"Maybe I should give him a call," Anderson suggested.
"I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from you," Lucas said. He looked around. "Where are the victims?"
Anderson turned toward the stand of trees north of the road, took a hand out of his jacket pocket, and pointed. "Back in there, where the guys in the orange hats are."
Lucas said to Del. "Let's go take a look."
"Are you running this, or Hank?" Anderson asked.
"Both of us, in a way," Lucas said. "I report directly to the commissioner of Public Safety and to the governor. Hank reports up through the BCA chain of command."
"So what exactly do you do?" Deputy Schnurr asked. "Handle the politics or what?"
"I kick people's asses," Lucas said. His eyes flicked over Schnurr and the other deputy, then went back to the sheriff. "When they need to be kicked."
He and Del both stepped away at the same time, toward the men in the orange caps. The sheriff and his two deputies hesitated, and Del and Lucas got a few steps away and Del said, "That was cool."
"Hey, the guy didn't even shake hands."
"Yeah." They pushed through a tangle of brush and caught a glimpse of the bodies hanging from the ropes; passed a few more trees and then saw them fully, in the clear. Lucas focused on them, got careless, pushed back a springy branch and got snapped in the face by a twig. His cheek stinging, he said, "Careful," to Del, and went back to staring at the bodies.
They looked like paintings, he thought, or maybe an old fading color photo from the 1930s, two gray, stretched-out bodies dangling from a tree, half facing each other, ropes cutting into their necks, with four white men not looking at them-desperately not looking at them.
As they came up, Del asked, quietly, "You ever noticed how hanged people sort of all look alike-like they lose their race or something? They all look like they're made out of clay."
Lucas nodded. He had noticed that. "Except redheads," he added. "They always look like they came from a different planet."
Del said, "You're right. Except for redheads. They just get paler."
The four orange-hatted men were spaced around the bodies at the cardinal points, as though they might be rushed from any direction. A short stepladder was set up beside the bodies, and the snow had been thoroughly trampled down for fifty feet around. Two of the men were doing the cold-weather tap dance, a slow shuffle that said they were freezing. When Lucas and Del came up, one of the orange-hats turned and asked, "Who're you?"
"BCA," Lucas said. "Who're you?"
"Dave Payton." The man turned back to the bodies and shivered. "D-Deputy sheriff."
"What're you doing?" Del asked.
"K-Keeping everybody out of a circle around the bodies. You guys are supposed to have a crime crew coming. You don't look like them."
"They'll be a bit," Lucas said. His voice had turned friendly. "You get here early?"
"I was the first car in, after the state patrol. Ass is freezin' solid."
"Where's the line they were brought in on… tracks or anything?"
Payton jerked his arm toward the road. "Back that way, I guess. Pretty trampled down, now."
Lucas looked, and could see the kind of snaky break in the brush that often meant a game trail. If the bodies had been brought in along it, then the hangman had known exactly where he was going.
Del had taken a couple steps closer to the dangling bodies. "Woman's got blood on her face," he said.
"G-Guy's pretty messed up, too," Payton said. "Looks like somebody beat the heck out of him before he did… this."
"I don't think it's her blood," Del said. "Some of it's off to the side, and on her upper lip and nose."
"We'll get the lab to check," Lucas said. "That'd be a break, if it's the killer's."
Payton said, "D-D-D-DNA. We did a DNA in a rape last year."
"Catch the guy?"
"N-N-No," Payton said.
Lucas said, "Look, why don't you go sit in a car for a while and get warmed up, for Christ's sakes? You're shaking like a leaf."
" 'Cause Anderson'd have a cow," Payton said.
"We're taking over the crime scene," Lucas said. "The BCA is. I'm ordering you to leave, okay?" He looked at the other guys, who were watching him, some hope in their eyes. "All of you. Get some place warm. Get some coffee."
Payton bobbed his head, said, "Aye aye, cap'n." The four men hurried in a wide circle around the hanging bodies, another of them muttered, "Thanks," and then they all scuttled off through the naked trees toward the cars.
"ANDERSON COULD BE a problem," Del said, conversationally, when the deputies were out of earshot. He and Lucas were still looking at the dead people. The ghastly fact was that Cash and Warr hung only a few inches off the ground, and neither one had been tall-Lucas and Del were looking almost straight into their dead, half-open eyes, at their purplish faces, and the two bodies swayed together as though dancing on the same floor where the two cops were standing. "He doesn't know what he's doing," Del continued. "Half the goddamn crime scene is stuck to the bottoms of the deputies' boots. Then he left them out here to freeze."
"Yeah." Lucas decided that they were gawking at the bodies. "We're gawking," he said.
"I know," Del said, looking at Warr. "How many dead people we seen in our lives? You think a thousand?"
"Maybe not a thousand," Lucas said, still looking.
"I don't dream about any of them, except maybe one burned guy I saw, all black and crispy but still alive… died while we were waiting for the ambulance. And a little kid who drowned in a creek, she was my first one right after I went on patrol."
"I remember my first kid."
"Everybody does," Del said. He did the cold-weather tap dance, and blew some steam. "I'm gonna remember this one for a while."
"THEY'RE ON DISPLAY, " Lucas said after a while. "You think it could be a biker thing? Bikers do this kind of shit, sometimes."
"I've never seen it," Del said doubtfully. A gust of wind came through, and both of the bodies slowly rotated toward them.
"Neither have I, but I've read about it," Lucas said.
"Read about it, or seen it in the movies?"
"Maybe the movies," Lucas admitted. "The thing is, the guy who did this wanted everybody to freak out. This isn't just a murder. This is something else. The guy was making a point."
"No clothes around," Del said. "Must've pulled the clothes off somewhere else, or took them with him."
"Somewhere else. This was all planned," Lucas said. "The killer wasn't struggling around in the dark, pulling their clothes off. He didn't have to look for this place, off the top of his head. He knew what he was going to do. He worked it all out ahead of time."
THEY WERE TALKING about the line the killer took through the trees, and the angle down to the kid's house and the distance from the town, and more about the display of the bodies, when they heard people coming in. Anderson was pushing through the brush with Braun and Schnurr, followed by three more men in bulky uniform parkas and insulated pants. "Must be the guys from Bemidji," Del said.
They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. "The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us," Dickerson said. "The ME's out on the road right now. The special ops guys'll get it on film and we'll process the scene, then we'll get those folks out of the trees."
"We need a careful sweep," Lucas said. "I mean like, crazy careful."
"Pretty screwed up already," Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, "We're getting set up now. We're bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the place, we'll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it."
"Excellent."
"You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who's going to do what." Again, a bureaucratic wariness.
"Del and I don't have anything to do with crime scene stuff," Lucas said. "That's all yours-but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman's mouth. That blood on her face looks likes it might not be hers. We'll want a DNA on it and we'll want her mouth cleaned out."