"Good call," Lucas said, nodding.
"I don't think we'll see any television," the fat man said. Lucas couldn't tell if that made him happy or unhappy. "Old D.T. put a lid on everything. D.T.'s the guy running the show down there."
"Hope we can keep it on," Lucas said, heading toward the side road. "But if they do turn up, don't take any shit from them at all."
"Right on." The deputy grabbed his gunbelt in both hands and gave it a hitch.
The side track was two hundred yards long. At the end of it, Lucas found a nervous gray-haired woman and a pipe-smoking man sitting on the narrow porch of a cabin, both in cable-knit sweaters and slickers. Beyond the cabin, in a tangle of brush and brambles, Swanson was standing in a pod of people, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes.
Lucas walked past the cabin and gingerly into the scrub, staying away from a long strip of yellow police tape that outlined the original track into the raspberry bushes. Halfway back, a uniformed deputy, working on his hands and knees, was pouring casting compound into a footprint. He looked up briefly as Lucas went by, then turned back to his work. He'd already poured some casts farther along the trail.
"Davenport," Swanson said, when Lucas pushed through to the end of the track. Two funeral home attendants in cheap dark suits were waiting to one side, a carry litter with pristine sheets for the uncaring body set carefully by their feet. Two more men, deputies, were working in a muddy foxhole, excavating the body with plastic hand trowels, like archaeologists on a dig. The body was half uncovered, but the face was still down. Swanson stepped away from the group, his face gloomy.
"It's for sure? George?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah. When they went into the hole, they got his foot, and the deputy stopped the digging and called for help. When they started again, they got to his hip, took his billfold out of his pocket. The same guy who found him recognized the name and called for help again. The clothes are right. It's him."
Lucas stepped off to the side to get a better look at the hole. A foot stuck up awkwardly, like a grotesque tree shoot struggling for the sun. A sheriff's deputy in a ball cap and a raincoat came over and said, "You're Davenport?"
"Yeah."
"D.T. Helstrom," the deputy said, sticking out a bony hand. He was a thin man, with a dark, weathered face. Smile lines creased his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. "I've seen you on TV…"
They shook hands and Lucas said, "You were the first guy out here?"
"Yes. The couple back there on the porch…?"
"I saw them," Lucas said. He moved away from the hole with Swanson and Helstrom as they talked.
"They saw some lights over here last night. We have a lot of break-ins in these lake cabins, so I came by and checked it out. There was nothing at the cabin, but I could see somebody had been through the bushes. I went along… and there was the grave."
"They didn't try to hide it?" Lucas asked.
Helstrom looked back along the track and cracked a thin grin. "Yeah, I guess, in a city way. Kicked some shit over the grave. Didn't try too hard, though. They must have figured that with the rain, hell, in a couple of weeks there'd be nothing to find. And they were right. In a week, you couldn't find that hole with three Geiger counters and a Republican water-witcher."
"We're both saying 'they,' " Lucas said. "Any sign of how many?"
"Probably two," Helstrom said. "They left tracks, but it was raining off and on all night, so the prints are pretty washed out. We've got one guy in gym shoes, for sure, 'cause we can still see the treads. Then there are prints that don't seem to have treads on them, on top of the treaded prints-but we can't be sure, because the rain might have taken them out…"
"Car?" Swanson asked.
"You can see where the tires were. But I followed it all the way out to the road, and the tread marks were gone."
"But you think there were two," Lucas said.
"Probably two," Helstrom said. "I looked at every track there is, marking the ones to cast; I couldn't swear to it in court, but I'd be willing to bet on it in Vegas."
"You sound like you've done this shit before," Lucas said.
"I had twenty years in Milwaukee," Helstrom said, shaking his head. "Big-city police work can kiss my ass, but I've done it before. We're taking the body over to Minneapolis, by the way. We've got a contract with the medical examiner, if you need the gory details."
Swanson was looking back toward the hole. From where they were standing, all they could see was the foot sticking up and the two men working in the hole, getting ready to move the body. "Maybe we got us a break," he said to Lucas.
"Maybe. I'm not sure how it'll help."
"It's something," Swanson said.
"You know what I thought, when I first dug him up?" Helstrom asked. "I thought, Ah! The game's afoot."
Lucas and Swanson stared at him for a moment, then simultaneously looked back to the hole, where the foot stuck up. "Jesus," Lucas groaned, and the three of them started laughing.
At that instant, one of the deputies, pulling hard, got the body halfway out of its grave. The head swung around to stare at them all with empty holes where the eyes should have been.
"Aw, fuck me," the deputy cried, and let the body slump back. The head didn't turn, but continued looking up, toward the miserable gray Wisconsin sky and the black scarecrow twigs of the unclothed trees.
He thought about it on the way back, weighing the pros and cons, and finally pulled into a convenience store in Hudson and called TV3.
"Carly? Lucas Davenport…"
"What's happening?"
"You had a short piece last night about a guy disappearing, a law professor?"
"Yeah. Found his car at the airport. There's a rumor flying around that he was Stephanie Bekker's lover…"
"That's right-that's the theory."
"Can I go with…?"
"… and they're taking him out of a grave in Wisconsin right this minute…"
"What?"
He gave her directions to the gravesite, waited while she talked to the news director about cranking up a mobile unit, then gave her a few more details.
"What's this gonna cost me?" she asked in a low voice.
"Just keep in mind that it'll cost," Lucas said. "I don't know what, yet."
Sloan was working at his desk behind the public counter in Violent Crimes when Lucas stopped by.
"You've been over in Wisconsin?" Sloan asked.
"Yeah. They did a number on the guy's eyes, just like with the women. Did you talk to George's wife yesterday?"
"Yeah. She said it's hard to believe that he was fuckin' Stephanie Bekker. She said he wasn't much interested in sex, spent all his time working."
"Huh," Lucas said. "He could be the type who gets hit hard, if the right woman came around."
"That's what I thought, but she sounded pretty positive."
"Are you going to talk to her again, today?"
"For a few minutes, anyway," Sloan said, nodding. "Checking in, see if she forgot to tell me anything. We got along pretty well. That Wisconsin sheriff called her with the news, she's got some neighbors over there with her. Her brother's going out to identify the body."
"Mind if I tag along when you go?"
"Sure, if you want," Sloan said. He looked at Lucas curiously. "What've you got?"
"I want to look at his books…"
"Well, shit, I'm not doing much," Sloan said. "Let's take the Porsche."
Philip George had lived in St. Paul, in a two-block neighborhood of radically modern homes nestled in a district of upper-middle-class older houses, steel and glass played against brick and stucco, with plague-stricken elms all around. Three neighborhood women were with his wife when Sloan and Lucas arrived. Sloan asked if he could speak to her alone, and Lucas asked if he could look at George's books.