“That’s true.”
“Pissed you off, I understand.”
“So?”
“Maybe enough for you to kill her?”
“Hey, I was drinking with an artist friend when Lauren was shot. Ask that other guy, Larson. He knows.”
“You left the bar around midnight. What did you do then?”
“Came back here, went to bed.”
“You didn’t stop by the boathouse?”
“Are you kidding? Lauren was in a mood. I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”
“What happened in your relationship?”
Huff put his half-finished croissant sandwich back in his deli box and set the box on the grass. “Look, I know my way around women, okay? Lauren was like no woman I’d ever come across.”
“How so?”
“She was one thing at first, then she turned into something else. You know The Wizard of Oz? She started out all Good Witch of the North, but ended up Queen of the Flying Monkeys.”
“Tell me about it.”
Huff actually looked pained as he recalled. “At first, it was pretty normal, then things began to get too weird. She’d, like, want to tie me up, which I would have been okay with except I got really uncool vibes from her. Get this, man. A week ago she pulls out a gun, puts the barrel inside her, and tells me to pull the trigger.”
“By ‘inside her’ you mean…?”
“I’m not talking about her mouth, dude. But, look, it wasn’t just the strange sex stuff. She was always making promises she had no intention of keeping. She was going to make my name huge in the art world. She was going to introduce me to important gallery owners. She didn’t do any of that. And when I got pissed because of it, she threatened me. And not only that, man, she was really cruel to Ophelia sometimes.”
“Did she behave bizarrely to anyone else?”
“Naw, with everybody else she was all sugar and spice.”
“Did you tell any of this to Captain Larson when he interviewed you?”
Huff shook his head. “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”
“I believe you. But I also think you might have killed her.”
“No way. I told you, I was drinking with Gilroy. Besides, Ophelia’s grandmother confessed.”
“I don’t think Hattie’s confession is going to stand up, and I don’t think Lauren died when Hattie said she did. I think there was time for you to have come back and visited the boathouse and shot her.”
The kid looked scared now. “Jesus, I told you. I went straight to bed. Look, I can prove it. I keep a video diary. It’s up in my room. Every night when I go to bed, I record something. I’ll show you.”
Huff got up and led the way back to the big house and upstairs to his room, which was at the end of the south wing. He went to the desk, where a laptop sat open. He sat down at the desk and worked the touch pad.
“It’s got a built-in webcam,” he said.
In a moment he brought up a piece of video that carried a time-date stamp in the lower right-hand corner. The date was the Sunday that Lauren Cavanaugh died, and the time was 12:17 A.M.
Derek Huff stared out from the screen of the laptop. For a long time he said nothing, just sat looking hollow-eyed and drunk. When he finally spoke, it was three sentences full of despair.
“Tomorrow I tell Lauren to go to hell. I miss the ocean. And I hate the fucking smell of pine trees.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Although Derek Huff’s video diary proved absolutely nothing, the feel Cork got from the kid-that he didn’t kill Lauren Cavanaugh-was genuine. He was also thinking about the squealing tires Brian Kretsch had reported on North Point Road well before Huff returned to the center. He didn’t write the kid off completely, but when he left Huff’s room, he turned his thinking to other possibilities.
He drove to his house on Gooseberry Lane, had some lunch, and afterward took Trixie for a midday walk. While he walked, he thought.
If not Ophelia, if not Hattie, if not Huff, then who?
He didn’t get much further before a black Tahoe pulled to the curb beside him, with a familiar Shinnob at the wheel. Tom Blessing leaned across the seat and hollered out the passenger window, “Hey, Cork! Somebody on the rez you need to talk to.”
“Mind if I bring my dog?”
“No problem. Hop in.”
Cork opened the passenger door, and Trixie, who hadn’t learned and probably never would learn to distrust strangers, eagerly leaped in ahead of him.
“I tried your home phone and Sam’s Place,” Blessing said, pulling away from the curb. “Didn’t have your cell number, so I finally decided to come into town and see if I could track you down.”
“What’s up?” Cork asked.
“You’ll see when we get to Allouette.”
Blessing headed out of Aurora, around the southern end of Iron Lake, and back up the eastern shoreline. He drove with the windows down, something Trixie thought was heaven. She sat on Cork’s lap with her head outside, blinking against the wind.
“Heard that with all the crap that’s happened in the Vermilion One Mine the government’s going to look elsewhere to store all their nuclear junk,” Blessing said. “True?”
“As far as I know, all they’ve done is pull the survey team back. They haven’t crossed the mine off their list yet.”
“But they’re thinking about it?”
“That’s my hope. A lot of bad publicity so far, and the worst is yet to come. But it’s the government, and you know how deep bureaucratic stupidity can run.”
“What do you mean the worst is yet to come? What’s worse than a bunch of bodies stuffed in a mine tunnel?”
What happened to those bodies before they got there was what Cork thought but didn’t say.
Instead he replied, “I’m just thinking there’s no chance they can spin any of this in a good way, Tom.”
“Are you kidding? They sold an entire nation of Christian folk on the idea of killing most of us Indians. If there’s a way to make radioactive drinking water sound like Kool-Aid, the federal government’ll find it.”
A few miles outside Allouette, Blessing got on his cell phone. “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “You still got him? Good.” He snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.
They entered Allouette, pulled onto Manomin Street, and swung into the parking lot of the community center.
“How long will this take, Tom? I’m wondering if I should leave Trixie in the truck.”
“Bring her in. Elgin’ll watch her.”
Inside the center, they walked down a long hallway, past the open doors to the gym, where Ani Sorenson was running some girls from the rez basketball team, the Iron Lake Loons, through drills. They passed the door to the administrative wing, where all the tribal offices were situated, and they took a right toward the room where Blessing did his work.
Tom Blessing had been a hard case. He’d been a leader in a gang of Ojibwe youths who’d called themselves the Red Boyz. As a result of a remarkable and deadly firefight on the rez, he’d experienced a radical transformation. Now he was deeply involved in the Wellbriety Movement, helping troubled Ojibwe kids find their way on a healing path using the teachings of elders and based on ancient wisdom and natural principles.
On his door hung a poster of a white buffalo. Inside his office, the walls were plastered with photographs of Blessing and some of the other former Red Boyz, along with a lot of kids doing a lot of things-learning to make birch bark canoes, harvesting wild rice, boiling down maple sap into syrup, playing softball, serving fry bread at a powwow, preparing for a sweat.
Elgin Manypenny, who’d also been one of the Red Boyz, sat on Blessing’s desk. In a chair shoved against one of the walls slumped a teenage kid. Cork knew him. Jesse St. Onge. His uncle Leroy stood next to him.
“Boozhoo, Elgin, Leroy,” Cork said and shook each man’s hand in turn. “Boozhoo, Jesse.”
“Anin,” the kid replied respectfully.