Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

5

Sheriff Michael Halloran watched as Danny Peltier pulled the twelve-gauge out of the cruiser’s trunk rack and checked the load.

‘What the hell are you doing, Danny?’

‘Inspecting arms, sir.’

Danny was fresh out of officer certification school, and although the phrase ‘eager beaver’ came to mind, it was woefully inadequate. For at least a year he would clean his unfired weapon two or three times a week, polish his badge and boots nightly, and iron creases in his pants that would cut lemons. But that would wear off eventually, and soon enough he’d start to look like the rest of them.

Halloran watched him, sipping too-hot coffee from a cup, trying to shake the feeling that he was forgetting something.

‘Doesn’t look like this weapon’s been fired in some time, sir.’

‘Not since crowd control at the high-school homecoming dance.’

Danny’s head jerked around to look at him. The grin, when it finally came, spread slowly across his face, moving all his freckles. ‘I guess you’re a kidder, aren’t you, Sheriff?’

‘I guess I am. Mount up, Danny. It’s a fair drive.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There were over a dozen cruisers in the lot this morning, exhaling exhaust into the morning chill. This was a rare thing in a county that kept only eight patrols on the roads at any given time. Most of the third-watch deputies would pull a double shift today, canvassing the members of Father Newberry’s parish, interrogating the faithful for a hint of madness.

Halloran was wondering how he was going to squeeze the overtime out of an already pinched budget when Sharon Mueller rapped angrily on his window with a gloved knuckle.

He looked out at a pair of fierce brown eyes in a cold-reddened face and wondered what had tripped her trigger today. Not that he’d grow any older waiting to find out. The concept of stoic silence eluded her completely. She was short-tempered, painfully straightforward, and had a tongue that could slash a grown man to ribbons. Last year she’d cut her brown hair very short. Around the office they called her the rabid elf.

Still, for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, Sharon was one of the many things that made Halloran glad he wasn’t bound to the dogma of confession anymore. If he’d ever once looked at her without having impure thoughts, he couldn’t remember the occasion.

She rattled a piece of paper at him when he rolled down the window and bent down to get in his face. He smelled soap. ‘Simons put fifteen people on my list, scattered all over the damn place. At this rate I’m going to spend more time on the road than questioning people.’

‘Good morning, Sharon.’

‘Everybody else gets a block of people in one tight area, which makes perfect sense, but me he sends to all four corners of the county, and if that isn’t gender discrimination I don’t know what is, and aside from the fact that I resent it, it’s just plain stupid . . .’

‘I told him to do that.’

That took her back a little. ‘Huh?’

‘You’re the best interrogator I’ve got. I told Simons to give you the ones the Kleinfeldts tried to have banned from the congregation. I know they’re scattered and I’m sorry about that, but if there’s anyone in this county with even half a reason to want them dead, they’re on your list.’

Sharon blinked at him. ‘Oh.’

‘You all right with that?’

‘Sure, Mike . . .’

Danny was instinctively careful, waiting until they were out of the lot and on the county road before he asked his question. That was a good sign, Halloran thought. The kid might make a fair deputy, given time. ‘Seriously? Sharon Mueller’s your best interrogator?’

‘She is that. Works child protection, mostly, and if you can get a six-year-old to tell you her daddy’s climbing into bed with her every night, you can get an adult to tell you almost anything.’

‘Oh.’ A single syllable, and then silence.

‘Sometimes the job sucks, Danny.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Highway 29 flattened out and stretched for about five miles before it climbed a ridge on the edge of the state forest, and that was where the wind always hit you. As far as Halloran was concerned, it was about the ugliest piece of land in the county, especially this time of year: treeless and flat with the cornfields cut to dead brown stubble, as if something big had come along and sucked all the life out of the earth. He punched the cruise up to seventy and kept his eyes on the center line.

‘Going to have an early snow,’ Danny murmured, as if there were finally enough miles behind Halloran’s mention of incest to make talking safe again. It was still a touchy subject in this part of the country, and not all the media blitzes and public awareness campaigns in the world would change that. Some people – good people, mostly – just didn’t want to believe such things happened.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Highway Department’s two weeks late putting up the snow fence along here. Almost a sure-fire guarantee we’ll have an early blizzard.’

‘Just what we need,’ Halloran said, and that was enough small talk. ‘You know what we’re looking for out here, Danny?’

‘Yes, sir. Information.’

‘That’s right. Paperwork, mostly. Anything at all that’ll tell us something about the Kleinfeldts. Phone records, credit card receipts, legal papers, like that.’ He slowed the car at Steiger’s House of Cheese and Video and turned right onto a narrow strip of washboard gravel. ‘The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have figuring out who might have wanted them dead.’

Danny unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, folded it in thirds, and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Diaries, journals . . .’

‘They’re good.’

‘ . . . calendars . . .’

‘Anything.’ Something, he added mentally, because a dead end loomed large. ‘Forensics didn’t get anything useful from the church, and Doc Hanson said that all he got from the bodies was nightmares.’

‘We got a usable slug, though, right?’

‘The one out of the missus is still in pretty decent shape, but there were no hits in the database, so it doesn’t count for squat without the weapon. So right now we’ve got no witnesses, no physical evidence to speak of, and only one more thing to look for to shine some light on this thing.’

‘Motive,’ Danny said without hesitation, and for the second time that morning, Halloran smiled. The kid was going to do all right.

There was a gate at the end of the Kleinfeldts’ driveway, with a padlock that glinted in the cold sun, a taunting reminder. ‘Damnit, damnit, damnit.’ He banged his hand on the wheel.

‘Sir?’

‘I forgot the keys.’

‘Some of the guys say you’re real good with a pick.’

But apparently he wasn’t that good. In the end he’d said the hell with it and taken the bolt cutters to the chain.

It wasn’t much of a house, for someone sitting on seven million dollars. Just a boxy, two-story farmhouse, unchanged, as far as he could tell, from when the Tikalskys raised Holsteins and children here.

Halloran had gone to CalumetHigh School with Roman, their youngest, and the day after that boy graduated they’d turned the house over to Countryside Realty and moved to Arizona.

Smart people, he thought, tugging up the fur collar of his jacket and still feeling the promise of winter crawl down his neck. The Kleinfeldts bought the house three months later, according to Nancy Ann Kopetke at Countryside, who had apparently been knocked over with a feather when they paid the asking price without a twitch. The idea of Nancy Ann Kopetke, three bills if she was a pound, being knocked over with anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler had given him the only other smile of the morning.

He climbed the front porch with Danny, eyed the heavy plate of a good dead bolt, but still tried the knob. Stupid, of course. You didn’t padlock your driveway and leave your house wide open.

‘Should I try the back, Sheriff?’ Danny was almost on the toes of his spit-shined shoes, eager to get into the house, find the clue and solve the crime.

‘Go ahead. I’ll try running the picks through this one.’

For all the good it’ll do, his thoughts grumbled a sullen accompaniment to the strangely merry sound of Danny trotting around the house through a crackling carpet of dried leaves. He’d played with this kind of dead bolt before and knew damn well that it was far beyond his meager skills. Still he went down into a crouch and started fooling with it, going through the motions, just as he was doing with the whole investigation.

The minute he’d seen that cross carved into Mary Kleinfeldt’s chest, he’d had the bad feeling that this was probably one of those crimes that would haunt his old age. From that point on it had just been a matter of how much of his budget and how many of his resources he would use up before the county commissioners shut him down. Unless there were clues inside this house with big red arrows pointing to them, there was no way he could justify keeping the whole department committed.

He gave up on the lock, pushed against his knees, and felt a crick he swore hadn’t been there yesterday. He rapped once against the door just to feel the weight of it, and frowned. One of those heavy metal numbers you usually saw only in the city. Hinges on the inside. Weird. Unless Danny worked miracles and found a way in through the back, they were going to have to break some glass here, because there was no way he was going to drive all the way back to town for the keys.

He glanced down the porch at the old-fashioned six-over-six windows, thinking they’d have to break some hundred-year-old woodwork, too, and that was a shame. He reached inside his jacket for the package of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket. The cellophane wrapper crackled in the silence.

The house muffled the sound of the shotgun blast, as much as such a thing can be muffled. It was still loud enough, or maybe just so unexpected, that Halloran jumped backward away from the door, heart pounding. Instinct kicked in before thought, dropping him to a crouch, 9mm already in his hand. See that, Bonar? he thought crazily. How’s that for a quick draw?

Before the thought was finished he was down the steps, off the porch, still crouched but running now, below the windows, around the house to the back corner. He stopped with his shoulder pressed against steel siding, gasping in silent, shallow breaths, listening so hard he could hear dried cornstalks rustling in the back field.

Goddamnit, where are you, Danny?

The part of the backyard he could see was treeless, lifeless; nothing but brown, close-cropped grass stretching a good hundred yards to the corn. He stooped, shot his head out to look around the corner, and jerked it back. Nothing. No bushes, no trees, no place for a shooter to hide, just a shallow cement stoop at the back door. He hugged the house and crept toward it.

A few minutes later he found the first bloody pieces of Danny Peltier spattered all over the small mudroom. He walked a little farther into the house and found the rest of him, and almost wished that he hadn’t.

Bonar found Halloran an hour later in the middle of the Kleinfeldts’ backyard. He’d dragged a kitchen chair out there and was sitting hunched over with his arms across his thighs, staring at the house.

Bonar dropped to a squat next to him and started pulling out blades of dried grass. ‘Warming up,’ he said.

Halloran nodded. ‘Sun feels good.’

‘You okay?’

‘I just had to get out of there for a minute.’

‘I hear you.’ He held out a ballpoint pen stuck in a pack of Pall Malls. ‘Found these on the porch. Yours, or do we have to print them?’

Halloran patted his pocket, then reached for the cigarettes and tapped one out. ‘Must have dropped them when I heard the shot.’ He lit one, drew on it deeply, then leaned back in the chair with a long exhale. ‘You ever out here when we were in high school? When Tikalskys owned this place?’

‘Nah. Different bus route.’

‘Used to be a lot of trees in this yard back then.’

‘Yeah?’

Halloran nodded. ‘Bunch of apples, couple oaks, biggest cottonwood I ever saw stood right over there, with a big old tractor tire hanging from a rope as thick as my arm.’

‘Huh. Storm damage, maybe. They had those straight-line winds out here six, seven years ago, remember?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ Halloran thought about it for a while. ‘Wouldn’t think a wind would strip a place this clean. You could hardly see the house for the bushes; those droopy things with the white flowers . . .’

‘Bridal wreath, generic name, spirea.’

Halloran looked at him. ‘Where do you get this stuff?’

Bonar found a blade of dried grass long enough to stick between his teeth. ‘I am a man of great and varied and mostly useless knowledge. What’s your point?’

‘All the hiding places are gone. They got rid of them.’

Bonar spit out the grass and looked around, eyebrows and brain working. ‘Fits, I guess. You see the stockpile of guns in there?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Seventeen of them so far, just on the first floor. Do you know how weird that is? I mean, these people were old. You got Polident and bifocals and a .44 Magnum all in the same drawer. Survivalist books and magazines all over the damn place. And the rig they used to set up that shotgun? That thing’s so high-tech even Harris is spooked. He’s got the boys on their hands and knees, moving by inches, looking for more trip wires. These people were seriously paranoid.’

‘Maybe money does that.’

Bonar shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Me neither.’ Halloran took another drag, pitched his cigarette, then stood up. ‘The thing is, they had every entrance to this house locked up tighter than a drum, and then the back door, they just leave wide open.’

‘Where the shotgun was set up.’

‘Yeah. They were expecting someone.’

‘Oh, man, this one is going to be a pip.’ Bonar shook his big head, grunted his way to his feet, looked over at his old friend. ‘You look like shit.’

Halloran’s eyes were fixed on the empty gurney waiting outside the back door, Danny Peltier’s last ride. ‘I forgot the keys, Bonar.’

‘I know, buddy.’ Bonar’s sigh sounded like the corn.