I came up next to him. I didn’t say a word.
“There,” he said. There were some thin trees scattered just a few yards from the shed, then some thick, tall weeds as the shoreline gave way to the forest. He ran into the slight gap he had spotted. I was right behind him. When he stopped, I almost ran over him.
Vinnie was kneeling on the ground. He was holding himself up with both hands on the barrel of his rifle, his head hanging like he had gotten this far and then given up. Maskwa put his hand on his shoulder. Vinnie picked his head up, shaking his hair away from his face. The tape on his right ear was torn away and a fresh stream of blood ran down his neck.
“Did you get the other one?” he said.
“Yes,” Maskwa said. “I did.”
“Alex,” he said, as he stood up slowly. “You’re here.”
“Yeah, I’m here. I went to Sudbury first.”
That stopped him for a second. Then he picked up his rifle and brushed off the leaves. “You saw what happened,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How did you know to go there?”
“I was in your cabin,” I said. “Leon helped me find the maps you printed out.”
“Okay.”
“What was the article about?”
He didn’t say anything.
“From the Detroit News, ” I said. “Whatever it was, it brought you all the way up here again.”
“We need to go see how Helen’s doing.”
“Vinnie, the police are coming.”
“What?”
“The OPP are on their way. I called Reynaud.”
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”
The three of us went back to the lodge. We passed the dead man, the ruin of his skull and blood and gore on the shed, the mist finally retreating from the dock and the lake as the sun came up. We passed the other dead man. We stepped over the blood and went up the stairs. Helen hadn’t moved. She was still huddled in the corner. High above the fireplace, the moose head was half obliterated, one antler lying on the floor.
Maskwa went down on his knees and spoke to her in a low voice. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s over.”
She looked up and scanned our faces, all three of us, one by one. She didn’t look surprised. She was probably incapable of surprise at that point. She was way beyond it.
“We have to get you out of here,” Vinnie said. “You can’t be here when the police come.”
“Vinnie,” I said, “what are you talking about?”
“We’ll explain later, Alex. Right now we’ve got to get her out of here.”
“Vinnie, you should go with her,” Maskwa said. “Go to my house.”
“I can’t ask you to stay here,” Vinnie said.
“If you’re here, they’ll ask you why you came looking for Helen.”
Vinnie thought about it. “Okay, you’re right.”
“Do you guys know what you’re doing?” I said.
“You’ve got to trust us, Alex. Okay? Just trust us for now.”
I took a long breath. “Okay,” I said. “Get going. Give me your rifle.”
“When you hit the main road, head west,” Maskwa said. “Give them a chance to come up the service road, then double back. We’ll meet you at my house.”
“We’ll see you there,” Vinnie said. He threw me his rifle, pausing just long enough to notice my muddy shoes. “What did the doctor tell you, Alex? You gotta keep your feet dry.” Then he and Helen were out the door.
I waited with Maskwa while Vinnie fired up the truck and took off. It was about a four-minute ride out to the main road, maybe three and a half if you were flying. I wasn’t sure if they’d make it.
“Maskwa, can you tell me what’s going on now?”
“It’s Helen’s story,” he said. “She’ll tell you.”
“Okay, fine. So what do we say when the police get here?”
“You came looking for Vinnie, and you picked me up to help you.”
“I talked to Reynaud just before I got here. I didn’t say anything about you being with me.”
“So you didn’t say anything. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t with you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We might be able to sell it.”
“We split up and searched the place, looking for Helen and Vinnie. Then those men got here. They started shooting at you, so we had to kill them. It was self-defense.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the story, Alex. We never saw Vinnie, and we never saw Helen. We have no idea where they are.”
A few minutes later, we heard the police cars coming down to the lodge.
“As soon as we’re done here, I get all the answers, right?”
He gave me a tired smile. “You and me both. They still haven’t told me.”
I stood there looking at him. The police cars got closer.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s showtime.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maskwa and I spent the next four hours at the lodge, telling our story over and over to several different constables. Staff Sergeant Moreland was there, of course, and as he listened to me go over the whole thing one more time, he had a look on his face like he wished I had never set foot in Ontario. Not that I could blame him. As I watched him standing over the body by the stairs, it occurred to me he was probably near retirement himself. For all I knew, he and DeMers had been making plans to go fishing together when they had both hung it up. Now DeMers was dead. DeMers and Gannon and Tom LeBlanc and four men from Detroit were dead, and now there were two more.
I saw Boxer Face and Suntan standing there for a moment, looking down at the other body, the one by the shed, and I saw a couple other constables who had kept guard over me in the medical center. The one person I didn’t see was Natalie Reynaud. When I asked the sergeant where she was, he told me she was back at the detachment and left it at that. Then he told me to go home and to wait by my phone in case he needed me for more questions. Aside from that, he didn’t want to ever see me or hear from me again.
When we were finally in my truck, I took my last look at the lodge and then turned the ignition. “Come on, Maskwa,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I turned the truck around and headed out the gravel road. A minute later, we passed the sedan, its front wheels off the road.
“This wasn’t the best way to do this,” I said.
Maskwa looked over at me. “What do you mean?”
“Setting the trap so far from the lodge. You gave them a chance to regroup.”
He looked back out the window. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were going to take Helen to the lodge, get her settled in there, and then come back out. Those guys would have never made it out of the car.”
“Did they get here too soon?”
He shrugged. “Vinnie misjudged how much of a lead we had.”
“Why not just leave her at your house?”
“She wouldn’t let us do that.”
“I wouldn’t have given her the choice.”
“You weren’t there, Alex.”
I shook my head and kept driving. We hit the main highway, took a left, and headed east, toward the reserve.
“You saw what they did to Helen’s friends,” Maskwa said. “I didn’t see it myself, you’ve got to understand that. Vinnie just told me about it. But you were there in the house.”
“Yes.”
“Did they really burn them alive?”
I hesitated as the scene came back to me. “It looked like they were still alive, yes.”
“They would have done the same to Helen. They were coming for her. We weren’t going to let her out of our sight.”
“So why did Vinnie come up here?” I said. “And why did he come alone?”
“He told me he didn’t want to drag you up here again.”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Yeah, he’ll hear about that one later.”
“Vinnie called me,” he said. “He was driving right by the reserve. It was a spur of the moment thing.”
That hit me in the gut. Spur of the moment or not, when Vinnie needed help, he chose one of his own people again. Not me.