Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She'd run with him, all right, but then she'd get them caught. She'd talk about art, she'd talk about antiques, she'd show off… and she'd fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn't want to do that again, but he'd be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…
He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…
At the house, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”
Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped… keep going.”
But there was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren't even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.
The farm was a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they'd had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They'd have a vegetable garden, eat natural food… And waterfront was always good, right? Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.
But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow.
Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.
The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”
“Got that right,” Leslie had said.
They put the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I'll carry her.”
Digging the hole was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.
When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed.38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where's my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”
But there were complications to all that. She hadn't thought about it long enough.
This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn't see far enough ahead…
She relaxed. Not yet.
They packed the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.
“Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it… Don't want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”
“Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won't work,” but she held back.
“What?”
“I don't know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.
“Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working, you know? Nothing.”
The bed they slept in was broken down; tended to sag in the middle. Neither could sleep much; and Leslie woke in the middle of the night, his eyes springing open.
Two people in the world knew about him and the killings. One was Amity Anderson, who wanted money. They'd promised her a cut, as soon as they could move the furniture, which was out in the steel building.
The other one was Jane.
A tear dribbled down his face; good old Jane. He unconsciously scratched at a dog bite. He could pull Anderson in with the promise of money-come on out to the house, we've got it. Kill her, bring her out here.
And Jane… Another tear.
Jenkins was asleep in the visitor's chair when Lucas arrived at his office the next morning. Carol said, “He was asleep when I got here,” and nodded toward the office.
Lucas eased the door open and said, quietly, “Time to work, bright eyes.”
Jenkins was wearing a gray suit, a yellow shirt, and black shoes with thick soles, and, knowing Jenkins's penchant for kicking suspects, the shoes probably had steel toes. He'd taken off his necktie and gun and placed them under his chair.
He didn't move when Lucas spoke, but Lucas could tell he was alive because his head was tipped back and he was snoring. He was tempted to slam the door, give him a little gunshot action, but Jenkins might return fire before Lucas could slow him down. So he said, louder this time: “Hey! Jenkins! Wake up.”
Jenkins's eyes popped open and he stirred and said, “Ah, my back… This is really a fucked-up chair, you know that?” He stood up and slowly bent over and touched his toes, then stood up again, rolled his head and his hips, smacked his lips. “My mouth tastes like mud.”
“How long you been here?” Lucas asked.
“Ahhh… Since six? I found the Kline kid last night, then I went out with Shrake and had a few.”
“Until six?”
“No, no. Five-thirty, maybe,” Jenkins said. “Farmer's market was open, I ate a tomato.
And one of those long green things, they look like a dildo…”
“A cucumber?” Lucas ventured.
“Yeah. One of those,” Jenkins said.
“What about the kid?”
“Ah, whoever was in the truck, it wasn't Kline,” Jenkins said. He yawned, scratched his head with both hands. “He was out with some of his business-school buddies. They're not the kind to lie to the cops. Stuffy little cocksuckers. They agree that he was with them from eight o'clock, or so, to midnight.”
“That would have been too easy, anyway.” Jenkins yawned again, and that made Lucas yawn.
“Girl have any kind of description?” Jenkins asked.
“The guy had a nylon on his head,” Lucas said. “She was too scared to look for a tag number. All we got is the dead dog and a white van, and we don't know where the van is.”
“Well, the dog's something. I bet they're doing high-fives over at the ME's office,” Jenkins said. He yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe I'll go out for a run.
Wake myself up.”
“Call nine-one-one before you start,” Lucas said. Jenkins was not a runner. The healthiest thing he did was sometimes smoke less than two packs a day “Yeah.” He coughed and went out. “See ya.”
“Eat another tomato,” Lucas called after him.
Lucas couldn't think of what to do next, so he phoned John Smith at the St. Paul cops: “You going up to Bucher's?”
“Yeah, eventually, but I don't know what I'm going to do,” Smith said.
“Anybody up there?”
“Barker, the niece with the small nose, an accountant, and a real estate appraiser.
They're doing an inventory of contents for the IRS-everything, not just what the Widdlers did. Widdlers are finished. School got out, and the Lash kid called to see if he could go over and pick up his games. He'll be up there sometime… probably some people in and out all day, if you want to go over. If there's nobody there when you get there, there's a lockbox on the door. Number is two-four-six-eight.”
“All right. I'm gonna go up and look at paper,” Lucas said.
“I understand there'll be some excitement in Dakota County this morning, and you were involved,” Smith said.
“Oh, yeah. Almost forgot,” Lucas said. “Where'd you hear that?”
