“We already did that.”
“Never hurts to double check.”
She looked ready to offer a reply, probably not a pleasant one, but instead moved to the phone to make the call.
Cork went back to the desk. The charging cord for the woman’s cell phone was still plugged in, but the phone was gone. Next to the cord was a small pad of notepaper supplied by the hotel. There was a clear indentation from a note that had been written and then torn from the pad. Cork lifted and turned it so that the white paper caught the light through the window just right, and the faint grooving of Kufus’s handwriting was legible. He put the pad back down as Dross hung up the phone.
“She usually takes a swim in the afternoon, but, as we’ve already been told, no one saw her go out today,” Dross reported.
“All right,” Cork said. “I’m finished here.”
“Wasted trip,” she said.
Cork chose not to contradict her.
It was dusk when he headed out of Aurora, south along the shoreline of Iron Lake. He passed the Chippewa Grand Casino just outside of town, where the parking lot was three-quarters filled and still filling. The casino had been a godsend to the Iron Lake Ojibwe, whose profits had underwritten more improvements on the rez than Cork could count. Over the years, however, the casino had also delivered its share of difficulties, but that evening when he passed, he wasn’t thinking about the pros and cons of Indian gaming. He was thinking about the words Kufus had written on the sheet of notepaper she’d torn from the pad in her room: Moon Haven Cove.
Four miles south, Cork turned off the highway onto Moon Haven Drive. The road narrowed to a slender thread of black asphalt weaving among a thick stand of red pine. He didn’t have to think about where the road led. There was only one home on Moon Haven Cove, and it belonged to Max Cavanaugh.
He could have told the sheriff what he’d found, but the note had satisfied him that the disappearance of the DOE’s mining consultant probably wasn’t cause for alarm, and he’d decided that it would be better to pursue the lead quietly on his own. If, as he suspected, Kufus’s visit had nothing at all to do with mine business, a sudden appearance by the authorities had the potential for being embarrassing for all involved.
Of course, the whole question could have been easily answered with a phone call, but Cork had a gut sense —and he was nothing if not a man who followed his gut instincts—that something very interesting might result from seeing to this personally.
He drove slowly as he approached Cavanaugh’s lake home. It was a behemoth of a construction. All the homes that went up on the lake these days seemed to be that way. When Cork was growing up, a place on the lake still meant a modest cabin or a small house with a screened porch that may or may not have been insulated for winter occupancy. There was often a tiny dock, where a boat with a reasonable outboard or a little skiff with a mast for a single sail was tied up. The woods drew close around those old places, and they shared the shoreline together in comfortable intimacy.
No one built small anymore. Certainly not Max Cavanaugh. And the woods stood back from his opulent construct, as if drawing away, repulsed.
The great home lay in deep purple cast from the evening sky. The wide lawn appeared to be an inlet of a wine-colored sea. The black asphalt gave way to a circular drive made of crushed limestone bordered with flowers. Parked in the drive, near the front door, was the red Explorer that Kufus had rented for her time in Aurora. Cork pulled up behind her vehicle, turned off his Land Rover, and stepped out onto the drive. He saw immediately that the Explorer’s tires were flat. On closer examination, he discovered they’d been slashed, all four. He also discovered that an envelope had been slipped under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. On the face of the envelope, printed in the dripping red font called From Hell, was Kufus’s name.
When he reached the porch of Cavanaugh’s house, he wasn’t surprised to find another envelope, this bearing the name of Max Cavanaugh, printed in From Hell. The envelope had been pinned to the door with a hunting knife that would have been perfect for gutting a moose or slashing tires.
He rang the bell, twice. No one answered. He began a slow circumnavigation of the property, checking the windows as he went, unable to see anything because the curtains were all drawn. From the back of the house came the sound of soft jazz playing over good speakers. Rounding the rear corner, he saw the great bricked patio, the table and wine bottle, the two chairs with towels folded over the back of each, but he saw neither Cavanaugh nor Kufus. The music came from an opened patio door.
Cork was just about to head that way when he caught sight of the dock on the far side of the back lawn where it edged the cove. Cavanaugh and Kufus were there. Cavanaugh wore red swim trunks. Kufus wore a swimsuit, a black one-piece that looked designed more for exercise than for showing off at the beach. They stood close together, and, as Cork watched, Kufus put her arms gently around her companion. Behind them in the late dusk, the surface of Moon Haven Cove was a perfect mirror of the plum-colored sky.
Cavanaugh spotted him and pulled away. He said something to Kufus, and they both turned toward the house. They spoke a moment more, then walked the path to the patio.
“My, my,” the woman said, taking one of the towels from the back of a patio chair. “You do get around.”
“I rang the bell,” Cork said. “No one answered.”
“Can’t hear much from down there,” Cavanaugh said, indicating the dock. He had a body taut and sinewy but also scarred in a number of places. In the shower after one of the basketball games the Old Martyrs had played, he’d told Cork they were all the results of his mine work over the years. He’d said he liked the danger of the job. “What’s up?”
Cork said, “Ms. Kufus, did you know the whole county is worried about you?”
“It’s Genie, and whatever for?”
“Some more threats have been delivered. As a matter of fact, you have one waiting for you on your car. And, Max, there’s one for you.”
Cavanaugh looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Why don’t we all go to your front door and I’ll show you.”
Cavanaugh led them into the house, leaving a gray trail of water droplets on the white carpeting all the way to the front door. When he saw the envelope, he reached for the knife that pinned it.
“It might be better to wait, Max,” Cork said. “The sheriff’s people will want to go over it for prints.”
Cavanaugh ignored him, tugged the knife blade free, and opened the envelope.
He held it out for Kufus to see. She read it, and her response surprised Cork.
“Fuck them,” she said. She looked beyond Cavanaugh to where her rental was parked. The envelope was clearly visible on the windshield, a white rectangle against the reflection of a bruise-colored sky, and she said again, low and hard, “Fuck them.”
Azevedo was the deputy dispatched on the call. When he arrived, he told Cork the sheriff wanted to see both Kufus and Cavanaugh at the department as soon as possible. Cavanaugh stayed while the deputy filled out an incident report, but Cork offered to drive Kufus into town immediately. Cavanaugh told her to go ahead. He’d be in touch. Azevedo put the notes, the envelopes, and the knife into evidence bags and gave them to Cork to deliver to the sheriff. Then Cork and a taciturn Kufus took off for Aurora.
Dark had fallen, and a mist of stars covered the sky. Kufus sat silently on the far side of the Land Rover, and Cork could feel her anger.
“Mind if I ask a question?” Cork said.
“Would it matter?” Clearly she was still pissed. Maybe about the threats. Maybe about Cork’s intrusion. Maybe about having to be chauffeured back to Aurora by a guy she didn’t particularly like.
“What is it between you and Max?”
She looked out the window and up at the stars. “He knows I’m a swimmer, and he invited me out to swim in the cove.”
“And to talk about mine business?”
“Yes,” she said. “Mine business.”
“That’s why you were holding each other? Mine business?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I haven’t told you what I think.”
