They’d gotten him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff’s car cut around a corner a half- mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees, and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, “She must have called it in.”
Lucas said, “Hang on,” and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that activated the two red- LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed to the sky, and Lucas shouted, “BCA-BCA,” and he and Del held up their IDs.
“I’m so fucked,” Davis said.
With the Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas asked if he understood them, and then Del said, “You scared the shit out of us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?”
“I knew you were coming, someday,” Davis said. “I knew you’d find out.” He began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas gave him a quick head shake.
“You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky,” Lucas said. “Two inches over, and I’d be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop.”
That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, “I didn’t want to do it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren’t trying to kill you.”Lucas was a little pissed: “Man, you shoot a gun at somebody.'
'I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case
Didn’t try to hit you in the nuts, though,” he said, miserably. Then. “Look at my truck. Jesus, look at my truck. What’s gonna happen to my birds? What’s gonna happen to the farm?”
“Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?'
'Yeah… paid it off, anyway,” he said. “We couldn’t afford the mortgage when it rolled over. It was some kind of A- T- M or A- R- M or something. Couldn’t make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate.”
“Who killed Frances?'
'She did,” he said bitterly. “Helen,” Lucas said. “Called me up at work and said there’d been a terrible accident and I had to get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that much.”
Del: “Hated them?'
'Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like, invisible. If I’d known all that shit… I don’t know.'
'So you didn’t plan it out?'
'Hell no. I wouldn’t have done anything to Frances Austin,” Davis said. “I mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn’t think she’d notice right away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years, because that’s what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen… stabbed her.”
“And you came down and picked up the body with your wrecker, and put her in the ditch.”
“I guess,” he said. “That’s the goddamnedest thing,” the Goodhue deputy said. “You should have gone right straight to the police.'
'You weren’t there,” Davis moaned. “You weren’t there.'
'And you loved her?” Lucas asked. “I did then, but that’s gone away,” Davis said. “That crazy bitch. I see her looking at me… she was scaring me. I think, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be around when she had a knife in her hand.”
“When she killed the other ones, were you around for that?” Lucas asked.
“What?'
'When she killed-'
'She didn’t kill anybody else,” Davis said. “I mean, I know that. We were together when those other people were killed, and we weren’t anywhere around there.”
“What about Frank?” Del asked. “Frank who?'
'Frank Willett?'
'I don’t know any Frank Willett. Who’s he?”
Goodhue County was part of a sheriff’s co- op and the deputy called in the crime- scene team, and they all trucked back to the trailer. Davis told them where the pistol was, the one he’d used to shoot at Lucas, and they marked it. And they dug out the folder from the Riverside bank, the one that would have Emily Wau’s fingerprints on it.
“Whose idea was the Francis thing-calling you Frank, so the ID would be good?” Lucas asked.
“Helen figured that out,” Davis said. “Where’d you get the ID?”He shrugged: “Trucker. Them things float around, you can get any name you want.”
“Did you have one of Frances’s credit cards or something? I understand you had to have two forms of ID.”
Davis’s head bobbed. “Yeah… Helen got one of those offers in the mail, for a credit card, already approved. She mailed it back, and the card came. That’s what started the whole thing. That right there.”
They were outside, in the dark, about to put Davis in the deputy’s car, when another car topped the hill by the neighbor’s farmhouse, and Davis said, “That’s Helen, coming home from work.”
Sobotny’s car slowed at the turnoff, as Lucas hustled back to the truck, and then straightened and continued down the road. Del piled into the passenger seat, and they went after her, caught her a mile away, flashers going, and she finally pulled over by a stop sign.
They came up behind her, slowly, carefully, and found her with her head resting on the center pad of the steering wheel.
Lucas said, “Come out of there.” She sat up for a moment, staring straight ahead, like she was considering other possibilities, then turned the key and shut down the car, and got out.
“Agent Davenport,” she said. “Helen.'
'What’s happened?'
'Ricky rolled the truck. You might have seen it back there in the ditch,” he said. “I thought…” she began. Then: “Never mind.” Del said, “Tell you what, ma’am. Ricky sort of spilled his guts.'
'Yes, that’s what he’d do,” she said. She looked at Del and sighed
“We weren’t smart enough to get away with this. We just weren’t smart enough. Maybe I was, but Ricky… Ricky’s a lunkhead.”
“Why’d you kill the other three?” Lucas asked. She frowned. “The other three? You mean… We didn’t kill those people. We’re not crazy. This has all been a mistake, that’s what it was. We didn’t want to hurt anybody-we certainly didn’t kill anybody else.”
Lucas looked at Del and said, “Ah, boy. I thought we had it wrapped.”
And to Sobotny: “You have the right to remain silent…”
24
They processed Davis and Sobotny in St. Paul. Sobotny asked for an attorney; Davis, miserable, declined an attorney, and made a statement, admitting that he’d moved the body and destroyed evidence: the knife used in the killing was in the woods, somewhere between the Austin house and the spot where the body was found, and he had no exact idea where.
He said that he moved the body in the wrecker, which made good the evidence taken off the plastic sheet, and out of the wrecker bed.
Sobotny actually hadn’t driven to the Austin house that morning, because her car’s water pump was out, and Davis had driven her to the Austins’. After the killing, they’d hastily cleaned up with paper towels and some “cleaning stuff” taken from the broom closet, which made good the crime- scene lab reports on the floor. Then they’d loaded the body into the wrecker, and Davis had taken it out a few miles and pitched it in a ditch. Sobotny
