“They’ve tried. Whoever it is, he’s smart.”
“But he’ll give them back, right?”
“I told you, Jen. I believe he will.” Cork pulled himself back from the anger that her persistent question and his persistent lie drove him toward. “We have every reason to believe he’ll do just what he’s promised.”
“The FBI deals with these situations all the time,” Rose offered. “They have things well in hand, I’m sure.”
The girls looked to their father for confirmation. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and stood up. “I need to get back out to Grace Cove.”
“The coffee’s almost ready.” There was a subtle plea in Rose’s voice. Don’t leave, she seemed to say. Cork understood how heavy was the weight she carried, holding up the hopes of the girls while she suspected the true gravity of things, isolated in the house on Gooseberry Lane, besieged by reporters, with nothing but her faith to sustain her.
“I have to go, Rose,” he told her. “I’ll keep you posted.”
She gave him a silent nod.
Cork hugged and kissed his daughters.
“When we see you again, you’ll have Mom and Stevie, right?” Jenny asked.
“We’ll be a family again,” he promised.
Cork headed out of Aurora and around the southern end of Iron Lake. There had been a breeze earlier, a hot one. Now the air was still and sitting heavy on the North Country. Something was ready to break. Cork felt it like an ache in his bones.
He’d tried all afternoon to put everything together in a different way, hoping to see something he hadn’t seen before. With Hell Hanover out of the picture, and with Joan of Arc and Isaiah Broom in jail, the most obvious possibility lay in Brett Hamilton, the son of Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. As far as Cork knew, he was still at large. If what Meloux had intimated was true, if the kid really was Eco-Warrior, then he’d killed once already. What more did he have to lose in kidnapping?
Yet the feel was all wrong. Meloux believed a man who’d kidnap women and children had to have a black heart and the balls of a warrior. The kid had balls. Cork had seen that in the way he’d faced Erskine Ellroy in the parking lot at Sam’s Place, ready to take a beating for his beliefs. But the same incident seemed to demonstrate both a selflessness of spirit and a concern for the sanctity of life that was incompatible with a heart black enough to put women and children in jeopardy.
He couldn’t say why exactly, but Cork’s thinking kept coming back to John LePere. Part of it was that he wasn’t convinced LePere was the drunk he’d appeared to be, and part of it was that LePere’s land on Grace Cove would have been the perfect area from which to observe Lindstrom’s home in planning an abduction. The problem was that LePere, like the Hamilton kid, seemed a different kind of man than would be involved in kidnapping. In his days as sheriff, Cork had prided himself on knowing the people of Tamarack County. He believed he’d learned to take the measure of a man pretty accurately. LePere had been a heavy drinker once. Sometimes when he was drunk he argued. Once in a while, he fought. But it was the booze that did that, and probably the disappointment life had handed him. He was no saint, but neither was he a devil who’d steal a man’s wife and child for money. Or so he’d seemed to Cork.
Still, Cork felt strongly that LePere knew more than he was telling, and if so, two obvious questions presented themselves: What did LePere know, and why was he silent?
Gil Singer was the deputy now posted at the turnoff to Grace Cove. Cork pulled over and called out to him, “Still a zoo at Lindstrom’s?”
“Only the hearty remain, Cork. Heat drove the rest of them back to their hotel rooms. You doing okay?”
“Holding my own, Gil. Have you seen John LePere lately?”
“Cy told me LePere took off earlier, complaining cops were all over his place like flies on shit. Haven’t seen him since.”
Cork started to pull away, but Singer hailed him down.
“By the way, the sheriff had me out on the rez this morning checking out that break-in at the clinic. All that was missing was some insulin and syringes.”
“A diabetic burglar?”
“Strange world, Cork.”
“Thanks, Gil.”
He parked on LePere’s property, but instead of hiking directly to Lindstrom’s, he walked to LePere’s cabin. The man’s pickup was gone. The place looked deserted. Cork headed around in back and to an outbuilding that was just large enough to hold LePere’s truck. The door was locked. Cork peered through a dusty window. Hand tools-a shovel, a pick, a long-handled ax, a couple of kinds of rakes-hung on the walls. A stack of old tires stood in a corner. Mostly, the shed was empty. He checked the dock, stepped down into a rowboat tied there, bent, and looked for anything that might have been left by someone taken against their will. The boat appeared clean.
“O’Connor.”
Cork turned, fast enough that he almost lost his balance and fell into the lake. Agent David Earl stood on the dock looking down at him.
“I already checked the boat,” Earl said. “Nothing.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, I imagine.” Earl reached out a hand and helped Cork back onto the dock. “I came out after I heard the news.”
“What news?”
“You don’t know?” Earl pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and tapped out a cigarette. He started to offer the pack to Cork, but drew it back. “That’s right. You gave them up.” Earl lit the cigarette with a Bic lighter and blew smoke over the dock. “Brett Hamilton’s dead.”
The news jolted Cork. “How?”
“It seems that after he eluded the FBI, he made a beeline back to the tent city on the reservation, recruited a dozen other activists, and they headed out to stop the fire burning Our Grandfathers. They got there before any firefighters and didn’t know what the hell they were doing. One of them got himself trapped under a falling tree full of fire. Hamilton put himself in danger cutting the guy free. The guy got out. Hamilton didn’t.” He pursed his lips and sent out a stream of smoke. “Just when you think you’ve got someone pegged.”
Cork thought about Joan Hamilton, Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. She was a hard woman, shaped even in her crippled walk by her choice of wars. But she was still a mother, a parent who’d tried to sacrifice herself for her son, her only child who was dead now. Cork looked up at the sky, and he let a moment of deep sorrow pierce the armor of his own concerns.
“How does that bring you here?” he finally asked Earl.
“I’ve been thinking-who’s left? I stand in Lindstrom’s big log house and all there is to see is this place. Now, that doesn’t mean John LePere has any connection with the abduction, but it’s odd that he saw nothing. If not that night, then before. He strikes me as a man extremely protective of his privacy. I’m guessing he’d know if someone were out here who shouldn’t have been.”
“I talked with him. He denied it.”
“He’s an alcoholic. Denial is everything.”
“Alcoholic?” Cork said. “Follow me.” He led Earl to the garbage can near the shed, lifted the lid, and released a cloud of black flies. “What do you see?”
“Besides garbage?”
“Booze doesn’t flow from the tap in the kitchen sink. Where are the bottles?”
“Why pretend to be drunk?”
“Good cover, especially if people are predisposed to believing it. I’ve known John LePere a long time. Not especially well, but enough to wonder how he’d get himself mixed up in something like this.”
“Two million dollars is a lot of incentive.”
“At great risk. That’s the thing. Whoever did this is risking everything. John LePere’s got a good job at the casino. And a nice place here, for a man who likes to live alone. He has a place on the north shore, too. Kidnapping just doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Maybe because we don’t have all the pieces.” Earl dropped his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. He
