“Retired,” Cork said. “In a manner of speaking. Mr. Langley, anybody offer you coffee?”
“No.”
“Would you like some?”
“Sure.”
Cork went back to where Borkmann and the priest stood together. “Cy, you used to carry a Thermos of coffee in your cruiser.”
“Still do,” Borkmann said.
“How about giving that man a little. Might not settle his nerves, but it can’t hurt.”
Borkmann looked at Jarrod Langley and nodded. “Good idea.”
When the deputy headed toward the Neon with the Thermos in his hand, Cork said to Mal Thorne in a low voice, “Let’s go.” He started quickly for the trail along Moccasin Creek. Without a word, the priest followed.
The trail access was through a break in the pine trees that enclosed the parking lot and began with a fairly steep incline ending at the creek. Cork led the way. The ground was thawed and muddy and full of boot prints. In a few minutes, the two men reached the footbridge where melting snow and ice had turned the little stream beneath into a milky torrent.
Nine people worked the scene, nearly a third of the whole department. Deputies Jackson, Dwyer, and Minot were using a hand winch hooked to the trunk of a big red pine to pull the snowmobile out of the creek and up the bank. Deputy Marsha Dross was documenting the scene with video while Pender did the same with a still camera. Johannsen and Kirk were working with a tape measure. Randy Gooding hunkered at the water’s edge, half hidden by a boulder that sat on a thick plate of melting snow. Also on that plate, jutting from behind the boulder like a couple of bread sticks, was a pair of jean-clad human legs.
Sheriff Arne Soderberg stood looking over Gooding’s shoulder. Soderberg never wore a uniform. He preferred, in the normal course of his duties, to dress in trim three-piece suits, crisp white shirts, silk ties. On the street, he could easily have been mistaken for a successful banker or stockbroker from the Twin Cities. He was a few years younger than Cork, but his hair was already a magnificent silver, which he had razor cut once a week. He was a good-looking man-strong jaw, piercing blue eyes, a charming, practiced smile-and he photographed well. He had no experience with law enforcement. It was widely known that he was simply being groomed by the Independent Republicans for higher office and that the job as sheriff was an opportunity for Soderberg to prove himself as a public servant before moving on to grander things. For years, he’d been on the family payroll, a vice president in his father’s company, Soderberg Transport, a huge enterprise that dominated trucking on the Iron Range and much of the rest of northern Minnesota. His enthusiasm for politics coincided with the age at which most men experienced a midlife crisis. Cork suspected public office might have been the answer for a man who could buy an expensive sports car anytime he wanted.
Cork and Mal crossed the bridge and worked their way down the creek bank toward Gooding and Soderberg. The deputies who knew Cork well gave him a nod, but no one said a word about his presence. Until Soderberg raised his head.
“O’Connor. What the hell are you doing here?”
The sheriff wore something a bit more appropriate to the work at hand than his usual three-piece suit. He sported a new Pendleton shirt and jeans that carried a sharp crease. Despite the April mud, he’d somehow managed to keep his Gore-Tex boots spotless.
Cork had been certain that after their heated exchange on Olaf Gregerson’s radio program Soderberg would not be happy to see him. Anger, however, wasn’t what Cork saw in that first moment his eyes locked on the sheriff. Instead there was a look of horror, the expression of someone whose senses brought to him a reality his sensibility couldn’t deal with. Cork figured the dead girl must be a gruesome sight.
“I heard about Charlotte Kane,” Cork said.
He’d reached the boulder and could now see what Gooding and the sheriff saw. The body lay on a bed of snow crystals like a fish in a meat market display. She was fully clothed, still wearing her down parka. The skin of her face and hands seemed well preserved, and Cork figured the body had been frozen all winter.
From Soderberg’s reaction, Cork had assumed the worst, but he’d been wrong. Even in death, Charlotte Kane was lovely to look at. Her hair was long and black, sleek from the snow around her melting under the April sun. Cork remembered how, whenever she’d stopped at Sam’s Place for a burger or a shake, she’d always been extremely polite. She’d been a quiet, lovely young woman. Now her face was pale, relaxed, her arms crossed over her chest, as if she were only in a long, deep sleep. Seeing her this way, Cork felt an overwhelming sadness for her and her family.
And something more, something he hadn’t felt in months. The tug of a dark shape from behind a curtain of solid white, an unseen hand that reached out to him.
“Pender,” Soderberg hollered. “Pender, get these men out of here.”
Cork looked back at the footbridge, then at the snowmobile being hauled up the bank, and finally at the place where the body lay. “Looks like her Arctic Cat flew right off the bridge,” he said. “Must’ve come hell-bent down that hill.”
Gooding nodded. “And she couldn’t negotiate the bridge. She’d been drinking, we know that.”
The bridge was well marked and wide enough for an easy crossing. Cork recalled what Jenny had told him about Charlotte the night she’d disappeared, about the girl’s dark poetry and fascination with suicide.
Soderberg stepped in front of Cork, eclipsing the body. “I want you out of here, O’Connor. This isn’t your concern.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Pender?”
“What’s that?” Cork pointed toward a scrap of brightly colored paper just visible in the snow a few feet away.
“I was just going to check it.” Gooding wore surgical gloves and he reached over and pulled out a red, white, and green wrapper. “Pearson’s Nut Goodie,” he said. He brushed away a bit of snow and brought up some torn cellophane. “Beef jerky.” He widened the cleared area and uncovered the remnant of a Doritos bag, pieces of frozen orange rind, and a Corona beer bottle with a couple of inches of pale liquid still in the bottom.
Gooding looked up at Cork. “What do you make of that?”
Soderberg, who still appeared shaken, said, “Maybe she was trapped by the storm and ate to keep her strength up, hoping to get found.”
Cork studied the body, its peaceful repose. There was a detail that bothered him. “Take a good look at her, Arne. Notice anything?”
Soderberg swung his attention back to Cork and to the priest, who stood observing at a slight distance. “Out of here, O’Connor. And look, Father, I’m sorry, but you need to leave, too. Pender,” he cried. “Pender, where the hell are you?”
“Here, Sheriff.” Duane Pender emerged from the shadow under the footbridge, zipping his fly as he came. He stepped carefully among the rocks and pockets of snow along the creek bank. “Nature called,” he said with a look of chagrin.
“Escort these men back to the parking lot,” Soderberg ordered. “O’Connor, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give my deputy any trouble.”
Cork said, “Where are her gloves, Arne?”
“What?”
“Her gloves.”
Soderberg looked down at her hands, which were white and bare.
“If she’d driven that snowmobile out here without gloves on, her hands would have been frozen long before she got to Moccasin Creek,” Cork said.
Soderberg nodded to Gooding. “Check her coat.”
Gooding went through the pockets of her parka and came up empty-handed. He sifted the snow around her body and shook his head.
“Why would she have the presence of mind to bring food with her but not gloves? And one more thing,” Cork said. “That bottle of Corona. Hard to believe it would have survived the crash in one piece.”
“But not out of the question,” Soderberg countered.
“Maybe not. How’d she open it?”
“How do you usually get a beer open? You twist off the damn top.”
“That’s a Corona, Arne. They don’t make a twist top. Unless you find an opener around here, you gotta
