Boundary Waters Read Online Free PDF Page A

long crooked fingers. At the moment he was dressed in a white shirt, gray pants, black suspenders. He looked tired, but he often looked that way. His wife Arletta suffered from Alzheimer’s, and between his duty to the voters and his duty to his wife, Schanno had those huge hands of his more than full.
    He waved Cork in like an impatient cop directing traffic. “Close the door behind you.”
    “Good evening to you, too, Wally,” Cork said.
    Three men were in the office with Schanno. Two were black, one white. They wore suits, although a couple of them had their coats off, ties loosened, sleeves rolled back. The windows were closed. The air in the office was warm, a little rank from the sweat of worried men. They’d been huddled in front of a map taped to Schanno’s wall. When Cork came in, they turned. He felt their eyes go over every inch of him, but their faces registered about as much emotion as if he were nothing but a draft of air.
    The tallest of the men was the first to move toward Cork and offer his hand.
    “Mr. O’Connor, Special Agent in Charge Booker T. Harris. FBI. I appreciate your coming.”
    Like the deep measured tone of his voice, his handshake was firm and purposeful. A man used to command. His hair was short and for the most part black, although gray had begun to flair along his temples. His skin was light, like maple wood.
    “Agent Harris,” Cork said, and nodded.
    Harris turned to the nearest of the others, a man whose skin was dark brown with just a hint of red, like cinnamon tea. “This is Special Agent Sloane.”
    Sloane reminded Cork of a linebacker he knew in college, a man low to the ground and solid. But if Sloane had indeed played football, his best games were thirty years behind him. Much of his muscle had gone to fat, although there was still a lot of power visible in his big chest and shoulders. Cork and Agent Sloane exchanged a decent handshake. The man’s eyes were a liquid brown and tired. His sleeves were rolled back and his huge forearms were covered with white scar tissue like long scratches on mahogany.
    “And Special Agent Grimes.”
    Grimes was lean and grinning. He had red-brown hair in a military crew cut, a jawbone sharp as a machete, blue-white eyes like hot steel, a calloused hand. His face carried the tan and sharp creases of a man who spent a lot of time in the sun.
    “Have a seat,” Schanno said.
    Cork sat down and looked carefully at the map taped to the wall. A topographic map of the Boundary Waters.
    “I’ll get right to the point, O’Connor,” Harris said. He leaned back easily against Schanno’s desk, in a pose that made the office seem familiar to him, as if the space had very quickly become his personal territory. “The sheriff has assured me you’re a man who can be trusted. We’ve got a problem on our hands, and we’re going to need your cooperation.”
    “Go on,” Cork said.
    Harris reached into a briefcase on the floor, pulled out a folded tabloid newspaper, and handed it to Cork. The major headline read $10,000 REWARD! It appeared above a huge color photo of the woman called Shiloh. The photograph was the kind anyone—man or woman—would have begged to have burned. Shiloh’s skin was bright and oily, her eyes angry, her face twisted in a snarling remark in the instant the glare of the flash had caught her. She looked positively demented, nothing like the soft CD cover Arkansas Willie Raye had shown him that afternoon. Beneath the photo the caption read HELP US FIND SHILOH AND YOU POCKET TEN GRAND!
    “It’s a gimmick,” Harris said. “This rag’s been updating the world on Shiloh sightings ever since she dropped out a couple of months ago. New York City, Paris, Sante Fe, Graceland. We have reason to believe this woman is, in fact, somewhere up here, O’Connor.”
    “What reason?” Cork asked. He returned the paper to Harris.
    “Good reason,” Harris said, and let it drop.
    “All right,” Cork said. “Assuming she is up here,