Free Vermilion Drift by William Kent Krueger Page A

Dross asked.
    “Because I was hired this morning to find her.”
    George Azevedo, one of the deputies guarding the scene, said, “Fast work, Cork.” He laughed, but no one else joined him.
    “How come you didn’t tell me this earlier?” Dross said.
    “Because I wasn’t sure.”
    “What makes you sure now?”
    “Two things. Those shoes on her feet. They’re expensive Italian jobs. There’s a whole closet full of their cousins at her residence in the old Parrant estate. And that big ring on her left hand. She’s wearing it in a portrait I saw today.”
    “Who hired you to find her?”
    “Her brother.”
    “Did he say when she’d gone missing?”
    “A week ago.”
    “And he didn’t report it?”
    “He wanted the matter looked into discreetly,” Cork said.
    “If it is her, there won’t be anything discreet about this now,” Rutledge said.
    Dross said to no one in particular, “How did she come to be here with these older remains?”
    “Maybe when we identify the remains we’ll have our answer,” Ed Larson responded.
    “How soon might that be?” Dross addressed her question to Upchurch.
    “I’d like everything in here documented in detail with photographs and video,” the BCA agent replied. “Once that’s done, I’llexamine each of the remains in situ, then remove them to my lab in Bemidji, where I can study them more carefully.”
    “That’ll take a while.”
    “Quite a while,” Upchurch said.
    “When will you have results?”
    “I’ll get started as soon as the first remains are in the lab. Tomorrow maybe, and then I’ll have something preliminary to offer.”
    “What about the new body?” Rutledge asked Dross.
    “I told Tom Conklin that I’ll need the autopsy done ASAP.” Dross was speaking of the medical examiner.
    “Handle the corpse carefully,” Rutledge advised. “It’s at a delicate stage. The skin’ll shift around. And be especially vigilant with the head. The hair will come off easily.”
    “We’ll be careful, Simon.”
    During all this exchange, Cork had noticed something in the crosscut—small metal cones that littered the floor around one of the skeletons—and his mind made a very old connection. “Agent Upchurch, is there any possibility that these corpses are over forty years old?”
    “They may well be. I can’t really tell yet. Why do you ask?”
    “The remains in the corner to the right. See those items littering the floor around it?”
    “The things that look like little rusted cones?”
    “Yeah, those. I think they’re jingles.”
    “Jingles?”
    “From a jingle dress. It’s traditionally worn for a healing dance.”
    “Jingles,” Larson said. He gave Cork a pointed look. “The Vanishings, you think?”
    “That’s exactly what I think,” Cork said. “The Vanishings.”

EIGHT
    N aomi Stonedeer was the first to vanish. Cork had known her well. She was seventeen, with black hair that hung to her waist and hazel eyes. She was bright and lovely and an accomplished Jingle Dancer.
    The Jingle Dance was an Ojibwe healing ritual performed by women in long dresses adorned with a couple of hundred jingles sewn closely together and attached in rows. The jingles were traditionally made from snuff can lids or tin can lids rolled into cones. When the dancers performed their steps, the jingles brushed together and created the unique sound that gave the ritual its name. Though it continued to be one of the most esteemed and sacred of the Ojibwe ceremonies, it was also a dance performed competitively at powwows.
    In the summer of 1964, Naomi lived near Cork’s grandmother in Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the Iron Lake Reservation. Cork was thirteen and had a terrible crush on her. Whenever he visited Grandma Dilsey, he always found a way to pass the little BIA-built house where Naomi lived with her mother and her aunt. He concocted scenarios in which he played the hero and saved her from a dozen iterations of doom. But when the real