Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger Page A

left at the Daychilds’. He looked tired. He said he’d stayed up half the night talking with Marlee, trying to get her calmed down enough so that she could sleep. Cork wondered if talking was the only technique his son had employed. Stephen offered to go with him back out to the rez, but Cork told him to get some sleep, and Stephen was fine with that. He helped Cork hook the trailer with its snowmobile to the hitch on the Land Rover, then dragged himself inside.
    On his way to the Daychilds’ home, Cork stopped at the sheriff’s department. Over coffee in her office, Dross told him what she knew.
    Deputies Azevedo and Pender had spent the night running the prints they’d taken from the Judge’s garage and his wife’s car. There were lots of prints on the big Buick, but only one set matched those on the knife blade, the rubber tubing, and the gas cans. That one set belonged to the Judge. It would be natural, of course, to expect the Judge’s prints to be all over the things he owned, so that in itself wasn’t necessarily telling. What was telling, Dross said, was the interview she’d conducted with Ralph Carter once his attorney had arrived.
    “He totally clammed up, Cork. Except for ‘I don’t know,’ I couldn’t get a word out of him. Did he have any idea why hiswife might have gone to Saint Paul on Tuesday? Any idea why she didn’t tell him? Any idea why, in fact, she’d lied to him about it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Broken record.”
    “Maybe he doesn’t know.”
    “That’s the thing. He’s not a good liar. It was all over his face and in his body language. There’s a lot he’s not telling.”
    “Any word from the BCA lab on that blood sample you sent them?”
    “I called Simon Rutledge, asked him to put a stat on it. He’s seeing what he can do. It’ll be a while.”
    “In the meantime?”
    “If someone really did empty the tank on the car Evelyn Carter was driving, I’d like to understand how they got the cans out of and back into the garage.” She sipped her coffee and said, as if offhand, “Of course, if it was the Judge, that wouldn’t have been a problem.”
    “You ask him where he was the evening his wife went missing?”
    “I did. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and told me, and I quote, ‘I got one car, woman, and my wife was driving it that night. Where the hell do you think I was?’ I asked him if there was any way he could prove that, and his lawyer—”
    “Abramson?”
    “Yeah, Al Abramson.”
    “A good man.”
    “And a good lawyer. He said it sounded very much like the kind of question one might ask a suspect. Was the Judge a suspect? And if so, what, in my mind, made him so?”
    “Did you tell him you thought the Judge was feeding you a lot of bullshit and that in itself was reason enough?”
    She smiled. Although she wore no makeup, she was still, in her straightforward way, attractive. She was wearing her uniform, something she rarely did. He figured she was going to do a lot of official investigating that day and wanted the force of her authority evident.
    “So, where do you go from here?” he asked.
    She looked at her watch. “The Judge’s daughter arrived this morning. I’ve already spoken with her on the phone and asked if she’d mind coming in today so that I could talk to her about her mother and our investigation.”
    “She said yes?”
    “In a heartbeat. She seems a good deal more worried about Evelyn than her father is.”
    The mug Dross had given him was almost empty. Cork stared at the last mouthful, which was full of grounds. “I believe Ralph’s the kind of man who, given the right circumstances, might kill his wife, but we come back to motive.” He gave her a questioning look, to which she offered only a shrug in reply. “We also have the issue of how that feeble old goat would even be able to manage siphoning the gas tank and hauling around the heavy cans.”
    “Maybe he had help.”
    “Who?”
    She