water called Tick Creek ran. North, the narrow access to the Tibodeau cabin was clear all the way to where it branched off the main road. Wooded hills stretched away in every direction. Pressing down above it all was the great blue palm of the sky. The shooter had chosen well, a vantage from which he could clearly see not just the cabin but also the approach of anyone traveling the road from the north or south.
He looked down at the pine-needle bed in the rocks and was puzzled.
The shooter had been careful in so many respects. Knowing Lucy and Eli’s schedule. Calling from the cabin, then wiping away all traces of his or her presence. Choosing a position that was excellent not only because of its vantage but also because it lay on solid rock where no footprints would be left. So why did he ignore the shell casings? They were crumbs on an otherwise empty plate, impossible to miss. Had the shooter simply overlooked them? Or been suddenly rushed, worried by the sound of the sirens as Pender and Borkmann approached, and fled without taking the time for the last details?
Cork considered the dead dogs. He thought it likely they were killed first, then the shooter or the accomplice made the call and climbed the hill, probably the same way he’d come. Did the accomplice come, too? How did they leave? Cork walked toward the back side of the hill where the night before it had been too dark to go. The slope was gentler there, with more soil and long tufts of wild oats beneath the aspen trees. About fifty yards from the shooter’s rocks, Cork found a spot where the incline increased suddenly and where some of the ground cover had been disturbed by a sliding shoe or boot. A few feet farther down was a scar in the soil where a whole bunch of oat stalks had been pulled completely out, as if someone had grabbed them in an attempt to prevent a fall. Below that, the bushes had been broken by the weight of a large object, perhaps a tumbling body. The shooter, or someone with the shooter, had taken a nasty spill.
Cork picked his way down the back side of the hill and reached the bed of Tick Creek. Fall had been dry, and this late in the season there was only a small trickle of water crawling along the bottom. A couple of hundred yards to the south, the creek crossed the road. That was the direction from which Pender had come the day before with his lights flashing and his siren screaming. Cork didn’t think the shooter would have fled that way. North was different. Before it intersected County 23 a half mile distant, Tick Creek curved sharply away from the turnoff to the Tibodeau cabin, so that a cop coming from that direction would see nothing of the creek. Cork turned north. The banks were high and formidably steep from the cut of floodwaters that came with the snowmelt each spring, and they were crowned with a thick growth of brush and popple. Someone on foot could have climbed out, but not a vehicle. In a few minutes, Cork reached the bridge at County Road 23. The structure was made of creosote-soaked wood with a web of rusted iron railing along either side and decorated with painted graffiti. In the soft dirt of the narrow shoulder at the east end of the bridge, Cork found recent tire tracks.
Larson watched Cork approach on foot. “I thought you were up there.” He pointed toward the hilltop.
Cork said, “I walked down the other side and around the hill.”
“You needed the exercise?” came a voice behind him.
Cork smiled and turned as BCA agent Simon Rutledge stepped from the cabin.
Rutledge spoke like Jimmy Stewart, with a little catch in his throat and a naively honest tone that you had to love. He was in his midforties, an unimposing man with thinning red hair and a hopelessly boyish smile, but his appearance and demeanor belied a tough spirit. Cork had watched Rutledge question suspects. He never browbeat, never bullied. He offered them his sympathy, bestowed on them his neighborly smile, opened his arms to them, and, after he got their trust, almost always got their confession. Simon Rutledge was so good that whenever he interviewed a suspect, other agents referred to it as “Simonizing.”
“How’s it hanging, Cork?” Rutledge said. The two men shook hands.
“I’ve had better days.”
“Bet you have. Where you been?”
Cork nodded toward the hilltop. “Our shooter left the back way. I found tire tracks at the bridge over Tick Creek on County Twenty-three. They’ll photograph well, and I’ll bet if we’re careful we can get a good cast made.”
“Mack,” Rutledge called to one of his BCA evidence team who was digging in the ground in front of the Tibodeau cabin. He gave the agent directions to the bridge over Tick Creek. “Check out the tire tracks…” He glanced at Cork.
“East side, south shoulder.”
“You heard him. Get good photos, and I’ll be there in a bit to help with casting.”
“On my way.” Mack put his shovel down and headed for his state car.
“You take a look at the cabin?” Cork asked Rutledge.
“Yeah. But I know Ed did a good job on it, so I wasn’t expecting much. I was just thinking of going up top to have a look where our shooter camped out. You see anything while you were up there?”
“I didn’t look hard. Mostly I was thinking.”
“Wondering who wants you dead?” Rutledge flashed a slightly diminished version of his smile but it still produced dimples. “I had a talk with Ed, and he’s got a point about you being the target. You need to be thinking seriously about who’d want you in their gun sight.”
“Any time you bust someone, deep down they want to bust you back,” Cork said.
“Not everybody’s got the balls for that. The question for you is who does?”
Two of Cork’s deputies were helping the BCA people dig in front of the cabin. They put a shovelful into a metal sieve, sifted, tossed out rocks and other detritus, then repeated the process. They were looking for the round that hit Marsha Dross. Cork hoped they’d find it and that it would prove good for a ballistics analysis.
Rutledge walked to his car, an unremarkable blue Cavalier, and brought back an evidence bag that held the two shell casings Cork had found the night before. “Remington. 357, packed with a hundred fifty grains, I’d say. Probably fired from something like a Savage One-ten. That would be my firearm of choice, anyway.”
“Why? That’s a game rifle,” Cork said.
“With a good scope, one of those babies could make Barney Fife into an effective assassin. And up here, a Savage One-ten is as common as a snowmobile. Wouldn’t raise any eyebrows like a more sophisticated sniper weapon might.”
“You’re saying it could be anyone,” Cork said.
“Those tracks you found at the bridge might help narrow things a bit.” Rutledge looked at Cork wistfully. “So?”
“So what?”
“Who wants you dead?”
6
Cork drove the Pathfinder back to Aurora and parked in the lot of the community hospital. He checked at the reception desk, then walked to Intensive Care, where Marsha Dross had been moved. It was breakfast time for the patients, and the smell of institutional food that filled the hallways reminded Cork that he hadn’t eaten that morning. He should have been hungry, but he wasn’t.
He found Frank Dross sitting in a chair outside Marsha’s room. Marsha’s father, a widower, was a retired cop from Rochester, Minnesota. Like his daughter, he was tall and not what you would call good looking. He had a long nose, gray eyes, and gray hair neatly parted on the right side. He wore a black knit shirt and tan Haggar slacks with an expandable waist that was, in fact, expanded over a small paunch. Cork had met him several times and liked the man.
Dross stood. “Sheriff.” He shook Cork’s hand.
“How’re you doing, Frank?”
“Better, now that I know Marsha’s out of danger. They tell me you saved her life.”
Saved her life? Maybe he’d kept her from dying in the dirt in front of the Tibodeau cabin, but he’d also been responsible, in a way, for the bullet that put her there.
“Do you know why yet?” Frank asked.
“We’re working on that. How is she this morning?”
