Barin shrugged. "I'm not big on bureaucracy. Tearing the place up is the right thing to do."
"The guy with me, Del, knows every drug hideout invented by modern man. I'll bring him by later on."
"Good enough."
The deputy came to the door. "This young lady… " Lucas and Barin turned. Letty was standing behind the deputy, looking around with interest. "… says she has to use the bathroom."
"Uh… not here. I'll run you home," Lucas said. To Barin: "So you know what you're doing. I'll get Del up here."
"Okay." Barin was looking curiously at Letty. "Is this the young lady who found… " He tipped his head to the north.
"Yeah," Lucas said.
Barin said, "For a second, I thought she might be your daughter. She's got exactly your eyes."
"ICAN WALK back to the cafe," Letty said to Lucas. "It's only two blocks."
"I'll take you," Lucas said. "C'mon."
On the way out, Letty pointed at the wide-screen Panasonic television in the corner. "That used to be in the window at Lute's. You know how much that cost?"
"Thousand, fifteen-hundred?"
Letty snorted. "It was on sale for nine-thousand, nine-ninety-nine. Ten thousand bucks. High-definition TV. Sat there for six weeks, and then one day, it was outa there. Didn't know it came here, though."
Lucas looked at Barin, raised his eyebrows. Barin nodded-he'd check. A ten-thousand-dollar television would give weight to the drug-dealing proposition.
"So let's go," Lucas said to Letty.
But outside, Letty said, "I don't really have to pee. I just wanted to get a look around."
"Well, Jesus Christ," Lucas said, irritated.
"I'm trying to help. You need all you can get," she said. Then, "Why couldn't I pee here?"
"They have to process the whole place. Crime scene process. Like the shows on television. Bathrooms are good places to process, because they have good surfaces for fingerprints and so on. You can sometimes get DNA out of them."
"Okay." She nodded. "Good reason."
"Let's get you home," Lucas said.
6
LETTY'S HOUSE WAS visible from Cash's: a gray spot on the bowl-rim of the horizon.
"What the heck are they doing?" Letty asked, peering out the passenger window, as they drove out of town.
"What?" Lucas ducked his head to look through her window. Out over one of the farm fields, directly south of the line of cop cars at the crime scene, two helicopters were hovering thirty feet above the ground, kicking up a small storm of ice crystals and dirt as they moved slowly sideways, in line, toward the ditch and the police cars.
"Television," Lucas said. He looked at his watch: not yet two o'clock. The newsies had been quick. "Taking pictures." He glanced over at her. "You really don't have to use the bathroom?"
"Not really."
"Okay. You better stick with me for a while."
ASHERIFF'S CAR was parked across the side road, and Lucas held his ID out the window as he turned in. The deputy stopped to look through the windshield-it was one of the guys who Lucas had released from the hanging site-and waved them through. They continued down the track toward the cop cars.
There were fewer cars now, but as they pulled up, they saw three men carrying a black body bag through the trees.
"Are those the dead people?" Letty asked, peering out over the dashboard.
"One of them," Lucas said. He popped the door and was about to get out of the car when his cell phone rang. He swiveled back into the car and punched the phone: "Yeah?"
"Lucas. Neil Mitford." The governor's aide. There was electronic noise in his voice. Again, Lucas remembered, they were on the edge of nowhere. "Anything yet?"
"One of the victims, the black guy, was in jail down in Missouri until he moved up here. That was probably a year and a half ago. The guys from Bemidji are running that down. And at the house where they lived, there're a couple of baggies in the wastebasket, small ones like the kind used for street drugs, that show some white residue-probably cocaine."
"Excellent," Mitford said. "Is it too early to start spinning out a dope story?"
"Don't let the governor do it. You want to be able to deny it if you have to," Lucas said. "But I think it'll hold up. They're just bringing the bodies out of the woods now."
"Any film?"
Lucas told him about the helicopters: "I don't know what they could see from out there. They'll be able to get pictures of the bodies coming out in the body bags."
"But nothing of the trees?"
"I don't know. I'll ask and get back to you."
"We're pretty anxious," Mitford said.
"I'll get back," Lucas said. He rang off and turned to Letty: "This time, you stay in the car."
"It's a free country," she said.
"You step out on the crime scene, which this is, and I'll put you in a sheriff's car and send you back to Armstrong to sit in the sheriff's office and think about it for a few more hours," he said.
"Not fair," she said.
"So take a couple aspirins and lie down," Lucas said.
As he started climbing out again, Letty said, "Ex-con with bags of cocaine, huh? That's a pretty picture."
"Stay,"Lucas said.
AS HE GOT out of the car, Lucas spotted Ray Zahn leaning on the fender of his patrol car at the far end of the line. Zahn was watching the body bag being loaded into a Suburban. Lucas walked toward him. Zahn turned his head, nodded, and called, "Bringing them out."
"ME still in there?"
"Yeah, he helped take them down. He had them cut the rope so they could keep it around their necks to make sure that this rope was what killed them."
"You think any of the TV helicopters got pictures?" Lucas asked as he turned into the trees. Zahn trailed behind.
Zahn said, "Yeah. I don't know how much they could see, but if you go over there diagonally, look out over toward the field, there was an open line into the hanging tree. You don't see it right away because of the brush, but if you're up fifteen or twenty feet, looking down at an angle… that's exactly where the choppers were. They kept moving in and out of that hole."
"Shit."
"Maybe couldn't see too much."
"Anything was too much." They could see the hanging tree and a group of men around it. "The ME's the guy in the black coat?"
"Yeah. Henry Ford."
"Really? Henry Ford?"
"Yeah. He's out of Thief River. Good guy. Doesn't know shit about cars."
ANDERSON, THE SHERIFF, Dickerson, the BCA supervisor, and a few other men were huddled to the left of the second black bag, cigarette smoke streaming away from them.
"Cold," Zahn mumbled from behind him. "Radio says it's two below."
"I heard," Lucas said. "But it's gonna warm up tonight. Then maybe snow."
"We could use it," Zahn said.
Anderson had spotted them coming through the trees and turned to the ME, who had what looked like an unfiltered cigarette hanging from one lip, and said something, and Ford looked toward them. He was a white-haired man, hardly old enough to be so white-thirty-five, Lucas thought-with round gold grandpa glasses. Lucas came up, with Zahn a step behind, nodded and said, "Dr. Ford? Lucas Davenport." They shook gloved hands, and Lucas said, "Anything useful?"
"They almost certainly died here, if that's useful," Ford said, talking around the cigarette. "Cash's neck was cut by the rope and he bled down the length of his body and there were a few drips on the ground, in the snow under his right foot, so he was alive when they hung him up. I assume the same was true with Warr, but we'll know for sure later. The blood on Warr's face-I don't believe it's hers. I was worried about jarring anything loose, taking her down, so I took some swabs on the spot. We've got three short blond hairs, not hers, not Cash's."
"Good. Excellent. Any signs of drug use?"
Ford took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Both of them were raw around the nostrils, like they might be if they used cocaine. Cash had some scars on both of his forearms and Warr on her right forearm and both feet, that could be from needles. I couldn't swear to the cocaine because we haven't seen much of that here lately. We'll need a few hours to verify all of this. We'll do the full range of toxicology, of course."