Mercy Falls (17 page)

“Couple of things about that bother me. Why did Eddie hang around Mercy Falls after she left? And why didn’t he put up a fight?” He gave a single shake of his head. “I’m laying odds it was someone who surprised him, someone he didn’t expect, or at least didn’t expect to have a knife.”

“So you’re back to Lizzie.”

“Not necessarily. I think there was someone else out there, someone with a colder heart than Lizzie has. I just don’t know who or why yet.”

Dina checked her watch just as the drone of an engine came out of the sky to the southeast. “Right on time.”

A plane appeared above the treetops, circled, and made its approach from the north. It touched down, and as it rolled off the runway onto an apron near Cork and Dina, the prop ceased to spin and the engine fell silent. Tony Salguero stepped out. “Sheriff O’Connor. Dina. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. You have the freight?” he asked.

“Here.” Cork handed over the sealed envelope. He looked at the plane while Salguero signed the receipt. “The Jacobys own a fleet?”

“The jet is Lou’s,” Salguero said. “This baby is all mine. I built her myself.”

“How’s Lou doing?” Dina asked.

Salguero inspected the envelope. “We buried his favorite child this morning, but you know Lou. A mule could kick him and he wouldn’t grunt. He simply takes it out on everyone around him.” Tony looked toward the Cozy Caribou Café. “I need something to eat before I head back. How is the food here?”

“Reasonably priced and mostly deep-fried,” Cork said.

“Perfect.” Salguero began long strides in that direction.

They sat on the deck in the cool air of early October, the only ones outside. The waitress was reluctant to seat them there, but Salguero insisted.

“I have been cooped up for hours,” he explained with a stunning smile and Spanish accent.

Cork never drank on duty, but he decided that, having handed off the evidence envelope, he was done for the day. He ordered a beer. So did Dina.

“A hamburger, bloody,” Salguero told the waitress.

“We don’t serve them rare anymore. Health reasons.”

Tony closed the menu and held it out. “I will sign an agreement. If I get poisoned, it’s my own fault.” The waitress didn’t take the menu or put anything down on her pad. Salguero finally tossed his hands up. “All right, cook it any way you please, just make sure the beer is cold.”

“Beer?” Cork said. He looked toward the plane Salguero had to fly back to Chicago. “Should you be drinking?”

“I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles, Sheriff, without a single incident. But tell you what. If I crash I will make certain it is into an empty field.” He smiled pleasantly.

“Have you flown long?”

“My father had his own planes. He flew himself everywhere, to the pampas, the rain forest, wherever he had investments. From the time I was a young boy, I dreamed of flying.”

“The pampas?”

“I am from Argentina. Buenos Aires.”

Cork said, “How long have you worked for the Jacobys?”

“Five years. But I’ve known them most of my life. My father and Lou Jacoby are old friends.”

“So you know them well?”

Salguero grinned, showing beautiful white teeth. “What do you want to know?”

“Everybody keeps referring to Eddie as Lou’s favorite child. Near as I can figure, he was mostly a son of a bitch.”

“No, Sheriff. He was a bastard. Born out of wedlock. That is no secret. But I also think he was born out of love. Eddie’s mother was the true treasure of Lou’s life, and I think that when he looked at their son, what he really saw was Eddie’s mother. Would you not agree?” he said to Dina.

She shrugged. “That’s one explanation. I’m more inclined toward the sick-puppy theory myself.”

“What’s that?” Cork said.

“Lou’s other children have done just fine in their lives, become responsible adults. If Lou died tomorrow, they’d probably grieve but they’d be fine. Eddie was like a sick puppy, always needing Lou. But I think in his way Lou needed Eddie just as bad. Maybe, in fact, that’s why Eddie never really grew up, never learned how to be a responsible man. Lou never gave him the chance to be one.”

The waitress delivered the beers.

“I think I will have that burger to go,” Tony said. “And do you have a men’s room?”

“Inside.”

Salguero followed her in.

Dina sipped her beer. “This is good.”

“Leinenkugel’s. Local favorite.” He took a swallow from his bottle and looked where Salguero had gone. “So. Argentina. A story there?”

“Tony’s family had money,” Dina replied. “When the Argentine economy collapsed, they lost it all. Pretty simple.”

Salguero returned just as the burger was delivered in a paper sack, along with a tab for the food and the beers. He threw money on the table.

“Your beer is on Lou,” he said. Then to the waitress: “Sorry if I gave you a hard time, miss. I have a long trip still ahead of me.”

She smiled into his handsome face. “You were no problem at all.”

He picked up the evidence envelope and the burger sack and started toward his plane.

“Need to gas up?” Cork asked.

“There is an airport in Wisconsin midway that I use for that purpose.” He opened the plane door, tossed the envelope and the sack inside, then looked back at Cork. “I don’t know what it is that I’m taking back, but I hope it helps to find the person who killed Eddie.”

“I’m sure it will.”

Cork stepped away as the engine kicked over and the prop began to spin. Salguero swung the plane around and took off into the wind. He circled back, tilting his wings in salute as he flew over.

Cork said, “Lost a fortune and now he flies for the Jacobys. He seems to take it well.”

“Doesn’t he,” Dina said, watching as the plane disappeared into the southeast.

H
E DROPPED DINA at her car in the Sheriff’s Department lot, then went home.

He couldn’t remember the last time the house had been so empty. The air felt close, smelled stale, and he realized that he’d left without opening the curtains or lifting the windows. He spent a few minutes going through the rooms doing just that. On the desk in Jo’s office, he found notes she’d scribbled to herself as she’d scrambled to rearrange her schedule. He sat in her chair and felt the slight indentation that over time she’d left in the cushion, and he thought how small her hips were and how good they felt pressed against him in bed. On the floor in Stevie’s room lay a sheet of paper, crayons, and a pair of scissors. Stevie had drawn a crude face on the paper and colored it green. For Halloween, he wanted to be the Hulk and he’d been trying to make a mask, but his work had been interrupted. In the living room, lying open on an end table next to the sofa, was a book Jenny had been reading,
The Beet Queen
, her place marked with a tarot card that held the image of a skeleton. In the kitchen, as he passed Annie’s softball glove hanging on a hook by the back door, he leaned to it and breathed in the smell of oiled leather. His family had been gone less than a day, but they’d left behind silence and a deep, painful loneliness that Cork was glad he would not have to endure for long. Every man’s life ought to be about something, he believed, and he was comfortable with the knowledge that his was about family.

But so was Lou Jacoby’s, apparently, a man Cork didn’t admire in the least and with whom he felt he had little in common.

He didn’t know what to do with that, so he let it go. He was exhausted, hungry, and couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Carl Berger’s right arm hung up on barbed wire. He went upstairs to shower, hoping it might refresh him a little. He thought that afterward he would go to the Broiler for dinner.

Half an hour later, as he was coming downstairs, the doorbell rang. When he opened the door, he found Dina Willner standing on his front porch, a grocery bag in one hand and a twelve-pack of Leinenkugel’s in the other.

“I figured after the kind of day you’ve had, you might need a little company,” she said. “So I brought dinner. Hope you like New York strip.”

Cork’s surprise probably showed on his face. “I don’t know, Dina.”

“Look, you just relax.” She squeezed past him into the house. “I’ll do the cooking. Just show me to the kitchen.”

She twisted the caps off two beers, handed a bottle to Cork, and drank the other as she worked. She started charcoal going in the backyard grill and wrapped garlic bread in foil so she could heat it over the coals while she grilled the steaks. Then she began to prepare a salad of assorted greens, red onion, and avocado. She talked the whole while, pleasantly.

“People around here think a lot of your family.” She took a long draw on her beer and tore up lettuce. “They tell me your father was the youngest sheriff ever elected in Tamarack County. That true?” She glanced at him, her brows lifted questioningly above her attractive green eyes.

“True,” he said.

“I also heard that the hands on the clock tower of your county courthouse have been stopped for thirty-five years, frozen at the moment of his death. Is that true, too?”

“More or less.” He told her the story. The escapees from Stillwater, the shoot-out in front of the bank during which his father stepped between a bullet and an innocent bystander. How the clock was hit about the same time by an errant round and the hands had never moved since. How the town viewed it as a kind of memorial to his father’s selfless act.

“Board of Commissioners periodically discusses getting the clock fixed, but they never do anything. They say it’s out of respect. I think they just don’t want to spend the money.”

“I think it’s a wonderful tribute.” Over her shoulder, she threw him a lovely smile.

The steaks sizzled when she laid them on the hot grill, and the good smell made Cork’s mouth water. He realized how hungry he was, and how happy that Dina had come.

It was dark outside by the time they sat down at the kitchen table to eat. The steak was excellent: rare, tender, juicy. She’d dressed the salad with her own balsamic-vinegar-and-oil preparation that tasted of garlic, lemon, and pepper. It was accompanied by the garlic bread and more beer.

“How are you feeling now?” she asked.

“Better. Thanks.”

She eyed him as she lifted her beer bottle to her lips. “Mind if I ask you a question? About this morning?”

He paused in cutting his steak. “All right.”

“A shooting, that’s a hard thing, I know. Still, I find it interesting that you didn’t kill Carl Berger.”

“It was a lousy shot.”

“Is that so? With a rifle at thirty yards? People around here seem to think you’re an excellent shot. Been hunting all your life.” She put her hands on the table and almost imperceptibly leaned toward him, narrowing the distance between them. “I’ve been wondering if you really meant to kill him.”

“Of course I meant to kill him. You never shoot unless you mean to kill. He was drawing a bead on Rutledge.”

“You’ve killed two men. People here talk about that. Respectfully. Men, I gather, who were better off dead. I’m guessing it wasn’t easy, but you did it. So I’m wondering what was different about this shooting.”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I managed to get a copy of your statement, and I’ve gone over it. Stay with me for just a minute. The mist. A figure not clear to you. Panicked, afraid, finally cornered. A slender figure with long, dark hair. I think you might have been wondering if it was Lydell Cramer’s sister, a woman you were about to shoot. Could that have made a difference?”

“It shouldn’t have mattered.”

“But it did.” She reached across the table and laid her hand against his cheek. “It did, didn’t it?”

“Like I said, I’d rather not think about it.”

“I understand.” She pulled her hand back slowly. “How about another beer?”

After dinner, they sat in the quiet of the living room. It was late—later than Cork had imagined he’d be up. He was tired, what with the beer and the weight of all that had occurred that day. He wanted to be alone, and at the same time he didn’t.

“How’s your back?” Dina asked. “You said you wrenched it this morning during the raid.”

“Stiff. Hurts. A lot of it’s probably stress.”

“I can help that.” She put her beer on the end table and moved toward the easy chair where Cork sat. “Lie down on the floor. Come on. I won’t hurt you, I promise. That’s right. On your stomach.” She took her shoes off. “Now, close your eyes.”

The next thing Cork knew, she’d stepped onto his back. She was surprisingly light or knew exactly how to distribute her weight, because she was anything but oppressive. With her toes and the balls of her feet, she started to knead his muscles, beginning with the small of his back.

“Oh my God. Where did you learn that?”

“Picked it up along the way.”

“You know, this could be very effective in getting suspects to cooperate.”

“There’s something I’d like to tell you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll try to listen, but this is distracting.”

“I was wrong about you.”

“How?”

“I’ve worked with a lot of rural law officers. More often than not they’re pigheaded, defensive, and incompetent.”

“I hope I’m only pigheaded.”

“I don’t work well with just anyone, but I feel like we’re working well together.”

“That’s interesting. I’m not sure I feel the same way.”

He could sense her reaction in the momentary pause of her feet.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I can’t help thinking that there are things about Eddie Jacoby you know but aren’t telling.”

“I can’t. Client confidentiality.”

“His? Or his family’s?”

She didn’t reply.

“Would you tell me if I wore a push-up bra?”

She laughed. “There is one thing I’ll tell you about Eddie that might give you an additional glimpse of the man. When he was twenty-five, he received the distribution from a trust fund his grandfather had set up for him. Several million. Eddie always wanted to be a hotshot movie producer, so he invested in a production company in California, proudly told everyone he was in the movie business. You know what kind of movies he was making? The kind that show pretty young girls doing pretty ugly things. And he was proud of that. His partners ended up taking him, stole most of the fortune, though legally. His father refused to bail him out of that one. But he still has business cards with his Hollywood logo, and I know he doles them out and when he hits on women he uses some line about making them a star.”

“Do they ever buy it?”

“I’m thinking Lizzie Fineday might have. I can’t imagine any other reason she’d be with Eddie.”

“Anything else you’d care to share?”

“I’m helping you all I can, trust me.”

She stepped off him. He couldn’t move, didn’t want to.

“Better?”

Slowly he rolled over and looked up at her. She seemed taller from that perspective, even prettier, if that were possible. He did want to trust her, and felt himself inclined. But he also knew his thinking was being filtered through exhaustion and alcohol. And he couldn’t forget the fact that, in the end, Dina worked for the Jacobys.

“I think it’s good night now,” he said.

“Don’t get up. I’ll see myself out.”

While she put on her shoes, he gradually pulled himself off the floor and followed her to the door.

“We’re closing in on the end, Cork,” she said in the doorway. “Coming toward the home stretch. Once we bring Lizzie in, I think it will be over, one way or another.”

She hesitated a long moment before heading into the night, as if there was something more she wanted to do or to say. Whatever it was, she thought better of it, and the last moment of their evening together was left empty. She went down the porch steps and walked through the light of the street lamp to her car.

He flipped the dead bolt, checked the other doors and windows, began turning out the lights, thinking all the while that if he loved Jo so much, why did he feel a small disappointment in the emptiness of that last moment with Dina.

He headed toward the stairs, but before he took the first step, the telephone rang. It was almost eleven o’clock. It was either the office or Jo, he figured.

“O’Connor,” he said into the phone.

“You think it’s over?” the voice at the other end said. “Think again. You’re dead, O’Connor. You’re so dead.”