islands of light until finally the darkness took him altogether. She sat down on the steps of St. Agnes, bowed her head, and kept her promise.
Will came into the baby’s room, where Lucinda sat in a rocking chair, feeding Misty a bottle of formula. “I’m going back to the shop,” he told her.
“Now?”
“I won’t be able to sleep anyway. Maybe if I get tired I’ll lie down on the cot there. Don’t worry if I don’t come home till late.”
“All right,” she said, because she knew whatever she said it wouldn’t matter. Will was going and that was that.
After he left, she rocked Misty and sang to her softly. When the baby was asleep, Lucinda laid her in the crib and went to the big picture window, in the living room, that looked out over the front yard. She was watching for Uly, who’d headed off earlier, borrowing her car, saying he was going to the library, though she didn’t believe it for a minute. She was worried about him. She’d always been worried about him, worried that he would break under the weight of all his father laid on him. Will was usually clear about what he expected of his sons. He was good at laying down the law. He wasn’t good at forgiving when the law was breeched. And he was a complete failure at letting his sons know when he was proud of them. It must have seemed to Alejandro and Ulysses that he had never been. Which wasn’t true. He simply didn’t know how to tell them so.
She lay down on the sofa, and without realizing it, she drifted off. She woke to a distant scream and thought at first that Misty had awakened. Then she realized the sound was coming from sirens racing through Aurora. Like a bad dream they faded away and the soothing chirr of the crickets returned and once again she slept.
TWENTY-NINE
When the phone rang, Cork was asleep in the bunk at Sam’s Place. Over the years, particularly in the days when he was sheriff of Tamarack County, he’d become accustomed to being hauled out of bed at god-awful hours, and he was awake instantly and across the dark room to the telephone.
“O’Connor,” he said.
“Cork, it’s Bos.” Bos Swain, one of the dispatchers for the sheriff’s department. “The sheriff asked me to call. She figured you’d want to know. Buck Reinhardt’s been shot. He’s dead.”
Homicide was always startling news, yet as he dressed to head out to the scene, Cork found himself thinking, Of course.
Buck Reinhardt had been killed at 10:35 P.M. as he left the Buzz Saw and made his way across the parking lot toward his truck. He was shot once in the head with a high-caliber bullet fired, witnesses said, from a wooded rise on the other side of the highway, a distance of approximately seventy-five yards.
“A tough shot,” Dross said, eyeing the rise from where she stood near Reinhardt’s truck. “Lighting’s not great, parking lot’s full, a lot of interference.”
Ed Larson, who was standing next to her watching his team finish with the crime scene, said, “With a scope and a steady hand, about anybody who knows how to handle a rifle could make the shot.”
Dross shook her head. “Killing a man, that’s not a cakewalk. Takes a lot of determination.”
“Scared people do it all the time,” Larson said, “and then wonder how the hell it happened.”
Dross turned from the rise and looked at her investigator. “Do you really think it was fear that killed Buck Reinhardt?”
Cork, who’d been leaning against the tailgate of Reinhardt’s truck with his arms crossed and his mind working on the incident, asked, “Witnesses see anything?”
“Nobody we’ve interviewed so far,” Larson said. “The shots were fired, Buck went down, and everybody scrambled for cover. They all agreed where the shots had come from, but that’s about all they’ve been able to tell us.”
Cork came away from the truck. “Shots? He was hit only once.”
“A second round was fired after he went down. Burrowed into the asphalt beside his body. We dug that one out.”
“Whoever it was knew enough about Buck to know he’d be at the Buzz Saw tonight. They just took up their position and waited,” Cork said.
“Who knew about Buck?” Dross asked.
Cork shrugged. “Just about anybody who’d spent five minutes asking. Wasn’t any secret he did most of his drinking here. And he drank a lot.”
They all turned and watched as Reinhardt’s covered body was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled to the ambulance. The small crowd that had gathered around the entrance to the Buzz Saw watched, too. A minute later, with no flashing of lights or other fanfare, the ambulance pulled away.
“Does Elise know?” Cork asked.
Marsha said, “I sent Cy Borkman and he broke the news.”
“How’d she take it?”
“According to Cy, with a little water and on the rocks.”
“What about Brittany Young?”
“Pretty shaken up. One of her friends took her home.”
In the woods on the rise, deputies were going over the area with halogen beams. Occasionally, a bright flash indicated that the scene was being documented with the department’s digital camera. BCA agent Simon Rutledge emerged from the pine trees, looked both ways, then crossed the highway.
“Anything?” Dross asked.
Rutledge grinned and held up a plastic evidence bag. “Found the place in the pine needles where our shooter laid down to wait, and we got a shell casing. No tracks or anything else yet.”
“Nobody saw the shooter leave the woods?” Cork asked.
“Nope,” Larson replied.
“Hiked out probably,” Rutledge said. “What’s the nearest road?”
“That would be Lowell Lake Road, about half a mile that way.” Dross pointed north, up the highway.
Rutledge said, “Any houses there? Anyone who might have seen a car sitting along the side of the road?”
Dross shook her head. “That stretch is deserted.”
“Still, you may want to get someone over there to look for tire impressions from a vehicle parked on the shoulder.”
Larson got on his walkie-talkie and raised Deputy Pender, who was on the wooded rise. He explained what he wanted and told Pender to take one of the other deputies with him.
A red pickup slowed on the highway in order to pull into the parking lot. It was stopped by Deputy Minot, who had instructions not to let anyone in. After an exchange between deputy and driver, the pickup came ahead and parked in an empty slot near the door to the Buzz Saw. Dave Reinhardt got out and walked toward his father’s truck.
“Where is he?” he said.
“His body’s already gone, Dave,” Dross replied. “The autopsy’ll be done first thing in the morning.”
“How’d it happen?”
Dross explained what she knew.
Reinhardt stood with his hands clenched at his sides. “Red Boyz,” he said.
“We’ve got nothing at the moment that points toward anyone, Dave. There’s still a lot of groundwork to do.”
Reinhardt looked at her. In the light of the parking lot lamp, his face was white and hard, like new plaster. “Are you blind or just stupid, Marsha?”
Dross said evenly, “It seems to me the stupid thing would be to rush to judgment.”
“Hey, Dave!” Cal Richards broke from the crowd at the door to the Buzz Saw. He slipped under the crime scene tape and came toward Reinhardt. He was still wearing the coveralls he’d had on when the shots had been
