"You got your two great families of wine," Del was saying.
"Yeah, yeah, red and white, which lacks something in the way of new information," one of the deputies said.
"I was talking about screw-top and cork," Del said, "Considering pop-top and bottle-cap as variations of the screw-top."
"You're talking about wine again?" Lucas asked. "You're turning into a fuckin' Frenchman."
"Am not. I use deodorant," Del said.
"Like that's gonna last," Lucas said skeptically.
Del turned back to the deputy. "As I was saying before the rude interruption…"
"Screw-top and cork, pop-top and bottle-cap," the deputy prompted. Now he was interested.
"Right. So among your screw-tops, you got your three basic families: fruit taste, Kool-Aid taste, and other."
"I think I've had some other," the deputy said. "I was once going through Tifton, Georgia, in a hurry. I was driving this 'sixty-three rose-blush Cadillac-"
Del interrupted. "You wanna hear about wine, or you wanna bullshit?"
"All right, fuck you, I won't tell you what happened."
"Good. Anyway, there's-"
At that moment, an anguished croak slashed across the hillside, the sound of a man who was having his eyes plucked out. The talk stopped cold and they all stepped to the edge of the tent, and Lucas saw the large man and Marshall on their knees next to the third grave. The two cops in the hole were standing up, unmoving, looking at the two men on their knees.
"Jesus Christ," one of the deputies said. "What happened to them?"
Lucas had an idea. He was on his way across the hillside, with Del a step behind. As they stepped into the harsh glare of the light, Lucas looked into the hole and saw a piece of reddish cloth. Terry Marshall put one hand on the shoulder of the large man and pushed himself back onto his feet. "It's Laura's shirt. We think it's the shirt she was wearing."
"It is," the large man sobbed. He had both hands to the sides of his head, as if he were holding it in place. "We hoped, we hoped…"
"Jack Winton. Laura's dad," Marshall said unapologetically.
Lucas was struck with a surge of anger. "Why'n the hell did you…"
"I couldn't keep him off; didn't even try," Marshall said. "He's family."
"Ah, jeez," Lucas said. "This…"
"This sucks," Marshall said. He patted the big man on the shoulder again. "Jack. Come on. Let 'em do their work. Come on."
LUCAS AND DEL left the site ten minutes later. With three graves producing bodies, there was little doubt that the others would, too. On the way back, Del said, "You getting pissed yet?"
"Getting closer to it," Lucas said. "Especially after that thing with Winton."
"Marshall should never have brought him."
"He's family. They're all family, and he couldn't say no," Lucas said.
"Yeah… It's a good sign that you're getting pissed. Focuses the mind."
"I guess." They drove on a little way, listening to the heater, and then Lucas said, "I just hope it doesn't spill over on Weather."
"She knows what you do for a living," Del said. "I think it was just that one thing that fucked her up, when she was right in the middle of it. She's a good guy. I'm happy you're back together."
WEATHER WAS STILL awake, reading a Barbara Kingsolver novel. Lucas had hung his rain suit from a nail in the garage, kissed her on the forehead, and said, "I'm gonna get some soup."
"Guy called-a McGrady? He gave me a cell phone number, said you should call him when you got back."
"All right." Lucas got a can of soup out of the cupboard, dumped it in a microwave-safe bowl, stretched some cling wrap over the bowl, and stuck it in the microwave for two minutes. Then he dialed McGrady's cell phone; McGrady answered on the first ring.
"You know that first skull we pulled out of the ground?"
"Yeah?"
"We're down to the skeletal bones and so on. First of all, it's definitely a female. And we found the hyoid. It's in two pieces, and the break looks like it happened at the time of death. It's not a new break."
"So she was strangled."
"I'll let the medical examiner figure it out, but I'd bet on it," McGrady said.
"Check the others, if you find more."
"We're gonna find more," McGrady said. "We've got two more skulls coming up now."
LUCAS GOT THE soup out of the microwave, stirred it, stuck it back in for another two minutes, and called Rose Marie to fill her in. He told her about Marshall, and she said, "You better keep an eye on him."
"Yeah. But it's his case, in a way. He put the file together."
"Sounds like he might be a little bit of a loose cannon, though," she said. "He can watch, but keep him out of trouble."
HE REPEATED THE story to Weather as he was eating the soup. She dragged a chair around to sit behind him, and put an arm on his shoulder. "You look… forlorn."
"You should've heard that guy," Lucas said. "He sounded like somebody was… torturing him. Plucking his eyeballs out or something."
"Breaking his heart," Weather said.
They stayed up talking, since Weather wasn't scheduled to operate the next morning; talked about Marshall, about the killer, about the graveyard in the rain. Sat close together; eventually found their way back to the bedroom. Making a baby, Lucas thought later, is something you can do even after a day spent digging up a graveyard.
Maybe even a good time to do it.
10
THE TELEVISED DISPLAY of his drawings had been a hammer blow. As he sat in his office, peering into the depths of his computer, James Qatar would turn each and every time he heard footsteps in the hallway. He possessed a level of courage, but he was not immune to fear. The building was nearly empty during the study term, and the shoe heels of every passerby echoed through his office.
He was waiting for the police. He'd seen the television show on forensic science, how the police could track a killer with a single hair or a flake of dandruff or the imprint of a gym shoe. He knew much of that was exaggeration, but stilclass="underline" It produced a vision.
Qatar was an old-movie buff, and in his vision saw broad-shouldered police thugs with bent noses and yellow-tan woolen double-breasted suits and wide, snap-rimmed hats. They'd have eyes like bloodhounds and they'd jam into the doorway and then one would mutter to the others, "That's him! Get him!" He'd stand up and look around, but there'd be no place to run. One of the cops, a brutal man with dry twisting lips, would pull a pair of chrome handcuffs from his pocket…
The scene was all very retro, very thirties, very movie stylish-but that was the way James Qatar saw it happening.
Never happened.
The same night that he'd seen the drawings on television, he'd driven himself in a panic to a CompUSA, where he'd bought a package of ZIP disks and a new hard drive. At his office, he'd locked the door, dumped all of his lectures to the new ZIPs, then stripped the hard drive out of his computer. He also dug out every ZIP disk in the place, except those he'd bought that morning-some of the disks were unused, but he was taking no chances-and put them in his briefcase with the old hard drive.
He took an hour fussing with Windows, reinstalling it on the new drive, then began the task of reading his lecture files back in. The whole process would take time, but he got started. When he ran out of patience, he headed home, carrying his briefcase.
At home, he smashed the old hard drive, extracted the disks, and cut them to pieces with metal shears. He used the same shears to shred the ZIP disks. He could have dumped the mess into the garbage safely enough, but he was both frightened and meticulous. He put all the pieces in a sack, drove south down the Mississippi, found a private spot, and tossed the sack into the viscous brown water.
That was that. Let the cops come now, he'd thought, and do all their forensic work on the computer. They'd find nothing but a pristine drive and the usual academic software. No Photoshop, no photo files. Nothing but a bunch of paintings in a series of PowerPoint lectures.