'Yes.' She stooped, opened her bag, and the deputy said, 'I don't want to look at this.' She stood up again and handed Carr a Ziploc bag. Inside was something that looked like a dried apricot that had been left on a charcoal grill. Carr peered at it and then gave it to Lucas.
'What is it?' Carr asked the woman.
'Ear,' she and Lucas said simultaneously. Lucas handed it back to her.
'Ear? You can't be serious,' Carr said.
'Taken off before or after she was killed?' Lucas asked, his voice mild, interested. Carr looked at him in horror.
'You'd need a lab to tell you that,' Weather said in her professional voice, matching Lucas. 'There are some crusts that look like blood. I'm not sure, but I'd say she was alive when it was taken off.'
The sheriff looked at the bag in the doctor's hand and turned and walked two steps away, bent over and retched, a stream of saliva pouring from his mouth. After a moment, he straightened, wiped his mouth on the back of a glove, and said, 'I gotta get out of here.'
'And Frank was done with an ax,' Lucas said.
'No, I don't think so. Not an ax,' the woman said, shaking her head. Lucas peered at her, but could see almost nothing of her face. 'A machete, a very sharp machete. Or maybe something even thinner. Maybe something like, um, a scimitar.'
'A what?' The sheriff goggled at her.
'I don't know,' she said defensively. 'Whatever it was, the blade was very thin and sharp. Like a five-pound razor. It cut through the bone, rather than smashing through like a wedge-shaped weapon would. But it had weight, too.'
'Don't go telling that to anybody at the Register,' Carr said. 'They'd go crazy.'
'They're gonna go crazy anyway,' she said.
'Well, don't make them any crazier.'
'What about the guy's face?' Lucas asked. 'The bites?'
'Dog,' she said. 'Coyote. God knows I see enough dog bites around here and it looks like a dog did it.'
'You can hear them howling at night, bunches of them,' the deputy said. 'Coyotes.'
'Yeah, I've got them up around my place,' Lucas said.
'Are you with the state?' the woman asked.
'No. I used to be a Minneapolis cop. I've got a cabin over in Sawyer County and the sheriff asked me to run over and take a look.'
'Lucas Davenport,' the sheriff said, nodding at him. 'I'm sorry, Lucas, this is Weather Karkinnen.'
'I've heard about you,' the woman said, nodding.
'Weather was a surgeon down in the Cities before she came back home,' the sheriff said to Lucas.
'Is that Weather, like 'Stormy Weather'?' Lucas asked.
'Exactly,' the doctor said.
'I hope what you heard about Davenport was good,' Carr said to her.
The doctor looked up at Lucas and tilted her head. The light on her changed and he could see that her eyes were blue. Her nose seemed to be slightly crooked. 'I remember that he killed an awful lot of people,' she said.
The doctor was freezing, she said, and she led the way toward the front door, the deputy following, Carr stumbling behind. Lucas lingered, looking down at the dead woman. As he turned to leave, he saw a slice of nickeled metal under a piece of crumbled and blackened wallboard. From the curve of it, he knew what it was: the forepart of a trigger guard.
'Hey,' he called after the others. 'Is that camera guy still in the house?'
Carr called back, 'The video guy's in the garage, but the other guy's here.'
'Send him back here, we got a weapon.'
Carr, Weather, and the photographer came back. Lucas pointed out the trigger guard, and the photographer took two shots of the area. Moving carefully, Lucas lifted the wallboard. A revolver. A nickel-finish Smith and Wesson on a heavy frame, walnut grips. He pushed the board back out of the way, then stood back as the photographer shot the gun in relation to the body.
'You got a chalk or a grease pencil?' Lucas asked.
'Yeah, and a tape measure.' The photographer groped in his pocket, came up with a grease pencil.
'Shouldn't you leave it for the lab guys?' Carr asked nervously.
'Big frame, could be the murder weapon,' Lucas said. He drew a quick outline around the weapon, then measured the distance of the gun from the wall and the dead woman's head and one hand, while the photographer noted them. With the measurements done, Lucas handed the grease pencil back to the photographer, looked around, picked up a splinter of wood, pushed it through the fingerguard, behind the trigger, and lifted the pistol from the floor. He looked at the doctor. 'Do you have another one of those Ziplocs?'
'Yes.' She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.
'Six shells, unfired,' he said. 'Shit.'
'Unfired?' Carr asked.
'Yeah. I don't think it's the murder weapon. The killer wouldn't reload and then drop it on the floor… at least I can't think why he would.'
'So?' Weather looked up at him.
'So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand. She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble,' Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: 'You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway.'
'I'll get it going,' Carr said. Then: 'I n-n-need some coffee.'
'I think you're fairly hypothermic, Shelly,' Weather said. 'What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy was walking up the driveway. 'I got those tarps, Sheriff. They're right behind me in a Guard truck.'
'Good. Get some help and cover up the whole works,' Carr said, waving at the house. 'There'll be guys in the garage.' To Lucas he said, 'I got some canvas sheets from the National Guard guys and we're gonna cover the whole house until the guys from Madison get here.'
'Good.' Lucas nodded. 'You really need the lab guys for this. Don't let anybody touch anything. Not even the bodies.'
The garage was warm, with deputies and firemen standing around an old-fashioned iron stove stoked with oak splits. The deputy who'd been doing the filming spotted them and came over with one of Lucas' Thermos jugs.
'I saved some,' he said.
'Thanks, Tommy.' The sheriff nodded, took a cup, hand shaking, passed it to Lucas, then took a cup for himself. 'Let's get over in the corner where we can talk,' he said. Carr walked around the nose of LaCourt's old Chevy station wagon, away from the gathering of deputies and firemen, turned, took a sip of coffee. He said, 'We've got a problem.' He stopped, then asked, 'You're not a Catholic, are you?'
'Dominus vobiscum,' Lucas said. 'So what?'
'You are? I haven't been in the Church long enough to remember the Latin business,' Carr said. He seemed to think about that for a moment, sipped coffee, then said, 'I converted a few years back. I was a Lutheran until I met Father Phil. He's the parish priest in Grant.'
'Yeah? I don't have much interest in the Church anymore.'
'Hmph. You should consider…'
'Tell me about the problem,' Lucas said impatiently.
'I'm trying to, but it's complicated,' Carr said. 'Okay. We figure whoever killed these folks must've started the fire. It was snowing all afternoon-we had about four inches of new snow. When the firemen got here, though, the snow'd just about quit. But Frank's body had maybe a half-inch of snow on it. That's why I had them put the tarp
