“Be right back.” And she was gone.
Borkman put down his fork. He grabbed his napkin and, with a quick swipe, cleaned hash browns and ketchup from his chin. “Say, what was all that commotion at the Vermilion One yesterday? Everybody’s talking about a convoy of official vehicles that trucked in there. The protest getting out of hand?”
“Nothing like that, Cy.”
“Me, I didn’t have these bum legs, I’d be walking that protest line myself. Say, heard you’re working for the mine.” It wasn’t the most friendly tone he’d ever used.
“Security consult,” Cork said. “Some threats have been made.”
“Now that’s a shocker.” Borkman laughed and gulped coffee.
“Cy, you remember the Vanishings? Back in ’sixty-four?”
“Hell, yes. Strangest damn case my whole time on the force. We never solved that one.”
“Three women, right?”
“Yep. Two from the reservation and Mrs. Peter Cavanaugh. Now there was a looker. That daughter of hers?” He shook his head and lifted his fork again. “Like I’m staring at a picture of the mother.”
“You never had a suspect in the case, right?”
“Not officially.”
“How about unofficially?”
He grinned and his face was all folded flesh. “The priest.”
“Priest?”
“Yeah. The priest at St. Agnes. Your church.”
“Why him?”
“For one thing, he was a young guy. Macho for a priest. Weight lifter. Big muscles. Me, I like my clergy kind of soft like bread dough, you know?”
“What else?”
“We got an anonymous tip about him. Said he—” Cy broke off and eyed Cork suspiciously. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this. It’s a cold case. File’s still open.”
“As a favor between old friends?”
He thought a moment. “What the hell. It’ll never be solved. This tip said that the priest liked to masturbate while listening to confessions.”
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it.”
Kathy Lehman breezed up with a cup of coffee in one hand and her order pad in the other. She slid the coffee onto the counter in front of Cork, snatched a pencil from where she’d stuck it in the hair above her ear, and said, “What’ll it be, hon?”
“Oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar.”
“Coming up.” She whirled and was gone again.
“Did you follow up on it?” Cork asked.
“Yep. Priest denied everything. But guess what we found stuffed behind the confessional. Delicates.”
“Delicates?”
“Women’s underwear, stained with semen.”
“I don’t remember any of this.”
He shrugged. “It was never made public. That was your dad’s doing. The confessional was open to anyone. No way to prove the priest put those things there. No way in those days to prove the stains were his. We didn’t have anything else on the guy. Your father was able to keep it all out of the papers. We could do that back then. But the bishop got involved and yanked the priest, sent him off to Siberia or someplace. And then Mrs. Cavanaugh disappeared. Because the priest was long gone, we pretty much wrote him off as a suspect. And after that the Vanishings stopped. End of case.”
“FBI and BCA involved?”
“Yep. Baffled them, too.”
“Was there ever any word on other missing women?”
“We watched things in the county and adjacent counties pretty carefully. Followed up real seriously when we got a report of a runaway or missing person. Nothing ever came of it.”
“Any speculation on disappearances that came before the first victim was reported and that might have been related?”
Borkman chewed thoughtfully and finally shook his head. “Not that I recall. What’s the big interest in an old case?”
“Just wondering. You know how it goes.”
“Yeah. I like retirement, but I miss being involved in the action. I think about old cases a lot. It was a good job, a good life. And your old man, he was a hell of a cop to work for.”
TWELVE
Cork found Marsha Dross in her office at the sheriff’s department. She looked ragged at the edges, and it was clear she hadn’t slept much. She cradled a cup of coffee and eyed him over the rim as he sat down on the other side of her desk. It was a lovely morning, and her office windows were open. Cork could hear a cardinal calling in the maple tree outside. Sunlight plunged through the eastern window like a gold sword stuck in the floor.
“All right,” he said. “Count me in.”
She put her coffee down. “In?”
“I’ll consult on the case. I’ll interview anyone on the rez you’d like me to interview. I’ll also interview anyone else I think might be able to help. I’ll keep you apprised of everything I learn. But I want something in return.”
“And that would be?”
“I want to know everything you know about the bodies in the Vermilion Drift.”
“Everything I know now?”
“Now and as it’s revealed.”
“Full access to everything?”
“That’s the deal.”
She frowned, thinking. “All right. But I want two more things from you.”
“Name them.”
“First of all absolute silence. Whatever you learn on the reservation, whatever you learn from me, it stays between us.”
Cork opened his mouth to say fine, but she held up her hand.
“I know you, Cork. I know that being part Ojibwe sometimes pulls you in a direction counter to the interests of this department. I have to believe absolutely that in this you’re with me. You understand?”
“I understand. And the second thing?”
“Everything you find out that pertains to the case you share with me. You don’t hold anything back. You don’t protect anyone. This goes right back to my concern about your Ojibwe ties.”
Dross was right. This had been a problem in the past, and so Cork had to think before he answered.
“It’s a deal,” he finally said. “What do you know about the bodies so far?”
“Not much. We got all the skeletal remains bagged and they’ve been taken to the BCA lab in Bemidji. Agent Upchurch is working on them now. The preliminary autopsy report on Lauren Cavanaugh indicates death from a single gunshot wound to the chest. The bullet pierced her heart. Luckily, it stayed in the body, and wasn’t badly deformed, so Simon’s people can run ballistics on it.”
“Any indication of sexual assault?”
“No.”
