'Yeah, right,' Harley scoffed. 'That's why every friggin' couture house in the world has a shop there. Let me tell you, you haven't begun to see wilderness until you've been to northern Wisconsin.'
'Like you would know.'
'Well, as it happens, I do know. Drove an Ojibwa friend up to the Bad River Rez once. Saw nothing but black bear for about three hours straight, and not one of them was carrying a cell phone.'
'See?' Roadrunner said to Grace, his forehead wrinkled with worry. 'You're going to be totally out of touch for a really long time.'
Grace smiled at him. Roadrunner somehow managed to be both the child and the fretting mother of the Monkeewrench crew. His outlook had always been dark, his general philosophy one of blanket pessimism. 'It's only a six-hour drive, Roadrunner.'
'Yeah, well, a lot can happen in six hours. The car could blow up. You could hit a moose or have a blowout, and then veer off the road into a tree and lie there unconscious with all your arms and legs broken. . . .'
Harley smacked him on the back of the head.
Ten minutes later, Harley, Roadrunner, and Charlie stood at the end of the driveway like three abandoned puppies, watching Grace and Annie pull away in Grace's Range Rover.
'We should have gone with them,' Roadrunner said.
Charlie whined his agreement.
'No room in that puny little SUV for two big, strapping men like ourselves and three women with all their makeup. Annie took a frig-gin' trunk, can you believe that? For a weekend in Green Bay, where nobody ever wears anything except Packers sweatshirts.'
'We could have taken the RV. . ..'
'Damnit, Roadrunner, how many times do I have to tell you not to call it that' It's a luxury motor coach.'
'Whatever. We could have taken it. There's plenty of room for all of us.'
Harley stared at the clump birch in the yard across the street. He rocked back and forth on his run-down heels. 'I hate goddamned Wisconsin.'
'The Harley-Davidson plant is in Wisconsin.'
Harley's big head moved up and down a little. 'Yeah. There is that.'
A LOT OF PEOPLE assumed that Chicago was the windiest city in the country, just because of the 'Windy City' moniker someone had slapped on the place more than a century ago. The truth was that Chicago wasn't anywhere near the top on any known list, and Minneapolis was windier by a whopping tenth of a mile per hour. Perched on the northern edge of the Great Plains, it was an easy target for the prairie winds that swept across the Midwest during the summer, which made the warm months tolerable for a population that wore parkas six or seven months out of the year. But every August, the prairies seemed to run out of breath, the wind stopped, and the heat settled over the city like shrink-wrap.
Grace had never minded the heat-or the cold, for that matter. Even after eleven years in the state, she was still baffled by the local fixation on the weather. But Annie had succumbed to the obsession almost immediately. Like almost every other resident, she watched every weathercast on every channel every chance she got, and spewed statistics like a meteorologist on uppers. They'd been in the car exactly two minutes when she started tapping the digital temperature readout on the dash.
'Lord, would you look at that. Eighty-eight degrees and it's not even ten in the morning. Another hour and we'll be fish poachin' in a kettle.'
'We'll turn up the air-conditioning.'
'Hah. As if air-conditioning could put a dent in the dew point we're expecting today. Did you hear how high it's going to be?'
'I don't even know what the dew point is.'
'Honey, no one really knows what the dew point is, but it's going to be bad. Tropical. And Fat Annie is going to suffer. Is that Sharon?'
Haifa block ahead, Sharon was standing at the curb outside her apartment building, wearing her little navy FBI pants suit and her dreadful black lace-ups. She wore her brown hair in a short pixie cut, and would have been button-cute if it hadn't been for the mean-little-dog expression on her face. She had a big leather handbag over one shoulder and a canvas duffel at her feet. 'Look at that bitty thing. Was she that short last week?'
'Shorter. She was sitting down.'
The three of them had arranged to meet at a bar and grill on the fringes of downtown to take a look at the documentation Sharon had gathered on the case. She had already commandeered a large booth in the back by the time Grace and Annie had arrived, and was frightening the regulars with a spread of autopsy photos she'd laid on the table. 'Are those all from the Green Bay case?' Grace had asked, and Sharon had swept the photos aside immediately. 'Lord, no. I just take these along whenever I'm going out alone. No one hits on a woman looking at dead people.'
Grace smiled at the memory, as she had smiled then. Most women would have worn a ring on their left hand to avoid unwanted male attention; Sharon brought pictures of corpses, and Grace liked that about her.
Annie rolled down her window when they pulled up to the curb. 'Sharon Mueller, what on earth are you doing standing out there in this heat, especially in that sorry synthetic getup?'
Sharon stepped up to the window and breathed mint into the car. 'I am a representative of the Federal government, and this is my Federal government outfit. In the back?' She hefted her duffel.
Grace nodded and got out to open the back gate for her. As Sharon tossed her duffel in, she eyed Annie's trunk suspiciously. 'Somebody planning to stay awhile?'
'Only the weekend, honey,' Annie answered as she climbed out of the passenger seat and held the door open for Sharon. 'I bring at least two trunks for anything longer than that. Now, you come on up here and sit in the front. I'll be needing the backseat to accommodate this dress. If it gets wrinkled, the appliques poke out this way and that, and I end up looking like I've been run through a paper shredder.'
'It's a pretty amazing dress,' Sharon said, giving her the once-over.
'I knew there was hope for you, darlin'.'
After a minute on the road, Sharon said, 'This feels weird.'
'What, the car?'
'Nah. Going on a road trip with a couple of women.'
'You've been on road trips with men?' Annie asked from the backseat, immediately intrigued.
'A couple. I wouldn't recommend it, though. Guys have this thing about getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. No side trips.
They never want to stop and look at anything. And they never have to go to the bathroom either.'
'Yeah, yeah, I know all that, but who'd you go on a road trip with? Sheriff Halloran?'
'God, no. Elias McFarressey. He played the accordion, among other things.'
Annie's jaw dropped. 'You dated a man who played the accordion?'
'It was Wisconsin. You kind of had to be there.'
'I'm seeing Lawrence Welk.'
'It wasn't quite that bad. Grace, do you know where you're going?'
'I figured I'd head east until you tell me to make a turn.'
'That'll work. I'm better than any GPS, at least in Wisconsin.'
'Good thing, because I don't have one.'
'I thought all these fancy rides had GPS.'
'Grace wouldn't hear of it,' Anne said. 'Too Big Brother. They always know where you are with a GPS.'
Sharon cocked her head at Grace. 'And who is 'they'?'
Grace shrugged. 'Could be anybody.'
DOWN THE LONG DRIVE that led to the Wittig farm, behind the barn and out of sight of the road, three figures in bulky white suits stood motionless in the tall grass bordering a paddock fence, looking as alien in this landscape as the barn would have looked on the moon.
Through the thick transparent shields in their helmets, three pairs of busy eyes watched the slow progress of
