Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 56 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

16

The rain was steady and cold, driving, slicing through his headlights, the wipers barely able to keep up. Miserable night. A half-dozen black beauties gave him the edge he needed, a couple of purple egg-shaped Xanaxes cooled his nerves.

Not enough, maybe. The flapping of the windshield wipers was beginning to grate on him, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting at them. Fwip-fwip-fwip, a torture . . .

Red light. He caught it at the last second, jammed on the brakes and nearly skidded through the intersection. The driver of the car one lane over looked at him, and Bekker had to choke down the impulse to scream at him. Instead of screaming, he went into his pocket, pulled out the cigarette case, tongued a yellow oblong Tranxene and snapped the case shut. He no longer tried to track his drug intake: he was guided by internal signals now, running with his body . . . .

And he was all right; he’d eaten half a handful of downers over the day, and they’d held him together like the skin of a balloon, containing the pressure. But only for a time. The snake was waiting, off in the dark. Then, when it was time to meet Druze, the black beauties pulled him up, out of the downers. He’d be afraid to drive with those downers in his blood. But with the black beauties, driving was a snap . . . .

The traffic light changed and Bekker went through, gripping the steering wheel with all his might.

They’d agreed to meet at an all-night supermarket on University Avenue, a place where the parking lot was usually full. Tonight there were only a few cars in front of the store, and one of them was a baby-blue St. Paul police cruiser. When he saw it, Bekker nearly panicked. Did they have Druze? How did they get him? Had he and Druze been betrayed? Had Druze gone to the police . . . ? No, wait; no, wait; no, wait; wait-wait-wait . . .

There he was, Druze, in the Dodge, waiting, the windows steamed. No cops near the squad car. Must be inside. Bekker parked on the left side of Druze’s car, killed the engine and slipped out, watching the lighted entrance of the supermarket. Where were the cops? He opened the back door of his car, got the shovel off the floor, locked the door. He was wearing a rain suit and a canvas hat, and had been out of the car for no more than fifteen seconds, but the water poured off the brim of the hat in a steady stream.

Druze popped the passenger door on the Dodge as Bekker stepped over. He was breathing hard, almost panting. He scanned the rain-blasted lot, then hurled the shovel on the floor of the backseat, on top of Druze’s spade, and clambered into the car. With the door shut, he took off the canvas hat and threw it in the back with the shovel. Druze was shocked when Bekker turned toward him. Bekker was beautiful; this man was gaunt, gray-faced. He looked, Druze thought, like a corpse in a B movie. He turned away and cranked the starter.

“Are you all right?” Druze asked, as he put the car in gear.

“No. I’m not,” Bekker said shortly.

“This is fuckin’ awful, man,” Druze said. He stopped at the curb cut, waiting for a stream of traffic to pass. His burned face was flat, emotionless, the scarred lips like cracks in a dried creek bed. “Digging up the dead.”

“Fuck it—fuck it,” Bekker rasped. A bolt of lightning zigzagged through the sky to the east, where they were going. “We gotta.”

“I can’t get the tarbaby out of my head,” Druze said. “We can’t shake this guy, Philip George.” In other people, anger, fear, resentment flowed like gasoline. In Druze, even the violent emotions moved like clay, slowly turning, compressing, darkening. He was angry now, in his muted way, listening to Bekker, his friend. Bekker picked it up, put his hand on Druze’s shoulder.

“Carlo, I’m fucked up,” Bekker said. He said it quickly, the words snapping off after the last syllable. “I’m fuckin’ crazy. I can’t apologize for it. I don’t want it. But it’s there. And honest to God, I’m dying.”

Druze took it in, not understanding, took the car onto the entrance ramp for I-94. “I mean, have you tried Valium or whatever?”

“You stupid shit . . .” Bekker’s anger burst through like napalm, but he instantly backed off, humbling himself. “I’m sorry. I tried everything. Everything. Everything. There’s only one way.”

“Dangerous . . .”

“Fuck dangerous,” Bekker shouted. Then, quiet again, straining to see through the rain as they accelerated off the ramp and into traffic, his voice formal, that of a man on an emotional seesaw: “A snake. There’s a snake in my brain.”

Druze glanced sideways at Bekker. The other man seemed to be sliding into a trance, his face rigid. “We were supposed to stay away from each other. If they see us . . .” Druze ventured.

Bekker didn’t answer. He sat in the passenger seat, twisting his hands. Six miles later, coming back from wherever he was, he said, “I know . . . . And one of them’s no dummy. I had him in for coffee.”

“You what?” Druze’s head snapped around: Bekker was losing it. But no: he sounded almost rational now.

“Had him in for coffee. Found him in front of my house. Watching. Lucas Davenport. He’s not stupid. He looks mean.”

“Tough guy? A little over six feet, looks like a boxer or something? Dark hair, with a scar coming through his eyebrow?” Druze quickly traced the path of Lucas’ scar on his own face.

Bekker nodded, his head cocked to one side: “You know him?”

“He was at the theater after you did Armistead,” Druze said. “Talking to one of the actresses. They looked pretty friendly.”

“Who? Which one?”

“Cassie Lasch. Played the maid in . . . you didn’t go to that. She’s a second-stringer. Good-looking. I could see this guy coming on to her. She lives in my building.”

“You work with her much?”

“No. We’re both part of the group, but we’ve never talked much or anything. Not personally.”

“Could she pipe you into what Davenport’s thinking?”

“I don’t know. She might pick something up. If the guy’s smart, I don’t need him checking on me.”

“You’re right,” Bekker said, looking at Druze as the Dodge’s interior was swept by the lights of an oncoming car. “What was her name again? Cassie?”

“Cassie Lasch,” Druze said. “A redhead.”

Lightning crashed around them as they crossed the St. Croix River into Wisconsin and headed up the bluff. When they passed the Hudson turnoff, the thunderhead opened. Rain swept across the road, shaking the car, and Druze was forced to slow as they pushed into the dark countryside. By the time they reached the exit to the lake, they were down to forty miles an hour, the last car in an informal convoy.

“What a fuckin’ night,” Druze said. Lightning answered.

“I couldn’t make it another twenty-four hours,” Bekker answered. “Is he deep?”

Deep? Ah, he meant George. “More than two feet, anyway,” Druze said. “Probably closer to three.”

“Should be quick . . . Won’t take long,” Bekker said.

“You weren’t here last night,” Druze said sourly. “We’re talking about a peat bog. This is gonna take a while.”

They missed the turnoff to the cabin. Druze had slowed further on the blacktopped county road, driving thirty, then twenty-five, watching for the reflectors that marked the turn . . . but they missed them, went a mile too far, had to come back. They saw only one other vehicle, a pickup, passing in the opposite direction, a man with a hat and a face that was a blurred oval hunched over the steering wheel.

They found the track coming back, turned and picked their way between the high bushes. The rain was tapering off; the thunderhead, still spitting out long chains of lightning, had moved to the north. The cabin popped up in the headlights like a mirage, congealing out of darkness, suddenly, and close. Druze parked in front of it, killed the headlights and said, “Let’s do it.”

He took a gray plastic raincoat from the backseat and pulled it on. Bekker wore sophisticated foul-weather gear, with a hood like a monk’s cowl.

“Take my hat,” he said to Druze, snagging it out of the backseat and passing it to the other man.

They got out, the ground firm underfoot, sandy rather than muddy. As the rain slowed, a wind seemed to increase and moaned through the bare birch trees overhead. Past the cabin, perhaps two or three hundred yards across the lake, Bekker could see a blue yard light and, lower, the yellow rectangle of a lighted window.

“This way,” Druze grunted. His pantlegs below the rain suit were already wet, and he felt the first tongue of water inside his athletic shoes. He put the spade over his shoulder and, with the flashlight playing on the ground, led the way through the brambles, back to the edge of the tamarack swamp. The ground changed from high and sandy to soft, and finally to muck.

“How much . . .” Bekker started.

“We’re here.” Druze shined the light on the ground, and Bekker could just pick out an oval pattern of raw earth.

“I kicked some shit over it before I left,” Druze said. “In two weeks, you wouldn’t be able to find it if you tried.”

“We’ll do that again before we leave. Maybe get some leaves on it,” Bekker said vaguely. Rain ran down his face and collected in his eyebrows, and he sputtered through it. He was disintegrating in the water, falling apart like the wicked witch, Druze thought.

“Sure,” Druze grunted. He jammed the flashlight into the branches of a bare bush and scooped up a shovelful of muck. “Dig.”

Bekker worked frantically, shoveling, talking to himself, spitting in the rain, digging like a badger. Druze tried to be more methodical but after a few minutes simply tried to stay out of the way. To the north, the thunderhead was still rumbling, and another burst of rain put a half-inch of water in the hole.

“I can’t tell . . .” Bekker said, gasping between words, “I can’t tell . . . if the water’s from the rain . . . or if it’s coming up . . . from below.”

“Some of both,” Druze said. The flashlight caught a lump that looked different, and Druze prodded it with the tip of his shovel. The blade hit something resilient. “I think I got him.”

“Got him? Here, let me . . .”

Bekker motioned Druze aside and knelt in the hole, holding the blade of his shovel like a scoop, working like a man in a frenzy, throwing the muck out in all directions. “We got him,” he said, breathing hard. A hip, a leg, a shoulder, the sport coat. “Got him got him got him . . .”

Druze stood back, holding the light, while Bekker cleared the mud away from the top of the body. “Shit,” he said, looking up at Druze, his pale face the color and consistency of candle wax, “He’s facedown.”

“I just kind of dumped him . . .” Druze said, half apologetically.

“That’s okay, I just have to . . .”

Bekker tried to free the body by pulling on the sport coat, but there was still too much dirt around it and it held George as firmly as if he were frozen in concrete.

“Suction or something,” Bekker grunted. His rain suit and his face were covered with mud, but he paid no attention. He straddled what he could see of the body, put his hands around George’s neck and tried to pry the head free. “Can’t fuckin’ get it,” he said after a minute.

“We have to clear away.”

“Yeah.” Bekker went back to the shovel, still using it as a scoop, a pan, and dug around the body, trying to loosen the arms, which were apparently sunk in the mud below. He got the left one first, the hand white as chalk, the fingers rigid and waxy as candles. Then Bekker got part of the left leg and turned his face up to Druze and said, “If you could help just here.”

Druze squatted on the rim of the hole, reached in, grabbed George’s belt. “Get his head,” he said. “Ready? Heave.”

George came partway out of the hole like an archaeological artifact on the end of a crane cable. Not stiff, but not particularly loose, either, his legs still anchored in the muck, his head hanging forward . . .

“There,” Druze said, and with a heavy pivoting motion of his shoulders he managed to flip the body onto its side, the legs rolling out of the muck below. Mud caked the nose and mouth, but one eye socket was clear. As the rain washed away the last of the soil, they could see the dead white orb of an eye looking up at them.

“Jesus,” Druze said, stepping back.

“I told you!” Bekker screamed. His hand groped in his pocket and came out with a screwdriver. “I told you, I told you, I told you . . .”

He held the corpse’s head by the hair and drove the screwdriver first into one eye socket, then the other, over and over, ten times, twenty, thirty, with furious power, screaming, “I told you,” until Druze grabbed him by the collar and jerked him out of the hole, hollering, “Enough, enough, enough . . .”

They stood looking at each other for a moment, the rain still driving down, Bekker gasping for breath, staggering, Druze afraid he was having a heart attack, and then Bekker said, “Yeah . . . that should be enough.”

He took the flashlight from Druze, squatted next to the hole and with an almost gentle hand turned George’s head. The eyes were deep bloodless holes, quickly filling with mud.

Bekker looked up, and a long flash of lightning from the distant storm lit him up as clearly as a fly on a television screen. His face was beautiful again, clear, the face of an angel, his white teeth flashing in a brilliant smile.

“That should do it,” he said. He let George’s head go, and the body flipped facedown into the watery hole with a wet, sucking splash.

Bekker stood up, turning into the rain, letting it wash him. He was bouncing, Druze thought: Jesus, it’s a dance. And as Bekker danced, the rain slowed, then stopped. Druze was backing away, frightened, fascinated.

“Well,” Bekker said a moment later, his labored breath squeezing through the hysterical smile, “I suppose we should fill the hole, should we not?”

The grave filled quickly. The last they saw of Philip George was his right foot, the sock pulled down around the hairless, paper-white ankle, the shoe already rotting with water. Druze beat the surface down with the shovel, then kicked some leaves and brambles over the freshly turned soil. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

They hurried back to the car, and Druze had to jockey it back and forth to turn in the narrow track in front of the cabin. Bekker, his voice clear and easy now, said, “Check the answering machine. Three, four times a day. Call from public phones. When George turns up missing, the cops are probably going to sit on me. If I’ve got to talk to you . . . the tapes are the only way. And listen, don’t forget to press number three, and reset the tape.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” Druze said, as he wrestled the Dodge onto the blacktopped road. “If you reset the tape, isn’t the message still there . . . ?”

Across the lake, the yellow rectangle burned in the cabin window. A woman in a pink robe, her hair in curlers, sat under the light reading an old issue of Country Living. She was facing an old-fashioned picture window, positioned to look over the lake, when Druze and Bekker got back to the car.

“Richard,” she called to her husband, and stood and looked out the window. “There are those headlights again . . . . I’m going to call Ann. I really don’t think they were planning to come up tonight.”

CHAPTER

17

Lucas punched the Porsche down the country highway, hissing along the wet blacktop, past woodlots of unleafed trees and the sodden, dark fall-tilled fields. The day was overcast, the clouds the color of slag iron. A deer, hit by a car, probably the night before, lay folded like an awkward, bone-filled backpack in a roadside ditch. A few hundred yards farther along, a dead badger had been flung like a rag over the yellow line.

He’d been to two hundred murder scenes, all of them dismal. Were murders ever done in cheerful surroundings, just by accident? He’d once gone to a murder scene at an amusement park. The park hadn’t yet opened for the season, and although it made a specialty of fun, the silent Ferris wheels, the immobile roller coasters, the awkward Tilt-A-Whirls, the Empty House of Mirrors were as sinister as any rotting British country house on a moor . . . .

He crested a low hill, saw the cop cars parked along the road, with an ambulance facing into a side road. A fat deputy sheriff, one thumb hooked under a gunbelt, gestured for him to keep moving. Lucas swung onto the shoulder, killed the engine and climbed out.

“Hey, you.” The fat deputy was bearing down on him. “You think I was doin’ aerobics?”

Lucas took his ID out of his coat pocket and said, “Minneapolis police. Is this . . . ?”

“Yeah, down there,” the deputy said, gesturing at the side road, backing off a step. He tried a few new expressions on his face and finally settled for suspicion. “They told me to keep people moving.”

“Good idea,” Lucas said mildly. “If the word gets out, you’re gonna get about a million TV cameras before too long . . . . How come everybody’s parked out here?”

Lucas’ collegial attitude loosened the deputy up. “The guy who answered the call thought there might be tracks down there in the mud,” the fat man said. “He thought we ought to get some lab people out here.”

“Good call,” Lucas said, nodding.

“I don’t think we’ll see any television,” the fat man said. Lucas couldn’t tell if that made him happy or unhappy. “Old D.T. put a lid on everything. D.T.’s the guy running the show down there.”

“Hope we can keep it on,” Lucas said, heading toward the side road. “But if they do turn up, don’t take any shit from them at all.”

“Right on.” The deputy grabbed his gunbelt in both hands and gave it a hitch.

The side track was two hundred yards long. At the end of it, Lucas found a nervous gray-haired woman and a pipe-smoking man sitting on the narrow porch of a cabin, both in cable-knit sweaters and slickers. Beyond the cabin, in a tangle of brush and brambles, Swanson was standing in a pod of people, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes.

Lucas walked past the cabin and gingerly into the scrub, staying away from a long strip of yellow police tape that outlined the original track into the raspberry bushes. Halfway back, a uniformed deputy, working on his hands and knees, was pouring casting compound into a footprint. He looked up briefly as Lucas went by, then turned back to his work. He’d already poured some casts farther along the trail.

“Davenport,” Swanson said, when Lucas pushed through to the end of the track. Two funeral home attendants in cheap dark suits were waiting to one side, a carry litter with pristine sheets for the uncaring body set carefully by their feet. Two more men, deputies, were working in a muddy foxhole, excavating the body with plastic hand trowels, like archaeologists on a dig. The body was half uncovered, but the face was still down. Swanson stepped away from the group, his face gloomy.

“It’s for sure? George?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. When they went into the hole, they got his foot, and the deputy stopped the digging and called for help. When they started again, they got to his hip, took his billfold out of his pocket. The same guy who found him recognized the name and called for help again. The clothes are right. It’s him.”

Lucas stepped off to the side to get a better look at the hole. A foot stuck up awkwardly, like a grotesque tree shoot struggling for the sun. A sheriff’s deputy in a ball cap and a raincoat came over and said, “You’re Davenport?”

“Yeah.”

“D.T. Helstrom,” the deputy said, sticking out a bony hand. He was a thin man, with a dark, weathered face. Smile lines creased his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. “I’ve seen you on TV . . . .”

They shook hands and Lucas said, “You were the first guy out here?”

“Yes. The couple back there on the porch . . . ?”

“I saw them,” Lucas said. He moved away from the hole with Swanson and Helstrom as they talked.

“They saw some lights over here last night. We have a lot of break-ins in these lake cabins, so I came by and checked it out. There was nothing at the cabin, but I could see somebody had been through the bushes. I went along . . . and there was the grave.”

“They didn’t try to hide it?” Lucas asked.

Helstrom looked back along the track and cracked a thin grin. “Yeah, I guess, in a city way. Kicked some shit over the grave. Didn’t try too hard, though. They must have figured that with the rain, hell, in a couple of weeks there’d be nothing to find. And they were right. In a week, you couldn’t find that hole with three Geiger counters and a Republican water-witcher.”

“We’re both saying ‘they,’ ” Lucas said. “Any sign of how many?”

“Probably two,” Helstrom said. “They left tracks, but it was raining off and on all night, so the prints are pretty washed out. We’ve got one guy in gym shoes, for sure, ’cause we can still see the treads. Then there are prints that don’t seem to have treads on them, on top of the treaded prints—but we can’t be sure, because the rain might have taken them out . . . .”

“Car?” Swanson asked.

“You can see where the tires were. But I followed it all the way out to the road, and the tread marks were gone.”

“But you think there were two,” Lucas said.

“Probably two,” Helstrom said. “I looked at every track there is, marking the ones to cast; I couldn’t swear to it in court, but I’d be willing to bet on it in Vegas.”

“You sound like you’ve done this shit before,” Lucas said.

“I had twenty years in Milwaukee,” Helstrom said, shaking his head. “Big-city police work can kiss my ass, but I’ve done it before. We’re taking the body over to Minneapolis, by the way. We’ve got a contract with the medical examiner, if you need the gory details.”

Swanson was looking back toward the hole. From where they were standing, all they could see was the foot sticking up and the two men working in the hole, getting ready to move the body. “Maybe we got us a break,” he said to Lucas.

“Maybe. I’m not sure how it’ll help.”

“It’s something,” Swanson said.

“You know what I thought, when I first dug him up?” Helstrom asked. “I thought, Ah! The game’s afoot.”

Lucas and Swanson stared at him for a moment, then simultaneously looked back to the hole, where the foot stuck up. “Jesus,” Lucas groaned, and the three of them started laughing.

At that instant, one of the deputies, pulling hard, got the body halfway out of its grave. The head swung around to stare at them all with empty holes where the eyes should have been.

“Aw, fuck me,” the deputy cried, and let the body slump back. The head didn’t turn, but continued looking up, toward the miserable gray Wisconsin sky and the black scarecrow twigs of the unclothed trees.

He thought about it on the way back, weighing the pros and cons, and finally pulled into a convenience store in Hudson and called TV3.

“Carly? Lucas Davenport . . .”

“What’s happening?”

“You had a short piece last night about a guy disappearing, a law professor?”

“Yeah. Found his car at the airport. There’s a rumor flying around that he was Stephanie Bekker’s lover . . .”

“That’s right—that’s the theory.”

“Can I go with . . . ?”

“ . . . and they’re taking him out of a grave in Wisconsin right this minute . . . .”

“What?”

He gave her directions to the gravesite, waited while she talked to the news director about cranking up a mobile unit, then gave her a few more details.

“What’s this gonna cost me?” she asked in a low voice.

“Just keep in mind that it’ll cost,” Lucas said. “I don’t know what, yet.”

Sloan was working at his desk behind the public counter in Violent Crimes when Lucas stopped by.

“You’ve been over in Wisconsin?” Sloan asked.

“Yeah. They did a number on the guy’s eyes, just like with the women. Did you talk to George’s wife yesterday?”

“Yeah. She said it’s hard to believe that he was fuckin’ Stephanie Bekker. She said he wasn’t much interested in sex, spent all his time working.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. “He could be the type who gets hit hard, if the right woman came around.”

“That’s what I thought, but she sounded pretty positive.”

“Are you going to talk to her again, today?”

“For a few minutes, anyway,” Sloan said, nodding. “Checking in, see if she forgot to tell me anything. We got along pretty well. That Wisconsin sheriff called her with the news, she’s got some neighbors over there with her. Her brother’s going out to identify the body.”

“Mind if I tag along when you go?”

“Sure, if you want,” Sloan said. He looked at Lucas curiously. “What’ve you got?”

“I want to look at his books . . . .”

“Well, shit, I’m not doing much,” Sloan said. “Let’s take the Porsche.”

Philip George had lived in St. Paul, in a two-block neighborhood of radically modern homes nestled in a district of upper-middle-class older houses, steel and glass played against brick and stucco, with plague-stricken elms all around. Three neighborhood women were with his wife when Sloan and Lucas arrived. Sloan asked if he could speak to her alone, and Lucas asked if he could look at George’s books.

“Yes, of course, they’re right down there, in the study,” she said, gesturing at a hallway. “Is there anything . . . ?”

“Just wondering about something,” Lucas said vaguely.

While Sloan talked to George’s wife, the neighbor ladies moved into the living room and Lucas walked through the study, a converted bedroom, looking at books. George had not been an adventuresome reader. He owned a hundred volumes on various aspects of the law, a few histories that appeared to be left over from college, a dozen popular novels that went back almost as many years, and a collection of Time-Life books on home repair. No art books. Lucas didn’t know much about art, but he knew that most of the work on the walls was of the professional-decorator variety. Nothing remotely like Odilon Redon.

On the way back to the living room, Lucas scanned the framed photographs hung in the connecting hall. George at bar association meetings, accepting a gavel. George looking uneasy in new hunting clothes, a shotgun in one hand, a dead Canada goose in the other. In two photos, one black-and-white, the other color, he was singing in different bars, arms outstretched, beery faces laughing in the background. Overhead in one, a banner said “St. Pat’s Day Bad Irish Tenor Contest” in the other, a cardboard sign said “Bad Tenors.”

Annette George, tired, slack-faced, was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Sloan when Lucas returned from the tour. She looked up, red-eyed, and said, “Anything?”

“Afraid not,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Was your husband interested in art at all? Painting?”

“Well, I mean . . . no. Not really. He thought maybe he’d like to try painting sometime, but he never had the time. And I guess it would have been out of character.”

“Any interest in a guy named Odilon Redon?”

“Who? No, I never heard of him. Wait, the sculptor, you mean? He did that Thinker thing?”

“No, he was a painter, I don’t think he did sculptures,” Lucas said, now confused himself.

She shook her head. “No . . .”

“There’re a couple of photographs in the hall, your husband singing in bad-Irish-tenor contests . . . .”

“Yes, he sang every year,” she said.

“Was he good? I mean, was he a natural tenor, or what?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, he was pretty good. We both sang in college. I guess if he had an art form, that was it.”

“When he sang in college, what part did he sing?” Lucas asked.

“First tenor. I was an alto and we sang in a mixed choir, we’d stand next to each other . . . . Why?”

“Nothing. I’m just trying to picture him,” Lucas said. “Trying to figure out what happened.”

“Oh, gosh, the things I could tell you,” she said, staring vacantly at the floor. “I can’t believe that he and Stephanie . . .”

“If it helps any, I don’t believe it, either,” Lucas said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat for the moment.”

“You don’t believe?” she asked.

“No, I don’t . . .”

Later, when Sloan and Lucas were leaving, she asked, “What am I going to do? I’m fifty . . . .”

One of the neighbor ladies, looking at Lucas as if the question were his fault, said, “Come on, Annette, it’s all right.”

Sloan looked back from the sidewalk: she was still standing there, looking through the glass of the storm door. “What does that mean, about the art? And the Irish-tenor contest?” he asked, turning to Lucas. “And do you really think there’s somebody else . . . ?”

“Have you ever heard an Irish-tenor contest?” Lucas asked.

“No . . .”

“I did once, at the St. Pat’s Day parade. The guys are tenors,” Lucas said. “That’s a fairly high voice—and especially a first tenor. You must’ve heard guys singing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’? Like that. Our guy on the nine-one-one tape, I don’t see how he could sing in a tenor contest. Not unless he had a terrible cold or something.”

“Didn’t sound like he did,” Sloan said, eyes narrowing.

“No. He sounded like a baritone, or even a bass.”

“And George wasn’t interested in art, or what’s-his-name . . .”

“Redon,” Lucas said absently. “And this artist I talked to, he said you’d probably have to know a little about art to pull that picture out of your head. It’s not one you see every day. As far as I could tell, the Georges don’t have an art book in the house.”

Sloan looked back at the house. Annette George was gone. “Well, if George wasn’t the guy, then the real lover’s in the clear. Everybody in the world’s assuming that he was the guy.”

“Now think about this,” Lucas said, moving slowly down toward the car. “If this guy’s a serial killer, why’d he go to the trouble of burying George? He didn’t care about burying the other two. And dragging a body around the countryside, that’s a hell of a risk. What’s he hiding about George?”

“And why didn’t they bury him the same night he disappeared, instead of waiting? That’s even more of a risk,” Sloan added.

“It’s fucked up. I’m beginning to wonder if we really know what’s going on,” Lucas said. They’d reached the car and he leaned on a fender. “We keep looking at Bekker, because we feel like he’s the guy. But it doesn’t make sense from his point of view.”

“Tell me,” Sloan prompted.

“If Bekker’s behind it, why was Armistead murdered? He claims he didn’t know her, and we’ve got no indication that he did. Her friends certainly didn’t know Bekker, because they’d remember his face. And if the killer hit George just for the thrill of it, why leave the others but bury George?”