He couldn’t say why exactly, but Cork’s thinking kept coming back to John LePere. Part of it was that he wasn’t convinced LePere was the drunk he’d appeared to be, and part of it was that LePere’s land on Grace Cove would have been the perfect area from which to observe Lindstrom’s home in planning an abduction. The problem was that LePere, like the Hamilton kid, seemed a different kind of man than would be involved in kidnapping. In his days as sheriff, Cork had prided himself on knowing the people of Tamarack County. He believed he’d learned to take the measure of a man pretty accurately. LePere had been a heavy drinker once. Sometimes when he was drunk he argued. Once in a while, he fought. But it was the booze that did that, and probably the disappointment life had handed him. He was no saint, but neither was he a devil who’d steal a man’s wife and child for money. Or so he’d seemed to Cork.
Still, Cork felt strongly that LePere knew more than he was telling, and if so, two obvious questions presented themselves: What did LePere know, and why was he silent?
Gil Singer was the deputy now posted at the turnoff to Grace Cove. Cork pulled over and called out to him, “Still a zoo at Lindstrom’s?”
“Only the hearty remain, Cork. Heat drove the rest of them back to their hotel rooms. You doing okay?”
“Holding my own, Gil. Have you seen John LePere lately?”
“Cy told me LePere took off earlier, complaining cops were all over his place like flies on shit. Haven’t seen him since.”
Cork started to pull away, but Singer hailed him down.
“By the way, the sheriff had me out on the rez this morning checking out that break-in at the clinic. All that was missing was some insulin and syringes.”
“A diabetic burglar?”
“Strange world, Cork.”
“Thanks, Gil.”
He parked on LePere’s property, but instead of hiking directly to Lindstrom’s, he walked to LePere’s cabin. The man’s pickup was gone. The place looked deserted. Cork headed around in back and to an outbuilding that was just large enough to hold LePere’s truck. The door was locked. Cork peered through a dusty window. Hand tools-a shovel, a pick, a long-handled ax, a couple of kinds of rakes-hung on the walls. A stack of old tires stood in a corner. Mostly, the shed was empty. He checked the dock, stepped down into a rowboat tied there, bent, and looked for anything that might have been left by someone taken against their will. The boat appeared clean.
“O’Connor.”
Cork turned, fast enough that he almost lost his balance and fell into the lake. Agent David Earl stood on the dock looking down at him.
“I already checked the boat,” Earl said. “Nothing.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, I imagine.” Earl reached out a hand and helped Cork back onto the dock. “I came out after I heard the news.”
“What news?”
“You don’t know?” Earl pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and tapped out a cigarette. He started to offer the pack to Cork, but drew it back. “That’s right. You gave them up.” Earl lit the cigarette with a Bic lighter and blew smoke over the dock. “Brett Hamilton’s dead.”
The news jolted Cork. “How?”
“It seems that after he eluded the FBI, he made a beeline back to the tent city on the reservation, recruited a dozen other activists, and they headed out to stop the fire burning Our Grandfathers. They got there before any firefighters and didn’t know what the hell they were doing. One of them got himself trapped under a falling tree full of fire. Hamilton put himself in danger cutting the guy free. The guy got out. Hamilton didn’t.” He pursed his lips and sent out a stream of smoke. “Just when you think you’ve got someone pegged.”
Cork thought about Joan Hamilton, Joan of Arc of the Redwoods. She was a hard woman, shaped even in her crippled walk by her choice of wars. But she was still a mother, a parent who’d tried to sacrifice herself for her son, her only child who was dead now. Cork looked up at the sky, and he let a moment of deep sorrow pierce the armor of his own concerns.
“How does that bring you here?” he finally asked Earl.
“I’ve been thinking-who’s left? I stand in Lindstrom’s big log house and all there is to see is this place. Now, that doesn’t mean John LePere has any connection with the abduction, but it’s odd that he saw nothing. If not that night, then before. He strikes me as a man extremely protective of his privacy. I’m guessing he’d know if someone were out here who shouldn’t have been.”
“I talked with him. He denied it.”
“He’s an alcoholic. Denial is everything.”
“Alcoholic?” Cork said. “Follow me.” He led Earl to the garbage can near the shed, lifted the lid, and released a cloud of black flies. “What do you see?”
“Besides garbage?”
“Booze doesn’t flow from the tap in the kitchen sink. Where are the bottles?”
“Why pretend to be drunk?”
“Good cover, especially if people are predisposed to believing it. I’ve known John LePere a long time. Not especially well, but enough to wonder how he’d get himself mixed up in something like this.”
“Two million dollars is a lot of incentive.”
“At great risk. That’s the thing. Whoever did this is risking everything. John LePere’s got a good job at the casino. And a nice place here, for a man who likes to live alone. He has a place on the north shore, too. Kidnapping just doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Maybe because we don’t have all the pieces.” Earl dropped his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. He glanced at the cabin. “I can’t go in there. I can’t even be aware of someone going in there.”
“Maybe it’s time you left,” Cork suggested.
“I think I’ve seen everything here I want to see.”
After Earl had gone, Cork tried the back door of the cabin. As he expected, it was locked. He returned to his Bronco and took a heavy-handled screwdriver and a pair of cotton gloves from the tool kit he kept in back. He put the gloves on and used the handle of the screwdriver to break a pane in the back-door window. It was simple, then, to reach in and undo the lock on the door handle.
LePere’s place surprised him. In his experience, bachelors were generally sloppy housekeepers, especially if they were heavy drinkers. LePere kept a clean home. Cork wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for. Whatever it was, the tidy kitchen-where not even a crumb lay on the counter-seemed unpromising. He stepped into the main room. It was furnished sparely, in the way of a man who seldom had to accommodate visitors. An easy chair with a standing lamp for reading, a small dining table with two chairs, a Franklin stove, a four-shelf bookcase-full. A tasteful, braided area rug in shades of brown covered the old floorboards in front of the stove. On the walls, LePere had hung several framed photographs, all black and white. Cork checked the only bedroom, went through LePere’s small closet and chest of drawers. In the bathroom, he looked inside a little Hoover portable washer. Back in the living room, he stood a while, hoping to be struck by something that felt out of place, but nothing hit him. He crossed to the nearest photograph on the wall. It was of a man and boy standing in front of a cabin under construction. Written in white in the lower right-hand corner were the words SYLVAN COVE, 1971. The boy looked to Cork to be a very young John LePere. He assumed the man, who had his arm proudly around the boy’s shoulders, was LePere’s father.
Cork moved to the next mounted photograph. A teenage John LePere stood on a dock alongside a boy a few years younger. Behind them lay a curve of silver-gray water backed by a huge ridge of solid, dark rock. The boys were smiling broadly. In the corner, in white, had been written PURGATORY COVE, 1979.