Purgatory Ridge Read Online Free Page A

what I’m thinking?”
    From the concern on her face, it was clear to him that she was. She straightened and turned from the window. “I’d better go.”
    “I’ll come with you.” Cork started toward the dresser to get his clothes.
    “Cork.” Jo put a hand on his arm to restrain him gently. “I have clients to protect. I need to be out there. But there’s no reason for you to go. You’re not the sheriff anymore.” She seemed reluctant to add thatlast bit of a reminder, as if she were afraid that even after all this time, it still might hurt him.
    He smiled gamely and said, “Then let’s just chalk it up to morbid curiosity.”

2
    T HE L INDSTROM LUMBER AND PLYWOOD MILL stood within a stone’s throw of the Superior National Forest, on three dozen cleared acres, hard up against the shoreline of a small oval of water called Grindstone Lake. Normally, the only smoke coming from the mill was generated by the kilns and smokestacks. However, as his old red Bronco broke from the pines along County Road 8, Cork could see clearly that the billow of smoke rising above the clearing came from the trailer of a logging rig parked in the mill yard and from the burning remains of a building just beyond.
    At the mill gate, Deputy Ed McDermott stopped Cork and leaned against the driver’s-side door.
    “Ed,” Cork said to the deputy in greeting.
    “Morning, Cork.”
    “What’s up?”
    “Big propane tank blew, set things on fire. Murray’s men have it pretty well under control now. In this drought, lucky it didn’t spread to the woods.”
    “Mind if I go in?”
    “Be my guest. Sheriff’s over by that stack of logs there.” He looked past Cork and gave his head a slight nod. “Morning, Ms. O’Connor.”
    Cork parked the Bronco next to a Land Cruiser with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door. Jo got out with him.
    Sheriff Wally Schanno stood beside a huge stack of pine logs that was awaiting milling. He was a tall man who, in his prime, had been every bit as strong and rigid as those sections of cut timber. But he was over sixty years old now. There was a slight bend to his tall frame, and time had rubbed its hand deeply into his long face, giving him a gaunt and haunted look. When he glanced at Cork and Jo, his gray eyes seemed tired.
    “Heard the explosion,” Cork said.
    “They heard the explosion in Brazil,” Schanno said. “Morning, Jo.” The sheriff gave her a grim purse of his lips, as near to a smile as he could apparently muster.
    “What happened?”
    “Ask Murray.”
    Alfred Murray, the fire chief for Aurora, and only one of three paid firefighters who manned the station in town, walked toward them from one of the yellow pumpers that was dousing the last of the flames among the logs on the trailer. He wore a black rubberized firefighter’s coat, black boots, and a yellow hat that said CHIEF .
    “Looks like we’ll have it all extinguished in a few minutes,” he told Schanno.
    “What happened, Alf?” Cork asked.
    “Well…” He seemed reluctant to commit. “To tell you the truth, at first I figured the LP tank went up, demolished part of that old equipment shed, and set the rest of it on fire. I figured burning fragments must have jumped to the logs on the trailer, and they went up, too, along with the cab.”
    “At first?” Cork said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Then?”
    Instead of answering Cork, Murray watched a dark blue Explorer swing through the mill gate and head toward them. The Explorer moved quickly across the mill yard that was becoming muddy where the water from the fire hoses ran. It stopped next to Cork’s Bronco, and Karl Lindstrom stepped out.
    He was technically Karl Magnus Lindstrom III. The mill was his. Had been his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and another generation yet again. At one time, there’d been nearly a dozen mills just like it in the Lindstrom empire that had stretched across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin,