Secret Prey

TWENTY-SIX

Marcy Sherrill was banging on Lucas’s door at seven o’clock. He stumbled out to open up, his hair still a mess from the night, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, one sock on, one sock off; his alarm had gone off ten minutes earlier.

"You look terrible," she said cheerfully. "I got up early and went for a run."

"God will someday strike you dead for that kind of behavior," he said. He was not a morning person. "If I could only get the glue out of my eyes."

"Quit pissing around; let’s get going," Sherrill said. "I’ll drive. You can sleep, if you want."

He perked up, but just slightly. "If you drive, I might survive."

"So, I’ll drive," she said. "C’mon, c’mon. Go." He turned back to the bedroom and she slapped him on the butt.

"Christ, it’s like having a coach," he grumbled, but he tried to hurry.

Minnesota is a tall state; Audrey McDonald’s hometown, Oxford, was in the Red River Valley in the northwest corner, on land as flat as the Everglades. They took Lucas’s Porsche out I-94, Sherrill driving the first two hours, giving it to Lucas, then taking the car back four hours out. Sherrill was a cheerful companion, not given to long stretches of silence. As she chattered away about the landscape, the various road signs and small towns, the river crossings, animals dead on the road, Lucas began to wonder what, exactly, he was doing with her. He began to check her from the corner of his eye, little peeks at her profile, at her face as she talked. Over the years, he’d had relationships, longer or shorter, with a number of women, and in the transition zone between them, had often felt ties to the last woman even as the ties to the new woman were forming.

In this case, there were more than simple ties back to Weather. Weather had been something different-the love of his life, if Elle Kruger wasn’t-while Sherrill was much more like the other women he’d dated: pretty, smart, interesting, and eventually, moving on.

He wasn’t sure that he wanted a relationship with a woman who’d be moving on, especially when she really wouldn’t be out of sight. Sherrill was a cop, who had a desk right down the hall from his office: even when he wasn’t trying to see her, he saw her four or five times a day.

"You sighed," she said.

"What?"

"You just sighed."

"A lot of shit going on," Lucas said. She patted him on the leg. "You worry too much. It’s all gonna work out."

They followed the interstate northwest to Fargo, crossed the Red River into North Dakota, took I-29 north past Grand Forks, then recrossed the Red into Minnesota on a state highway to Oxford.

"Starting to feel it in my back," Sherrill said to Lucas. Lucas was behind the wheel again. "Probably would’ve been more comfortable in my car."

"Yeah, I’m getting too old for this thing, I need something a little smoother," Lucas said. "Good car, though.""Too small for you.

Though you’ll probably start to shrink a little, as the age comes on. You know, your vertebrae start to collapse, your hair thins out and sits lower on your head, your muscle tone goes…"

"You go from a 34-C to a 34-long…"

"Oooh. That’s mean. But I kinda like it," she said.

They passed a sign warning of a reduction of speed limits; Lucas dropped from eighty to sixty as they went past the 45 sign. Past a farm implement dealer with a field of new John Deeres and Bobcats and antique Fords and International Harvesters; past competing Polaris and Yamaha snowmobile dealerships, both in unpainted steel Quonset huts; past a closed Dairy Queen and an open Hardee’s, past a Christian Revelation church and a SuperAmerica; and then into town, Lucas letting the car roll down to forty-five by the time they got to the 25 sign. Past a redbrick Catholic church and a fieldstone Lutheran church and then a liquor store that may once have been a bank, built of both fieldstone and brick.

"Just like Lake fuckin’ Wobegon," Sherrill said.

"No lake," Lucas said. "Nothing but dirt."

"If I had to live here, I’d shoot myself just for the entertainment value," Sherrill said.

"Ah, there’re lots of good things out here," Lucas said.

"Name one."

Lucas thought for a moment. "You can see a long way," he said finally, and they both started to laugh. Then Sherrill pointed out the windshield at the left side of the street, to a white arrow-sign that said, "Proper County-Oxford Government Center."

The Proper County Courthouse and Oxford City Hall had been combined in a building that resembled a very large Standard Oil station-low red brick, lots of glass, an oversized nylon American flag, and a large parking lot where a grassy town square may once have been. Lucas spotted three police cruisers at one corner of the parking lot, and headed that way.

"Watch your mouth with these people, huh?" Lucas said, as they got out of the car.

"Like you’re Mr. Diplomat."

"I try harder when I’m out in the countryside," he said. "They sometimes resent it when big-city cops show up in their territory."

The Oxford Police Department was a starkly utilitarian collection of beige cubicles wedged into a departmental office suite twenty-four feet square. The chief’s office, the only private space in the suite, was at the back; the department itself seemed deserted when Lucas and Sherrill pushed through the outer door.

"A fire drill?" Sherrill asked.

"I don’t know. What’s that?" An odd, almost musical sound came from the back; they walked back between the small cubicles, and spotted a man in the chief’s private office, hovering over a computer. As they got closer, they could hear the boop-beep-thwack-arrghh of a computer action game. Sherrill gave Lucas an elbow in the ribs, but Lucas pushed her back down the row, walking quietly away. Then: "Hello? Anybody home?"

The boop-beep-thwack stopped, and a second later a young man with a round face and a short black mustache stepped out of the chief’s office.

"Help you folks?"

"We’re looking for the chief of police, or the duty officer…"

"I’m Chief Mason." The young man hitched up his pants when he saw Sherrill, and walked down toward them. Lucas took out his ID and handed it over. "I’m Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis, and this is Detective Sherrill…"

He explained that they had come up to review documents and interview people who might have any information about the death of George Lamb, Audrey McDonald’s father, twenty-four years earlier. The chief, who had been staring almost pensively at Sherrill’s breasts, started shaking his head. "I been a cop here for four years; nobody in the department has been here more than twelve. Better you should go up and talk to the county clerk, she might be able to point you at some death records or something."

"Second floor?" Lucas asked.

"Yee-up," the chief said.

The County clerk was even younger than the chief, her hair dyed an unsuccessful orange: "Okay, twenty-four years. About this time of year, you say?"

"About this time."

"Okay… We’re computerizing, you know, but all this old paper is hard to get on-line," she said, as she dug through a file cabinet. "Here we go. George Lamb? Here it is."

"You got anything in there on an Amelia Lamb? George’s wife? Four years after George?"

She went back to the cabinet, dug around, then shook her head. "Nothing on an Amelia."

She straightened up, stepped to the counter, pushed a mimeographed form across the counter at them, said to Marcy, "I really like your hair," and Marcy said, "Thanks. I just got it changed and I was a little worried about doing it… used to be longer."

The death form was filled out on a typewriter, and signed by a Dr. Stephen Landis. Lucas scanned the routine report and asked, "Is Dr. Landis still practicing here?"

"Oh, sure. He’s over at the clinic, right down the street to Main, take a left two blocks."

Marcy looked over Lucas’s arm: "Heart attack?"

"That’s what it says."

"You know, Sheriff Mason would’ve been a deputy back then; I bet he would know about it," the clerk said, reading the file upside down. She tapped a line on the file with her fingertip. "This address isn’t right in town-it’s out at County A-so they would have been the law enforcement arm involved in a death."

"We just talked to a Chief Mason," Sherrill said. "They’re not the same guy?"

"Second cousins, though you could never tell," the clerk said. "Sheriff John Mason’s grandparents on his father’s side, and Chief Bob Mason’s great-grandparents on his father’s and grandfather’s side, are the same people, Chuck and Shirley Mason from Stephen."

"Thank you," Lucas said. "Where can we find the sheriff’s office?"

"Down the hall all the way to the end."

As they left, Sherrill asked, "Are Chuck and Shirley still alive?"

"Well, sure," the clerk said. "Hale and hearty. Course, they’d be down in Arizona right now."

The Sheriff was out, the receptionist said, but if it was a matter of importance, he’d be happy to come right back. Lucas identified himself, and the receptionist’s eyebrows went up, and she punched a number in her telephone. A minute later, the phone rang, and she picked it up and said, without preamble, "There’re some Minneapolis police officers here, looking for you."

The sheriff was a chunky, weathered man, going bald; he wore an open parka and was carrying a blaze-orange watch cap when he stepped into the office five minutes later.

"You want to see me?"

"Yes," Lucas said. He introduced himself, produced his ID, and mentioned the death of George Lamb.

"George Lamb? You mean about a hundred years ago, that George Lamb?" The sheriff’s voice picked up a hint of wariness.

"Twenty-four years," said Lucas.

"Come on back," the sheriff said. And to the receptionist: "Ruth, go get Jimmy and tell him to come back too."

To Lucas: "You folks want some coffee?"

"That’d be fine," Lucas said. They were passing a coffeepot in a hallway nook, and Sherrill said, "I’ll get it. Sheriff? Sugar?"

As the sheriff settled behind his desk, and Sherrill brought the coffee, Lucas said, "We’re sorta digging through the background on Lamb. The county clerk said you were around at the time, I don’t know if you’d remember it or not."

"Yeah, I do. He used to be a mail carrier outa here, he had the rural route. Died of a heart attack. Why’re you looking into that? If I might ask?"

"We’ve got a case going on in the Cities, woman just shot her husband," Lucas said. "She’s charged second degree, but that could get dismissed as self-defense. We’re looking into all the deaths that have been associated with her, and we found out that both her father and mother died young…"

"I know the woman," the sheriff said. "Audrey. McDonald. Used to be Lamb. Been reading about the case in the Star-Tribune. What the heck is a chief of police doing way up here on a case like that?"

"Actually, uh, Marcy and I are friends," Lucas said, tipping his head toward Sherrill. "We were both working the case, and we sorta wanted to get away for a weekend… and we were sorta curious about Lamb."

The sheriff glanced at Marcy and then back at Lucas, nodded as if everything was suddenly clear. "I didn’t take the first call on Lamb, but when we got word that somebody out there was dead, I came in," the sheriff said. He spun in his office chair, looking out of the office window toward the back of a line of Main Street stores. "This was early in the morning. I mean real early, like four o’clock. He was dressed in gray long johns, and he was laying on the kitchen floor. One of the girls had called us-Audrey I think, the other one was still pretty young-and the two little girls had their mom out in the living room, and she was sitting on the couch all wailing away. And Lamb was deader’n a mackerel. It was his practice to wake up in the morning by breaking a raw egg in a double-shot glass, then pouring the glass full with rye, and drinking it down. We found him laying on the floor in a puddle of rye, with the egg all over his face. Took him off quick."

"Egg and rye. That’d open your eyes, all right," Sherrill said.

" ’Spose," said the sheriff. Another man, tall, lean as a fence post, ten years older than the sheriff but with a full head of hair, propped himself in the office doorway.

"You wanted me?"

"Yeah, Jimmy, come on in…" The sheriff introduced Lucas and Sherrill and said, "They’re checking around about the time George Lamb died down there on A. You remember that?"

"Yeah. Long time ago. Don’t quite see what you’d be checking on. Dropped dead of a heart attack."

"Was there anything unusual about the circumstances?" Lucas asked. "Something to make you wonder if it was more’n a heart attack?"

The sheriff shook his head, and Jimmy scratched his head and said, "Well, no. Not really. The population up here is older’n average-not much to hold the younger people anymore-so we see a lot of heart attacks. Probably once or twice a week we get a call, and a fair number of times, the victim is dead before the ambulance gets there. I probably seen a few hundred of them in my time, and…" He shrugged. "Soon as I saw him, I thought,Heart."

"Shoot," Lucas said. "How about the mother? Amelia?"

The sheriff shook his head. "They left here after George died-sold the place off and moved down to your territory, I think."

"Really?" Lucas shook his head ruefully. "You know, I never asked. I just assumed…" Lucas glanced at Marcy, then said to the sheriff, "I didn’t see a motel coming in. Is there a place we can stay?"

The sheriff seemed to relax a half-inch. "North out of town a half-mile, there’s the Sugar Beet Inn. Real clean place."

"Good enough," Lucas said. They all stood up and Lucas shook with the sheriff and Marcy said, "Thanks for the coffee."

And then they were outside and Lucas looked up at the building and said, "That’s the goddamnedest thing, huh?"

"He seemed a little tense," Marcy said.

"They oughta be a little tense," Lucas said. "They’re covering something up."

They were at the car, and Marcy looked at him over the roof: "All right, you got me. How do you know they’re covering something up?"

"Because they both remembered the details of a heart attack twenty-four years ago. What he looked like lying on the floor. Gray long johns. The egg-and-rye thing…"

"I might have remembered that, the egg and rye. ’Cause it’s unusual."

"Audrey’s name…"

"They could have remembered that from reading the paper."

Lucas shook his head: "Why? She didn’t change it until she married McDonald, eight years after her father died. You think they were tracking her?"

Marcy nodded. "All right. They remembered too much. What do we do next?"

"We go over and jack up the doctor."

"You notice how I’m being the nice little housewife and sweetie pie? Get the coffee, girl-talk about hair, let it pass when you hint to the good sheriff that we’re up here for a little whoopee?"

"It’s making me nervous," Lucas said. "The pressure’ll start to build. Sooner or later, you’ll explode."

"That could happen," she said.

Dr. Stephen Landis couldn’t see them until the end of his patient day, at four o’clock.

"You can come right here to the clinic," the nurse said. "Four o’clock sharp. He has some patient visits to make out in town, starting at four-thirty, so you’ll have about twenty minutes."

"You mean, he actually goes out and visits people?" Marcy asked.

"Of course."

"Amazing."

Back on the street, Lucas looked at his watch: an hour to kill. "Let’s go see the undertaker," he said.

The undertaker was a roly-poly young man in a plaid suit: he didn’t remember the case because he was too young. "Dad might remember, though," he said. "He’s out in the garage…"

The senior undertaker was a pleasant fellow, dressed in cotton slacks and a V-necked wool sweater. He was in the back of the mortuary’s heated garage, hitting golf balls into a net off an Astroturf pad.

"Yep, I remember Mr. Lamb," he said, slipping his fiveiron back into his golf bag. "Actually, I don’t remember Mr. Lamb as well as I remember the daughter… the older one."

"Audrey," Sherrill said.

"Don’t remember her name. Audrey could be right. I do remember that she handled all the arrangements. Her mother came along, of course, but it was Audrey who settled everything."

"Cremation, I understand," Lucas said.

"Yes, it was. Quite a bit cheaper, you know. I applaud that, by the way. The family didn’t have a great deal of money, and with the breadwinner gone, they had to watch their nickels and dimes. The young woman marched right in the door, said we could forget about a big funeral, they didn’t have the money, and she wanted the body cremated. Period. No argument allowed."

"Did she pick up the ashes?"

"Yup. In a cardboard box. She said they didn’t need an urn, they were planning to scatter them over the family farm."

"Tough kid," Lucas said.

"That she was," said the senior undertaker. "Never saw a tear from her, except once when the sheriff happened to come by while they were making the arrangements, and then she couldn’t stop bawling. That was the only time." He took another iron out of his bag. "What do you know about the two-iron?"

"If only God can hit a one-iron, then it’d probably take a prophet to hit the two," Sherrill said.

The senior undertaker looked at her with interest. "You’re a golfer."

"A little," she said. "My husband was a two-handicap."

"Was?"

"He died."

"Ah. That will play hob with your handicap," he said cheerfully. Then, "Do you think that young lady- Audrey? — do you think she might have killed her father?"

Lucas looked at Sherrill and then back at the senior undertaker. "Why would you ask?"

"Well, because you’re here, obviously. And because there was something very cold and unpleasant about that young girl. It crossed my mind when we were setting up the funeral arrangements that she cared less for her father than she might for a clod of dirt. When she came to pick up the ashes-and she drove herself, by the way, and she was too young to have a license, I’m sure-I watched her from the window when she went back to the car. She opened the car door and tossed the box in the backseat like you might toss an old rag. There was something in the way she did it. I thought at that very moment that the ashes might never make it to the family farm. That they might not make it further than the nearest ditch."

"But she was bawling about it, you said."

"Oh, and very conveniently, with the sheriff." The senior undertaker shook his head. "You see a lot of very strange things in this business, but that has stuck in my ind as one of the strangest. No. Not strange. Frightening. I locked the doors for the next few weeks. I would dream that the little girl was coming for me."

"He died of a heart attack," Dr. Stephen Landis said. Landis was a roughneck fifty-five, with sparkling gold-rimmed glasses and heavy boots under his jeans. A stuffed mallard, just taking wing, hung from the wall of the reception room, while a nine-pound walleye was mounted over his desk in his private office. "He’d been having some problems-cardiac insufficiency-and he wouldn’t stop drinking or smoking. I told him if he didn’t stop, he was gonna have a heart attack. And one day he keeled over. Drink and cigarette in hand."

"He was smoking when he went?" Sherrill said.

"Still had the cigarette between his fingers," Landis said.

"But you didn’t do an autopsy?" Lucas asked.

Landis shrugged. "There didn’t seem to be a reason to do one. He’d been sick, it seemed apparent that it was the onset of a heart problem. And then he had a heart attack."

"Aren’t you required to do an autopsy when the person didn’t die under a doctor’s immediate care?" Sherrill asked.

"Not then. Back then, not everything was regulated by the legislature yet. You could use your judgment on occasion."

"Did you ever treat Mrs. Lamb?" Lucas asked, injecting a slight chill into his voice.

Landis’s eyes drifted away from Lucas’s. "I may have seen her a time or two, but the Lambs moved away, you know…"

"Did you ever treat her for injuries that might have been inflicted by her husband?"

"No, I didn’t. Well-you probably heard this from somebody else, or you wouldn’t be asking the question. There were rumors that George used to knock her around. And I had her in one time, and she had some bruises that looked like they might have come from a beating. She said she fell down the stairs. I doubted that, but the bruises were old and… I let it go. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it."

They sat in silence for a moment; then Lucas said, "No sign of anything but the symptoms of a heart attack."

"Not that I could see."

"And you examined the body carefully."

"I examined it. Briefly."

"No tissue cultures."

"No."

"You never came to suspect that anything unusual might have led to George Lamb’s sudden death."

"No. He had heart trouble. If anything, I was expecting a heart attack."

Outside, Sherrill said, "I see what you mean-another case of remarkable memory. Lamb had a cigarette between his fingers when he died."

"There’s something here," Lucas said, turning to look back at the front of the clinic. "I have trouble thinking what it might be."

"Maybe she’s some kind of town philanthropist and gives them money or something, so they protect her,"

Sherrill suggested.

"Have you seen her? She doesn’t look like she’d give a nickel to a starving man. And if it has been that, somebody would have mentioned it."

"So what do you want to do?"

"Let’s go check into this motel. Get some dinner."

Lucas always expected a certain amount of awkwardness when he and a new woman friend got around a bed, and the room at the Sugar Beet Inn was basically a queen-sized bed, a television set, and bathroom; along with the built-in scent of disinfectant. Sherrill wasn’t quite as inhibited: she pulled off her jacket, tossed it on the chair, jumped on the bed, giving it a bounce, then hopped off to check the TV. "I wonder if they have dirty movies?"

"Give me a break," Lucas said. "Come on, let’s find a restaurant."

"Too early. It’s barely five o’clock. I wanna take a shower and get the road off me," she said. "You wanna take a shower?"

"If we take a shower, we’ll probably wind up on the bed, dealing with sexual issues," he said, injecting a tone of disapproval into his voice. "We’re here on business."

"Quit bustin’ my balls, Davenport," she said. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head. "But if you want to sit out here and wait…"

"I suppose we’d save water if we both got in there."

"And water is precious out here on the prairie."

"Well, I mean, if it’s for the environment…"

The desk clerk at the Sugar Beet told them two restaurants would be open: Chuck’s Wagon, a diner, and the Oxford Supper Club, which had a liquor license. They drove down to the supper club and were met at the entrance by a cheerful, overweight woman with hair the same tone of orange as the county clerk’s, and a frilly apron. She took them to a red-vinyl booth and left them with glasses of water and menus.

"That hair color must be a fashion out here. She looks like a pumpkin," Sherrill whispered.

"Mmm. Open-face roast beef sandwich with brown gravy, choice of potato, string beans, cheese balls as an appetizer, and pumpkin or mince pie with whipped cream, choice of drink, seven ninety-five," Lucas said.

"You ever hear of cholesterol?"

"Off my case. I’m starving."

Lucas ordered a martini, to be followed by the roast beef sandwich; Sherrill got the Traditional Meatloaf with a Miller Lite up front. They ate in easy companionship, talking about the day, talking about cases they’d worked together and what happened to who, afterwards. Touched lightly on Weather’s case. Lucas got a Leinenkugel’s and Sherrill got a second Miller Lite, to go with the pie. They were just finishing the pie when Lucas felt the khaki pants legs stepping up to the table. He looked up at two sheriff’s deputies, two men in their late twenties or thirties, one hard, lanky, the other thicker, like a high school tackle, with the beginning of a gut.

"Are you the Porsche outside?" asked the one with the gut.

"Yeah. That’s us," Lucas said.

"So you’re the guys from Minneapolis."

"Yeah. What can we do for you?"

"We were just wondering if you’re done here," said the lanky one. His voice was curt: his cop voice.

"I don’t know," Lucas said. He was just as curt. Across the table, Sherrill had swiveled slightly on her butt so that her back was to the wall, and her legs, still curled up, projected toward the deputies. Their attitude was wrong; and other patrons in the restaurant had noticed. "We didn’t get very far today. We weren’t getting a lot of cooperation."

"We were just talking over at the office about how everybody was cooperating, and you were being pretty damn impolite about it," said Gut.

"Not trying to be impolite," Lucas said. Swiveling a bit, as Sherrill had. "We’re trying to conduct an investigation."

"Yeah. I bet you were investigating the hell out of this chick up to the Sugar Beet," Gut said.

Sherrill said, "Hey, you…" But Lucas held up a peremptory finger to silence her, and she stopped and looked at him; then Lucas said to Gut, "Fuck you, you fat hillbilly cocksucker."

Gut looked at the slender man, who stepped back a bit and said, "Let’s cool this off," but Gut put his fists on the table and leaned toward Lucas and said, "If you said that outside, I’d drag your ass all over the goddamn parking lot."

"Let’s go," Lucas said. "I’m tired of this rinky-dink bullshit."

Lucas tossed a twenty on the table and followed Gut toward the entrance; the lanky man said, "Hey, whoa, whoa," and Sherrill said, "Lucas, this is a bad idea…"

But six feet outside the door, Gut took a slow, short step, feeling Lucas closing behind him, spun and threw a wild, looping right hand at Lucas’s head.

Lucas stepped left and hit the heavy man in the nose, staggering him, bringing blood. As Gut turned, bringing his hands up to his face, Lucas hooked him in the left-side short ribs with another right; when Gut pulled his arms down, Lucas hit him in the eye with a left, the other eye with a right, then took the right-side short ribs with a left, then crossed a right to the face. Gut was trying to fall, staggering backward, got his back wedged against a pickup truck, and Lucas beat him like a punching bag, face, face, gut, face, ribs, face, face, like a heavy workout in the gym.

Lucas felt it all flowing out: the frustration with Weather, the attacks on Weather and Elle, the uncertainty, the depression. And heard Sherrill screaming, flicked somebody’s arm off his shoulder, was hit from the left and turned, almost punched Sherrill in the forehead, felt another man moving behind him, spun, and saw the lanky man covering Gut, holding his hands in front of him, shouting something…

The world began to slow down, and Lucas backed up, hands up, Marcy pushing him, shouting. He could barely hear her. "Okay," he said finally, through the roaring in his head. "Okay, I’m done."

Marcy faded in. "You’re done. Are you done?"

"I’m done…" He dropped his hands. They were dappled with blood, and blood from Gut’s nose was sprayed across his shirt. He said, "This shirt’s fucked."

Gut was stretched on the ground next to the pickup running board, groaning, the lanky man leaning over him, saying, "Breathe easy. Come on, you’re okay."

But he wasn’t okay. He said, "I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…" Every time he tried to sit up, he moaned, holding his sides; he was blowing streams of blood from his nose. "We better get an ambulance," the lanky man said. "Get him over to the clinic."

"Can you call from your car?" Sherrill asked.

"Yeah, I can do that," he said, as if the concept were new to him. He hurried to the squad car, parked at the edge of the lot, pushing through a narrow ring of spectators. As he went, Marcy asked, quietly, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, he never touched me," Lucas said.

"That’s not what I meant."

He looked at her: "Yeah, I’m okay. I sorta let it all out, there."

"I’d say."

The lanky deputy was back, said, "The ambulance’ll be here in a minute." Then to Lucas, "I ain’t gonna try to take you in, ’cause we all got guns, but you’re under arrest."

"Bullshit," Lucas said. "You two came here to try to push us out of a murder investigation and he took the first swing. If I don’t get some answers, I’ll get the goddamn BCA up here and we’ll tear a new asshole for your department. You two are gonna be lucky to get out of this with your badges."

"We’ll see," the lanky man said. "Why don’t you go on down to the courthouse. I’m gonna get the sheriff in. And you’re not helping around here."

"Why don’t you just come up to the Sugar Beet," Lucas said. "We’ve got a big room."

A siren started down in the town, the ambulance. The lanky man looked at Sherrill and then at Lucas. "All right. We’ll see you up there."

"This is just fuckin’ awful,"Sherrill said, on the way back to the motel.

"The fight?" That was odd; she’d always been one of the first to get in.

"Not the fight. The way the fight turns me on. You could bend me over the front fender right now, in front of all those people, I swear to God. Whoo. But you sorta hung me up there, dude. I don’t think I coulda taken that skinny guy." She was vibrating, talking a hundred miles an hour. "Maybe I could have slowed him down. Didn’t take you long with the fat guy, that’s for sure. Man, if the skinny guy had gone for his gun, though, I’d’ve had to do something, and we coulda wound up with dead people out there. Whoa, what a rush. Man, the fuckin’ adrenaline is coming on, now. It always comes about ten minutes too late."

Lucas grinned at her: "About once a year. It cleans out the system."

"What’re you gonna tell the sheriff? I mean, we could be in some trouble."

Lucas shook his head. "There’s something going on. We know it, and now they know we know. I think we might learn something."

"Jeez-I wish I hadn’t used you up before dinner. I’m serious here, Lucas, I could really use some help."

"We might have a couple minutes."

"It won’t take that long…"

The Sheriff showed up a little more than an hour later. Lucas was walking back from the Coke machine with a Diet and a regular Coke, his hair still wet from another shower, when they arrived in two cars; the sheriff, the older deputy named Jimmy, the young, lanky man from the restaurant, all in the sheriff’s squad car, and Dr. Stephen Landis in a two-year-old Buick.

Lucas continued to the room, pushed through the door, said, "They’re here."

Sherrill tucked her shirt in: she’d been worried the room would smell too much like sex, which she thought would seem perverted so close to the fight-which Lucas told her was perverted-so she’d turned up the shower full blast, cold water only, and sprayed it against the back wall of the shower stall. Now the room smelled faintly of chlorine, with a hint of feminine underarm deodorant. "We’re ready," she said, looking around. "Put your gun over on the nightstand. That’ll look nice and grim. I’ll keep mine, but I’ll let them see it." She was wearing her.357 in the small of her back.

He nodded: "You could be good at this."

She came over and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. "Remember that," she said.

The sheriff knocked a second later. Sherrill opened the door and let them in.

"Damn near killed him," the Sheriff said.He was standing in front of the dresser, looking at Lucas, who was sitting on the bed, his back to the headboard. The other three men were standing near the door, while Sherrill stood at the head end of the bed, near Lucas. "He could still be in trouble."

"Bullshit. I cracked his short ribs and busted his nose. He won’t be sneezing for a month or six weeks, that’s all," Lucas said.

"That’s a fairly clinical judgment," Landis said. "You must’ve done this before."

"I’ve had a few fights," Lucas agreed.

"In all my time as sheriff, I haven’t had a man hurt that bad, except one who was in a car accident," the sheriff said. "We’re talking to the county attorney to see if an arrest would be appropriate. We don’t want you going anyplace."

"We’re leaving tomorrow, I think," Lucas said. "But we’ll be available down in Minneapolis. I’m gonna talk to a couple of friends over at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, maybe a guy in the attorney general’s office. About coming up here and deposing you people on the murder of George Lamb: to ask you why you’ve been covering it up all these years. Why you’d send a couple of cops to roust us, in the middle of a murder investigation that you’d been reading about in the Star-Trib."

The sheriff shook his head: "We didn’t send anybody to roust you. These idiots thought of it themselves." He tipped his head toward the lanky man, who shrugged and looked at the curtains covering the single window.

"The thing is, we can take care of Larry," the older deputy drawled. "Cops get beat up from time to time. The real question I got-not the sheriff, just me-is whether you can be talked to. Or if you’re just some big-city asshole up here to kick the rubes."

"I’ve got a cabin outside a town half this size, in Wisconsin. The sheriff’s a friend of mine, and he’s been bullshitting me about moving up to run for the office when he quits, and I’ve thought about it. I’ve worked with a halfdozen sheriffs all over this state and Wisconsin, and this is the first time I’ve had trouble," Lucas said. "You want some references?"

"Already made some calls," the older man said. After a few seconds’ silence, he said, "You want to talk, or do we do this all legal?"

"Talk," Lucas said.

The sheriff looked at the older deputy and said, "You think?"

"Yeah, I think."

The sheriff nodded and said, "The thing is, we don’t know whether or not George Lamb was murdered. But he might have been."

"There were some problems at the time, with the way the death happened," the older man said. "Happened way too early in the morning. He got up early, for his job, but not in the middle of the night. It looked to us like he’d gotten sick the evening before, and they’d let him lay there until he died."

"He came to see me twice in the month before he died. He was feeling sicker and sicker, and at first I thought it was the flu. He’d had some diarrhea, he’d had some episodes of vomiting, dizzy spells, and so on. We’d had some flu going around at the time, and it fit," Landis said. He pulled a chair out from the dresser/desk and sat down. "I gave him some antibiotics for a lung infection he’d developed-nothing serious, he was coughing up some phlegm with pus in it. And we had an argument the second time he came in, and he never came back. Then he dropped dead. Could have been a heart attack."

"But you don’t really think so," Lucas said.

Landis shook his head. "I think maybe it was rat poison. Arsenic. The thing is, when I went out and looked at this body, he had a rash, a particular kind of rash that flakes off the skin when you’ve been taking in arsenic for a while."

"You didn’t take any tissue samples?"

"If we’d taken tissue samples, and sent them to a lab, then the fat would be in the fire," Landis said. "Other people would know about it…"

"You didn’t want other people to know?" Sherrill asked. The sheriff took off his hat, smoothed his hair back, and said, "My daughter went to high school with the Lamb girls. And the older Lamb girl had a reputation as knowing way too much about sex for a girl her age. Then, a couple of months before George died…"

Landis picked it up. "The mother brought in the older girl, Audrey, to the clinic. Said she’d been fooling around with one of the boys at school, wanted me to keep it quiet, but wanted her tested to see if she was pregnant. She wasn’t. But I gave her a little standard lecture that I gave back then, about staying out of trouble, about saying no to boys, about using some protection… She sort of went along with the lecture until she got tired of it, then she got up and left," Landis said. "As she was going out the door, she turned and looked at me. The look was like ninety-five percent hate and fear. And she said, ‘That’s all fine and good, but not relevant in my case.’ "

"Not relevant in my case," the sheriff quoted. "Hell of a line for a kid that age. The fact is, George had been f-" He glanced at Sherrill. "Having sex with her."

"When I told you that his wife had some bruises," Landis said, "I was telling you the truth. But not all of it. The woman had been beaten from head to foot."

"The whole goddamn house was a reign of terror," the sheriff said. "Steve told me what he thought was going on. I talked to the sheriff at the time, Johnny James, and he told me that there was nothing to do, unless somebody complained. So I caught up with George on his mail route one day and said if I ever heard of him screwing that little girl, I’d kill him."

"Did he believe you?"

"I don’t know, but he should of, ’cause I would of," the sheriff said. "But it never came up, because he dropped dead."

"He was lying there on the floor, looking okay, except for this rash," Landis said. "We knew he’d been screwing at least the older girl, and maybe the younger one too; we knew he’d been beating the bejesus out of his wife. So the question was, do we do tissue samples? Didn’t have to. No requirement."

"Steve came and talked to me, and we said screw it. Leave it alone. And we did. Shipped George off to the funeral home. And that was the end of it, until you showed up this morning."

They all thought about that for a moment; then Lucas rubbed his chin and changed the subject: "That fat kid I beat up," he said to the sheriff. "He’s gonna be nothing but a pain in the ass for you. He’s gonna be in trouble for the rest of his career."

"He’s had a couple problems," the sheriff said.

"You oughta get rid of him before it’s too late. And this guy," Lucas said, nodding at the lanky man. "He rode along a little too easily. He’s gotta learn to stand up. He wanted to stop the whole thing, but he couldn’t get the job done."

"I learned something," the lanky man said.

"I hope the hell you have," the sheriff said. To Lucas: "What do you think?"

"I think if you recast exactly what you told me here tonight, you’d have a perfectly good story if you ever had to go to court to testify. You know, that you thought it was a heart attack at the time-still think it was possible-but sometime later worked out that it might have been a poisoning. But by then it was too late, the body had been cremated. That kind of thing happens all the time. That’s why we have exhumations."

"You think we might have to testify?"

Lucas stood up, yawned, stretched. "We’re putting together a circumstantial case. So you might have to. But we’ve got a way to go, before we get anything together."

"But her husband… The papers say he was beating her, just like her father beat her mother. It seems to me there might be some justification."

"We’re looking at eight murders and several ag assaults over the last ten years, including a couple of out-and-out executions of absolutely innocent people," Lucas said.

After a moment of stunned silence, the sheriff said, "Eight?"

Lucas nodded.

"God in heaven."

And Landis stood up and looked at the sheriff and said, "Old George did a lot more damage than we knew about. You shoulda killed him."

The older man pushed himself away from the wall. "So what’re we going to do about tonight?"

Lucas shrugged. "Nothing happened to me. If you guys want to say nothing happened, nothing happened."

The sheriff took a quick eye-poll, then nodded to Lucas: "Nothing happened."

"If we need to talk to you again, an assistant county attorney’ll be calling," Lucas said. "I’ll give you a warning call ahead of time."

"I appreciate it," the sheriff said. "I’d also appreciate it if you’d get the hell out of my town."

"We’re going tomorrow morning," Lucas said.

"And I surely wish you hadn’t taken Larry out in the parking lot. I’m always shorthanded when the snow starts to fly."

"Sorry."

"But not too sorry," the sheriff said.

"Not too," Lucas agreed, and grinned at him.

The sheriff showed the faintest hint of a smile, and eased out the door. The older man was the last to leave, and at the threshold, he turned and looked at Sherrill, and then back at Lucas. "I once had a woman looked just about like that," he said to Lucas. "When I was just about your age."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." He gave Sherrill a long look, and said, "She flat wore me out."

"Better to wear out than to rust," Sherrill said, from her corner.

"Yeah." And he laughed, a nasty laugh for an old codger, and closed the door.