‘How do you know about that?’
Helen gave him the eye-roll, the classic teenage admonition for being so dense. ‘Daddy, it was all over the TV.’
‘Fifteen-year-olds shouldn’t watch TV.’
She gave him a mischievous smile. ‘The entire school saw you and Uncle Leo on the news yesterday. Ashley thinks Uncle Leo is totally hot.’
Gino winced at the adjective. She was too young for that kind of thinking, wasn’t she?
‘You looked nice, too, Daddy.’
‘Gee, thanks. And tell Ashley Leo’s old enough to be her grandfather.’
‘He is not.’
‘Well, father, at least.’
Helen tipped her head and regarded him with one of those scary wise-woman smiles that he saw on her face more and more these days. ‘Young women our age are always attracted to older men, Daddy, don’t you know that?’
Oh, dear Lord, Gino thought as he stared at the strange, wonderful creature sitting next to him in her fuzzy red robe with white reindeer cavorting all over it. Kid’s robe, woman’s face. He couldn’t keep up.
21
It was almost eight p.m. when Sampson walked into Iris’s office unannounced and plopped a Styrofoam take- out container on her desk. There was something about the way he did it that reminded her of old Puck’s glory days as a hunter, when the cat used to deposit gifts of dead rodents on her pillow in the middle of the night.
‘This isn’t a mouse, is it?’ she asked, prodding the container with her pen.
Sampson gave her a puzzled look. ‘Nope, it’s the best cheesecake in town, from Trapper’s on Highway Eight. But if you prefer mice, I saw a couple down in the filing room earlier.’
Iris had been forcing false, polite smiles all day, so it was a little startling when she felt herself genuinely smiling from the inside out for the first time since she’d crawled out of bed this morning. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant Sampson.’
‘You’re welcome, Sheriff.’
‘And thanks for… well, thanks for not making me feel like an idiot today.’
‘You weren’t an idiot today. Otherwise, I would have let you know. Why are you still here? It’s been a hell of a long day.’
‘I’m just finishing up. I authorized overtime for anybody who wants to work extra shifts until we apprehend Weinbeck. I can do that, can’t I?’
‘Hell, Sheriff Bulardo used to authorize overtime for late-night poker games, so I think you’re safe.’
‘Did he really?’
‘Sure he did. Bulardo and his cronies did a lot of things below the board, but they were good at covering their tracks. Just for the record, I never took part in any of it.’ He made himself at home on the recliner and kicked up his feet. This was definitely a bad habit Iris was going to have to address at some point very soon, cheesecake or not. ‘Hell, as long as we’re on the subject, I might as well tell you something I think you need to know.’
This didn’t sound promising. It was the kind of statement that usually prefaced bad news, like, ‘Iris, there’s something I think you need to know. Mark has been taking two-hour lunches with his secretary for the past month.’ ‘Oh? Like what?’
‘Well, I’m sure it’s not a newsflash that he’s plenty pissed about losing his seat, but he’s even more pissed that it was a woman who pushed him out. Double the humiliation for a man like that.’
Iris grimaced. ‘I figured as much. He seems like a good ol’ boy.’
Sampson nodded. ‘He is, with a network of good ol’ boys, and a lot of them are still on the force.’
Iris recalled her earlier encounter with the rude deputy at the Lake Kittering crime scene. ‘I think I’ve met one of them already.’
‘You have, and there’s more where he came from. Bulardo’s still got a lot of friends, and you’re going to have to figure out who they are and do a little house cleaning. But in the meantime, you might want to watch your back.’
Iris suddenly had the unsettling feeling that Sampson was holding out on her, telling her just what he thought she needed to hear, but not everything she needed to know. ‘What are you saying? Is Bulardo dangerous?’
‘That depends on your definition of dangerous.’
‘Dangerous is an angry, bitter, humiliated ex-sheriff who is plotting to kill off his successor.’
Sampson actually considered that for a moment, which scared the hell out of Iris. ‘I don’t think he’d ever go that far. But he can and will make your life a living hell if you give him half a chance.’
Iris sagged back in her big chair. In Bulardo’s big chair – a hand-me-down from the former regime, chosen to accommodate a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame. And apparently, Bulardo’s shadow was even bigger than the man himself, and it was positioned directly over her head. ‘Great. And I thought the criminals were the only ones I had to worry about.’
‘Politicians are some of the worst criminals around. Current company excepted.’
Iris gave him a weak smile, then decided to change the subject before she did something intelligent, like tender her resignation.
‘Detective Magozzi called earlier. He said there’s a chance that Kurt Weinbeck might be connected to the Minneapolis snowmen, too.’
‘“Might” being the operative word, or we’d have half the MPD up here already stomping the county flat.’
‘They want to talk to Weinbeck badly enough to check on how we’re handling it.’
Sampson’s eyes got smaller. ‘He actually asked that?’
‘Not in so many words. He wants a call if anything breaks.’
Sampson sighed and crooked his arms behind his head. ‘If I were Weinbeck, I’d be a thousand miles away by now. And even if he isn’t, we’ve got the county covered up and locked down. I think we can sleep easy tonight.’
‘Speak for yourself. I’m going to see Steve Doyle’s face in my nightmares for the next ten years.’
‘I hear you,’ he said quietly, turning to gaze out the window, at the sprinkling of lights from the fish shacks on the lake below. ‘You know, when I first started out, I used to think that crime scenes and dead bodies and violence were all things you’d get used to eventually, because they were part of the job, and if you didn’t get used to them, you’d drive yourself crazy.’
Iris followed his gaze out the window and thought about a good man she’d never met named Steve Doyle, dying out there on Lake Kittering, a few hundred yards from where she sat. ‘Do you ever get used to it?’
‘Some do, I suppose. I never did.’ He turned away from the window and looked at the stack of papers on her desk. ‘Field reports?’
‘No. I already went through those. I was reading through the dispatch log for last night and today, just to make sure there wasn’t something we missed.’
Sampson raised his brows slightly and nodded.
In man-speak, Iris supposed that was a baby kudo for thinking of another rock that needed turning over, so she gave him a small smile. ‘The truth is, it doesn’t feel right just going home when there’s still a killer out there.’
‘There’s always a killer out there.’
That single short sentence, more than anything else Iris had seen or heard today, shook her to the core. And yet it was probably the way all cops had to think; a sad, hopeless reality that English teachers never had to consider when they put their heads on their pillows every night.
Sampson pushed himself up from the recliner with a weary sigh. ‘They’re talking about an ice storm later. Don’t stay too late.’
‘I won’t.’
He was on his feet and heading for the door when Iris suddenly realized she didn’t want him to leave. It felt good to have the company, and it would probably feel really good to wind down and let the day go with somebody
