Lightning Strike

A Novel

William Kent Krueger

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982128692
• eBook ISBN: 9781982128708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

An instant New York Times bestseller, this prequel to the acclaimed Cork O'Connor series is "a pitch perfect, richly imagined story that is both an edge-of-your-seat thriller and an evocative, emotionally charged coming-of-age tale" ( Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author) about fathers and sons, small-town conflicts, and the events that shape our lives forever. Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown, his family, and himself.Cork's father, Liam O'Connor, is Aurora's sheriff and it is his job to confirm that the man's death was the result of suicide, as all the evidence suggests. In the shadow of his father's official investigation, Cork begins to look for answers on his own. Together, father and son face the ultimate test of choosing between what their heads tell them is true and what their hearts know is right.In this "brilliant achievement, and one every crime reader and writer needs to celebrate" (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author), beloved novelist William Kent Krueger shows that some mysteries can be solved even as others surpass our understanding.

- PART ONE -SUICIDE

SUMMER 1963

CHAPTER 1

Before they discovered the body, Jorge had been singing.

“Sixty-six bottles of beer on the wall, sixty-six bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, sixty-five bottles of beer on the wall.”

That droning ditty had gone on longer than Cork O’Connor could stand, and he finally said, “Will you just shut up.”

“Sixty-five bottles of beer on the wall, sixty-five bottles of beer…”

It was late July, hot and humid. In the North Country of Minnesota, everything under the blaze of the sun sweltered. The afternoon was a miserable biting of blackflies, and to keep from being eaten alive, the two boys had done their best to maintain a brisk pace. They were hiking an abandoned logging road through the Superior National Forest, at the edge of what was then officially known as the Quetico-Superior Wilderness, though most folks simply called it the Boundary Waters. This was one of the ten milers required for their hiking merit badge, their destination a place known as Lightning Strike. They both carried packs topped with rolled sleeping bags, intending to spend the night, then hike back into the town of Aurora in the morning, completing the second of the required ten milers. They’d set out at noon, and it was now nearing three o’clock.

“… take one down and pass it around. Sixty-four bottles of beer on the wall.”

“Geez, just can it for a while.”

“Okay. What do you want to sing?”

“I don’t want to sing.”

“Guess what I watched on television the other night.”

“You already told me. The Thing.”

“That creature was so cool. Know who was inside the monster suit?”

“No idea.”

“James Arness. You know, Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I swear.”

“Why would he do something stupid like that when he’s already Marshal Dillon?”

“This was before Gunsmoke. Everybody’s got to start somewhere. Check this out.”

Jorge shrugged off his pack, reached under the flap, and pulled out a rolled sheet of drawing paper. He unfurled it and showed it to Cork. It was a pencil sketch of the creature from the movie they were discussing. Even at twelve years of age, Jorge was a terrific artist, and his interest for a long time now had been in things that go bump in the night, especially those things pumped out by the Hollywood B-movie horror factories.

“That’s really good,” Cork said.

“I’ve already sent away for the model kit. When I put it together, I know exactly where it will go. Right beside the Wolfman and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Jorge stopped talking for a moment, sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose, and said, “What died?” Cork smelled it, too, the foul odor of rotting flesh, brought to them on a weak breeze. “Probably a deer or something,” he said. “Somewhere in the woods.”

A hundred yards down the grown-over logging road, the two boys could see the meadow where the ruins of Lightning Strike lay. “Let’s go,” Cork said. “We’re almost there.”

Jorge put away his drawing, reshouldered his pack, and they walked on.

Lightning Strike sat in a clearing in the middle of a great stand of old-growth white pines and mixed hardwoods on the shoreline of Iron Lake. Cork had been there many times, usually in the company of Billy Downwind, a friend from the rez, and Billy’s uncle, Big John Manydeeds. Because of his deep knowledge of the great Northwoods and the skills it took to survive there, Big John was a man Cork respected and admired. But the first time Cork visited Lightning Strike, he’d been only six years old and in the company of his grandmother Dilsey. From the reservation, it was a three-mile hike, and though Cork’s legs were small, they’d carried him to Lightning Strike and back easily. The whole way, Grandma Dilsey had pointed out plants and trees and the signs of animals, telling him the Ojibwe names for these things. She was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe, and one of only a handful of elders left who spoke the language of her people fluently. She was always trying to convince Cork to learn to speak as his ancestors had, but he complained that it was too hard.

“Only to a lazy mind, Corkie,” was her usual reply. She’d been a teacher most of her life, and although she chose not to push him in his learning, she would generally add something along the lines of “When I die, and the other elders, too, the language dies with us. And there will go everything we’ve ever been as a people.” Which always made Cork feel guilty, but not enough that he’d knuckled down yet to learn a language his father had complained was the second most difficult on earth behind Mandarin Chinese.

In the center of the clearing stood the burned remains of a large log construction. The walls had long ago collapsed and only a stone hearth and chimney remained intact. The clearing was filled with rattlesnake ferns and club moss and fireweed that bloomed in spiked clusters of brilliant purple blossoms. The boys crossed the meadow and went directly to the burned-down structure.

Jorge stood looking at the charred scene, then at the sky. “Hope there’s not a storm tonight. I don’t want to end up like this place.”

“This is a sacred place for the Ojibwe, a place of power,” Cork told him. “Grandma Dilsey says no one should have ever logged here. That’s why the spirits caused it to be hit by lightning. You and me, I think we’re okay.” Cork gave a skeptical look. “Well, I’m okay anyway.”

Jorge punched Cork’s shoulder, then contorted his face in a look of revulsion. “That dead stink is following us. Maybe we should camp somewhere else. I don’t want to smell that all night.”

Cork wasn’t listening now. He was looking toward the south end of the meadow. Through the trees there, the surface of Iron Lake shimmered as if it were made of mercury. But it wasn’t the lake that had caught Cork’s attention. He was focused on a huge maple tree that stood alone inside the clearing. “Jorge,” he whispered and nodded toward the tree.

Jorge followed his gaze, then whispered back, “Jesus. That’s no dead deer.”

The boys dropped their backpacks and walked slowly toward the solitary maple, unable to take their eyes away from what they saw there. They stopped a dozen feet from the hanging body.

The man at the end of the rope was huge, a goliath. His long black hair lay draped over his shoulders like a mourning shawl. His face was swollen, his tongue distended and black. Foamy, blood-colored liquid leaked from his mouth and nostrils. His eye sockets were empty holes from which maggots crawled down his cheeks like milky tears.

The breeze shifted strong in their direction, and they recoiled at the smell that overwhelmed them.

“God!” Jorge turned and stumbled away.

Despite the stench and the grotesque, rotting figure, Cork couldn’t move, couldn’t take his eyes away, because he knew this man. And although what hung before him was in no way his fault or his doing, Cork began to cry and said, “I’m sorry, Big John. I’m so sorry.”

CHAPTER 2

Four men stood in the clearing, three of them in the uniform of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. With the toe of his boot, Deputy Joe Meese tapped one of the two empty whiskey bottles lying in the meadow grass near the hanging man. “Had to build up his courage first, looks like.”

Sheriff Liam O’Connor gave a sad shake of his head. “I thought he’d kicked the booze for good.”

Sigurd Nelson, who owned the only funeral home in Aurora and was the county coroner, stepped back from the cursory examination he’d been doing of the body, which still hung from the tree. “Dead awhile, Liam. Long enough the crows and maggots and decomposition have been at work. Four or five days would be my guess. Around the time of the long Fourth of July weekend.”

Cy Borkman, another Tamarack County deputy, was circling the body with a Polaroid camera, shooting the scene from every angle. He finished, placed the camera and the photos he’d taken into a carrying bag, and joined the other men. “When are we gonna cut him down, Liam?”

The breeze was blowing west to east. Liam O’Connor and the others stood on the upwind side of the body. When the breeze let up, the stench came back to them.

“You finished here, Sigurd?” Liam said.

“I’ve seen what I need to. I can do an autopsy, if you want, but cause of death is pretty clear. You could save the county a chunk of money.”

Liam studied what was left of the body of Big John Manydeeds. As the coroner had pointed out, the crows and maggots had done their work. Add to that the bloat of decomposition, the rupture and oozing of the flesh, and the god-awful stink, and what remained was the repulsive final horror that had been a man he’d known and had respected.

“Skip the full autopsy, Sigurd. I need to get his body to his people as quickly as possible. Ceremonial reasons. But I’d like to send blood samples to the BCA for a toxicology report, just to be on the safe side.”

“Will do. I’ll be waiting at the mortuary with a gurney.” The coroner turned and walked back to his car, which he’d parked on the old logging road next to a Sheriff’s Department cruiser and Liam O’Connor’s pickup.

“Cut him down now, Liam?” Borkman said.

“Let me get a tarp from my truck.”

Liam walked slowly across the meadow as the coroner’s car swung around and headed back to Aurora. He dropped the liftgate on his truck, climbed into the bed, and opened a large cargo bin attached to the back of the cab. He pulled out a canvas tarp and returned to his deputies and to what was left of Big John.

“Help me get this under him, Joe.”

The dead man’s booted feet hung only six inches above the ground. Liam and Meese slid the tarp beneath the body, arranged it, and Liam said, “Cut the rope, Cy. Where it’s tied around the branch.”

“I’m not sure I can reach that high. Can’t I just cut it somewhere above the noose?”

“That’ll leave rope on the branch. I don’t want anything left behind here that will attract ghouls.”

Borkman shrugged. “You’re the sheriff.”

A four-foot section of rotting trunk from a fallen pine lay near where the body had hung. The lawmen had already speculated that Big John had dragged it there and used it to reach the branch where the rope was tied, then had taken his fatal step. Borkman mounted the trunk section, reached up on tiptoe, and sawed at the rope with his pocketknife. The body dropped suddenly. It hit the tarp with an odd squishing sound, and fluid oozed onto the canvas around it.

“Jesus,” Meese said. “Sometimes I hate this job.”

Liam carefully worked the noose off the man’s neck and laid the rope aside. The two deputies each took a corner of the tarp. Liam pulled the other two corners together and gave the order to lift. They carted the heavy body to the pickup truck and maneuvered it onto the bed. Liam folded the tarp over and secured the ends, so that what remained of the dead man would be completely covered on the ride to the funeral home.

He closed and latched the liftgate, then stood looking at the sky. The sun was already nearing the western horizon, its rays peach colored and sharply slanted. The meadow lay in the long shadow of the old pines that edged the clearing.

“I’ll drive the body in,” Liam said. “When you come, bring the rope and the bottles. And before it gets too dark to see, look around for anything else.”

“Like what?” Bor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part One: Suicide
• Part II: Murder
• Epilogue
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Copyright