"Howard," Lucas said. He punched Howard's address into the SUV's navigation system, and they headed east. As they drove, Shrake called around until he found Howard's probation officer, a woman named Melanie. They talked for a few minutes, and Shrake rang off.
"She says Howard and his wife got caught stealing eight hundred and sixty board-feet of walnut and cherry from a wood specialty place in Shakopee. Got caught loading it onto their pickup. She says there was an argument about money he'd given them for some wood, and he told the cops he was just taking what he was owed. She said he was probably right about what he was owed, but he broke through a back door, so there it was. They both got probation. He had some arrests six or eight years back when he was running with the Seed, drugs, firearms, did some county-jail time over in Wisconsin. She says he's not a problem."
"Good. I'm not in the mood for a big deal."
"Neither am I." A minute later: "I wish Weather wasn't involved. I mean… you know."
"Yeah, and she won't budge, either," Lucas said. "She'll be over at the hospital every day. Marcy's not getting anywhere inside the hospital. I might have to go over there with my nutcracker."
"I've done hospitals before," Shrake said. "You know what the problem is? Doctors. No offense, you know, about Weather being a doctor…"
"S'okay."
"They're so sure they know everything. They were the smartest kids in high school, which is how they got in premed, and they were the smartest guys in premed, which is how they got in med school, and then they get this big piece of paper that says, 'Yup, you're the smartest,' and they truly believe that shit. They will tell you everything you need to know about your job. They never answer questions-they'll tell you that you don't need to know that answer. You need to know the answer to something else."
"Hey, I live with one," Lucas said. "And she's a surgeon. They're worse than everybody but the shrinks."
"And you gotta shrink for your best friend…"
"Almost intolerable," Lucas said. "Goddamn Weather, if I didn't love her, I'd choke the shit out of her about twice a day."
"To say nothing of your goofy daughter," Shrake said. "No offense again, but she really does scare me. Sometimes, she acts like a forty-five-year-old narc."
Lucas laughed and said, "The sad thing is, I've never been happier."
"Well, that's nice," Shrake said. "I mean, that really is. That makes one."
"One what?"
"Happy cop." HOWARD LIVED in a rambler-style single-story house halfway down a hillside, brown fiberglass siding with a two-car garage on one end; bright light was shining through the three windows in the garage door. A pickup and an old Camry were parked in the driveway.
Lucas looked at the dashboard clock: ten-forty-five. Not too late. Shrake had taken the pistol out of his pocket and put it back in its holster, and now took it back out and stuck it in the pocket. "Better safe," he said.
Lucas rang the doorbell, and a moment later a woman came to the door and peeked out behind a chain. "Who is it?"
"We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension… state police," Lucas said. "We're talking to people who knew Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman."
"Oh… jeez. Just a minute." She pushed the door closed and the chain rattled, and she said, "Ron's in the shop. We thought somebody might come by."
"You're Mrs. Howard?"
"Yes. Donna." She was using the female nicey-nice voice, submissive, scared by cops. She looked pleasant enough, a round woman with brown hair and dark eyes and a prominent mole by the corner of her mouth. Lucas smiled at her and stepped inside, carefully shuffled his feet on the mat inside the door and she said, "Oh, don't worry about that. He's this way…"
He followed her through the small kitchen, past a dining table and through a garage door. The garage had been converted into a woodshop, with a table saw, band saw, drill press, and lathe fixed to the floor, and a long workbench with wood-cutting tools along the far wall. Howard was working over the lathe, wearing goggles and earmuffs; his back was turned to them. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood, and a stack of wooden bowls sat along one wall of the shop.
Donna Howard flipped a switch on the wall, a quick on-and-off, and a light flickered and Howard backed away from the machine and turned around, saw them, hit a kill switch. He pulled off the goggles and headset as the machine wound down; he was holding a nasty-looking chisel. He saw them check it out and hastily put it aside. "Police?" THEY SAT in the Howards' small living room. Howard started right out with an explanation of the burglary they'd been convicted of. "I hadn't been in trouble for years, since I was a kid. But I gave those assholes twelve hundred dollars for the wood I needed, and they kept putting me off. If I don't produce, I don't eat. They wouldn't give me the money back, either, said they'd already ordered the stuff and the supplier was having problems and all of that. Bullshit. So I made the mistake. Two mistakes-I took Donna with me."
"The judge knew all that, so he went easy," Donna Howard said.
"Did you ever get your money back?" Shrake asked.
"Yeah… but the lawyer cost us two thousand, and we were lucky to get off that easy. Tell you what, soon as it was settled, I put the word out on the Internet. Won't be many guys going out there for their turnin' wood, I can tell you."
Lucas said, "I understand you guys were talking to Shooter and Mike last week."
"Yeah. A friend called and told us about them being dead. He was down at the bar when you were there," Donna Howard said. "I've never known anybody who was murdered."
"How well did you know them?"
Howard shook his head. "I've known them since we were all kids, running around in the woods in Wisconsin. They never grew up. I rode with the Seed for a while, but you know, it gets to be a lot of bullshit. People hassling you, cops coming around. Some of the guys were enormous assholes. Ridin' was fun, you know, impressing the squares and then… you wonder why the hell you're drunk all the time and living out of a shitty apartment. So I got a straight job and met Donna, and we eventually started the business. But we still go up to Cherries three or four times a year, talk with the older guys. That's about it."
"So you wouldn't know what they were up to." Lucas let a little skepticism show in his voice.
"No, we really don't." They sat silently for a moment, then Howard said, "They were always trying to hustle something up. Usually, it was like buying stuff from drug guys up in Minneapolis. Stolen stuff, computers and cameras and stuff. About a million iPods. They'd sell them to high school kids for ten bucks each."
"They'd done some time for robbery…"
"Yeah, but they weren't any good at it," Howard said. "Fact is, Shooter was sort of a chicken, and Mikey was just dumb."
"Pulled off a pretty slick robbery up in the Cities," Shrake said. "We think they're the ones that knocked over that hospital pharmacy."
"Really?" Donna Howard looked surprised. "That doesn't sound like them. They were more the Saturday-night liquor store guys."
"Didn't a guy get killed?" Ron Howard asked.
"Yeah, they kicked a guy, and it turned out he was on some blood thinner because of his heart," Shrake said. "He bled to death internally. They got him to the emergency room, but the docs couldn't stop it."
"God, that's awful." Donna Howard put her knuckles to her teeth. "I can't believe they did that."
"Could have been accidental," Lucas said. "The guy tried to sneak out a cell phone, and they kicked him a couple times. But, you know, you're robbing a place, and somebody dies because of it, it's murder."