kind of man who’d know where to thrust a knife to kill somebody instantly.”
Dina’s end of the line went silent a long moment. “As in Eddie Jacoby.”
“Exactly.”
He told her what he knew and what he suspected.
“Gabriella and Tony together.” She was quiet, probably rolling the idea around in her thinking. “Gabriella was a better woman in almost every way than Eddie could have hoped for. Murder might not have been on her mind at first, but I imagine anybody married to Eddie would, over time, begin to think about it seriously.”
“There’s something else,” Cork said. “I think Ben suspected. I think that’s why he took you off the case. ‘Poor vaceeto.’ He put it togther right away.”
“God, why didn’t I?”
“It had been a hard day, remember?”
“Still…”
“Look, with your connections, any way you could find out quickly who Ben called after he talked to you yesterday afternoon?”
“You’re thinking he called Gabriella or Tony?”
“And then went to see them.”
“That’s why he canceled on Jo. Cork, do you think they killed him?”
“Not necessarily themselves. They may have had it done. Ed Larson’s working on the connection with Eddie Jacoby’s murder. Once we have that, Winnetka PD might be persuaded to look at them for Ben’s murder as well. Given the ties between the Jacobys and local law enforcement, it might be best not to tip our hand too early.”
The silence again. Then: “It feels so cold, Cork.”
He thought about Gabriella, the shadow she’d cast over Lou Jacoby that morning, her control. It may all have started as a way to rid herself of a man no woman in her right mind would want, but it was different now, huge and malevolent. It had probably taken the life of Ben Jacoby, and Cork could feel the menace at his own back, in Lou Jacoby’s ignorant vow, “An eye for an eye.”
“Watch yourself, Cork.”
“You, too.”
He put the phone down. He’d made the calls in the front room of the duplex, away from the rest of the family who were all gathered in the kitchen around the table talking and laughing. He could hear Mal and Rose, each of the children, and Jo. He thought about the Jacobys, the various reasons they had married-money, position, beauty, prestige, duty. For all its pain, all its uncertainty, all the terror of the power it wielded, love was still, in Cork’s book, the best reason.
He started toward the kitchen, toward the laughter that was a song, toward the love that was everything.
51
He heard the phone ring, looked at the clock beside the bed, wondered who would be calling at two in the morning. In the hallway, the floorboards creaked, and Mal Thorne said, “Hello?”
He didn’t say anything else. A minute later, a cupboard door squeaked open in the kitchen, followed shortly by the rattle of glass in the refrigerator.
Cork threw back the covers, pulled on his pants, and slipped from the room where Jo lay sleeping.
The kitchen light was on. Mal stood at the counter near the sink, a glass of milk in one hand, a cold chicken leg in the other. He held up the leg. “There’s more in the fridge if you’re hungry.”
“No, thanks.”
Mal wore a white T-shirt, red gym shorts, white socks. “Trouble sleeping?”
“Can’t get my eyes to close. My brain won’t stop working. Who was on the phone?”
“Nobody there. Second time tonight. Would it help you to talk?”
“Maybe.”
Mal used the chicken leg to point toward the kitchen table. “Confessional’s open.”
Cork sat down. His feet were bare and cold on the linoleum.
“I’ve been thinking about everything that’s happened recently,” he said. “A lot of what’s occurred I understand now, but I’m having trouble understanding my place in all this.”
“How so?”
“Jo’s a wonderful woman.”
“You won’t get an argument from me on that.”
“She didn’t want me to take the job as sheriff, Mal.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No, but I knew. She’s always been afraid of the effect it’s had on our family.”
“Cork, if you’re going to start blaming yourself for what’s happened-”
“It’s not that, Mal. It’s a realization. I was doing fine running Sam’s Place. It’s a pretty location there on Iron Lake. I grilled good burgers. I set my own hours, closed up at night, went home, and what did I have to worry about except making sure there were enough potato chips for the next day? Now I lie awake worrying about everything. The department budget, county politics, the safety of my people.” He glanced toward the hallway. “The safety of my family.”
“Why did you take the job?”
“I told myself there were good reasons, but in the end it was pride, plain and simple.”
“I suspect there was more to it than that, but I understand what you’re saying. So what are you going to do?”
The fridge kicked on, and the hum grabbed Cork’s attention. He looked at the refrigerator door, which was decorated with photos, mostly ones Jo had sent of the children and her and Cork.
“I’m going to quit. When I get back to Aurora, I’m going to tender my resignation.”
Mal took a bite from the chicken leg and didn’t seem inclined to argue.
The phone rang in the hallway.
“There it is again,” Mal said. “The caller who isn’t there.” He got up to answer. “Hello?” He paused. “Yes, he is. Just a minute.” He brought the cordless into the kitchen. “It’s Dina Willner, for you.”
“Dina, what’s up?”
“Make sure the lights are out, then carefully look out the front window.”
Cork said, “Kill the lights, Mal.”
Mal did as Cork asked and followed him to the front room. Cork parted the curtains a crack.
“What am I looking for, Dina?”
“Black Malibu two houses down, far side of the street.”
He lo
cated it parked in a place where the streetlights didn’t quite reach. “I don’t see anything. Wait.” Inside the Malibu, a match flared, lighting a cigarette perhaps. “Okay, I make ’em.”
“They’ve been watching for a while.”
“Who are they?”
“Lou threatened you this morning. I’d say he’s making good on that threat.”
“A hit?” Cork eyed the Malibu fiercely. “Where are you?”
“In the alley back of the duplex. Get dressed and get out here. You have a firearm, bring it.”
“Winnetka PD took it.”
“Then just get out here.”
Cork handed the phone to Mal.
“What is it?”
“See the black Malibu? Dina thinks there’s someone in it who’s been paid to kill me.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Let’s call the police.”
“Wait, Mal. There’s not much they could do at this point but roust the guy. If it is a hit, that would only delay the inevitable.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Dina’s out back. I’ll talk to her. Maybe we can come up with something. Don’t wake anybody.”
Cork went to the bedroom, dressed quietly, put on his windbreaker, and paused a moment before he walked out. Jo lay on her side, the top sheet half covering her face. She looked peaceful, and he wanted her to stay that way. He closed the door silently as he left.
In the kitchen, Mal said, “Take the back stairs. I’m going to keep an eye on the guy out front. You know Dina’s cell phone number?”
Cork gave it to him.
“He moves, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, Mal.”
Outside was a small landing with a flight of wooden stairs that led down to the backyard. Cork descended, crossed the yard, and went out a gate near the garage. Dina was parked in the alley, in a dark blue Honda Civic.
“What happened to the Ferrari?” Cork asked when he got in.
“This car doesn’t shout when I’m on surveillance.” Her eyes shifted to the mirror, then back to the alley in front of her. “Among the calls I made after we talked this afternoon were a few discreet inquiries about Lou and those threats he made. Couple hours ago I got a call back. Lou got things going fast. There’s a contract on you. Half a million is what I was told.”
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