Across the lake, the yellow rectangle burned in the cabin window. A woman in a pink robe, her hair in curlers, sat under the light reading an old issue of Country Living. She was facing an old-fashioned picture window, positioned to look over the lake, when Druze and Bekker got back to the car.
'Richard,' she called to her husband, and stood and looked out the window. 'There are those headlights again… I'm going to call Ann. I really don't think they were planning to come up tonight.'
CHAPTER 17
Lucas punched the Porsche down the country highway, hissing along the wet blacktop, past woodlots of unleafed trees and the sodden, dark fall-tilled fields. The day was overcast, the clouds the color of slag iron. A deer, hit by a car, probably the night before, lay folded like an awkward, bone-filled backpack in a roadside ditch. A few hundred yards farther along, a dead badger had been flung like a rag over the yellow line.
He'd been to two hundred murder scenes, all of them dismal. Were murders ever done in cheerful surroundings, just by accident? He'd once gone to a murder scene at an amusement park. The park hadn't yet opened for the season, and although it made a specialty of fun, the silent Ferris wheels, the immobile roller coasters, the awkward Tilt-A-Whirls, the Empty House of Mirrors were as sinister as any rotting British country house on a moor…
He crested a low hill, saw the cop cars parked along the road, with an ambulance facing into a side road. A fat deputy sheriff, one thumb hooked under a gunbelt, gestured for him to keep moving. Lucas swung onto the shoulder, killed the engine and climbed out.
'Hey, you.' The fat deputy was bearing down on him. 'You think I was doin' aerobics?'
Lucas took his ID out of his coat pocket and said, 'Minneapolis police. Is this…?'
'Yeah, down there,' the deputy said, gesturing at the side road, backing off a step. He tried a few new expressions on his face and finally settled for suspicion. 'They told me to keep people moving.'
'Good idea,' Lucas said mildly. 'If the word gets out, you're gonna get about a million TV cameras before too long… How come everybody's parked out here?'
Lucas' collegial attitude loosened the deputy up. 'The guy who answered the call thought there might be tracks down there in the mud,' the fat man said. 'He thought we ought to get some lab people out here.'
'Good call,' Lucas said, nodding.
'I don't think we'll see any television,' the fat man said. Lucas couldn't tell if that made him happy or unhappy. 'Old D.T. put a lid on everything. D.T.'s the guy running the show down there.'
'Hope we can keep it on,' Lucas said, heading toward the side road. 'But if they do turn up, don't take any shit from them at all.'
'Right on.' The deputy grabbed his gunbelt in both hands and gave it a hitch.
The side track was two hundred yards long. At the end of it, Lucas found a nervous gray-haired woman and a pipe-smoking man sitting on the narrow porch of a cabin, both in cable-knit sweaters and slickers. Beyond the cabin, in a tangle of brush and brambles, Swanson was standing in a pod of people, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes.
Lucas walked past the cabin and gingerly into the scrub, staying away from a long strip of yellow police tape that outlined the original track into the raspberry bushes. Halfway back, a uniformed deputy, working on his hands and knees, was pouring casting compound into a footprint. He looked up briefly as Lucas went by, then turned back to his work. He'd already poured some casts farther along the trail.
'Davenport,' Swanson said, when Lucas pushed through to the end of the track. Two funeral home attendants in cheap dark suits were waiting to one side, a carry litter with pristine sheets for the uncaring body set carefully by their feet. Two more men, deputies, were working in a muddy foxhole, excavating the body with plastic hand trowels, like archaeologists on a dig. The body was half uncovered, but the face was still down. Swanson stepped away from the group, his face gloomy.
'It's for sure? George?' Lucas asked.
'Yeah. When they went into the hole, they got his foot, and the deputy stopped the digging and called for help. When they started again, they got to his hip, took his billfold out of his pocket. The same guy who found him recognized the name and called for help again. The clothes are right. It's him.'
Lucas stepped off to the side to get a better look at the hole. A foot stuck up awkwardly, like a grotesque tree shoot struggling for the sun. A sheriff's deputy in a ball cap and a raincoat came over and said, 'You're Davenport?'
'Yeah.'
'D.T. Helstrom,' the deputy said, sticking out a bony hand. He was a thin man, with a dark, weathered face. Smile lines creased his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. 'I've seen you on TV…'
They shook hands and Lucas said, 'You were the first guy out here?'
'Yes. The couple back there on the porch…?'
'I saw them,' Lucas said. He moved away from the hole with Swanson and Helstrom as they talked.
'They saw some lights over here last night. We have a lot of break-ins in these lake cabins, so I came by and checked it out. There was nothing at the cabin, but I could see somebody had been through the bushes. I went along… and there was the grave.'
'They didn't try to hide it?' Lucas asked.
Helstrom looked back along the track and cracked a thin grin. 'Yeah, I guess, in a city way. Kicked some shit over the grave. Didn't try too hard, though. They must have figured that with the rain, hell, in a couple of weeks there'd be nothing to find. And they were right. In a week, you couldn't find that hole with three Geiger counters and a Republican water-witcher.'
'We're both saying 'they,' ' Lucas said. 'Any sign of how many?'
'Probably two,' Helstrom said. 'They left tracks, but it was raining off and on all night, so the prints are pretty washed out. We've got one guy in gym shoes, for sure, 'cause we can still see the treads. Then there are prints that don't seem to have treads on them, on top of the treaded prints-but we can't be sure, because the rain might have taken them out…'
'Car?' Swanson asked.
'You can see where the tires were. But I followed it all the way out to the road, and the tread marks were gone.'
'But you think there were two,' Lucas said.
'Probably two,' Helstrom said. 'I looked at every track there is, marking the ones to cast; I couldn't swear to it in court, but I'd be willing to bet on it in Vegas.'
'You sound like you've done this shit before,' Lucas said.
'I had twenty years in Milwaukee,' Helstrom said, shaking his head. 'Big-city police work can kiss my ass, but I've done it before. We're taking the body over to Minneapolis, by the way. We've got a contract with the medical examiner, if you need the gory details.'
Swanson was looking back toward the hole. From where they were standing, all they could see was the foot sticking up and the two men working in the hole, getting ready to move the body. 'Maybe we got us a break,' he said to Lucas.
'Maybe. I'm not sure how it'll help.'
'It's something,' Swanson said.
'You know what I thought, when I first dug him up?' Helstrom asked. 'I thought, Ah! The game's afoot.'
Lucas and Swanson stared at him for a moment, then simultaneously looked back to the hole, where the foot stuck up. 'Jesus,' Lucas groaned, and the three of them started laughing.
At that instant, one of the deputies, pulling hard, got the body halfway out of its grave. The head swung around to stare at them all with empty holes where the eyes should have been.
'Aw, fuck me,' the deputy cried, and let the body slump back. The head didn't turn, but continued looking up, toward the miserable gray Wisconsin sky and the black scarecrow twigs of the unclothed trees.
He thought about it on the way back, weighing the pros and cons, and finally pulled into a convenience store in Hudson and called TV3.
