“Get out!” Gretchen barked at me after she was safely tucked in.

“We’ll talk again,” I told her and left the hospital room. Loushine followed me out.

“Is this how things are done in the big city,” he asked when we were in the corridor, Gretchen’s door closed behind us. “Is this how trained homicide cops conduct investigations?”

I didn’t respond. Instead, I led Loushine to the hospital switchboard. “No calls in or out of Gretchen Rovick’s room until we tell you,” I instructed the operator. “By order of the sheriff’s department.”

The operator looked at Loushine, and he nodded. I took him by the arm and half pulled him toward the hospital door.

“Put a tap on her phone,” I told him. “Then you can release her calls. I want to know who she talks to.”

“Why?” Loushine asked.

“Because in the unlikely event that she actually was involved in the shooting, she might contact her two partners.”

“Oh,” Loushine replied with an expression that was as cheerful as three days of hard rain.

We were climbing into Loushine’s 4X4 after he made the necessary calls.

“You’re wrong, you know,” he said as he slid behind the steering wheel. “I did what you asked because the sheriff ordered me to give full cooperation. But you’re wrong.”

“Probably,” I agreed.

“No, I mean it,” Loushine said. “I remember this time, it was about six months after we hired her. Gretchen and I were called to a simple burglary; I was riding with her from time to time back then, doing the supervising-officer routine. It was a trifle—fishing equipment taken from a victim’s shed—and I acted like it, veteran cop telling the rookie not to get excited. The victim didn’t see it that way and became pretty upset at my indifference.

“After we took the complaint, we went back to the car. I was about to open the passenger door, when Gretchen suddenly drew her revolver, aimed across the roof of the squad, and yelled, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ She was aiming at someone standing right behind me. ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ she yelled again. I didn’t move an inch. Then Gretchen started counting, real slow but loud. ‘One, two, three …’ I’m standing there, praying to hear something hit the ground. Then I heard a muffled thud, and Gretchen yelled, ‘Step back!’

“I turn around, and there’s the owner of the shed with his hands in the air. On the ground is a crossbow. The man was going to shoot me in the back with an arrow because I didn’t take the theft of his fishing equipment seriously. Later, I asked Gretchen how high she was willing to count before she pulled the trigger. She told me she knew at three the guy would drop the bow.”

“And if he didn’t?” I asked.

“She would have killed him at four.”

“What has that got to do with this?” I asked him.

“Gretchen is cool enough,” he answered. “If she wanted Michael dead, she would have done it herself. Clean. And simple. No way she would have been as sloppy as the shooters at The Harbor.”

“Now there’s an endorsement,” I said smugly.

“She’s one of us,” Deputy Loushine snapped back.

“Hell, Gary,” I told him. “According to TV, according to the movies, cops go bad all the time.”

I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t come off that way.

twenty

I loved reading Jack London as a kid, loved learning the language of nature, listening to “the voices of wind and storm.” Even now I’m impressed by his violence, the violence of the unconquered wilderness, of the men and animals who call it home. Kreel County is a far cry from London’s forest primordial, of course. Honeycombed with highways, roads, and logging trails, it’s nearly impossible to escape man’s presence. Hike in a straight line long enough and you’re sure to trip upon some vestige of civilization: a snowmobile track, a power line, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. There are no packs of starving wolves to contend with, no rampaging grizzlies. Only hunters who can’t shoot straight. It’s much the same in northern Minnesota where my family kept a hunting and fishing cabin—at least it was a hunting and fishing cabin before electricity, before TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens turned it into something else. Still, it’s infinitely superior to existence in the concrete jungles of big-city America, where a man can live a lifetime without ever setting a foot to untrampled earth.

At my insistence Deputy Gary Loushine drove to Chip Thilgen’s cabin, even though he insisted Thilgen was not at home; he’d had people watching the place for nearly two days now. The cabin was located on a small lake at the base of a heavily wooded hill and virtually surrounded by poplar, fir, and birch trees. It was difficult to see from the narrow, seldom-used gravel road that cut through the forest between the cabin and the hill. We drove past it twice. An abandoned logging trail branched off from the gravel road well above the cabin and wound its way up the hill. After our third pass we took the trail as far as we could, eventually parking the 4X4 behind another Kreel County Sheriff’s Department vehicle that was hidden well out of sight. We worked the rest of the way up the steep hill on foot. At the top of the hill I paused to look at my watch. I really didn’t care what time it was. But it gave me an excuse to rest and regain my lost breath.

“Coming?” Loushine asked. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Right behind you,” I told him, a false smile on my face, as I reminded myself that I was in shape, that I worked out, that I know karate and jujitsu and aikido. I just don’t make a habit of climbing steep hills in the forest, is all.

We resumed pushing ourselves through the trees and underbrush until we found a small clearing with good sight lines to Thilgen’s cabin. Hunkered down at the edge of the clearing was a sheriff’s deputy—the one who had driven my car when I was escorted to the county line. He was watching the cabin with a pair of binoculars. He must have known we were coming because he didn’t even acknowledge our presence until we knelt next to him.

“Tell me you’re here to relieve me,” he said.

“Sorry,” Loushine said, promising that another deputy would be along shortly. “Anything?”

“Nope.”

Thilgen’s cabin was about three hundred yards below us. It was tiny, one of those one-story, prefabricated jobs built on cinder blocks—from that distance the entire structure looked like it could fit inside my living room. A short flight of stairs led to a narrow deck and the cabin’s only door. Like the cabin, the deck was stained red. A fire pit surrounded by a circle of large stones had been dug in back of the cabin, about fifty feet from what looked like a crumbling outhouse. Beyond the cabin I could see a small patch of lake peeking through the trees.

We sat and watched for a long time without speaking.

In the forest, first you hear nothing. Then you hear everything: birds chirping, crickets singing, wind whipping through tree branches and sounding just like running water. If you’re not familiar with it, the racket can be downright disconcerting. Sitting, not moving, concentrating completely on the cabin below me, my imagination began to amuse itself at the expense of my nerves. Several times I heard voices and laughter and footsteps yet saw nothing. I convinced myself that I was being watched, stalked; convinced myself that there was a psychotic killer hiding behind every bush—the same guy who escaped from the lunatic asylum in the stories we told ourselves as children … the one with the hook.

A hand gripped my shoulder. I knocked it away impulsively and pivoted on my heels, my hand deep in my jacket pocket digging for the Walther PPK.

Startled, Loushine pulled away from me. Then he smiled knowingly.

“Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again,” I warned him.

Loushine chuckled. “What do you want to do?” he asked.