'It'd take a hell of a coincidence,' Lucas said.
'It'd take more than that,' Sherrill said. 'She would have had to leave the minute we did, get over here, work herself into a rage, shoot him, get away without any neighbors hearing the shots… it's bullshit.'
'Maybe the other woman did it, the shooter,' Lucas said.
'Look at the wounds,' she said. 'That looks like somebody who was pissed off, not a cold-blooded professional killer.'
'But look at the group in the forehead… that looks like a pro.'
'Yeah, but…'
'This is ludicrous,' Lucas said. 'I don't even believe it. What happened to the woman who found the body? Alice…'
'Alice Miller. She's getting her arm sewn up. She saw the body and took off and ran right through the door, put her hand through the glass.'
'She's not…'
'No. She came here looking for him, because he'd missed a couple of serious appointments, and she couldn't get through to him,' Sherrill said. 'Besides, even if she was a put-up deal, did you ever hear of anybody slicing up their arm for verisimilitude?'
'Veri what?' Lucas eyes slipped over to her, and she caught the unspoken amusement, out-of-place as it might be.
'Fuck you,' she said. 'I know some multi-syllabic words.'
'I've just never heard that spoken before,' Lucas said. His minuscule grin slipped back into the cold stare. 'I need to talk to Carmel.'
A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: 'The Miller woman is calling from the hospital. She wants to talk to whoever's in charge.'
'Probably you,' Lucas said to Sherrill.
Sherrill nodded and went to take it, and somebody laughed and yelled at somebody outside the door: crime- scene crew was coming in. Lucas met the crew chief at the door and said, 'About a million people have already trampled through, but nobody's been past his feet. I need every goddamned thread and hair and print and stain you can find.'
'Bad news?'
'This is very bad news,' Lucas said. 'The newspapers are gonna tear us a new asshole.'
Sherrill was back, moving fast: 'You remember Allen had a girlfriend, Louise
Clark, had an affair with her, before his wife was killed? Before he started seeing Carmel?'
'Yeah?'
'Miller was calling to tell us that Louise Clark also didn't make it into work today. And as far as Miller knows, Clark didn't call in to tell people she wouldn't make it. Miller isn't her supervisor or anything, just heard she wasn't around, and didn't really put it together with Allen…'
'All right,' Lucas said. 'Let's get her address and get over there. Goddamnit, what is this? What is this?'
Louise Clark was a fine picture of a murder-suicide, stretched across her bed in her pretty pink negligee, the gun fallen away from her hand on the pillow. The gun had a silencer screwed onto the snout.
Lucas brought a kitchen chair into the bedroom and reversed it at the end of the bed and sat down, his arms on the back of the chair, his chin on his hands, and stared at her. Another cop came in and looked at him, and then at Sherrill:
Sherrill shrugged and the cop made a screw-loose gesture at his temple, and backed out of the room.
After two minutes of staring at the body, Lucas said, 'It's perfect.'
'Perfect?'
'Someplace in this house, we're gonna find either a gun, or shells, or something else, that'll tie her to the earlier shootings. The only thing we won't find is, we'll do some swabs and there won't be any semen.
Usually, there's semen, and there won't be any, because they couldn't do that.
And we'll get the ME to check Allen, and he won't have had sex in the last twenty-four hours, because they couldn't do that, either.'
'By they, you mean…'
'Carmel and the shooter-chick.'
Sherrill looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, then turned and walked back out of the room, only to return three seconds later: 'Lucas, I could make a pretty good case that Louise Clark is the shooter-chick. She was sleeping with Allen; she's a low-level secretary, and if she gets rid of the old lady, and she marries Allen, she goes from being poor and single to rich and married. She's got the motive… she's got the gun.'
'Where'd a goddamn low-level secretary get a silencer like that?' Lucas snarled.
'You buy a silencer like that on the black market, it'd cost you a grand. And who did the tooling on the muzzle? Did you find a machine-shop in the basement?'
'No, but Lucas… what if she's the shooter, and she knows Carmel that way?
What if Carmel's her lawyer?'
'And Carmel starts screwing her boyfriend, knowing that the woman she's kicking out of the saddle is a professional killer? Bullshit. Nope: this is a set-up.
That's why there won't be any semen, and that's why we're gonna find a gun,'
Lucas said. 'When you said you could make a pretty good case that Clark is a shooter, you're exactly right. You could. And a pro defense attorney like Carmel could make an even better one. She could make a perfect case. Trying to get anyone else for these murders is pointless: we'll never do it.'
'What're we gonna do?'
'I don't know what you're gonna do,' Lucas said, standing up. 'But I'm going up north. You can handle this fuckin' thing.'
Lucas arrived at his cabin a little after five o'clock, driving back roads most of the way to dodge the Wisconsin state patrol, the most rapacious gang of weasels in the North Woods. As he drove, the image of the dead Louise Clark hung before his eyes.
Then, just before the turnoff for his cabin, he saw a neighbor, Roland Marks, driving an orange Kubota tractor along the side of the road. The tractor had an oversized loader on one end, and a backhoe on the other. Lucas pulled off and climbed out of the car, and Marks rode the throttle back to idle.
'What the hell are you doing?' Lucas asked, walking around the tractor. Louise
Clark began to fade.
'Gonna clear me off some snowmobile trails on the back,' Marks said. Marks had forty acres of brush, gullies and swamp across the road. He called it his huntin' property.
'You don't know how to drive a tractor,' Lucas said. 'You're a goddamn stockbroker.'
'Yeah? Watch this.' Marks drove the backhoe down a shallow slope into the roadside ditch; did something with the controls, set the brake, turned his seat around backwards, lowered hydraulic support pads on both sides of the tractor, and raised the bucket. With one slow chop, he took a couple of cubic feet of dirt out of the bottom on the ditch.
'How much did that thing cost?' Lucas asked, impressed despite himself.
'About seventeen, used,' Marks said, meaning seventeen thousand dollars. 'Got four hundred hours on her.'
'Jesus, you're starting to talk like a shitkicker.'
'What're you doing this evening?' Marks asked.
'Going out in the boat.'
'Why don't you come over? I'll check you out on this thing.' He carefully dumped the dirt back in the hole where he'd gotten it; only half of it slopped over the edge.
'Yeah? What time?'
'Half-hour?'
'See you in a half-hour.'
Lucas turned the pump and the water heater on, got a light spinning rod and carried it down the dock and flipped a Moss Boss out into a shallow area spotted with water lilies. The Moss Boss slid and skated frog-like through the lilies and reeds, back up to the dock.
