“I can feel it,” the cop said. He looked at the other cop. “Can you feel the edge of the hole?”
“Right there? It feels . . .”
“That’s it,” the first cop said. “We’re in the hole part here.”
Still scraping, they defined the hole. “That looks like nothing more’n a grave,” Marshall said to Lucas. Lucas nodded, and a minute later, Marshall stepped off down the hill and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Lucas looked around the hill. All morning, the cops had been chattering as they took turns working down the hill with the radar set. Now there was nothing but the sound of the shovels and the occasional grunt of the diggers. Del caught his eye and shrugged.
Then: “Wait.” One of the cops held out an arm to stop another, then knelt in the hole. “Is that a rock?”
He pulled off his glove and probed the soil with his fingers. A moment later he came up with a white object. “What is it?” Lucas asked, squatting next to the hole. Del moved in beside him, and the cop handed the white thing to Lucas.
Lucas turned it in his hand and looked at Del. “Finger bone,” Del said.
“I think,” Lucas said. He looked up at Hammond. “We better stop digging, and get the state crime lab down here. We gotta excavate these things an inch at a time.”
“Ah, sweet Jesus,” Hammond said. “Sweet fuckin’ Jesus.”
THE DRIZZLE CONTINUED. The sheriff showed up and sent two deputies back into town to find some tarps to build tents over the supposed graves. Lake began working on a larger plot. The state crime people showed up at midafternoon and looked at the six sites that Lake had outlined.
The officer in charge, Jack McGrady, had worked with Lucas on another case. “We’re gonna get some generators and lights from the highway department. We’ll get some more tents up and get at it.”
Lucas had shown him the bone in an evidence bag. “The question we all had . . . is it possible that it’s not human?”
McGrady held the bag up to the sky, looked at the bone for a few seconds, then handed it back to Lucas. “It’s human. A phalange—a little short and squat, so it’s probably from a thumb.”
“A thumb.”
“Probably. Can’t tell you what era. . . . Wish you’d picked a better day for this. You know, sunny and cool.”
Lucas looked down the hillside and at the cop cars lined up along the gravel road, two at each end, with their light bars flashing. “Sorry,” he said, and he was. Then: “What do you mean, ‘era’?”
“Bones last a long time. This is kind of a pretty hillside, with a view. Maybe you’ve turned up a settler graveyard. Just by coincidence.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said.
“Neither do I.”
LATE IN THE afternoon, Lucas and Del went back into Cannon Falls, to the café, and ate open-faced turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes. The café did a steady business, large quiet men in coveralls, coming and going, and smelling of wet wool, mud, and radiator heat.
“Mashed potatoes count as a vegetable?” Del asked.
“Not these,” Lucas asked. “These are some kind of petroleum derivative.”
They ate in silence for a moment, then, “If those are all graves up there, we’ve got a busy little bee on our hands,” Del said.
“They’re all graves,” Lucas said. “I can feel it.”
“In your bones?”
“Not funny.”
“Okay, so we’re looking for sources where he might have gotten the bodies for his drawings. If we can find those, maybe we can track back to his computer; we’ve got a photograph that he might have taken. We have a kind of physical description. We’re putting together lists of everybody that all the drawings—what would you call them, victims?—we’re putting together lists of everybody they know. What else?”
“Ware thinks he might be a priest.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Del said. “A priest who was an art student? In Menomonie? Ware’s either jerking us around, or we really don’t know what’s going on.”
“But he didn’t say for sure that the guy was a priest, just that something he said made Ware think he might be a priest.”
“That’s no help.” Del picked up a glob of potato on a spoon and contemplated it. After a minute, he said, “Okay. Answer me this. You know the chick whose picture got pasted up on the bridge across the river?”
“Yeah?”
“Why was she picked out?” Del asked. “What’d she do to piss him off, that he went after her like that? Why was she treated different?”
Lucas leaned back in his chair and said, “Ah, shit. Why didn’t we think of that before? Something’s gotta be going on there.”
“So we start pulling her apart,” Del said.
“And maybe we check with the archdiocese, and see if they had any priests who were art students.”
“In Menomonie.”
A waitress came by with a pot of coffee. She was a pudgy young woman with heavily teased honey-blond hair. “Are you the cops digging up the Harrelsons’ woods?”
Del nodded. “Yup.”
“We heard you found a whole bunch of skeletons.” Her jaw dropped open, waiting for the inside information.
“We don’t know what we have,” Lucas said politely. “We’re still digging.”
“That’s a lonely place out there,” she said. “Sometimes kids used it like, you know, a lover’s lane. Park down there at the bottom, then get a blanket and go up on the hill. But it was always spooky.”
“Really,” Del said. “You ever go up there?”
“Maybe,” she said. “And maybe not. You want seconds on them potatas? We got plenty more.”
AT SIX, LUCAS called Weather from the site and told her that he wouldn’t be home until very late. “Trying to avoid your obligations, eh?” she asked.
“You sound like a fuckin’ Canadian, eh?” he said. “Maybe I can get out of here a little earlier than that. . . .”
THE HILL WAS lit by a half-dozen sets of powerful lights, plus lower-powered reading-style lights in an Army-surplus command tent. A diesel generator hammered away from the roadside, and the parking strip smelled like a bus stop.
Each grave had been covered by a broad tarp, and three of the six graves were being excavated by two-man teams; progress was slow, the excavation being done with small Marshalltown trowels. Along the road, three TV trucks were sitting in the rain, their crews warm inside, and unhappy: They would rather have been wet outside, with some close-up tape.
Lake came by just after dark, squatted next to Lucas, and said, “We’ve finished the next plot, going out another twenty-five meters in every direction, and I think you’ve got all the graves identified. There are two more spots that we’re gonna stake out as possibles, but they’re not as clear as the others.”
“Good. Six is enough. If it is six.”
Lake, with water dripping off the bill of his hat, said, “I’ll tell you something, Lucas: You’re gonna find bones in every one of those holes.”
THE FIRST GRAVE, the one where the finger bone had been found, was the first to produce clothing—a polyester shirt that Marshall recognized as a brand sold at Wal-Mart. McGrady, squatting next to the grave, looked up at Lucas and said, “So it’s not a settler site.” They went back to the command tent, and Lucas called Rose Marie to give her the news. He was just off the phone when one of the members of the excavation team called, “Jack: we got a skull,” and as Lucas and McGrady recrossed the hillside, “And we got hair.”
They got to the grave and looked into the hole. The skull looked almost like a piece of a dirty-white coffee cup. The guy in the hole touched the edge of the bone with the tip of his trowel and said, “Looks like blond hair.”
McGrady got down on his knees to look, then said, “All right. Go to brushes and art knives. Careful with the hair.”
Lucas nodded. “How long to clean out the graves?”
“We’ll be working around the clock. We got TV now, so there’s gonna be
some pressure. These first three, if they’re shallow, we’ll have by midnight, I think. The rest by tomorrow. You heading out?”
“I’ll stick around for the first three,” Lucas said. “But we need to get working on the IDs as quick as we can. I’ve got a name for you, and there’s some dental stuff available on her.”
“If her jaw’s intact, I can give you a quick read tomorrow morning, then,” McGrady said.
DEL WENT BACK into town and returned with a thermos full of coffee. Lucas was drinking a cup when he saw a large man in a camouflage rain suit join Marshall on the hillside. The two bent together, and the new man put his arm on Marshall’s shoulder as they talked; another Dunn County deputy, Lucas thought.
Clothing and bones were coming up in two of the three holes. Lucas had done a tour, spoke briefly with Marshall, looked curiously at the large man with him, but Marshall offered no introductions. Lucas wandered off to the command tent, where Del was talking with a group of coffee-drinking deputies.
“You got your two great families of wine,” Del was saying.
“Yeah, yeah, red and white, which lacks something in the way of new information,” one of the deputies said.
“I was talking about screw-top and cork,” Del said, “Considering pop-top and bottle-cap as variations of the screw-top.”
“You’re talking about wine again?” Lucas asked. “You’re turning into a fuckin’ Frenchman.”
“Am not. I use deodorant,” Del said.
“Like that’s gonna last,” Lucas said skeptically.
Del turned back to the deputy. “As I was saying before the rude interruption . . .”
“Screw-top and cork, pop-top and bottle-cap,” the deputy prompted. Now he was interested.
“Right. So among your screw-tops, you got your three basic families: fruit taste, Kool-Aid taste, and other.”
“I think I’ve had some other,” the deputy said. “I was once going through Tifton, Georgia, in a hurry. I was driving this ’sixty-three rose-blush Cadillac—”
Del interrupted. “You wanna hear about wine, or you wanna bullshit?”
“All right, fuck you, I won’t tell you what happened.”
“Good. Anyway, there’s—”
At that moment, an anguished croak slashed across the hillside, the sound of a man who was having his eyes plucked out. The talk stopped cold and they all stepped to the edge of the tent, and Lucas saw the large man and Marshall on their knees next to the third grave. The two cops in the hole were standing up, unmoving, looking at the two men on their knees.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the deputies said. “What happened to them?”
Lucas had an idea. He was on his way across the hillside, with Del a step behind. As they stepped into the harsh glare of the light, Lucas looked into the hole and saw a piece of reddish cloth. Terry Marshall put one hand on the shoulder of the large man and pushed himself back onto his feet. “It’s Laura’s shirt. We think it’s the shirt she was wearing.”
“It is,” the large man sobbed. He had both hands to the sides of his head, as if he were holding it in place. “We hoped, we hoped . . .”
“Jack Winton. Laura’s dad,” Marshall said unapologetically.
Lucas was struck with a surge of anger. “Why’n the hell did you . . .”
“I couldn’t keep him off; didn’t even try,” Marshall said. “He’s family.”
“Ah, jeez,” Lucas said. “This . . .”
“This sucks,” Marshall said. He patted the big man on the shoulder again. “Jack. Come on. Let ’em do their work. Come on.”
LUCAS AND DEL left the site ten minutes later. With three graves producing bodies, there was little doubt that the others would, too. On the way back, Del said, “You getting pissed yet?”
“Getting closer to it,” Lucas said. “Especially after that thing with Winton.”
“Marshall should never have brought him.”
“He’s family. They’re all family, and he couldn’t say no,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. . . . It’s a good sign that you’re getting pissed. Focuses the mind.”
“I guess.” They drove on a little way, listening to the heater, and then Lucas said, “I just hope it doesn’t spill over on Weather.”
“She knows what you do for a living,” Del said. “I think it was just that one thing that fucked her up, when she was right in the middle of it. She’s a good guy. I’m happy you’re back together.”
WEATHER WAS STILL awake, reading a Barbara Kingsolver novel. Lucas had hung his rain suit from a nail in the garage, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “I’m gonna get some soup.”
“Guy called—a McGrady? He gave me a cell phone number, said you should call him when you got back.”
“All right.” Lucas got a can of soup out of the cupboard, dumped it in a microwave-safe bowl, stretched some cling wrap over the bowl, and stuck it in the microwave for two minutes. Then he dialed McGrady’s cell phone; McGrady answered on the first ring.
“You know that first skull we pulled out of the ground?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re down to the skeletal bones and so on. First of all, it’s definitely a female. And we found the hyoid. It’s in two pieces, and the break looks like it happened at the time of death. It’s not a new break.”
“So she was strangled.”
“I’ll let the medical examiner figure it out, but I’d bet on it,” McGrady said.
“Check the others, if you find more.”
“We’re gonna find more,” McGrady said. “We’ve got two more skulls coming up now.”
LUCAS GOT THE soup out of the microwave, stirred it, stuck it back in for another two minutes, and called Rose Marie to fill her in. He told her about Marshall, and she said, “You better keep an eye on him.”
“Yeah. But it’s his case, in a way. He put the file together.”
“Sounds like he might be a little bit of a loose cannon, though,” she said. “He can watch, but keep him out of trouble.”
HE REPEATED THE story to Weather as he was eating the soup. She dragged a chair around to sit behind him, and put an arm on his shoulder. “You look . . . forlorn.”
“You should’ve heard that guy,” Lucas said. “He sounded like somebody was . . . torturing him. Plucking his eyeballs out or something.”
“Breaking his heart,” Weather said.
They stayed up talking, since Weather wasn’t scheduled to operate the next morning; talked about Marshall, about the killer, about the graveyard in the rain. Sat close together; eventually found their way back to the bedroom. Making a baby, Lucas thought later, is something you can do even after a day spent digging up a graveyard.
Maybe even a good time to do it.
10
THE TELEVISED DISPLAY of his drawings had been a hammer blow. As he sat in his office, peering into the depths of his computer, James Qatar would turn each and every time he heard footsteps in the hallway. He possessed a level of courage, but he was not immune to fear. The building was nearly empty during the study term, and the shoe heels of every passerby echoed through his office.
He was waiting for the police. He’d seen the television show on forensic science, how the police could track a killer with a single hair or a flake of dandruff or the imprint of a gym shoe. He knew much of that was exaggeration, but still: It produced a vision.
Qatar was an old-movie buff, and in his vision saw broad-shouldered police thugs with bent noses and yellow-tan woolen double-breasted suits and wide, snap-rimmed hats. They’d have eyes like bloodhounds and they’d jam into the doorway and then one would mutter to the others, “That’s him! Get him!” He’d stand up and look around, but there’d be no place to run. One of the cops, a brutal man with dry twisting lips, would pull a pair of chrome handcuffs from his pocket. . . .
The scene was all very retro, very thirties, very movie stylish—but that was the way James Qatar saw it happening.
Never happened.
The same
night that he’d seen the drawings on television, he’d driven himself in a panic to a CompUSA, where he’d bought a package of ZIP disks and a new hard drive. At his office, he’d locked the door, dumped all of his lectures to the new ZIPs, then stripped the hard drive out of his computer. He also dug out every ZIP disk in the place, except those he’d bought that morning—some of the disks were unused, but he was taking no chances—and put them in his briefcase with the old hard drive.
He took an hour fussing with Windows, reinstalling it on the new drive, then began the task of reading his lecture files back in. The whole process would take time, but he got started. When he ran out of patience, he headed home, carrying his briefcase.