Tamarack County: A Novel Part 6

"I'm just thinking about the empty tank on Evelyn's car. She filled up the day before she went missing and, according to the Judge, didn't drive much. It could be she drove four gallons' worth."

"And the rest was . . ." Dross's gaze returned to the coil of rubber hose on the shelf. She leaned to it and sniffed. "Siphoned?"

Cork shrugged. "Would explain a lot."

She glanced toward the door where the Judge had just disappeared. "Why?"

"You won't know until you ask him."

"Another long night ahead," she said, though not in a tired way.

A cell phone rang, but it wasn't Dross's. Cork reached to the little belt holster that held his own phone. The call was from his son.

"Yeah, buddy, what is it?"

"Dad, you need to get out here." Stephen's voice was on the razor edge of panic.

"Where are you? What's wrong?"

"I'm at Marlee's place. Someone-" Stephen broke off.

"Stephen? Stephen, are you all right?"

His son's voice returned. "Sorry. Marlee's really upset. Dad, someone killed her dog." There was quiet on the line. Then Stephen's voice again. "They didn't just kill him, Dad. They cut off his head."

CHAPTER 10.

Stephen opened the door to his father, who asked immediately, "You're okay? And Marlee?"

"Fine, Dad. We're fine."

He stood back and let his father in. Marlee was in the room behind him, sitting on the sofa, hugging herself for comfort. She wasn't crying anymore, but the tears had taken forever to subside. All Stephen had been able to do was hold her, and although she let him, it hadn't felt to him as if he was doing enough.

"Where is he?" Cork asked.

"Out by the lake."

"Tell me exactly what happened."

So Stephen told him about letting Dexter out to do his business, about the barking, the quiet, the yelp, and the sudden silence that had ended it all. He didn't say anything about having been p.r.o.ne on the couch with Marlee at the time. It seemed . . . irrelevant.

"Then you went out and found the dog?"

"Yes."

"Did you see anybody?"

"No."

"What about before?"

"Before?"

"When you first got here."

"I wasn't really looking for anyone." It sounded feeble to Stephen, and he wondered if his father, in his place, might have noticed more.

"You didn't hear anything along with the barking? Or after? A snowmobile maybe?"

"Nothing."

Marlee was crying again, very softly. Stephen turned from his father, went back to her on the sofa, and put his arm around her.

"It'll be okay," he said gently.

"No, it won't," she said. "It will never be all right."

"I'm going to have a look," his father said.

"I'll go with you."

Stephen started to get up, but Marlee grabbed his arm. "I don't want to go."

"You don't have to," he said.

"And I don't want to be alone either."

Stephen looked to his father, who said, "Why don't you stay here? How do I find the dog?"

"In back, there's a trail through the trees to the lake. Just follow our tracks. Thanks, Dad."

His father opened the door, then turned back. "Keep this locked."

Alone again with Marlee, Stephen thought, not for the first time, how the night had not gone at all as he'd imagined. He was glad his father had come, but he was also, to his own surprise, resentful. He wished he'd had the presence of mind, the experience, the knowledge to have handled this on his own. He wondered how he must look in Marlee's eyes, running to his father for help.

But she laid her head on his shoulder and whispered, "Thank you," and Stephen felt better, felt necessary.

Cork found the trail and followed it west toward Iron Lake. He'd taken the Maglite from his Land Rover and had no trouble seeing his way. The sky was clear, with a vast splatter of stars, and the quarter moon perched among the bare branches of the birch trees like a silver vulture. Except for Cork's footsteps crunching through the snow cover, the night was quiet. Far away in the direction of Allouette, the largest town on the Iron Lake Reservation, he could hear the whine of a snowmobile, which reminded him of the irritating buzz of a mosquito.

He broke from the trees, and the beam of his Maglite followed the clear line of tracks left by Marlee and Stephen and, before them, the dog. The tracks headed directly onto the lake ice, which in some places, the wind had blown clean of snow and in others had piled it in drifts, like a capricious child. Winter had already been long and the temperatures so consistently in the single digits or lower that he didn't worry about breaking through the ice.

Ten yards out from the sh.o.r.eline, he found the dog. It was a large animal, s.h.a.ggy, with cocoa-colored spots on a dirty white background. Its paws were big as dust mitts. Its head was missing. The snow and ice all around it were splashed with its blood. Cork knelt and studied the body. He found no wounds, except for the amputation, which had been a ragged, hurried job. In the way of his thinking, of his imagining as a result of a lifetime of criminal investigation, he tried to reconstruct how it happened. The barking: the dog had seen its killer. The quiet: the dog had been placated. The yelp: the dog had been attacked, most probably its throat cut. The silence: the dog was dead and was being decapitated. Cork wondered about the placation. He scoured the area with his flashlight beam and discovered a raw steak half-buried under kicked-up snow. He searched in an arc and didn't find what he was looking for next, which was the dog's head. He did find two sets of tracks, one leading in to sh.o.r.e from farther out on the lake, and the other returning along that same line. He followed the tracks.

They led him to the closest of the cl.u.s.ter of small islands known to the Ojibwe as Maangwag and to the white population as the Loons. Same name, different languages. The tracks ended at a spot where a snowmobile had been parked. Whoever rode the machine had climbed back onto it, spun it in a tight arc, and headed southwest, toward the glow on the horizon that rose from the town of Aurora.

When Cork returned, Stephen stood to meet him and asked, "You found him?"

"Yeah," Cork said.

"Aren't dogs supposed to be, like, suspicious of strangers?" Marlee said, not really speaking to anyone.

"a.s.suming it was a stranger," Cork said. "Whoever it was, they used a piece of steak to entice Dexter."

"Probably wouldn't have mattered," she said, hopelessly. "That big, dumb dog, he was just so friendly with everyone. Why would anyone do something like that?"

"I don't know, Marlee. Have you called your mom?"

She nodded. "They had to get someone to cover for her. She said she'd be here as soon as she could."

"That was a good question Marlee asked," Stephen said. "Why would someone do something like that?"

Cork could have told him about sick people like Charles Devine, but he chose instead to say, "The world is full of human beings you won't understand. They'll do things you find outrageous, repugnant, incomprehensible. But you know, Stephen, it's been my experience that, more often than not, in their own twisted minds, they see themselves as the good guys."

They heard a vehicle drive up and park. A moment later the door opened, and Stella Daychild came in. She threw off her quilted parka and let it fall on the floor by the door. She went immediately to her daughter on the couch and put her arms around Marlee and held her tightly.

"Oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry."

"It's been an awful night, Mom." Once again, Marlee was shedding tears.

"I know, I know."

"Mom, they killed Dexter."

"Shhh," Stella said. "It's okay, baby. It's okay." She looked up at Cork. "Thanks for being here." Then her eyes s.h.i.+fted to Stephen. "And thank you, Stephen."

Cork's son shrugged. "You're welcome, Stella."

Stella? Cork thought. Not Mrs. Daychild?

Marlee drew away from her mother and wiped her eyes. "What are we going to do? How do we tell Uncle Ray Jay?"

"We'll figure that out. Let's just take this one step at a time. I need a cigarette, sweetheart. Cork and I are going to step outside while I smoke. Okay?"

Marlee nodded and looked at Stephen. "Will you sit with me?"

Stephen seemed more than happy to oblige.

From the smell of the house, Cork figured Stella Daychild wasn't averse to smoking inside. Maybe she did need a cigarette, but he was pretty sure that wasn't the point of asking him to join her on the front porch. They both donned their parkas and stepped outside. Stella dug a pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket along with a Bic lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, put it between her lips, flicked a flame, inhaled, and sent a great plume of smoke toward the stars. She held the pack out to Cork, but he declined with a shake of his head.

Although he didn't know all the details, he knew that Stella Daychild had not had an easy life. But unlike many women who'd had it tough, she didn't seem to have the broken, jagged edges that, in Cork's experience, so often came with the territory of abandonment and adversity. She'd been a beauty when she was young, and she was lovely still. She had the broad face and high cheeks of the Ojibwe. Her skin was the color of honey on wheat bread, her hair as dark as a raven's wing and worn long. She'd been born and raised on the rez, by parents who were addicted to alcohol and seemed to love the bottle more than they did their children. She and her two brothers had been taken and placed in foster homes, a series of them. Stella had eventually been adopted by one of the families but had grown up wild. At sixteen, she'd run away and headed to the Twin Cities. This part of her life, Cork knew nothing about. When the Chippewa Grand Casino had opened south of Aurora, Stella, who was in her mid-twenties by then, returned to the rez a single mother with two young children. She came because there was work at the casino and because she wanted to reconnect with her relations and her roots and to raise her children in Tamarack County. That was ten years ago. She'd worked steadily at the casino, and it seemed to Cork that she'd done a pretty good job where her children were concerned. Her son, Hector, was making her proud as a Marine. And because Marlee had been employed at Sam's Place the previous summer, Cork knew that she was smart and responsible, and he liked her. He didn't mind at all that she and Stephen "were talking."

Stella seemed to be taking the current situation rather well, although she drew on her cigarette a little more frequently than was probably necessary.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"Has anybody threatened you lately?" Cork replied.

"No."

"You p.i.s.s anybody off?"

"Not that I know of."

"How have your dealings with the folks on the rez been?"

"Okay. n.o.body's threatened to cut off Dexter's head anyway. You think it was a s.h.i.+nn.o.b who did this?"

"Honestly, no."

"Somebody just getting their perverted jollies?"

"I don't think that either. I followed his tracks from where he left Dexter. They went out to the Loons. He'd left his snowmobile there. Probably didn't want to alert you or Marlee to his coming. He headed back in the direction of Aurora."

"A chimook?" she said, using the slang, and slightly unkind, Ojibwe term for white people. She blew smoke, a furious billow this time. "I get hit on at the casino bar a lot. I handle most of them pretty well. My livelihood depends on it. But every so often a guy won't take no. Then I have to get serious. Sometimes I have security escort him out. When he leaves, he leaves p.i.s.sed. Once in a great while, one of these guys is waiting for me when I get off at the end of a s.h.i.+ft."

This concerned Cork a lot and went beyond what had happened to Dexter. It was the kind of thing that, when he was sheriff, he would have wanted to know. It was about vulnerability, and everything in him cried out to protect. "What do you do when that happens?"

"I talk tough. And I have pepper spray. Do you really think this all might be because of something like that?"

"Best not to discount anything at this point. Whoever it was, he planned it. He knew where you live, knew that you have a dog. It seems most likely that Dexter was killed to send you a message or maybe to punish you. Again, that brings us back to someone off the rez. If it was a s.h.i.+nn.o.b, he'd have known the dog belonged to Ray Jay and not to you."

Stella straightened up, and Cork watched her eyes narrow as she went someplace deep in her thinking. "There was a guy," she said finally. "Maybe a month ago. Came into the bar one night, and there was this look in his eyes. Not drunk. I know drunk. This was different. Intense in a really creepy way. He sat at a table by himself, but his eyes never left me. Whenever he wanted a drink, instead of asking one of the waitresses, he came right up to the bar so he could order directly from me. He drank Maker's Mark, neat."

"Did he say anything?"

"No. Not really. But that look creeped me out plenty. And then when I got off that night, someone followed me. All the way from the casino out to the rez."

"The guy?"

"That's what I figured. I didn't want him knowing where I live, so I went into Allouette and stopped for some gas. He drove by, disappeared. I waited, but he didn't come back. I drove home fast, and you better believe I locked all the doors."

"What did he look like?"

"Thinning red hair. Medium height. Big, though, in his upper body, like he worked out or something. I remember he had a mole on his cheek, right here." She pointed to a spot just to the left of her nose. "Looked like a fly had landed."

"What kind of vehicle?"