On his second trip he passed through Hinckley in the daytime, and picked up a tourist map. There was a paragraph on the back about the various attractions, and one was the Hinckley Fire Museum. He read more closely and learned that all the land for miles around here had been old forests that had been logged in the nineteenth century. The cutters had trimmed the brush from the lumber and left it where it fell. When a fire started in 1894, the land had burned uncontrollably, leaving nothing. All the trees had grown in since then.
When Varney reached the road where the farm was, he did his first daylight reconnaissance. The utility vehicle that had been parked outside the house was gone this morning, and no other vehicle was visible, so he guessed that Kelleher had gone out, and probably lived alone. He paid particular attention to the woods that covered the right side of the farm. Since the left side was low stubble and weeds, it would be a bad place to cross on foot.
He knew he was teasing himself, relishing the planning phase because he had been so anxious to get back to work. He knew that most likely, planning was unnecessary. He could have sat in Minneapolis waiting for the phone call, driven right up here that night, pulled up the farm road to the house, kicked in the door, shot Kelleher, and driven off. There were few cars on this road in the daytime, and almost none at night. Minnesota north of Minneapolis was not as crowded as the places where he had worked before. He had driven up here twice, about ninety miles each way, and had not seen a single police car. He’d had to drive around in Hinckley to see a few parked by the station so he would know what colors they were painted. He had also searched out a state police barracks along the interstate highway to look at state police cars.
Varney studied the road near the farm for the best place to park his car. The landscape presented extremes. Long stretches of road were flanked on both sides by endless, swampy, treeless fields where red-winged blackbirds perched on cattails, their weight making the shafts bend, so that they bobbed in the wind as they called to each other. The rest was either farmers’ fields or thick forests of the uniform twenty-foot deciduous trees like the ones on Kelleher’s land.
When he had first seen them, he had assumed they were young, but now he supposed they must have been what sprouted after the fire over a hundred years ago, and they’d been stunted by the weather. Every place he saw a grove that looked promising he slowed down to look closer and saw an obstacle. In many places, there was a drainage ditch beside the shoulder of the road, or a fence. In other places, the trees had grown in too dense a pattern for a car to slip in between them.
When he worked in cities, he could always find a safe place to leave a car. Cities were full of commercial buildings with small parking areas behind them. Sometimes he would park his car in a shopping mall or the lot of a big apartment complex, where it would become invisible, just one of a hundred. Here it was different. He could hardly leave a car on the shoulder of the road, because it would be the only one visible for miles. He considered leaving the car in Hinckley. There was a big hotel and casino run by the Ojibwe Indians there, with hundreds of cars in its lot. But it was too far from the farm. The casino was surrounded by long stretches of straight, empty highway where a solitary walker would be a novelty. People didn’t go for pleasant ten-mile hikes beside roads around here. There was a big state park a few miles away, where people could hike along the St. Croix River if they wanted to.
As he drove back to Minneapolis, he thought of various ways to handle the problem of transportation. He was already as far south as Mounds View before he hit upon the right one. For the rest of the drive, he worked out the details until he was satisfied.
For the next few days, Varney stayed in Minneapolis and prepared. He would get up early each morning, go down to the exercise room on the fourth floor of the hotel, and use the weights and machines before the other guests were up. Then he would step through the locker room to the pool and swim for an hour. Then he went up to the room, took Mae to breakfast, and walked the streets with her until lunchtime. He drove her to the Mall of America and bought her some clothes, took her to parks with little lakes in them, looked at the Mississippi. In the late afternoon, he drove to a park where people jogged after work, and joined them. He and Mae went to dinner at a different restaurant each evening, and when they were back in the room, he turned his attention to his equipment. The kind of meticulous care he used was best done in quiet times like this.
Varney put on thin rubber gloves, and thoroughly cleaned his three pistols. He bathed each part in solvent, wiped it clean, and put a thin layer of gun oil on it, then reassembled the weapon without putting any fingerprints on its internal parts. He used the same procedure with each magazine, then loaded the magazine with ammunition without touching any of the rounds with bare hands. Then he put the pistols into plastic bags and returned them to his suitcase.
He treated his clothing with equal care. None of the clothes had anything memorable or distinctive about them. The brands were all national, the brand names and even size labels cut out. He did not do this because a police force would not be able to find out these things if they had his clothes. He did it because he wanted to make them work harder. If they had to learn the brand name by cut, material, and pattern, it would take time. And that information would give them nothing, because there was nothing special about the clothes.
He washed the soles of the shoes he planned to wear and put them into a plastic bag so no fibers from a hotel rug or a car’s interior would stick to them.
His precautions were meticulous and painstaking, but they dispelled the worries that distracted him. He knew a shell casing left near the body would not carry a fingerprint. If he got blood on his clothes, or was seen wearing them, he could change and throw them away. He could drop his gun in a ditch and not give it another thought, because his guns were all ones he’d stolen in burglaries years ago in California.
Mae watched him making his preparations, never coming near the belongings he spread on the table in their room or speaking to him during his period of meditation on risks and countermeasures. It was only after he had performed all the rituals and put away the tools and clothes that she moved within ten feet of him. She said, “Are you done?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s interesting, the way you do things. So careful, everything in a certain way. It’s kind of like a doctor or something.”
He gazed at her in wonder. She didn’t get it. She kept pushing forward, and she sometimes came right up close to figuring something out, but she just wasn’t paying enough attention after she got there. She was doomed always to think she understood things when she didn’t.
The telephone rang, and she gave a small jump. It had not rung in the five days since they had arrived. She flopped on the bed and reached for the telephone on the nightstand. “I’ll get it.”
“No,” he said. “I will.” He lifted the receiver on the desk. “Yes?”
“Sugar!” came the high, oily voice. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he answered, “it’s me. Did you get the call?”