New drifts blanketed old, the layered bedding of a landscape deep in slumber, mounded as though with the forms of sleepers dreaming. The bone-pale skeletonized limbs of winter-pasted trees, chokeberry and moosewood and gray poplars, and the storm-crusted boughs of evergreens more white than black, not green at all in the night, rendered a monochromatic scene in the spectral light of the snowfields.
In his sheriff’s-department Jeep, Luther Tillman drove alone into the out-county, by the mile further convinced that the mass murder at the Veblen Hotel was not an insane incident complete unto itself, but was only the beginning of something. The contentment and many pleasures of his much-blessed life rested on the thinnest ice.
With no light in any window, Cora Gundersun’s single-story white-clapboard house, nestled in late-winter swaddling, did not loom into view suddenly complete, but instead gradually articulated in the headlights. He turned onto the driveway, which had not been plowed, drove around to the back of the house, and parked behind Rob Stassen’s Jeep. He killed the headlights and the engine.
Exhaust vapor plumed from the tailpipe and crystalized as Rob got out of his vehicle and closed the door.
As Luther approached the deputy, Cora’s long-haired dachshund sprang into the driver’s seat of the Jeep and peered out the side window with solemn interest.
“Dixie won’t have had her dinner,” the sheriff said.
“I thought of that.” Rob was thirty-six, ten years a Navy MP before he had enough of foreign ports and came home to help keep the peace. “I found her kibble. Had to coax her to eat. Even then, she wouldn’t eat much. She trembles and whimpers, poor thing. It’s like she knows.”
“Dogs know,” Luther agreed.
“Cora of all people, Minnesota Teacher of the Year. It takes the wind out of you to think about it.”
Heading toward the nearby back porch, snow crunching-squeaking as it compacted under his boots, Luther said, “One way or another, this Cora today wasn’t the Cora we knew.”
“You mean like a brain tumor or something?”
“We’ll never know. Not enough left of her for an autopsy.”
The porch steps had been swept clear of snow. Climbing them, Luther said, “No police notice on the door, no seal?”
“They were sort of going by the book at first, until that Hendrickson guy showed up. Then they went out of here with their tails between their legs.”
“What Hendrickson guy?”
“Booth Hendrickson from the Department of Justice. He must’ve cracked a whip, I don’t know why.”
The FBI was only a semi-independent agency, under the authority of the Department of Justice.
“You get his card?” Luther asked.
“He claimed he was out of them. Maybe he was. Too Harvard-and-Yale if you ask me. But his Justice ID looked real enough, and the specialists from Quantico knew him.”
“What did he say to them? Why did he pull them out?”
“Wasn’t privy, Sheriff. To Hendrickson, I was just a mall cop. House is locked. He took the key, so if you think we need to do this, we’ll have to force the door, maybe find an unlatched window.”
Luther said, “Cora hid a key in case she got locked out.”
He picked up a long-handled, stiff-bristled brush that leaned against the wall, and he scraped the snow off his boots.
“They already tracked it up pretty bad in there, sir.”
“We don’t need to add to it, Robbie.”
Rob Stassen used the brush while Luther felt for the key on the lintel ledge overhead. He unlocked the door, switched on the lights.
Havoc in the kitchen. Melted snow puddled the linoleum. Partial muddy footprints overlapped like some antic mockery of abstract art. Cabinet doors stood open. The contents of the trash can had been turned out on the floor, gone through, and then left uncollected.
Black fingerprint powder mottled the table, the refrigerator door, the cabinets. They would have been seeking prints other than Cora’s, in case she’d had co-conspirators. Nitrile gloves, worn by investigators to avoid muddling the scene with their prints, had been stripped off and thrown on the floor or left on counters.
“This look like the work of the FBI you know?” Luther asked.
“Scene’s been contaminated, Sheriff. It’s not movie FBI.”
“Maybe it hasn’t been for a long time. Were they collecting evidence or eliminating it?”
“Lord alive, did you really just ask that question?”
Luther stood by the dinette table, considering a thick spiral-bound notebook that had been left open. “This is Cora’s. Nobody I’ve ever known has handwriting half as neat as hers.”
“You’d think a machine wrote it,” the deputy said.
For this entry, she had used only the front of each page. The left side of the revealed spread remained blank.
On the right, starting at the top, she had written, Sometimes at night sometimes at night sometimes at night…As if she had sat here in some quasi-autistic state, her mind stuck like an old-fashioned phonograph needle in one groove of a vinyl record, those three words filled line after line.
Luther turned a page, then another, a fourth and fifth, all alike in content, until he came to where she continued the thought that she needed so badly to express: Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, I come wide awake, I come wide awake…
For six pages, Cora repeated only those last four words, which were formed time after time with eerie regularity.
When Luther found new material eight pages later, Rob Stassen, standing beside him, said, “I’ve got ice in my veins.”