Purgatory Ridge Read Online Free Page B

and Minnesota. But declining resources, cheap foreign lumber, and the profligate lifestyle of Karl Magnus Lindstrom II had brought the holdings down to this one.
    In his late thirties, Lindstrom was a tall, slender man with thinning blond hair kept short in a sharp military cut. His bearing was stiff and military as well, the legacy of Annapolis and eight years in an officer’s uniform. In the few times he and Cork had exchanged words, Lindstrom had spoken crisply and to the point. The only thing about him that had any look of softness were his eyebrows, so blond and fine they looked like a couple of delicate feathers stuck to his forehead. What kind of man he really was at heart Cork could only guess, for Cork didn’t know Lindstrom well at all. As far as he could gather, no one did. He wasn’t from Aurora. The Lindstroms had always been like absentee landlords, directing the business of the mill from their headquarters in Chicago. Karl Lindstromhad moved his family to a home on Iron Lake only a few months before. All anybody really knew about him was that he’d kept the mill open and kept a lot of people in Tamarack County working.
    “Was anybody hurt?” Lindstrom asked.
    “Fortunately, no,” Schanno replied. “Only person here was your night watchman, Harold Loomis. He was way over to the other side of the mill when it happened. He called in right away.”
    “Did he see anything?”
    “Harold?” Schanno asked it seriously. “He’s seventy-two, Mr. Lindstrom. Even when he stays awake, he probably doesn’t see much.”
    Lindstrom stepped away from the others and went to a fragment of blackened metal a few feet away. He stooped and reached for it. “Any idea what happened?”
    “Don’t touch anything,” Schanno warned him.
    Lindstrom shot a look his way. “Still hot?”
    “Evidence,” Schanno said.
    “Evidence?” Lindstrom stood up quickly. “You never answered me, Sheriff. What happened here?”
    “We’re not sure yet.” Schanno looked to Cork. “You ever work a bomb scene? In Chicago maybe?”
    “Only crowd control, Wally. You think this was a bomb?”
    “Alf sure does. And I’m figuring it probably wasn’t too far from your own way of thinking, else why would you and Jo be here? With all this ballyhoo over logging those old white pines, I’ve been worrying it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”
    Lindstrom turned to the fire chief. “Was it a bomb?”
    Alf Murray looked toward the flame and smoke. “Well, like I said before you came, I thought at firstthe fire must’ve started with the explosion of the LP tank. That was the big bang we all heard. Blew down the equipment shed like the big bad wolf blowing down a straw house. Seemed possible anyway, the tank going first and everything else following from that. Except those tanks are plenty safe. Never heard of one going up by itself. So I did some more looking around. There’s a small crater in the ground under the cab of the logging rig. Now, when the gas tank on the cab caught fire, it made for some pretty good fireworks, but it wouldn’t account for that little crater. Only thing I can think of would’ve left that kind of scar in the earth’d be an explosive device of some kind, probably attached to the undercarriage of the cab. So if it was a bomb, and I ain’t for a moment saying it necessarily was, then I’d say the cab went up first, and everything else happened because of that.”
    It was only a moment before all eyes had turned to Jo. She didn’t say anything, but Cork could feel her harden, prepared to defend.
    “‘Course, I ain’t an expert,” the fire chief hastened to add. “Mostly I deal with house fires, grass fires. We won’t know for sure until Wally gets someone up here who knows what the hell they’re doing.”
    Schanno rubbed his jaw with his long fingers. “I’ve already got a call in to the BCA,” he said, speaking of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minnesota’s