“My mother’s cousin. What’s it to you?”
“According to Millie Joseph, he disappeared about the same time the Vanishings ended.”
“So?”
“Just wondering if there might have been some connection.”
“Between him and the Vanishings?” Broom seemed genuinely surprised but not offended.
“Isaiah, has the sheriff talked to you about the remains they found in the Vermilion Drift?”
“What about ’em?”
“They’ve positively identified all but one of the bodies. The one still remaining? I think there’s a good chance it’s your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Millie Joseph told me your mother disappeared just before the Vanishings began. Everyone thought that she’d taken off, abandoned you. I believe that wasn’t true. I believe she was one of the first victims. And I believe that Indigo Broom may have had something to do with it.”
Broom was stunned to silence. He stood there, a big man with his mouth open.
Cork went on. “Millie Joseph called Indigo Broom ‘Mr. Windigo.’ She told me he was a man folks on the rez avoided. Did you know him?”
Now Broom’s mouth closed and his eyes became hard as fists. “I knew him,” he said, his lips barely moving.
“What happened to him?”
“He left.”
“And went where?”
“I didn’t care.”
“Did anyone ever say?”
“No. And no one gave a shit.”
“Not even his family?”
“Family? He fed on family.”
“What do you mean?”
Broom looked at Cork. “We called him Mr. Windigo, too.”
“Was he the kind of man who could have made those women disappear?”
Broom said, “I’ve talked enough.” He turned his back on Cork and began to walk away.
“Isaiah,” Cork called after him. “Are you responsible for the graffiti in the mine?”
Broom stopped and turned back.
Because the second entrance to the Vermilion Drift was on the rez, Cork had felt strongly from the beginning that a Shinnob was responsible. Although Cork’s question had been a shot in the dark, Broom’s reaction made him think he might have hit the mark.
“Which would mean you knew about the other way into the mine. Did you know about the remains?”
Broom walked slowly back and stood looking down into Cork’s face. The big Shinnob cast enough shadow that it completely swallowed Cork.
“I know nothing about those bodies down there. As for the graffiti, if I had anything to do with it, which I didn’t, I’d know that tunnel was about the most evil place on earth.”
Broom left, taking his huge shadow with him.
TWENTY-FIVE
Given what Cork now knew, he believed that Isaiah Broom’s long-lost relative, Indigo, was a very likely suspect in the disappearance of the women on the Iron Lake Reservation more than forty years earlier. It struck him as odd that Indigo Broom’s name had never been mentioned during the investigation Cork’s father had conducted. Cork had made the connection with relative ease. Why hadn’t his father? Or the other people on the rez?
He thought about these things as he drove back to Aurora, and before he reached the town limits, he’d arrived at some very speculative conclusions.
Indigo Broom and Monique Cavanaugh had disappeared at approximately the same time, and the Vanishings had stopped. Broom was a man of desires dark enough to be feared, even by his own people. Cork might have suspected that Indigo Broom was responsible for the fate of Monique Cavanaugh except for one salient detaiclass="underline" his father’s.38 Smith amp; Wesson Police Special may well have been the weapon used to kill her. He knew, too, that Cavanaugh was a woman of dark desires and devious motives, which she’d hidden well from others, but not from the priest and probably not from her husband, who refused to speak of her once she was gone. Could she, too, have played some part in the Vanishings?
It was entirely possible, probable even, Cork concluded, that the Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation had not been as ignorant as the official reports of the investigation seemed to indicate, nor had his father.
But why had they all lied?
And how had a bullet from his father’s gun come to be lodged in the spine of Monique Cavanaugh? If he knew that, maybe Cork would know how a bullet from the same weapon had found its way into the body of her daughter.
As he pulled into town, his cell phone rang. Sheriff Dross. She told him that she’d scheduled another news conference for the afternoon. She wanted everyone in her office beforehand, at 2:00 P.M., so that she knew where all the parts of the investigation stood.
Cork stopped by home, grabbed a quick bologna sandwich, and took Trixie for a short walk. Then he headed to the Tamarack County sheriff’s office. He was the last to arrive. In addition to Dross, there were the other usuals: Captain Ed Larson, Agent Simon Rutledge, and Agent Susan Upchurch. Once again, there weren’t enough chairs, so Cork leaned against a wall.
“Susan,” Dross said to the BCA agent, “why don’t you give us an update on what you’ve found so far.”
“All right. Remember the marks on the bones that I indicated earlier could have been made by incisions or by the teeth of a scavenger? I’ve pretty much concluded that they’re the result of a knife blade. I also believe they were delivered perimortem.”
“Perimortem?” Cork asked.
“At or very near the time of death.”
“What makes you believe that?” Larson said.
“In perimortem wounds, the edges of the bone along the incision often curl, like if you’d cut into a live branch that you’ve pulled off a tree.”
“So the victims may well have been alive when these cuts were made?”
“Yes. But it’s also possible the cuts were made immediately after death.”
“To what purpose?”
“They might be ritualistic. They might have been the result of some kind of homicidal frenzy, I suppose. But you also sometimes find this same kind of mark on victims of cannibalism.”
“Cannibalism?” Dross looked aghast.
“I’m not saying that’s what occurred, just that the marks are consistent with a number of possibilities, and that’s one of them.”
“Great,” Dross said. “The media will love that, I’m sure.”
Cork asked, “Did Monique Cavanaugh have any of these marks?”
“No. We’ve found no knife marks on the remains of the Cavanaugh woman, no evidence of knife wounds.”
“So cause of death was probably the bullet lodged in her spine?”
“That’s the best speculation at the moment.”
Cork looked at the sheriff. “Anything more from the Lauren Cavanaugh autopsy?”
“Yes,” Dross said. “In addition to the bullet wound to her chest, Tom Conklin found a superficial wound on her right side, just above her hip.”
“What kind of wound?”
“Tom thinks it’s a bullet graze.”
“The killer missed the first time around?”
“We couldn’t say that officially, but that would be my current speculation. Ed, tell Cork what you’ve got.”
“We’ve gone over the old Parrant estate,” Larson said. “We didn’t find anything of particular value in the big house. But in the boathouse, which Ms. Cavanaugh had renovated into an additional private living area for herself, we found two things. First, between the floorboards, we discovered traces of what we believe to be blood. Simon’s people are analyzing the samples now.”
“What do you think?”
“Well, the M.E. believes she died quickly from the gunshot wound. The blood covered a significant area, so I think Lauren Cavanaugh lay facedown after she died, lay there quite a while so that gravity pulled a lot of blood out the chest wound. It looks to me like someone eventually tried to clean things up and, except for what seeped between the boards, did a pretty good job.”
“What was the other thing?” Cork asked.
“We got really lucky. We pulled a fingerprint from the back of a table lamp. A bloody fingerprint. Simon’s people are analyzing that blood, too, and trying to match the print.”