Loushine demonstrated his lack of experience when he shook his head at the suggestion, eliminating the owner of The Height out of hand.
“She stands to lose business if The Harbor is a success,” I explained. “How many gourmet restaurants can this region support?”
Loushine still shook his head.
“How ’bout Charlie Otterness?” I asked.
Gretchen cringed at the sound of his name.
“Betrayed?” I continued. “Humiliated by the woman he loved?”
“That was before Michael became involved with Bobby Orman,” Gretchen interjected, as if that made all the difference in the world.
Loushine shook his head some more. “Charlie wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he said.
Unbelievable. According to these two, nobody in Kreel County was capable of murder.
“King Koehn,” I suggested.
Loushine held out his hand, wobbled it. “I suppose he’s worth looking into,” he agreed, bending just so slightly to the possibility.
Man, I thought. If they didn’t like those suggestions, they’re going to hate the final two names.
“Sheriff Orman?”
“Bullshit!” Loushine spit the word quickly and loudly.
“What motive would he have?” Gretchen queried.
“Did he know about Michael; that she was Alison?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Maybe he found out. Maybe he didn’t like it.”
“Bullshit,” Loushine repeated.
“He’s sure gone out of his way to botch the investigation, hasn’t he?” I reminded them.
The two deputies stared at me without speaking, but I could tell I’d struck a nerve. They looked at each other and then away.
“He just doesn’t understand how things work, that’s all,” Loushine said. But his words didn’t echo with the same vehemence as before.
“Who else?” Gretchen asked. “That’s five suspects on your silly little list. Who’s the sixth?”
I stepped next to the bed and showed her the name I had written last.
She read the name, blinking several times while reading it as if she feared her eyes were deceiving her. She was looking at Loushine, expecting him to say something, but he remained silent. He hadn’t seen my list and didn’t know the sixth name. Gretchen shook her head and closed her eyes more tightly than natural, then opened them quickly as if she expected me to disappear. I didn’t.
“Fuck you,” she said at last.
She was breathing hard through her nose; her mouth was clamped shut but only for a moment. When it opened again, she shouted, “How dare you?! Who do you think you are?”
She threw Nevada Barr’s book at me, but fortunately it was a paperback and easy to dodge.
“What?” a confused Loushine asked.
“It’s me!” Gretchen shouted. “I’m the sixth name!” Then to me: “Get outta here! Get outta my sight!”
I moved away from the hospital bed, ending up in the corner as far from her as I could get and still be in the same room. I studied her from my vantage point, my arms folded over my chest, pretending I could determine her guilt or innocence just by looking at her.
“What the hell, Taylor?” Loushine asked.
“Michael Bettich has no family, as you well know,” I reminded Gretchen. “So if she dies, what happens to The Harbor? Who collects the little gold mine she was building for herself? Her best friend, I bet.”
“You think I hired someone to shoot her so I could get her resort?” Gretchen demanded.
“People have been killed for less,” I told her.
“I’m a deputy!” she shouted at me. When that had no effect, she added, “I was shot!”
“How convenient,” I told her.
“You sonuvabitch,” she hissed at me. She flung the covers off and attempted to swing her legs over the edge of the bed to come after me. But Loushine stopped her and rolled her back in bed—he seemed excited to have physical contact with his fellow deputy.
“Get out!” Gretchen barked at me after she was safely tucked in.
“We’ll talk again,” I told her and left the hospital room. Loushine followed me out.
“Is this how things are done in the big city,” he asked when we were in the corridor, Gretchen’s door closed behind us. “Is this how trained homicide cops conduct investigations?”
I didn’t respond. Instead, I led Loushine to the hospital switchboard. “No calls in or out of Gretchen Rovick’s room until we tell you,” I instructed the operator. “By order of the sheriff’s department.”
The operator looked at Loushine, and he nodded. I took him by the arm and half pulled him toward the hospital door.
“Put a tap on her phone,” I told him. “Then you can release her calls. I want to know who she talks to.”
“Why?” Loushine asked.
“Because in the unlikely event that she actually was involved in the shooting, she might contact her two partners.”
“Oh,” Loushine replied with an expression that was as cheerful as three days of hard rain.
We were climbing into Loushine’s 4X4 after he made the necessary calls.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he said as he slid behind the steering wheel. “I did what you asked because the sheriff ordered me to give full cooperation. But you’re wrong.”
“Probably,” I agreed.
“No, I mean it,” Loushine said. “I remember this time, it was about six months after we hired her. Gretchen and I were called to a simple burglary; I was riding with her from time to time back then, doing the supervising-officer routine. It was a trifle—fishing equipment taken from a victim’s shed—and I acted like it, veteran cop telling the rookie not to get excited. The victim didn’t see it that way and became pretty upset at my indifference.
“After we took the complaint, we went back to the car. I was about to open the passenger door, when Gretchen suddenly drew her revolver, aimed across the roof of the squad, and yelled, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ She was aiming at someone standing right behind me. ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ she yelled again. I didn’t move an inch. Then Gretchen started counting, real slow but loud. ‘One, two, three …’ I’m standing there, praying to hear something hit the ground. Then I heard a muffled thud, and Gretchen yelled, ‘Step back!’
“I turn around, and there’s the owner of the shed with his hands in the air. On the ground is a crossbow. The man was going to shoot me in the back with an arrow because I didn’t take the theft of his fishing equipment seriously. Later, I asked Gretchen how high she was willing to count before she pulled the trigger. She told me she knew at three the guy would drop the bow.”
“And if he didn’t?” I asked.
“She would have killed him at four.”
“What has that got to do with this?” I asked him.
“Gretchen is cool enough,” he answered. “If she wanted Michael dead, she would have done it herself. Clean. And simple. No way she would have been as sloppy as the shooters at The Harbor.”
“Now there’s an endorsement,” I said smugly.
“She’s one of us,” Deputy Loushine snapped back.
“Hell, Gary,” I told him. “According to TV, according to the movies, cops go bad all the time.”
I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t come off that way.
twenty
I loved reading Jack London as a kid, loved learning the language of nature, listening to “the voices of wind and storm.” Even now I’m impressed by his violence, the violence of the unconquered wilderness, of the men and animals who call it home. Kreel County is a far cry from London’s forest primordial, of course. Honeycombed with highways, roads, and logging trails, it’s nearly impossible to escape man’s presence. Hike in a straight line long enough and you’re sure to trip upon some vestige of civilization: a snowmobile track, a power line, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. There are no packs of starving wolves to contend with, no rampaging grizzlies. Only hunters who can’t shoot straight. It’s much the same in northern Minnesota where my family kept a hunting and fishing cabin—at least it was a hunting and fishing cabin before electricity, before TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens turned it into something else. Still, it’s infinitely superior to existence in the concrete jungles of big-city America, where a man can live a lifetime without ever setting a foot to untrampled earth.