Glass Tiger (12 page)

So Corwin’s wife, Terry, had been his girlfriend when he and Wallberg were playing hockey together. Wallberg knew the wife, years later had an affair with the daughter. Creepy, but that’s all: Corwin never saw Wallberg again after he went to Vietnam.

Hide in plain sight. Thorne felt a tingle. He wouldn’t wait for Doyle to come through. He’d tell Hatfield he was going into the field again, and fly out the next day.

Janet Kestrel waved her thanks to the grizzled rancher who had given her the ten-mile lift on California 120 from Groveland to the River Store at Casa Loma. The River Store was a brown rustic wooden one-story building with a steepled shingled roof covering the store, a deli, and the AQUA River Trips office and store room in back.

Above the roofed and railed porch was a wooden coffee cup and saucer painted light blue, and a big blue sign with ESPRESSO DELI – River Store in blue and gold lettering. An American flag was angled out from one of the porch’s support pillars. The only vehicle in the
parking area was a three-year-old Suzuki SUV that belonged to the store’s proprietor, Sam Arness.

‘Hey, Janet.’ Arness was a bulky man with a gray handlebar mustache, long hair in a ponytail, jeans and boots and a faded mackinaw. ‘Jessie’s at the Pine Mountain Lake Campgrounds, Flo’s on her way in. She’ll give you a lift to the Put-In Spot.’

She missed her 4-Runner’s four-wheel drive that could take her down five miles of incredible dirt track to the Tuolemne River thousands of feet below. Riding sedately down with Flo just wasn’t the same.

‘So I’ve got time for a cup of coffee.’

‘And a Danish,’ grinned Arness.

Janet had missed last year’s stint as a white-water guide on the Tuolemne, and she was glad to be back. She loved going down the narrow, fast, twisting river in a rubber raft. It was a level four ride, which took great skill to keep from coming to grief on submerged rocks. But she would abandon the river for good if she heard from Charlie Quickfox at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino.

What they would be talking about skirted the illegal, and since Hatfield could never quite escape the paranoid suspicion that the Justice Department’s internal security bugged their own agents’ offices, he arranged to meet Ray Franklin at the Lincoln Memorial. Beltliners wouldn’t be found dead there unless they were squiring around out-of-town visitors. It was crowded with shrieking, running school kids from shit-kicker towns like East Jesus, Nebraska, and Dismal Seepage, Arkansas. Small chance of anyone seeing or overhearing them anywhere near there.

They stood side-by-side overlooking the long skinny Reflecting Pool that fronted the Memorial: two random strangers contemplating the placid water. Roy Franklin
was a field man, plain and simple, six-foot, hard-bitten, in his element behind the sights in a hostage situation, almost ill-at-ease in a suit and tie. Hatfield spoke without looking at him.

‘Your buddy Thorne is flying to Minneapolis tomorrow, then driving north to Portage where Corwin had his cabin.’

Ray shook out a Marlboro, lit it, sucked smoke greedily into his lungs. He didn’t appreciate Hatfield’s ironic comment about buddies. Without ever having met him, he hated Thorne’s guts. The bastard had made him and Walt Greene look bad by finding the way Corwin had eluded them in the Delta and in King’s Canyon. By making them look bad, he had made their whole Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team look bad.

‘That asshole. He’s not going to find anything there. In November we were all over that place like flies on shit. Even checked for hollowed-out logs and loose stones in the fireplace. Talked to that hick doctor with his one-man clinic who patched Corwin up, talked to the bank manager, the Catholic priest, the protestant minister… Nobody knew anything, except the bank manager. He said that when Corwin left, the doctor bought the cabin to fix up and rent out this spring. End of story.’

‘Even so, go to Minneapolis and put a GPS transmitter on the car the AIC Minneapolis will give Thorne to drive.’

‘Why don’t I try to get audio on his interviews as well?’

‘We don’t want to alert him to the surveillance, Ray. I just want to know where he goes. Anyway, what’s he going to learn? You’ve already talked to the same people he’ll see.’

Corwin never tried to anticipate his shot, it had to just sort of… happen. Through the scope he could see, a
thousand yards away, the white cambium where his round had hit the oak tree. If it had been a man, it would have been dead.

He maneuvered himself to his feet, worked his left leg for the three-mile walk back to the cabin. Tonight he would e-mail Whitby Hernild that he would be leaving. Driving the seven miles into town was a needless risk. Around here, people knew him.

Within ten days, Gustave Wallberg would be standing at a podium on a platform in a mountain meadow, his minions about him, beginning his speech. What odds that he would finish it?

The clerk gave Thorne a nine-by-twelve envelope when he stopped at the Mayflower’s massive front desk to say he’d be away for a few days. He stuck it into a topcoat pocket so the watchers outside wouldn’t see it, opened it in the taxi on the way across the Potomac to Reagan National. From Doyle, obviously.

The Delta crime scene data. The .357 Magnum had been purchased by Damon Mather in a St. Paul gunstore in mid-March of the previous year, probably for self-defense when Corwin turned up alive. Which greatly increased the odds that Corwin had been right, Mather had shot him. So why hadn’t Damon shot when Corwin stormed the houseboat? The only fingerprints on the weapon were Corwin’s. The ultimate irony: Mather and Nisa had been murdered with their own firearm. How had Corwin gotten it away from them?

Thorne put the report away. From the doctor at Portage, he hoped to learn how debilitating Corwin’s injuries had been. In ’Nam Corwin had been a thousand-yard assassin. Would those injuries prevent him from going for the sniper’s shot against Wallberg?

Since Hatfield couldn’t resist peering over his shoulder, Brendan Thorne didn’t check the vehicle awaiting him at the Minneapolis airport – a Crown Vic, of course – for the GPS transmitter he knew would be hidden on the car’s underbody. Without visual surveillance the GPS tracker was useless anyway. He would just be going exactly where they expected him to go. He just hoped to learn things they didn’t expect him to learn. Things they hadn’t learned in their own interviews.

On the drive north, Minnesota 169 reminded him of the Alcan Highway with its flanking muskegs on the way to Fairbanks. A flat landscape broken by dark green evergreens growing thicker with every passing mile. To his right lay the vast expanse of Lake Mille Lacs. It was a clear day: blue water and bright sun, fishermen in motor-boats trolling for walleyes, or plug-casting along the lake’s weedy edges for northern pike and pickerel.

During the winter, the frozen lake would be dotted with ice-fishermen’s shacks on runners, smoke coming from their stovepipes. Kids, as he and his buddies had done in Alaska, would be making ice rinks by shovelling away the snow, piling up backpacks at either end to make impromptu goals for afterschool hockey games.

Portage. Three bars. Two churches. Cafe, Italian restaurant, pizza joint, shops, supermarket, drug store, hardware store, bank, three-story granite City Hall and
sheriff’s office on the town square. Wilmot’s General Store with handmade crepe-paper Easter cutouts fading in the windows. The Chateau Theater with FOR RENT FOR PARTIES OR MEETINGS on the marquee in black capital letters that once had spelled out current movie titles.

Thorne drove through on Main Street to the Bide-A-Wee, one of the town’s two motels, asked for the furthest corner room from habit, said he’d be one night, maybe two. The wide-hipped woman checking him in had faded blue eyes and a stingy chin and the midwest twang most Minnesotans didn’t even know they had.

‘You’ve got your pick right now, but there’s good walleye fishing all summer long, so from Memorial Day on we’ll be full as a tick right on through Labor Day. During deer season, full up on weekends. The bucks run big up in these parts.’

‘I’ll remember,’ promised Thorne. ‘Where’s good to eat?’

‘Breakfast, the Good Eats Cafe. Alfred’s, that’s a nice steakhouse a couple of miles out of town near the airport. And there’s the Pizza Palace and Dominic’s Italian.’

He dumped his overnighter on the bed and walked into town. The local branch office of Marquette Bank had the ground floor of a two-story red brick building on Oak and Main.

Arlie Carlson, the bank manager, was in his forties, a stocky man with graying blond air. False front teeth and faint scars beside his shrewd blue eyes suggested he had played hockey in the days before protective masks. Thorne flashed his temporary FBI credentials, and was led into an inner office. Carlson closed the door. They could see the tellers and customers through the interior window. Carlson’s high tenor voice didn’t go with his build or his hockey scars.

‘Special agents were up here from Minneapolis last November, asking some pretty pointed questions about Halden Corwin. Never did say what it was all about…’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t involved in the original investigation.’

Carlson’s blue eyes said he didn’t believe a word of it. Thorne took out a notebook and consulted a page that from across the desk Carlson couldn’t see was blank.

‘I understand that Corwin sold his cabin before he left.’

‘To his best friend, Whitby Hernild, the local doctor in these parts. I guess you can demand to know the selling price and I guess I’d have to tell you, but…’ His eyes hardened. ‘It’s confidential bank information and we always protect our customers.’

Thorne winked. ‘Need-to-know – just like the Bureau. But can you confirm that Corwin left town right after the sale?’

‘Sure can. Next day.’

Thorne made a check-mark on his blank notebook page.

‘Is there anything else that you might have learned since we were here in November?’

Carlson started to shake his head, then frowned. ‘Wait a minute. When we sent out the tax documents in mid-February, we found that Doc Hernild had never transferred title.’

‘Doesn’t sound too important.’ Thorne stood up. Carlson was on his feet, hand out, affable now that Thorne was leaving.

The April afternoon sun was hot; on impulse, Thorne turned in at Dutch’s Tavern. He needed to think about what Carlson had let drop at the very end of the interview. Only two drinkers at the bar, heavy, hard farmers in bib overalls, holding glasses of draft Hamms in calloused
hands. They turned in unison when Thorne entered, then turned back to their conversation.

He took a stool near a fishbowl full of hard-boiled eggs with a hand-lettered sign, ‘Toofer a buck.’ The thick-bodied bartender was sprinkling salt in draft beer glasses, sloshing them in hot soapy water, then setting them upside down on a rubber mat to drain. He had bright blue eyes and a heavy jaw; his thinning blond hair was going silver and was parted down the very center of his square Teutonic head. Obviously Dutch himself. He came down toward Thorne automatically drying his hands on a wet-grayed apron.

‘What’ll it be there, mister?’

‘Draft beer. And…’ He picked a hard-boiled egg out of the bowl, tapped it on the stick hard enough to crack the shell.

‘You betcha.’

Hernild had bought the cabin off Corwin and Corwin had left town the next day. Okay, getting shot had ended his life as a recluse in the big woods, he needed traveling money, so the quick sale to his best friend made sense. But why had Hernild never registered the transfer of title? He was paying property taxes on a cabin that on the books still belonged to Corwin.

Down the bar, Dutch had drawn the beer, was slushing away the head with a wooden tongue-depressor, then topping it again from the spigot. He returned to set down the wet-beaded glass. Thorne raised it in salute.

‘You cut the clouds off ’em, my friend.’

‘Two other bars here in town, local folks wouldn’t let me get away with a short fill.’ He leaned heavy forearms on the mahogany. ‘Just passing through?’

‘Looking for a cabin I could maybe rent for the summer.’ Thorne took a bite of egg, sipped beer. ‘The bank said the local doctor had one for rent.’

‘Doc Hernild. But I heard he rented it out a month back.’

A month. March. Just about the time Corwin had disappeared after ditching Franklin and Greene in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. Thorne feigned disappointment, then brightened his face.