Floodlights lit the hollow with an unnatural glare, and the poplar trees around the Tibodeau cabin looked like a crowd of gawkers gone white with shock. Cork pulled up behind Cy Borkmann’s cruiser and got out.
Ed Larson stood in the doorway of the cabin. He wasn’t wearing the latex gloves anymore and looked as if he’d gathered evidence and was weighing the meaning. Or at least, that’s what Cork hoped his look meant.
“Where’s Lucy?” Cork asked.
“She and Eli went into Allouette to stay with his uncle. We took statements from both of them. They were pretty broken up over the dogs.”
Cork glanced inside the cabin. “So, what did you find?”
Larson adjusted his wire-rims, not a good sign. Then he said, “Well,” which nailed the coffin shut.
“Nothing?” Cork said.
“Not down here. Whoever it was, they actually wiped out the tracks leading back to the woodpile where they threw the dogs. Looks like they used a pine branch or something. I took prints off the phone, but I’m betting they’re just latents from Eli and Lucy. Nothing on the shell casings you found earlier. We pulled the slugs out of the Land Cruiser but they’re too mashed up to be of any use for ballistics. We’re still looking for the round that went through Marsha. Doing a quadrant search of the ground surface right now, then I’ll have the guys start digging. Come morning, we’ll go over every inch of the hilltop where the shooter was. We bagged the dogs. If you think it’ll be of any value, we can have them autopsied.”
Duane Pender, who was working on the search of the ground, hollered.
“What is it?” Larson said.
Pender picked up something and held it up in the light. “It’s a bell. A little jingly Christmas bell.”
Larson walked carefully to the deputy and took the bell from him. It was a silver ball with a little metal bead inside that jingled when the ball moved. “It’s new. Not dirty, so it hasn’t been on the ground long. What do you make of it, Cork?”
Cork walked over. “Could be from a Christmas ornament.”
“In October?”
“Or maybe from a jingle dress.”
“A what?”
“For ceremonial dances. It may be nothing, but make a note of where you found it, Duane, and put it in a bag.”
Larson followed him back to the cabin door. “Any word on Marsha?”
“She was still in surgery when I left the hospital.”
“You don’t look too good yourself.”
Cork slumped against the door frame. The lights for the search were bright in his eyes, and he turned his face from them. “I keep trying to figure all this.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Larson said quietly. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to get you out here. Think about it, Cork. The call comes from the rez. Since you’ve taken over as sheriff, the old policy of you responding to most of the calls from out here is back in place. Marsha’s driving the Land Cruiser. She’s your height, more or less. She’s wearing a cap. The sun’s down, the whole hollow here is in shade. The shooter assumes it’s you who gets out and he fires.”
“Or she fires,” Cork said.
“She?”
“I listened to the tape of the call when I was back at the department. It was a woman doing a pretty good job of sounding like Lucy.”
Larson considered it while he scratched the silver bristle of his hair. “Whoever, they knew what they were doing. Two dead dogs, tracks erased, a well-chosen vantage point from which to fire.”
“Why didn’t he…she…set up a crossfire?” Cork said.
“That probably means the number of people involved is limited. Maybe just the shooter. Or the shooter and the woman he used to get you out here.”
“A lot of speculation,” Cork said.
“Without a lot of hard evidence to go on, you’ve got to begin your thinking somewhere. I’m guessing it’s someone who knows the rez. They knew that Lucy and Eli would be gone, anyway. They were pretty sure it would be you who’d respond. Cork, this wasn’t some sort of random violence. It was well planned and you were the target.”
Borkmann strolled over. In the glare, his bulk cast a huge shadow before him. “We still got two men on that hill.”
The moon wasn’t up yet, but it was on the rise. “Might as well bring them down,” Cork said. “I don’t think we’ll have to worry any more tonight. Maybe we should all call it a night. What do you think, Ed? Come back in the morning? BCA’ll be here then. In the meantime, we can post a couple of men to keep the scene secure, and we’ll send everyone else home. That bullet you’re hoping to dig out of the ground’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“Cork?” Borkmann called from his cruiser. “Just got word from Patsy via Bos. Marsha’s out of surgery and doing well.”
Cork felt something begin to break inside him, a wall behind which an ocean of emotion was at risk of flooding through.
Ed put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take care of getting things packed up here. You go on home and get some rest. We’ll have a go at it again tomorrow.”
He went back to the department and filled out an incident report, then stopped by the hospital one last time. Patsy had gone, but he found Charlie Annala asleep on the sofa in the waiting area of the recovery room. Someone had put a thin blanket over him. Shortly after midnight, Cork headed home.
By the time he turned onto Gooseberry Lane, the moon had risen high in the sky, a waxing gibbous moon, a silver teardrop on the cheek of night. His home was an old two-story frame affair with a wonderful front porch and a big elm in the yard. The whole town knew it as the O’Connor place. With the exception of college and a few years when he was a cop in Chicago, he’d lived in that house his whole life. In a way, it contained his life. He stood on the lawn a few moments, in the shadow the elm cast in the moonlight, trying to draw to himself the feel of all that was familiar. A light in his bedroom upstairs told him Jo had waited up for him. A soft glow drizzled through the window of his son’s room, Stevie’s night-light. His daughters’ rooms were on the backside of the house, but it was late and a school night and he figured they would be asleep by now. He listened to the creak of the chains on their metal hooks as the porch swing rocked slowly in the breeze. He put his hand against the rough bark of the big tree that was as old as he and took in the dry smell of autumn.
Jo had left a light on in the living room so that he wouldn’t walk into a dark house. He turned it off and headed upstairs, where he checked the children’s rooms. Stevie was snoring softly. Jenny lay asleep with the headphones of her Discman still over her ears. Annie’s pillow was over her head, and her right leg was off the bed. Cork took a moment and carefully settled her back in.
In his own room, he found Jo sitting up but asleep, a manila file folder open on her lap; her reading glasses had slipped to the end of her nose. She was a lawyer and she often brought her work to bed, one way or another. Cork decided not to wake her. He wasn’t quite ready for sleep yet, anyway. Too much going on inside.
He went back downstairs and stood in the dark living room, feeling oddly alien in the quiet of the house, as if he’d been gone a long time and had lost touch with the details that created the mosaic of a normal day. He felt adrift, stranded in a place he didn’t quite know or understand.
In the kitchen, he latched onto the cookie jar, an icon of familiarity. It was Ernie from Sesame Street, and it had been in the O’Connor house for more than a decade. Cork dipped into Ernie’s head and brought out a chocolate chip cookie, which he put on the kitchen table while he took a glass tumbler from the cupboard next to the sink. From the refrigerator, he grabbed a plastic gallon jug of milk and filled the tumbler halfway.
As he turned back to the refrigerator, the shatter of glass exploded the quiet of the kitchen. He hit the floor, let go of the jug, reached automatically for his. 38. He scrambled across the linoleum and pressed his back to the cabinet doors below the sink, clutching his gun. One of the windows? he wondered. But a quick glance told him no bullet had come through any of the panes.
Then he saw the broken tumbler on the floor, the puddle of milk around the shards, and he realized he’d
