care of our own affairs.”
They left her, a small figure standing alone in the shadow of her father’s great house.
50
From Rose and Mal’s duplex, he called the number on the card Dina Willner had given him.
“I just came from Lou Jacoby’s,” he told her.
“And you’re still alive?”
“Not for long, from the way he’s talking.”
“Cork, Lou doesn’t just talk.”
“Gabriella Jacoby says you’ve been silent on what happened at Ben’s place.”
“Silent? I’ve been trying to reach Lou but Gabriella is screening everything. I can’t get through to him.”
Cork heard the frustration in her voice, a rare emotion in his experience. He realized how tired she must be, too.
“How’s Jo?” she asked.
“Doing remarkably well, considering.”
“Strong woman. How about you? Are you all right?”
“Jo’s safe. I can handle everything else.”
“I’ll get to Lou somehow, explain things, Cork. That’s a promise.”
He was exhausted, but he spent the afternoon at a park on the lake with his family, pushing Stevie on the swings, talking with his daughters about Northwestern and Notre Dame, watching Jo-who seemed, in spite of what she’d been through, calm as the water on the lake that day. Twenty years before, he had proposed to her on Lake Michigan, on a dinner cruise, an evening that had changed his life and taken it in the best of directions.
He sent Jenny and Annie off to play with their brother while he sat on a blanket with Jo.
“I’ve been thinking about Gabriella,” he said. “And her brother. And about an angel who spoke to Lizzie Fineday.”
“An angel?”
“In Lizzie’s confused recollection anyway. What was it that Gabriella called Rae this morning? Pobrecito? What does that mean?”
“If I recall my college Spanish, it means something like ‘poor little one.’”
“Lizzie said her angel called her ‘poor vaceeto.’ Could it be that the angel spoke Spanish and what she really said was pobrecito?”
“You think Gabriella was Lizzie’s angel?”
“When I called Edward Jacoby’s home the morning after he was murdered, his housekeeper told me that Mrs. Jacoby wasn’t there. She was on a boat. Tony Salguero told me he was sailing on Lake Michigan. Because I didn’t know there was a connection between them, I didn’t put it together at the time, but what do you want to bet they were on the same boat? How difficult would it be to anchor somewhere not far from an airfield, fly to Aurora, take care of some pretty gruesome business, and get back to the boat in time for Lou Jacoby’s call the morning after Eddie was murdered?”
“I don’t know. How would you prove something like that?”
“They had to leave a trail. Dock somewhere, file a flight plan, gas up, land and park a plane. If they tailed Eddie out to Mercy Falls, they had to have a vehicle of some kind. A rental, maybe? There’s got to be documentation for some of this somewhere. It should just be a question of tracking it down.”
He stood up and called to the children. He hated to end the picnic, but there was work to be done.
First he called Ed Larson, who had already spoken with the Winnetka police and knew about what had happened to Jo.
“Christ, Cork. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d love to get that Jacoby kid alone somewhere.”
“Won’t happen, Ed.”
“How’s Jo doing?”
“Holding her own.”
“Look, I do have two pieces of good news.”
“I could use some about now,” Cork said.
“First, Simon Rutledge was finally able to talk to Carl Berger. Looks like we’ll be amending the complaint against Lydell Cramer to include conspiracy to commit murder. Berger says that Cramer used his sister and LaRusse to arrange to have Stone do the hit at the Tibodeau cabin. The motive was revenge, pure and simple.
“Now for the second piece of good news. We finally found Arlo Knuth. He’d gone on a bender and wound up in the drunk tank in Hibbing. I talked to him. He says that after Schilling ran him off, he parked behind the blockhouse on the lower level at Mercy Falls. Around midnight, he saw two vehicles head to the upper lot near the overlook. Right behind them came a third vehicle that parked in the lower lot. Two people got out and hiked up the stairs toward the overlook. They came back down half an hour later and left. Arlo says he left right after that. The place was getting too busy.”
“Was he able to give you a description?”
“No, but he did give us something very interesting. Whoever those two people were, they spoke Spanish.”
“ Pobrecito, Ed.”
“What?”
Cork told him about Gabriella Jacoby and Antonio Salguero, and explained his thinking about Eddie’s murder.
“The Salgueros lost everything in Argentina. Marrying Eddie Jacoby gave Gabriella a handle on another fortune. With her husband dead, she probably stands to get her hands on a significant chunk of change. Insurance, at the very least. Maybe she even moves up a notch in the old man’s will.”
“They’d been married for years. Why kill Eddie now?” Larson asked.
“Maybe she waited until she was solid with his father. She’s given Lou grandchildren, weaseled her way next to his heart. I’d bet she and Tony have been thinking about it for a while. Could be that Aurora’s isolation seemed to offer the opportunity they’d been hoping for.”
“And the hick cops they figured would do the investigating.”
“Probably that, too. Look, it’s a lot of speculation, I know.”
“Makes sense, though.”
“When Dina gave Ben her report on our questioning of Lizzie Fineday, Jacoby must have known what ‘poor vaceeto’ was really all about. He took Dina off the case in the hope of keeping her ignorant, and I’ll bet he canceled his rendezvous with Jo because he went to see Gabriella or Salguero, to confront them.”
“Didn’t want the police involved?”
“Exactly. A family matter. The family name at stake. Something like that. There’s a lot of digging to do, Ed.”
“I’m on it, Cork,” Larson said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
The next call was to Dina Willner’s cell phone.
“Tell me what you know about Tony Salguero,” he said when she answered.
“Handsome. Educated. Refined. Daring.”
“Daring? What do you mean?”
“He flies. He sails. Like his father, he’s a world-class big-game hunter. He was in the Argentine military for a long time, an officer.”
“Special training?”
