Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger Page B

sheriff’s deputy, she was married and living in New York City. Over the years, he’d seen her occasionally at St. Agnes when she was home for a visit and attended church with her parents, but aside from perfunctory greetings, they’d had little to say to each other. Now here she was, a woman of fifty, who looked whittled down by life to not much more than a matchstick.
    “Hello, Cork,” she said dryly when he walked in.
    “Hello, Justine. It’s been a while.” He shed his coat, draped it over the back of the office’s unoccupied chair, took a moment to shake her hand, then sat down.
    “I don’t come back to Aurora much these days,” Justine said. “I wish I didn’t have to be here now.”
    “I’m sorry about the circumstances,” he offered.
    “Thank you.”
    Dross said, “I’ve told Justine that we’ve pretty much exhausted our search of the area where we found her mother’s car and that our investigation has taken a turn toward possible foul play in her mother’s disappearance.”
    Cork glanced at Justine. She’d had a couple of days already to deal with the fact that her mother was missing, but he could see from the muscles tensed across the bone of her face that this new turn of events had been especially hard on her.
    “Would you mind telling Cork what you told me?” Dross said.
    Justine looked at him, frowning just a little, the hollows inher cheeks deepening. “I thought you weren’t in law enforcement anymore.”
    “He’s a licensed private investigator now, and he’s agreed to consult on this case,” Dross told her, saying it quickly but casually, as if it was quite an ordinary occurrence in the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.
    Justine gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, a little gesture of whatever. She said, “My mother was seriously considering leaving my father.”
    “Why?” Cork asked. Although knowing the kind of man the Judge had always been, he understood that it was, in a way, a silly question. “I mean, why now?”
    Justine rubbed one hand over the other, her long fingers idly feeling the prominent knuckles. “I’ve been trying to get her to leave him for years. Devout Catholic that she is, she believes that a marriage is forever. Fine, I’ve always told her. You don’t have to divorce him. Just leave. But she’s spent her life under his thumb. It’s hard for her to change.”
    “So why has she been thinking of leaving now?”
    “It really began when all that crap came out about the LaPointe case years ago. I think it drove home to her what a morally corrupt man my father really is. That’s something I’ve known all my life, but Mom has always made excuses for him.”
    She was talking about a situation that had come to light nearly two years earlier. A man named Cecil LaPointe was serving a forty-year sentence in Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison for the killing of a young woman twenty years earlier. LaPointe was a Shinnob, an Ojibwe, living in Tamarack County. He’d been tried and sentenced in the court of Judge Ralph Carter. It had been a brief but sensational trial. The evidence against LaPointe had been overwhelming. In the end, the deliberation of the jury—all white males—had been swift, LaPointe had been found guilty, and Judge Carter had delivered a sentence of forty years’ imprisonment, the maximum allowable under Minnesota law.
    But nearly two years ago, Ray Jay Wakemup, who’d beenlittle more than a kid at the time of the trial, had come forward with information about the crime, information that had been withheld from the jury and that cast significant doubt on LaPointe’s guilt. Ray Jay claimed that while the trial was under way, he’d shared this information with Judge Ralph Carter and also with the prosecution and the sheriff’s department. Yet none of those officers of the court or officers of the law had bothered to share the information with the defense.
    “When it became public that Dad had been a part of all that—I don’t