For a moment Lucas couldn't track it. 'Where are you, Shelly?' Lucas asked. He could hear voices behind Carr.
'At the rectory. He's here.'
'How many people are with you?' Lucas asked.
'Half-dozen.'
'Get everybody the fuck out of there and seal the place off. Get the guys from Madison in there.'
'They're on the way,' Carr said. He sounded unsure of himself, his voice faltering.
'Get everybody out,' Lucas said urgently. 'Maybe Bergen killed himself, but I don't think he killed the LaCourts. If the note says he did, then he might have been murdered.'
'But he did it with pills and booze-and the note's signed,' Carr said. His voice was shrill: not a whine, but something nearer hysteria.
'Don't touch the note. We need to get it processed.'
'It's already been picked up.'
'For God's sake put it down!' Lucas said. 'Don't pass it around.'
Weather stepped into the hallway with the comforter wrapped around her, a question on her face. Lucas held up a just-a-moment finger. 'How'd he do it? Exactly.'
'Drank a fifth of whiskey with a couple bottles of sleeping pills.'
'Yeah, that'd do it,' Lucas said. 'I'll be there as soon as I can. Look, it may be a suicide, but treat it like a homicide. Somebody almost got away with killing the Harper kid, making it look like an accident. He might be fucking with us again. Hold on for a minute.'
Lucas took the phone down. 'Do you know who Bergen's doctor is? GP?'
'Lou Davies had him, I think.'
To Carr, Lucas said, 'Bergen's doctor might have been a guy named Lou Davies. Call him, find out if Bergen had those prescriptions. And have somebody check the drugstore. Maybe all the drugstores around here.'
'Phil Bergen's dead?' Weather asked when Lucas hung up the phone.
'Yeah. Might be suicide-there's a note. And he confesses to killing the LaCourts.'
'Oh, no.' She wrapped her arms around herself. 'Lucas… I'm getting scared now. Really scared.'
He put an arm around her shoulder. 'I keep telling you…'
'But I'm not getting out,' she said.
'You could go down to my place in the Cities.'
'I'm staying. But this guy…' She shook her head. Then she frowned. 'That means… I don't see how…'
'What?'
'He would have been the guy who tried to shoot me last night. And the guy who was chasing me the first night.'
'You were still at the LaCourts' when Shelly and I left, and we went into town to interview Bergen. Couldn't have been him,' Lucas said.
'Maybe the guy wasn't chasing me-but after last night, I was sure that he was. I was sure, because it was so strange.'
'Get dressed,' Lucas said. 'Let's go look at it.'
Seven o'clock in the morning, utterly dark, but Grant was awake, starting the day, people scurrying along the downtown sidewalks in front of a damp, cold wind. One city police car, two sheriff's cars, and the Madison techs' sedan were waiting at the rectory. Lucas nodded at the deputy on the door. Weather followed him inside. Carr was sitting on a couch, his face waxy. A lab tech from Madison was in the kitchen with a collection of glasses and bottles, dusting them. Carr wearily stood up when Lucas and Weather came in.
'Where is he?' Lucas asked.
'In here,' Carr said, leading them down the hall.
Bergen was lying faceup, his head propped on a pillow, his eyes open, but filmed-over with death. His hands were crossed on his stomach. He wore a sweater and black trousers, undone at the waist. One shoe had come off and lay on the floor beside the couch; that foot dangled off the couch. His black sock had a hole at the little toe, and the little toe stuck through it. The other foot was on the couch.
'Who found him?' Lucas asked.
'One of the parishioners, when he didn't show up for early Mass,' Carr said. 'The front door was unlocked and a light was still on, but nobody answered the doorbell. They looked in the garage windows and they could see his car. Finally one of the guys went inside and found him here. They knew he was dead-you could look at him and see it-so they called us.'
'You or the town police?'
'We do the dispatching for both. And the Grant guys only patrol from seven in the morning until the bars close. We cover the overnight.'
'So you got here and it was like this.'
'Yeah, except Johnny-he's the deputy who responded-he picked up the note, then he handed it to one other guy, and then I picked it up. I was the last one to handle it, but we might of messed it up,' Carr confessed.
'Where is it?'
'Out on the dining room table,' Carr said. 'But there's more than that. C'mon.'
'I'll want to look at him,' Weather said, bending over the body.
Lucas took a last look at Bergen, nodded to Weather, then followed Carr through the living room and kitchen to the mudroom, then out to the garage. The back gate of the Grand Cherokee was up. A pistol lay on the floor of the truck, along with a peculiar machete-like knife. The knife looked homemade, with wooden handles, taped, and a squared-off tip. Lucas bent over it, could see a dark encrustation that might be blood.
'That's a corn-knife,' Carr said. 'You don't see them much anymore.'
'Was it just laying here like this?'
'Yeah. It's mentioned in the note. So's the gun. My God, who would've thought…'
'Let me see the note,' Lucas said.
The note was typed on the parish's letterhead stationery.
'I assume he has an IBM typewriter,' Lucas said.
'Yes. In his office.'
'Okay…' Lucas read down through the note.
I have killed and I have lied. When I did it, I thought I did it for God; but I see now it was the Devil's hand. For what I've done, I will be punished; but I know the punishment will end and that I will see you all again, in heaven, cleansed of sin. For now, my friends, forgive me if you can, as the Father will.
He'd signed it with a ballpoint: Rev. Philip Bergen.
And under that: Shelly-I'm sorry; I'm weak when I'm desperate: but you've known that since I kicked the ball out from under that pine. You'll find the implements in the back of my truck.
'Is that his signature?'
'Yes. I knew it as soon as I looked at it. And there's the business about the pine.'
Crane, the crime tech, stepped into the room, heard Lucas' question and Carr's answer, and said, 'We're sending the note down to Madison. There might be a problem with it.'
'What?' asked Lucas.
'When Sheriff Carr said you thought it could be a homicide, we got very careful. If you look at the note, at the signature…' He took a small magnifying glass from his breast pocket and handed it to Lucas. '… you can see what looks like little pen indentations, without ink, at a couple of places around the signature itself.'
'So what?' Lucas bent over the note. The indentations were vague, but he could see them.
'Sometimes, when somebody wants to forge a note, he'll take a real signature, like from a check, lay it on top of the paper where he wants the new signature. Then he'll write over the real signature with something pointed, like a ballpoint pen, pushing down hard. That'll make an impression on the paper below it. Then he writes over the impression. It's hard to pick out if the forger's careful. The new signature will have all the little idiosyncrasies of an original.'
'You think this is a fake?'
'Could be,' Crane said. 'And there are a couple of other things. Our fingerprint guy is gonna do the Super-Glue trick on the whiskey bottle and pill bottles, but he can see some prints sitting right on the glass. And except for the
