The William Kent Krueger Collection #4

by William Kent Krueger

  “Whoa, O’Connor. How about you come up here and we talk.”

  “All right.”

  Cork started for the rock, but Jubal held him back.

  “You ever climb before?” he asked Cork.

  “No.”

  “Then I’m going up.”

  “Do you know how to climb?”

  “No. But I’m better at it than you.”

  Which was probably true. Jubal was better at everything. Still, it stung.

  “You stay here,” Jubal said.

  “And do what?”

  “If I chase him down off there, I don’t want him running away.” He looked up, as if contemplating the difficulty of the task ahead. “And if I fall, you think he’s going to go get help? I need you down here.”

  Without waiting to confer further, Jubal stepped up to the rugged face of Trickster’s Point and began to climb after Donner Bigby.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jubal was a spider, nimble on the rock. He climbed with a swiftness that astonished Cork, and Bigby was clearly alarmed. The big kid turned back to his own task and continued up the face of Trickster’s Point, heading for the top, which was still a good seventy feet above him. Jubal relentlessly closed the gap between them, and by the time Bigby had topped the monolith, fifteen minutes later, Jubal was only a dozen feet below him. Bigby stood and caught the full light of the sun, and bright yellow flickered all over his body as if he were electric or on fire. He bent over the edge of the rock and called down to Jubal, “Gee, Little, it’d be a shame if you lost your grip and fell.”

  “You let him come up there,” Cork hollered.

  Bigby laughed. “Or what?”

  Cork shielded his eyes against the midday sun and watched helplessly as Jubal approached the top with Bigby towering above him, showing his teeth in a kind of hungry grin. Cork was truly afraid that when Jubal’s hands made their final reach, Bigby would stomp on them and send Jubal plummeting. He was furious with himself for not going up along with his best friend or going up in his stead. He felt twisted and helpless watching from the ground as the drama played out a hundred and fifty feet above him.

  Bigby finally stepped back and disappeared from Cork’s view. Jubal crawled onto the flat crown of Trickster’s Point unimpeded, and he, too, was lost from sight. Cork became aware again of the oppressive humidity of the day. Each breath felt heavy in his lungs, and his nostrils seemed clogged with the dank smell of wet earth. He realized that a deep stillness had fallen over the area. There wasn’t a whisper of wind or the call of a single bird, and above him came no sound from the two kids facing off atop the great pillar.

  “Jubal! Bigs! What’s going on?”

  The minutes passed, and Cork’s concern grew. He remembered advice Sam Winter Moon had given him about hunting. “The most important skill of all, and the most difficult to master, is patience.” Why hadn’t they been patient? They could simply have waited on the ground, because Donner Bigby would have had to come down sometime. Cork knew the answer. Anger. It had clouded all their thinking. He looked up, unable to swallow and barely able to breathe.

  That’s when he heard the sound, one that made his blood turn to ice. From the top of Trickster’s Point, but from the far side, came a brief, terrible scream. It hit the stillness like a rock might hit a big lake, with only a moment’s impression, then it was gone and what was left was simply the vast stillness.

  “Jubal?” Cork cried toward the sky. “Jubal?”

  He received no answer. He thought for a second of climbing Trickster’s Point but had no idea what good that would do. Instead, he ran around the base of the formation, toward the side from which the scream had come.

  The body lay on its back, bent at an abnormally acute angle across a rock slab that had, ages ago, splintered from the flank of the pillar and toppled to the earth. The sight stopped Cork instantly. His legs, for a moment, refused to move him forward, and his brain refused to believe the image his eyes delivered to it. Slowly he lifted his gaze and saw, high above, a head and shoulders, silhouetted against the sun as they bent over the edge of the pillar’s crown to face the scene on the ground below.

  Cork finally willed himself forward.

  Donner Bigby’s eyes were wide open and his mouth, too, as if he was looking up at something that absolutely astonished him. Cork stared at the body, searching for any movement of those eyes, for any faint rise and fall of the massive chest, for any sign, no matter how feeble, that there might still be life in Donner Bigby. He knew he should touch Bigby, check for a pulse, speak to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do any of those things.

  He glanced back up and saw that Jubal was easing his way over the lip at the top of Trickster’s Point. Jubal moved more slowly, more carefully than he had when ascending. Cork figured that might have been because coming down was harder, but he also thought the reason could simply have been that Jubal was in no hurry to face what awaited him at the bottom. Knowing it would be quite a while before Jubal joined him, Cork finally forced himself to do what duty demanded.

  He leaned close, and his shadow fell over the kid’s face. “Donner? Can you hear me?” He gingerly touched Bigby’s neck with his fingertips, feeling for even a ghost of a pulse. He laid his ear against Bigby’s chest. Nothing came to him, except the smell of Bigby’s emptied bowels. Cork stood and moved far enough away that he couldn’t smell the stench of death.

  The full weight of the situation fell on him, and his legs would no longer hold him up. He dropped into a sitting position on the wet ground and went, for a little while, into a kind of daze.

  “Cork?” It was Jubal’s voice cutting through the haze.

  Cork snapped back to the terrible reality of the moment.

  “You okay?” Jubal asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  Jubal’s face was ghost white, and he sat down heavily beside Cork. “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  Jubal was quiet a long time, and the voice that finally spoke was smaller than Cork had ever heard from his friend. “He stumbled. He just stumbled and fell.”

  Cork tried to look into Jubal’s eyes, to find some clue there about the truth of that explanation, but Jubal averted his face.

  “I want to know everything,” Cork said.

  “There’s nothing to know,” Jubal insisted, almost desperately. “I accused him of what happened to Winona. He didn’t deny it, just told me to go fuck myself.”

  “And then he . . . just fell?”

  “He swung at me. He started it. So I swung at him. Next thing I know, he’s stumbling back and falling. It was an accident, I swear. Cork, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to say about this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We both have to tell the same story.”

  “It was an accident. We just tell them that.”

  Jubal shook his head furiously. “We can’t tell anyone I went up there with him. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t intentionally push him?”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Of course not. But nobody’s going to believe me. I’m an Indian. That’ll come out now. Think white people are going to take an Indian’s side in something like this?”

  “You’re Jubal Little,” Cork said, amazed that his friend had no idea how much weight that carried.

  “Jubal Littlewolf. With a father in prison for manslaughter. Like father, like son. That’s how they’ll play it.” He took Cork by the shoulders and leaned toward him until their faces were only inches apart. “You’re my brother. I’m counting on you.”

  A breeze had finally come up, cooling against his face. Cork was suddenly deeply aware of how much he loved his friend. He had a choice. He could believe Jubal or not. If he believed him, there was only one thing he could do.

  “What do we tell them?” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Phillip Holter, the agent in charge of the BCA team that had been sent to help with the investigation of Jubal Little
’s death, was a tall, good-looking guy somewhere in his forties. He had a build that made it clear he and a barbell were intimate friends. His hair was black and thick and held in place with a shellacking of mousse. He wore stylish glasses that had no framing around the lenses, so there was nothing to detract from one’s view and appreciation of his deep baby blues. His gaze was studied; he seemed never to blink. There was a crispness in his actions and in the way he spoke that suggested he was a man who knew his abilities and was pretty sure others appreciated them as much as he did. Cork took an immediate dislike to him, a rare experience in all his own years as a cop, but he figured he’d take a dislike to anyone who eyed him as if he were the Son of Sam.

  They interviewed Cork and Stephen separately. Holter took the father, and Ed Larson questioned the son. Under the circumstances, Cork couldn’t very well insist that he be with Stephen while Larson conducted that interview, but he wasn’t greatly concerned. The truth that Stephen would tell—and that Cork told as well—didn’t incriminate either of them. This most recent body, they’d simply stumbled upon. When Holter pointed out that the arrow was identical to the one that had killed Jubal Little and also to the arrows Cork had carried in his own quiver, Cork simply replied, “If they are my arrows, then it would be just as easy to steal two as one. Same thing would be true if someone decided to manufacture an arrow identical to mine.”

  Cork and Stephen stood well out of the way while the crime scene techs—deputies whom Larson had sent to the BCA for special training—did their jobs. The dead man’s wallet had yielded a driver’s license bearing the name William Graham Chester, a resident of Red Wing, Minnesota. When he was asked, Cork replied that the name meant nothing to him and reiterated that he’d never seen the man before. A search of the area offered no other immediate evidence, except for the tracks that the officer from the Border Patrol had been following when he left.

  After a while, among the bare aspen trees, Holter convened a conference with Sheriff Dross and Captain Ed Larson. In the time since her discussion with Cork that morning, Dross had changed into her uniform, over which she wore a yellow down vest. Though the day continued to threaten precipitation, she sported no hat on her short hair, which was the brown of otter fur.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” Stephen asked.

  “They’re probably trying to figure what all this has to do with Jubal Little’s killing.”

  “Are the two definitely related?”

  “What do you think?” Cork asked. It wasn’t rhetorical.

  Stephen said, “That’s what I was thinking about all the way to Allouette. It could have been that, whoever he was, he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the more I thought about that, it just seemed too big a coincidence.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “So if they’re related, how?”

  Cork had been watching the three cops in discussion. Holter had said something that caused Larson to look in Cork’s direction and furiously shake his head.

  “Any speculation?” Cork asked his son.

  Stephen seemed surprised to be asked, and he furrowed his brow for a while before he answered.

  “It might make sense that they were in on it together and something went bad between them up here.”

  “In on it together?”

  “Like, well, they wanted to be sure that Mr. Little was dead, and they meant to do it in a way that would throw the blame on you. So the arrow. But you’ve always talked about how hard it is to hit a moving target, especially from a distance, so they brought the rifle along, too, as sort of backup. If the arrow missed, they were going to shoot Mr. Little with the rifle.”

  Cork smiled at the beauty of the logic, which was different from his own, and better. He’d been thinking that it was two separate men with two separate agendas, but he couldn’t quite put it together in an understandable way. Stephen’s scenario, on the other hand, made good sense.

  Stephen was almost as tall as his father, and he looked almost directly into his father’s eyes as he went on. “But if the first plan didn’t work, and they couldn’t pin the murder on you, then . . .” He faltered. Traditionally, the Ojibwe were a people who ably hid their emotions behind a stolid mask, and Stephen was the O’Connor in whom the Ojibwe blood was most apparent. But he didn’t bother to try to hide his horror. “If they hadn’t killed Mr. Little with the arrow and had to shoot him, they’d probably have to get rid of the only witness. So you’d be dead, too.”

  Cork put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “But I’m not dead.” He nodded toward the great stone monolith that stood dark against the gray sky. “Nanaboozhoo, that old trickster, must have something else in mind for me.”

  “It’s not funny, Dad.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Stephen. I’ve always believed that things happen for a reason, and the reason is always part of some greater design. And so the question here is, What’s the big picture?”

  “You sound like Henry Meloux.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. And the question still stands.”

  Cork spotted a lone figure threading his way among the aspens on the crown of the ridge, and he quickly recognized John Berglund. Dross saw the officer, too, said something to Holter and Larson, and they all turned to watch him come.

  Cork said to Stephen, “Let’s mosey over and see what he has to say.”

  No one tried to stop them as they crossed the ridgetop, and they reached the sheriff and other officers just as Berglund arrived.

  “Agent Berglund, I’m Agent Holter, BCA.” Holter extended his hand. “This is Captain Ed Larson. Sheriff Dross, of course, you know. She’s already filled us in.”

  Berglund shook hands around and gave Cork a nod in acknowledgment. Then he asked Holter, “Any idea who he is?”

  “Driver’s license says he’s William Graham Chester, from Red Wing,” Holter replied. “That’s all we know at the moment.”

  “What did you find, John?” Dross asked.

  “Two sets of tracks. They came from different directions, but their paths joined about a mile from here. One came from the lake, the other from an old logging road farther north. It’s barely a road anymore, so overgrown you’d have trouble identifying it as such, and I couldn’t find it on any of my maps. But a vehicle’s parked there. My guess is that you’ll find the keys to it somewhere on your dead man. When your people are ready, I’ll be happy to show them where it is.”

  “Thank you,” Larson said.

  “One came from the lake?” Cork said.

  “Any sign of a canoe?”

  “Gone, but I found where he’d beached it.”

  “So two came in, but only one left,” Dross said.

  They stood a moment, digesting the information.

  Into that meditative silence Cork offered, “He looks like a hunter, but if he is, where’s his blaze orange? Stephen believes he wasn’t a hunter and that the guys were working together. The plan was to kill Jubal and make it look like I’d done it. But killing someone with a bow is pretty risky, so our guy on the ground over there was backup. If the arrow failed, Jubal Little would have been shot to death. And probably me along with him, to eliminate the witness.”

  Holter chewed on that a bit, then asked, “Okay. If they were in on it together, why is one of them lying there dead?”

  “They had a falling-out,” Stephen offered, but not boldly, clearly not prepared to defend his thesis.

  Dross nodded, as if giving Stephen’s speculation due consideration. Then she said, “Maybe there’s another possibility, Stephen. What’s the best way for two people to keep a secret?”

  The young man thought a moment, then the light dawned. “If one of them is dead.”

  “Exactly,” Dross said. “Maybe our killer simply eliminated the only man who could finger him.”

  “But who were they, and why would they want Mr. Little dead?”

  “That’s for us to figure out,” Holter said,
tersely drawing the discussion to a close. “Mr. O’Connor, I think your usefulness here, and that of your son, is at an end. You’re free to go. I’m sure we’ll have further questions, however, so please make yourself available.”

  Ed Larson had been staring at Trickster’s Point, as if the great pillar held him hypnotized. Before either Cork or Stephen could move to leave, he asked, “Who chose this site for your hunting outing?” His voice was a little distant, as if he was daydreaming or maybe just very deep in thought.

  Cork said, “Jubal did.”

  “Did anyone else know you were coming here?”

  As if it should have been dismally obvious, Holter said, “Anyone who reads a newspaper knew that Little planned to go hunting here with O’Connor.”

  Larson shook his head. “I spent last night reading the major newspaper stories following the election. They all reported Jubal Little’s intention to come north to hunt with Cork, but nowhere in any of the stories was Trickster’s Point mentioned specifically.”

  For a brief instant, Holter looked like a kid who’d blown his homework assignment, then he swung his unblinking blue eyes to Cork and said, as in accusation, “Well?”

  “At the Broiler yesterday morning, a lot of folks drifted over to wish him luck and tell him they were going to vote for him,” Cork said. “Jubal mentioned to a few of them where we’d be hunting.”

  “What about before that?” Larson said. “Because if the killing was planned, they probably had to know in advance where they would do it.”

  “I told my kids,” Cork said. “Did you mention it to anyone, Stephen?”

  “I told people you were going hunting with Mr. Little. I don’t remember if I said where.”

  “I’ll ask Jenny when I get back to Aurora,” Cork promised.

  “What about Jubal?” Larson asked. “Who did he tell?”

  Cork shook his head. “No idea.”

  Larson again eyed the great monolith and asked, as if genuinely mystified, “Why Trickster’s Point?”