back.'
Grace started to walk around the side of the cafe toward the frame house behind it, then stopped, blue eyes riveted to the small metal box bolted into the concrete block. A fat sheath of PVC snaked down from the bottom into the ground. She walked a little closer to read the name of the local telephone company imprinted on the box, just to make sure, then felt a shot of adrenaline fire at her heart. The PVC sheath, and the cluster of wires within, had been sliced through.
Grace froze in position, moving only her eyes, and felt her hearing sharpen, trying to pull sounds out of this eerily silent place.
Kids,she told herself.Kids with a pocketknife and a serious streaky of ill-guided mischief.
After a few moments she moved slowly, cautiously, circling the gas station until she found its phone box and severed cord sprouting ragged wire ends. Her mind was moving at light speed, compensating for the restraint she forced on her body.
She found the outside phone box on the house, another clean cut, and then moved warily to the front door, opened it, looked into the shadows, and listened. It wasn't necessary to search the place. She knew instantly that there was no one inside.
She closed the door to the house quietly, then stood there on the stoop for a moment, looking, listening, longing for a breeze to ruffle the silence that threatened to smother her.
She didn't care what Sharon said about normalcy and small towns and unlocked doors on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn't think of any of that now. She was too busy listening to the voice in her head that said they weren't supposed to be there.
SHERIFF MICHAEL HALLORAN was sitting in his office on the second floor of the Kingsford County Government Center, his chair turned toward the big window that looked out over Helmut Krueger's dairy farm.
He'd never heard anyone describe Bonar Carlson as brilliant, but the man saw more than most and paid attention to details that the rest of the world glossed over. That was part of what made him such a good cop. Halloran was now seeing what Bonar had noticed a long time ago, and it made him feel a little inferior, like he'd been walking around with his eyes shut for most of the summer.
Helmut Krueger's pasture wasn't nearly as lush and green as it should have been; it had that autumn cast that happens when grass starts to dry from the roots up and the yellow shows through. And if that wasn't enough to confirm Bonar's predictions of drought, all you had to do was look at the herd of Holsteins. They were crowded into a black-and-white jumble today, butts out like football players in a huddle, tails beating ineffectually at the plague of biting flies that could take a hundred pounds off a heifer in a matter of days.
Bugs of one sort or another were a constant bother during any Wisconsin summer, but when drought threatened, the mosquito population went way down while the deerflies, horseflies, and stable flies reproduced in epidemic numbers to torment the daylights out of farm animals.
The signs had all been there in front of him, and Halloran hadn't seen them. It made him question his own powers of observation, made him wonder what he was doing in a job where success often rested on seeing what other people didn't.
Like this case. This was his second homicide case in as many years, after a decade of thinking that breaking up a bar fight was going to be the pinnacle of his law enforcement career. No way did that kind of background prepare you for making sense of three bodies that looked like war casualties dumped in a rural swimming hole.
He looked down at the case file cover sheet on his desk, the blank lines taunting him with all he didn't know.
Bonar gave the doorjamb a cursory rap on his way in, heading straight for the chair opposite Halloran's desk. When he sat down, the cheap vinyl wheezed like a defective whoopee cushion. 'I've got a thumbprint on my birth certificate,' he said without preamble. 'You do, too.'
'I do?'
'You were born at Kingsford General, right?'
'Right.'
'Then you were printed.'
Halloran lifted a pen. 'Should I be taking notes?'
'Most hospitals print newborns right in the delivery room. Feet, hands, thumb, something, so they don't send the wrong baby home
with the mother. So what I want to know is, how hard would it be to print a full set off every kid when they were born and put them in some kind of a database?'
'Gee, Bonar, you've got the makings of a despot.'
'Do you know how many bodies go unidentified every year? How many families sit around waiting for someone to come home, and all the time they're in the ground somewhere under a John Doe marker?'
Halloran sighed. 'I'll take a wild guess here. Nothing came up on the prints, right?'
'Not in AFIS, or anywhere else they let us look. And I don't mind telling you I was pretty surprised that not one of the three had an arrest record. It seems obvious that they were running in a pretty rough crowd, and not one of them did time? That almost defies logic.'
Halloran started making folds in the case cover sheet. 'Maybe they were just nice young men who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
'You're going to have to do some fast talking to convince me that an execution with an automatic rifle was just some kind of unfortunate turn of events.' Bonar pulled a flattened Snickers bar out of his pants pocket, ripped it open, and took a huge bite. 'Any luck with Missing Persons?'
'Nothing on our sheets. I've got Haggerty posting the photos on the nationwides, for all the good it will do.'
Bonar dabbed a fleck of chocolate from his lip with his little finger. 'These boys are pretty fresh. Maybe no one's missing them yet.'
'Could be. The autopsies might give us a place to start, but that's going to take a while. Doc says the state boys at Wausau are backed up with that multiple on Highway 29.'
Bonar sighed and got up to throw his Snickers wrapper in the garbage can. 'You want to tell me how we're supposed to solve a triple homicide without knowing who the victims are?'
Halloran went back to folding the paper on his desk. 'How many automatic rifles you figure we've got in this neck of the woods, Bonar?'
'Probably one or two more than Fort Bragg.'
'And who uses them?'
Bonar thought about that for a minute. 'Well, we busted Karl Wildenauer for blasting ducks with one last November.'
'Besides Karl.'
'Green Bay took a couple of AK-47s in that cocaine bust last week.'
Halloran scribbled on a notepad. 'Okay. Drug dealers.'
Bonar made a face. 'Kingsford County may have a few teenagers trying to grow pot in their folks' corn patch every now and again, but I doubt they've got firing squads on retainer. The real serious bad boys usually do their dealing in the cities.'
'So maybe it's city business. Maybe this was a body dump, pure and simple. Wouldn't be the first time. How about if we send the morgue shots to some of the narc divisions around the state, maybe even Chicago, see if anybody recognizes them.'
'That's an excellent thought.'
'Thank you. Now tell me who else uses automatic rifles, just in general.'
Bonar rolled his eyes to the ceiling and started rattling them off: 'Military, organized crime, militia crackpots, collectors-and we have a fair number of all of those in the Dairy State.'
'That's about the same list I came up with, and I'm thinking that if our three victims were involved in any one of those, Milwaukee might be able to help us out with an ID.'
'The FBI?'
'And maybe the ATF-I'd be willing to bet they both have lists nobody else gets to see.'
'I take it you feel like spending the rest of the weekend jumping through flaming hoops.'
