The Devil's Analyst (38 page)

Josh pulled open one of the fishing compartments built into the boat. He seemed to be searching for something among the tackle. Danny didn’t even realize the boat was equipped with lures and sinkers suitable for fishing muskie or northern pike.

“What are you doing,” he asked. Danny slowed down the boat and kept one eye out for unexplained ripples that might mark danger below the surface. The other remained focused on Josh.

Josh looked up with a self-satisfied smile. He pulled a large folding utility knife from one of the tackle box trays. “I thought this was here,” he said and unfolded the blade. Even in the fading light, its gleaming stainless steel edge managed to reflect back some of the fleeting molten sky.

The knife worried Danny. He could kill the motor, Danny thought, and just let the boat drift in the weak currents of the flowage. Or he could increase speed and race toward the safety of land. Neither choice was appealing. He didn’t remember the shore well enough to know where to run aground and seek sanctuary. Much of the shore was swamp. The firmer ground usually sported summer homes, which were frequently unused. If he could make it to the channel and into the first lake in the chain, then he could reach the year-round home of the high school principal in Thread and escape Josh and his knife by dropping off the boat and swimming to that man’s house. The principal was always at home.

“Did you ever go fishing?” Josh asked. He didn’t seem concerned about what Danny might be plotting. “With some fish, you just have to be patient, let the bait float down and just do its job. Are you that kind of fish Danny? What does it take to land you? I really want to know. You never bit at anything I sent your way. Do I just need to be more patient?

“Now your mother—I thought telling her story would be enough to make you bite. You’ve always blamed yourself for her suicide. It was written all over your face whenever you mentioned her. But I never thought you held any responsibility, and now I’ve blessed you with that freedom. But will you take it? Face it. Your mother was no saint, so no matter what she did, she was the one who chose death. She had reason to despair and none of it had anything to do with you. Don’t hold it on yourself. You’ve been living a lie.”

Danny agreed. His life was a lie, but it was one that became a falsehood due to Josh’s existence. Not his mother. He realized he didn’t care what she did or why. This was his life, and he wouldn’t be pushed into one path or the other just to satisfy a whim of Josh. He needed to understand one thing.

“Why research my mother and why show me the findings?”

Josh was playing with the knife, tossing it back and forth between his hands. The opened tackle box contained large lures, designed to catch the region’s biggest fighting fish, the muskie. Danny always considered the hooks on such lures to be dangerous.

“I needed to know,” Josh said, “That’s all it’s ever been. Not about your mother, but about you. What kind of person are you really? I’ve always felt that you’ve been too afraid to peel back the layers of your true emotions. But bottom line, you’re no better than me. You need to know it. You never dared to get away with anything. You’re stuck in the normal, never grasping for more. But until you realize that you and I aren’t so different, I can’t help you.”

Danny felt there was one more thing he needed to ask. And then he would act. While he still had time.

The sound of the rushing engine drowned out normal evening sounds, and the boat’s speed kept the mosquitoes at bay. They were heading toward a distant shore, but it wouldn’t take that long to run aground. Josh simply watched Danny, awaiting his move, measuring some trait that only he seemed to detect. Then Josh sighed.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you’re filled with grace, blessed by God and able to move on. But I don’t think so. You know Pete always worried about you.”

Danny had been planning to rush Josh to knock him overboard, but those words derailed his plotting. The last thing he had expected was a mention of Pete. ”What do you know about Pete’s worries?”

“Quite a bit actually. A few years ago when I felt that I just wasn’t able to understand you the way that I wanted to, I tracked Pete down. You know everyone in town knew about the two of you. They know that you’re the one who pushed Pete over the edge with desire. Made him crazy. But I wanted to hear from him first-hand how it happened. I heard he was still around, so I tracked him down in Phoenix. Met up with him under a freeway overpass on one of those crazy monsoon rainy nights in the desert.”

Danny knew he had to do it. Push the guy overboard. It was either Josh or him. Only one of them could make it to shore.

Josh laughed. “You’re so transparent. Thinking about rushing me, aren’t you? That’s what Pete thought too that night. I think he planned to push me into the flood channel. But I had a knife that night too. He tried, but I guess you know how that ended. Did you find his hat in my secret room?”

A calm descended on Danny. Maybe, he realized this was his final night. Alone in the middle of a lake, caught in the light that was rapidly vanishing into the night, standing face to face with the man he had always thought he loved, trying to keep balanced on a moving boat.

“Did you ever love me?” Danny asked.

“What is love?” Josh responded.

Danny could always define love. It was loyalty and the willingness to wait for however long it might take for the right thing to occur. It was dedication to a person, taking the steps that honor required—while never forgetting the person you honored. It was focus and perseverance. It was all the stories that had populated his mind while growing up in Thread—tales of Indian chiefs and French voyageurs, of copper miners and poor farmers, of those individual people who saw in another person the opportunity to achieve their own self-realization. It was Josh.

And then it clearly wasn’t.

“Maybe love is just the way we get tumbled together, or maybe there is no love greater than the person who will sacrifice everything for you and your future,” said Josh. Danny had no idea what he meant, but it infuriated him.

Josh toyed with the utility knife, held out his palm, and lightly drew the tip of the blade across his skin until blood seeped out. Some drops fell on the floor of the boat. “We could become blood brothers,” he said. Danny didn’t know what to make of the look in Josh’s eyes.

“Your turn,” Josh commanded, pointing the knife toward Danny. “Let’s make a pact, mingle our blood together, and forget everything in the past. We will look only toward the future.”

Still facing Josh, Danny pushed upward on the lever that would drive the boat into full throttle. The entrance to the channel was only a few hundred yards more. The boat’s red and green running lights on the edge of the boat were growing more visible. The moon wouldn’t rise for hours, but several stars were already shining down. A loon sounded in the distance. The motor still roared, and the wake rushed behind them.

Josh took a step closer and then he lunged. The knife pierced Danny’s chest and was quickly withdrawn. Surprised but not frightened, Danny tapped an unexpected reservoir of strength. He rushed forward, butted his head into Josh’s chest and knocked the knife loose from Josh’s hand. It clanked as it hit the boat’s floor, but the sound was lost in the roar of Danny’s pent-up anger. He continued to push into Josh, who lost his footing and began to tumble backward. Danny skidded to a stop as Josh fell backward. For a moment he was perched precariously on the rear corner of the boat. He looked up toward Danny with a startled look, which transformed into a smug smile of satisfaction as though some long-held belief had at last been confirmed. The boat continued to rush forward. It hit some submerged object. The entire boat bucked.

And Josh lost balance.

He fell overboard. Energy from the displacement propelled the boat forward and helped it leap over the submerged obstacle. It continued to rush forward.

Blood was seeping from Danny’s chest wound, and he had trouble concentrating. He needed to stop the boat. He needed to search for Josh. He needed to . . .

. . . and Danny blacked out.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Aftermath

The hospital room
felt sterile. Sitting in the chair beside the bed, Cynthia watched her friend, listened to the sounds of the instruments registering his heartbeat and blood pressure, noted the slow drip in the various tubes, and waited for Danny to wake.

Earlier the doctor said, “He should fully recover. The knife wound was never life threatening, but Mr. Lahti likely felt faint from the shock, blacked out and fell, and then suffered a concussion from hitting the deck. When he does wake up, the mosquito bites resulting from floating all night on a boat in the middle of the lake might just be the worst of it. So don’t worry.”

But Cynthia did. She blamed herself for not calling the authorities immediately the night before. Because she accidentally left her credit card behind, she returned to their table at the restaurant just in time to look out the window and see Danny depart the marina. A man rushed down the dock and jumped onto the prow of the boat. Even though she was too far to see any details, she knew it was Josh. The person was the right height and shape. Who else could it be? But she convinced herself there was no need to worry.

If Danny weren’t one hundred percent okay, she would always know it was her fault. After everything discussed during their dinner, alarm bells should have sounded loudly in her mind. If she had called her friends at the resort security office, they might have immediately sent out their patrol boat. There was still enough light. They could have intercepted the boat.

But she gave the situation the benefit of the doubt because a part of her wanted Danny to have a chance to work the relationship out. But once home she rethought her position, and tried calling Danny at the camp because she needed to be sure. No one answered. She phoned multiple times, allowing an extra half hour for transit in case he made a turn down the wrong channel, but after the fourth time of receiving no pickup, she realized night had fully descended and feared she had waited too long. At that point, giving in to her fear, she called both the tribal police and the resort security. Because she was who she was, they agreed to send out a search boat.

It was a dark night, and the flowage was immense. Decades earlier, when the Coeur de Lattigeaux River had been dammed for the generation of electricity, the spreading waters turned swamps into miles of open water that stitched together the small lakes that were left behind from the glacial period. The resulting footprint was immense and included miles of rugged, tangled shorelines. From year to year, the edges of the flowage ebbed and grew as water levels shifted. There were many indistinct boundaries, all lined with brush. Everyone searching knew there was little chance of finding a missing boat in the darkness, but no one wanted to tell that to the widowed wife of the dead tribal leader.

In the morning, authorities added a helicopter to the mix, and it didn’t take long to spot a craft jammed into half-submerged trees along one shoreline. By the time the rescue boat arrived, the motor on Danny’s boat had run out of fuel but through the night its continual attempt to move forward firmly lodged it into the mix of brush and crumbling shore. On the boat’s floor, Danny was lying in a pool of blood, unconscious. A bloody folding utility knife rested near him.

There was no sign of Josh.

A knock on the door interrupted Cynthia’s thoughts. An elderly man who looked a lot like Danny peered in.

“Mr. Lahti, come in,” Cynthia said. She was surprised to see Danny’s father. Even though he lived nearby in Thread, it hadn’t occurred to her that she should notify him. Now she felt a bit foolish. She wondered how he discovered that Danny was in the hospital, but remembered that bad news traveled fast in small towns.

“I’m sure Danny will be glad to see you when he wakes up,” she said. She wasn’t sure that was the truth.

“Do you think so?” he asked. “We don’t talk much but maybe I should be changing that. Are you sure it’s okay to stay?”

She nodded yes, and he took the other chair. Cynthia remembered when Danny’s dad would sometimes come into the café back when she and Danny worked there as teenagers. He never had much to say then either, but she always trusted that he loved his son, but just didn’t know how to show it. Remembering those days, she smiled at him and said a silent prayer that Danny would also smile when he saw his father.

Then another visitor appeared, really two. An officer from the tribal police entered the room, along with Andrew, the comptroller from Lattigo Industries.

“Is he awake yet?” the policeman asked Cynthia, even though he already knew the answer. It was a way to start the conversation.

“No,” she replied. Seeing the young man’s face upset Cynthia; she realized how tired she was of cops and their uniforms. This was one of the men she had talked to when Chip first went missing, but that didn’t mean she wanted to talk to him again. Life was too complex, and no one ever wanted to unite all the untidy pieces.

“We wanted to give you an update, ma’am,” the police officer said. “We’ve towed the boat back into the marina here in Lattigo, and it’ll be a joint investigation that will involve both the tribal police and the county sheriff. It’s not clear whether the incident happened in tribal waters or on state land. But we’re used to cooperating.” Then he blushed. No doubt he recalled the earlier and unresolved incidents regarding Chip Grant and the suspected embezzlement.

Andrew spoke next, “The officials will want to speak to Mr. Lahti as soon as he wakes. But based on what you already told us as well as the evidence in the boat, it seems pretty clear what happened. Given your account of the marina last night, we believe Josh Gunderson jumped on the boat with Danny Lahti as it was departing. It appears some type of altercation occurred once they were out in the lake, and that Mr. Gunderson pulled a knife from the tackle box to attack Mr. Lahti. Based on scuff marks and damage to the side of the boat, it looks like Mr. Lahti fought back and that in the struggle Mr. Gunderson went overboard.”

“We’re dragging the bottom of the lake near where we found the boat,” the officer added. “And we’re bringing in divers. But we may just have to wait for the body to reappear. As far as we can tell the boat was moving during the fight, so we don’t really know exactly where the fight happened. The flowage is a huge area to search, and the bottom is littered with dead trees that could snag a clothed body. It’s possible the body will turn up today, float up in a few days as it decomposes, or even that it might never be found.”

“I understand,” Cynthia murmured.

“But the state sent in its investigators who are processing the boat as a crime scene. We got blood samples, fingerprints, the knife, and soon we should be able to get a statement from our victim. We will make sense of it.”

Andrew looked closely at Cynthia as he asked his next question. “Do you know why the two of them might have fought?” The Lattigo Industries comptroller had seen all of the material from her private investigator. No doubt he had his own suspicions on Josh’s role in the Lattigo embezzlement, but luckily he didn’t know the latest details about Josh.

Before she could answer, the sounds of the medical equipment changed. Danny moved, opened his eyes, and asked, “What happened?”

Danny found
it extremely comfortable to remain living in the guest room at Cynthia’s home, although he knew it was time to move home. The challenge was to know which home that should be—remain in Thread at the camp or return to the mansion in Los Angeles. As long as she would have him, he was prepared to stay with Cynthia.

Nearly a month had passed since the police discovered his unconscious body lying in the wale of the boat. During that time, he neither ventured back to the camp nor stepped onto the boat, which with Cynthia’s help, had been returned to storage at the boathouse. It might have been wiser to have simply sold it, but like many things he held on. Cynthia also hired people to close up the camp. Sooner or later, he would have to deal with the place. But at the moment, he didn’t want to give it any thought.

Despite a thorough search, the authorities never found Josh’s body, but forensics evidence clearly identified both his fingerprints and blood on the boat. When combined with Cynthia’s eyewitness account of the man jumping in the boat and Danny’s testimony, no one doubted that Josh attacked Danny that night, that Danny responded in self-defense, and, as far as Danny knew, everyone believed Josh drowned when he was knocked overboard.

That was Danny’s belief as well. Even though his innate sense of ESP often failed him, he still believed it tuned him in to the universe of people who mattered. He felt no presence of another. He had killed Josh.

In a way, it didn’t really matter whether Josh was dead or alive. The man had legally handed his life over to Danny before his disappearance. As a result, everyone found it easy to finalize the liquidation of Josh’s scattered assets, and the funds from the sale were in accounts under the control of Danny. If Josh’s body never floated up, eventually they could petition the court to declare him dead. In the meantime, it made little difference.

At least it didn’t make much of a difference to cold and logical minds. In reality, it mattered greatly. Danny suffered from knowing he could never ask Josh the questions he really wanted to know. For the rest of his life, he would struggle with what drove Josh to discover in Danny’s behavior the answers to his personal life questions. What did he really expect to learn from testing Danny? Danny would never forget the look on Josh’s face right before he fell overboard. There was a knowing satisfaction in it as though Danny had finally said or done what Josh wanted to see all along. Was it that Danny finally fought back? Or was it something else?

Danny understood the itching pain of questions that could never be answered. His mother’s suicide left him with that pain. In a way, Josh provided Danny one gift, although he was certain that was never Josh’s intent. While disclosing his mother’s checkered past made her death more mysterious, the new information freed Danny. At last, he realized that it was impossible to know any other person’s motivations, thoughts, fears, or goals. One could only hope to know one’s own.

When he woke up in the hospital bed and saw his father there, he was surprised to realize the man’s presence made him happy. Eventually, he knew he would ask his dad about the woman who died in that bombing and more details about his mother. Perhaps he could learn what made his father love his mother. For far too long, they had avoided talking about the person who had been so central to each of them. But Danny felt no hurry. He was just happy that his father cared enough to show up at his bedside.

All in all, it was a time for new beginnings. That’s what he decided. After meeting with a psychiatrist to talk about Josh, he realized that Josh displayed the classic symptoms of a sociopath—the man didn’t care what the rest of the world thought of him, nor was he bound by any social mores. Josh felt superior and free to do what he wished. That diagnosis made it easier for Danny to let Josh go.

There was plenty of money. At least Josh had left him that. When Danny finally decided where he wanted to live and what he wanted to do in the days ahead, cash would not be a concern. Likely, he would sell both houses and use much of the proceeds to set up a foundation to do some good.

Cynthia said that after her baby was born, she would like to join him in creating a fund to support youth from the local tribe and promote a better northwoods environment. It was a good idea. Maybe he could lure Kenosha to the Midwest to manage the charity.

The days ahead were bright. They were good. And Danny was happy that Josh was at the bottom of a lake.