Mercy Falls

  There was another reality for him as well. It was grounded in a maple leaf of blood on Marsha’s uniform, the sound of glass shattered by a bullet capable of exploding his head like a melon, and the long, terrifying moments when he’d scrambled desperately to make sense of the absolutely senseless.

  “You okay?” Jo asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he answered.

  She accompanied him into the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Bos Swain, who’d relieved Patsy as dispatcher, buzzed them through the security door.

  Bos was short for Boston, which was the name by which Henrietta Swain was known. As a young woman, she’d dreamed of going to college, specifically to Boston College, for reasons which she’d never divulged. Instead, she’d married her high school sweetheart, who went off to Vietnam and came back messed up psychologically. Bos had worked to support them and the two girls who were born to them, and although she never went to college herself, she sent both girls east, one to Barnard and the other to Boston College. When the girls were gone, she divorced her first husband and remarried, a good man named Tim Johnson who had a solid job stringing wire for the phone company. Although she didn’t need to work to support herself anymore, she kept on as a dispatcher, drawing a county paycheck every two weeks, which she deposited in trust funds for her grandchildren’s education. She was a fleshy woman, unusually good-humored, but the events of that evening had put her in a somber mood.

  “I thought you were going to the hospital,” she said to Cork in a scolding tone.

  “I just came from there.”

  “How’s Marsha?”

  “Still in surgery when I left. Thanks for coming early so Patsy could be there.”

  “She seemed to be holding up real good, but I know it’s tough for her. How’s Charlie taking it?”

  “Hard.”

  “Well, sure.” She eyed his uniform and shook her head. “Jo, you ought to take him home so he can change those clothes. He’s not exactly a walking advertisement for law enforcement.”

  Cork said, “I want to listen to the recording of the call that came from the Tibodeau cabin.”

  “Lucy’s call?”

  “That’s what I want to know. Lucy claims it wasn’t her.”

  Bos went to the Dispatch area, where the radio, at the moment, was silent. The public contact phone was linked to two different recording systems. The first recorded date, time, and the number of the phone from which the call had been made. The other system was a Sony automatic telephone tape recorder. It wasn’t top-of-the-line—it had actually been donated to the department by the Chippewa Grand Casino when they’d upgraded to a digital recorder voice bank that fed directly into a computer—but it was a workhorse of a unit. Bos rewound the tape to the call that had purportedly come from Lucy. She played it, and they all listened. Then she played it again.

  Patsy: Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.

  The caller: I’m telling you, if you don’t get somebody out here, I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

  Patsy: Who is this?

  The caller: Lucy Tibodeau.

  Patsy: Where are you, Lucy?

  The caller: At my goddamn cabin. And I’m telling you, you better get someone out here pronto, or I swear I’ll kill him.

  Patsy: Kill who?

  The caller: That son of a bitch husband of mine.

  Patsy: Eli?

  The caller: You think I got another husband stashed in the woodpile, sweetie? Well, I wish to god I did, ’cuz the one I got ain’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

  Patsy: Where is Eli?

  The caller: Outside, pounding on the door, hollering to let him in.

  Patsy: You just stay put, Lucy. Take a few deep breaths. We’ll have someone out there right away.

  The caller: I’m warning you, the sheriff better get here real fast, he wants to avoid bloodshed.

  Patsy: He’s on his way, Lucy. You just relax, and don’t you let that husband of yours rankle you, understand?

  The caller: I ain’t making any promises.

  The caller hung up.

  Jo was the first to respond. “If someone’s trying to sound like Lucy, they did a pretty fair job.”

  Bos nodded. “If I hadn’t been leery, I’d have been fooled. I can see why Patsy didn’t give it a second thought. Whoever it is, she’s got Lucy’s speech down pat. But it’s someone younger, I’d say.”

  Cork had Bos play the tape once more. “Hear that?” he said, midway through.

  “What?”

  “Rewind it a bit.” He waited. “Listen.” He held up a finger, then dropped it suddenly. “Now. Did you hear it? A door closing in the background.”

  “Somebody came in?” Bos said.

  “Or went out.” Jo looked at Cork. “Either way, she wasn’t alone.”

  “Pull that tape, Bos. We’ll give it to BCA to analyze.”

  He went into his office and made the call to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office in Bemidji, explained the situation to the voice mail, then pulled out the clean uniform he kept in the closet. When he stepped back into the department common area, Jo looked at the uniform.

  “You’re not coming home,” she said.

  “No. I’ll shower downstairs, change, and then I’m going back out to the rez.”

  “I wish you’d come home. You’ve got people who can handle the investigation.”

  “I need to be there. Don’t wait up.”

  She kissed him and he could feel her restraint, her irritation.

  “Be careful,” she said, and left.

  As he showered, he was conscious of his wound. The local anesthetic was wearing off, and a dull ache crept in behind it. He put on the clean uniform and went back upstairs.

  “I’m taking my Bronco,” he told Bos. “Let Ed know I’m on my way.”

  “You really ought to get a radio in that vehicle.”

  He started for the door, but Bos called him back.

  “Sheriff?”

  He turned around.

  “Somebody lured you out there.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “They wanted you dead. Or maybe Marsha.”

  “That’s generally the reason they use bullets.”

  “My point is this,” she said. “They didn’t succeed. Does that mean they’ll try again?”

  4

  FLOODLIGHTS LIT THE hollow with an unnatural glare, and the poplar trees around the Tibodeau cabin looked like a crowd of gawkers gone white with shock. Cork pulled up behind Cy Borkmann’s cruiser and got out.

  Ed Larson stood in the doorway of the cabin. He wasn’t wearing the latex gloves anymore and looked as if he’d gathered evidence and was weighing the meaning. Or at least, that’s what Cork hoped his look meant.

  “Where’s Lucy?” Cork asked.

  “She and Eli went into Allouette to stay with his uncle. We took statements from both of them. They were pretty broken up over the dogs.”

  Cork glanced inside the cabin. “So, what did you find?”

  Larson adjusted his wire-rims, not a good sign. Then he said, “Well,” which nailed the coffin shut.

  “Nothing?” Cork said.

  “Not down here. Whoever it was, they actually wiped out the tracks leading back to the woodpile where they threw the dogs. Looks like they used a pine branch or something. I took prints off the phone, but I’m betting they’re just latents from Eli and Lucy. Nothing on the shell casings you found earlier. We pulled the slugs out of the Land Cruiser but they’re too mashed up to be of any use for ballistics. We’re still looking for the round that went through Marsha. Doing a quadrant search of the ground surface right now, then I’ll have the guys start digging. Come morning, we’ll go over every inch of the hilltop where the shooter was. We bagged the dogs. If you think it’ll be of any value, we can have them autopsied.”

  Duane Pender, who was working on the search of the ground, hollered.

  “What is it?” Larson said.

  Pender picked up som
ething and held it up in the light. “It’s a bell. A little jingly Christmas bell.”

  Larson walked carefully to the deputy and took the bell from him. It was a silver ball with a little metal bead inside that jingled when the ball moved. “It’s new. Not dirty, so it hasn’t been on the ground long. What do you make of it, Cork?”

  Cork walked over. “Could be from a Christmas ornament.”

  “In October?”

  “Or maybe from a jingle dress.”

  “A what?”

  “For ceremonial dances. It may be nothing, but make a note of where you found it, Duane, and put it in a bag.”

  Larson followed him back to the cabin door. “Any word on Marsha?”

  “She was still in surgery when I left the hospital.”

  “You don’t look too good yourself.”

  Cork slumped against the door frame. The lights for the search were bright in his eyes, and he turned his face from them. “I keep trying to figure all this.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Larson said quietly. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to get you out here. Think about it, Cork. The call comes from the rez. Since you’ve taken over as sheriff, the old policy of you responding to most of the calls from out here is back in place. Marsha’s driving the Land Cruiser. She’s your height, more or less. She’s wearing a cap. The sun’s down, the whole hollow here is in shade. The shooter assumes it’s you who gets out and he fires.”

  “Or she fires,” Cork said.

  “She?”

  “I listened to the tape of the call when I was back at the department. It was a woman doing a pretty good job of sounding like Lucy.”

  Larson considered it while he scratched the silver bristle of his hair. “Whoever, they knew what they were doing. Two dead dogs, tracks erased, a well-chosen vantage point from which to fire.”

  “Why didn’t he…she…set up a crossfire?” Cork said.

  “That probably means the number of people involved is limited. Maybe just the shooter. Or the shooter and the woman he used to get you out here.”

  “A lot of speculation,” Cork said.

  “Without a lot of hard evidence to go on, you’ve got to begin your thinking somewhere. I’m guessing it’s someone who knows the rez. They knew that Lucy and Eli would be gone, anyway. They were pretty sure it would be you who’d respond. Cork, this wasn’t some sort of random violence. It was well planned and you were the target.”

  Borkmann strolled over. In the glare, his bulk cast a huge shadow before him. “We still got two men on that hill.”

  The moon wasn’t up yet, but it was on the rise. “Might as well bring them down,” Cork said. “I don’t think we’ll have to worry any more tonight. Maybe we should all call it a night. What do you think, Ed? Come back in the morning? BCA’ll be here then. In the meantime, we can post a couple of men to keep the scene secure, and we’ll send everyone else home. That bullet you’re hoping to dig out of the ground’ll still be there tomorrow.”

  “Cork?” Borkmann called from his cruiser. “Just got word from Patsy via Bos. Marsha’s out of surgery and doing well.”

  Cork felt something begin to break inside him, a wall behind which an ocean of emotion was at risk of flooding through.

  Ed put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take care of getting things packed up here. You go on home and get some rest. We’ll have a go at it again tomorrow.”

  He went back to the department and filled out an incident report, then stopped by the hospital one last time. Patsy had gone, but he found Charlie Annala asleep on the sofa in the waiting area of the recovery room. Someone had put a thin blanket over him. Shortly after midnight, Cork headed home.

  By the time he turned onto Gooseberry Lane, the moon had risen high in the sky, a waxing gibbous moon, a silver teardrop on the cheek of night. His home was an old two-story frame affair with a wonderful front porch and a big elm in the yard. The whole town knew it as the O’Connor place. With the exception of college and a few years when he was a cop in Chicago, he’d lived in that house his whole life. In a way, it contained his life. He stood on the lawn a few moments, in the shadow the elm cast in the moonlight, trying to draw to himself the feel of all that was familiar. A light in his bedroom upstairs told him Jo had waited up for him. A soft glow drizzled through the window of his son’s room, Stevie’s night-light. His daughters’ rooms were on the backside of the house, but it was late and a school night and he figured they would be asleep by now. He listened to the creak of the chains on their metal hooks as the porch swing rocked slowly in the breeze. He put his hand against the rough bark of the big tree that was as old as he and took in the dry smell of autumn.

  Jo had left a light on in the living room so that he wouldn’t walk into a dark house. He turned it off and headed upstairs, where he checked the children’s rooms. Stevie was snoring softly. Jenny lay asleep with the headphones of her Discman still over her ears. Annie’s pillow was over her head, and her right leg was off the bed. Cork took a moment and carefully settled her back in.

  In his own room, he found Jo sitting up but asleep, a manila file folder open on her lap; her reading glasses had slipped to the end of her nose. She was a lawyer and she often brought her work to bed, one way or another. Cork decided not to wake her. He wasn’t quite ready for sleep yet, anyway. Too much going on inside.

  He went back downstairs and stood in the dark living room, feeling oddly alien in the quiet of the house, as if he’d been gone a long time and had lost touch with the details that created the mosaic of a normal day. He felt adrift, stranded in a place he didn’t quite know or understand.

  In the kitchen, he latched onto the cookie jar, an icon of familiarity. It was Ernie from Sesame Street, and it had been in the O’Connor house for more than a decade. Cork dipped into Ernie’s head and brought out a chocolate chip cookie, which he put on the kitchen table while he took a glass tumbler from the cupboard next to the sink. From the refrigerator, he grabbed a plastic gallon jug of milk and filled the tumbler halfway.

  As he turned back to the refrigerator, the shatter of glass exploded the quiet of the kitchen. He hit the floor, let go of the jug, reached automatically for his .38. He scrambled across the linoleum and pressed his back to the cabinet doors below the sink, clutching his gun. One of the windows? he wondered. But a quick glance told him no bullet had come through any of the panes.

  Then he saw the broken tumbler on the floor, the puddle of milk around the shards, and he realized he’d knocked the glass off the table. A simple accident due to his own carelessness, a small incident in a day full of enormous event. Still, it felt as if something had finally snapped inside him, the cord that had kept him from taking a long fall.

  Finally alone, he drew his legs up, laid his arms across his knees, cradled his head, and with a violent quaking gave himself up to the dark emotions—terror, rage, regret—that had stalked him all night.

  5

  BOSTON WAS STILL on duty when Cork rolled in at first light.

  She glanced at her watch. “You didn’t sleep much,” she said. “And you don’t mind me saying so, you still look like hell.”

  “What’s the word from Morgan and Schilling?” he asked, referring to the two deputies who’d been posted overnight at the Tibodeau cabin.

  “Checked in every hour; nothing to report.”

  Cork poured himself some coffee from the pot in the common area before going to his office. He spent a few minutes typing a memo on his computer, printed thirty copies, and handed them to the dispatcher. Bos lifted the top copy, read it, and looked up.

  “Everybody wears armor on duty now?”

  “No exceptions,” Cork said. “I want this memo posted on the board and I want every deputy to check off with initials so I know they’ve read it.” He handed her another sheet on which he’d printed some instructions. “Give this to Cy when he comes in. I want him to brief everyone about last night. Duty assignments remain the same except for Larson’s evidence team, who’ll be
out at the cabin. I’m taking a cruiser and heading to the rez.”

  She eyed him with maternal concern but said nothing.

  He drove a Pathfinder that had been confiscated in a raid on a meth lab near Yellow Lake in August. It had since been fitted with a radio and was now an official part of the vehicle pool. He’d taken only a couple of sips of the coffee he’d poured himself earlier, so he stopped at the all night Food ’N Fuel and bought three coffees and several granola bars.

  As he headed north out of town, a red sun inched above the ragged tree line on the far side of Iron Lake. In an autumn in which the whole earth had seemed the color of a raw wound, the water itself appeared to be a well of blood. Cork couldn’t look at it without thinking of all the blood that had soaked the blouse of Marsha Dross’s uniform. As much as possible he kept his eyes on the road and considered the question of who might want him dead.

  He’d been sheriff of Tamarack County before, for a period of seven years. Things had happened near the end of that tenure, terrible things that had torn him apart and nearly shattered his family as well. His badge had been taken from him. He’d spent the next three years running Sam’s Place and putting himself back together. Over time he’d begun to feel whole again and to believe that his life still had promise. In those first seven years as sheriff, he’d been responsible for a lot of people going to jail. On many occasions, he’d been threatened with reprisal, idle threats for the most part. Or so he’d thought.

  Still, that was old business. Retribution was usually born of rage, and rage generally lost its heat over time. So an old grudge, while possible, didn’t feel like a solid thread.