Vermilion Drift

  As he waited, he heard something move behind him. He spun and searched the darkness, sensing a watcher he couldn’t see. He stabbed the flashlight beam into the black throat of the tunnel. Deep inside the Vermilion Drift, two yellow eyes glowed back at him.

  “You coming?” Haddad shouted down.

  “Just a minute!”

  Cork crept toward the eyes, which didn’t move. He reached down and picked up a rock from the tunnel floor. As he approached, a hiss came from the darkness, then an angry snort. Cork kept moving, the rock firmly in his grip. When he was fifteen feet away, the creature turned to flee and, in turning, showed its fat, furry body and bushy tail. A raccoon. Cork figured the tunnel would be a pretty good place to make a den for the winter months, and probably the coon had young somewhere. He was just about to return to the rock mess at the bottom of the test pit when the Maglite beam swept across a broken area in the wall that he’d overlooked as he’d passed through earlier. It appeared as if rocks had been loosely piled to close off a crosscut tunnel. He stepped around the rubble on the floor and worked one of the stones away from the makeshift wall. Behind was a well of darkness, and from that well flowed the stench that fouled the air in the tunnel. He shined his Maglite inside.

  Cork had always thought that as a cop he’d seen the worst of everything. When his flashlight revealed what the stone wall had hidden, he realized how wrong he’d been.

  SEVEN

  The sink, which Haddad had identified as most probably a wildcat operation, was in the middle of a small clearing a quarter mile north of the headframe for the Number Six shaft of the Vermilion One Mine. The sheriff’s people had been able to reach it by driving carefully among the pines that lay between the sink and the mine buildings.

  It was nearing seven in the evening, and Cork stood with Sheriff Marsha Dross and Captain Ed Larson near the edge of the sink. Dross had put in a call to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office in Bemidji, and they were waiting for the agents to arrive. The drive would have taken a good three hours, and enough time had already passed that Cork and the others were watching their watches. Alf Murray, the chief of the Aurora Volunteer Fire Department, stood with Cork and the others, using a walkie-talkie to communicate with his men below. The firemen had brought out mobile lights and a generator, and a power cable snaked out of sight down the passage that led eventually to the Vermilion Drift. They’d set up the lights in the tunnel, but only as far as the gruesome discovery Cork had made. Ed Larson, who was in charge of major crimes for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, had overseen the dismantling of the makeshift stone wall. Some of Dross’s people had done a flashlight search of the tunnel from that point to the timber construction where Haddad and Cork had crawled through. Dross had put others to work doing a quadrant search of the area surrounding the surface opening of the sink for anything that might prove to be evidence. She’d hoped for maybe a footprint or tire track, but the ground had yielded nothing.

  Someone had gone to Lucy’s in Gresham and brought back a big container of coffee, and Cork stood sipping from a white foam cup as he waited. The sun had shifted to the far west, and the shadows of the pines had begun to creep across the clearing.

  “Ever deal with anything like this when you were sheriff?” Dross asked.

  “Nope,” Cork replied. “I can’t imagine many sheriffs do.”

  “Jesus, I hope not.”

  Cork heard the sound of a vehicle engine approaching gradually through the pines. The sun was in his eyes, and it was hard to see into the deep shade among the evergreens. A minute later, a white Suburban entered the clearing and rolled slowly toward them. It stopped beside the sheriff’s pickup truck, and the two occupants got out. One of them Cork knew well: Simon Rutledge, with whom he’d worked in the past, both when he was sheriff of Tamarack County and in the time since. Cork liked him immensely and had great respect for his ability. Rutledge’s companion was a stranger. She was of medium height, early fifties, hair the color of a cirrus cloud and with the same wispy appeal.

  “Marsha, Ed, Cork,” Rutledge said in greeting, and they all shook hands.

  “Thanks for coming, Simon,” Dross replied.

  Rutledge gestured to his companion. “Agent Susan Upchurch. Her specialty is forensic anthropology.”

  “The truth is we’re so short-staffed these days that I do everything.” Upchurch laughed. “Damn budget cuts.” Her accent was southern.

  “Alabama?” Cork guessed.

  “Birmingham,” she said.

  “Long way from home.”

  “I went to graduate school at the U of M. Found I didn’t mind the snow, and then the BCA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Here I am.”

  “And we’re lucky to have her,” Rutledge threw in. “Fill me in. What have you done so far?”

  Dross replied, “We’ve dismantled the wall that blocked off the crosscut tunnel. We’ve gone over the main tunnel all the way to the timbers. Not easy. Most of the drift is still without lights, so it’s pitch dark.”

  “Did you videotape the dismantling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Anything else?”

  “We shot video and stills of everything inside the crosscut, but haven’t gone in yet. Our M.E.’s the only one who’s been inside, and just to certify death.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “No, he left to prepare for the autopsy.”

  “He didn’t disturb anything down there?”

  “No.”

  “Who else has been in the tunnel?”

  “Besides Ed’s crime scene team, only Lou Haddad, one of the officials from the mine. He was with Cork.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the mine office. We can bring him back if you want him.”

  “Not necessary at the moment.” Rutledge glanced around the perimeter of the sink. “Did you go over the area up here?”

  “Yeah. Nothing.”

  “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  They gathered at the edge of the sink. It was a five-foot drop to the opening in the rubble where the passage began. Although there were natural hand- and footholds in the side of the pit that could have been used to climb in and out, the firemen had placed an aluminum ladder against the wall. Dross went first, Rutledge next, Upchurch after him, and finally Larson. Cork brought up the rear. He wasn’t eager to return to the hardness and the darkness of the Vermilion Drift, but the tunnel was full of questions, horrifying questions, and he was a man trained his whole life in mining answers. He hesitated in the evening light, watched Larson disappear into the narrow throat of the opening in the rubble, took a good, deep breath of pine-scented air, and descended.

  The passage was a snaking affair, lit by daylight that slipped through gaps in the blasted rock. It was big enough throughout its length to accommodate the body of even a large person, but the ragged rock edges and the constant twisting made the journey a slow one. Those who reached the bottom first waited for the others to arrive. In the passage itself, the air was fine, but in the tunnel where the cool mine air pooled, the nauseating smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming.

  Lights supplied by the fire department illuminated the drift. Cork and the others walked a path cleared and marked with yellow tape by the crime scene team. The nearer they came to the room, the stronger became the putrid odor of decomposition. Mingled with the foulness of the air was the aroma of eucalyptus, which some of the deputies and firemen had applied to the area below their noses to deal with the stench.

  The place where the wall had been dismantled was guarded by a couple of deputies. The crosscut tunnel that had been revealed was not at all deep, less than ten feet. The striations from the drill bits made the walls look like rust-colored corduroy.

  There were six bodies in all. Five were nothing more than skeletal remains with a few rotted, parchment-like remnants of clothing still clinging to the bones. Four of the skeletons were arranged in a sitting position against the walls, placed in a
way that put their backs to each of the four points of a compass—north, south, east, and west. A fifth skeleton lay in the center, and next to it the sixth body had been placed. That body was fully clothed. It hadn’t been there long enough to be skeletal, but it had been there long enough so that the bloat of the gases from decomposition had distended the abdominal cavity, and the thin material of the black cocktail dress the corpse wore had been stretched and ripped along the seams. The neck and face were swollen like those of an overfilled blow-up doll. The corpse’s tongue had turned black and grown huge, and it protruded between puffed lips. The skin was a sickly yellow-orange and translucent so that the vessels that ran beneath were visible. Cork had seen all this earlier with Dross and Larson, and they stood back while Rutledge and Upchurch both knelt and studied the scene.

  “How long you figure the skeletons have been here?” Rutledge asked his colleague.

  “I won’t have any idea until I examine the remains,” she replied.

  “Well, this one,” Rutledge said, pointing toward the corpse prostrate in the center, “hasn’t been here more than a week.” Over his shoulder, he said, “Has anyone reported a missing woman, Marsha?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Yes,” Cork said.

  Dross shot him a puzzled look. Rutledge turned and eyed him as well.

  “I think the corpse might be Lauren Cavanaugh,” Cork said. “She’s been missing since last Sunday.”

  “How do you know that?” Dross asked.

  “Because I was hired this morning to find her.”

  George Azevedo, one of the deputies guarding the scene, said, “Fast work, Cork.” He laughed, but no one else joined him.

  “How come you didn’t tell me this earlier?” Dross said.

  “Because I wasn’t sure.”

  “What makes you sure now?”

  “Two things. Those shoes on her feet. They’re expensive Italian jobs. There’s a whole closet full of their cousins at her residence in the old Parrant estate. And that big ring on her left hand. She’s wearing it in a portrait I saw today.”

  “Who hired you to find her?”

  “Her brother.”

  “Did he say when she’d gone missing?”

  “A week ago.”

  “And he didn’t report it?”

  “He wanted the matter looked into discreetly,” Cork said.

  “If it is her, there won’t be anything discreet about this now,” Rutledge said.

  Dross said to no one in particular, “How did she come to be here with these older remains?”

  “Maybe when we identify the remains we’ll have our answer,” Ed Larson responded.

  “How soon might that be?” Dross addressed her question to Upchurch.

  “I’d like everything in here documented in detail with photographs and video,” the BCA agent replied. “Once that’s done, I’ll examine each of the remains in situ, then remove them to my lab in Bemidji, where I can study them more carefully.”

  “That’ll take a while.”

  “Quite a while,” Upchurch said.

  “When will you have results?”

  “I’ll get started as soon as the first remains are in the lab. Tomorrow maybe, and then I’ll have something preliminary to offer.”

  “What about the new body?” Rutledge asked Dross.

  “I told Tom Conklin that I’ll need the autopsy done ASAP.” Dross was speaking of the medical examiner.

  “Handle the corpse carefully,” Rutledge advised. “It’s at a delicate stage. The skin’ll shift around. And be especially vigilant with the head. The hair will come off easily.”

  “We’ll be careful, Simon.”

  During all this exchange, Cork had noticed something in the crosscut—small metal cones that littered the floor around one of the skeletons—and his mind made a very old connection. “Agent Upchurch, is there any possibility that these corpses are over forty years old?”

  “They may well be. I can’t really tell yet. Why do you ask?”

  “The remains in the corner to the right. See those items littering the floor around it?”

  “The things that look like little rusted cones?”

  “Yeah, those. I think they’re jingles.”

  “Jingles?”

  “From a jingle dress. It’s traditionally worn for a healing dance.”

  “Jingles,” Larson said. He gave Cork a pointed look. “The Vanishings, you think?”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Cork said. “The Vanishings.”

  EIGHT

  Naomi Stonedeer was the first to vanish. Cork had known her well. She was seventeen, with black hair that hung to her waist and hazel eyes. She was bright and lovely and an accomplished Jingle Dancer.

  The Jingle Dance was an Ojibwe healing ritual performed by women in long dresses adorned with a couple of hundred jingles sewn closely together and attached in rows. The jingles were traditionally made from snuff can lids or tin can lids rolled into cones. When the dancers performed their steps, the jingles brushed together and created the unique sound that gave the ritual its name. Though it continued to be one of the most esteemed and sacred of the Ojibwe ceremonies, it was also a dance performed competitively at powwows.

  In the summer of 1964, Naomi lived near Cork’s grandmother in Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the Iron Lake Reservation. Cork was thirteen and had a terrible crush on her. Whenever he visited Grandma Dilsey, he always found a way to pass the little BIA-built house where Naomi lived with her mother and her aunt. He concocted scenarios in which he played the hero and saved her from a dozen iterations of doom. But when the real thing occurred, he was powerless.

  She disappeared in late June. She’d gone to the old community center in Allouette, which had once been the schoolhouse where Cork’s grandfather and his grandma Dilsey taught the children of the rez. Naomi had joined a lot of other women to practice the Jingle Dance in preparation for a powwow that was to be held in Winnipeg in July. She left the community center around 9:00 P.M., wearing her jingle dress. It was still daylight, and her house was only a quarter mile away, but she never made it home. Her mother called everyone in Allouette, and, when no one knew Naomi’s whereabouts, she called Cork’s mother, who was her good friend. Cork’s mother enlisted his father, who was sheriff of Tamarack County.

  His father’s first reaction was that probably the girl had simply run away, something a lot of Ojibwe kids did. Poverty was not an unusual circumstance on the rez, nor were the unpleasant domestic situations that frequently resulted. Kids often took off, heading to the safety of a relative who lived somewhere else, or to Duluth or the Twin Cities, looking for a different—they hoped better—life. Naomi’s home life was just fine, Cork’s mother insisted. The young woman had no reason to run.

  Cork’s father went to Allouette and that night began a fruitless investigation, which lasted for weeks. He contacted relatives, authorities on other reservations and in the Indian communities in Duluth and the Twin Cities. Word went out to teen shelters all across the Upper Midwest.

  Naomi’s father, who’d long ago abandoned his family, lived in Crosby, a good eighty miles from Aurora, where he worked as an auto mechanic. Cork’s father questioned him repeatedly. Although the man couldn’t supply a decent alibi for the night Naomi went missing, there was no evidence that he’d been anywhere near Allouette at the time, and eventually Cork’s father stopped badgering him.

  In the end, the search was abandoned, and no trace of Naomi Stonedeer was ever found.

  The next vanishing occurred later that summer, in August. Cork remembered it well because it was a great tragedy in his family.

  His mother’s sister, Ellie Grand, lived with Grandma Dilsey. Ellie had two daughters. Marais, the elder daughter, had already left home to seek her fortune in country music. That left Fawn at home, and Fawn was special. She was a gentle spirit, a girl who smiled all the time and would probably never grow sophisticated in her understanding of the world.
Cork’s grandmother once told him that Fawn offered the Iron Lake Ojibwe a gift. The gift was her simplicity. It was her acceptance, with inexhaustible delight, of the everyday blessings that Kitchimanidoo showered on The People. Fawn laughed at snowflakes, was delighted when a dandelion puff exploded on the wind, cried with excitement when a fish leaped from Iron Lake and sent a spray of water into the air like pearls thrown against the sky. The Ojibwe on the rez watched over her. But even their protectiveness failed to keep her safe that summer day.

  Shortly after lunch, she’d told her mother that she was going for a swim in Iron Lake. Fawn was a good swimmer and often went into the lake alone. She left in her swimsuit, carrying a towel, and her feet were bare.

  Allouette had a small beach area next to the old dock where men who gillnetted and spearfished kept their boats. Jon Bruneau was at the dock that day, working on his Evinrude outboard. He swore that he never saw Fawn at the beach the whole afternoon.

  Fawn’s disappearance was a blow that knocked the breath out of Cork’s family. Over the next few weeks, his mother spent much of her time with Aunt Ellie and Grandma Dilsey. Other Ojibwe women visited as well. As had often been the case in its turbulent history, the reservation came together around tragedy.

  His father exhausted himself in the search for Fawn. He sent divers into the lake off the shore at Allouette, just in case Jon Bruneau had been wrong. He also had divers in the water at Sunset Cove, which was south of Allouette and a place that Shinnobs sometimes went for a swim. He grilled Bruneau mercilessly. He pressed his own good friend Sam Winter Moon to question the whole Ojibwe community. He thought maybe the Anishinaabeg would be more responsive to questions coming from one of their own than from a uniformed white man, even though he was considered a friend of the rez. No one saw anything. No one knew anything. Fawn, like Naomi Stonedeer, had simply dropped off the face of the earth.