Thorsen heard Megan Ostrowski before he saw her, coming down the corridor at twenty to nine, her voice quite level and quite clear.
“No, Sheriff. I’ve read it. I read it at six o’clock this morning, in my kitchen. I’d like to see him now, please.”
The lock went over and the door opened. She was small, dark-haired, pale, thirty-four, in a navy parka over a grey suit, with a leather case under her arm that had been somebody’s father’s.
“Mr. Thorsen. I’m Megan Ostrowski, the county attorney. I’m declining to charge you.” She said it to him, but loudly enough for the corridor. “You walked in off state forest land across an unposted boundary, and when the landowner’s agent asked you to leave you left, which is what the statute asks of you, and there’s a film on a young man’s phone that shows you doing it, which Mr. Pruitt kindly sent the sheriff’s office as evidence.” She turned her head. “The posting signs are on the wrong section line, Sheriff.”
Hollister was in the corridor behind her, smiling. The muscle in his jaw stood out under the smile like a knot in a rope.
“Well, now, Megan,” he said. “I’d call that a technicality.”
“So would I,” said Megan Ostrowski. “It’s the kind they make the law out of.”
They gave him back his things at the desk in a plastic bag. His belt, his laces, his wallet. Ray’s napkin, folded, a little damp. The 7-Eleven phone.
He turned it on at the counter while Hollister watched from the doorway of his office with his thumbs in his belt, and went to the photographs. The last one was of frost on the van’s windscreen in Claire’s yard. No brass cap. No pink ribbon on a stake.
He looked up. Hollister looked back at him pleasantly.
“Phone working all right?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Those cheap ones, you never know.”
Outside, in a wind straight off the lake, Wally was already in the grey Ford with the engine running.
“I’ve got eleven photographs of a brass cap on an iron pipe,” he said through the window, to nobody in particular. “I printed them twice. One set’s in my desk and one’s in my freezer. It’s the only place in my house nobody looks but me.”
Ostrowski stopped on the steps beside Thorsen and turned up her collar.
“Judge Pike would have heard your trespass this morning,” she said quietly. “He goes fishing every June with Bryce Hale on Kettle Lake. His grandfather was Elmer Pike. You’ll have seen the name on a deed.”
“Small county.”
“Everybody’s somebody’s grandson. From now on, anything I need signed in this case goes to a judge in Duluth who has never been fishing with anybody.” She went down the steps, and at the bottom she turned. “Don’t get arrested again, Mr. Thorsen.”
She got into a small red Mazda with a parking permit for the courthouse on the dash and drove away up the hill.
Wally bought two coffees at the Kwik Trip at the bottom of the hill and parked facing the LEC across the road. He took two things out of his corduroy coat. The first was a still photograph printed on office paper: a street of frame houses at night under a single streetlight, and a black pickup at the kerb with a plough mount and a light bar.
“Shawna Kuznia’s downstairs neighbour,” Wally said. “Doorbell camera. In October he told me it recorded over itself. Then his son-in-law showed him the cloud.” He tapped the corner of the print. 09/30 21:26. “Truck parks at nine twenty-six. It doesn’t move till six-ten in the morning. Nobody gets in it. Nobody gets out. I watched the whole night.” His finger moved to the little car tucked against the truck’s front bumper. “Her Corolla’s parked in front of it. That doesn’t move either.”
“So Pruitt didn’t kill Paul Strand.”
“Not unless he walked to the Point and back in the dark.” Wally drank his coffee. “Doesn’t clear him for your van.”
“No.”
“And then there’s this.” The second thing was an envelope, and on the back of it, in Wally’s careful pencil hand, six lines. “Paul Strand’s cell records. Court order, from a judge in Duluth who’s never been fishing with anybody. Came Friday.” He laid the envelope on the steering wheel. “I’ve copied out what matters. The rest is his mother and his dentist.”
09/29 14:06 out → Lacourse Marine & Welding, 2 min
09/30 22:14 out → D. Albrecht (home), 9 min
09/30 22:39 out → Thorsen Pt landline, 6 min 12 sec
09/30 23:31 in ← C. Hollister (cell), unanswered
10/01 00:31 in ← Thorsen Pt landline, unanswered, to voicemail
Last network registration 00:13. Sector: Nordby north (22:14–23:58), then the Point.
Thorsen read it twice.
“Nordby north,” Wally said. “The mast on the water tower. Covers the shore road from the edge of town to about your uncle’s lane. He sat somewhere north of Nordby for an hour and three-quarters, making phone calls.”
“Walt Erickson’s kitchen,” Thorsen said.
“That’s what I thought. That chair.” Wally did not look at him. “Gary Erickson says it was the middle of the month.”
“Gary Erickson says a lot of things.”
Wally put his finger on the third line.
“The landline in your uncle’s kitchen. Only phone out there. Ten thirty-nine on the night Paul Strand died, he calls your uncle and talks for six minutes.” The finger moved past the next line, and down. “And the phone stops talking to anybody at twelve-thirteen. That’s when it went in the lake, or he did. And at twelve thirty-one your uncle rings it. From his kitchen. Eighteen minutes after.” Wally took his finger away. “A man ringing a dead man’s phone so there’s a record he was waiting for a guest. I’ve seen it done. Once. A dentist in Eveleth.”
“That’s clever for a fisherman.”
“He’s had a long time to get clever.” Wally drank some coffee. “Your uncle told the sheriff he never heard from Strand after his second visit. He told you he didn’t know Strand was coming back that night. At his own table.”
He had given an old man a week, for the truth, and the old man had never mentioned a six-minute phone call. You could not keep your side of a bargain the other man had never been in.
“He told me something,” Thorsen said. “Last Thursday. At his table.”
He told it the way he had told it to Claire, in order, with nothing added. Wally did not write anything down or interrupt, and when it was done he sat with both hands on the wheel at ten to two, like a man taking his test.
“A statement against interest,” he said at last. “To the cousin of the accused. No caution, no lawyer, no tape. At a kitchen table.” He breathed out through his nose. “I can use you. His lawyer will eat you. An ex-cop with an LAPD file and a family grudge, who sat on it a week before he told anybody.” He did not say it unkindly. “I need somebody who was there.”
They both knew who. A man of eighty on a hill above San Pedro, with a bag.
“I gave him a week,” Thorsen said. “From last Thursday. To tell it to you himself. I told him after that I’d tell you, with him or without him.”
“That’s Thursday coming.”
“Yes.”
“And then he lied to you about a telephone.” Wally nodded slowly. “So you’re two days early.”
“I’m two days early.”
“Good.” Wally reached into the coat again. “One more. Full post-mortem came. She’s careful, the ME.” He had it by heart. “Laceration four and a half centimetres, curved, one margin straight as a ruler. Depressed fracture under it with a crescent edge. Particulate in it: grit off the boulders, most of it, and some she won’t put a name to. She’s sent it all to St. Paul, and they’ve got a queue like the DMV.” He turned a page in his head. “And the fall. Cheekbone broken, two ribs, the face torn up on the rock, and hardly a bruise round any of it. Not much blood pressure left by then. Nothing on his hands. He didn’t put them out. The head came first. She wrote that down too, in a footnote nobody read.”
“The priest’s got lead in the head,” Thorsen said. “Let into the wood, flush. That’s your edge. It’s hanging on its nail over the knives. He told me so himself.”
“Lead’s round too.” Wally turned the coffee cup in his hand. “The wound’s wrong for a fish club. Something with a rim. The end of a pipe. A bottle. A cop’s flashlight.”
He looked up the slope at the LEC, at the black Tahoe parked by the door in the space marked SHERIFF.
“Curt carries a four-cell,” he said. “They all do. You watched him knock your plug out with his.”
Thorsen had. And the same man had wanted this closed by breakfast on the first of October, and would not have the BCA, and had taken the kindest sentence the ME could write and walked off with it.
Wally put his finger back on the envelope, on the line he had skipped.
“And at eleven thirty-one the county sheriff rings him. On his own cell, not the office. Strand doesn’t pick up.” Wally took the finger away. “Curt’s never said a word about that. Not to me, not in his file.”
“Why would the sheriff ring a title examiner at half past eleven at night?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Wally said. “I’m saying I’d like to know. And I’d like to know where Curt Hollister was at twelve-thirteen on the first of October. That’s all.”
“He fell fifteen feet onto rocks, Wally. Rocks have edges.”
“Huh,” said Wally.
He folded the envelope and put it away. Then he took it out again, and unfolded it, and put his finger on the top line, the one from the twenty-ninth.
“And that’s your welder.”
Thorsen let it lie. After a while Wally put the envelope back in his coat, and put the car in gear.
Thorsen did not tell him about the light in the smokehouse. He told himself he did not know why.
Arne was splitting wood behind the house, in his shirtsleeves in the cold, without hurrying, as if his hands had been doing it for seventy years and he was only going along with them.
He saw the van and put the maul down and came across the yard with his face grey with worry.
“Danny. They had you in the jail all night? For walking in the woods?” He took Thorsen by both arms. “Nils was there, they said. Next to you. How did he look?”
“He’s all right. He told a deputy to fuck off at three in the morning.”
Arne stared at him. Then his face cracked, and he laughed, a great surprised bark that went off the side of the fish house and came back.
“Nils did? Who to?”
“Travis Kline.”
“Oh, that boy. He learned to swim off our dock.” Arne let go of him, wiping his eyes.
“Paul Strand phoned you,” Thorsen said. “Ten thirty-nine, the night he died. And you phoned him back at twelve thirty-one.”
The smile did not go anywhere at once. It stayed on Arne’s face for a second or two after there was nothing behind it, the way a light stays on in a window after the person has left the room.
“He did, God help me,” Arne said. He rubbed his face with one hand. “He called late. I thought it was Nils in a ditch. And it was that fellow, all wound up like a kid. Asked about Dad. About ’86. Had the Lacourse fellow ever come to the Point.” He shook his head. “I said, it’s eleven o’clock at night, son, I’m seventy-six. Come in the morning.”
Nils in a ditch. He had heard Nils’s truck come home at half past ten. He had said so over the egg coffee, on the first afternoon.
“And twelve thirty-one?”
Arne looked away, out past the fish house at the cove, where there was a skin of new ice along the stones. A gull came down on the dock and walked the length of it and flew off again before he spoke.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I lay there. And I got up and rang him to say don’t come at all. Not in the morning, not ever. I’d thought better of it.” He looked at his hands. “He never picked up.”
“You told Hollister you never heard from him.”
“I told Hollister a lot of things that morning. My son was sitting in my kitchen with his hands shaking and a dead man on my rocks.”
“You sat at that table last Thursday,” Thorsen said, “and told me you’d decided to tell it. All of it.”
“I’d decided a lot of things,” Arne said. “At half past twelve I undecided them.”
It was a good answer. It had the shape of a true one. But honest memory gets worse with handling and a lie gets better, and come in the morning had been a fair first story. This one was better made. He thought of the card under the walleye magnet on the fridge, with a Duluth number on it, which he had read on his first night and said nothing about.
“Where are you sleeping, Danny?” Arne said.
“Stone Bay.”
Arne nodded slowly, looking at the ice.
“She’s a good woman. Her dad was a good man. Everybody liked Leonard.” He set another round on the block. “People will talk.”
“They’re talking.”
“I know it.” He smiled, rueful and kind. “I’d rather have you where I can see you, Danny. That’s all. Wait there.”
He came back from the house with a quart jar of pickled herring, onion and allspice in the brine, the lid tied down with a square of cloth.
“Marit’s recipe. Tell her it’s from Arne. Nils and me took her mother soup one winter, when she was poorly. She’ll remember.” He clapped Thorsen on the shoulder, hard. “Go on. Go and be a fool somewhere warm.”
Thorsen stood with the jar in his hands and watched him pick up the maul.
He nearly left it on her mailbox. In the end he put it on her bench and told her whose it was, because anything else would have been the Thorsen way of doing it.
Claire read the label, HERRING NOV in Arne’s block capitals. “He doesn’t know you told me.”
“No.”
“Soup for my mother. Herring for me.” She put it on the shelf in the office, next to a coffee can of welding rod. “I’m not opening it. I’m not throwing it out either. I want to see how long it can sit there.”
The phone woke him at two-oh-seven.
The screen showed a 323 number he knew by now, the only one in the phone that ever rang after midnight, and nobody calls at two in the morning to say that everything is fine.
“I need you awake,” Brooks said. Her voice was tight and fast, with a car engine idling behind it. “Mateo’s got a gun.”
He sat up.
She told it in fragments. Lonnie Dwyer, Royce Dwyer’s cousin, drove a tow truck out of Sun Valley. For four nights he had parked it across the street from Rosa’s building in Frogtown with the amber lights going round, doing nothing. On Monday he had followed Mateo home from school at walking pace. On Tuesday he had pulled up beside him at a bus stop and rolled the window down and said, pleasantly, that it was a hard thing, being a witness. Witnesses forget things. Or they get forgotten.
“Rosa found a box of nine-millimetre under his bed tonight and he wasn’t in it. She’s got his phone on Find My. He’s under the Fletcher Drive bridge, down in the riverbed.” A breath. “I’m on the bridge with my lights off. I’ve called him nine times. He won’t pick up for me.”
“Have you called it in?”
“No.” Flat and hard. “If I call it in I get six cars and a helicopter and some kid eight months on the job looking down a riverbank at midnight at a Latino kid with a gun in his hand. You know how that ends. He’ll pick up for you, Thorsen. He sends you frogs.”
“Stay in the car. Don’t go down.”
“I know how to do my job.”
“I know you do. Stay in the car.”
He found the number with the frog beside it and listened to it ring under a bridge in Los Angeles.
Six rings. Then it was picked up, and there was nothing. Breathing, and a trickle of water over concrete, and high above it the hum of a freeway.
“Mateo,” Thorsen said. “It’s Thorsen.”
A voice he hardly knew, thick and young and very far down. “She called you.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“Then you won’t mind talking to me for a while. It’s two in the morning here and I’m in a van in the snow and I can’t sleep.”
Thorsen kept his voice low and level and slow, the way his father kept his. “Where’s the gun?”
A long pause. “In my hand.”
“Is your finger on the trigger?”
Another pause.
“Take it off. Lay it flat along the side, above the trigger guard. You know where.”
He heard the boy breathing.
“Okay,” Mateo said.
“Thank you.” Thorsen let a moment go by. “Who’s it for?”
“Him.” It came at once. Then, so quietly the freeway nearly covered it: “I don’t know.”
Thorsen sat very still in the dark.
He had heard that answer before, in rooms, on rooftops, once at the end of a pier in San Pedro from a man who had been his training officer. He knew that if he said the next thing wrong there was no taking it back.
“Okay,” he said. “Then we’ll talk about both.”
He talked for forty minutes. He did not hurry. Twice the boy cried, and Thorsen let him, and said nothing, and waited, the way his father had waited at the ends of beds.
He told him what Lonnie Dwyer wanted, because he had understood it the moment Brooks said tow truck.
“He doesn’t need you dead. He needs you with a gun. A seventeen-year-old with a gun he bought on the street, under a bridge at midnight. That’s a felony. That’s what the amber lights were for, and the nice voice. And then on the eighth of December, when you stand up in Department Thirty, his cousin’s lawyer says the witness is an armed juvenile with a felony arrest and a grudge. And Royce Dwyer goes home.”
The water trickled over the concrete.
“I didn’t think of that,” Mateo said.
“No. He did.”
He told him about Ray, who had carried a gun his whole working life and never fired it, and used to say a gun in your hand makes every problem in the world the same shape, and the shape is a hole. He told him that Marisol had carried nothing on that river path but a phone, and that a phone had brought them down, in a boy’s pocket.
“That was you,” he said. “Not a gun. You. That’s the bravest thing anybody in your family ever did, and your sister did it first, and neither of you needed a gun to do it.”
The boy was crying again. Thorsen waited.
“You asked Brooks about the academy,” he said, when it had passed. “No felonies. You know what the job is, most of it? Somebody at two in the morning with a gun in their hand, and getting them to put it down. If you want it, this is the first night of it. You can do it right now. On yourself.”
“I’m so tired, man,” Mateo said. “He knows my mom’s shifts. He said it like he was telling me the time.”
“I know. Brooks is going to deal with Lonnie Dwyer. That’s her job. Your job’s tonight.”
He heard the boy breathe in, and out.
“What do I do.”
“Put it down on the concrete. Gently, pointing at the water. Stand up and walk away from it. Ten steps. Count them. Then up the ramp to the bike path and up to the bridge, with your hands out of your pockets. Brooks is up there on her own. She’s been there two hours. She says she’s freezing. It’s fifty-five degrees.” He paused. “Will you do that?”
Nothing. The water. The freeway.
Then a small scrape. Metal on concrete.
Then footsteps. He counted them with the boy without either of them saying a word. Ten. Then faster, on a slope, and the freeway getting louder. A car door, somewhere above. A woman’s voice, close and quiet, not a police voice at all.
“Hey, kid.”
The phone went muffled against cloth. Thorsen sat in the dark in Minnesota with his elbows on his knees and listened to Imani Brooks say Okay. Okay. I got you. Get in the car, it’s warm, over and over, the way you say it to a child, and a door closing, and then nothing but an engine idling.
Then Brooks was on the line, not quite steady. “He’s in the car with my coat on him. I’m going down for it.” He heard her go, and come back, slower. A click and a rattle, a magazine coming out, a slide going back. “Cheap nine. Serial’s ground off.” A pause. “There was one in the chamber.”
“I’m keeping it,” Brooks said, louder, to the passenger seat. “You hear me? Till you’re twenty-one and you’ve got a permit.” To Thorsen, quietly: “It’s found property. I found it under a bridge. No name. And at seven o’clock I’m going to be at Lonnie Dwyer’s tow yard with two uniforms and a very bad attitude. I’m taking him home. His mother’s been at the window since eleven.”
“Brooks.”
“What?”
“I’ll be there on the eighth.”
“I know,” Imani Brooks said. “I wrote it down.” And hung up.
It was ten past three. He slid the side door back and the cold came in like water, and he sat on the edge of the bunk in it with his boots unlaced and the phone in his hand and looked out.
Claire’s house was dark. The Point was eight miles up the shore, behind two headlands and the dark, and he could not see it from here.
He saw it anyway. The chimney against low cloud, and the little window beside it, and in the window a yellow flicker, at one in the morning, in a firebox that had not been lit since Labor Day.
A telephone ringing in that kitchen at ten thirty-nine. Come in the morning. The same telephone, at twelve thirty-one, ringing a man who had stopped answering anything eighteen minutes before.
He had spent his life not believing people. He believed rooms. And he had lived in that place for five weeks and believed an old man with enormous hands, because the old man had taught him a bowline, and called him Danny in a voice he had not heard since he was eleven. He had gone on believing him about Paul Strand after Gull Rock, because he had wanted to; because one killing at the Point was a history and two were a family.
He sat in the open door of the van in the snow with the cold going into him, and for the first time he let the thought come all the way up, and gave it its name.
Arne.