"I could use some bad news, since all the other news has been so good," Lucas said.
"Yeah, well, you might want to get yourself some stainless-steel underwear," Stephaniak said. "You know, I told you about a bunch of guns and other stuff?"
"Yeah?"
"The crime-scene crew got down in there, in the tank, and they found this empty box. Military. There was one empty hand-grenade canister beside it, no grenade. It's just possible that these guys have a whole box of M67 HE frag grenades."
Lucas scratched his head. He didn't really know what to say.
"Hello? You there?" the sheriff asked.
15
LUCAS DROVE SOUTH on Highway 61, crossed the Mississippi into Hastings, took Highway 55 to the law enforcement center, checked in with the sheriff's office and was escorted to forensics. A tall, narrow, dark-haired woman met him at the door and stuck out a hand: "Lucas? Nancy Knott. Come on through. What's up?"
Lucas followed her to a cubbyhole office, took the visitor's chair as she settled behind her desk. Lucas asked, "You processed the scene at the Haines-Chapman murder, right?"
"Basically, Lonny Johnson did, but I was out there for a while," she said. "Lonny's off today. I did most of the in-house processing."
"So when I read your forensics report yesterday, it said that you found hay-wait, not hay, you said straw-stuck to the back of one of the victims. You thought that he might have died in an agricultural area. I understand the bodies were found in a ditch under a little bridge, in an ag area. So my question is, so what? Was there something about the straw?"
"There wasn't any straw there," Knott said. "It was one of those seasonal creeks, grown up with dead weeds. There was a bean field up the hill, so no straw there. And the bodies were in plastic bags, and the straw was stuck to the outside of their clothing, inside the bags."
Lucas dug in his pocket and pulled several pieces of straw from his pocket. "Hay like this?"
He dropped it on her desk and she leaned over and looked at it, then took a pencil out of a cup and pushed it around. "Straw. Yeah. Like that. Exactly. See this cut? Cut like that. Same color and texture."
"Is there any way to tell if it's the same straw? Or hay? Like genetically the same?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe the FBI could. Maybe one of the big ag schools could tell you what variety of straw it is, if that would help."
"I'm not exactly following-I'm a city kid. Hay, straw…"
Hay, she said, was essentially different from straw. Hay was a dried food crop, like alfalfa or clover, heavily fed to cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and sometimes other animals. Straw was the support stalk for cereal grains, like wheat, oats, and rye, didn't have much nutritive value, but was used for animal bedding.
"And what we had on Haines's back was several pieces of straw, not hay. It looked exactly like what you've brought in, and I suspect a lab could tell you that they were both, say, oat straw, or not. Or wheat straw, or not. About the genetics, I bet they could figure it out, but I'm not sure."
"Bedding material. For what kind of animals?" Lucas asked.
"Horses. You know, horses in a barn," she said.
"Huh."
"If you want to leave this, I can check around, see if we can find a place to compare it. If you have a scene where you think they might've been killed, well, just me eyeballing it, your samples look identical to what we took off Haines," she said. "And Haines and Chapman were living in the city, too-they wouldn't have just picked it up anywhere. So… I bet you found it. Uh, where was it?" LUCAS CALLED JENKINS from the road: "You still got her there?"
"Yes. Having a nice chat."
"Hold her there." GABRIEL MARET pulled the surgical team together outside the operating theater. "One more day. The cardiologists say there could be some benefit by holding off for another twelve to twenty-four hours, but not after that. So tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock, we're going, and we have to go the whole way, regardless of what happens."
Virgil had been leaning against the wall down the hall, and when Weather broke free of the group, asked, "Back home?"
She said, "I was thinking. About these latest killings. Lucas thinks that the hospital guy has to be involved somehow. He's one guy they don't have any ideas about, except for the accent."
Virgil nodded. "So?"
"So they killed this one man last night, and another one probably this morning. Who do we know who has a French accent, who didn't show up for work today?"
Virgil's eyebrows went up. "Not a bad thought. Who'd we ask about that?"
"Let's go down to admin." LUCAS GOT BACK to the BCA office and found Jenkins and Honey Bee in a conference room finishing a pepperoni pizza. Lucas took a chair, pulled it close to her, and said, "Ms. Brown. Harriet. Honey Bee. When the bodies of Haines and Chapman were found, some pieces of straw were taken off their backs. I collected some straw from your driveway this morning. I've just been down to the Dakota County sheriff's office and we've done a comparison. We think we can prove that Haines and Chapman were killed at your farm."
Her mouth dropped open. "What?"
"We can use genetics techniques to prove the connection," Lucas said. "Very sophisticated, but they're better than fingerprints."
"I don't-"
Lucas beat her down with an angry snap: "Goddamnit, don't bullshit us. This is way out of control. Do you realize how many people are dead? Somebody's killed six people."
"Not me…"
"But you were involved, one way or another," Lucas said, leaning toward her, looming, tapping on the table with his index finger. "We've already got enough to convince a jury: you were intimate with Lyle Mack, you were friends with Joe and Ike, you were friends with the victims, Haines and Chapman, we've got the evidence of the straw, taken from your house. Have you helped us? No. You've stonewalled. You've given us exactly zip."
She looked at Jenkins. "I've been cooperating…"
"You've been talking to me," Jenkins said. "You've been nice, I gotta admit. But Honey Bee, you've given me exactly no useful information. Not even the simple stuff, like, who's the 'doc' guy?"
"I don't know who the doc guy is," she said. "I think he's a doper. Joe told me once that the worst doper he knew was a doctor, and I think it's the same guy. I think that's how they knew him. The guy was trying to buy dope."
"Did Joe sell dope?"
She looked away, and then said, "He might have, at one time. I don't know exactly."
"Oh, horseshit," Lucas said. "Did he sell dope?"
Long pause, then, "Yes. Not so much sell it, as trade it. You know, for stuff."
"What kind of stuff?" Jenkins asked.
"Office equipment."
"Office equipment." The two cops looked at each other.
"They used to sell a lot of office equipment on the Internet," she said. "And cameras and stuff," she said.
"In other words, hot stuff," Lucas said. "Stuff from burglaries, stolen stuff from offices."
"I guess," she said.
"Where'd they keep it?" Lucas asked. "There wasn't any at the bar, or their houses."
She started to cry, and the cops sat and watched. After a minute, she stopped, checking for effects, saw nothing but stone faces. "What?"
"Where'd they keep it?" Lucas asked again.
Another long wait, and then, "They have a storage place out in Lake Elmo."
"Do you know where it is?"
"Yes."
"Did they put the dope from the hospital robbery out there?"
"I don't know about the hospital robbery. "
They pushed her around for a while, then Lucas said to Jenkins, "I think we better check her into Ramsey County."