“People leave footprints on rocks?”
“Not necessarily, but they may leave other signs,” Cork said.
“Didn’t the sheriff’s investigators look there?”
“They did. We’re going to adjust our thinking and our eyes to look for what they didn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s go, and I’ll show you.”
Trickster’s Point had once been a part of the long, upthrust ridge, but over millennia, the thousands of cycles of freeze and thaw had shattered the great stone wall and left a gap littered with talus. They crossed the rock-strewn ground, and at the base of the ridge, Cork paused. From there, the wall sloped upward in a ragged chest of boulders and ledges that topped out a couple of hundred feet above him.
“Even the best of bow hunters isn’t effective much beyond fifty or sixty yards,” he said. “So whoever sent that arrow into Jubal had to be somewhere within the first ten or fifteen yards of the bottom of this slope, hiding behind one of those boulders.”
“So we’re looking for the boulder he hid behind?”
“Yes, but even more, we’re looking for an indication of how he came and how he left. By the time I got to Jubal, his killer was gone. I want to know where he went.”
“What exactly are we looking for then?”
“Anything that strikes you as unnatural or out of place. With every step, take a moment, and don’t just look with your eyes. Feel what’s around you.”
Stephen shot his father an easy grin. “You sound like Henry.”
“Pay attention just like you would with Henry, okay?”
“You got it,” Stephen said.
They separated from one another, a space of a dozen feet between them, then began slowly to make their way among the rocks and up the slope. Cork took his time, but Stephen seemed less careful and moved a little ahead of his father. Cork was about to caution him to be more observant when Stephen seemed to grow smaller before his eyes.
“Dad?”
“What is it?”
“Check this out.”
Stephen had stepped down into a kind of box, a recessed area bounded on all four sides by tall rock. When Cork dropped into the box with him, Stephen pointed toward the stone surface that faced Trickster’s Point.
“It looks like some kind of scraping, don’t you think?”
Cork bent and eyed the mark, which stood out white against the charcoal-colored rock. “That’s exactly what it is, Stephen. Maybe from a belt buckle where someone hugged that rock.” Cork took a position and eyed the base of Trickster’s Point where Jubal had fallen. “The logistics are right.” He knelt and scrutinized the ground. “See this?” He put his index finger to a small line of stone particles and dirt pushed against the face of the rock wall opposite the scraped stone. “I’d bet that’s from the shove of a boot as our killer positioned himself.” He stood up and looked at his son with certainty. “Good work, Stephen. You found the place.”
“Where’d he go from here?”
Cork scanned the wall right and left, then said, “Where would you go?”
Stephen studied their surroundings and shook his head. “We’re pretty much blocked in here. Hard to move either way.” He turned and scanned the slope behind them. “There’s a kind of a natural trough up that way. I guess that’s where I’d go.”
“That’s where I’d go, too. Let’s see what we find.”
Cork led the way, working slowly toward the top of the ridge, which was backed by the bare limbs of aspens and the gray overcast of the sky. He paused occasionally, pointing out to Stephen additional places where small rocks had clearly been displaced and, near the top of the ridge, a spot where a partial boot print had been left in a rare, thin layer of damp soil.
“Medium-size foot,” Cork noted. He’d brought a camera that hung in a belt pouch, and he pulled it out. “Probably a common sole type, so it won’t tell us much, but you never know.”
Cork took some digital shots, then he and Stephen continued to the peak of the slope.
The line of trees that topped the ridge began a couple of dozen yards back from the edge. The stand was full of undergrowth that had caught and held many of the fallen aspen leaves, so that it presented itself as an impenetrable-looking wall of gold. Cork and Stephen scanned the area at the lip of the ridge, and Cork said, “Well?”
Stephen squinted at the ground. “Lots of trampling.”
“Azevedo. One of Ed Larson’s team. I saw him come up.” Cork nodded far to the left of the trail that he and Stephen had followed up the slope. “He didn’t find anything.”
“The guy who was down there in the rocks came from somewhere.”
“Exactly,” Cork said. “So where?”
Stephen stood a moment, looking hard at the stand of trees. “There?” He pointed toward a place where the gold wall seemed to have been breached, where the leaves had been disturbed and had fallen to the ground.
“My guess, too,” Cork said. “Let’s go.”
They entered the woods and slowly moved among the aspens. The initial breach opened onto a trail that, because of the disturbance of the leaves among the undergrowth, wasn’t particularly difficult to follow. They paralleled the edge of the ridge for about twenty yards and then came to a place where the trees opened onto a tiny clearing, which offered a broad vista of the lake and shoreline, dominated by Trickster’s Point. As soon as they reached the clearing, they stopped abruptly. Both of them stood stone still, staring at the body splayed at their feet.
The man lay faceup, with an arrow shaft protruding from his left eye. A scoped deer rifle lay next to him, and his hunter’s cap had been knocked from his head. Cork could see that the arrow had gone clear through his brain and out the back of his skull.
He knelt, and although he already knew the result, he nonetheless put his fingertips to the man’s carotid artery to check for a pulse.
“Dead,” he said. “And, from the looks of it, a day at least.”
Stephen’s face had gone ashen. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “So he was here when Mr. Little was shot?”
“He was here. I don’t know if he was alive then, but he was here.”
“Who is he?”
“No idea, Stephen.”
“What should we do?”
“Did you bring your cell phone?”
“You said cell phones don’t work up here, so I left it in the Land Rover.”
“Me, too,” Cork said. “No service there either. Okay, this is what you’re going to do. Take the canoe back the way we came. Here are the keys to the Land Rover. Drive into Allouette or however far you have to go before you get a signal, then call the sheriff’s office and report what we’ve found. Can you handle that?”
“Sure. But what about you?”
“I’ll wait here until the sheriff’s people arrive.”
“Alone with the dead guy?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Cork told him.
“But why? It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”
“I don’t want the body disturbed by scavengers.”
Stephen eyed the dead hunter a last time, with obvious revulsion, then gave his father a look Cork couldn’t quite decipher. “I hope I never get to the point where sitting with a dead man doesn’t bother me.”
He turned and began to make his way out of the trees while Cork thought about his son’s comment and decided that he hoped so, too.
CHAPTER 11
Cork stood at the edge of the ridge and watched his son paddle across the broad gray of the lake. It was like watching a small bird fly alone into a great threatening sky. He felt a deep sorrow in having to send Stephen on that lonely mission. No parent’s child should have had to go through what Stephen, in his brief sixteen years, had already been asked to endure. Cork felt an abiding loneliness as well, but this was for himself, because the tone of his son’s comment in parting hadn’t escaped his notice. Corcoran O’Connor attracted death the way dogs at
tracted fleas, a phenomenon that his son clearly recognized and just as clearly disapproved of. Cork thought every man wanted to be understood by his children, but—he looked toward the dead man, the second he’d kept company with in as many days—how could anyone understand this?
He turned to a duty that, across the decades of his life, had become depressingly familiar: He investigated the corpse. He didn’t touch anything, just looked the body over carefully.
The dead hunter was Caucasian, with a powerful build. He wore a full camouflage suit, insulated for cold weather, the kind of clothing worn when stalking rather than hunting from a blind. His boots were Danner, expensive but well worn. His rifle was a Marlin 336C, a common make, popular for hunting deer. It was scoped with a Leupold, which was what Cork, when rifle hunting, usually mounted on his own Remington. Cork bent close to the crusted eye socket and studied the entry wound. Probably the hunter had died instantly, or almost so. And, probably, he’d been caught by surprise, otherwise, considering the Marlin, he’d have had the advantage. Cork wished he knew if the hunter had been murdered before Jubal Little or after, and how the two killings were connected, because it was clear that they were. The fletching on the arrow that had killed the man was the same pattern Cork used on his own arrows, the same as on the arrow that had killed Jubal Little.
Cork would have loved to have been able to go through the hunter’s pockets for a clue to his identity, but he knew better. He would have to wait, maybe hours, before the crime scene team from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department made another visit to that remote location. He couldn’t begin to imagine what Marsha Dross and Ed Larson and the BCA people would make of this. Hell, he had no idea what to make of it himself.
He was about to see if he could track the route of the hunter’s approach, hoping that he might be able to determine if the killer had stalked him there, when movement at the base of Trickster’s Point caught his eye. Cork knelt quickly to hide himself and watched as a figure slowly circled the great pinnacle. It was a man, he was pretty sure, although he couldn’t be entirely certain because the head was down and the face hidden beneath the bill of a cap. The figure wore a blaze orange vest, a wise precaution during hunting season in order not to be mistaken for a deer. Every so often, he would pause and bend and scrutinize the ground, then move slowly on. He spent a good deal of time at the place where Jubal Little had breathed his last, then his eyes seemed to follow an invisible line that led to the base of the ridge. Cork laid himself fully on the ground and continued his vigil.
The man walked to the ridge and began to ascend, but gradually. He spent a while in the small natural box that Stephen had discovered and that Cork was certain Jubal Little’s murderer had used. He continued to climb, pausing in the same places Cork had paused when he’d found the displaced stones and the boot print. He crested the ridge and studied the ground, just as Cork and Stephen had, then he eyed the aspens, went to the breach in the gold wall of captured leaves, and followed the trail. Cork finally stood up and moved to block his way before he entered the tiny clearing.
The man looked up, startled.
“Who are you?” Cork demanded.
“Officer John Berglund. U.S. Border Patrol.” He reached inside his vest and brought out ID. “Who are you?”
“Cork O’Connor.”
Berglund, who’d looked grim and official until then, smiled, as if the name was not unfamiliar to him. He appeared to be in his late fifties, medium height and weight, black-rimmed glasses, a friendly face. But there was something penetrating about his eyes, as if he knew things about you that you’d rather nobody knew. He offered his hand.
Cork hesitated in accepting the offer. “What are you doing here?”
“Sheriff Dross asked me to come out and look things over.”
That explained a good deal. In law enforcement circles, the agents of the Border Patrol were legendary for their tracking ability. Cork finally shook the man’s hand, but by then Berglund was more interested in the dead guy at Cork’s back.
“What’s going on?” the agent asked. It was a true question, no hint of an accusation.
“Found him here like this,” Cork replied.
Berglund walked to the corpse, knelt, and while he studied it, said, “I saw evidence of several people climbing that ridge. I imagine you were one of them.”
“And my son,” Cork replied. “When we found the body, I sent him back to call the sheriff’s department.”
“This man’s been dead quite a while. Think he came up the ridge, too?”
“My guess would be no.”
“What, then? A hunter who found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“If he’s a hunter,” Cork said, “where’s his blaze orange?”
Minnesota law required that anyone not hunting from a stand wear blaze orange clothing above the waist as a safety precaution.
Berglund thought a moment. “Maybe already got his limit and was poaching?”
“Maybe. What exactly did Sheriff Dross ask you to do?”
Berglund stood up and scanned the ground around him. “Pretty much the same thing you’re probably here to do. She said she believed you weren’t responsible for Little’s death, and she wanted me to see if I could find any trace of someone else out here, someone you wouldn’t necessarily have seen. She said she thought her people had done a good job with the crime scene itself, but she wanted me to look a little farther afield.”
Marsha, God bless her, Cork thought.
Berglund began to walk slowly to the east, moving among the aspens, following the crown of the ridge, eyes sweeping earth covered with aspen leaves that had fallen in the weeks before and were soggy from the rain. He went out about fifty yards, then returned.
“Two men came in this way,” he said. “Only one went back.”
“Did they come together?”
“Can’t tell.”
“Think you can follow the trail far enough to figure out how they approached Trickster’s Point?”
“As I understand it, there’s just the one Forest Service trail, and that’s the one I took from the trailhead back at the county road. Saw evidence of foot traffic along the way, but nothing that appeared recent. How’d you get here?”
“Canoed across the lake. It’s the shortest route.”
Berglund nodded. “We might be able to assume that this man and whoever killed him both approached the area in a way that assured they wouldn’t be seen.”
“Can you confirm it?”
Berglund considered. “I guess I can try. You want in on this?”
Cork shook his head. “I’m going to stay with the body, make sure it isn’t disturbed.”
Berglund shrugged as if to say “Whatever,” turned his back, and began to move east along the ridge crown, his nose aimed toward the ground like that of a bloodhound.
Once again, Cork was left alone with the dead and in spitting distance of Trickster’s Point.
* * *
The first time he’d been in that situation, he was just shy of seventeen. Not much older than Stephen was now.
It was early October, deep into football season. The Aurora High Wolves were at the top of their division that year, taken there mostly by the strong arm and reliable leadership of Jubal Little. Talk of a state title was on everyone’s lips. But no team is built entirely on one man, and that year there were several fine players, among them Cork O’Connor, who was a junior and played end, and Donner Bigby—Bigs—in his senior year, at fullback. Between Jubal and Bigs there was no love lost. Since that first meeting in Grant Park when Jubal had stepped in to thwart Bigby’s cruelty toward Willie Crane, there’d been a kind of charge building between them, like a summer storm you knew was on the way, inevitable, and even though it was still beyond the horizon, you could feel the buzz of the electricity everywhere around you. On the football field, Jubal was all business and didn’t appear to let his own feelings toward Bigs get in the way of what was best for the team. Bigs was
n’t so magnanimous; when a pass went awry or a play call was questionable, he was given to deriding his quarterback. If Donner Bigby hadn’t been an unstoppable locomotive in the backfield, his mouth might have got him benched for much of the season.
The homecoming game that year was against the Virginia High School Blue Devils, a team whose win record was only one game back of Aurora’s. It was played in a downpour, on a field that was more mud than grass. The wet conditions seriously hampered both Jubal’s accuracy in passing and his receivers’ ability to hold on to the ball. So the game was played mostly on the ground and was dominated by the rhino charges of Donner Bigby. As the fourth quarter neared its end, the score was tied at 13–13. The Blue Devils had the ball and had pushed deep into Wolves territory. The drive stalled on the twenty-two-yard line, and the Blue Devils lined up for a field goal attempt. The kick went wide to the right. All that remained was for the Wolves to run out the clock—five or six running plays, or three and a good long punt—and the game would end in a tie, with Aurora’s lead in the division secure.
In the huddle, Jubal Little called a fullback sweep right. The play was good for a short gain. He called a gut left. Bigs plowed ahead for four yards on that one. The team huddled. Their jerseys, once a glorious white and gold, were the color of pig slop and hung wet and heavy against their pads. Their bare legs and arms were so mud-crusted that you couldn’t see the color of their skin or the bruising there. The air was chill, and their huffed breaths clouded the center of the circle that their bodies, shoulder pad against shoulder pad, had formed.
Jubal looked them over. His eyes were the color of his muddied uniform, and the whites of them, under the glare of the field lights, seemed to glow. He said, “You want to settle for a tie? Or do you want to beat these bastards?”
“I want to grind their nuts under my cleats,” Bigs said without hesitation. “Just give me the ball.”
“We all together on this?” Jubal asked his teammates.
“Yeah,” they said and “You bet.”
Jubal’s eyes fell on Cork. “If I get it to you, can you hold on to it?”
The William Kent Krueger Collection #4 Page 73