New Title 1 (13 page)

There were five of them, women between the ages of forty and sixty I guessed, and they sat in a worshipful circle around him, laughing when his inflection said he was being witty, asking questions when his inflection said he was being profound. He ran to type, a sort you see in university towns, the handsome professor in his post-hippie phase, striped button-down shirts and $150 chinos out of
GQ
, graying hair caught up in a sweet little ponytail. It went well with his sweet little earring. You don't have to listen long to hear the sneer in the voice or see the arrogance in the gaze. Fifty years ago he would have been in Montmarte, seducing the frail daughters of European wealth while proclaiming himself a most serious artist. He was the sort of man Hemingway used to slap around when he was in his cups.

When he saw me, he looked as if he planned to have me arrested.

He had been standing in the middle of his front yard, right next to his easel and canvas, on the edge of which sat a huge monarch butterfly, demonstrating to the ladies the basic techniques of painting, when he heard me and looked around.

He frowned. "You're Hokanson, aren't you?"

I nodded.

"I don't have anything to say to you. But I do want you off my property and right now."

"Maybe I came to see your wife."

"Off. And right now. Do you hear me? Off!"

As one, the students turned to scowl at me.

Just then I saw Joanna coming down the stairs, looking thin and pretty in her designer denim shirt and designer denim jeans.

"I'll handle it, Sam. You go on with your class."

"I forbid you to talk to him," Sam said, sounding very silly.

She waved him away, swooped over by me and said, in little more than a whisper, "The word's out about you."

"The word?"

"Everybody knows you're not really a reporter. Even if you do have that business card saying otherwise."

She slid her arm through mine, started steering me toward my car in the gravel drive, away from the Queen Anne Victorian and the students, most of whom were still glaring at me.

"They don't like me."

She giggled. "Of course not. They all have crushes on him. He doesn't like you, therefore they don't like you."

"What's he so angry about?"

"I wish I knew."

"You really don't know?"

She shook her head. "It's strange. For the first time, I think he's really hiding something from me. And I think it's a lot more serious than just one of his little affairs."

"But you don't have any idea what?"

She shook her head again.

We stood by my car.

She was about to say something when Sam erupted again. "Get away from that car, Joanna, and go back in the house! Get away from there right now!"

If he'd had a bullhorn, he would have sounded like a cop talking a killer out of a building.

"What a jerk he can be," she said, red daubing her cheeks suddenly. "I'd better go back inside." She dropped her gaze and then suddenly raised it again, looking right at me. "Oh, hell, I may as well tell you. I had a fantasy about you, just like I said."

"I hope it was a good one."

"It was a great one!"

"Joanna! You heard me! Get away from that car and go back inside!"

She glanced at me and smiled. "I'm so proud to be married to him sometimes."

Then, just as her Daddy had demanded, she went back inside.

That spring, one of the talk shows came to the prison—THREE LIVE SHOWS FROM THE MOST DANGEROUS PRISON IN AMERICA! as the announcer kept saying all week—and guess who one of the inmate-guests was?

It's crazy what you can get sentimental about sometimes. For me, on this particular day, it was field glasses. I hadn't used this pair of Swarovskis since leaving the FBI.

I sat six car lengths down from the McNally house. Through the field glasses, I watched a man pacing back and forth in the side window, approximately where their dining room was, as I recalled. He was big and looked like he might have been tough once, before the beer caught up to him.

I assumed this was McNally. I also assumed, because of his frantic movements, that the McNallys had not gotten their daughter back. I tried not to think of what that finger in the box had looked like.

He slapped her.

She'd suddenly appeared inside the window frame with him, shouting at him, face raw with tears and fear and rage, and then he'd slapped her the way one man slaps another, enough to move her back at least a foot. Then he slapped her again, backhanded this time, and then she disappeared from the window frame.

In the small town where I grew up, there had been a young married couple famous for their battles. In the early years, he'd given her a few cut lips and a black eye or two. A little later, he started giving her broken arms and legs, once a broken nose. You know the rest, how one night, the sixth year of their marriage it was, he slammed her head too many times into an old-fashioned radiator and killed her before the ambulance arrived. She was twenty-four years old when she died. She was also my cousin. I still had the occasional dream of looking the sonofabitch up when he got out, and slamming his head into a radiator thirty or forty times. See how he liked it.

He came fast out of his house, McNally did, going around the far side to his garage. A minute later, he backed out of the driveway in a new gray Dodge. If he noticed me parked there at the curb, he gave no hint.

He headed west. I waited a minute and a half, then headed west, too.

Following people in a small town is difficult. Following them in the country is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, after only three or four miles, I sensed where he was going. He was headed in the right direction for it, anyway, and I had this feeling—I'll spare you the lecture on "hunches" that law-enforcement officials always like to give civilians—I had this feeling that he knew something about Nora's murder last night.

I dropped back, giving him a two-mile advantage.

I drove slowly past farms, remembering what it was like to attach milker units to cows' teats at a frosty 5:30 A.M.; and what it was like on a sweet warm Indian-summer afternoon to rake the corn I'd just chopped up onto a conveyer belt leading to the silo; and what it was like to lie on the sun side of a summer hill and have five tiny kittens and two tiny rabbits crawling all over you and making you giddy with the pleasure of it. We'd been going to have kids someday and live on a working farm, Kathy and I, but of course it had never happened—not in reality anyway, though sometimes I could fancy it so vividly I'd swear it had actually taken place.

I pulled up on top of the hill overlooking the deserted farm where the blue Caddy had sat last night. The river, sparkling blue, ran behind the farm.

In sunlight, the once-white farmhouse was scabrous, and the ancient red barn almost comical in the way it leaned, and over all was a Poe-like pall, an unnatural silence where human life had been taken with obscene enjoyment. No animals, no flowers prospered here.

I left the car on the shoulder, grabbed my trusty binoculars, and walked down the dusty gravel for a better angle.

McNally had pulled his car down into the barn so it couldn't be seen from the road. He had yet to emerge from the cool shadows inside.

Far down the road ahead of me, I saw a car hidden inside a great rolling wraith of gravel dust traveling fast toward the farm. Of course, it might well go right on past the farm and then right on past me. But, as I'd expected, it started slowing down when it got within a quarter-mile of the farm, slowing down and using its blinker to signal a left turn.

This car was a blue Toyota four-door, the family model.

The driver did the same thing McNally had: pulled straight into the barn, failed to reappear. I hadn't had any look at all at his face. I was damned curious.

I went back and sat behind the wheel of my car and turned on the radio to a news station.

No sense in making myself any more obvious than necessary. Sitting in your car was obvious enough. Standing out in the road with binoculars was pointing a bright red arrow at yourself.

They went fifteen more minutes, and still there was no sign of them. They could be doing all sorts of things in that barn, but I guessed it would have something to do with McNally's daughter. He might be a drunk and a wife beater, but even scum care about their children in their own scummy way.

In the interim, a big gravel truck roared by, rocking my ancient jeep; a long vented truck filled with squealing pigs rumbled past; then a motorcycle with a young helmetless kid raced by; and finally two big bays ridden by two young girls clopped onward, leaving road apples of a curious iridescent green.

I mention all this so you'll know why I was numbed into indifference when I heard the next car come up behind me. Figured it was just another local pilgrim hastening on to farm or co-op or babbling brook.

Only when I heard the door chunk shut behind me did I realize that the car had stopped and pulled over to the side of the road.

Only when I heard gravel crunch and pop did I realize that somebody was walking through it directly toward me.

By the time I got the window rolled down, she was there. She put her nice arms on my door and leaned in and spoke to me. She wore a sweet innocent perfume.

"You doing a little bird-watching?" she asked.

"I didn't think you were speaking to me."

"I shouldn't be, actually. I should be arresting you."

"For what?"

"For what? C'mon, whatever-your-name-is, for withholding evidence."

"What evidence?"

She sighed. She looked sexy in her blue uniform and dark, dark shades. "So are you going to tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"What you're doing at the scene of the crime?"

"This isn't the scene of the crime."

"It's very close."

I was tempted to just tell her. For one thing, I liked her. For another, she would eventually find out anyway. But I had given the McNally woman my word that I'd keep her secret. Given the stakes, her daughter being kidnapped and all, it was a promise I certainly meant to keep.

"How about if I buy you dinner tonight?"

"Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?"

"You bet I am."

"I don't know why I like you."

"I'm just glad you do."

"Maybe I'll seduce you tonight and get the information that way."

"I think you're serious."

She shrugged. "Maybe I am. Or maybe I want to do both—get to know you and find out everything you know."

"You wouldn't hear me object."

She sighed again. "Actually, I hate coy stuff like that. I shouldn't have said it."

I smiled. "I thought it was kind of sweet."

"I grew up in a very strict household, so I guess I've still got some hangups about sex."

"Most of us do."

"You?"

"A little, I suppose." I smiled. "But I don't let it get in my way." I looked at her a long moment. "I'd tell you what I know, but somebody may die if I do that. So right now I have to keep silent. I don't expect you to understand what I'm talking about, but I am telling you the truth."

She took her own long look at me. "You know what? I believe you. But I'm still kind of mad."

"I know. And I don't blame you."

She looked down the hill at the ancient shabby outbuildings and the ancient shabby house, and shook her head. "It's always different in the daylight—crime scenes, I mean. You always wonder how people can be such animals. But people seem to be different at night. They change, somehow." She looked back at me. "You could help me, you know."

I was tempted again but said nothing.

"What kind of meat do you like?"

"How about if I bring a cheese pizza over?"

"Are you serious?"

"Sure. Why should you have to cook? You work a full-time job."

"You wouldn't mind a cheese pizza?"

"Huh-uh."

"I could make us some kind of dessert."

"You don't have to make us anything. I'll bring a pizza and a six-pack of a good imported beer, and we'll just enjoy ourselves."

She smiled. "Now if you'd just tell me why you're sitting out here."

"Maybe tonight."

"Now you're the one who's being coy."

"Yeah, I guess I am."

She was still leaning in and looking at me and didn't see them, McNally first, his friend second, backing out of the barn, backing down the driveway and then heading off quickly in the opposite direction, lost in a gravel dust storm of their making.

"Maybe I'll follow you back to town."

"I'm not headed back to town," she said. "I'm going back to the farm."

"For what?"

"See if we missed something last night."

"You're thorough."

She smiled. "No, egotistical. I want to make sure that I do a very good job so that all the cynics in this town will know that a woman can do a very good job as a peace officer."

"Is it all right to tell you that I like you?"

"Only if that thought is accompanied by your real name." She stood up and smiled. "I'll see you about eight tonight. With your cheese pizza."

She gave me a little salute, walked back to her patrol car, got inside and drove down the hill, giving me a blast on her horn and a wave as she reached the farm driveway.

But by this time I was preoccupied wondering who McNally's friend was and what they were doing in the barn together. I turned the car around and drove back two hills where, with my field glasses, I could watch Jane walk around the farm. She stayed twenty minutes.

When she was done, she left, and then I drove over for my own look.

I spent the next fifteen minutes peeking through shattered windows into empty farmhouse rooms littered with gray-and-white pigeon droppings, and with empty Bud cans and empty Pepsi cans and empty red Trojan wrappers that looked like lurid autumn leaves.

I had just stepped inside the barn when I heard the tires of a heavy automobile crunch through gravel.

I stood in the barn watching as Jane walked up to me. "Thought you were going back to town."

I smiled. "Thought you were, too."

"Now'd be a good time to tell me who you really are." If she was kidding, she wasn't kidding much.

I looked back into the barn. I wanted to scout around but not when Jane was here.

I checked my watch. "Well, guess I'd better head back."

"Not going to finish checking out the barn?"

I laughed. "And give you all my trade secrets?"

She walked me back to my car. She was going to make sure that this time I left.

"Maybe I'll see you later," she said.

Just then she looked tired and melancholy and I wanted to give her a hug but I knew better. You didn't hug women when they were wearing badges and holster rigs.

"I hope so," I said, and drove off. This time I really did go back to town.