“Where’s your sister?” Cork asked.
“Jenny?”
“Yeah, that sister.”
“With the other sister. Crow Point.” Stephen went back to watching Waaboo.
“I thought Annie wanted to be alone.”
“Guess not.”
Cork hung his coat on a wall peg near the door, removed his boots, and left them on the doormat. He went to Waaboo, who stood up and offered his grandfather a lid. Cork accepted it, sat down, picked up another lid, and used them as cymbals, banging out a beat as he sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Delighted, Waaboo dropped onto his bottom and joined him. To Stephen, Cork said, “Everything go okay with Skye?”
“Got her out there and back.”
Cork put his lids down and studied Stephen, who wouldn’t look at him. “You okay?”
Stephen didn’t answer that one. He said, “How’s Marlee?”
Waaboo went on playing, but Cork got up and took a chair at the table. “Pretty beat up,” he replied. “She wants to see you, but she doesn’t want you to see her, not the way she looks right now. Here’s something that might interest you, though. I took her and her mom out to Ray Jay Wakemup’s place, so they could get it cleaned before he gets released tomorrow. Somebody left Dexter’s head in a cake box on the kitchen table.”
Stephen’s demeanor changed in an instant. He looked like a guard dog on alert. “Who?”
“The only person who saw anything was Carson Manydeeds, and he didn’t see enough to be very helpful. Did say that whoever it was drove a pickup.”
“The guy who went after us?”
“That’s where my money is at the moment.”
“So if it’s Mr. Wakemup he’s after, why did he try to run Marlee off the road?”
“From what you’ve told me, it seems like Marlee ran herself off the road.”
“That pickup was definitely following us, Dad.”
“I believe you. But the question is what was his motive. Did he really intend Marlee harm?”
Stephen’s eyes went to the window. Outside, only the thin, bare tree branches seemed to be holding the sun above the horizon. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “Is somebody staying with Marlee and her mom tonight?”
“That would be me.”
His son’s face clearly showed the deep desire for the night’s watch to fall to him, but Stephen only nodded and said, “Good.” Then he said, “It’s your turn to fix dinner. What were you planning?”
Cork reached into his back pocket, drew out his wallet, and pulled from it a twenty and a ten. “I was planning on ordering pizza. Why don’t you give Skye a call and ask if she’d like to join you?”
Stephen seemed reluctant.
“That’s okay, isn’t it?” Cork said.
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“Good. I’m going to put a few things together for tonight.”
Cork went upstairs, threw a change of clothing into a gym bag, tossed in a toothbrush and toothpaste. Back in the kitchen, he found Stephen on the floor spinning pan lids like tops, much to Waaboo’s delight. Cork kissed the top of his grandson’s head. “You be good,” he said. He walked to the door, pulled on his boots, and took his coat from the peg.
“Dad, there’s something else,” Stephen said.
“What is it?”
Stephen seemed to wrestle with himself a moment, then shrugged. “Forget it. It can wait.”
Cork snugged on his gloves and reached for the doorknob. “Call me if you need me.”
He walked back into the steel blue light of that cold winter evening. The first stars were visible, and Cork headed quickly out of Aurora. As he drove, he tried to put events together in a way that made some sense. It was clear that someone wanted to send Ray Jay Wakemup a message, a brutal one. If it was the same person who’d followed Marlee and Stephen in the green, mud-spattered pickup, had he intended to use Marlee to send Ray Jay another message, one even more brutal? If so, why? Cork didn’t know Wakemup well. He knew what most folks on the rez knew. Wakemup’s life had been the kind that white people pointed to when they said Indians were hopeless. Like a lot of Shinnobs, he’d grown up in foster care, shuffled from one family to another. At seventeen, he’d gone into juvie for boosting a car. He’d been high on alcohol and angel dust. After that, he was in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, though nothing so heinous that he did hard time. He wasn’t dangerous. He was just someone who white folks-and most Ojibwe-thought of as shiftless.
His older brother, Harmon Wakemup, was a stark contrast. Harmon, who’d also graduated from the foster care system, had become a cop. He’d worked his way up and had been hired as chief of police in Bovey, west on the Iron Range. A few years later, he’d been tragically killed while helping a motorist who’d spun off the road one icy night. Another vehicle hit that same patch of ice and slid into Harmon, pinning him against the other car and crushing the life out of him almost instantly. His memorial service had been well attended by both whites and the Anishinaabeg.
Ray Jay was often compared to his older brother, and never in a good way.
Then there was their younger sister, Stella, who’d been adopted by a childless Ojibwe couple, Peter and Aurelia Daychild, owners of a small resort on Lake Vermilion. Despite their best efforts to raise her well, Stella ended up a wild one. She’d run away at sixteen, lived, by her own admission, a hard life in the Twin Cities, and had come back to Tamarack County the single mother of two children. Although in Cork’s opinion, she’d come back a much wiser woman, the jury on the rez was still out on Stella Daychild. She’d been back nearly a decade, but that hadn’t been long enough. On the rez, she was still trouble waiting to happen. Which, Cork thought, was probably why Carson Manydeeds had passed along his friendly warning.
And Ray Jay? Had he grown any wiser with time? What Cork knew was that Wakemup had finally pulled himself together almost two years ago, joined AA, gone to some Wellbriety meetings on the Bois Forte Reservation, and been clean and sober since. What was, perhaps, even more important was that, as the result of Step 8 in the 12-step process, the step that required seeking out those you’d wronged in order to make amends, Ray Jay had come forward with information about an old murder in Tamarack County. If the story Ray Jay told was true, the legal system had sentenced an innocent man to prison for forty years.
And if it was true that such an injustice had been done, Cork O’Connor had been part of the broken system responsible for that travesty. It had happened this way.
He’d been a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department for five years when Gerald and Babette Bowen reported their daughter missing. Karyn Bowen was a twenty-year-old college student home for the summer. The day she disappeared she’d told her parents she was heading to the Twin Cities for a rock concert and planned to stay the night at a hotel there. She never came home. Cork was well acquainted with Karyn Bowen. Twice that summer, he’d pulled her over in her red Corvette, once to deliver a warning about speeding and the next time to ticket her for the same offense. Roy Arneson, the Tamarack County sheriff at the time, was a good friend of Gerald Bowen, who’d made a fortune paving roads in the North Country. Arneson had taken care of the ticket, much to Cork’s displeasure. In Cork’s opinion, Karyn Bowen was a spoiled child and could have used a lesson in consequences.
After her parents reported her missing, two days passed before Karyn’s red Corvette was found parked on an old logging road south of Aurora. Karyn’s nude body was in the trunk.
Along with his other duties, Cork was in charge of major crimes investigation for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He oversaw the processing of the scene, handling most of the responsibilities himself. There were bruises on Karyn Bowen’s neck, and later the coroner confirmed that she’d been killed by manual strangulation. The coroner also found evidence of significant sexual activity. There was skin under the fingernails of her right hand, which may have indicated she’d fought her assailant. In the glove box of the Corvette, Cork discovered a small amount of cocaine and several marijuana cigarettes that later analysis showed were laced with PCP, better known as angel dust. He found no fingerprints at all in the obvious places-door handles, steering wheel, seat belts, trunk-and understood that the car had been wiped clean.