Sandy Darling sat and shivered, but not with the cold; sat and tried to figure a way out.
THE TRAILER WAS a broken-down Airstream, sitting on the cold frozen snow like a shot silver bullet. Butters and LaChaise crunched through the sparse snow on four-wheel drive, then they got out of the truck into the cold and Butters unlocked the trailer. “I come by this morning and dropped off some groceries and turned on the heat . . . Can’t nobody see you in here, but you might want to keep the light down at night,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about smoke. Everything’s electric and it works. I turned the pump on and filled up the water heater, so you oughta be okay that way.”
“You done really good, Ansel,” LaChaise said.
“I owe you,” Butters said. And he turned away from the compliment: “And there’s a TV and a radio, but you can only get one channel—sort of—on the TV, and only two stations on the radio, but they’re both country.”
“That’s fine,” LaChaise said, looking around. Then he came back to Butters, his deep black eye fixing the other man like a bug: “Ansel, you ain’t owed me for years, if you ever did. But I gotta know something for sure.”
Butters glanced at him, then looked out the window over the sink: “Yeah?”
“Are you up for this?”
Ansel glanced at him again, and away: it was hard to get Crazy Ansel Butters to look directly at you, under any conditions. “Oh yeah. I’m very tired. You know what I mean? I’m very tired.”
“You can’t do nothin’ crazy,” LaChaise said.
“I won’t, ’til the time comes. But I am getting close to my dying day.”
The words came out with a formal stillness.
“Well, that’s probably bullshit, Ansel,” LaChaise said, but he said it gravely, without insult intended or taken.
Butters said, “I come off the interstate, down home, up an exit ramp at night, with pole lights overhead. And I seen an owl’s shadow going up the ramp ahead of me—wings all spread, six or eight feet across, the shadow was. I could see every feather. Tell me that ain’t a sign.”
“Maybe it’s a sign, but I got a mission here,” LaChaise said. “We all got a mission now.”
“That’s true,” Butters said, nodding. “And I won’t fuck you up.”
“That’s what I needed to know,” LaChaise said.
4
A CLERK NAMED Anna Marie knocked on Lucas’s office door, stuck her head inside, struggled for a moment with her bubble gum and said, “Chief Lester said to tell you, you know Dick LaChaise?”
“Dick?”
She paused for a quick snap of her gum: “Dick, who was married to that one woman who got shot, and was brother to the other one? Last week?”
Lucas had one hand over the phone mouthpiece and said, “Yeah?”
“Well, he escaped in Wisconsin and killed a guy. A prison guard. Chief Lester said you should come down to Homicide.”
“I’ll be down in two minutes,” Lucas said.
A HEAVYSET PATROL cop, with a gray crew cut, was walking down the hall when Lucas came out of the office. He took Lucas’s elbow and said, “Guy comes home from work and he finds his girlfriend with her bags packed, waiting in the doorway.”
“Yeah?” The cop was famous for his rotten jokes.
“The guy’s amazed. He says, ‘What’s going on? What happened?’ ‘I’m leaving you,’ says the girlfriend. ‘What’d I do? Everything was okay this morning,’ says the guy. ‘Well,’ says the girlfriend, ‘I heard you were a pedophile.’ And the guy looks at his girlfriend and says, ‘Pedophile? Say, that’s an awwwwfully big word for a ten-year-old . . . ’ ”
“Get away from me, Hampsted,” Lucas said, pushing him off; but he was laughing despite himself.
“Yeah, you’ll be tellin’ all your friends . . .”
LESTER WAS TALKING to the homicide lieutenant, turned when Lucas came in, dropped his feet off the lieutenant’s desk and said, “Dick LaChaise cut the throat of a prison guard during the funeral of Candace and Georgia LaChaise, and vanished. About an hour ago.”
“Vanished?” Lucas said.
“That’s what the Dunn County sheriff said: vanished.”
“How’d he cut the guy’s throat? Was there a fight?”
“I don’t know the details,” Lester said. “There’s a cluster-fuck going on at the funeral home. It’s over in Colfax, ten, fifteen miles off I-94 between Eau Claire and Menomonie. Probably an hour and a half drive.”
“Hour, in a Porsche,” the lieutenant said lazily.
“I think you ought to send one of your group over there,” Lester said.
“Hell, I’ll go,” Lucas said. “I’m sitting on my ass anyway. Do we have any paper on LaChaise?”
“Anderson’s getting it now,” Lester said. “Anyway, the sheriff over there says LaChaise might be heading this way. LaChaise’s mama says he’s gonna get back at us for Candace and Georgia. ‘Eye for an eye,’ she says.”
Lucas looked at the lieutenant. “Can I take Sloan?”
“Sure. If you can find him.”
Lucas picked up a half-pound of paper from Anderson, the department’s computer jock, beeped Sloan, and when he called back, explained about LaChaise.
“You want to go?” Lucas asked.
“Let me get a parka. I’ll meet you at your house.”
LUCAS DIDN’T DRIVE the Porsche much during the winter, but the day, though bitterly cold and sullenly gray, showed no sign of snow. The highway had the hard bone-dry feel that it sometimes got in midwinter.
“Are we in a hurry, I hope?” Sloan asked as they rolled north along the Mississippi.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. As soon as they got on I-94 at Cretin, he called Dispatch and asked them to contact the Wisconsin highway patrol, to tell that he was coming through on an emergency run. They dropped on the interstate at noon, and at 12:20 crossed the St. Croix bridge into Wisconsin. Lucas put the snap-on red flasher in the window and dropped the hammer, cranking the Porsche out to one-twenty before dropping back to an even hundred.
The countryside looked as though it had been carved out of ice, hard sky, round hills, the creek lines marked by bare gray trees, snapped-off golden-yellow cornstalks sticking out of the snow, suburban homes and then isolated farmsteads showing plumes of straight-up gray wood smoke.
Sloan watched it roll by for a few minutes, then said, “I get to drive back.”
DUNN COUNTY SHERIFF Bill Lock was a fussy, officious, bespectacled man, a little overweight, who, if he’d put on a fake white beard, would make an adequate department-store Santa. He met Lucas and Sloan among the coffins in the Eternal Comfort Room at Logan’s Funeral Home, where Logan had set up coffee and doughnuts for the cops.
“Come on and take a look,” Lock said. “We’d appreciate it if one of our guys could talk to Duane Cale—you still got him over there in Hennepin County jail. He might have some ideas where they went.”
“No problem,” Lucas said. He dug out a card, scribbled a number on the back and handed it to Lock. “Ask for Ted, tell him I said to call, and what you want to do.”
“Good enough.” Lock walked them through the staging room, where the bodies of Georgie and Candy LaChaise were still waiting for a funeral. “You want to look?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” Lucas said hastily. “So what happened?”
“Logan says LaChaise insisted that he open the coffins. They came back here and he opened them. Then LaChaise asked if there was a Coke machine around, and Logan told them where the machine was. That was one of the cooler things he did: he was so routine, taking his time with the bodies, saying good-bye, then asking for a Coke . . .”
Lock walked them through it, a couple other deputies standing around, watching. They wound up in the back room, next to the Coke box. Sand’s body was still on the floor, in the middle of a drying puddle of blood. Sand looked small, white and not particularly tough, his head cocked up at an odd angle, his chin squarely on the floor, his nose off the ground.
>
“Logan figures he was gone for five minutes. When he came back to the staging room, there was nobody here. He looked into the back, and found this.”
“Never saw LaChaise again?” Lucas asked.
“Never saw him again,” Lock said, shaking his head. “Never heard any noise, nothing. Now we got the sonofabitch running around the countryside somewhere.”
“He’s long gone,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but we’re doing a house-to-house check anyway,” Lock said.
“He had to have help.” Lucas walked around the body, squatted, and looked at Sand’s hands as they stuck out of the cuffs. “There aren’t any defensive cuts, so it wasn’t like LaChaise pulled a shank on him.” Lucas stood up and made a hand-washing motion. “If LaChaise was cuffed and wearing leg irons, there’s no way he could have taken this guy without some kind of fight. There must’ve been somebody else here.”
“Unless he’d cut a deal with Sand to turn him loose, and make it look like an escape—then double-crossed him.”
“Huh. What’d he have to offer Sand? Candy and Georgie were dead, so the source of money had dried up . . .”
“We’re checking with Michigan, see if Sand had any problems back there. Something to blackmail him with . . .”
“Nobody saw him walking away.” Lucas made it a statement.
“Nope. Nobody saw nothing.”
Sloan jumped in: “I heard his mother says he’s coming after us.”
“That’s what she says,” Lock said, nodding. “And she could be right. Dick is nuts.”
“You know him?” Lucas asked.
“From when I was a kid,” Lock said. “I used to run a trap line up the Red Cedar in the winter. The LaChaises lived down south of here on this broken-ass farm—Amy LaChaise is still out there. I used to see the LaChaise kids every now and then. Georgie and Dick. Their old man was a mean sonofabitch, drunk, beat the shit out of the kids . . .”
“That’s how it is with most psychos,” said Sloan.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody told me he’d been screwing Georgie, either. She always knew too much, there in school.” Lock scratched his head, caught himself and slicked back his thinning hair. “The old man came after me once, said I was trespassing on his part of the river, and they didn’t even live on the river.”
“What happened?” Sloan asked.
“Hell, I was seventeen, I’d baled hay all summer, built fence in the fall and then ran the trap line. I was in shape, he was a fifty-year-old drunk: I kicked his ass,” Lock said, grinning at them over Sand’s body.
“Good for you,” Sloan said.
“Not good for his kids, though—living with him,” Lock said. “The whole goddamn bunch of them turned out crazier’n bedbugs.”
“There’s more? Besides Georgie and Dick?” Lucas asked.
“One more brother, Bill. He’s dead,” Lock said. “Ran himself into a bridge abutment up on County M, eight or ten years back. Dead drunk, middle of the night. There was a hog in the backseat. Also dead.”
“A hog,” said Sloan. He looked at Lucas, wondering if Lock was pulling their legs.
Lock, reading Sloan’s mind, cracked a grin. “Yeah, he used to rustle hogs. Put them in the car, leave them off at friends’ places. When he got five or six, he’d run them into St. Paul.”
“Hogs,” Sloan said, shaking his head sadly.
Lock said the only two people who’d showed up for the funeral were Amy LaChaise and Sandy Darling, Candy’s sister. “They’re both still sitting out there. They say they don’t know what the heck happened.”
“You believe them?” Sloan asked.
“Yeah, I sorta do,” Lock said. “You might want to talk to them, though. See what you think.”
AMY LACHAISE WAS a mean-eyed, foulmouthed waste of time, defiant and quailing at the same time, snapping at them, then flinching away as though she’d been beaten after other attempts at defiance.
“You’re gonna get it now,” she crowed, peering at them from beneath the ludicrous hat-net. “You’re the big shots going around killing people, thinking your shit don’t stink; but you’re gonna see. Dickie’s coming for you.”
SANDY DARLING WAS different.
She was a small woman, but came bigger than her size: her black dress was unconsciously dramatic, the silver-tipped black boots an oddly elegant country touch, both sensitive and tough.
She faced them squarely, her eyes looking into theirs, unflinching, her voice calm, but depressed.
Sandy had seen Lucas arrive with Sloan, had seen them talking with the sheriff. The big tough-looking guy wore what she recognized as an expensive suit, probably tailored. FBI? He looked like an FBI man from the movies. The other man, the thin one, was shifty-looking, and dressed all in shades of brown. They went in the back, where the dead guard was, and a few minutes later came back out, and talked to Amy LaChaise. She could hear Amy’s crowing voice, but not the individual words.
After five minutes, the two men left Amy LaChaise and walked over to where she was sitting. She thought, Hold on. Just hold on.
“Mrs. Darling?” The big guy had blue eyes that looked right into her. When he smiled, just a small polite smile, she almost shivered, the smile was so hard. He reminded her of a Montana rancher she’d met once, when she’d gone out to pick up a couple of quarter horses; they’d had a hasty affair, one that she remembered with some pleasure.
The other guy, the shifty one, smiled, and he looked like Dagwood, like a nice guy.
“I’m Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis,” the big guy said, “And this is Detective Sloan . . .”
She caught Lucas’s name: Davenport. Wasn’t he . . . ? “Did you shoot my sister?” she blurted.
“No.” The big man shook his head. “Detective Sloan and I were at the credit union, but neither one of us fired a gun.”
“But you set it up,” she said.
“That’s not the way we see it,” Lucas said.
Sandy’s head jerked, a nod: she understood. “Am I going to be arrested?”
“For what?” the thin man asked. He seemed really curious, almost surprised, and she found herself warming to him.
“Well, that’s what I want to know. I came to the funeral, and now they won’t let me go anywhere. I’ve got to ask before I go to the bathroom. Nobody’ll talk to me.”
“That’s routine,” the thin man said. “I know it’s tiresome, but this is a serious thing. A man’s been murdered.”
The thin man—Sloan?—made it sound so reasonable. He went on. “We’ll talk to the sheriff, see if we can get you some information on how much longer it’ll be. I imagine you’ll have to make a formal statement, but I’d think you’d be home for dinner.”
“If you’re not involved,” Davenport said. She was sitting in a big chair, and he dropped into another one at a right angle to her. “If you’ve got anything to do with this, if you know where LaChaise is at, you better say so now,” he said. “Get a lawyer, get a deal.”
She shook her head, and a tear started down her cheek. “I don’t know anything, I just came to say good-bye to Candy . . .”
Three things were going on in her head. When Lucas said, “Say so now,” she thought, deep in her mind, Oh, right. At another level, she was so frightened she could hardly bear it. And in yet another place, she really was thinking about Candy, dead in a coffin not ten yards away; and that started the tear down her cheek.
LUCAS SAW THE tear start, and he glanced at Sloan. A wrinkle appeared between Sloan’s eyes. “Take it easy,” Sloan said gently. He leaned forward and touched her hand. “Listen. I really don’t think you had anything to do with this, but sometimes, people know more than they think. Like, if you were Dick LaChaise, where would you go? You know him, and you both know this territory . . .”
They talked with her for another fifteen minutes, but nothing came of it. Sandy showed tears several times, but held her ground: she simply didn’t know. She was a horse rancher, for G
od’s sakes, a landowner, a taxpayer, a struggling businesswoman. She didn’t know about outlaws: “Candy and I . . . she moved out of the house when I was in ninth grade and we didn’t see her much after that. She was always running around with Dick, doing crazy stuff. I was afraid she’d wind up dead.”
“What’d your folks do?” Sloan asked.
“My dad worked for the post office—he had a rural route out of Turtle Lake. They’re both gone now.”
“Sorry,” Sloan said. “But you don’t know anybody they might have run to?”
She shook her head: “No. I didn’t have anything to do with that bunch. I didn’t have time—I was always working.”
“So how crazy is LaChaise?” Lucas asked. “His mother says he’s gonna come after us.”
Sandy flipped her cowboy hat in her hands, as though she was making an estimate. “Dick is . . . strange,” she said, finally. “He’s rough, he was good-looking at one time, although . . . not so much now. He was wild. He attracted all the wild guys in the Seed, you’d hear about crazy stunts on his bike, or sleeping on the yellow line. He really did sleep on the yellow line once—on Highway 64, outside a tavern. Dead drunk, of course.”
“Do you think he’ll come after us?” Lucas asked.
“Are you worried?” asked Sandy, curiously. The big guy didn’t look like he’d worry.
“Some,” Lucas said. “ ’Cause I don’t know enough about him. And his wife and his sister—excuse me for saying this, I know Candy was your sister—the things they did were nuts.”
Sandy nodded. “That’s from Dick,” she said. “Dick is . . . he’s like an angry, mean little boy. He’ll do the craziest stuff, but then, later, he’ll be sorry for it. He once got drunk and beat up a friend, and when he sobered up, he beat himself up. He got a two-by-two and hit himself in the face with it until people stopped him and took him to the hospital.”