"That DOA I got called to last night is definitely a homicide." I passed around the copies of the ICR I'd prepared the night before. "Read these as soon as we're done here, but right now—" I looked at my watch; it said twelve minutes after eight—"I'm going to assign your new jobs for this case. Don’t drop your existing cases, work them around the new jobs. Bring any promising leads to me right away. First thing we need is identification on this John Doe.

  "Darrell, when we finish here and you've read the ICR, check out the rolls of film I put into evidence last night, take them to Jay Billingsley, tell him we need two sets of prints ASAP. Then come back here and check out everything else I put in evidence last night. All the blood work is in the freezer, be sure you take the paper bags as well as the kits." He was scribbling notes at top speed; misspelled or not, he always seemed to be able to read his own notes. Darrell's track record for doing everything I send him to do is beyond reproach. "Third, go to Hampstead County Pathology Lab and pick up the fingerprints one of our guys will be taking from the victim. Don't forget to sign his evidence form. Take the blood work, the prints and the jewelry to BCA—the road's open all the way by now, isn't it?" Nobody knew. "Call the State Patrol, find out. And listen, the stuff that's in the freezer? Get the cooler out of the cupboard in the evidence room, take it in that.

  "Oh, and at the Hampstead County Lab, pick up the clothing from the body and take that to St. Paul too. Make up our evidence forms for it—copies to everybody, and don't forget to file them when you get back here. In St. Paul, follow BCA guidelines for how and where they want the stuff checked in up there. Don't get into any pissing matches. Any questions, call me. Come back as soon as you can; I really need a clone for every one of you today.

  "Ray, I want you to go back out to the crime scene and search for the gun and the missing clothes off the body, the shirt and the shoe."

  "Is it marked? Where you found the body?"

  "We left the tape up. It was blowing like hell out there, though, so some of it may have blown away. And you can expect a lot of drifting."

  "Otherwise you think my chances are excellent, correct?"

  "Ray, we have to say we tried." He nodded glumly.

  "Lou, we've got a DOA here with no identification whatever. Fingerprints may take a couple of days and DNA much longer, meantime we need to get lucky. Check Missing Persons and Attempt to Locate reports for the five-state area. Do some networking around the state, see if anybody you know is looking for anybody.

  "Rosie, same thing—check all the homeless shelters, town and county as well as Twin Cities."

  "How about battered women's clinics?"

  "Absolutely, good thinking, he could be a spouse of one of them. Spread the victim's description around, ask them to talk to all their clients.

  "Bo, I want you to get in touch with every snitch you can reach this morning, find out if there's any action going on out there that might have generated a nearly naked body here last night."

  "He was under a highway, right? I better call Chicago and Milwaukee too."

  "Right. Start nearby and keep expanding the circle. Kevin, I'm gonna want you to go along with me to the autopsy at four o'clock. Meantime contact all your POP officers, tell 'em what we've got, get 'em all networking, see if anybody's got a clue who this guy is." I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty-three.

  "Okay, everybody but Rosie, go to it. Beep me the minute you learn anything. Rosie, one more thing—" She sat with her pen poised over her notepad.

  "Complete change of pace here," I said. "Remember all-electronic reporting?"

  "Brave New World? Sure."

  "You won't believe this. The chief says it's actually happening. Today."

  "Oh, fantastic!"

  "Well, glad you’re pleased. Because right now the problem is this: the technical genius is on his way here, and the chief says we need one watchdog from each section, to show this guy where the forms are and make sure we get all the access and reporting space we need. I want you to do it for our crew."

  "Oh, Jake." She slammed her case file on the table. "Jeee-sus!"

  "What?"

  "When I tested for this job, didn't I beat all the guys I went up against?"

  "By a country mile," I said.

  "Okay," she said, "and didn't you promise me if I came in off the street you'd still treat me like a real cop?"

  "Haven't I always?" I asked her, stuffing reports and my cell phone into my briefcase. I slid my cuff back. It was eight-forty-three.

  It was a mistake for me to look at my watch. Rosie Doyle picked up the stack of papers in front of her and threw them into the air. "Then why do you keep trying to turn me into a secretary?" she yelled out of the paper blizzard surrounding her. Little combs flew out of her curly red hair, and the freckles on her nose looked suddenly vivid against her white skin. "You always give me the phone calls and the records searches! Pretty soon you'll be asking me to make coffee every morning!"

  Frank warned me when I recruited her that Rosie Doyle was a top high school athlete and very competitive. "Her father and two of her uncles were Rutherford cops," he said, "every one of 'em stubborn as a post. Always sure they're right. Second generation's just the same, look like 'em, talk like 'em, argue till hell freezes over if they have to, everything's their way or the highway. Her brother Brendan's in the State Patrol, and her cousin Jerry's a sheriff's deputy."

  "Since when is that a reason not to hire her?"

  "It isn't. Just be prepared for the fact that she's used to competing with men, and she’s anything but a pushover."

  "Fine with me," I said. "What would I do with a pushover if I got one? I’ve got work enough for ten investigators and a budget for six. If she can hack it, she can have it."

  Now I saw what Frank meant: Rosie's sharp edges were not so much feminism as force of habit. The only girl in a house full of tough male competitors, she had been guarding her turf since preschool and had a sharp eye for chauvinism in all its aspects.

  "Rosie," I said. "Sit down. Sit down, damn it! Now listen," I tried a trick that sometimes works with angry prisoners; I hitched my chair closer to her, leaned in close, and lowered my voice. "This job I just handed you is positively not gender specific. I gave it to you because you're a whiz on computers, far and away the best in the section." She shot me a little quick look, loving the praise but not wanting to get suckered. "But okay, if you still hate it after a couple of days, I'll change it. Only please, right now I don't have time. Go to the records room at nine-thirty, meet the guy who's starting to plan the new workstations, his name is ...uh—" I looked at my notes—"Stacey Morse. Help him all you can. Will you?"

  She dabbed at her sweaty freckles with a piece of Kleenex and said, reluctantly, "Okay." "Rosie, lemme tell you something. The chief is nervous about this job, there's a lot of money riding on it, and he's not as confident as he'd like to be that it's the right answer. I promised him we'd make it work if we can. Help me deliver on that promise, and I'll owe you a big one. Okay?"

  She rose to that bait, cautiously, a team player before everything. "I don't mean to be hard to get along with, Jake."

  "You're not." The other thing prisoners have taught me is to get out of the room while you're ahead. I gave her one quick buddy tap on the shoulder and left her in the small meeting room, sheepishly picking up papers and putting combs back in her hair.

  Lou French was standing in the doorway of my office, waving a piece of paper.

  "You got something?" I said. "Already?"

  "Hey, we aim to please." He handed me the printout, an Attempt to Locate request from the manager of Clearwater Truck Lines in Minneapolis. A long-haul truck was past due at its destination in Duluth, and the driver wasn’t answering his cab phone.

  "Probably not our guy," Lou said. "Not much information on the driver, mostly ID on the truck. But there's a number to call."

  "Come on in," I said, "let's try it." The number rang twice before a secretary answered, and then a man's voice, said, "Dietz."

  I told him about my DOA. John Dietz thanked me, but said my location was all wrong. "The rig I’m looking for would have been over on Interstate Thirty-five, somewhere between Albert Lea and Minneapolis."

  "Still," I said, "if it’s lost—why don’t I just give you this man’s description?" I told him everything I remembered about the body—his size and the complexion I figured he had when he wasn’t frozen, his hair, his pants and his one shoe. A note of uncertainty crept into John Dietz’s voice.

  "That does kinda sound like Wayne," he said, "but it can’t be."

  "Is it possible you could come down here and take a look?"

  "Um, well...I'm supposed to be...well, never mind, I'll work it out. Yes, I think I'd better do that. Tell you what, I’ll make one more try to locate this rig of mine. If I don’t get any answer, I’ll come right away." I gave him the address of the lab and told him I'd meet him there, and he agreed to let me know if he found his truck and wasn’t coming.

  Lou said, "We got a hit?"

  "Possibly. Don't quit looking. A lot of things don't fit. This Dietz might call back any minute and say he found his truck and driver broken down in Iowa."

  "Right. I'll stay on that search and do some more work on the break-in at the bowling alley." He went back to his cubicle looking jaunty, elated by his possible quick find.

  I dialed Russ Swenson, who was ramrodding the morning shift. "Who've you got on duty that's qualified for fingerprints?"

  "Lessee...Green's on duty today. And Kranz...Green's already out in a squad, though, but Kranz is just standing here picking his nose. If he can find his hankie, he should be just the ticket for one of your keen-eyed scientific in-VEST-uh-gations." Russ is talented; not everybody can manage to insult two guys at once like that.

  "May I speak to him, please?" I have a long-standing promise to myself not to acknowledge Russ Swenson's taunts. He's an insufferable bullying bigot who can't stand to see dark-skinned people get ahead, but hey, who notices? Certainly not Jake Hines.

  "Yo," Kranz said.

  "Nick, I need you to go to Hampstead County Pathology Lab at ten o’clock to take fingerprints from the John Doe DOA we found last night. Can you?"

  "Guess so," Nick said. "Beats taking guff offa Russ Hitler here."

  "Good. And then wait there, will you, till Darrell Betts gets there, and give the prints to him. He's making a run to BCA this morning."

  "Oh. So take along the folders and stuff, huh, the mailing stuff?"

  "Yeah—go ahead, seal 'em up like you were sending them. Let's not give anybody a chance to bitch at us later." Since O. J.'s trial everybody's antsy as hell about carrying anything around, but the Supreme Court has ruled that sending evidence by U.S. mail preserves the chain of evidence. So now when we hand-carry evidence to St. Paul, we seal it up as if we were going to mail it. It's getting a little ridiculous; lately we've been signing the seals on the packages and dating our signatures. What's left? Initial the date, maybe.

  I stuck my head in the door of Frank's outer office, found his door closed and Lulu stapling pages as if her life depended on it. Standing in front of her desk, I wrote a note that said, "Meeting witness at lab for possible ident. of DOA— Jake." I folded it twice and started to put it in Frank's In basket; Lulu, glaring, grabbed it out of my hand, stuck a Post-it note on it, ran it through the date-and-time stamper, and then put it in Frank's In basket.

  "Have a really great day, Lulu," I said. I found a Polaroid camera loaded with film in the records room, put it in my briefcase, got a fresh cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut from the break room, and juggled the whole load outside to my pickup against a stiff breeze that cut like a knife. I could have taken a division car out of the nice warm basement garage, but as long as this storm system kept dumping snow on us every few hours, I liked my own four-wheel drive. Heavy-looking clouds moved in fast out of the north while I scraped my windshield, and by the time I turned the corner on Fourth Avenue and headed into the Hampstead County parking lot, the sky had darkened completely, and a few flakes had piled up against the wipers.

  Before I went inside I called BCA, asked for Trudy, and was told she and her crew had returned from Thief River Falls, caught a quick nap on the cots in the supply room, and now were headed for St. Cloud.

  "Huh. I thought she told me Red Wing was next in line."

  "It was," Lucy said, "but the road's plowed to St. Cloud."

  FIVE

  Through the glass door of the lab, I watched John Dietz get out of his company car and come up the walk, a tall, strong man wearing a fleece-lined windbreaker with a Clearwater Truck Lines logo on the chest. Once inside, he took off his glasses and stood staring at them nearsightedly, waiting for them to defrost. When he could see, he took his coat off and stood with it over his arm, wearing a blue oxford-cloth shirt with a company logo on the pocket.

  I walked up to him, said, "Jake Hines," and showed him my badge. I took my time shaking hands, to give him a chance to get used to my face. It startles people I've talked to first on the phone. Because I grew up in Minnesota and have a midwestern accent, they're expecting pale skin and blue eyes. Instead they see almond-colored skin, Asian eyes, a nose like Crazy Horse, and dimples. I can't help them sort it out, either; I have no idea who my parents were.

  I gave him the department card with my e-mail address and phone number, and he fastened it carefully under the clip on his clipboard, then pulled a company ballpoint out of his pocket protector and wrote my name next to the card. The busywork steadied him.

  He got a little spooked again, though, as we went through the door of the morgue. Waiting to view the body under the sheet, he stood rigid, with a nerve jumping in his hard-clamped jaw.

  Thawed overnight, the victim lay flat on his back, with arms at his sides. The skin of his face had faded to waxy marble. The big wound on the right side of his face drew the eyes away from the undamaged left side, so that the whole face now looked abused. John Dietz drew a ragged breath and said, "Aw, shit."

  "You know him?" He nodded. "Is he your missing driver?" He nodded again and mumbled something. "What?"

  "Wayne Asleson," he said. "That's his name."

  We went out to the little waiting room. I sat in a corner with Dietz while he collected himself. In a couple of minutes he cleared his throat and began to tell me what he knew. Wayne had worked for Clearwater Truck Lines for five years. He did short hauls in the Twin Cities area for the first eighteen months, Dietz said, and when he built up points enough—the company had some rating system that measured trustworthiness and good judgment—he began to make long hauls, to North Carolina first, and then to southern California.

  "Then for the past eighteen months or so," Dietz said, "he's been on the Nogales run regular. Drivers like to get fixed routes with regular schedules, and Nogales is one of those. A load down and back in ten days, then five days off. Stays the same year round, they get a schedule they can count on, even get certain places where they meet buddies to eat and shoot the shit with. Makes it less lonely on the road. Once Wayne got on the Nogales run, he never changed."

  "So," I said, staring at my notes, wishing I knew anything about long-haul trucking, "What does Minnesota get so much of from Arizona?"

  "Not from Arizona," he said. "Mexico. That's where the maquiladoras are, all those factories that take American parts and assemble them cheap. Then they ship 'em back across the border to warehouses in Nogales, Arizona, and we pick 'em up there and bring 'em to places like, well, for instance, the load of CD players and amplifiers that Wayne had this time, that's headed for a music store in Duluth. Where is it?" he asked me.

  "What?"

  "Where's the rig?"

  "We don't have your truck, Mr. Dietz," I said. "We had no idea our DOA was a truck driver till we talked to you."

  "Well, but—" He stared at me. "What about his partner, then?"

  "He had a partner?"

  "Sure. That's how long hauls work, usually. One guy drives while the other one sleeps. So the truck keeps moving without drivers getting overtime."

  "Overtime's too expensive, huh?"

  "Oh, it's not our rule. The government—OSHA and them—they got laws that drivers can't drive more than ten hours a day, or seventy a week."

  "I know the trucks have beds in them now, but don't they have to stop to eat?"

  "Not always. Lotta drivers carry provisions for two meals a day and only stop for one. That space behind the seat has a toilet, refrigerator, most of the comforts of home." He shrugged. "Except a shower. But a lot of the truck stops have those."

  "I see." It was obviously a big subject. I was already wondering how much it was essential to know, which facts I didn't have to take the time to learn. "Okay, well—what's the partner's name?"

  "Roger Carr. On this trip. Before that Wayne was partnered with Tom Deever, ever since he got the Nogales run. But Tom transferred to North Carolina because his wife wanted to be near her mother, she's getting on in years—"

  "And Roger Carr, he's new with your company?"

  "No, oh no, Roger's been with us—uh—about a year longer than Wayne, actually. But he lost his partner, see, just before Wayne did, because Buddy Hall, who was Roger's partner, wanted to get off long hauls, because he said being away from home so much was starting to affect his marriage—"

  My eyes were glazing over. "So these two drivers, Roger and, uh, Wayne, they were new to each other."

  "But I figured it would work out," John Dietz said, "because they both wanted long hauls, they were experienced drivers, and Wayne knew the Nogales run well. It's tricky matching up long-haul drivers"—he rotated his head uncomfortably, as if his shirt collar hurt—"because if they don't get along, that truck cab can get too small in a hurry. But this first run seemed to go smooth as silk, they made every checkpoint on time, and nobody had any complaints."

  "But then this morning they didn't show up when you expected?"

  "Right. Well, not show up, they weren’t due in Duluth for a few hours yet, but they didn’t check in when they were supposed to. They’re supposed to send an e-mail every eight hours or five hundred miles, whichever comes first."

 

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