Boundary Waters (28 page)

Dear God,
Jo found herself praying,
please don’t let it be Cork.

“You okay?” Schanno asked.

“No.”

“Yeah.” He nodded sympathetically.

“Wally—” She wanted to know, but couldn’t bring herself to ask.

As if he’d read her mind, he said, “It wasn’t an accident, Jo.” He studied the sky with undue interest and the muscles at the back of his long jaw twitched. “An ax blow. To the neck.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus.”

Lights around the heliport came on. The double doors of the hospital opened and two orderlies in parkas appeared, pushing a gurney. They moved into the glare of the lights, men Jo didn’t know, looking tired, as if they’d been on duty all night. There was no doctor with them. What the helicopter was bringing was far beyond healing.

“Here it comes.” Schanno motioned toward the north.

Jo heard it, too. Then she saw it, coming in low over the trees, its lights tracking across the sky like shooting stars. Harris and Jackson got out of their car and waited. Harris cast a glance in Jo’s direction. The helicopter came down in a swirl of blowing snow. Jo could see the body bag on a sled secured to one of the runners. A couple of men jumped from the helicopter. They wore jackets that had
TAMARACK SEARCH AND RESCUE
printed across the back.

“Wait here,” Wally Schanno said.

Jo nodded, barely able to breathe and unable to talk at all. Schanno went to the helicopter, joined by Harris and Jackson along the way. They gathered around the sled. Jo saw them zip open the body bag and confer. Schanno turned, remained hunched under the blades of the chopper that hadn’t stopped spinning, and started back toward Jo. She turned away. She didn’t want to try to read his face.

Schanno put his hand lightly on her shoulder. “It’s not Cork.”

Jo almost collapsed. Tears of relief blinded her momentarily. She put her hands over her eyes a minute, then she faced the sheriff. “Who is it?”

“The man named Grimes.”

The orderlies wheeled the gurney with the body of Grimes across the parking lot and into the hospital. Harris and Jackson approached Jo and Schanno.

“I want a meeting with Benedetti,” Harris said. “And I want it now.”

“You don’t think Vincent Benedetti is responsible for this?” Jo asked.

“What I think is that there are six more people out there and I’m scrambling for answers before any of them show up dead. Get Benedetti. We’ll be at the Quetico.”

38

T
HE WORLD FELT NEW TO CORK
. Like Easter morning. Like hope had been born again.

The sun was up, bright as a vision of God. The lake was blue as heaven. Snow lay thick on the evergreens and made them white as angels’ wings.

The patches on the canoes were holding.

Cork and the others had hit the lake at first light—Raye in the bow of Cork’s canoe, Sloane, Stormy, and Louis in the other. They spoke little, putting all their effort into their strokes, into making distance. They’d set Louis, whose eyes were young and hawk sharp, to the duty of watching for any sign of Shiloh or the man who pursued her. The morning was so clear that had it not been for all the islands that obscured the horizon, Louis could have seen for miles.

The contrast struck Cork powerfully. In the midst of a beauty so pervasive and dramatic it made his soul quiver, they were racing against a faceless, depthless evil. If Shiloh’s life hadn’t been the stake, he would have allowed himself to exalt in the thrill of the chase. It was a day for doing battle, and he couldn’t help but feel that God and Kitchimanidoo, the Great Spirit, were on the lake with them. When he heard the blaring of a line of Canada geese coming over the treetops, it was as if Gabriel had sounded his horn. He believed—believed absolutely and for no other reason than the day was glorious and their luck was holding—that they were meant to beat the evil. It could easily have been a false euphoria, he admitted to himself, born of exhaustion and the strain of the last two days. But it felt like a gift, a sign, a revelation, and he bent his will to what seemed a greater will that guided them.

He knew the feeling was not just with him. The others were on fire, too. Their faces may have been hollow, sunken with fatigue, but in their eyes burned a light as illuminating as that morning sun. They’d reached deep inside themselves, deep into a place where warriors reached for extraordinary courage. Cork was glad—immensely proud—to be in the company of such men. In a grim way, he was pleased for Louis. The boy had seen terrible things, it was true. But he’d also been given a chance to experience this rare companionship, to feel this rare emotion that lifted them all up and carried them forward together.

They moved swiftly through the morning hours. The lake remained calm and the canoes flew across the water like swallows through air. He’d worried about Arkansas Willie at first, but the illness of the previous night seemed to have passed and Willie made no complaint.

Midmorning, as they approached the Deertail River, Louis cried out, “Over there!”

He pointed toward a jut of land ahead of them and a little to the north dominated by a tall lightning-scarred pine tree. Cork ceased paddling, shielded his eyes against the glare, and squinted where Louis had indicated.

“What is it?” he asked, for he saw nothing.

“A camp,” Louis said. “A tent and a canoe.”

Once Louis had defined the images, Cork could see them, too. The tent was covered with snow and blended almost invisibly into the snow-covered evergreens behind it. The canoe was a long white finger pointing out from the whitened shore.

“Do you see anybody?” Cork asked.

Louis shook his head. “Looks deserted.”

“Let’s check it out,” Sloane said.

“Why don’t Willie and I go first. That way you can cover us with the rifle.”

Sloane chambered a round. “You’re covered.”

They moved in cautiously. As the bow nudged shore, Raye and Cork stepped out. Everything was lightly layered with snow, and the snow was crisscrossed with animal tracks, mostly those of birds and rabbits. Cork went to the tent and pulled back the flap. Two sleeping bags were laid out inside, both empty. He headed to the lightning-struck pine and studied the tracks around the shredded remains of a pack.

“Food,” he said over his shoulder to Raye. “Looks like bears got to it.”

But bear tracks were not the only tracks he saw there. He examined the rope that had at one time held the pack suspended from a high branch of the pine. The end had been cleanly cut with a knife.

“Was this bears, too?” Arkansas Willie asked behind him. He was staring down at a lump of snow sparkling at his feet.

Cork stepped up next to Raye, knelt, and brushed the snow away, revealing eyes as lifeless as agates. He carefully cleared the snow from the rest of the body. Over the dead man’s heart, his blue flannel shirt was hard and black with frozen blood.

“Not a bear,” Cork said grimly. “Unless someone taught it how to fire a gun.”

He moved to a second lumping of snow next to the circle of stones that formed a fire ring. The snowfall hadn’t covered the body entirely, and one arm lay exposed like a severed limb on a white sheet.

“Another one,” he said, wiping the snow from a face dull and white as lard.

“How long have they been dead?” Arkansas Willie asked.

“Hard to tell. A while.”

Cork waved the others to shore.

“Louis, you stay in the canoe,” he called.

Sloane entered the camp and stood beside Cork.

“Two bodies,” Cork told him. “Caucasian males. Multiple gunshot wounds to the chest on both. Dead . . . a while.”

“Today, you think?”

Cork shook his head. “Snow’s completely covered them. Maybe yesterday.”

“Think they have anything to do with Shiloh?”

“All the death we’ve seen up here has to do with Shiloh. Let me show you something else.” He led Sloane to the shredded pack. “She’s been here. Look, same small boot tracks as at the cabin.”

The tracks led from the shore to the pack, where they were mixed with the tracks of the bear. Boot tracks also led back to the shore, in the same unerring line that had been followed in.

“Food,” Cork said. “She was after food. Cut down the pack from the tree and either took what she wanted and left the rest or she was surprised by the bear and had to leave it.”

Sloane looked at the evidence. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, knelt, and picked up some snow. The warmth of his light brown palm turned the snow quickly to water that trickled through his fingers.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“The sun’s had time to melt the edges of the prints, so I’d say a few hours.”

“Shit!” Arkansas Willie doubled over a moment. “Good Lord, here it comes again.” He hurried to the canoe, grabbed his pack, and raced to the cover of the trees.

After Willie had gone, Stormy called quietly, “Cork.” He stood near the shoreline, beckoning.

When Cork reached him, he saw what Stormy saw. At the edge of the water, near Shiloh’s tracks, were the tracks of the other.

“He’s been here, too,” Cork said.

“Prints are clear,” Stormy pointed out. “Edges clean. The sun hasn’t had time to melt them. He was here after her. And not that long ago.”

Sloane said, “We should move out quickly.”

“What about taking their canoe?” Louis suggested.

Cork stepped to the dead men’s canoe. “Good idea, Louis, but we can forget it. He took care of this one, too.”

Arkansas Willie emerged from the woods looking ashamed. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Cork assured him. “Up here, it happens. But if you can, hang on a bit. I think we’re almost there.” He nodded toward the Deertail, a wide drift of silver in the morning sunlight that led into the pines a hundred yards down the shoreline. “He thinks he took care of us. He thinks he’s home free. But we’re about to nail that son of a bitch, Willie. We’re about to nail him good.”

39

S
HE ATE THE DEAD MEN’S FOOD
.

Long before she reached the place where she knew the bodies lay, she’d begun to think about the bag that hung from the tree branch. She’d never been so hungry. Her stomach curled in on itself as if desperately searching the emptiness there. She felt weak as well. The hunger she could live with, but the weakness scared her. It would slow her down, and she had to keep moving. She didn’t know how he’d do it, but she knew the man who called himself Charon would find a way to follow her.

So she steeled herself. And when the jut of land with its lightning-struck pine—just a stone’s throw from the Deertail River—came into view, she made for it with all the strength she could muster.

The sun hadn’t yet risen above the trees and the camp lay in the cold blue shadow of the forest. Fate had been kind, in a way. The snowfall had covered the bodies. Almost. She tried not to look where the dead men lay, graveless, sheeted in a cloth the sun would soon strip away, but her guilt betrayed her. She stopped in horror when she saw that some quirk of nature had kept one man’s outstretched arm bare. It was almost as if he were reaching out to her from a place that should have been hers. She fought back tears, fought back the weakness of her legs, and forced herself toward the pine with its long lightning scar and its hanging bag. She cut the rope wrapped around the tree trunk and the bag dropped heavily. She was on it like the creature she was, a starved animal. She found plastic bags containing freeze-dried stew, powdered eggs, jerky, pancake mix, and dried fruit. Her mouth watered so fast her jaws ached. She nearly screamed with delight when she pulled out a plastic jar of peanut butter and a big Baggie full of white bread.

She had the peanut butter and the bread in her hand when the black bear entered the camp. The wet snuffle as the animal investigated the tent made her turn suddenly and startle the bear. The animal rose up on its hind legs, let out a menacing
woof
that shook the silence of the camp, and clawed the air in her direction. She clutched the bread and the peanut butter as she backed away. The bear dropped to all fours, shuffled to the bag, and began to rummage. Shiloh bolted for her canoe and hit it on the run. The little craft shot into the lake. She nearly tipped it, but she never let go of the food. She scrambled to the stern, dropped the food into the hull, grabbed the paddle, and dug at the water hard, not daring to look back until she was fifty yards from shore. When she did look back, she saw the bear seated on its haunches, breakfasting noisily on the rest of the dead men’s food.

The bread and peanut butter seemed like a feast. She was sure she’d never tasted anything so good. Afterward, as the current of the Deertail swept her away from the big lake, she sat back a while and let the river carry her. The sun was high now, and warm, and she felt as if she’d come out of a long, dark tunnel into the light. She finally let herself consider her dream the night before. Stiff, hugging herself for warmth, drifting in and out of sleep, she’d been visited again by the Dark Angel.

This time she’d been in a shower, a small stall full of steam with hot water flowing over her, cleansing her. She felt safe. She’d let her fear wash away, let herself relax. Then, turning, she’d seen the Dark Angel, its faceless form coming at her through the steam. She pressed herself back against the wet tiles; in the small stall, there was nowhere to escape. She awakened with a scream trying to tear itself from her throat.

The Dark Angel had been a part of her dreaming all her life. Dr. Sutpen—Patricia—had been very interested in this faceless figure of terror. In the course of the therapy, she’d finally guided Shiloh back to the night when the Dark Angel first entered her life. That had been the night Marais Grand was murdered.

Shiloh had been awakened from her sleep. Her room was in the center of night, a place of dim shapes and deep shadow. The night-light in the hallway misted the door and the carpet with a dull yellow luminescence that sifted toward her bed like the creep of a moonlit fog. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, enough to see that the man crouched by her doorway was really only the rocking chair. She lay back down, let her eyelids start to close. Then she heard it again, the sound that had awakened her. An angry voice somewhere downstairs. It frightened her. It was not her mother’s voice. It was no voice she knew. Her mother’s voice was there, low and crooning, the way she sounded when Shiloh was scared and her mother held her and whispered everything was all right. But the angry voice didn’t sound all right.