Lake, surrounded by hardwoods and evergreen in a way that made it feel completely isolated. It was a beautiful pine log structure, two stories, with a screened porch in front and wide glass windows all around. Smoke poured from the stone chimney. All the curtains were drawn.
Jo opened the porch door and stepped in. Schanno followed. The porch was furnished with cane chairs and table, a bentwood rocker, and a standing brass lamp. The wood burning in the fireplace inside the cabin scented the air. Jo knocked on the door, waited a five count, then knocked again. As she raised her fist a third time, the door opened. Booker T. Harris filled the doorway.
“Agent Harris,” Schanno said. “We need to talk.” Harris didn’t reply. His eyes shifted toward Jo.
“This is Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor is her husband,” Schanno told him.
“Ms. O’Connor.” He nodded politely, but his courtesy had a grim edge.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Jo said.
“I’m afraid that will have to wait. I’m busy at the moment.” His gaze shifted again to Schanno. “Couldn’t we arrange to speak in your office later, Sheriff? Say in an hour?”
“The answers we need can’t wait,” Schanno replied.
“It’s impossible for me to talk to you now.”
“Impossible?” Jo said. “I’ll tell you what’s impossible. To believe anything that you tell us is the truth, that’s what’s impossible. So far, you’ve misrepresented facts, framed an innocent man, and may very well have put in jeopardy the lives of several people, including a child.”
Schanno said, “We talk now, here, or I’ll place you under arrest and we’ll all go down to my office and talk there.”
“Arrest me for what?” Harris asked.
“Something along the lines of criminal misconduct, pending an investigation by the Bureau’s OPR. I called the resident agents in Duluth. They contacted the L.A. field office. There is no official investigation here.”
“Ah.” Harris looked behind him and to his left. “Just a moment.” He waited, his eyes tracking something neither Jo nor Schanno could see. “Maybe you’d better come in,” he finally said.
Harris pushed the door open wide and moved away. Inside, the cabin was plush. Wormwood paneling on the walls, thick beige carpeting, brown leather sofa and love seat facing a big fireplace made of brown stone. The far wall was mostly glass looking onto a scene in which the gray water of Iron Lake and the gray drip of the sky merged in a dismal, seamless curtain. The room was lit with lamplight and the flicker from logs burning in the fireplace.
Harris wasn’t alone in the cabin. The other man was slender, early fifties, his hair long and silver and pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a hooded gray sweatshirt, the hood thrown back, with STANFORD printed in red across the chest. His jeans were neatly creased and he wore expensive Reeboks. He stood near the fireplace, beside a map-a topographical map of a section of the Boundary Waters-taped to the wormwood paneling. On a table near the long glass windows sat a large radio transmitter, a laptop computer, and several other pieces of electronic equipment.
Although the room was full of the smell of the burning pine logs, there was another odor in the room, less appealing to Jo. Cigar smoke.
“Jerome Metcalf,” Harris said, introducing the man with the silver hair.
“Another agent?” Schanno said skeptically.
“A consultant,” Harris clarified. “Communications, electronics, that kind of thing. Jerry, this is Sheriff Wally Schanno and Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor’s wife.”
“How do you do?” Metcalf made a slight, gracious bow with his head.
“Not too well, thanks,” Schanno said. “I feel like a trout being jerked around on a line. I need some straight answers.”
“We’ll see what we can do, Sheriff,” Harris said.
His brown skin wore a sheen of perspiration that glistened in the firelight. His blue work shirt was wet at the collar. The room was warm, Jo thought, but not that warm. The man was scared.
“Why don’t we start with a simple question,” Jo suggested. “There is no official FBI involvement in the investigations of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Patricia Sutpen. So why are you here?”
Harris opened his hands as if to show the sand-colored palms concealed nothing. “I assure you, we’re here at the request of the California authorities.”
“Which authorities?” Jo asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t it true that your involvement is at the request of one authority? Your half brother, Nathan Jackson?”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Is it true?”
“I’m not prepared to answer-” Harris began to say.
“And isn’t it true that your involvement in the investigation of the murder of Marais Grand fifteen years ago was also because of your brother? Were you trying to cover up your brother’s relationship with Marais Grand, Agent Harris? To save his political career? Maybe even to help him get away with murder? And is that why you’re here now?”
She was out on a limb, and she knew it. One of the first tenets she’d ever learned in cross-examining was never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.
“These are serious accusations,” Harris cautioned.
“I don’t hear you denying them,” Schanno said.
Harris walked to the window. Against the gray outside, he looked like a shadow as he stood considering. But Jo’s attention was momentarily captured by a slice of light that appeared at the top of the stairs, as if someone down a hallway there had opened and closed a door very quickly.
“You have a reputation as a strong advocate of civil rights, Ms. O’Connor.” Harris didn’t turn, speaking instead as if Jo were beyond the glass he faced. “You’ve got an impressive history of helping the Chippewa people here.”
“They prefer to be called Anishinaabe,” she told him. “Or Ojibwe. Chippewa is a white term.”
“Whatever.” He slowly turned around. “My point is that you understand the importance of the issue of civil rights.”
“Actually, I’m having trouble understanding your point.”
“Sheriff, do you mind if Ms. O’Connor and I have a word alone?”
“I mind,” Schanno replied.
“Ms. O’Connor, I’d rather speak to you in private. It’s important. And I promise, your questions will be answered.”
Jo figured what the hell. “Wally?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Please,” Harris said. And he seemed sincere.
“You want me to leave?” Schanno asked.
“No. We’ll just step upstairs. Jerry, get the sheriff some coffee or whatever he’d like. Ms. O’Connor, if you’ll follow me.”
Harris led the way up the stairs, turned down the hallway, and knocked at the second door. Inside, someone called out evenly, “Come in.”
He was over six feet tall, the man who waited in the bedroom. Early fifties, trim and fit. He wore indigo jeans, a yellow lamb’s wool sweater, and a gold chain. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, appraising her as if he were an officer gauging a new recruit. His eyes were quick and intelligent in a face so lightly colored and softly featured that he could have passed for a beachcomber instead of an African American. Except for the gray that salted his hair, he looked no different from the first time Jo had seen him many years before in Chicago.
“Ms. O’Connor,” Nathan Jackson said, “I suspected it was only a matter of time before we met.”
Harris offered her a chair, but Jo preferred to stand.
“Then it’s true,” she said. “You were involved with Marais Grand.”
Nathan Jackson held a cigar in his left hand and gestured with it as he talked so that he seemed to write in the air with smoke. “Marais and I were lovers for a time, yes. But I certainly didn’t have anything to do with her
