Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger Page B

said in a voice that was a very good imitation of the Judge, “I don’t know.”
    Cork laughed and stood up. “After you’ve talked to Justine, will you let me know what you found out, if anything?”
    “All right. And you’ll let me know how your snowmobile expedition goes, okay?”
    *  *  *
    He drove to the reservation of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and parked at the deserted marina. He backed the snowmobile off the trailer and headed out onto the frozen lake toward the Loons, a little more than a mile distant. The sun off the snow was a blinding hammer, and Cork wore his tinted goggles against the glare. The temperature was double digits below zero and expected to rise only a few degrees that day. It was pretty typical weather in the North Country in the dead of winter, and Cork loved it. He lovedhow the deep cold cleaned the air and how everything he looked at seemed more clearly defined. In summer, the heat and the humidity that often accompanied it made things seem to melt into one another like the images of an oil painting in which the colors had run. In winter, a cold winter especially, each thing brought into being by God or the Great Mystery or Kitchimanidoo or whatever you chose to call the force of creation stood out separately from every other thing in an almost mystical way. Half a mile out, he looked toward the shoreline southeast and found the break in the birch trees that marked the trail to the Daychilds’ old prefab home. Half a minute later, he was following the tracks that he and whoever had killed the dog had left going to and from the Loons the night before. He quickly arrived at the place where the dog killer’s snowmobile had come and gone, and he set his Bearcat into that track and followed southwest toward the open lake and Aurora.
    Long before the details of the far shoreline became clear to him, he could see smoke from the chimneys of town rising straight into the air like erect white feathers pressed against the powdery blue sky. As he drew nearer, a small village of ice fishing houses appeared on the lake. He figured the track of the dog killer’s snowmobile would head through that gathering and be lost among the maze of tracks left by other snowmobiles. To his surprise, however, the killer’s track veered north and stayed well clear of the fishing shanties. Cork wondered if the killer had been concerned about being seen and identified, even in the dead of night. He followed the track easily for a few more minutes, drawing very near to the western shore of Iron Lake a couple of miles north of town. There the killer had entered an area crisscrossed by dozens of other snowmobiles, and the track became impossible to follow. But that area in itself was interesting, because it was near the mouth of the White Iron River. Although it was not the safest route, the broad river was often used by snowmobilers to access the lake. The system of snowmobile trails in Tamarack County was like a spiderweb with threads reachinginto every corner of the county, even the most remote. Many of those threads crossed the White Iron River. Whoever had killed the Daychilds’ dog could have come from just about anywhere.
    It didn’t leave Cork with much except that he was almost certain the killer was, as Stella Daychild had said, a chimook . And because the killer had come a distance and gone out of his way to avoid being seen, the killing of the dog had not been just a random act of violence. Someone wanted to punish the Daychilds or to send them a terrible and frightening message. Cork thought about the guy Stella had described, the one she believed had followed her to the rez from the casino, the man with a mole like a fly on his cheek. She’d said that just his look had been enough to make her nervous. Whoever he was, was he the kind of man who, for whatever reason, would behead a dog that was too trusting for its own good?
    But in the way he’d trained himself to think over a lifetime of looking beyond the