No lights were on at the old Parrant estate either. He hoped that meant Fletcher Kane had gone to bed. When he was near enough to see things more clearly, however, his uneasiness crystallized into fear. Solemn’s black Ranger pickup sat in the circular drive.
Cork parked behind the Ranger and got out. In the light that leaked from the blistered moon, he saw that the truck was empty. A night wind came off the lake, rustling the tall bushes next to the house, scraping branches restlessly across the stone of the wall. Cork climbed the front steps onto the porch. He peered through a window where the curtains hadn’t been drawn completely, but he could see nothing inside. He knocked at the door. The only answer was the creak of a loose porch board as he stepped back to wait. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He opened it.
The smell of pot roast greeted him, a pleasant aroma that seemed out of place in that unwelcoming house.
“Fletcher!” he called. “Solemn!”
He took a hesitant step inside. For Cork, the move had the dreadful feel of inevitability, for he recalled far too well the night only three years earlier when he’d entered the Parrant estate in just this way, only to find that a shotgun blast had scattered most of the judge’s head across a wall. He waited for his eyes to adjust completely to the dark inside the house, then he walked ahead to the switch he knew was in the entryway. The lights came on, revealing nothing extraordinary. The living room was empty. In the dining room, the table was set for dinner, a big pot roast center stage. There was one dinner plate on the table, dirty. An opened bottle of red wine stood beside a stemmed glass that was half full. Cork went to the stairs and called up toward the second floor, “Fletcher! Solemn!”
He turned at last down the long hallway that led to the study, where the sight of violent death and the smell of spilled blood had awaited him before. His steps seemed loud in the silence of that house. He reached the study door, which was closed. He knocked, waited, then pushed the door open. Although the room beyond was dark, the trapped, foul smell told him everything. The stink of gunpowder, the stench of blood.
When he turned on the light, his worst fear became reality. The wall behind the big desk was stained with splattered blood and fragments of tissue and bone, still glistening. On the floor below, lay Fletcher Kane, all but his long, insectlike legs hidden by the bulk of the desk. His legs and the ugly blue barrel of a shotgun.
Sprawled on his stomach next to an overturned chair, dead center in the room lay Solemn, an island in a lake of his own blood.
Cork’s knees threatened to buckle and he steadied himself against the doorjamb.
He staggered forward, knowing that everything was useless, that with all his blood spilled onto the hardwood floor, Solemn was already dead. But it was what you did, what you were trained to do. He dialed 911, then knelt beside Solemn and numbly reached to check for a pulse.
The moment Cork’s fingers touched him, Solemn gave a small groan.
“Oh, Christ,” Cork said. He went down on his knees, knelt in the blood. Carefully, he rolled Solemn over. The shotgun blast had obliterated his T-shirt and made a pulpy mess of everything under it. Solemn opened his eyes, only the width of a whisker, but enough that Cork knew he was conscious.
“Cold,” Solemn said.
“Here.” Cork sat down, took him in his arms, and cradled him. “The paramedics are on the way. Hold on. Just hold on, son.”
Solemn looked up at him and tried to speak.
“Don’t talk.” Cork held him tenderly and whispered, “Please, God. Don’t let him die.”
Where Solemn found the strength, Cork didn’t know. The young man’s hand slowly rose, touched Cork’s chest over his heart, held there a moment, then dropped to the floor where it hit with a hollow sound.
Solemn Winter Moon was gone.
“Oh, Solemn, Solemn,” Cork said. He laid his cheek against the young man’s blood-matted hair, and before he knew it, he was weeping deeply, grieving as he would have for a son.
42
Cork sat on the front steps, in the glaring wash of colors from the cruisers’ blinking lights, drinking coffee Cy Borkmann had poured from the Thermos he always kept in his cruiser. The steps were broad, and the crime scene team had no trouble moving past him, in and out of the house. He was grateful for the coffee. The bitter taste of it was something familiar, grounding. Even so, he felt as if he’d taken a long fall and had left an important part of himself behind.
With Solemn dying in his arms, he’d said a desperate prayer, but it had done no good. Maybe if he’d believed, if he’d been sure of God the way Solemn had, it would have made all the difference.
It was ridiculous thinking, he knew. The kind of thinking that sprang from guilt and grief. From believing that he hadn’t done enough to protect Solemn. From realizing too late how much he’d cared. He drank his coffee, and he remembered the small boy with fierce, dark eyes who’d loved fishing and Sam Winter Moon’s jokes. He wanted to block from his memory the feel of Solemn limp in his arms, the sight of his chest shredded by buckshot, the helplessness that had led to a prayer unanswered.
Gooding came out and Borkmann followed him.
“Finished?” Cork asked.
“We’re just about to bag the bodies.” Borkmann heaved a sigh that sounded like the wheeze of a tired draft horse. “You take a good look at things before you called us?”
“Good enough, I guess.”
“Notice the top of Kane’s desk?”
“I didn’t look that good, Cy.”
“Nice cherry wood, but scratched up pretty bad. New scratches. Gooding, here, thinks they’re from the recoil of the shotgun. I think he’s right. I think Kane laid the barrel across the desk and pointed it directly at Winter Moon where he sat. The kid had to know what was coming. I don’t see any way Kane could have sprung the shotgun on him sudden, a piece that big.” He held off for a moment, as if waiting for Gooding or Cork to offer another theory. When they didn’t he said, “Murder-suicide is what I’d say.”
A cruiser door slammed, and Pender came up the walk.
“Dross just radioed. She finished interviewing Olga Swenson.”
Borkmann glanced at Deputy Gooding and nodded approval. Immediately after they’d arrived at the house, Gooding had recommended to the acting sheriff that, despite the late hour, he dispatch someone immediately to talk to Kane’s housekeeper.
Pender looked at his notes. “According to Ms. Swenson, she had dinner on the table at eight o’clock, which was a little later than usual, but she said Kane’d been keeping odd hours. After the food was out, she left. Didn’t stick around for any compliments on her cooking. I guess the drill was that Dr. Kane bused his own dishes. As far as she knows, Kane was alone in the house. She also said that he still insisted on her fixing a big family meal even though he wasn’t eating much these days. Getting pretty lax in all his personal habits, too. Sounds like he was definitely on the edge. Dross’ll give you a full report back at the office.”
“Eight o’clock,” Borkmann said. “And what time did you get here, Cork?”
“Ten-forty-five.”
“All right.” Borkmann tipped back the brim of his hat. “Looks like, Dr. Kane made a pretty good dent in that pot roast on the dining room table. And that bottle of wine is better than half empty, so he took some time to mellow out good. Let’s assume he started eating right after the housekeeper left, and took his time stuffing his face. Maybe half an hour. Now from what you say, Cork, Winter Moon left his mother’s place around twenty hundred hours. If he came straight here, he’d have arrived at about twenty-thirty hours, just about the time Kane was finishing his meal, sipping on that last glass of wine. Winter Moon comes in. They palaver, end up in the study with the shotgun between them. I’m guessing time of death is going to be around twenty-one hundred hours. It’s a miracle he was still alive when you got here, Cork.”