Copper River

“Thanks, Ed.”

  Cork ended the call.

  “So,” Dina said, “that’s it?” She looked straight ahead, eyeing the highway, black and empty in the headlights. Nothing in her voice gave away what she might be thinking.

  “No, that’s not it.” Cork tossed the cell phone into the Pathfinder’s glove box. “I want to see Lou Jacoby. I want to get right up in his face.”

  Dina shot him a look that might have been approval. “Whatever you say.”

  A little before seven A.M., they stopped a hundred yards south of Jacoby’s estate on the shoreline in the exclusive community of Lake Forest. The predawn sky above Lake Michigan was streaked with veins of angry red. They got out and began to walk. The air was cool and still and smelled of autumn and the lake. Their shoes crunched on the loose gravel at the edge of the road with a sound like someone chewing ice. They passed through the front gate onto the circular drive. Jacoby’s house looked like an Italian villa. The windows were dark.

  “Motion sensors?” Cork asked quietly.

  Dina shook her head. “Not outside. Security system is all internal.”

  She led the way to the rear corner, where Cork could see the back lawn, big as a polo field, stretching down to a tall hedge. Beyond the hedge lay Lake Michigan reflecting the red dawn. Dina stopped at a door on the side of the house and took from her jacket the pouch with her picklocks.

  “Will you trip the alarm?” Cork asked.

  “Relax. I designed the system for him.”

  They were inside quickly, staring at a large kitchen hung with enough pots and pans and shiny cooking utensils that it could have served a fine restaurant. Dina tapped a code into the alarm box beside the door. She signaled for Cork to follow her.

  They crept down a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and up a narrow set of stairs at the far end of the house, and came out onto a long corridor with doors opening off either side. Dina moved to the first door on the left. She reached down and carefully turned the knob. The door slid open silently. She stepped in.

  They found themselves in an anteroom that opened onto an enormous bedroom. The place smelled heavily of cigar smoke. The drapes in the anteroom were drawn against the dawn, but the bedroom was lit with the fire of a sun about to rise. Dina stepped silently through the far door. She turned to her right and spoke. “Up early, Lou.”

  Cork heard Jacoby reply without surprise, “No, Dina. I’m just not sleeping these days. I thought you were with…” He paused as Cork limped into the room. “… O’Connor.”

  Lou Jacoby stood framed against the window. He wore a dressing gown and slippers, and smoke rose from a lit cigar in his right hand. He was nearing eighty. In the light through the window—the only light in the room—he looked pale and hard, more like the plaster cast of a man.

  “Our business is finished,” the old man said.

  “You put a contract out on me,” Cork replied.

  Jacoby waved it off. “That’s been taken care of.”

  “An eye for an eye, you said. You threatened my boy. Another kid I’m fond of was kidnapped by someone looking to collect on that half-million-dollar bounty you put on my head. A lot of other innocent people stood to get hurt.”

  Jacoby looked unimpressed. “And you’re here to what?”

  “Maybe start by beating the living shit out of you,” Cork said.

  “Bloody an old man?” Jacoby opened his arms in invitation.

  “I told you it wasn’t me who killed your son,” Cork spit out.

  Jacoby almost laughed. “And I was supposed to take your word for it? Hell, I know my garbageman better than I know you.”

  “How does it feel having to accept that it was family killing family—your family? And by the way, Salguero’s disappeared. Doesn’t that leave your coffer of vengeance a little empty?”

  Jacoby lifted his cigar, took a draw, and said through the smoke, “Does it?”

  Dina gave a short, hollow laugh. “They’ll never find Tony Salguero, will they, Lou? You had him taken care of.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jacoby said.

  “There’s still Gabriella,” Cork pointed out. “With a good lawyer—”

  “She’ll use the lawyer I pay for,” Jacoby said. “And he’ll make sure she rots in prison.”

  Jacoby moved away from the window to the side of the great bed. He reached out and pressed a button on the wall.

  “And her two boys?” Dina looked at the old man with a kind of sickened awe. “You’ll take them from her, won’t you, Lou?”

  “I’ll raise my grandsons to be the men my sons never were.”

  Cork went for Jacoby and grabbed a handful of his soft robe. Somebody needed to take this son of a bitch down. Jacoby dropped his cigar and looked startled, then afraid. Cork pinned him to the wall. The old man seemed flimsy as cardboard.

  Cork felt Dina’s hand on his arm, gently restraining. She moved up beside him. He looked into her eyes and their calm brought him back to his senses. It would be easy enough to beat the old man to a pulp, and probably not hard to go further. But to what end? His own family was safe. Giving in to anger would only start the trouble all over again.

  Sometimes a man had to swallow hard and accept what he could not change.

  He nodded to Dina, and she dropped her hand. He let go of his grip on Jacoby and stepped back. The old man smoothed his robe and bent to retrieve his cigar.

  Shuffling came from the hallway. A moment later, Evers, the houseman, appeared at the bedroom door. He was almost as old as Jacoby and, like his employer, wore a robe and slippers. His white hair was mussed from sleep. He looked at Dina and Cork with surprise but said nothing.

  “See them out,” Jacoby said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell Mrs. Portman I’m hungry. I’d like breakfast.”

  “Very good, sir.” Evers stood aside so that Cork and Dina could go before him.

  They drove to Evanston, to the duplex that belonged to Cork’s sister-in-law and her husband. He’d used Dina’s cell phone to call ahead and let them know he was coming. Dina parked on the street in front but left the motor running.

  “I guess this is it,” she said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go home, get a little sleep, then head back to Bodine.”

  “Charlie?” he asked.

  “Charlie,” she answered.

  “You’ve only known her a couple of days, Dina.”

  She shook her head. “Her, I’ve known my whole life.”

  “Back there at Jacoby’s, I was ready to kill him. Thanks for stopping me.”

  “You were about to make a mistake I knew you’d regret. And I’d hate to lose you to the Illinois state penal system. It’s a harsh world, and men like Lou Jacoby will always be in it. What keeps things balanced is men like you.”

  “Yeah?” He turned to her. Her face in the rising light of morning was soft and bright. “Seems to me not long ago you accused me of being a lot of things that aren’t good. What was that all about?”

  She reached out and cupped his cheek with her hand. “Mostly this: You always struggle so hard to do the right thing. Nobody always does the right thing, Cork, not even you. Be easy on people when they disappoint you. And be a little easier on yourself while you’re at it.”

  She leaned to him and kissed his cheek.

  “Go on.” She nudged him gently. “Time for you to go.”

  He got out, walked around the car, and leaned in her window. One last time he looked into her eyes, which were as green as new leaves.

  “Let me know how it goes with Charlie, okay?” he said.

  “The truth is I’m a little scared.”

  “You? That’s a first.”

  “Good-bye, Cork.”

  She slipped the car into gear and drove away. He watched until she turned the corner and was gone.

  He stood on the sidewalk of a street still deep in the quiet of early morning. Behind closed curtains, men a
nd women shared their beds, their fortunes, their lives, and their dreams, and their children were the sum of all these things made flesh. To rise in the morning and watch his sons and daughters stumble sleepy-eyed into the day, to send them out into the world on wings of love, to lie down at night and draw over himself the comforting quilt of the memories he shared with them—batting practice on a softball field or wrestling in the living room after dinner—what more could a man ask for or want?

  Cork looked up and a seven-year-old boy appeared in the upstairs window of the duplex. Stevie’s face lit up as if the sun had just risen after a very long, dark night. He smiled beautifully and his lips formed a single word that Cork could not hear but understood absolutely.

  Daddy.

  ATRIA BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  VERMILION DRIFT

  WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  PROLOGUE

  Some nights, Corcoran O’Connor dreams his father’s death.

  Although the dream differs in the details, it always follows the same general pattern: His father falls from a great height. Sometimes he stumbles backward over a precipice, his face an explosion of surprise. Or he’s climbing a high, flat face of rock and, just as he reaches for the top, loses his grip and, in falling, appears both perplexed and angry. Or he steps into an empty elevator shaft, expecting a floor that is not there, and looks skyward with astonishment as the darkness swallows him.

  In the dream Cork is always a boy. He’s always very near and reaches out to save his father, but his arm is too short, his hand too small. Always, his father is lost to him, and Cork stands alone and heartbroken.

  If that was all of it, if that was the end of the nightmare, it probably wouldn’t haunt him in quite the way that it does. But the true end is a horrific vision that jars Cork awake every time. In the dream, he relives the dream, and in that dream revisited something changes. Not only is he near his father as the end occurs but he also stands outside the dream watching it unfold, a distanced witness to himself and to all that unfolds. And what he sees from that uninvolved perspective delivers a horrible shock. For his hand, in reaching out, not only fails to save his father. It is his small hand, in fact, that shoves him to his death.

  ONE

  That early June day began with one of the worst wounds Cork O’Connor had ever seen. It was nearly three miles long, a mile wide, and more than five hundred feet deep. It bled iron.

  From behind the window glass of the fourth-floor conference room in the Great North Mining Company’s office complex, Cork looked down at the Ladyslipper Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore excavations in the world. It was a landscape of devastation, of wide plateaus and steep terraces and broad canyons, all of it the color of coagulating blood. He watched as far below him the jaws of an electric power shovel gobbled eighty tons of rock and spit the rubble into a dump truck the size of a house and with wheels twice as tall as a man. The gargantuan machine crawled away up an incline that cut along the side of the pit, and immediately another just like it took its place, waiting to be filled. The work reminded him of insects feeding on the cavity of a dead body.

  At the distant end of the mine, poised at the very lip of the pit itself, stood the town of Granger. The new town of Granger. Thirty years earlier, Great North had moved the entire community, buildings and all, a mile south in order to take the ore from beneath the original town site. Just outside Granger stood the immense structures of the taconite plant, where the rock was crushed and processed into iron pellets for shipping. Clouds of steam billowed upward hundreds of feet, huge white pillars holding up the gray overcast of the sky.

  Although he’d viewed the mine and the work that went on deep inside many times, the sight never ceased to amaze and sadden him. The Ojibwe part of his thinking couldn’t help but look on the enterprise as a great injury delivered to Grandmother Earth.

  “Cork. Good. You’re here.”

  Cork turned as Max Cavanaugh closed the door. Cavanaugh was tall and agreeable, a man who easily caught a lady’s eye. In his early forties, he was younger than Cork by a decade. He was almost the last of the Cavanaughs, a family whose name had been associated with mining since 1887, when Richard Frankton Cavanaugh, a railroad man from St. Paul, had founded the Great North Mining Company and had sunk one of the first shafts in Minnesota’s great Iron Range. Cork saw Max Cavanaugh at Mass every Sunday, and in winter they both played basketball for St. Agnes Catholic Church—the team was officially called the St. Agnes Saints, but all the players referred to themselves as “the old martyrs”—so they knew each other pretty well. Cavanaugh was normally a guy with an easy smile, but not today. Today his face was troubled, and with good reason. One of his holdings, the Vermilion One Mine, was at the center of a controversy that threatened at any moment to break into violence.

  The two men shook hands.

  “Where are the others?” Cork asked.

  “They’re already headed to Vermilion One. I wanted to talk to you alone first. Have a seat?”

  Cork took a chair at the conference table, and Cavanaugh took another.

  “Do you find missing people, Cork?”

  The question caught him by surprise. Cork had been expecting some discussion about Vermilion One. But it was also a question with some sting to it, because the most important missing person case he’d ever handled had been the disappearance of his own wife, and that had ended tragically.

  “On occasion I’ve been hired to do just that,” he replied cautiously.

  “Can you find someone for me?”

  “I could try. Who is it?”

  The window at Cavanaugh’s back framed his face, which seemed as gray as the sky above the mine that morning. “My sister.”

  Lauren Cavanaugh. Well known in Tamarack County for her unflagging efforts to bring artistic enlightenment to the North Country. Two years earlier, she’d founded the Northern Lights Center for the Arts, an artists’ retreat in Aurora that had, in a very short time, acquired a national reputation.

  “I thought I read in the Sentinel that Lauren was in Chicago,” Cork said.

  “She might be. I don’t know. Or she might be in New York or San Francisco or Paris.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Is what I tell you confidential?”

  “I consider it so, Max.”

  Cavanaugh folded his hands atop his reflection in the shiny table-top. “My sister does this sometimes. Just takes off. But she’s always kept in touch with me, let me know where she’s gone.”

  “Not this time?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Nothing before she left?”

  “No. But that’s not unusual. When she gets it into her head to go, she’s gone, just like that.”

  “What about Chicago?”

  He shook his head. “A smoke screen. I put that story out there.”

  “Is her car gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last hear from her?”

  “A week ago. We spoke on the phone.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “Like she always sounds. Like sunshine if it had a voice.”

  Cork took out the little notebook and pen that he generally carried in his shirt pocket when he was working a case. He flipped the cover and found the first empty page.

  “She drives a Mercedes, right?”

  “A CLK coupe, two-door. Silver-gray.”

  “Do you know the license plate number?”

  “No, but I can get it.”

  “So can I. Don’t bother.”

  “She hasn’t charged any gas since she left.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I oversee all her finances. She also hasn’t charged any hotel rooms, any meals, anything.”

  “Any substantial withdrawals from her bank account before she left?”

  “Nothing extraordinary.”

  “Is it possible she’s staying with a friend?”

  “I’ve checked with everyone
I can think of.”

  “Have you talked to the police?”

  “No. I’d rather handle this quietly.”

  “You said she does this periodically. Why?”

  Cavanaugh looked at Cork, his eyes staring out of a mist of confusion. “I don’t know exactly. She claims she needs to get away from her life.”

  As far as Cork knew, her life consisted of lots of money and lots of adulation. What was there to run from?

  “Is there someplace she usually goes?”

  “Since she moved here, it’s generally the Twin Cities or Chicago. In the past, it’s been New York City, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires, Rome.”

  “For the museums?”

  He frowned. “Not amusing, Cork.”

  “My point is what does she do there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t ask. Can you find her?”

  “From what you’ve told me, she could be anywhere in the world.”

  He shook his head. “She left her passport.”

  “Well, that narrows it down to a couple of million square miles here in the U.S.”

  “I don’t need your sarcasm, Cork. I need your help.”

  “Does she have a cell phone?”

  “Of course. I’ve been calling her number since she left.”

  “We can get her cell phone records, see if she’s called anyone or taken calls from anyone. Did she pack a suitcase?”

  “No, but sometimes when she takes off, she just goes and buys whatever she needs along the way.”

  “According to her credit card records, not this time?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Does she use a computer? Have an e-mail account?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any way to check her e-mails?”

  “I already have. There’s been no activity since last Sunday, and nothing in the communication before that that seems relevant.”

  “Is it possible she has an account you don’t know about?”

  “It’s possible but not probable.”

  “How did you manage to get her e-mail password?”

  “We’re close,” he said, and left it at that.

  “Look, Max, there’s something I need to say.”