Secret Prey

  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, BUTIF 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 INA 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 mind 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.