“And she mentioned no one else?”
Kane seemed to have hit the end of his patience. His eyes bugged out, and he spit his words. “What does this have to do with anything? Winter Moon murdered her and that’s all there is to it.”
“You know that for a fact? How?”
“You mean besides all the goddamn evidence? He threatened her before.”
“When?”
“Just before Christmas. He came to the house. They argued. He grabbed her, made threats. I ran him off.”
Cork knew this was Kane’s perception of the incident and that Solemn told a slightly different story.
“Two weeks later, she’s dead.” Kane threw his rod against the side of the boathouse. “I shouldn’t have run him off. I should have killed him.”
“Did they argue often?”
“All the time.”
“You were in the habit of listening in on their conversations?”
Kane took a quick step forward. In height, he towered over Cork. Rage burned in his eyes, the desire to strike. But he didn’t. He balled his hands into fists at his side and said, “Just get the hell out of here. Everything I loved is gone. What more do you want from me?”
It was a question that, at the moment, Cork couldn’t answer.
As he left the boathouse, a wind rose, blowing in from across the lake. Big clouds that had been sleeping in the distance all afternoon suddenly woke up and raced across the sky, their dark blue shadows ghosting off the water onto the land. In the myths of his grandmother’s people, manidoog rode those shadows, spirits of the woods, sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent.
Halfway to the house, Cork paused as a great block of shade engulfed the lawn, turning the deep grass around him the color of a bad bruise. The crows in the line of cedars thirty yards away began to raise a ruckus, and Cork looked to see what the big deal was.
Snakes. Thousands of them. Slithering scales over slithering scales, wave after wave, an angry black sea, smothering the grass under the trees. Crying wildly, the crows took to the safety of the sky. Cork felt his own flesh crawling as he stared at the writhing mass sweeping against and around the cedar trunks. One snake he could tolerate. A whole fucking sea was terrifying.
A shaft of light struck the ground, and Cork looked up where the sun pushed through a split in the cloud. When he glanced back at the cedars, the snakes were gone. The crows were gone. And by then the cloud shadow was gone, too.
Carefully, Cork walked to the place where the snakes had been. He thought the grass might carry some mark of their passage, but the long, upright blades showed no sign of disturbance. He stepped to the cedars. Beyond them was the south shore of the point, all rock and water, facing toward Aurora. There was nowhere for the snakes to have gone except into the lake.
Far down the shoreline, the crows wheeled away like ashes in a wind.
23
Dorothy Winter Moon was in Jo’s office in the Aurora Professional Building. Cork knew this the moment he pulled into the parking lot. The enormous orange International dump truck she drove for the county was there, dwarfing all the other vehicles in the lot.
When he knocked, Jo told him to come in. Dot sat in one of the client chairs. She wore bib overalls with a dusty yellow T-shirt underneath, and the tan on her arms was even darker from the grime of her labor. Her old steel-toed Wolverines looked battle scarred and her face looked worried.
“I was telling Dot about the pubic hairs,” Jo said.
In the autopsy of Charlotte Kane’s body, the medical examiner had combed the pubic area and found hairs that didn’t appear to match the dead girl’s. The evidence had been sent to the lab of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul for DNA testing and to match against a DNA sample from Solemn. The report had come back that morning. The pubic hairs were not Charlotte’s, nor had they come from Solemn.
“That’s good, right?” Dot said.
“It’s a good-news, bad-news thing,” Jo replied.
Cork leaned against a windowsill and crossed his arms.
“The good news is that it indicates the last person to have sex with Charlotte wasn’t Solemn,” Jo said.
“The bad news?”
“Motive. The prosecution could argue that it proves Charlotte was seeing somebody else and that Solemn killed her in a jealous rage.”
“Seeing who?”
Jo looked to Cork.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he said.
“Can’t you tell from the DNA of those pubic hairs?”
“We need a sample to match them against, Dot. And for that we need a suspect and enough evidence to request that a sample be taken.”
“You don’t have a suspect?”
“Not yet.” Cork gave her a sympathetic smile. “How’re you holding up?”
Tough as she was, Dot seemed to soften in her chair. She stared down at her rough hands. “People are out at my place all the time now, reporters, assholes, all the time taking pictures, asking questions. Somebody broke the deer on my lawn. I’ve been keeping Custer locked in the house. All those people around, they’re driving the poor dog crazy.” She looked at Cork, then past him out the window. “It’s hard when I visit Solemn. He’s my son, but he isn’t. It’s like a stranger stepped into his skin. We don’t seem to know what to say.”
“It’s the situation,” Jo said. “It’s put a lot of stress on both of you.”
Dot handed Jo several papers. “Anything else you want me to sign?”
“No, that’s it.”
Dot tugged a pocket watch on a chain from her overalls. “Got to get back to work. Spreading gravel out at the fairgrounds parking lot today.”
“I’ll let you know when there’s anything new,” Jo said.
“Thanks.”
Dot gathered her hair back and jammed a red ball cap over it. Cork could hear the clomp of her heavy boots long after she’d closed the door behind her.
“Coffee?” Jo asked, rising from her chair.
“No thanks.”
She poured a mugful from a stainless steel server. “Well?”
Cork sat in the chair Dot had vacated. “I talked with Tiffany Soderberg. She says Fletcher Kane was creepy when it came to Charlotte. Watched her all the time.”
“Fletcher Kane is creepy, period. Proves nothing.” Jo sat down and sipped her coffee. “Okay, for the sake of argument, suppose there was something between daughter and father, that doesn’t mean he killed her. You’ve read the statement he gave about the night she disappeared. He was home. His sister corroborated his story.”
“And Glory’s conveniently gone now. He claims he doesn’t even know where. I’d love to have his phone records for the past couple of months. I’d bet there’s a good chance we’d find a number for Glory. Have you heard anything about the phone records for Valhalla yet?”
Cork had recommended that Jo subpoena the telephone record of the calls made to and from Valhalla on the day of the fatal New Year’s Eve party. He thought it might be enlightening to know whom Charlotte had talked to on the last day of her life.
“Nothing yet.” She looked at him and he could tell she was mulling something over.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m just wondering about due diligence.”
