Prologue

The best of autumn was past, color fallen from the trees, branches gone bare and black against a sky that had been overcast for days. This was always an unsettled time, after the flow of leaf peepers had dried up and before the snowmobilers arrived. Halloween was only a few days away. In the week following that celebration of ghouls and goblins, Cork O’Connor would close Sam’s Place for the winter.

Nine p.m. and it had already been hard dark for more than an hour. Cork prepared to bag the day’s take for the drop at the First National Bank on Center Street. He was alone. The high school kids who’d been his crew that evening had finished up the cleaning and gone home. Cork sat in the back of the old Quonset hut where he conducted both the business of Sam’s Place and his occasional work as a private investigator. He’d pulled a Leinenkugel’s from the fridge and sat sipping the beer and looking at the numbers he’d entered on his laptop. It had been a slow day. In a slow week. In a slow fall.

He felt old.

He had a birthday coming up in November, one he didn’t feel at all like celebrating. He’d recently added cholesterol and blood pressure medications to his daily dose of multivitamins. He’d begun wearing glasses for reading. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten out of bed in the morning without feeling pain somewhere. He played basketball regularly at the Y with the Old Martyrs, a bunch of guys who had gray hair or no hair at all anymore. When each spring came in full, he biked a good deal, on road and off. He could still paddle for a week in the Boundary Waters and portage a fifty-pound pack and canoe across several hundred rods. But the prospect of an upcoming birthday, of yet another step toward the inevitable decline of everything, weighed on him heavily and caused him, as he sat alone in Sam’s Place, to consider the future darkly and ruminate, with many regrets, on the past.

He thought of himself as a man of few words, well chosen and unrevealing. He didn’t want people worrying about him. So he hadn’t shared with anyone—not his wife, Rainy, or his children or his friends—the depth of his dark considerations. It was his struggle alone, and he would get through it.

He sat in a circle of harsh light from the overhead bulb. A stiff autumn wind blew outside, and occasionally a branch from one of the pines that grew next to the old Quonset hut scraped against the metal siding, a sound like the scratch of some wild creature trying to claw its way in. Otherwise, the place was deathly quiet. So when Cork’s cell phone rang, that shattering of the stillness startled him. He fumbled the phone from his pocket and saw on the display that it was his son.

Stephen currently lived in Saint Paul with his wife, Belle, and was in his second year of law school. He’d secured an internship working for the Great North Innocence Project, an organization whose aim was to analyze old cases to determine if new evidence might overturn a wrongful conviction. Stephen was passionate about this work, and Cork was proud of him. But he missed his son. And maybe that was a part of the darkness he felt.

“Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” Cork said.

“Still at Sam’s Place?” Stephen asked.

“Just closed up. In the counting house now, counting out my money.”

“And the queen is in her parlor?”

“Rainy’s at home. Only me here.”

“Drinking a Leinie’s, I’ll bet.”

“Good call, Counselor.”

“Not a counselor yet, Dad.”

“All in good time.”

“So,” Stephen said, then paused.

Cork sensed in that momentary silence at the other end of the line the seriousness of what Stephen was about to say. He set the bottle of Leinenkugel beer on the table.

“Do you remember a case you handled a long time ago? Axel Boshey?” Stephen finally asked.

“Of course,” Cork said. “Impossible to forget. The first major crime I investigated after being elected sheriff. A particularly brutal murder. Why do you ask?”

There was another pause, another plunge into an unsettling silence.

Then Stephen drove home the painful point of his call, the nightmare of every man or woman who’d ever worn the badge of a sheriff and had taken to heart the solemn pledge to protect and to serve.

“Dad, I’m pretty sure you sent an innocent man to prison.”

PART I

25 Years Ago

Chapter 1

In those days, the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department was located on the first floor of the courthouse. The hands of the clock in the clocktower on that grandiose county structure hadn’t moved in more than twenty years, having been significantly damaged during an exchange of gunfire in which Sheriff Liam O’Connor, Cork’s father, had been killed. Cork was thirteen years old at the time. The clock had never been repaired. Some folks said it was because the cost was too great, others that it was a fitting memorial to a good and brave lawman. Only a few months had passed since Cork O’Connor had been sworn in as sheriff of Tamarack County and had pinned to his own uniform the same badge his father had worn. Every day, when Cork showed up for work, the paralyzed clock face looked down on him, a stern reminder of the shoes he had to fill.

That morning, Cork walked into the sheriff’s department and said hello to Bos Swain, who was dispatcher, clerk, public greeter, and sometimes mother hen to the small cadre of Tamarack County law enforcement officers. Her real name was Henrietta, but in her youth, she’d had a fascination with the American Revolution and her greatest desire had been to live in Boston, the center of all that history. She’d married instead and stayed in Aurora, but she’d seen to it that one of her daughters fulfilled the passionate dream. That daughter had graduated from Boston College and was on the school’s faculty now. Bos, who’d worked for the sheriff’s department for years, had been saddled with her nickname as far back as Cork could remember.

“Banana nut muffins,” Bos said, nodding toward a plate on one of the three desks in the open area behind the contact counter. She stood at a filing cabinet, top drawer open.

“Ed Larson in yet?” Cork asked.

Bos’s thin eyebrows arched a bit and she gestured an empty hand across the department, every inch of which, except for Cork’s office, was visible. “See him anywhere?”

“Could’ve checked in and gone out,” Cork said.

“Well, he didn’t. Just you and me here, pumpkin.”

Before being elected sheriff, Cork had been a deputy for several years. He’d served under Bill Gunderson, who’d been less a lawman and more a politician. Gunderson had no law enforcement experience before he was elected, but he’d been a popular civil attorney, a regular figure in the county courthouse, and had curried the favor of the local party machine. He knew the law, more or less. Often, in Cork’s experience, a bit less than more. He was a sympathetic figure, a widower who’d raised his daughter alone after his wife died in a boating accident. He was big and flamboyant. As soon as he was sworn in, he took to wearing a sidearm everywhere and encouraged the nickname “Wild Bill” Gunderson. For the most part, he’d let his officers perform their duties without a lot of interference. The previous summer, a county commissioner who’d been away on business had returned early and discovered Gunderson in bed with his wife. Although it had been a huge scandal, Wild Bill refused to resign his public office and chose to run for another term. Cork, who was a solid family man, an Aurora native with lots of law enforcement experience, and son of a legendary father, had been encouraged on all sides to run against Gunderson. Cork had won the badge handily.

“The specifics of the next budget request are on your desk,” Bos said. “Good luck convincing our county commissioners.”

“How about you bake them some snickerdoodles before I argue my case?”

“Happy to do whatever I can to help.”

Cork stepped into his office. When his father was sheriff, Cork had been in that room many times. Although small, it had seemed to him almost a sacred place and his father’s duty there to be a kind of high priest of the law. Cork had a more human and informed understanding of the job now, much of which was simply mundane and far too political in nature for his taste. Before coming back to the place of his birth, he’d been a Chicago cop for several years. On the whole, law enforcement in Tamarack County tended to be on the quiet side.

He’d only just seated himself and prepared to bend to the budget document in front of him when the 911 call came in.

“Slow down,” he heard Bos caution. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” He stepped from his office and saw her with a pencil poised above the log sheet beside the phone. She glanced up at Cork and shook her head. “Try to stay calm. Where are you?” She wrote something down. “Are you in danger?” She listened. “All right. We’ll have officers there in a few minutes. I’m going to stay on the line until they arrive. What’s your name? No, wait, don’t hang up.” She set the phone in the cradle and read from the note she’d written. “Timber Lodge and Resort. One victim, multiple stab wounds. The caller was female, hysterical, didn’t give her name. And, Cork, I heard a baby crying in the background.”

“Who’s out on patrol?”

“Cy Borkman west county, Rocky Martinelli east county.”

“Radio them both. Have them meet me there. Get hold of Ed Larson. And get the paramedics on it.”

In a heartbeat, he was in his cruiser, siren blaring, light bar flashing, racing down Center Street toward the outskirts of Aurora. He listened to the chatter on his radio, Borkman and Martinelli reporting their locations and ETAs, Bos confirming that paramedics were about to roll. As he drove, he was trying to wrap his thinking around a homicide with a baby somewhere on the scene.

The Timber Lodge and Resort had been officially closed for the season. Although the main lodge and most of the cabins had been winterized and locked, the caretaker’s cabin was occupied year-round. When he pulled up, Cork spotted a familiar pink VW Beetle parked there and saw that the cabin door was wide open. He leaped from his cruiser and hit the open doorway at a run. The moment he entered, he stopped. Before him was a pool of blood. At its center lay the naked body of Chastity Boshey. Beside her sat Aphrodite McGill, her mother, a butcher knife in her hand. From a room out of sight came the constant crying of a toddler.

“Aphrodite,” Cork said as calmly as he could.

She didn’t respond. Her silky black hair hung long over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed on a point beyond the small lake of blood in which she sat.

“Aphrodite,” Cork said again. “Put the knife down.”

Now her gaze lifted. She focused on Cork, but he could see the emptiness in her eyes.

“The knife, Aphrodite,” he said. “Put it down.”

Her eyes shifted to the bloody blade. She stared at it as if she couldn’t comprehend what it was doing there in her hand. She looked up at Cork in a questioning way.

“Just set it down and we’ll talk, Aphrodite. We’ll sort this out.”

At last, she lowered her arm and set the knife down beside her.

Cork took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his uniform khakis and, careful not to step into the pool of blood, reached forward, took the big knife gingerly by the handle, and removed it. Next, he pressed the fingers of his free hand against Chastity Boshey’s carotid artery. No pulse and her skin was ice cold.

“Wait there, Aphrodite,” he said, although it was clear to him she wasn’t going anywhere.

He didn’t want to leave the knife where she might once again put her hand on it, so he carried it with him as he sought out the room with the crying toddler.

Moonbeam—Cork knew the child’s name, knew the whole family well—was standing in her crib, fat little hands gripping the railing, her eyes squeezed shut and her face contorted as she wailed. As far as Cork could tell, she wasn’t hurt. His natural instinct was to comfort her, but not with a bloody knife in his hand and a traumatized woman in the other room, where the brutalized body of the child’s mother lay. For the moment, he left Moonbeam screaming in her crib.

Off the cabin’s main front room and separated from it by a simple counter was a small kitchen. Several doors led to other rooms. One to the baby’s room. Another to a bedroom where Cork could see the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed. Another to the bathroom. Cork heard the howl of sirens on fast-approaching vehicles. He set the knife and handkerchief on the kitchen counter, walked carefully around the crime scene. A set of bloody shoe prints lay between the big pool of blood and the telephone on the wall. Cork stepped over the prints and stood at the outside door. Aphrodite McGill still sat in the middle of the room, staring at nothing, her clothing deeply stained with her daughter’s blood.

The paramedics were the first to arrive, a team of three men. Cork knew them all. He’d worked with them on the scenes of car wrecks and house fires and sudden deaths. They stepped past him into the cabin, then pulled up short when they saw the body.

“Uh . . .” Brisco, who was the team leader, said. “What do you want us to do, Sheriff? Should we check for vitals?”

Cork said, “I checked for a pulse already. She’s gone.”

“What about her?” LaForge, another of the paramedics asked, nodding toward Aphrodite McGill.

“Wait until my team arrives. I want photos. Then we’ll get her up and you’ll probably need to treat her for shock.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t wait for your team,” Dannon, the third paramedic said. “She looks pretty pale.”

“She’s always looked pale,” Cork said. “And see those footprints in the blood? I don’t want to lose them in a confusion of other prints. Just a few more minutes.”

He heard another siren scream to the cabin, and a half a minute later, Cy Borkman rushed in, almost knocking into the paramedics. Borkman had been a deputy when Liam, Cork’s father, was sheriff. He’d also been Liam’s good friend. He was a heavy man, in his late fifties, nearing retirement now, but still a good officer.

“Jesus,” he said when he saw the scene.

“Get the camera from your cruiser, Cy,” Cork said. “I need photos of this, and I need them now.”

Borkman spun and took his huge bulk out the door.

“Aphrodite,” Cork said, using the calm voice with which he’d spoken to her all along. “In a minute, we’re going to help you up, okay?”

She showed no sign that she’d heard him.

“And then I need to know what happened here.”

Now she lifted her head. Her face contorted and her eyes became dark slits. In a rasp of a voice that bespoke pure hatred, she said, “He killed her. That son of a bitch Axel butchered my little girl.”