county courthouse was a low rambling building of fieldstone and steel at the end of Main. A cluster of sheriff's trucks sat in a parking lot in back and Lucas wheeled in beside them. A Bronco with an unfamiliar EYE3 logo was parked in a visitor's slot by the door.
A deputy coming out nodded at him, said, 'Mornin',' and politely held the door. The sheriff's outer office was behind a second door, decorated with curling DARE antidrug posters and the odors of aging nicotine and bad nerves. A reporter and a cameraman were slumped in green leatherette chairs scarred with cigarette burns and what looked like razor cuts. The reporter was working on her lipstick with a gold compact and a small red brush. She looked up when Lucas stepped in. He nodded and she nodded back. A steel door and a bulletproof glass window were set in the wall opposite the reporter. Lucas went to the window, looked at the empty desk behind it, and pushed the call button next to the window.
'It'll just piss them off,' the reporter said. She had a tapered fox-face with a tiny chin, big eyes and wide cheekbones, as though she'd been especially bred for television. She rubbed her lips together, then snapped the compact shut, dropped it in her purse, and gave him a reflexive smile. The cameraman was asleep.
'Yeah? Where're you guys from?' Lucas asked. The reporter was very pretty, with her mobile eyes and trained expressions, like a latter-day All-American geisha girl. Weather could never work for television, he thought. Her features were too distinctive. Could be a movie star, though.
'Milwaukee,' she said. 'Are you with the Star-Tribune?'
'Nope.' He shook his head, giving her nothing.
'A cop?' The reporter perked up.
'An interested onlooker,' Lucas said, grinning at her. 'Lots of reporters around?'
'I guess so,' she said, a frown flitting across her face. 'I heard Eight talking on their radios, so they're up here somewhere, and I heard the Strib came in last night. Probably out at the lake. Are you one of the lab people from Madison?'
'No,' Lucas said.
A harried middle-aged woman bustled up behind the glass, peered through, and said, 'Davenport?'
'Yes.' The reporter was wearing perfume. Something slightly fruity.
'I'll buzz you in,' the woman said.
'FBI?' the reporter pressed.
'No,' he said.
The woman inside pressed her entry button and as Lucas slipped through the door, the reporter called, 'Tell Sheriff Carr we're gonna put something on the air whether he talks to us or not.'
Carr had a corner office overlooking the parking lot, the county garage and a corroded bronze statue of a World War I doughboy. The beige walls were hung with a dozen photographs of Carr with other politicians, three plaques, a bachelor's degree certificate from the University of Wisconsin/River Falls, and two fish-stamp prints with the actual stamps mounted in the mats below the prints. A computer and laser printer sat on a side table, and an intricate thirty-button decorator-blue telephone occupied one corner of an expansive walnut desk. Carr was sitting behind the desk, looking gloomily across a tape recorder at Henry Lacey.
'You got reporters,' Lucas said, propping himself in the office door.
'Like deer ticks,' Carr said, looking up. 'Morning. Come in.'
'All you can get from deer ticks is Lyme's disease,' said Lacey. 'Reporters can get your ass fired.'
'Should I let them shoot pictures of the house?' Carr asked Lucas. 'They're all over me to let them in.'
'Why wouldn't you?' Lucas asked. He stepped into the office and dropped into a visitor's chair, slumped, got comfortable.
Carr scratched his head. 'I dunno… it doesn't seem right.'
'Look, it's all bullshit,' Lucas said. 'The outside of a burnt house doesn't mean anything to anybody, especially if they live in Milwaukee. Think about it.'
'Yeah.' Carr was still reluctant.
'If I were you, I'd draw up a little site map and pass it out-where the bodies were and so on,' Lucas said. 'That doesn't mean shit either, but they'll think you're a hell of a guy. They'll give you a break.'
'I could use a break,' Carr said. He scratched his head again, working at it.
'Did the guys from Madison get here?' Lucas asked.
'Two hours ago,' said Lacey. 'They're out at the house.'
'Good.' Lucas nodded. 'How's it look out there?'
'Like last night. Uglier. There was a lump of frozen blood under Frank's head about the size of a milk jug. They're moving the bodies out in an hour or so, but they say it could take a couple of weeks to process the house.'
'We gotta push them: there's something in there we need, or the guy wouldn't have burned the place,' Lucas said irritably. Two weeks? Impossible. They needed information now. 'Anything more new?'
'Yeah. We got a call,' Carr said. He reached across his desk and pushed a button on the tape recorder. There was a burst of music, a woman country-western singer, then a man's voice: You tell them goddamned flatheads down at FNR to stay away from white women or they'll get what LaCourt got.
Lucas stuck out his bottom lip, shook his head: this was bullshit.
The music swelled, as if somebody had taken his mouth away from the phone, then a new voice said, Give'm all a six-pack of Schlitz and send them down to Chicago with the niggers.
The music came up, then there were a couple of indistinguishable words, a barking laugh, a click and a dead line.
'Called in on the 9-1-1 number, where we got an automatic trace. Went out to a pay phone at the Legion Hall. There were maybe fifty people out there,' Lacey said. 'Mostly drunk.'
'That's what it sounded like, drunks,' Lucas agreed. A waste of time. 'What's the FNR? The Res?'
'Yeah. Foret Noire,' Carr said. He pronounced it For-A Nwa. 'The thing is, most everybody in town'll know about the call before this afternoon. The girl on the message center talked it all over the courthouse. The guys from the tribe'll be up here. We're gonna have to tell the FBI. Possible civil rights whatchamajigger.'
'Aw, no,' Lucas groaned, closing his eyes. 'Not the feebs.'
'Gonna have to,' Carr said, shaking his head. 'I'll try to keep them off, but I bet they're here by the weekend.'
'Tell him about the windigo,' Lacey said.
'There's rumors around the reservation that a windigo's been raised by the winter,' Carr said, looking even gloomier.
'I've heard of them,' Lucas said. 'But I don't know…'
'Cannibal spirits, roaming the snowdrifts, eating people,' Lacey said. 'If you see one, bring him in for questioning.'
He and Carr started to laugh, then Carr said, 'We're getting hysterical.' To Lucas he said, 'Didn't get any sleep. I picked out some guys to work with you, six of them, smartest ones we got. They're down in the canteen. You ready?'
'Yup. Let's do it,' Lucas said.
The deputies arranged themselves around a half-dozen rickety square tables, drinking coffee and chewing on candy bars, looking Lucas over. Carr poked his finger at them and called out their names. Five of the six wore uniforms. The sixth, an older man, wore jeans and a heavy sweater and carried an automatic pistol just to the left of his navel in a cross-draw position.
'… Gene Climpt, investigator,' Carr said, pointing at him. Climpt nodded. His face was deeply weathered, like a chunk of lake driftwood, his eyes careful, watchful. 'You met him out at the house last night.'
Lucas nodded at Climpt, then looked around the room. The best people in the department, Carr said. With two exceptions, they were all white and chunky. One was an Indian, and Climpt, the investigator, was lean as a lightning rod. 'The sheriff and I worked out a few approaches last night,' Lucas began. 'What we're doing today is talking to people. I'll talk to the firefighters who were the first out at the house. We've also got to find the LaCourts' personal friends, their daughter's friends at school, and the people who took part in a religious group that Claudia LaCourt was a member of.'
They talked for twenty minutes, dividing up the preliminaries. Climpt took two deputies to begin tracking the LaCourts' friends, and he'd talk to the tribal people about any job-related problems LaCourt might have had at the
