The black Ford picked him up at the mailbox on Saturday morning and stayed with him for eleven miles.
He had been going to Two Harbors for screws and a roll of aluminium tape that Claire wanted for the vent. He saw the truck in his mirror before he had gone a quarter of a mile. It came out of a forestry road on the far side of 61, where it must have been waiting, and settled in four hundred yards behind him and stayed there, through Nordby and down the long grade to the Baptism River bridge.
It did not try to hide. That was the point. It stayed exactly where he could see it.
There was a scenic overlook three miles past the river: a half-moon of tarmac on the lake side of the road, with a stone wall along its edge and a brown sign with a picture of a camera on it. In summer it would be full of people from the Cities photographing the lighthouse. On a Saturday in October at half past nine in the morning, it was empty.
Thorsen indicated, slowed, and pulled in, and parked the van at the far end, nose to the wall. He turned off the engine and got out and went and stood at the wall with his hands in his pockets, looking at the lake.
It was a hundred feet straight down to the water. The rock was red here, and the lake below it so clear that he could see boulders on the bottom twenty feet down with the sun lying on them in shifting nets.
The black truck came in off the road behind him, and stopped, crossways, so that it blocked the van in against the wall. He heard the engine idle and then die. He heard the door.
He did not turn round.
“Nice view,” Pruitt said.
“It is.”
“Told you. Real pretty up here.” Boots on the tarmac, unhurried. They stopped about eight feet behind him and a little to his left. “Hale wants to see you.”
“Does he.”
“He wants you to come up to the lodge. Have a coffee. Talk like reasonable people. He said to ask you nice.” A pause. “I’m asking you nice.”
“You followed me for eleven miles to ask me nice.”
“I wanted to see where you’d go.” Pruitt’s voice had a smile in it. “You came here. Big empty pull-off, nobody around, hundred-foot drop. I’ve got to say, for a cop, that’s not real smart.” The smile widened a fraction. “Specially for a man who can’t keep his van on the road.”
Thorsen turned round.
Pruitt was standing with his weight on his back foot and his canvas jacket unzipped. Under it, on his right hip, there was a holster, and in the holster there was a pistol, a big square-backed polymer thing, and Pruitt’s right hand was resting on his belt about three inches from it, with the thumb hooked in, the way men stand when they want you to see the gun and want to be able to say afterwards that they never touched it.
“You’ve got a permit for that,” Thorsen said.
“Course I do. Ex-law enforcement. I can carry anywhere in the state.” Pruitt smiled. “You don’t, I’m guessing. Not here. Not anymore.”
“No,” Thorsen said, and walked towards him.
He did not hurry. That was what Ray had always said was the trick of it. A man who rushes you, you react to. A man who walks towards you at the pace of somebody crossing a car park to ask the time, you wait for. Pruitt waited. He had a fraction of a second to understand that Thorsen was not going to say anything, and he used it to start to move his hand, and by then it was too late, because Thorsen was there.
He put his left hand flat over Pruitt’s right, on the gun, and pressed it into the holster, and held it there. Pruitt was strong. It did not matter. Thorsen was stronger, and he had the leverage, and he had done this before. With his right hand he took Pruitt by the front of the jacket and turned him, not hard, and put his back against the side of the black truck, and leaned on him.
They stood like that. Close. Pruitt’s breath smelled of coffee and chewing tobacco. His face had gone a dark, mottled red, and his eyes were very wide.
“Let go of it,” Thorsen said quietly.
Pruitt’s hand stayed where it was for a second. Then it opened.
Thorsen drew the pistol out of the holster with his left hand, stepped back two paces, and looked at it. It was a Glock, a big one, a 21, loaded and chambered. He thumbed the magazine release and caught the magazine as it dropped, and racked the slide and caught the round that came out of the chamber in the same hand, and looked at it, and put it in his pocket. Then he turned and threw the magazine, overarm, out over the stone wall.
It went a long way. He watched it turn over in the sun, small and black, and drop, and go into the lake a hundred feet below with a splash he could not hear.
He held out the pistol to Pruitt, butt first, empty, with the slide locked back.
Pruitt did not take it at once. He was breathing hard through his nose. He looked at the gun, and at Thorsen, and at the wall where the magazine had gone, and something went across his face that was not quite fear and not quite rage, and under them, at the bottom, something Thorsen recognised from a great many interview rooms: the look of a man who has just been made smaller in front of himself, and will not forget it.
He took the gun.
“Things happen,” Thorsen said. “You said.”
Hale’s lodge was twenty miles inland, at the end of a private road that left the county highway at a gate with a stone pillar on each side and a cast-iron sign that said HALE — KETTLE LAKE — 1924.
He followed the black truck to it. That had been the arrangement, made without many words in the overlook car park: Pruitt in front, not stopping, and Thorsen behind, no closer than he had to be.
The road went through old pine, red and white, standing in long straight colonnades with their trunks bare for forty feet and their crowns closed overhead, so that it was like driving through the nave of a church. Nobody had cut here for a long time. Then the trees opened onto a small black lake with a fringe of reeds gone gold, and on a rise at the near end of it stood the lodge: whole trunks a yard through, gone silver with age, a long porch, a stone chimney at each end, and the additions of a century built carefully round it, like a family round a grandfather in a photograph.
Bryce Hale was standing on the porch in a fleece vest and jeans, holding two mugs of coffee. He came down the steps as Thorsen got out of the van, and held one of them out.
“Mr. Thorsen. Thank you for coming.” His handshake was dry and brief. He looked past Thorsen at Pruitt, who had got out of his truck and was standing beside it, and gave a small nod towards the trees, and Pruitt got back into the truck and drove round the side of the house and out of sight. Hale watched it go. “I’m sorry about Jarrett,” he said. “He’s very loyal. He was a deputy for eleven years, and he still thinks like one, which is to say badly. I asked him to invite you.”
“He invited me.”
“So I gather.” Hale looked at him with mild amusement. “He’ll have to get another magazine for that thing, I suppose. They’re not cheap.” He turned towards the porch. “Come and sit down. It’s warm enough in the sun.”
They sat on the porch in two old wooden chairs with the sun on their faces. Hale talked, and he was good at it: the lake, the lodge Josiah Hale had built in the winter of 1924 from the best of that year’s timber, the shore and its people, as though he were fond of them, and perhaps he was.
Thorsen drank the coffee, which was very good, and said nothing, and waited.
“Your cousin needs a lawyer,” Hale said at last. He said it in the same tone as everything else, conversationally, looking at the lake. “A real one. Not a public defender with sixty files. There’s a firm in Minneapolis, Brennan Haugh, they do the serious criminal work in this state. I’ve spoken to Tom Brennan. He’ll take Nils’s case. I’ll pay for it. All of it. No conditions.” He turned his head. “I want you to tell your uncle that. He won’t take it from me. He might take it from you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve known Arne Thorsen all my life, and Nils since he was born, and whatever happened out on those rocks, he deserves a proper defence.” Hale smiled slightly. “And because I’m not a fool, Mr. Thorsen. I know how it looks. A man dies who was looking into the title on land I’m selling. People talk. Walt Erickson stands up in a school gym and asks me what that fellow found. I’d like it known, when people talk, that I did right by the Thorsens.”
“What did he find?”
Hale was quiet for a moment. He set his mug down on the arm of the chair.
“Paul Strand,” he said, “wrote to my office in August asking for access to the company’s historical records. The old ledgers, the land files, my great-grandfather’s correspondence. We have it all. Josiah never threw away a piece of paper in his life. Strand said he was doing due diligence for Laurentian’s title insurer. I said no.” He looked at Thorsen. “I’d say no again. Those are private papers. A hundred and forty years of a family business. I’m not opening them to a title clerk on a fishing expedition.”
“What was he fishing for?”
“He thought there was something wrong with a deed. From 1924. The one that brought the Kettle River tract into the company, and the Point to your family. He thought one of the signatures wasn’t valid.” Hale’s voice was patient, a man explaining something tedious. “There’s a certain kind of person who hears the word allotment and thinks they’ve found the key to the whole history of the country. Every few years one of them turns up. A lawyer. A graduate student. A man from the Band office. Nothing ever comes of it, because there’s nothing there. The deed was recorded. It’s been relied on for a hundred years. Courts don’t unpick a century of title because somebody doesn’t like the look of an X.”
“Somebody went into his apartment after he died and took his laptop and his files.”
Hale did not move. But the stillness in him had a quality that it had not had before.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“The Baptism County sheriff did. It’s not in his file.”
“Then you should talk to Curt about it. Not me.” Hale picked up his mug again. “And if you want someone who had something to lose, ask Dennis Albrecht why he insured a title his own examiner was still digging under.”
Thorsen thought of a binder on a desk in Duluth with a printed tab, and a man looking at a clock. He kept it off his face.
“Where were you that night, Mr. Hale?”
Hale smiled, as if he had been waiting to be asked and was a little disappointed it had taken so long.
“I was on a dais at the St. Paul Hotel with the governor until eleven that night, Mr. Thorsen. There’s video. I gather that’s what people call an alibi. I’ll tell you something else, since we’re being frank. You’ve been told that Jarrett was on your uncle’s lane the night that man died. I know you’ve been told, because Arne rang Curt Hollister at home last night, and Curt told me, because Curt tells me everything. It’s a small county.” He drank. “Jarrett was there that day. That’s true. I sent him. Laurentian’s closing schedule had to be served on your uncle by hand, by the end of September, and I sent Jarrett with it, because I didn’t want it in the mail. He was there at about seven in the evening. Arne signed for it. Then Jarrett drove to Duluth, to his girlfriend’s, and spent the night there, and you can ask her, and you can ask the gas station on London Road where he filled up at ten past nine, because they’ll have him on camera.” He set the mug down. “I’d ask your uncle, if I were you, why he’s remembered him there at eleven.”
Hale watched him for a while. Then he got up, and said, “Come inside. I want to show you something,” and went in through the big door without waiting to see if Thorsen followed.
The main room went up two storeys to the roof beams. There was a fire in a stone fireplace big enough to stand in, and on the walls the heads of a moose, an elk, a wolf with its lip lifted. One whole wall was photographs, hundreds of them, in frames of every age: the camps, the mill, the men, the rafts of logs on the rivers in spring.
Hale went to one near the middle of the wall and stood in front of it, and waited for Thorsen to come and stand beside him.
It was a big print, sepia, a little foxed at the corners, in a heavy dark frame. It showed a dock. Thorsen knew the dock. He knew the shape of the rock behind it, and the line of the shore beyond, and the roof of a fish house, newer then, with a stone chimney at one end.
Two men stood on the dock in front of a catch of fish laid out in rows, hundreds of them, shining. One was a slim, tidy man in a three-piece suit and a homburg hat, with a watch chain across his waistcoat and a neat dark moustache, standing very straight, with one hand resting on a walking stick. The other was enormous. He was half a head taller than the man in the suit and twice as wide, in a fisherman’s wool sweater and rubber boots, with a cap pushed back on his head and a great blond beard, and he was holding a lake trout up by the gills in one hand as though it weighed nothing, and laughing.
Underneath, on the mount, somebody had written in white ink in a careful copperplate hand:
J. Hale & A. Thorsen. Thorsen Point. July 1925.
“Your great-grandfather and mine,” Hale said. “They were partners. Did you know that?”
Thorsen looked at the man with the fish. He looked at the shoulders, and the hands, and the way he stood with his weight back on his heels and his head up, the way Thorsen himself stood, the way Arne stood, the way his father stood at the end of a long day. He had never seen a picture.
“No,” he said.
“Partners,” Hale said again. “Anders fished, and Josiah bought his fish, and when Anders lost his boat and his nets in the big November storm in ’22, Josiah carried him through the winter. And in 1924 they made a deal, the two of them, together, over the land at the Kettle. The pine went to Josiah, and the shore went to Anders, and that deal made both our families. Everything I have and everything your uncle has came out of that dock and that handshake.” He turned and looked at Thorsen. His face was perfectly serious now. “Somebody would like to undo that. With a story about an X on a piece of paper. If they do, your uncle loses the Point. Not the four million dollars, the Point. The house, the fish house, the dock, everything. The Band gets it, or the federal government gets it, and they sort it out between them over twenty years in court. Laurentian walks away. Six hundred jobs walk away with it. And your cousin goes to prison anyway, because none of that has anything to do with what happened between him and Paul Strand on those rocks.”
The fire cracked. Up on the wall the wolf looked down at them with its glass eyes.
“I’m not threatening you,” Hale said. “I want to be very clear. I’m telling you where the road goes. You’re a man who follows things to the end, I gather. That’s admirable. I’m asking you to look at where this one ends before you start down it. For your family’s sake.” He held out his hand. “Brennan Haugh. Tell Arne. The offer stands.”
Thorsen looked at the hand for a moment. Then he took it, because it cost nothing and told him something, and it told him that Bryce Hale’s palm was perfectly dry.
He drove back down the private road under the pines with the photograph in front of his eyes.
J. Hale & A. Thorsen. July 1925. A man laughing on a dock with a fish in his fist, sixteen months after somebody had signed a deed with an X.
At the gate with the stone pillars he stopped, and sat with the engine running, and took out the 7-Eleven phone. There was one bar. He found the number Heikkinen had keyed into it himself at the impound lot, with no name against it, in case you need to talk about local history.
It rang four times.
“Heikkinen.”
“It’s Thorsen.”
A pause, with a radio in it, and what sounded like a chainsaw a long way off. “It’s Saturday. I’m stacking wood.”
“Hale says Pruitt was on the lane at seven that evening, serving a closing schedule on my uncle, and that he was in Duluth by nine. He says there’s a camera at a gas station on London Road.”
The chainsaw stopped.
“Does he,” Heikkinen said.
“Can you check it?”
“I can check a gas station camera. It’s not hard. It’s not even interesting.” Another pause. “Why are you telling me? It hurts your uncle’s story. It helps the sheriff’s.”
“Because I want to know what happened,” Thorsen said. “Not what helps.”
The radio played. He could picture the old Finn in his woodlot, maul in one hand, thinking about it.
“I’ll call you Monday,” Heikkinen said. “And Thorsen.”
“What?”
“Wednesday I’m driving down to the Cities for a training day. Very dull. Use of force. I’ll be done at three.” The voice did not change at all. “Northfield’s forty minutes south of there. I’ve never been. I hear there’s a nice college.”