Iron Lake (30 page)

C
ORK MADE HIS WAY THROUGH THE SNOW
, up the long slope of the judge’s estate. The broken pane on the side door had been covered with a bit of plywood that Cork easily pried loose. He reached in, unlocked the door, stepped inside. The cans he’d knocked over the night Russell Blackwater died still lay strewn across the kitchen floor. The smell of rotting garbage had grown worse. Cork made his way back to the judge’s study, where all the evidence of what the shotgun had done to the judge’s head still remained splattered on the map behind the desk, brownish now, more like mud than rivers of red. Cork started with the desk. He checked the telephone, a complicated thing with lots of buttons. Beside two of the buttons numbers were listed, one of which belonged to GameTech. He checked the drawers but found nothing that seemed relevant. He went through the judge’s mahogany secretary and came up blank there, too. He removed the books from the shelves, as Schanno had done, and, probably like Schanno, found nothing.

Including the bathroom, there were seven rooms on the first floor. Cork went through them all. If the judge kept any GameTech-related documents at his home, they weren’t downstairs. Cork headed up to the second floor. As he reached the top of the landing, he heard the front door open and quietly close. A shadow passed through a bar of sunlight across the floor, but he couldn’t see the figure who’d cast it. Carefully, he descended the stairway. From the kitchen came the squeak of a hinge like that of a little mouse. Cork crossed the bare wood floor, hoping the complaint of an old board wouldn’t give him away. He hadn’t thought to bring his Winchester, so he picked up a black metal sculpture of a perched hawk and cradled the heavy piece in his hand as he edged toward the kitchen doorway.

Hannah Mueller screamed as she stepped from the kitchen and saw Cork with the heavy black hawk drawn back ready to strike.

“Christ, Hannah, I’m sorry.” Cork let his hand drop immediately.

“Sheriff O’Connor!” the woman said breathlessly. Her eyes were huge with fright.

“It’s all right, Hannah. I didn’t know it was you.”

Hannah Mueller was a woman about forty, small, heavy, with dull gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and bound with a rubber band. She had a plain face, and in her blue eyes was an innocence much younger than her forty years, for Hannah was mildly retarded. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt and sneakers. She carried a mop and a bucket.

“I came to clean,” she said, as if she needed to defend her presence. “Mr. Parrant called me and said it was okay for me to clean. I didn’t clean my regular days.”

“That’s fine, Hannah,” Cork assured her. “That’s just fine.”

Hannah looked at him, her gaze full of question.

“I’m investigating, Hannah.”

“Oh,” Hannah said, as if that explained it just fine. She looked past Cork toward the hallway that led to the judge’s study. “I heard it’s bad.”

“It’s not pleasant,” Cork acknowledged. “Hannah, what are your regular days?”

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes I clean on Sunday if the judge has a party or something. He leaves me a note.”

“He doesn’t speak with you?”

“I don’t ever see him. He’s always gone.”

Cork looked at his watch. “You always come at nine?”

“Nine.” Hannah nodded. “Always at nine.”

“And the judge is always gone.”

“Always gone.” Hannah nodded.

“What if you needed to talk to him? Could you call him?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the numbers.”

“What numbers?”

Hannah reached into her back pocket and drew out an old leather wallet with a nicely tooled design. She extracted a worn piece of paper and handed it to Cork. Two telephone numbers were written on the paper. Beside one Hannah had noted “Monday & Friday.” Beside the other she’d written, “Wensday.” The “Wensday” number was preceded by the digit 1. Long distance, same area code as Aurora.

“Wait just a minute, Hannah.” Cork put the hawk back on its stand, stepped to the phone near the stairs, and dialed the Monday/Friday number.

“Good morning. Great North. How may I direct your call?”

Cork smiled. “Joyce. Cork O’Connor.”

“Yes, Cork. Hi.”

“Could I ask you a question?”

“You can. Doesn’t mean I can answer it.”

“Did the judge work at Great North on Wednesdays?”

“No. For the last year or so Wednesday has been his day off.”

“Thanks, Joyce. You’re wonderful.”

“Tell Albert that.”

Cork hung up. He tried the Wednesday number. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He called Ed Larson and asked for one last favor. Could he track down a long distance number?

“I have to wait for someone to call me back,” he explained to Hannah, who’d stood patiently, mop and bucket in hand, while he called.

“Sure, okay,” she shrugged. She looked again, not with great enthusiasm, toward the back hallway.

“You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” Cork said.

“It’s Christmas,” she explained. “The money.”

“Then let me do it,” Cork offered.

“No.” She shook her head vigorously, her dull ponytail swishing across her blue collar. “It wouldn’t be right. Mr. Parrant said he’d pay me.”

“Mr. Parrant doesn’t have to know.”

“It wouldn’t be right,” she insisted. She looked at Cork gratefully. “But it’s sure nice of you to offer, Sheriff.”

“At least let me help.”

“No. It’s my job.”

The phone rang. Cork picked it up. He listened. “Just a minute. Let me write this down.” There was a notepad by the phone but nothing to write with. Cork checked his pockets for a pen, then glanced at Hannah, who’d put down her bucket and was holding out to him a stubby pencil that looked as if the point had been sharpened with a knife. Cork smiled gratefully. He wrote down the address, thanked Ed, and hung up.

“Thanks, Hannah.”

“You’re welcome.” She picked up her bucket, took a deep breath, and started toward the back room.

It seemed to Cork the good people were always cleaning up the messes.

Not surprisingly, the address of the Wednesday number was in Duluth. It fit. As Cork made the two-hour drive to the port city on Lake Superior, he thought about the judge making the same trip once a week, retrieving GameTech mail from the post office box, and sitting in an anonymous office somewhere taking care of business. Cork wasn’t exactly sure what the business was, but the more he’d learned the more certain he was that it was a less than honorable enterprise.

He found the address near the harbor bridge. A small office building—square, red brick—that had probably once been busy when the ore ships ran regularly, but it looked as if it was mostly abandoned now. A big sign in one of the first-floor windows advertised office space for rent. Parked in front was a white van that had “Mosely Remodeling” printed on the sides. The directory just inside the front door had as many gaps as a Minnesota street had potholes. GameTech didn’t appear at all.

From somewhere above came the whine of a power saw. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped, but was repeated as Cork started up the stairway. The stairs were gritty from the sand and dirt tracked in on the bottom of snowy shoes and boots. Cork climbed to the second floor and walked down the hallway, which was uncarpeted brown tile long in need of a good waxing. Only a few of the office doors carried logos on their translucent glass, and fewer still seemed currently occupied. Cork heard a phone ring in an office somewhere ahead and the laughter of a woman involved in one side of the conversation that followed.

The address Ed Larson had given him was Suite 214. There was nothing on the door to indicate that it was the office of GameTech. The light was off inside, the door locked.

From above him the sudden cry of the saw came again. It drowned the sound of the woman on the phone for a couple of seconds, then stopped. Something—a severed board?—clunked onto the floor almost directly over Cork’s head. A few moments later the pounding of a hammer began.

Cork considered the locked door. The phone rang again down the hallway. The woman’s voice and laughter followed. She sounded as if she enjoyed her job. The hammering stopped. The saw took up its drowning whine.

Cork went back outside to his Bronco parked behind the van on the street, hauled out the ice spud, returned to Suite 214, and the next time the saw blade howled, punched out a chunk of glass from a corner of the window in the door. He reached inside and undid the lock.

The room was dark and he opened the blinds. The office had a nice view of the northeast. Beyond the bridge and the harbor opening, the ice of Lake Superior stretched away under the morning sun like the great salt flats of Utah. Cork took a good look at the office. It was small, one room, not a suite at all. The walls were bare. The carpet was beige, and either new or so little used as to still look new. There was a desk near the windows, an L-shaped affair with a computer and printer on the long part of the L. A white three-drawer filing cabinet sat in one corner, exactly the same kind of cabinet that had been in Schanno’s office.

Cork checked the filing cabinet. The top drawer was marked “GameTech” and held a number of hanging files: Budget, Finance, Lease Agreements, Personnel, Taxes. He lifted Personnel. Inside he found folders labeled with many familiar names and containing the originals of the documents that had appeared among the negatives he’d found at Lytton’s. Next he pulled Lease Agreements. The file contained contracts signed by Russell Blackwater for the lease on a monthly basis of gaming equipment. He set the file on the desk beside the other.

The middle drawer was labeled “Vendors,” and each hanging file was designated with the name of a company. Cork pulled the file for a company called Polaris Gaming and found invoices for the purchase of a variety of gaming equipment. He began checking the invoices against the prices on the lease agreements signed by Blackwater. After Polaris Gaming, he checked the files of two other vendors.

The last drawer, unmarked, held a single file: Partnership Agreement. The document had been prepared by the judge, and although it was long and involved, as Cork scanned it, he understood exactly what it was about.

As he stood hunched over the partnership document, the saw cut out above him, and in the abrupt stillness that followed, Cork heard a slight rustle at his back. He turned and found himself confronting the cold determination in Hell Hanover’s pale blue eyes.

Flanking Hanover on either side were Al Lamarck and Bo Peterson, two men Cork recognized from the pictures of the ranks of the Minnesota Civilian Brigade.

“I don’t suppose you’re here to invite me to go Christmas caroling,” Cork said.

Hanover carefully drew off his black stocking cap. In the light from the window, his bald head shone like an ivory doorknob. The left corner of his mouth twitched as if a smile had been stillborn.

“When you first started sticking your nose into all this, O’Connor,” Hanover said, “I told the men to discourage you. It didn’t work.”

Cork glanced at Lamarck and Peterson. They’d unzipped their leather coats. Both wore .45s, military issue, holstered on their hips. Cork wondered if either of them had been present at Sam’s Place the night he’d been jumped.

Hanover limped forward on his artificial leg and studied the documents Cork had spread out on the desk. “When you persisted,” he went on, “I decided to let you go ahead, figuring that at worst you’d hit the same dead ends we had. On the other hand, it was possible you just might lead us to where we all wanted to be.”