Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"
Автор книги: John Sandford
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Текущая страница: 90 (всего у книги 105 страниц)
“Been looking for you,” the tech said, walking over. “I’m the lab chief here . . . Tod Crane.” Crane looked like he might be starving. His fingers and wrists were thin, bony, and the skin on his balding head seemed to be stretched over his skull like a banjo covering. When they shook hands, an unexpected muscle showed up: he had a grip like a pair of channel-lock pliers.
“How’s it going?” Lucas asked.
“It’s a fuckin’ mess,” Crane said. He held up his hands, flexed them. They were bone-white and trembling with cold. “Whoever did it spread gas-oil premix all over the house. When he touched it off, Boom. We’re finding stuff blown right through some of the internal walls.”
“Premix from the boats?”
“Yeah, that’s what we think. Maybe some straight gas from the snowmobiles. We’ve found three six-gallon cans. The LaCourts had two boats, a pontoon and a fishing rig, and there aren’t any gas cans with them. And premix, you put it in a bottle with a wick, it’s called a Molotov cocktail.”
“Any chance our man was hurt? Or burned?” Lucas asked.
“No way to tell, but he’d have to be careful,” Crane said. “He spread around quite a bit of gas. We’ve got an arson guy coming up this afternoon to see if we can isolate where the fire started.”
Lucas nodded. “I’m looking for a piece of paper,” he said. “It was a picture, apparently torn from a magazine or a newspaper. It shows a naked man and a naked boy on the bed behind him. It might be in the house.”
“Yeah? That’s new?” Crane’s eyebrows went up.
“Yup.”
“Think he was trying to burn it up?” Crane asked.
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“I’ll tell you right now, there were a couple of filing cabinets that were dumped and doused with gas, and he shot some gas into a closet full of paper stuff, photographs, like that. He did the same thing on the chests of drawers in the parents’ bedroom, after he dumped them.”
“So maybe . . .”
“There ought to be some reason he torched the place. I mean, besides being nuts,” Crane said. “If he’d just killed them and walked, it might of been a day or two before anybody found them. He’d have time to set up an alibi. This way he tipped his hand right away.”
“So find the paper,” Lucas said.
“We’ll look,” Crane said. “Hell, it’s nice to have something specific to look for.”
Carr came in while they were talking. He’d mellowed since morning, a small satisfied smile on his face. “They’re gone, the reporters. Most of them, anyway,” he said. “Poof.”
“Probably found a better murder,” Lucas said.
“I talked to Helen, back at the office,” Carr said. “What’s this about Jim Harper?”
“Rusty and Dusty found a kid at the junior high who says Jim Harper posed for sex photos with an adult male,” Lucas said. “That’d be a long-term felony and might be worth killing somebody for. The picture came out of a pulp-paper magazine or newspaper. Some kids got hold of it and it may have been passed around the school. Lisa LaCourt had it last. She took it home on Thursday and showed it to this kid who talked to me.”
“Who is it? The kid at the school?”
“John Mueller. His father’s a taxidermist,” Lucas said.
Carr nodded. “Sure, I know him. That’s an okay family. Damn, these things could be tied.”
Lucas shrugged. “It’s a possibility. The Harper kid’s parents, are they around?”
“One of them is, the old man, Russ. The wife left years ago, went out to California. She was back for the funeral, though.”
“What does Harper do?” Lucas asked.
“Runs an Amoco station out at Knuckle Lake.”
“Okay, I’ll head out there.”
“Whoa, whoa.” Carr shook his head. “Better not go alone. Are you gonna be up late?”
“Sure.”
“Harper’s open till midnight. He’d never talk to us if he didn’t have to: never to a cop. Why don’t I pick up a search warrant for Jim Harper’s stuff out at his house, and we’ll get a couple deputies and go out there late? I got church.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “Harper’s an asshole?”
“He is,” Carr said, nodding. And he said, “Lord, if these two cases are tied together and we could nail them down in a day or two . . . that’d make me a very happy man.”
“Will Father Bergen be at your service tonight?” Lucas asked.
“Probably not. He’s pretty shook up. You heard him this morning.”
“Yeah.” Lucas crossed his arms, watching Carr. “The Mueller kid said the adult in the photo was a big guy. And probably blond or fair. The kid didn’t remember the guy as being hairy, which means he probably didn’t have much.”
“Like Father Phil,” Carr said, flushing. “Well, it wasn’t Phil. There are a thousand chunky blonds in this county. I’m one.”
“I talked to the firemen. Westrom thinks Bergen did it. He says so. And he looks like someone who’d talk about it.”
“Dick’s the gossip-central for the whole town,” Carr said. Then, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “God damn him.”
“Have you ever heard anything about Bergen being involved in sexual escapades?”
Carr stepped back. “No. Absolutely not. Why?”
“Just bullshit, probably. There are rumors around that he’s messed with both women and men.”
“A homosexual?” Carr was flabbergasted. “That’s ridiculous. Where’n the heck are you getting this stuff?”
“Just asking around. Anyway, we’ve gotta talk to him again,” Lucas said. “After your service? Then we can hit Harper.”
Carr looked worried. “All right. I’ll see you at the church at nine o’clock. Are we still meeting with the other guys at five?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think there’s much, except for Rusty and Dusty coming up with the photo thing.”
“You’re not going to tear Phil up, are you?” Carr asked.
“There’s something out of sync, here,” Lucas said, avoiding a direct answer. “He’s not telling us something, maybe. I gotta think about it.”
CHAPTER
6
The yellow-haired girl sat on a broken-legged couch, smoking an unfiltered Camel, working on her math problems; old man Schuler would be on her ass if she didn’t finish all ten of them. She hated Schuler. He had a way of embarrassing her.
The couch cushions were stained with Coke and coffee spills, the cushions pulled out of shape by shrunken upholstery. The yellow-haired girl’s brother had seen the couch sitting on the street late one rainy night, waiting for the annual spring trash pickup, and had hauled it away himself. Almost good as new, except for the cushions.
She exhaled, playing with the smoke with her mouth and nose. Snorted it. Trying to think. Across the room, the letter-woman, what’s-her-name, the blonde, was turning letters on “Wheel of Fortune.” She turned two t’s and the audience applauded.
A train is traveling west at twenty-five miles an hour. Another train is traveling east at forty-five . . .
Bullshit.
The yellow-haired girl looked back at the television. The letter-woman wore a silky white dress with a deep neckline, some kind of an overlap on the material, with padding at the shoulders. She looked good in the dress; but she had the complexion and the body for it.
The yellow-haired girl checked herself every morning in the mirror on the back of her door, lifting her small breasts with her hands, squeezing them to make a cleavage, looking at herself sideways and straight-on, at her back over her shoulders. She tried all of Rosie’s clothes and some of her brother Mark’s. Mark’s t-shirts were best. She’d wear them downtown next summer, to Juke’s, without a bra. If she lightly brushed the tips of her nipples, they’d firm up and faintly indent the t-shirt material, if she arched her back. Very sexy.
If the trains start two hundred miles apart, how long will . . .
Doritos sacks littered the floor at her feet. A round cardboard tray, marked with scrapings of chocolate-cake frosting, sat on a spindly-legged TV-dinner table. An aluminum ashtray was piled with cigarette butts, and she’d just dropped another burning butt into the hole of a mostly empty Coke can. The butt guttered in the dampness at the bottom, and the stench of burning wet tobacco curdled the air; and beneath that, the smell of old coffee grounds, spoiled bananas, rotting hamburger.
On the “Wheel of Fortune,” the contestants had found the letters T – – – – n-t– – – – n – n -. She stared at them, moving her lips. Turn? No, it couldn’t be “turn,” you just thought that because you could see the t’s and the n’s.
Huh. Could be two . . . ?
The truck rattled into the driveway and her heart skipped. The girl hopped to her feet, peered out the window, saw him climbing down, felt her breath thicken in her chest. His headlights were still on and he walked around to the front of the truck, peered at a tire. Sometimes, in her young-old eyes, he looked like a dork. He weighed too much, and had that turned-in look, like he wasn’t really in touch with the world. He had temper tantrums, and did things he was sorry for. Hit her. Hit Mark. Always apologized . . .
At other times, when he was with her, or with Mark or Rosie or the others, when they were having a fuck-in . . . then he was different. The yellow-haired girl had seen a penned wolf once. The wolf sat behind a chain-link fence and looked her over with its yellow eyes. The eyes said, If only I was out there . . .
His eyes were like that, sometimes. She shivered: he was no dork when he looked like that. He was something else.
And he was good to her. Brought her gifts. Nobody had ever brought her gifts—not good ones, anyway—before him. Her mom might get her a dress that she bought at the secondhand, or some jeans at K Mart. But he’d given her a Walkman and a bunch of tapes, probably twenty now. He bought her Chic jeans and a bustier and twice had brought her flowers. Carnations.
And he took her to dinner. First he got a book from the library that told about the different kinds of silverware—the narrow forks for meat, the wide forks for salad, the little knives for butter. After she knew them all, they talked about the different kinds of salads, and the entrées, and the soups and desserts. About scooping the soup spoon away from you, rather than toward you; about keeping your left hand in your lap.
When she was ready, they did it for real. She got a dress from Rosie, off-the-shoulder, and some black flats. He took her to Duluth, to the Holiday Inn. She’d been awed by the dining room, with the view of Superior. Two kinds of wine, red and white. She’d remember it forever.
She loved him.
Her old man had moved away two years before, driven out by Rosie and her mom, six months before the cancer had killed her mom. All her old man had ever given her were black eyes—and once he’d hit her in the side, just below her armpit, so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe for a month and thought she was going to die.
He was worse with Rosie: he tried to fuck Rosie and everybody knew that wasn’t right; and when Rosie wouldn’t fuck him, he’d given her to Russ Harper for some tires.
When he’d started looking at the yellow-haired girl—started showing himself, started peeing with the bathroom door open when he knew she’d walk by, when he came busting in when she was in the shower—that’s when Rosie and her mom had run him off.
Not that they’d had to.
Her old man had worn shapeless overalls, usually covered with dirt, and old-fashioned sleeveless undershirts that showed off his fat gut, hanging from his chest like a pig in a hammock. She couldn’t talk to him, much less look at him. If he’d ever come into her bedroom after her, she’d kill him.
Had told him that.
And she would have.
This man was different. His voice was soft, and when he touched her face he did it with his fingertips or the backs of his fingers. He never hit her. Never. He was educated. Told her about things; told her about sophisticated women and the things they had to know. About sophisticated love.
He loved her and she loved him.
The yellow-haired girl tiptoed into the back of the double-wide and looked into the bedroom. Rosie was facedown on the bed, asleep, a triangle of light from the hallway crossing her back. One leg thrust straight down the bed and was wrapped from knee to ankle with a heavy white bandage. The yellow-haired girl eased the door shut, pulling the handle until she heard the bolt click.
He was climbing the stoop when she got to the door, a sack of groceries in his arms. There was a puddle of cold water on the floor and she stepped in it, said, “Shit,” wiped her foot on a rag rug and opened the door. His heavy face was reddened with the cold.
“Hi,” she said. She lifted herself on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek: she’d seen it done on television, in the old movies, and it seemed so . . . right. “Rosie’s asleep.”
“Cold,” he said, as though answering a question. He pushed the door shut and she walked away from him into the front room, hips moving under her padded housecoat. “Is Rosie still hurting?”
“Yeah, she bitches all day. The doctor was back and took the drain out, but it’ll be another week before she takes out the stitches . . . stunk up the whole house when she took the drain out. Bunch of gunk ran out of her leg.”
“Nasty,” he said. “How was the birthday party?”
“Okay, ’cept Rosie was so bitchy because of her leg.” The yellow-haired girl had turned fourteen the day before. She looked at the cake ring on the floor. “Mark ate most of the cake. His friend had some weed and we got wrecked.”
“Sounds like a good time.” His cheeks were red like jolly old St. Nick’s. “Get anything good? For your birthday?”
“The fifty bucks from you was the best,” she said, taking his hand, smiling into his eyes. “Rosie gave me a Chili Peppers t-shirt and Mark gave me a tape for the Walkman.”
“Well, that sounds pretty good,” he said. He dumped the groceries on the kitchen table.
“There was a cop at school today, one I never seen before,” the yellow-haired girl said.
“Oh, yeah?” He took a six-pack of wine coolers out of the sack, but stopped and looked at her. “Guy looks like an asshole, a big guy?”
“He was kinda good-looking but he looked like he could be mean, yeah,” she said.
“Did you talk to him?”
“No. But he had some kids in the office,” she said. “Lisa’s friends.”
“What’d they tell ’em?” He was sharp, the questions rapping out.
“Well, everybody was talking about it in the cafeteria. Nobody knew anything. But the new cop took John Mueller home with him.”
“The taxidermist’s kid?” His thin eyebrows went up.
“Yeah. John rode on the bus with Lisa.”
“Huh.” He dug into the grocery sack, a thoughtful look on his face.
“The cop was talking to the doctor,” she said. “The one who takes care of Rosie.”
“What?” His head came around sharply.
“Yeah. They were talking in the hall. I saw them.”
“Were they talking about Rosie?” He glanced down the hall at the closed door.
“I don’t know; I wasn’t that close. I just saw them talking.”
“Hmm.” He unscrewed the top of one of the wine bottles, handed it to the yellow-haired girl. “Where’s your brother?”
Jealousy scratched at her. He was fond of Mark and was helping him explore his development. “He’s over at Ricky’s, working on the car.”
“The Pinto?”
“Yeah.”
The man laughed quietly, but there was an unpleasant undertone in the sound. Was he jealous? Of Ricky, for being with Mark? She pushed the thought away.
“I wish them the best,” he said. He was focusing on her, and she walked back to the couch and sat down, sipping the wine cooler. “How have you been?”
“Okay,” she said, and wiggled. She tried to sound cool. Okay.
He knelt in front of her and began unbuttoning her blouse, and she felt the thickness in her chest again, as though she were breathing water. She put down the wine cooler, helped him pull the blouse off, let him reach around her and unsnap the brassiere; he’d shown her how he could do it with one hand.
She had solid breasts like cupcakes, and small stubby nipples.
“Wonderful,” he whispered. He stroked one of her nipples, then stood up and his hand went to his fly. “Let’s try this one.”
She was aware of him watching, of his intent blue eyes following her; he pushed her hair out of her face.
Behind him the blonde woman on “Wheel of Fortune” was turning around the last of the letters.
Two Minute Warning, the sign said.
When the Iceman left, he drove out to the county road, to the first stop sign, and sat there, smoking, thinking about John Mueller and Weather Karkinnen. So many troubling paths were opening. He tried to follow them in his mind, and failed: they tangled like a rats’ nest.
If the photograph turned up, and if they identified him, they’d have him on the sex charge. That’s all he’d wanted to stop. When Harper called and said Frank LaCourt had the photo but didn’t know who was in it, all he’d wanted was to get it back. Get it before the sheriff got it.
Then he’d killed Claudia too quickly and hadn’t gotten the photo. Now the photo would mean they’d look at him for the killings. More than that: when they saw the photo, they’d figure the whole thing out.
He was in a perfect position to monitor the investigation, anyway. He’d know when they found the photo. He’d probably have a little time: until Weather saw it, anyway.
He’d been crazy to let the kid take the picture. But there was something about seeing yourself, contemplating yourself at a distance. Now: had John Mueller seen? Did he have a copy or know where it came from?
If they found the photo, they’d have a place to start. And if they showed it to enough people, they’d get him. He had to have it. Maybe it had burned in the fire. Maybe not. Maybe the Mueller kid knew.
And Weather Karkinnen. If she saw the photo, she’d know him for sure.
Dammit.
He rolled down the window a few inches, flipped the cigarette into the snow.
He’d once seen himself in a movie. A comedy, no less. Ghostbusters. Silly scene—a jerk, a nebbish, is possessed by an evil spirit, and talks to a horse. When the cabriolet driver yells at him, the nebbish growls and his eyes burn red, and the power flares out at the driver.
Good for a laugh—but the Iceman had seen himself there, just for an instant. He also had a force inside, but there was nothing funny about it. The force was powerful, unafraid, influential. Manipulating events from behind the screen of a bland, unprepossessing face.
Flaring out when it was needed.
He had a recurring dream in which a woman, a blonde, looked at him, her eyes flicking over him, unimpressed. And he let the force flare out of his eyes, just a flicker, catching her, and he could feel the erotic response from her.
He’d wondered about Weather. He’d stood there, naked under his hospital gown, she examined him. He’d let the fire out with her, trying to look her into a corner, but she’d seemed not to notice. He’d let it go.
He often thought about her after that encounter. Wondering how she saw him, standing there; she must’ve thought something, she was a woman.
The Iceman looked out at the frozen snowscape in his headlights.
The Mueller kid.
Weather Karkinnen.
CHAPTER
7
An hour after dark, the investigation group gathered in Carr’s office. Climpt, the investigator, and two other men had worked the LaCourts’ friends and found nothing of significance. No known feud, nothing criminal. The Storm Lake road had been run from one end to the other, and all but two or three people could account for themselves at the time of the killings; those two or three didn’t seem to be likely prospects. Several people had seen Father Bergen loading his sled on his trailer.
“What about the casino?” Lucas asked Climpt.
“Nothing there,” Climpt said, shaking his head. “Frank didn’t have nothing to do with money; never touched it. There was no way he could rig anything, either. He was in charge of physical security for the place, mostly handling drunks. He just didn’t have the access that could bring trouble.”
“Do the tribe people think he’s straight?”
“Yup. No money problems that they know of. Didn’t gamble himself. Didn’t use drugs. Used to drink years back, but he quit. Tell you the truth, it felt like a dead end.”
“All right . . . Rusty, Dusty, how about that picture.”
“Can’t find anybody who admitted seeing it,” Rusty said. “We’re talking to Lisa LaCourt’s friends, but there’s been some flu around, and we didn’t get to everybody yet.”
“Keep pushing.”
The next day would be more of the same, they decided. Another guy to help Rusty and Dusty check Lisa’s friends. “And I’ll want you to start interviewing Jim Harper’s pals, if you can find any.”
The sheriff’s department’s investigators shared a corner office. One did nothing but welfare investigations, worked seven-to-three, and was out of the murder case. A second had gotten mumps from his daughters and was on sick leave. The third was Gene Climpt. Climpt had said almost nothing during the meeting. He’d rolled an unlit cigarette in his fingers, watching Lucas, weighing him.
Lucas moved into the mumps-victim’s desk and Helen Arris brought in a lockable two-drawer file cabinet for papers and personal belongings.
“I brought you the Harper boy’s file,” she said. She was a formidable woman with very tall hair and several layers of makeup.
“Thanks. Is there any coffee in the place? A vending machine?”
“Coffee in the squad room, I can show you.”
“Great.” He tagged along behind her, making small talk. He’d recognized her type as soon as Carr sent him to her for his ID. She knew everybody and tracked everything that went on in the department. She knew the forms and the legalities, the state regs and who was screwing who. She was not to be trifled with if you wanted your life to run smoothly and end with a pension.
She wouldn’t be fooled by false charm either. Lucas didn’t even try it: he got his coffee, thanked her, and carried it back to the office, left the door open. Deputies and a few civilian clerks wandered past, one or two at a time, looking him over. He ignored the desultory parade as he combed through the stack of paper on the county’s first real homicide in six years.
Jim Harper had been found hanging from a pull-down towel rack in the men’s room of a Unocal station in Bon Plaine, seventeen miles east of Grant. The boy was seated on the floor under the rack, a loop of the towel around his neck. His Levi’s and Jockey shorts had been pulled down below his knees. The door had been locked, but it was a simple push-button that could be locked from the inside with the door open and remain locked when the door was pulled shut, so that meant nothing. The boy had been found by the station owner when he opened for business in the morning.
Harper’s father had been questioned twice. The first time, the morning after the murder, was perfunctory. The sheriff’s investigators were assuming accidental death during a masturbation ritual, which was not unheard of. The only interesting point on the preliminary investigation was a scrawled note to Carr: Shelly, I don’t like this one. We better get an autopsy.—Gene.
Climpt. His desk was in the corner, and Lucas glanced at it. The desk was neatly kept, impersonal except for an aging photograph in a silver frame. He pushed the chair back and looked closer. A pretty woman, dressed in the styles of the late fifties or early sixties, with a baby in her arms. Lucas called Arris, asked her to find Climpt, and went back to the Harper file.
After an autopsy, a forensic pathologist from Milwaukee had declared the death a strangulation homicide. Russ Harper, the boy’s father, was interviewed again, this time by a pair of Wisconsin state major-crime investigators. Harper didn’t know anything about anything, he said. Jim had gone wild, had been drinking seriously and maybe smoking marijuana.
They were unhappy about it, but had to let it go. Russ Harper was not a suspect—he had been working at his gas station when the boy was murdered, and disinterested witnesses would swear to it. His presence was also backed by computer-time-stamped charge slips with his initials on them.
The state investigators interviewed a dozen other people, including some Jim’s age. They’d all denied being his friend. One had said Jim didn’t have any friends. Nobody had seen the boy at the crossroads gas station. On the day he was killed, nobody had seen him since school.
“Hear you want to talk to me?”
Climpt was a big man in his middle fifties, deep blue eyes and a hint of rosiness about his cheeks. He was wearing a blue parka, open, brown pac boots with wool pants tucked inside, and carried a pair of deerhide gloves. A chrome pistol sat diagonally across his left hip bone, where it could be crossdrawn with his right hand, even when he was sitting behind a steering wheel. His voice was like a load of gravel.
Lucas looked up and said, “Yeah, just a second.” He pawed through the file papers, looking for the note Climpt had sent to Carr. Climpt peeled off his parka, hung it on a hook next to Lucas’, ambled over to his own desk and sat down, leaning back in his chair.
“How’d it go?” Lucas asked as he looked through the file.
“Mostly bullshit.” The words came out slow and country. “What’s up?”
Lucas found the note, handed it to him: “You sent this to Shelly after you handled that death report on the Harper kid. What was wrong out there? Why’d you want the autopsy?”
Climpt looked at the note, then handed it back to Lucas. “The boy was sittin’ on the floor with his dick in his hand, for one thing. I never actually tried hanging myself, but I suspect that right near the end, you’d know something was going wrong and you’d start flapping. You wouldn’t sit there pumpin’ away until you died.”
“Okay.” Lucas nodded, grinned.
“Then there was the floor,” Climpt continued. “There aren’t many men’s room floors I’d sit on, and this wasn’t one of them. The gas station gets cleaned in the morning—maybe. There’s a bar across the highway and guys’d come out of the bar at night, stop at the station for gas, the cold air’d hit ’em and they’d realize they had to take a whiz. Being half drunk, their aim wasn’t always so good. They’d pee all over the place. I just couldn’t see somebody sitting there voluntarily.”
Lucas nodded.
“Another thing,” Climpt said. “Those damn tiles were cold. You could frostbite your ass on those tiles. I mean, it’d hurt.”
“So you couldn’t add it up.”
“That’s about it,” Climpt said.
“Got any ideas about it?”
“I’d talk to Russ Harper if I was gonna go back into it,” Climpt said.
“They talked to him,” Lucas said, flipping through the stack of paper. “The state guys did.”
“Well . . .” His eyes were on Lucas, judging: “What I mean was, I’d take him out back to my workshop, put his hand in the vise, close it about six turns and then ask him. And if that didn’t work, I’d turn on the grinder.” He wasn’t smiling when he said it.
“You think he knows who killed his boy?” Lucas asked.
“If you asked me the most likely guy to commit a sneaky-type murder in this county, I’d say Russ Harper. Hands down. If his son gets killed, sneaky-like . . . that’s no coincidence, to my way of thinkin’. Russ might not know who killed him, but I bet he’d have some ideas.”
“I’m thinking of going out there tonight, talking to Harper,” Lucas said. “Maybe take him out back to the shop.”
“I’m not doin’ nothing. Invite me along,” Climpt said, stretching his legs out.
“You don’t care for him?”
“If that son-of-a-bitch’s heart caught on fire,” Climpt said, “I wouldn’t piss down his throat to put it out.”
Climpt said he’d get dinner and hang around his house until Lucas was ready to go after Harper. Helen Arris had already gone, and much of the department was dark. Lucas tossed the Jim Harper file in his new file cabinet and banged the drawer shut. The drawer got off-track and jammed. When he tried to pull it back open, it wouldn’t come. He knelt down, inspecting it, found that a thin metal rail had bent, and tried to pry it out with his fingernails. He got it out, but his hand slipped and he ripped the fingernail on his left ring finger.
“Mother—” He was dripping blood. He went down to the men’s room, rinsed it, looked at it. The nail rip went deep and it’d have to be clipped. He wrapped a paper towel around it, got his coat, and walked out through the darkened hallways of the courthouse. He turned a corner and saw an elderly man pushing a broom, and then a woman’s voice echoed down a side hallway: “Heck of a day, Odie,” it said.
The doctor. Weather. Again. The old man nodded, looking down a hall at right angles to the one he and Lucas were in. “Cold day, miz.”
She walked out of the intersecting corridor, still carrying her bag, a globe light shining down on her hair as she passed under it. Her hair looked like clover honey. She heard him in the hallway, glanced his way, recognized him, stopped. “Davenport,” she said. “Killed anybody yet?”
Lucas had automatically smiled when he saw her, but he cut it off: “That’s getting pretty fuckin’ tiresome,” he snapped.
“Sorry,” she said. She straightened and smiled, tentatively. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what I didn’t mean. Whatever it was, I didn’t mean it when I saw you at the school, either.”
What? He didn’t understand what she’d just said, but it sounded like an apology. He let it go. “You work for the county, too?”
She glanced around the building. “No, not really. The board cut out the public health nurse and I do some of her old route. Volunteer thing. I go around and see people out in the country.”
“Pretty noble,” Lucas said. The line came out sounding skeptical instead of wry. Before she could say anything, he put up a hand. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”
She shrugged. “I owed you one.” She looked at his hand. He was holding it at his side, waist height, clenching the towel in his fist. “What happened to your hand?”
“Broke a nail.”
“You oughta use a good acrylic hardener,” she said. And then quickly, “Sorry again. Let me see it.”
“Aw . . .”
“Come on.”
He unwrapped the towel and she held his finger in her hand, turned it in the weak light. “Nasty. Let me, uh . . . come more under the light.” She opened her bag.
“Listen, why don’t I . . . Is this gonna hurt?”
“Don’t be a baby,” she said. She used a pair of surgical scissors on the nail, trimming it away. No pain. She dabbed on a drop of an ointment and wrapped it with a Band-Aid. “I’ll send you a bill.”
“Send it to the sheriff, I got it on the job,” he said. Then: “Thanks.”
