Bone Harvest (16 page)

CHAPTER 19

When Mrs. Lindstrom answered the door, Claire felt as if she were looking at a woman from the fifties. Mrs. Lindstrom’s hair was up in curlers and she was wearing a snap-down-the-front housedress. Claire couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a woman wearing curlers, but at least she wasn’t out in public. Mrs. Lindstrom was thin and pale, hunched over as if she were cold in the midsummer heat. Her hair was a light brown without much gray in it, but she looked close to sixty years old.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Mrs. Lindstrom said, her slight hand flying up and patting at her curlers.

“Sorry, I called and talked to your husband. Didn’t he tell you I was coming?”

“Paul isn’t much of a talker. I think he’s out in the barn. Let me call him in.” Instead of walking out the door and heading toward the barn, Mrs. Lindstrom went back into the house. Claire stood on the steps, as she hadn’t been invited in, and watched the woman push a button on an intercom in the kitchen.

“Paul,” Mrs. Lindstrom yelled, not counting on the intercom to carry her voice adequately. “Paul, there’s a woman in a police uniform here to see you.”

Claire had nearly brought Tyrone with her to interview Paul Lindstrom. She wondered how Mrs. Lindstrom would have described him—a black man in a business suit? That was what happened when you were in the minority—you were seen only for your difference.

“I think he’s coming.” Mrs. Lindstrom came back to the screen door and pushed it open. “Please come in. He won’t be a minute.”

Claire walked into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. It was definitely from the fifties—metal legs with a yellow Formica top. Very cheery. The kitchen was painted yellow, and a red rooster ceramic plaque crowed on the wall above the stove. Everything was clean, but a little worn-looking.

“Can I help you with anything?” Mrs. Lindstrom asked.

“I need to talk to your husband about the Schuler murders.”

Mrs. Lindstrom looked blank, then said, “I haven’t heard about anyone being murdered. When did this happen?”

“About fifty years ago.”

“Oh, are you still trying to solve it?”

“More like again. Have you heard about the pesticides that were stolen from the co-op?”

“No.”

Paul Lindstrom walked in the door. “My wife isn’t from around here. She doesn’t follow the local news much.”

Mrs. Lindstrom stood by the sink, hovering with a dish towel in her hands. Lindstrom sat down and turned to his wife and said quietly, “Why don’t you go read one of your books, honey. I’ve got to talk to this deputy woman and none of it has anything to do with you.”

Claire noted that he didn’t say it meanly. He was just clearly telling Mrs. Lindstrom what to do. His wife seemed relieved and scurried out of the room.

Lindstrom settled into the chair across from Claire. Like his wife, he was on the thin side. He had clear dark eyes, high cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose. If he had been an animal, he might have been a mink—dark, handsome, and a little furtive. Farm work had made him wiry.

She pulled out a notebook. “Do you know about the stolen pesticides? The poisonings in the park?”

“Yes, the fellas down at the Kum and Go are talking about it. Gives them something to chew on while they drink too much coffee.” He stated it as fact.

“Well, we feel that these incidents are tied into the Schuler murders. I wanted to ask you about your father.”

Lindstrom jerked as if she had given him a slight shock. “My father? Whatever for? He’s been dead awhile.”

“I’ve heard that he didn’t care much for the Schulers.”

Lindstrom snorted. “What’s that got to do with anything? They weren’t anyone’s favorite people after the war. You know, the father had just come over from Germany before the war broke out. He could hardly speak English.”

“Did your father argue with the Schulers?”

Lindstrom looked at his hands, then rubbed them and kept rubbing them together like he was cold, but it was eighty degrees out. “ ‘Argue ’might be a little strong. It was no secret that Dad didn’t like them. Dad didn’t like any Germans. Didn’t like Catholics, for that matter, and the Schulers were both.”

“Was there some kind of land dispute?”

“Oh, I sorta remember that. Dad claimed that Mr. Schuler’s fence was infringing on his property. They threatened to get a surveyor, but then when the family was killed, I don’t think he did anything about it.”

“How old were you?”

“Well, I’m fifty-seven now. You can do the math.”

“Do remember the murders?”

“Of course. My mother was petrified. She was a fearful woman anyway. I thought she’d never let me go anyplace on my own again. She became so protective of me. Dad didn’t say much. I think he might have felt uncomfortable about the bad feelings between him and Otto Schuler.”

“I heard your father was away from home when the murders took place.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth. He left that morning for Milwaukee and didn’t get back till the next day. I expect the sheriff checked his alibi out carefully at the time. Like I said, Dad made no secret of his feelings about the Schulers.”

“When did you find out that the family had been murdered?”

Lindstrom tipped back in his chair and let his eyes half close while he was thinking. “Hard to think back that far. All I can remember is some neighbor—maybe Folger, Chuck Folger—coming over to tell my dad. I’m not even sure if it was that night or the next morning.”

Claire wasn’t sure what to ask him next. It was so long ago, and he had been just a little boy. What right did she have to suggest at this late date that his father might be a murderer? On no evidence to speak of. Then she remembered the ages of the Schuler children at the time they were killed. Paul Lindstrom would have been close in age to the two boys.

“Did you ever play with any of the Schulers?”

He picked at the steel edge of the table, then said quietly, “At school. Schubert and I played a bit. But my dad wouldn’t let me play with them when I was home. My mother and I couldn’t have anything to do with them.”

Claire closed her notebooks, disappointed in what she had learned. But you just had to keep asking the questions. She sat still and willed herself to devise one more. “Who did your dad think had killed them? Did he ever say anything?”

“I can’t remember him trying to place the blame on anyone.” Lindstrom paused a moment to clear his throat. Then he continued, “The only thing I remember him saying was something about the deputy sheriff who found them. How he could remember Earl Lowman stealing a car and nearly wrecking it, and wasn’t it something that he had ended up on the right side of the law after all.”

Harold felt oddly elated sitting at his desk. Sometimes that happened to him after he had had a little too much to drink the night before. He had realized early on that he had the potential for being a drunk, so he had put all sorts of limits on his alcohol intake. And he had married a wife who didn’t imbibe at all. But from time to time he tied one on, and occasionally that experience left him slightly euphoric. It gave him a little remove from the world and made him feel he was above it all and could see what was going on around him more clearly.

Sarah walked into his office, holding the copy of the threatening letter that had come in last night from the pesticide guy. “How do you want to handle this? What would you like me to do?”

“I think this time we should run something about the letter,” Harold said.

She looked down at the letter. “This is getting pretty weird. All this biblical language, and then he ends with ‘I mean it. ’This guy’s nuts.”

“Probably. But that might be to his advantage. He believes that what he’s doing is righteous. It gives him a kind of biblical power and authority. What have we got on the front page right now?”

She looked at her notes. “The results of the county fair baking contest, the crop report, and the two-car accident on Deer Island last night.”

“What happened? They can’t have been going very fast. The island’s not long enough to pick up any speed.”

“An older woman stopped for a rabbit that was crossing the road and one of her neighbors rear-ended her.”

“Oh, I like that. Any pictures?” he asked hopefully. “Of the rabbit?”

Sarah giggled.

“Keep that story below the fold, but bump the fair story onto the next page. Above the fold I want a picture of the letter, a quote from the sheriff, info on the two guys that DCI has sent out, and a short piece on the Schuler murders.”

He patted an old stack of papers that was sitting on his desk. “Here’s most of the pieces we ran on the Schuler murders, written by yours truly. Read them all through and you’ll know most of what was known at the time—or at least everything this reporter knew. Then write up a summary of the events, leading into what is presently happening.”

She stood up and picked up the papers. “I’ll try.”

“Bother me whenever you need to, but I’m going to let you run with this. Get those other two pieces written up.”

“Already done.” Sarah looked at the top paper and asked, “Who do you think was responsible for what happened to the Schulers? I’ve read a little about it. Did you ever come up with a theory?”

Harold steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips. An affectation, he knew, but it gave him time to think. “Not really. There was something about the whole disaster that seemed off to me. I mean, I guess that goes without saying. You have a whole family shot to death on their isolated farm and something obviously went wrong. But I never felt like we knew what really went on. That there was something everyone was missing. See what you think when you read everything.”

Sarah was a good kid. If she ever tried to buy the paper from him, he would dissuade her. No one should stay in one place so long that the mysteries of your youth come back to haunt you.

When Claire walked in, Judy told her that most of the deputies were still over at the Daniels farm, but that Sheriff Talbert and Stewy were back in the conference room with those two DCI guys.

Judy rolled her eyes, but Claire could tell she liked all the excitement. “They’ve still got their suits on today. And they’ve been tromping around in the fields. They’ve gotta be hot as the dickens in them.” Judy shook her head and pointed toward the conference room. “I just delivered lunch.”

When Claire walked into the room, Stewy held up a bag for her. She had been starving when she left the Lindstroms’, but had decided she needed to get back to the office to check in before eating. She thought she had had a piece of toast for breakfast, but couldn’t quite remember. Tyrone was talking about the new letter the paper had received.

“What strikes me about this letter is that it’s handwritten. That element tells us something very important about this man,” Tyrone was saying.

Not wanting to interrupt him midthought, Claire leaned against the wall by the door.

Singer saw her and nodded. Tyrone was in full sermon and didn’t notice her. The sheriff and chief deputy were listening, but looking into their lunch bags at the same time. Not much threw them off their feed.

Tyrone leaned over the table. “This guy wants us to catch him. Or maybe to put it more implicitly, he doesn’t care if we catch him, he doesn’t care if we find out who he is. One thing that’s in his favor, and he knows it, is time. He’s running the schedule and we’re just trying to catch up. Even though we have his handwriting, we have no way to trace it back to him, no database that we can plug it into. He might well realize that, but more probably he just doesn’t care.”

There was silence; then Claire spoke up. “It might also tell us that he doesn’t own a computer or for that matter a typewriter. This is a farming community. I’d guess that only about fifteen percent of the county is plugged into the Internet; maybe another twenty percent have computers. In fact, it’s hard to get service down here.”

Everyone turned around to look at her as she walked up to the table and slid in next to Tyrone. “What I noticed was that he didn’t just handwrite it; he used a pencil. My guess is he’s a farmer. They always have pencils on hand to mark things, to jot things down. They work better in dust and grease than an ink pen.”

Tyrone looked at Claire with some interest. With a nod in his direction, she added, “But I think you’re right that he doesn’t care if we find out who he is. Also obvious by the way he sauntered up to the Danielses’ house last night and dropped off the rest of the bones. He’s a man on a mission and he wants it done and figures it will be done before we can stop him. He’s wrong about that.”

Singer spoke up. “What I don’t understand is that if he really wants this information, the truth about these old murders, then why does he put such a tight time limit on it?”

Claire had given the deadline issue quite a bit of consideration over the last several days. “I think this date is very important to him. He probably has watched it roll around for many years. This year he wants everyone to remember what happened on the seventh of July. He’s never forgotten.”

Stewy slapped his sandwich down on the table. “I think it’s because he’s nuts. He just wants to raise hell. And he’s doing it. People in this community are scared. I’m getting calls from all sorts of people demanding that we catch this guy and make the county safe again. When this next letter is published today, I expect all-out panic to erupt. We’ve got to do something. But first let’s eat.” Swanson dug into his bag and everyone else followed suit.

Claire opened the bag lunch that was waiting for her. Tuna-salad sandwich. Not her favorite. She wrinkled her nose.

Tyrone noticed and looked over at her food and said, “I’ll trade you a half a turkey sandwich for part of that tuna.”

“That’s awfully kind of you.” She handed him half of her sandwich. “I guess my mom made me too many tuna-fish sandwiches for school lunches when I was growing up.”

“My mother specialized in olive loaf.” He smiled at her and she envied his straight, white teeth. Teeth always looked better next to dark skin. His skin, seen close, was the color of the dark soil in her garden. Good growing soil.