Trickster's Point

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Reviews

  About the Author

  About Atria Books

  Ask Atria

  Reader’s Companion

  For Joanna MacKenzie and Alec MacDonald, two of my brightest guiding stars

  To Live and Die in Minnesota

  Minnesota is a state of mythic storytelling. Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Paul Bunyan and Babe. In a more modern vein, the stories of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, of course, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales. I’m sure that a lot of readers assume I’ve set the Cork O’Connor series in Minnesota simply because I live here. True, but only a small part of a much larger picture. In the course of my life, I’ve made my home in some stunningly beautiful areas: Oregon, northern California, Colorado. I’ve tried to write stories nestled in these places, but the inspiration hasn’t been there for me, not in the way I feel when I write a novel grounded solidly in Minnesota. And here’s the reason in two words: conflict and heart.

  What is it that drives great stories? Conflict. Think Romeo and Juliet. The engine at the heart of that timeless tragedy is the conflict between two families, the Montagues and the Capulets. In Moby Dick, it’s Ahab’s relentless battle against the great white whale. In To Kill A Mockingbird, social justice is pitted against racial prejudice in the Depression-era South. Conflict, conflict, conflict. When, at just over forty years of age, I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery, I turned my sights to the North Country of Minnesota, because all I saw was conflict. There was the age-old abrasion of the Ojibwe culture rubbing against the culture of the white intruders, and before that it was the Lakota being pushed out by the Ojibwe through bloody battle. There was the land itself, a rugged topography of old rock, immense forests, deep lakes, fast streams, and vast areas of isolation. On top of all this, there were the infamous bitter winters of Minnesota, looming, in the imagination of most Americans, as large as Paul Bunyan and as deadly as the cannibal monster of Ojibwe myth, the Windigo. In a nutshell, Minnesota is a land that, from its beginning, has been steeped in conflict.

  But I couldn’t write about this place if my heart wasn’t wholly invested in it, and that’s probably the most important reason for the setting I’ve chosen.

  I’m not native to Minnesota. I came here at the age of thirty so that my wife could attend the University of Minnesota’s law school. Before that, I was a gypsy kid. Growing up, I lived in ten different towns in eight different states. I never had a place I truly thought of as home. The moment I set foot in Minnesota, however, I knew I’d finally found my home. I fell in love with this state and its people, and I understood from very early on that, when I knuckled down and became serious about my writing, whatever I created would be, in some way, a tribute to this adopted homeland of mine.

  The writer Tony Hillerman, author of the marvelous Navajo Tribal Police series, which is set in the Four Corners area of the Southwest and deals significantly with the culture of the Dinee, had a profound effect on the decisions I’ve made regarding my own Cork O’Connor series. I had the great good fortune of hearing his editor, Eamon Dolan, speak at a mystery conference many years ago. During the course of his remarks, Dolan told his audience that Americans liked to read “domestica exotica,” which was a term he’d coined. What he meant was that Americans enjoy reading about a setting within the confines of the continental United States, ergo, domestica, but they prefer to be introduced to a place that’s more or less unknown to them and that, as a result, has an exotic flavor.

  In my own stories, I try very hard to give readers a sensual journey. I want them to feel as if they’ve been to the North Country, felt the bite of a bitter winter wind or breathed the piney scent of an evergreen forest or plunged into the bracing, pristine water of a wilderness lake. I want them to love Minnesota as much as I do.

  I’m not alone in putting my feelings about this remarkable state on paper. Some of the best mystery writers in the country are my neighbors, and they, too, set their work here—John Sanford, Ellen Hart, Pete Hauptman, Mary Logue, David Housewright, Brian Freeman, Jess Lourey, to name just a few. I’m often asked why Minnesota breeds so many fine authors in the genre. Cabin fever always comes readily to mind, but there’s a more realistic reason. It’s a state that inspires fine writing in general, and our mystery writers are simply a subset of that great whole.

  In my fiction, setting is the foundation for almost everything. Character is built on it. Motivations arise from it. Death visits because of it. To read a Cork O’Connor novel is, in a way, to understand what it is to live and die in Minnesota.

  PROLOGUE

  The dying don’t easily become the dead.

  Even with an arrow in his heart, Jubal Little took three hours to die. Politician that he was, most of that time he couldn’t stop talking. At first, he talked about the arrow. Not how it got there—he believed he knew the answer to that—but arguing with Cork over whether to try to pull it out or push it through. Corcoran O’Connor did neither. Then he talked about the past, a long and convoluted rambling punctuated by moments of astonishing self-awareness. He admitted he’d made mistakes. He told Cork things he swore he’d never told anyone else, told them in a way that made Cork feel uncomfortably like Jubal’s confessor. Finally he talked about what lay ahead. He wasn’t afraid to die, he said. And he said that he understood the situation, understood why Cork had put that arrow in his heart.

  He died sitting up, his back against hard rock, his big body gray in the long shadow cast by the imposing monolith known as Trickster’s Point. If the political polls were correct, in just a few days Jubal Little would have won a landslide victory as the new governor of Minnesota. Cork had known Jubal Little all his life and, for some of those years, had thought of him as a best friend. Even so, he’d planned to mark his ballot for another man on election day. Partly it was because Jubal wanted different things for Minnesota and the North Country and the Ojibwe than Cork wanted. But mostly it was because Jubal Little was absolutely capable of murder, and Cork O’Connor was the only one who knew it.

  CHAPTER 1

  The walls of the interrogation room of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department were dull gray and completely bare. There were no windows. It was furnished with two chairs and a plai
n wooden table nudged into a corner. The subject of an interview sat in a straight-back chair with four legs that rested firmly on the floor. The interviewer’s chair had rollers, which allowed movement toward or away from the subject. On the ceiling was what appeared to be a smoke detector but, in reality, concealed a video camera and microphone that fed to a monitor and recording system in the room next door. The interview room was lit from above by diffuse fluorescent lighting that illuminated without glare. Everything had been designed to be free from any distraction that might draw the subject’s focus away from the interviewer and the questions. Cork knew this because he’d had the room constructed during his own tenure as sheriff of Tamarack County.

  Although he wore no watch and there was nothing in the room that would have clued him about time, Cork knew it was late afternoon. Around five o’clock, more or less. Captain Ed Larson had removed his own watch, a standard procedure when questioning a suspect in the interview room. Timelessness was part of the protocol for keeping the subject focused only on what was happening inside the small box created by those four bare walls. This was Cork’s third round of questioning about the death of Jubal Little that day and was the most formal so far.

  The first interview had taken place at Trickster’s Point while the techs were processing the crime scene. It had been Sheriff Marsha Dross herself who’d asked the questions. Cork was pretty sure nobody really thought then that he’d killed Jubal Little. Marsha was just trying to get a good sense of what had gone down. It wasn’t until he told her that he’d sat for three hours while Jubal died that she gave him a look of incomprehension, then of suspicion.

  The second interview had been conducted an hour and a half later in her office back at the department. Ed Larson had been present for that one. He was in charge of major crimes investigation for Tamarack County. He’d let Marsha ask the questions—more of them this time and more probing—and had mostly observed. At the end of that round, he’d asked if Cork was hungry and would like something to eat or drink. Cork wanted nothing, but he said yes anyway.

  While the food was coming, they moved to the interview room, just Larson and Cork this time, but Cork knew that Dross would be watching on the monitor next door.

  Deputy Azevedo brought in the meal. He looked at Cork as if he didn’t know him at all, though they’d been acquainted for years.

  “On the table,” Larson told him, and the deputy set the tray down and left. “Go ahead and eat, Cork,” Larson said. “I just want to look over a few of my notes.”

  He pulled a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sport coat. Larson always looked and dressed more like a college professor than a cop. He had gold wire-rim glasses and wore honest to God tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. He was nearing sixty, more than a half dozen years older than Cork, and still had an enviable head of hair that was a distinguished silver-black. He was already on the force when Cork first joined as a deputy more than twenty years before. They’d become friends, and Cork had a great deal of respect for him and his abilities. As soon as Cork was elected sheriff, he’d put Larson in charge of investigating major crimes.

  While Cork sat at the table and ate, Larson pretended to go over his notes. Cork knew that, in reality, Larson was more interested in his appetite, knew that people who’d committed a violent crime were often so troubled by what they’d done that they couldn’t eat. So Cork made as if he hadn’t had a bite of food in a month and rammed down every crumb of his cheeseburger and gulped every drop of coffee.

  “Thanks,” he said when he’d finished.

  Larson looked up from his notepad and, with his index finger, eased his glasses a quarter of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture he sometimes made unconsciously when he was about to do something that was uncomfortable for him. “Cork, I know you know the drill. I’ve got to make sure that you understand your rights.”

  “Miranda,” Cork said.

  “Miranda,” Larson acknowledged and went through the litany.

  “It’s official then?” Cork said.

  “What’s official?”

  “I’m officially a suspect.”

  Larson squinted, a look of pain. “In my shoes, how would you see it?”

  “I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how I’d see it, Ed. If our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that you’d killed Jubal Little.”

  “Tell me why, if I were in your shoes, I would have waited three hours before trying to get him some help.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get him help. He was already dead when I left him.”

  “Okay, so why didn’t you go for help as soon as you understood the seriousness of the situation?”

  “I’ve told you. Jubal asked me to stay.”

  “Because he was afraid?”

  “Jubal?” Cork shook his head. “No, not Jubal. Never Jubal.”

  “You were his only hope of surviving, and yet he insisted that you stay. I don’t understand.”

  “He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.”

  “You couldn’t have carried him out?”

  “He hurt whenever I tried to move him, hurt a lot. It was that broadhead arrow tip tearing him up inside. I didn’t want to give him any more pain. If I’d tried to carry him out, he would simply have died sooner.”

  “So you just sat there and watched him go?”

  “No. I listened to him. I think that was the main reason he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to. You know how politicians are.”

  Larson gave a startled look that quickly turned critical. “There’s nothing humorous in this situation, Cork.”

  “I’m not sure Jubal saw it that way. The last thing he did on this earth was smile, Ed.”

  He could see that Larson didn’t believe him. Probably he didn’t believe a lot of what Cork had said so far.

  “Did you have your cell phone with you?”

  Cork shook his head. “We were out there to get away from a world of phone calls. But even if I’d taken my cell phone, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Why?”

  “Coverage is hit and miss up there. But around Trickster’s Point, especially, nothing gets through.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Cork shrugged. “Ask the Ojibwe, and they’d tell you it’s just Nanaboozhoo messing with you.”

  “Nanaboozhoo?”

  “The Trickster. That’s his territory.”

  Larson stared at him. His face reminded Cork of a ceramic doll with all the features painted on and none of them capable of moving. Larson looked down at his notes. “You had breakfast at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler before you headed out. You had a cheese omelet, and Jubal Little had cakes and eggs over easy. When you left, you both spent a few minutes standing out on the sidewalk, arguing.”

  Cork said, “Did you find Heidi or did she come looking for you?”

  He was talking about Heidi Steger, their waitress at the Broiler that morning.

  Larson didn’t answer but said instead, “What did you argue about?”

  “We didn’t argue. It was more like a heated discussion.”

  “What did you discuss, then, so heatedly?”

  “Politics, Ed. Just politics.”

  Larson maintained his ceramic doll face for a long moment, and Cork, in that same long moment, returned his steady gaze.

  “Okay,” Larson finally went on. “You said he talked a lot as he was dying. What did he talk about?”

  “First he talked about that arrow, whether to try to remove it. Jubal wanted to, I didn’t. Then I tried to leave to get help. Jubal wanted me to stay. After that, he talked about life. Or I should say his life. It was so Jubal of him, but understandable under the circumstances. He had a lot of regrets. Toward the end, he was in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he mostly rambled. It was hard to make much sense of anything.”

  “Did he say who’d shot him?”

  “He didn??
?t have to. We both knew who he believed it was.”

  “Who was that?”

  “He thought it was me.”

  “He thought you were trying to kill him?”

  “He thought I’d shot him by accident.” Which was the only lie Cork had told in any of the interviews that day.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “You meant to shoot him with that arrow?”

  Cork refrained from smiling at the obvious and shallow trap and told him once again, “It wasn’t me who shot Jubal.”

  “Who then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Hear anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “So, as far as you know, you were both alone out there?”

  “Clearly not. Whoever shot that arrow was out there with us.”

  In the beginning, Larson had positioned his chair near to Cork, making the interrogation a more intimate affair, just between the two of them. Between friends, maybe. Now he backed off a couple of feet and asked, rather indifferently, “Do you consider yourself a good bow hunter, Cork?”

  “Fair to middling.”

  “When you hunt, you’re a purist, right? You do still-stalking. No deer blind. You actually track the animal on foot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m guessing you’d have to be tuned in to all the sounds around you, wouldn’t you? Reading all the signs?”

  Cork understood the thrust of Larson’s questions. If there was someone else at Trickster’s Point with them, why didn’t Cork know it?

  “Must take incredible stealth,” Larson said.

  “That all depends on what you’re after,” Cork replied.

  “You were after white-tail deer, weren’t you?”

  Cork said, “Ed, what I was really after is something you can’t understand, and if I say it, you’ll misconstrue my meaning.”

  “I’ll do my best to understand.” He promised with such earnest appeal that Cork knew he was telling the truth.

  So Cork offered his own truth in return. He said, “I was hunting Jubal Little.”