“All right, all right. I’ll check. How long before you’re here?”
LePere adjusted his stance and his grip on the board.
“Jesus, relax. Everything will be fine.”
Bridger was quiet for a while. Jo figured the phone call was finished. She waited for the sound of the lock being released. It didn’t come. Bridger simply walked away. Jo rushed to the window and stood on the crate.
“He’s gone down to the boat dock,” she reported. “He’s getting on one of the boats.”
“Where’s your boy?” LePere asked.
As Jo peered at the house, she saw a small form edge through the front door and slip into the dark away from the porch. A moment later, Stevie was at the fish house.
“Which key?” he called softly through the door.
“It’s the only silver one on the ring,” LePere said.
“It’s hard to see.”
Jo could hear her little boy’s voice choked with fear. “You’re doing fine, Stevie,” she told him, trying to keep her own voice calm. “Just fine.”
The lock rattled. The door opened. Jo flung her arms around her son and thought it had never felt so good to hold him.
“We’ve got to go,” LePere said. “To my truck.”
Thunder rolled out of the clouds that spilled over the Sawtooth Mountains. The first drops of rain splatted against Jo’s cheek as she ran with the others away from the fish house. A strong wind came with the storm, and as the lightning etched a stark black-and-white image of the cove, Jo saw the water churning. She also saw Bridger on the deck of one of the boats. She prayed he didn’t see them.
LePere opened the door of his truck. “Damn. He took the key.”
“Isn’t there an extra somewhere?” Grace asked.
“In the house. But he may have taken that one, too. Let’s just get out of here.” LePere dug into the glove compartment and brought out a flashlight. “Come on. Up the road.”
He led the way, Grace and Scott right behind him, Jo and Stevie bringing up the rear. Rain had begun to fall heavily and the wind drove it into their faces. They hurried along the narrow lane that skirted the cove. Jo held Stevie’s hand. Her heart beat wildly, and she dared to let herself feel real hope. They were almost free.
LePere stopped abruptly.
“What is it?” Grace called above the wind and rain.
Jo didn’t have to ask. She’d seen it, too. Another set of headlights winding through the poplars, coming down to the cove from the highway. She remembered Bridger’s phone conversation. Whoever he was expecting had arrived. She leaned to LePere and shouted, “We can hide in the trees until they’ve passed, then go up to the highway and flag someone down.”
He shook his head, flinging rain from the end of his nose. “No one’s on the road at this hour. And it’s the first place Bridger will look.”
“Then we hide in the trees until morning.”
“That’s the second place he’ll look, and there aren’t enough trees to hide us until morning.”
The headlights frosted the trees at the nearest curve. In only a moment, they would shine fully on the place where Jo and the others stood.
“This way,” LePere hollered.
He started through the trees, leading the way toward the dark, hard cliffs of Purgatory Ridge.
46
THE STORM MOVED EAST toward Lake Superior, and Cork moved with it, following State Highway 1 as it twisted and curled around the southern end of the Sawtooth Mountains. The whole North Woods was receiving its first significant rainfall in many months. Dust-gathered deep along the shoulders of the road-turned to mud and washed across the pavement in a thin, slippery coating that made the drive treacherous. The wheels drifted around sharp curves as Cork pushed his old Bronco dangerously fast. In the flashes of lightning, he caught glimpses of Lindstrom beside him. Although the man was tight-jawed and held to the dashboard with a desperate grip, he said not a word to Cork about slowing down.
“You carrying your Colt? The one you had at the marina,” Cork asked.
In answer, Lindstrom reached to his belt and brought out the firearm. He held it toward the windshield so that Cork could see it without taking his eyes off the road. “What about you?”
“In the glove compartment,” Cork directed him. “My revolver.”
Like Lindstrom’s handgun, Cork’s Smith amp; Wesson. 38 police special was something handed down from father to son, something he trusted.
“I keep the cartridges separate. In my tackle box in back. Mind loading it for me?” Cork asked.
Lindstrom pulled the handgun from the glove compartment and climbed over the seat. Cork heard him rattling in the tackle box. Lindstrom started to return to the front, but the Bronco swung hard around a curve and he fell against the back door.
“I’ll just stay put back here,” he said.
Cork heard him release the cylinder and begin to feed in the rounds.
They drove mostly in silence. Cork’s mind was occupied with the business he’d trained it for in his two decades as a cop-putting the pieces of a puzzle in place. The more he considered, the more everything came together, so that the holes became fewer and were more obvious to him.
A few miles outside of Finland, he broke the quiet inside the Bronco. “When you talked with the kidnapper, Karl, why didn’t you ever mention your son’s diabetes?”
“Not my son. My wife’s son. He refused to let me adopt him.” He slapped the full cylinder into place. “What good would it have done, saying something about the boy’s weakness?”
Weakness? Cork thought.
“A man like LePere wouldn’t care,” Lindstrom added.
“Apparently, he cared enough to risk everything breaking into the rez clinic for insulin. You know, that’s something I can’t quite figure. If he was so concerned about keeping Scott alive, why would he be so quick now to rush to murder? It’s almost as if there are two minds at work here.”
“A man like LePere, he could be schizoid for all we know. Hell, he lost his whole family to Lake Superior- father, mother, brother. Something like that’s bound to snap anybody’s mind.”
His father, his mother, and his brother? Cork had been acquainted with John LePere for many years, and this was more specific information than he’d ever learned about the man. How was it that Lindstrom knew?
Cork fell back into a meditative silence for a few miles. When he glanced into the rearview mirror, he saw Lindstrom sighting down the barrel of the. 38.
“Nice heft,” Lindstrom said. “You pretty good with it?”
“I generally hit what I’m aiming at.”
They moved ahead of the storm, just beyond the edge of the rain. They passed through an open area where the wind kicked dust across the road and shoved against the Bronco. Cork held the wheel steady.
“At the marina,” he said over his shoulder, “when Earl questioned you about your military service, you told him you couldn’t talk about what you did. Does that mean naval intelligence?”
“Naval intelligence,” Lindstrom confirmed. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just thinking. You’ve been well trained in gathering information.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. Because Cork was thinking about Lindstrom’s building a home in a place where his only neighbor was a man who had every reason in the world to hate the Fitzgerald name. It seemed to indicate a terrible lapse in reconnoitering. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was evidence of something else entirely. Something cold and abominable.
“Nothing?” Lindstrom said quietly. “O’Connor, I’ve observed how your mind works. You don’t ask a question
