第6章 The Foreman's Alibi

The old mill lot at Nyman's was a field of frozen gravel with four chimneys standing in it like a fist of fingers, and the wind came across it off the river without anything to stop it. Vail parked between two drifts and looked at the buildings. Half were shells, glass gone, doors standing open to the snow. The rest were locked and sealed by the new owner, Rurik Kelso, whose name was on a sign at the gate announcing a project he had not yet begun. "Stur died out here the first winter," Vail said. "He was found at the Keld, but he was drinking in the old shift office the night before, alone, or so the story went, and then he walked down to the river because a drunk man walks to water." "Is that what the file says?" "That's what the file says." He got out. "Come on. I want to see where a fifty-eight-year-old foreman with a bad hip would have walked in the dark." They picked through the drifts to the river-side of the lot, where a gate in the chain-link had been cut and mended and cut again, and a path of packed snow ran down through the willows to the bank. At the bottom the willows opened on the Keld, twenty feet of black water breathing steam into the cold like a mouth that would not close. "Somebody kept this path open," Runa said, studying the packed snow. "The snow's been walked on and refrozen and walked on again." "Somebody uses it." Vail looked back at the mill. "It's the shortest way from the lot to the water, and it doesn't show from any road." He walked the bank the way he had walked it the first morning, reading it, and this time he stopped where the willow roots came down and found what he had found before: two flat ovals in the snow, out of the wind, and the small tripod dents between them. "They're here too," he said. "The same perch." "The same person, at the same place, over four winters." Runa crouched and photographed the dents with her phone. "This is where he watches." They worked the path both ways and took casts and samples and wrote down the depth of the packed snow and the exact hour the light would reach the bank, and when they were done Vail stood at the gate and looked at the long spine of the mill where the shift office still had its windows boarded. "Stur's alibi," he said. "The file says he was alone and drunk. But a foreman doesn't drink alone in a building he doesn't own the keys to." They found the shift office door cut open on the far side, and inside, in the cold, a table with a bottle and two glasses and a chair pulled out, all of it frosted over. On the wall the old shift board still hung, and on it, in chalk faded to a ghost, the last shift assignments the mill had ever written. Vail looked at the board for a long time. "Stur, Kask, Holm, Muir," he read aloud. "All four on the same gang, the winter the mill closed." He turned to Runa. "They weren't just men who were there the night Ivar died. They were a crew. They worked the outfall together. Whatever Ivar found, all four of them helped put it in the water." "And you," Runa said. "And me." He wiped the chalk dust off his glove. "I didn't work the outfall. I covered the night. There's a difference in the ledger, but not in the ledger that counts." "You keep putting yourself in the same sentence as the four dead men," Runa said, as they came out through the mill gate. "Because I am in the same sentence," Vail said. "There were five men on that ice and four of them are in the water. That leaves one, and the one is the man who did not do the killing and did the covering, which is a smaller crime and a longer one, and I have had twenty years to find out how long it is." They drove back to town through the mill gate, and at the first stoplight Runa asked the question he had been waiting for. "The knots," she said. "Varti said padded restraint, broad, tied for days. Did the old files note anything on Stur's wrists?" "No postmortem. No photographs of the hands." Vail watched the light. "Whoever ruled them was in a hurry, and the hurry came from somewhere above a coroner." "Havik's chair." "Havik's chair, or the chair before him." The light changed and he turned north. "Which is why we stop asking the constabulary for help and start asking the men who used to sit in those chairs." Rolf Brekke lived in a bungalow on the bluff above the dam, where the reservoir lay behind the gates in a black sheet and the spillway was iced into white ropes. He was seventy-six and he moved slowly and he kept his house warm enough to grow orchids, which he did, in a window full of them, pink and heavy over the snow. He let them in and made them sit and he did not pretend not to know why they had come. "You've found the fifth," he said. "You knew there would be a fifth." "I knew there was a list." Brekke lowered himself into his chair and looked at the window and the winter beyond it. "I've known since the first winter, when Stur came out of the Keld. I read the report and I knew." "And you said nothing." "I said it to myself every night for four years." He looked at Vail. "I said the same thing to myself twenty years ago, when you brought me the Sund file and I told you the report would write itself. I've had a long time to be wrong." "Why did you tell me that?" Brekke was quiet. The orchids stood in the window like a garden in a locked room. "Because the mill came to me before you did," he said. "A man in a good coat, the mill's man. He told me Sund had been drinking on the ice and went under and there was nothing else in it, and he gave the station a check for the youth hockey team, and he asked me to make sure a young constable didn't go chasing a drowning into a business. And I said yes. I said yes because it was November and the check cleared and I was a sergeant with a pension coming." "You knew it was a lie." "I knew it was a lie." Brekke's hands lay still in his lap. "Now ask me the thing you came to ask." Vail leaned forward. "The man in the good coat. Who was he?" "Not the mill owner. The owner never came near this town." Brekke looked at Vail. "It was the safety officer. Corwin Muir. He's the one who brought the story and the check, and he's the fourth man to come out of that water. So if you want to know why a killer has been patient with this city for four years, she has been patient about the right four men first." He said she, and neither of them corrected him. Vail drove back to town with the heater going and did not say anything for a mile, because the old man's word had done what no file could do: it had made the shape of the thing plain. Four men had walked up that bank. Four men had died at the hole where they had left Ivar. The person doing the counting had known exactly who to count, and had known it long enough to wait, and waiting is a thing a killer does only when the killer is certain of the list. Outside, snow had begun again over the reservoir, fine and dry, and down at the Keld the river went on breathing its one warm breath into the cold, and somewhere on the ice someone was keeping a list of the men who had turned a drowning into a check that cleared. ---