Hannah Mueller screamed as she stepped from the kitchen and saw Cork with the heavy black hawk drawn back ready to strike.
“Christ, Hannah, I’m sorry.” Cork let his hand drop immediately.
“Sheriff O’Connor!” the woman said breathlessly. Her eyes were huge with fright.
“It’s all right, Hannah. I didn’t know it was you.”
Hannah Mueller was a woman about forty, small, heavy, with dull gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and bound with a rubber band. She had a plain face, and in her blue eyes was an innocence much younger than her forty years, for Hannah was mildly retarded. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt and sneakers. She carried a mop and a bucket.
“I came to clean,” she said, as if she needed to defend her presence. “Mr. Parrant called me and said it was okay for me to clean. I didn’t clean my regular days.”
“That’s fine, Hannah,” Cork assured her. “That’s just fine.”
Hannah looked at him, her gaze full of question.
“I’m investigating, Hannah.”
“Oh,” Hannah said, as if that explained it just fine. She looked past Cork toward the hallway that led to the judge’s study. “I heard it’s bad.”
“It’s not pleasant,” Cork acknowledged. “Hannah, what are your regular days?”
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes I clean on Sunday if the judge has a party or something. He leaves me a note.”
“He doesn’t speak with you?”
“I don’t ever see him. He’s always gone.”
Cork looked at his watch. “You always come at nine?”
“Nine.” Hannah nodded. “Always at nine.”
“And the judge is always gone.”
“Always gone.” Hannah nodded.
“What if you needed to talk to him? Could you call him?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the numbers.”
“What numbers?”
Hannah reached into her back pocket and drew out an old leather wallet with a nicely tooled design. She extracted a worn piece of paper and handed it to Cork. Two telephone numbers were written on the paper. Beside one Hannah had noted “Monday amp; Friday.” Beside the other she’d written, “Wensday.” The “Wensday” number was preceded by the digit 1. Long distance, same area code as Aurora.
“Wait just a minute, Hannah.” Cork put the hawk back on its stand, stepped to the phone near the stairs, and dialed the Monday/Friday number.
“Good morning. Great North. How may I direct your call?”
Cork smiled. “Joyce. Cork O’Connor.”
“Yes, Cork. Hi.”
“Could I ask you a question?”
“You can. Doesn’t mean I can answer it.”
“Did the judge work at Great North on Wednesdays?”
“No. For the last year or so Wednesday has been his day off.”
“Thanks, Joyce. You’re wonderful.”
“Tell Albert that.”
Cork hung up. He tried the Wednesday number. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He called Ed Larson and asked for one last favor. Could he track down a long distance number?
“I have to wait for someone to call me back,” he explained to Hannah, who’d stood patiently, mop and bucket in hand, while he called.
“Sure, okay,” she shrugged. She looked again, not with great enthusiasm, toward the back hallway.
“You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” Cork said.
“It’s Christmas,” she explained. “The money.”
“Then let me do it,” Cork offered.
“No.” She shook her head vigorously, her dull ponytail swishing across her blue collar. “It wouldn’t be right. Mr. Parrant said he’d pay me.”
“Mr. Parrant doesn’t have to know.”
“It wouldn’t be right,” she insisted. She looked at Cork gratefully. “But it’s sure nice of you to offer, Sheriff.”
“At least let me help.”
“No. It’s my job.”
The phone rang. Cork picked it up. He listened. “Just a minute. Let me write this down.” There was a notepad by the phone but nothing to write with. Cork checked his pockets for a pen, then glanced at Hannah, who’d put down her bucket and was holding out to him a stubby pencil that looked as if the point had been sharpened with a knife. Cork smiled gratefully. He wrote down the address, thanked Ed, and hung up.
“Thanks, Hannah.”
“You’re welcome.” She picked up her bucket, took a deep breath, and started toward the back room.
It seemed to Cork the good people were always cleaning up the messes.
Not surprisingly, the address of the Wednesday number was in Duluth. It fit. As Cork made the two-hour drive to the port city on Lake Superior, he thought about the judge making the same trip once a week, retrieving GameTech mail from the post office box, and sitting in an anonymous office somewhere taking care of business. Cork wasn’t exactly sure what the business was, but the more he’d learned the more certain he was that it was a less than honorable enterprise.
He found the address near the harbor bridge. A small office building-square, red brick-that had probably once been busy when the ore ships ran regularly, but it looked as if it was mostly abandoned now. A big sign in one of the first-floor windows advertised office space for rent. Parked in front was a white van that had “Mosely Remodeling” printed on the sides. The directory just inside the front door had as many gaps as a Minnesota street had potholes. GameTech didn’t appear at all.
From somewhere above came the whine of a power saw. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped, but was repeated as Cork started up the stairway. The stairs were gritty from the sand and dirt tracked in on the bottom of snowy shoes and boots. Cork climbed to the second floor and walked down the hallway, which was uncarpeted brown tile long in need of a good waxing. Only a few of the office doors carried logos on their translucent glass, and fewer still seemed currently occupied. Cork heard a phone ring in an office somewhere ahead and the laughter of a woman involved in one side of the conversation that followed.
The address Ed Larson had given him was Suite 214. There was nothing on the door to indicate that it was the office of GameTech. The light was off inside, the door locked.
From above him the sudden cry of the saw came again. It drowned the sound of the woman on the phone for a couple of seconds, then stopped. Something-a severed board? — clunked onto the floor almost directly over Cork’s head. A few moments later the pounding of a hammer began.
Cork considered the locked door. The phone rang again down the hallway. The woman’s voice and laughter followed. She sounded as if she enjoyed her job. The hammering stopped. The saw took up its drowning whine.
Cork went back outside to his Bronco parked behind the van on the street, hauled out the ice spud, returned to Suite 214, and the next time the saw blade howled, punched out a chunk of glass from a corner of the window in the door. He reached inside and undid the lock.
The room was dark and he opened the blinds. The office had a nice view of the northeast. Beyond the bridge and the harbor opening, the ice of Lake Superior stretched away under the morning sun like the great salt flats of Utah. Cork took a good look at the office. It was small, one room, not a suite at all. The walls were bare. The carpet was beige, and either new or so little used as to still look new. There was a desk near the windows, an L-shaped affair with a computer and printer on the long part of the L. A white three-drawer filing cabinet sat in one corner, exactly the same kind of cabinet that had been in Schanno’s office.
Cork checked the filing cabinet. The top drawer was marked “GameTech” and held a number of hanging files: Budget, Finance, Lease Agreements, Personnel, Taxes. He lifted Personnel. Inside he found folders labeled with many familiar names and containing the originals of the documents that had appeared among the negatives he’d found at Lytton’s. Next he pulled Lease Agreements. The file contained contracts signed by Russell Blackwater for the lease on a monthly basis of gaming equipment. He set the file on the desk beside the other.