Red Knife

  Now Lucinda allowed the worry to overwhelm her. No mother would willingly desert her child this way. And Alejandro, for all his macho posturing, was a good father and husband. He, too, would not be absent if he could help it.

  She stood slowly and tried to return Misty to her crib, but the baby began to wake and Lucinda decided it was best to hold her a bit longer. Once again she checked the rooms of the house. Nothing seemed out of place, nothing amiss, though she wondered at the shoes on the mat beside the front door. In addition to her own, there were a pair of Skechers she knew belonged to Rayette, and a pair of Red Wing boots that were probably Alejandro’s. It seemed odd that these items were still there. Rayette usually picked up before she retired for the night. And if they’d gone out this morning, why hadn’t they put on their shoes?

  She grabbed the soiled diaper she’d left on the changing table and took it to the utility room off the kitchen to dispose of it in the trash bin. The room had a door to the outside, facing the garage. The door frame was splintered, as if by a powerful blow, and the door itself stood open.

  “Madre de Dios,” Lucinda whispered, hoarse with fear.

  With the child still in her arms, she stumbled outside through the open door and gulped in the cool, pine-scented air. She hurried to the garage and peered in a window. Both her son’s Explorer and the Toyota Corolla that Rayette drove were parked inside. She stepped back, stepped into something slippery, and she looked down. She stood in the middle of a dark, irregular shape that might have been spilled oil, but looked more like blood.

  Her legs went shaky. Misty felt too heavy in her arms. Something had happened, she knew it absolutely. Something bad.

  “Call Will,” she said, speaking aloud to give herself courage. Her husband would know what to do.

  The backyard had been carved out of a meadow, and tall wild grasses grew up against Alejandro’s neatly mowed lawn. A gathering of crows, noisy and contentious, fluttered about in the high grass a few yards into the meadow. She wanted to ignore their greedy cries, but crows were scavengers, she knew, and she found herself drawn toward them, pulled slowly across the yard by the dark need to know what it was they fought over. As she drew nearer, she saw an outline pressed down in the meadow grass where the birds had gathered. The sun had climbed above the pines along the east side of the meadow, and grass shimmered with drops of yellow dew and beads of a garnet color.

  At her approach, the crows lifted, a black curtain rising, and they flew away.

  When Lucinda saw the prize that had drawn them there, she screamed. The baby woke and echoed her.

  FIVE

  Occasionally on Sunday mornings in church, Cork just wasn’t there. His butt was in the pew but his mind was a million miles away. That was a blessing of ritual: Some Sundays you could fake it. This was one of those Sundays, and Cork went through Mass without thinking about it. In his head, he was going over the talk he would have with Buck Reinhardt afterward. It would be tricky, but he liked the challenge of bringing Buck and Kingbird together. The truth was that he was dying to know what the leader of the Red Boyz had to say. What was it he was willing to offer Reinhardt? Giving up Lonnie Thunder, turning him over to the sheriff, didn’t feel right. A gang—any brotherhood—was strong because of the integrity of the whole. Solidarity was the foundation, and its erosion was the end. Giving up Thunder would be too great a risk. Kingbird had to understand that. So what do you offer as justice, Cork wondered, when justice was impossible to offer?

  He was pulled from his reverie when his daughter, seventeen-year-old Annie, left the choir loft and joined another teenager—Ulysses Kingbird—in front of the chancel rail for the offertory. Annie sang a medieval hymn that the young Kingbird had arranged. Ulysses accompanied her on guitar. They’d been practicing for weeks. Cork had heard Annie singing in the bathroom, in her bedroom, humming on the stairs. This was the first time he’d heard her with the accompaniment and he was moved. It was extraordinary.

  After the service, Cork and Jo caught up with Ulysses Kingbird in the common room in the church basement. This was where the congregation usually gathered to socialize. Refreshments were kept simple: juice or punch for the children, coffee for adults, cookies for all. The kitchen abutted the common room, and there were always several women visible through the wide serving windows, bustling around in an important way.

  Ulysses stood in a corner with his father, Will Kingbird, who had a cell phone to his ear. Ulysses was sixteen—barely. His skin had the shadowy cast of the Ojibwe, courtesy of his father, but his features were sharp, his face narrow, his lips thin and soft, all evidence of the Hispanic blood on his mother’s side. In a couple of years, he might grow handsome, but at the moment he was awkward and pimpled. Standing beside his father, he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

  “Ulysses,” Jo said, approaching him with a warm smile. “That was an absolutely beautiful piece you played.”

  “Thanks.” His dark eyes dropped to the linoleum. “It was Annie, you know. She’s got the voice.”

  “Don’t go selling yourself short. You play the guitar wonderfully. And that arrangement was extraordinary.”

  He shrugged off her compliment. It was clear that if there had been a way, he would have disappeared.

  “Where’s your mother?” Jo asked. “I can’t believe Lucinda would miss this.”

  His father flipped his cell phone closed. “That’s what I was just trying to find out.” Will Kingbird was full-blood Ojibwe. Powerfully built, he stood well over six feet tall. He was Cork’s age, staring fifty in the face, and his black hair, which he kept military short, was salted with gray. He held himself impossibly rigid, the result, Cork figured, of thirty years in the marines. “She was supposed to pick up Rayette and Misty and bring them to church like she always does. Can’t get her cell phone and nobody answers at Alex’s place.”

  “Car trouble maybe,” Cork suggested. “If they’re on the rez, it’s hard to get a cell phone signal.”

  “Or baby trouble,” Jo said. “They can be a handful.”

  Kingbird frowned at their casual suggestions. “I think Uly and me’ll head out there, see what’s going on.”

  Annie worked her way toward them through the post-Mass gathering. When she reached Ulysses, she playfully punched his arm. “Awesome, dude.”

  A smile slid briefly across his lips. “No, you were.”

  “Oh, like you and your guitar were totally not there.” She put her arm around him in the way Cork had seen her do with her softball teammates. She glanced at Will Kingbird, cordial but not friendly. “Morning, Mr. Kingbird.”

  “Morning.”

  “Wasn’t he incredible?”

  “You both did a nice job.”

  “Dude,” she said to Ulysses, “your mother would have loved it. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re about to find out,” Will Kingbird said. He gave them all a nod in parting. “Let’s go, Uly.”

  Cork watched them weave their way across the basement. Halfway to the door, the parish priest, Father Ted Green, met them and spoke to Kingbird for a moment. They followed the priest toward another door where Cy Borkman, in his deputy’s uniform, was waiting. They all went upstairs.

  “What was that about?” Annie said.

  “No idea,” Cork replied. But it didn’t look good.

  Jo turned to head away. “I’m going to find Stevie. I’ll be right back.”

  A few minutes later, Father Ted returned to the common room. He approached Cork, a look of anguish on his youthful face. “There’s someone in my office who wants to see you.”

  “Who is it?” Cork said.

  “The sheriff.”

  “What’s up, Ted?”

  “I think you’d better talk to the sheriff.”

  Cork turned to Annie. “Tell your mom I’m upstairs.”

  He followed the priest to his office. Inside, Sheriff Marsha Dross was waiting, standing at a window, looking out at
the sunny May morning. She turned when she heard them enter.

  “Mind, Father?” she said.

  “No, I’ll be happy to wait outside.”

  “And would you close the door?”

  When they were alone, Cork said, “What’s going on, Marsha?”

  “Alexander and Rayette Kingbird were killed last night.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Lucinda Kingbird found their bodies this morning.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Before I answer that, I need to ask you a few questions, Cork.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What was the nature of your relationship with Kingbird?”

  “Until last night I had no relationship with him to speak of.”

  “What changed last night?”

  “He asked me to come and see him. I went to his place and we talked.”

  “What time?”

  “I got there about eight thirty, left maybe twenty minutes later.”

  “He was alive when you left?”

  “Of course he was alive. Haven’t you got a time of death yet?”

  She lifted her hand to hold back his questions. “In a minute. What did you talk about?”

  “He wanted me to arrange a meeting with Buck Reinhardt.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep things from getting out of hand. Kingbird told me Buck and some of his men threatened one of the Red Boyz.”

  “Did you arrange a meeting?”

  “I couldn’t find Buck.”

  “Where’d you look?”

  “His house first, then four or five bars. I gave up a little before eleven and went home.”

  Dross was thirty-five, not a pretty woman exactly—big bones, broad face, hair kept short. She was wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back. She pulled a paper evidence sack from the breast pocket of her shirt and handed it to Cork. He opened it and saw that it held one of the business cards he gave out for the work he sometimes did as a private investigator. There was dried blood on the card. He closed the sack and handed it back.

  “We found this on Kingbird,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.” Her eyes were brown and, at the moment, edged with a look that might have been anger. “It was an execution, Cork. Their hands were taped. They were shot in the back, close range, a shotgun. Preliminary estimate of time of death is between eleven P.M. and one A.M. Ed and his team are working the scene. BCA’s on the way. Would you mind going out there with me? Something I’d like you to take a look at.”

  “Sure. Just let me tell Jo.”

  Father Ted was outside, staring down the hallway toward the open door to the sanctuary, where sunlight through the stained-glass windows fell on the pews in colorful, broken pieces.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he asked. He was not quite thirty, had been the priest at St. Agnes for a little over two years, and was full of a naive and vibrant energy that Cork sometimes found exhausting.

  Cork put a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “You know any prayers for peace, Ted, now’s the time to haul ’em out.”

  SIX

  You could have had a deputy do this,” Cork said as they drove south along Iron Lake in the sheriff’s cruiser.

  “I wanted to talk to you myself,” Dross said. “Ever since Kristi Reinhardt died, I’ve been worried something like this would happen.”

  “Still no luck locating Lonnie Thunder?”

  “The people who could help live on the rez—and you know how much they like white folks in uniforms.”

  “A lot of them wouldn’t mind one bit if you arrested Thunder.”

  “No one’s come forward to tell me where he is.”

  During the third year of his first term as sheriff, Cork had hired Marsha Dross as the first female law enforcement officer in Tamarack County. She was approximately his height and not too dissimilar in build. One evening nearly two years earlier, in the soft light of dusk, a sniper had mistaken her for Cork and put a bullet into her. She’d survived, but the damage had killed any hope she might have had of ever conceiving a child. She wasn’t married—the shooting had ended her engagement to a man who desperately wanted children—there were no prospects on the horizon, and Cork didn’t know if the question of marriage and children was one she even pondered much these days.

  “Taking a lot of crap lately from a righteous and outraged citizenry?” he asked.

  She gave a snort that passed for a laugh. “You see Hell Hanover’s editorial in this week’s Sentinel?”

  She was referring to Helmuth Hanover, publisher of the area’s weekly newspaper. Anyone who’d ever been the target of one of his venomous printed diatribes pretty much figured that he was in league with the devil. Hence, the name by which he was generally known: Hell.

  “Yeah. And come to think of it, you do resemble Barney Fife with a bra.”

  Dross rounded the southern end of the lake and began to head north, up the eastern shoreline toward the rez.

  “Makes you feel any better,” Cork said, “Hanover took a lot of shots at me when I wore the badge.”

  “Hanover’s an ass, but he’s reflecting a pretty significant sentiment. This Red Boyz horseshit’s got everybody pissed. It’s bringing out the bigot in people.”

  “You think it’s horseshit?” Cork asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “There’s stuff I disagree with, but I can understand the reasoning.”

  “You’re not going to give me a sociology lecture about poverty, are you? Because with the casino, every Ojibwe in the county is getting a nice chunk of change now.”

  “That’s not exactly true and you know it. But it’s not about money. The Red Boyz are all young, a lot of them raised by parents who weren’t much more than kids themselves and didn’t give them any sense of who they are or what they could be. All they know is that they’re Indian and looked down on, generally speaking. A brotherhood is one way for them to find some self-esteem, to belong to something that makes them feel important, especially a brotherhood with its roots in Ojibwe ethics.”

  “Ethics? The Red Boyz? The ethics of thugs maybe.”

  “The Red Boyz stand pretty firm against drugs and alcohol. They don’t use and they do everything they can to discourage it on the rez. Bet if you tracked the numbers, you’d find that since Kingbird organized the Red Boyz, arrests for drug use and related crimes in this county have gone way down.”

  “I do track them and you’re right. But”—she held up a cautionary finger—“that doesn’t mean there’s no crime going on. The Red Boyz all drive nice, new, big vehicles, and I can almost guarantee they didn’t pay for them with what they get from the distribution of the casino revenues. DEA’s convinced the Red Boyz operate a narcotics depot on the rez. They warehouse the merchandise and distribute it all over the Midwest.”

  “Where other people’s children buy it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I told you there’s stuff I didn’t agree with. That’s some of the stuff.”

  “What else don’t you agree with?”

  “It’s a charismatic organization. Its strength depends too much on Kingbird’s influence. He was the one who gave it direction, who set the guidelines.”

  “Guidelines? You think Lonnie Thunder was operating under guidelines, Cork? You ought to see the videos he made.”

  “I don’t know what to make of Thunder.”

  “Kingbird’s gone now, so what’ll the Red Boyz do?”

  “I wish I could say there was somebody capable of stepping in to fill his shoes. Tom Blessing was basically his right hand, but Tom’s no Alexander Kingbird. Things could easily fall apart, get real messy.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, this whole situation getting out of hand. I’d feel a lot better if I had Lonnie Thunder in custody. That might go a long way toward pacifying everybody.” She gave him a sidelong glance.

  “This is what you wanted to talk to me about?”
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  She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “You’re part Ojibwe. People on the rez trust you.”

  “Trust me more than they trust you anyway. It’s a situational kind of thing. For a lot of Shinnobs, I’m still way too white.”

  “Cork, I don’t have a single deputy with a drop of Ojibwe blood in him.”

  “No one to creep around the rez and snoop unnoticed? No one to go looking for Lonnie Thunder? That’s what you want me to do?”

  “That’s where I was headed, more or less.”

  “I would do this why? For the sake of friendship or some other sentimental crap?”

  “There’s something you need to see at Kingbird’s place.”

  * * *

  Captain Ed Larson headed up major-crimes investigation in Tamarack County. He was midfifties, a tall, studious-looking man who wore wire-rims and preferred button-down oxford shirts and suede bucks. When Dross and Cork arrived at the Kingbird home, Larson was out front deep in conversation with Agent Simon Rutledge from the Bemidji office of the BCA, the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Cork knew Rutledge well. He liked the man and respected his abilities.

  Rutledge seemed surprised to see him. “Cork?”

  “Hey, Simon.” He shook the agent’s hand, then Larson’s. “Morning, Ed.”

  Larson appraised Cork’s attire: sport coat, white shirt, tie. “Church?”

  “I snatched him after the service,” Dross said. She exchanged a handshake with the BCA agent. “Thanks for coming, Simon.”

  Rutledge wasn’t an imposing figure. A couple of inches under six feet, he had reddish thinning hair and a hopelessly boyish smile. He was, however, one of the most effective interrogators Cork had ever worked with. It was his style, full of sympathy and very winning. Cork had seen him coax confessions out of suspects whose lips were sealed with distrust, anger, contempt. People in the cop business who knew Rutledge called his style of interrogation “Simonizing.”

  “You don’t mind me asking, what’s O’Connor doing here?” Rutledge said to Dross. “No offense, Cork.”

  “None taken.”

  “I asked him here in a consulting capacity. Have you had a chance to look things over?”