offer Reinhardt? Giving up Lonnie Thunder, turning him over to the sheriff, didn’t feel right. A gang-any brotherhood-was strong because of the integrity of the whole. Solidarity was the foundation, and its erosion was the end. Giving up Thunder would be too great a risk. Kingbird had to understand that. So what do you offer as justice, Cork wondered, when justice was impossible to offer?
He was pulled from his reverie when his daughter, seventeen-year-old Annie, left the choir loft and joined another teenager-Ulysses Kingbird-in front of the chancel rail for the offertory. Annie sang a medieval hymn that the young Kingbird had arranged. Ulysses accompanied her on guitar. They’d been practicing for weeks. Cork had heard Annie singing in the bathroom, in her bedroom, humming on the stairs. This was the first time he’d heard her with the accompaniment and he was moved. It was extraordinary.
After the service, Cork and Jo caught up with Ulysses Kingbird in the common room in the church basement. This was where the congregation usually gathered to socialize. Refreshments were kept simple: juice or punch for the children, coffee for adults, cookies for all. The kitchen abutted the common room, and there were always several women visible through the wide serving windows, bustling around in an important way.
Ulysses stood in a corner with his father, Will Kingbird, who had a cell phone to his ear. Ulysses was sixteen-barely. His skin had the shadowy cast of the Ojibwe, courtesy of his father, but his features were sharp, his face narrow, his lips thin and soft, all evidence of the Hispanic blood on his mother’s side. In a couple of years, he might grow handsome, but at the moment he was awkward and pimpled. Standing beside his father, he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.
“Ulysses,” Jo said, approaching him with a warm smile. “That was an absolutely beautiful piece you played.”
“Thanks.” His dark eyes dropped to the linoleum. “It was Annie, you know. She’s got the voice.”
“Don’t go selling yourself short. You play the guitar wonderfully. And that arrangement was extraordinary.”
He shrugged off her compliment. It was clear that if there had been a way, he would have disappeared.
“Where’s your mother?” Jo asked. “I can’t believe Lucinda would miss this.”
His father flipped his cell phone closed. “That’s what I was just trying to find out.” Will Kingbird was full-blood Ojibwe. Powerfully built, he stood well over six feet tall. He was Cork’s age, staring fifty in the face, and his black hair, which he kept military short, was salted with gray. He held himself impossibly rigid, the result, Cork figured, of thirty years in the marines. “She was supposed to pick up Rayette and Misty and bring them to church like she always does. Can’t get her cell phone and nobody answers at Alex’s place.”
“Car trouble maybe,” Cork suggested. “If they’re on the rez, it’s hard to get a cell phone signal.”
“Or baby trouble,” Jo said. “They can be a handful.”
Kingbird frowned at their casual suggestions. “I think Uly and me’ll head out there, see what’s going on.”
Annie worked her way toward them through the post-Mass gathering. When she reached Ulysses, she playfully punched his arm. “Awesome, dude.”
A smile slid briefly across his lips. “No, you were.”
“Oh, like you and your guitar were totally not there.” She put her arm around him in the way Cork had seen her do with her softball teammates. She glanced at Will Kingbird, cordial but not friendly. “Morning, Mr. Kingbird.”
“Morning.”
“Wasn’t he incredible?”
“You both did a nice job.”
“Dude,” she said to Ulysses, “your mother would have loved it. Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re about to find out,” Will Kingbird said. He gave them all a nod in parting. “Let’s go, Uly.”
Cork watched them weave their way across the basement. Halfway to the door, the parish priest, Father Ted Green, met them and spoke to Kingbird for a moment. They followed the priest toward another door where Cy Borkman, in his deputy’s uniform, was waiting. They all went upstairs.
“What was that about?” Annie said.
“No idea,” Cork replied. But it didn’t look good.
Jo turned to head away. “I’m going to find Stevie. I’ll be right back.”
A few minutes later, Father Ted returned to the common room. He approached Cork, a look of anguish on his youthful face. “There’s someone in my office who wants to see you.”
“Who is it?” Cork said.
“The sheriff.”
“What’s up, Ted?”
“I think you’d better talk to the sheriff.”
Cork turned to Annie. “Tell your mom I’m upstairs.”
He followed the priest to his office. Inside, Sheriff Marsha Dross was waiting, standing at a window, looking out at the sunny May morning. She turned when she heard them enter.
“Mind, Father?” she said.
“No, I’ll be happy to wait outside.”
“And would you close the door?”
When they were alone, Cork said, “What’s going on, Marsha?”
“Alexander and Rayette Kingbird were killed last night.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Lucinda Kingbird found their bodies this morning.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Before I answer that, I need to ask you a few questions, Cork.”
“Go ahead.”
“What was the nature of your relationship with Kingbird?”
“Until last night I had no relationship with him to speak of.”
“What changed last night?”
“He asked me to come and see him. I went to his place and we talked.”
“What time?”
“I got there about eight thirty, left maybe twenty minutes later.”
“He was alive when you left?”
“Of course he was alive. Haven’t you got a time of death yet?”
She lifted her hand to hold back his questions. “In a minute. What did you talk about?”
“He wanted me to arrange a meeting with Buck Reinhardt.”
“Why?”
“To keep things from getting out of hand. Kingbird told me Buck and some of his men threatened one of the Red Boyz.”
“Did you arrange a meeting?”
“I couldn’t find Buck.”
“Where’d you look?”
“His house first, then four or five bars. I gave up a little before eleven and went home.”
Dross was thirty-five, not a pretty woman exactly-big bones, broad face, hair kept short. She was wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back. She pulled a paper evidence sack from the breast pocket of her shirt and handed it to Cork. He opened it and saw that it held one of the business cards he gave out for the work he sometimes did as a private investigator. There was dried blood on the card. He closed the sack and handed it back.
“We found this on Kingbird,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.” Her eyes were brown and, at the moment, edged with a look that might have been anger. “It was an execution, Cork. Their hands were taped. They were shot in the back, close range, a shotgun. Preliminary estimate of time of death is between eleven P.M. and one A.M. Ed and his team are working the scene. BCA’s on the way. Would you mind going out there with me? Something I’d like you to take a look at.”
“Sure. Just let me tell Jo.”
