Strange Country (12 page)

He looked at the stone itself still in the evidence bag.

He’d used his cell phone camera to take a picture of all three stones, in position, but with the dirt wiped off. He pulled his phone out now and laid it, with the picture he’d taken earlier on-screen next to the bag. All three stones were oval in shape, though not identical, the two Gerson had kept smaller than the one in front of him. They looked smooth, like stones that had lain in a creek bed for years. He wanted to touch the stone on the desk in front of him, could almost feel the smooth coolness in his hand. But he was patient. He could wait.

All three stones were mostly gray, mostly granite he suspected, though he was no expert on rocks. Each of them had distinct undertones, though. The stone he’d kept looked more silver in the light; the two Gerson had were gold, not like precious metal, the colors warmer, like if you touched them, your hands would feel warm. He turned out the light in the room and pulled the shades. In the dimness, the stone glowed. It seemed to vibrate very, very slightly, though if Boyd touched the evidence bag, he couldn’t feel the movement.

He wrote all these observations in the notebook, not just how the stone in front of him looked, but how he felt, the flash of light in the cellar, the positions of all three stones, the sense of energy or movement or something he couldn’t quite grasp, but which seemed important. He made another sketch—the stones in relation to the bones, the furnace, and the cellar walls, all the measurements taken before he’d left the cellar. He recorded everything Gerson had said, which wasn’t much. He wanted to know more about her, where she’d learned what she knew and what she knew that he did not. He wrote
Conclusions:
on a line by itself, stared at it, and realized he didn’t have any. Not yet.

As he walked out of his office, his cell phone rang.

“Got a minute?” It was Ole. He almost never said hello, never introduced himself. His greetings varied—“Got a minute?”, “Something you might be interested in,” and “Where the hell are you?” among his favorites.

“I’m on my way out,” Boyd said.

“Can you come by the office? Won’t be more than five, ten minutes. I’ll catch you up on where things are at.”

In a reaction that surprised him, Boyd realized that there was nothing he wanted to do less than stop at the sheriff’s office and talk about the investigation. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. That he didn’t want to, didn’t compete with duty and obligation. If Ole wanted to talk about the case, if he thought Boyd could help, Boyd would be there. It was simple. It was what he did.

The wind was hard out of the northeast when he left the house, locking the door behind him. No snow, though the ground was rock hard, like the surface of the moon.

It took him less than three minutes to drive from his house to the sheriff’s office, but he let his SUV warm up a full minute before he put it in gear and backed out onto the street. He didn’t do it because the car needed to warm up before he drove it or because he wanted it to already be warm inside when he got in; he did it because it was a habit formed years ago when his father had taught him to drive, when they’d sit in the car and his father explained every dial and button on the dashboard, how internal combustion engines worked, what a solar-powered car would look like. He didn’t think he did it because it reminded him of his father, whom he could call on the phone and talk to anytime he wanted. And he didn’t do it because he wanted to relive his high school years. He did it because it was winter and it was cold and it was what he did.

As he headed up Main, he noticed that Tommy Ulrich’s Toyota was gone. Sometime during the day when Boyd had been at Prue’s house or writing his report or sleeping, someone had come and towed it away. One thing, just one thing in a crappy day that had been cleaned up and taken care of. It wasn’t enough and it didn’t make up for anything, but it was something.

The glass doors of the main entrance to the sheriff’s office were etched with ice like an abstract study in white and gray. The reception area was empty with half the overhead lights dimmed. Ole said it kept people from lingering or saved on the utility bill—one of those. He, Ole, was still deciding which sounded better. Boyd could hear voices farther back and walked around the front desk and down a short hall with photographs on one side depicting the three county sheriffs who’d served before Ole, all three photos in black-and-white, including the one from just ten years before.

Boyd could see a light on in Ole’s office, the windowed door half-open. He knocked on the door before he entered.

“We’ll look into it,” Ole was saying into the phone. He waved at Boyd to close the door and take a seat. “We’ll do whatever it takes, but my people aren’t investigators. Frankly, that’s your job. That’s what we pay for, isn’t it?” He was silent, presumably listening to someone on the other end of the line. “Yeah, well,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Budget? Manpower? We sure as hell don’t have any of those problems here. Look, you give me a list of what you want done, and it’ll get done.” He banged the phone down so hard, Boyd was surprised it didn’t crack the plastic.

“Bureaucrats,” Ole said. “They’re pulling Gerson and Cross back to Pierre until the lab work is done, and they want us to do all the leg work for ’em. Don’t we pay taxes or something?”

“Everyone pays taxes,” Boyd said.

Ole looked unimpressed. “Yeah, well, whatever we do, they’ll manage to screw it up somehow back in Pierre and blame me for it later on. But—” He smacked his hands together, the sound loud and hollow in the enclosed space. “—we got a job to do and we’re going to get ’er done. I figure you want to be involved.”

It wasn’t exactly a question, but Boyd answered anyway. “Absolutely,” he said. Then added because he couldn’t not say it, “I feel like—I know I couldn’t have done anything different, I don’t think I could have seen what was going to happen, but I feel like I should have.”

“Yeah,” Ole said. He scratched at something on the surface of his desk. “Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”

He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. “Here’s what we know: Stalking Horse didn’t have any next of kin. She was originally from St. Paul or Minneapolis, one of those. She had a sister who apparently disappeared about twenty years ago. Eventually had her declared dead, but no one knows what really happened. Family name was Shortman—Stalking Horse changed it when she moved to South Dakota. Patty out front says she used to know the sister, long time ago, when Stalking Horse first moved out here. Used to visit all the time. No other family that we can find, though Teedt is looking.

“She didn’t have any other jobs than the one at Cleary’s, but she had a lot of money in the bank, over thirty thousand dollars, and we don’t know if she had any other accounts that weren’t local. DCI’ll check into that.”

“What about the skeleton?” Boyd asked. When their conversation began, he had leaned back in the battered vinyl chair he was sitting in, one of two that Ole kept for visitors, but as Ole talked, he leaned forward until he was at the edge, his back muscles tensed as if for a punch. Something cold seemed to have settled along his spine, like there was a persistent breeze in the room even though the door and all the windows were closed.

“Cross and Gerson—or, I guess, the forensic team—took it back to Pierre. They’ll try to identify it from dental records, that kind of thing. I told them if we knew about when they think it went into the cellar, we could turn up missing person reports. I mean how many people go missing in a place like this?”

More than anyone cared to think about, Boyd knew. He said, “She must have known the bones were there.”

“Yeah.” Ole drew the word out like a curse. “I think we can assume Prue Stalking Horse either put them there or knew they were there. Or knew who put ’em there.” He studied Boyd for a minute. “How well did you know her?” he asked.

Boyd sat back. “How well?” He had to think. “We were acquainted,” he finally said, not sure what Ole was actually asking. “I knew her from Cleary’s, sure. And she called dispatch once in a while, but I never knew her on a personal level.” He’d known her from people around the county talking about her, because people did, some odd thing she’d done or some place she’d been that someone hadn’t expected her.

“Never thought I’d see her away from that bar,” people would say, though it wasn’t shocking, as far as he knew, any of the places people saw her. It was more that Prue convinced you to see her in a certain way and even if you saw her at, say, the grocery store on the edge of town, it seemed odd and out of place and a little bit uncertain. Hallie had talked to her several times in connection with Martin Weber and with dying and, probably, Death, but just to talk? To sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee? No. He’d never known her like that.

The cold along the back of his neck persisted.

Ole leaned forward in his chair, the springs creaking madly as they adjusted. “You’d hear things about her,” he said. “You know, like she was a witch or something. But who the hell believes that? I mean, aside from that stuff I’m not talking about and don’t believe in and shouldn’t be happening.”

“As far as I know,” Boyd said, the tension in the room a fraction lighter than it had been a minute earlier, “aside from the Wiccan religion, there’s no such thing as witches.”

“Yeah, that’s what you say,” Ole grumbled. He reached sideways and opened one of the desk drawers, drawing out an evidence bag that looked like the one Boyd had. “Gerson left this for you.”

Boyd recognized the bag. It was the one he and Gerson had used for the two other stones from Prue’s house.

“Why?” This casual handling of evidence was a problem. A big problem that no one but Boyd seemed to recognize or be concerned about.

“She says they can’t go into the regular evidence pool. Says it screws everything up. She wants you to handle that side of things since she’s gone back to Pierre. She and Cross will take care of the lab and autopsies. And apparently, we’re going to do all the goddamned legwork.”

“She doesn’t know me,” Boyd said.

“I vouched for you,” Ole told him, as if that were sufficient for anything. “I told you, you’re my guy.”

All his life, Boyd had resisted acknowledging the prescient dreams he had, had avoided admitting that they made him different or made the world stranger. But in the last five months, everything had become strange; strange had grown from dreams to encompass ghosts, reapers, black dogs, and blood magic. And he’d been in the middle of it all.

Apparently, he’d always been the guy.

He rose and picked up the evidence bag. It felt as if something hummed along his bones, like an extremely low-level electrical current.

“Who makes—?” He hesitated. “If she didn’t have family, if Prue didn’t have any family, who takes care of the arrangements?”

“Maybe us,” Ole said. “We’ll see if there’s a will first, though. And go from there.”

12

When Boyd left the sheriff’s office through the double-glass main doors, two of the big lights in the lot were flickering, one of them making a noise like the snap of an electric fence. A cold north wind scattered loose dirt and pea gravel like dry leaves, then died as suddenly as it had arisen. It was already twenty to seven and he was running late, which he rarely did.

A car pulled out in front of him from the street just past the parking lot and sped up as soon as they passed the town limits. Three miles out of town, the only thing he could see of the car ahead of him was the dull red of its rear taillights. Two cars passed him going the other way before he turned. It was full dark, nearly seven o’clock now, a Wednesday night in early March.

He could see the headlights of a car down the long straight stretch of road coming toward him. They appeared, disappeared, appeared again as the road rose and fell so slightly that in the daytime it looked completely level, the only set of lights, other than his, on an empty road. It wasn’t until the approaching vehicle came over the last shallow rise, maybe a quarter mile ahead of him, that he realized it was coming straight at him. He honked his horn. Nothing. Laid on the horn hard, the sound nearly deafening in the enclosed space of his SUV. The lights came faster. A blast of cold across his face like—

Ditch
.

Thinking it and doing it at the same time. He was in the ditch, through, and out, as the car screamed past. One big thump, into the field, turning as he came, grass striking against the undercarriage of his SUV. Back through the shallow ditch, still turning, but the car was gone.

Boyd sat for a minute, SUV idling, foot hard on the brakes. The car had either turned off, gone into a ditch itself, or turned off its lights. He backed around, pulled the Escape to the side of the road, and got out. With the headlights angled to light the asphalt, he walked up the road in the direction the vehicle had come. No skid marks.

He got back in the SUV, turned again, and drove slowly back up the road. He didn’t see a car in the ditch, though there were two gravel roads it could have turned off on. He reversed again, heading back toward Hallie’s ranch.

He called it in.

“You didn’t see the car?” Ole was running dispatch, which was unusual but not unprecedented. He filled in when there was no other substitute. “Keeps my hand in,” he’d say if anyone asked. But everyone knew it was because his son and his daughter were both in college out of state and his wife worked in Rapid City during the week and was home only on the weekends. Mostly home on the weekends. Ole would never say it, but everyone knew he hated an empty house.

“Headlights only,” Boyd said. “It was dark. Not big, judging from the height of the lights. Maybe a small SUV. But that’s about all I can say.”

“Think they were drunk?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll tell Mazzolo to keep an eye out,” Ole said. “She’s on tonight.”

“Thanks.” Boyd replaced his phone in his belt clip, drove on, and turned into Hallie’s long driveway fifteen minutes later.

Ole was right. They’d probably been drinking. Or fell asleep at the wheel. Probably. The problem with that was how they’d disappeared. They hadn’t ended up in a ditch or the middle of a field. Either the close encounter had sobered them, woken them up, or there was something going on that he didn’t yet understand.