Free Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger Page B

disappointed, “Like what you see?”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. And he was. “You probably get stared at a lot.”
    “What bothers me is that there’s so much more to me. But guys who stare don’t care about that.”
    Cork had never thought of himself as that kind of guy, but here he was, caught dead to rights. It troubled him, and Stella must have seen that on his face.
    “It’s okay,” she said, her voice softened. “Forget it.” She snubbed out her cigarette, threw the butt into the snow of the yard, and said, “I’m cold. What say we go back inside before they worry about us?”
    Cork held the door for her and followed her into the house. “Time to go, Stephen,” he said.
    “I think I should stay,” Stephen replied. “At least until Stella can get someone else to come.”
    “I’d feel safer, Mom,” Marlee chimed in.
    Cork could see the look of pleasure that put on his son’s face.
    “Would it be all right, Cork?” Stella asked. “He can sleep on the sofa. And by tomorrow, I’ll have some family coverage.”
    What could he say? It made sense, yet it also worried him.
    “Okay, but any sign of trouble, you call me, understand?” he cautioned.
    “I understand,” Stephen said.
    “No heroics.”
    “Dad.”
    “All right. Give me the keys to Jenny’s Subaru. I’ll drive it home and leave you the Land Rover. I’ll need it first thing in the morning.”
    “Ten-four,” Stephen said. And he gave his dad the kind of smile he usually reserved for an equal and a friend.
    Outside, Cork started the Subaru, but he didn’t leave immediately. He sat for a little while thinking about Stephen and Marlee, and remembering the first girl he’d been crazy about. Her name had been Winona Crane, and although Cork had tried his best to win her, she’d given her heart instead to Cork’s best friend. In the end, nothing good had come of it. Cork had hoped that Stephen, when he fell in love, might have an easier, more normal, experience. But given the way things were shaping up at the moment, that prospect looked pretty bleak.

C HAPTER 11
    O n the way back to Aurora, Cork called Marsha Dross on his cell phone. She was still at the Judge’s house.
    “We’ve taken blood samples from the knife blade. They’re already on their way to the BCA lab in Bemidji. We also took prints from the knife handle and from the tubing and the gas cans. We dusted the whole garage basically. We’re also dusting her car.”
    “How’s the Judge?”
    “Rattled. Pissed.”
    “Worried about Evelyn?”
    “He’s making more of a stink about someone breaking into his house than about his wife still missing. I’m not sure how to read it. Does he not realize that things aren’t looking good for Mrs. Carter? Does he just not care? Or is he not surprised that she may not be coming back?”
    “Have you questioned him?”
    “Waiting for his lawyer. He’s old and mean as spit, but he’s not stupid. This man’s got the personality of a scorpion. How the hell did he stay on the bench so long?”
    “Connections. Political contributions. Entrenched cronyism. Voter apathy. Once judges are elected, they’re hard to unseat, even bad ones. He sat on the bench during a couple of high-profile cases, and that didn’t hurt him any either.”
    “Yeah, but one of those was Cecil LaPointe’s conviction.”
    A case that Cork knew well and that didn’t make him happy whenever he thought about it.
    “The LaPointe case didn’t come back to bite him in the ass until long after he’d retired,” he said. “Although it sure scuttled any kind of legal legacy he might have hoped to leave behind.”
    “Okay, tell me about the dog,” Dross said.
    “Brutal. Someone lured him with meat, then killed and decapitated him.”
    “Some kind of reprisal, you think?”
    “Stella Daychild claims she doesn’t know anyone who’s that angry with her, but it may be a customer she wasn’t nice enough to at the bar and who has a very mean and very