Trickster's Point

  “They would, huh?” He looked up into the big man’s face, into his own reflection in the lenses of the sunglasses. “I was under the impression that you didn’t work for the Jaegers. You work for the Littles.”

  “Consider it a request from Mrs. Little then. But the Jaegers’ll be there, too.”

  “All right. I’ll follow you.”

  “I’d prefer you rode along with me.” Yates finally took the sunglasses off, and Cork saw that his eyes were troubled. “Got something I want to say to you.”

  “All right. Let me call home first.”

  He checked in with Jenny. Everyone was up, and everything was fine, and Cy Borkman, God bless him, had shown up of his own accord and was having a plate of pancakes and eggs at the kitchen table even as they spoke. Jenny relayed a message from him to Cork: Do what you have to. The home front is secured.

  Yates drove, but not a direct route to Jubal Little’s place on Iron Lake. Cork waited for him to say what was on his mind, but it was clear that Yates had to work up to it. Cork figured it must be something pretty hard, considering all the posturing and now all the delay.

  They came to a stoplight, one of only three in Aurora, and Yates said, “It’s like this. No matter how it turns out, Camilla’s going to be hurt.”

  So it’s Camilla now, Cork thought. What he said was, “Jubal’s dead. What could hurt her more than that?”

  Yates shot him a cold look. “It’s going to all come out about Jubal and that Indian woman, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, Kenny.”

  “Don’t play stupid, Cork. I’d hate to see Camilla have to go through the public shit bath that would result if the press found out why Jubal came north.”

  “Kenny, you have no idea why Jubal really came north.”

  “To fuck the Indian woman.”

  “The physical thing was part of it, I’m sure, but there was something else, something much deeper going on. In a way, I think Jubal was looking for wholeness of spirit. I think that’s what he was really after.”

  “Doesn’t matter what he was really after. Those reporters, if they get wind of this woman, won’t be saying he visited her for wholeness, believe me.”

  “I’m going to do my best to keep anyone out of this who doesn’t have to be a part of the public story. Once again, I’m giving you my word.”

  The light turned green, and Yates pulled ahead.

  “Okay, something you maybe ought to know, Cork. That bullet hole through your windshield? You got a lead on the guy who fired it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Check this out. Yesterday afternoon Nick Jaeger leaves the house. He’s carrying a piece, a rifle. Gets into his Mercedes and takes off. Doesn’t come back for maybe three hours. Brings the rifle with him back into the house. This morning Camilla tells me he’s heading down to the Twin Cities tomorrow. Not even sticking around to see the end of the investigation into Jubal’s murder.”

  “A pressing appointment?” Cork asked.

  “Right,” Yates scoffed. “Him and Jubal used to hunt together. Black powder, muzzle-loaders, that antique gun shit. Jubal told me that Nick Jaeger was the second best shot he’d ever seen.”

  Cork said, “Let me guess. Jubal was the best.”

  “There’s a gun case in Jubal’s house,” Yates went on. “It’s locked or I would have checked to see if any of his rifles had been fired recently. Maybe it’s something you ought to think about. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Why would Nick Jaeger try to kill me?”

  Yates pulled into the drive of Jubal Little’s lake home. “You’re the P.I. You figure it out.”

  Jaeger’s Mercedes SUV was parked in the drive, and Yates pulled up behind it. They got out, and Yates walked ahead. Cork saw a curtain in a front window drop into place. Yates opened the door for Cork and ushered him inside.

  “In here,” Alex Jaeger called from down the hallway.

  “They’re all yours,” Yates said and bowed out.

  Cork walked to the den, where he’d faced the Jaeger family the day after Jubal died. They’d scattered themselves about the room like throw pillows, Alex standing by the fireplace, Nick at the liquor cabinet, and Camilla sitting demurely on the brown leather divan. When he came in, they watched him like a caribou might track a nearby wolf.

  “Thank you for coming,” Alex said.

  “With all due respect, Kenny didn’t give me much choice.”

  “I’m sorry, Cork,” Camilla said. “Kenny’s . . . well, Kenny takes his job seriously. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

  A fire crackled away in the fireplace, and the room felt too warm.

  “Mind if I take my coat off?” Cork asked.

  “Be my guest,” Alex said. He waited until Cork had slipped off his jacket and laid it over the back of one of the plush easy chairs, then he got down to brass tacks. “Is it true they’ve arrested the man who killed Jubal?”

  Cork didn’t answer immediately. He took a moment to study each of the Jaegers carefully. Alex stood erect, almost imperious, and Cork could see him commanding men in uniform, or standing before legislators and speaking to them in a way meant to bend them to his purpose. He was born to lead, or at least held himself as if that were the case. Nick dropped ice into a glass and poured in some Johnnie Walker Blue. He seemed more intent on his liquor than on what was occurring in the room, but it was, Cork thought, a studied gesture. And then there was Camilla, who sat lovely and attentive and with a lingering air of sadness about her, and who seemed to Cork to be somehow at the apex of this familial triangle.

  “Why am I really here?” Cork said.

  “I don’t understand,” Alex replied. “It was a simple question.”

  “And one you already know the answer to. You’ve been inside this investigation from the beginning. I don’t know how, and I don’t care, but everything I know about it, you know, too. So what is it that you really want to ask me?”

  Nick glanced up from his glass of scotch and locked eyes with his brother. Camilla looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap.

  “All right, here it is,” Alex said. “How much will it cost us to make sure that you say nothing to the press about Jubal and this Indian woman?”

  “Ah,” Cork said. He thought a moment. “How much are you willing to pay?”

  “I assume you have a number in mind.”

  “Make an offer.”

  “All right,” Alex said. “Five hundred thousand dollars.”

  Cork smiled. “What is it you’re trying to protect? Jubal’s name? The Jaeger name?” His eyes swung toward Camilla. “Or just protective brothers trying to stand between their sister and the bullies of the world? I don’t want your money.”

  Camilla spoke up immediately. “I told them you wouldn’t accept something like this, Cork. They wouldn’t believe me. And honestly, I don’t care what people might say about Jubal and Winona Crane. I know the truth, and that’s what’s important to me.”

  Alex said, “The truth? Hell, Camilla, the truth is that the guy’s been unfaithful to you for years with this woman.”

  “We had an understanding about her.”

  “Yeah, that Jubal could walk all over you and you wouldn’t say boo to him.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Her anger was clearly mounting.

  “Oh? I’d love to be enlightened. Because whenever I confronted Jubal with it, he just clammed up. Christ, the stink of guilt poured off him.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Camilla shouted. “Jubal loved me.”

  “Then why was he fucking another woman?”

  “Because,” she said as the tears began, “I wasn’t enough. And I understood that. And I wanted Jubal anyway. And she was the price.” She wiped her cheeks with her knuckle.

  Alex threw his arms up as if in disgust or surrender. “It doesn’t matter. If the press gets wind of her, they’ll fry him up and serve him to the public on a platter.” r />
  “He’s dead,” Camilla said. “It can’t hurt him now.”

  Nick said, “But it’ll hurt you, Camilla.” This was the first he’d spoken since Cork arrived, and it was a tender offering. “The shadow of Jubal will follow you, and people will think all kinds of things about you. They don’t know you.”

  She smiled at her brother. “You don’t think I’m strong enough to endure that?”

  “All these years, I’ve watched you take what Jubal offered you, and I couldn’t understand why you accepted so little when you deserved so much more. It’s not right that he should go on making your life miserable even after he’s dead.”

  She stood up, walked to the liquor cabinet, put her hand against her brother’s cheek, and said, “The life I had with him was the life I chose, Nickie.”

  “No, Dad and Alex chose it for you. You were the sacrifice on the altar of their political ambition.”

  “Is that what you’ve thought all these years?”

  “When we hunted together,” Nick said, “I sometimes put Jubal in my sights and thought about pulling the trigger, just to set you free.”

  Her hand slid from his cheek, and she took a half step away. “You didn’t kill him, did you, Nickie?”

  “Me?” He seemed genuinely surprised at the question. “No. But I won’t lie to you. I’m not sorry he’s dead.”

  “I don’t want to hear that.” Camilla turned from him and walked away.

  He watched her go, then took a long swallow from his glass.

  An uncomfortable silence had fallen over the room, and into it Cork dropped this: “Is that why you tried to kill me, Nick? To protect your sister from more hurt?”

  “Tried to kill you?” Nick gave a short laugh. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The slug through my windshield. I think you fired it.”

  “Whoa, O’Connor, hold on a minute,” Alex said. “That’s a hell of an accusation.”

  “Maybe so, but easily proven.” Cork walked to a window of the den that overlooked the driveway. He pulled a curtain back, so that Nick Jaeger’s Mercedes was visible on the drive. “Whoever it was who fired the shot left tire tracks at the scene. The sheriff’s people took impressions. My guess is that if I told them to check the tires on your SUV, Nick, they’d get a match.”

  “There are lots of vehicles with those tires on them, I’m sure,” Nick said.

  “Maybe so. But they also got an impression from the sole of an expensive hiking boot. If they secured a search warrant, I’d be willing to bet they’d find that boot and its mate somewhere among your things. So, I’m going to ask you again, is that why you tried to kill me?”

  Nick didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all. He was like one of the animals he hunted, frozen in crosshairs. “If I’d wanted to kill you,” he finally said, “I would have shot you through the eye.”

  “Jesus, Nick, just shut up,” Alex cried.

  “You just wanted to scare me?” Cork said.

  “Don’t say another word, you dumb ox,” Alex said.

  “Fuck you, Alex. I’m not Jubal. I don’t have to listen to you.” To Cork, Nick said, “I didn’t want you asking any more questions that might end up hurting Camilla. I just wanted you to butt out.”

  “No, Nickie, no,” Camilla said. “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did,” he told her. “Alex was just standing around doing nothing. I knew he didn’t care about you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Alex fired at him.

  “To you and Dad, all Camilla’s been is a way to get the Jaeger name firmly imprinted on American politics. You never cared if she was happy.”

  “Oh, Nickie, I wasn’t unhappy.”

  He gave her a look that Cork thought was full of a lifetime of love and concern. “I wanted more for you than that. You deserved more.”

  “Oh, God,” Alex said and leaned against the mantel as if he needed support.

  Camilla returned to her younger brother and stared deeply into his eyes. “You didn’t kill Jubal. Promise me that you didn’t kill Jubal.”

  “I didn’t,” Nick said. “I swear to you. I was having brunch and Bloody Marys at Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis when Jubal was killed. I can prove that, if I need to.”

  Alex said, as if exhausted, “So what now, O’Connor?”

  Camilla went to Cork and took his hands in hers. “Please, let it go. I know it was awful, but you weren’t hurt. Please, if you ever cared about Jubal and me, let it go.”

  The green of her eyes reminded him of wet mint leaves. In her gaze, he saw desperation and hope and sincerity, and although it went against everything sensible and every instinct he’d ever acquired in his years as a cop, he said to her, “All right.” To Nick, he said, “I want to talk to you. Alone.”

  Cork let Nick Jaeger go ahead. He picked up his jacket, slung it over his arm, and walked out the door, leaving in the room behind him a silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the slide of ice in an emptied liquor glass.

  In the hallway, at the front door, Nick stopped and turned to face him.

  “Rhiannon,” Cork said.

  Nick looked at him blankly.

  “Did you fire that shot because of Rhiannon?”

  Nick seemed genuinely confused. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cork had dealt with enough liars in his law enforcement career and in his life to know more often than not when he wasn’t being given the truth. As disappointed as he was, he thought Jaeger was being straight with him.

  “All right,” he said. Then he leaned threateningly close. “I heard that you’re thinking of leaving Tamarack County tomorrow. See that you do. By first light would be good, don’t you think?”

  Nick’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was swallowing something bitter, and his hand squeezed the glass he still held as if choking the life from it.

  “And I’d like it if I never saw you here again.”

  For a long moment, Nick didn’t move. At last he gave a nod, barely perceptible.

  “Good. One last question,” Cork said. “How’d you know I’d be on the road and where to position yourself for that shot?”

  Nick straightened himself, as if attempting to recover his dignity. “You’re not the only one who knows how to stalk when he’s hunting.”

  Cork let it go at that, stepped away from him, opened the door, and left the house.

  Yates was waiting for him at the Escalade. “So?”

  “One hell of a goofy family.”

  “Tell me about it.” Yates made no move to get into the vehicle. “So?”

  “Kenny, we’ll probably never know who fired that shot at me. I’m thinking maybe it was just a dumb-ass hunter who didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “That’s the way it is, huh?”

  “That’s the way it is. Mind taking me back to my car now?”

  Yates opened the door. “My pleasure.”

  CHAPTER 33

  In November, a little over a year after he’d married Camilla Jaeger, Jubal Little came north to bow-hunt with Cork O’Connor. That’s what he told Camilla anyway. Cork knew it was for a different reason, and he knew because Jubal had asked him to help in the deception. As a married man with children, he normally would have had no part in helping a man deceive his wife in order to be with another woman. But this was different.

  When Jubal married Camilla, it was a union of purpose. It reminded Cork of the royal marriages of old Europe, mergers for the consolidation of power. The Jaegers had political savvy and their name had political cachet. Jubal had the bearing, the looks, the image, the ambition. But he told Cork, in a drunken phone conversation shortly after the wedding, that he felt like a big empty ship gone off course. He made it clear he wasn’t fond of the Jaegers.

  In that same drunken conversation, he told Cork, “All they want me to be is some kind of horse they can all ride to political glory on. They want it to be all about the Jaeger legacy. They want to pull the
strings and have me do their dance.”

  “What about Winona’s vision, you on the mountaintop?”

  “Fuck her vision. And fuck the Jaegers. Fuck ’em all.”

  “Does that go for Camilla?”

  Jubal was quiet a long time. “She deserves better than me,” he finally said.

  Better than Jubal Little? Cork thought, and he knew that his old friend was in trouble.

  “Winona won’t answer my calls. And Willie won’t pass along my messages. I need to see her, Cork.”

  “What do you want from me, Jubal?”

  “Talk to her. Tell her I’ve got to see her. Tell her I’m dying.”

  Coming from anyone else, that would have been hyperbole. But coming from the mouth of Jubal Little, it was serious.

  “I’m not going to help you start something with her.”

  “I don’t want to start anything, Cork. I want . . .” He’d fallen quiet again, but this time it was as if he’d lost his way.

  “What do you want, Jubal?”

  “Tell her I want to heal. Tell her I want to be strong again. Will you do that, Cork?”

  And so Cork had been the intermediary, and Jubal Little had come north without his wife on the pretext of a bow hunt with his best friend from boyhood.

  They had, in fact, gone bow hunting, for the first time since they’d parted ways after Jubal graduated from high school. Cork hunted every season, hunted in the old way Sam Winter Moon had taught him, often with Sam himself, who was still alive in those days. He was amazed at his old friend’s ability. Not only was Jubal still able to find and follow the track of a deer but he was also, even after all the years away from the hunt, a better shot with an arrow than Cork could ever hope to be.

  But the bow hunt was only the cover. Jubal’s visit with Winona was the real point, and he sandwiched his time with Cork between his times with Winona. Cork had no idea what passed between them, though he could guess about part of it. In his own mind it was, as Henry Meloux had said long ago, that there were spiritual bonds connecting certain people, that they were two sides of the same leaf, two halves of a broken stone, and that it was not about love, as most people thought of that word, but about a wholeness that was there when the two parts came together.