"Ray, I want you to go over those weigh bills for the load Wayne’s truck was carrying, look for anything odd or offbeat or extra valuable. Then get me a figure for the value of the whole load. And Bo—" My pager sounded; three loud beeps. We all jumped. I trotted down the hall and called Mary.

  "I know you asked me to hold calls," she said, "but I’ve got the manager of Clearwater Truck Lines here, sounds like he’s ready to bust."

  "Put him on."

  "The State Patrol just called me," John Dietz said

  "Yeah?"

  "They’ve found our missing truck. The tractor anyway—they say the trailer's missing."

  "You’re sure it’s yours?"

  "They read me the numbers; it’s Wayne's rig all right."

  "Where is it?"

  "Up near Pine Island, in a patch of woods behind a farmer’s barn—" he read me the directions "They say it’s got a lot of blood inside."

  "You got a name for this farmer?"

  "Uh...yes. Norman Schellhammer."

  "Okay. You know we’ll have to impound the truck?"

  "I figured. I’d like to see it, though."

  "Of course. We’ll be sending it to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul, for them to do the fingerprint and blood work and so on. You can see it up there. I’ll call you with the address of the storage facility as soon as I know it."

  "It’s a break, isn’t it?"

  "Absolutely. Great news."

  "All this blood"—his throat sounded dry— "I guess you have ways to prove, don’t you, if it's all Wayne’s blood?"

  "Yes." I didn’t want to talk anymore, but the man was plainly distressed, so I said, "We’ll know a lot more as soon as we run some tests on this vehicle, Mr. Dietz, and we’ll make certain you get all the facts as fast as we learn them." People find the promise of more information reassuring even when it’s rotten news they’re waiting for.

  But I realized, after I hung up, that I’d forgotten to tell him about the jacket and shirt that the State Patrol was bringing in.

  Which gave me an idea. I went back into the meeting room and said, "Rosie, when those bloody clothes get here, see if you can find a size tag in any of it, or any marks or stuff in the pockets, to tell us if it’s the victim’s or his partner’s."

  "Okay. You want me to check it in, too?"

  "Yes. Write it up and check it into the evidence room. I’m gonna check it right out again to take to St. Paul, but let’s not skip any steps. And then call John Dietz, will you, and tell him what we’ve got? Be gentle with him, he hates talking about blood."

  "You got it."

  "Fine. Everybody else but Bo, let’s go ahead with what we’ve got so far. I just got a call that a farmer thinks he’s got the victim’s truck, so Bo and I are gonna go out and have a look. Kevin, mind the store, will you? We’ll be back ASAP."

  They all watched out of the sides of their eyes as Bo and I walked out. Their faces were carefully noncommittal, but I could feel them wondering, Why is he getting a ride to Pine Island instead of a couple of days of processing gun permits? They know how I feel about promptness. Since he mostly does narcotics and vice cases, Bo has a lot of autonomy to start with. All the more reason for them to resent any sign he's working the system to his advantage. I took a department car, because I wanted Bo to drive and I can’t stand anybody driving my pickup but me. While he negotiated North Broadway and turned left on Thirty-seventh Street, I made phone calls. By some fluke, everybody answered that morning.

  I gave the chief a quick rundown on the case and told him where we were headed now, and he promised to get Lulu working on the impound papers and the tow truck.

  "Touch base with me later today if you can, huh?" he said. "I need a few new details every so often to feed the media."

  "What say we give them the truck this morning," I said, "and keep the shirt and jacket till after lunch?"

  "Good. I’ll do it. But keep in touch."

  I called BCA, got Jimmy Chang, and told him about the jacket and the truck.

  "I’ll add them to my growing list, Jake," he said. "We’re not promising curbside service this week."

  "I know that. Don’t be so hostile. Which storage yard do you want this vehicle sent to?" He gave me the information, and I asked him, "Any chance you’ve got my significant other chained to a desk there someplace?"

  "Hell no," he said. "My rule for van crews this week is that at no time are their butts to touch a chair in this building."

  "You building a lot of team loyalty that way?."

  "They’ve all begun to talk about fleeing across the ice to Canada."

  "Rats. I was hoping to keep that woman. Any idea where she is right now?"

  "About halfway to Montevideo. Some fool went postal in the feed store over there."

  "Is that gonna be another all-nighter?"

  "No. He mostly blew holes in grain sacks and feral cats, but there’s one death. It doesn’t sound complicated. I expect them back this afternoon."

  "You mean I might get a glimpse of her if I brought the jacket up there myself?"

  "Save your tires," he said. "Trudy convinced me they really do have to have some rest before they go out again, so I’m laying on an extra crew for twelve hours. Your lady can spend tonight in her own bed."

  "Why, Jimmy," I said, "you’re turning into an old softie."

  "No, actually I was facing a possible OSHA fine for too many consecutive hours of hazardous employment."

  Jay Billingsley answered the phone in his store, sounding harassed out of his mind, and said my pictures would be ready by midmorning. I called the station and asked Darrell to go get them by eleven.

  Then I put the phone back in my briefcase and asked Bo Dooley’s stone-hard profile, "Okay, tell me about it."

  "About what?"

  "Don’t shit me, Bo. You were late twice last week and again this morning, and last Thursday you snuck out at four o’clock. What the hell is going on?"

  He shifted in his seat, pulled in a deep breath, and let it out. Mumbled something.

  "What?"

  "Diane’s back on the stuff."

  "Oh." A truck passed us, and I watched our wipers scrape holes in the mess it threw on the windshield. "When she got out of detox last year, you said—"

  "Yeah. She seemed so sure of herself, like she’d really...seen the light or something. But then...it was hard for her that Nelly hardly remembered who she was. I said, .Look, it’s just gonna take a little time. But it made her ashamed, Nelly turning away, asking me for everything. They told me, at that hospital in St. Louis, the first time she was in treatment, that women have a harder time than men coming back. That time she said, If I could just get away from here, I wouldn’t have to see people I know. So I transferred up here. Now she says the trouble is she doesn’t have any friends here. Didn’t. Looks like she’s made a couple now." He choked a little, and I saw desperation in his face.

  "What happened?"

  "Well...I kind of knew a while ago, from little things...she got slipshod around the house. Had trouble sleeping. I smoothed things over, I guess, I didn’t want to know. Then Friday before last I got home and found Nelly in the house alone."

  "Jesus."

  "Yeah. I asked her, ‘Where’s Mommy?’ and she said, "Mommy went to the store.’ She had jam all over her face, and the bread was out of the drawer. I said, ‘You had a snack, huh?’ and she said, ‘Mommy had to go with the man, so I made lunch.’ I think she’d been there almost all day by herself."

  "You think? Haven’t you asked Diane?" He shook his head. "You mean she hasn’t been back?"

  "Oh, she came back, toward morning, but she wasn’t in any shape to talk. Stayed in bed all day, got up for supper, and disappeared again sometime that night. Since then she comes and goes on her own schedule and we don’t speak."

  "What are you doing about Nelly?"

  "I found three different baby-sitters. None of them can take her full-time. One she really doesn’t like and another one I don’t like, the one that made me leave work and come get her last Thursday. Something came up. Goddamn. I’m sorry I just ran out."

  "Say no more."

  "I shoulda told you sooner, but—I hated to narc on my own wife, you know?"

  "Sure. You gotta do something pretty soon, though, Bo."

  "I know. I’m scared shitless she’ll burn the house down. Or I’ll come home and find one of her new friends there and kill him with my bare hands."

  That was a possibility, I thought, watching the nerve jump in his jaw. Bo has manners a girl would not hesitate to take home to her mother, but there’s something in his face that would look right at home in a knife fight.

  The sign for the Goodhue County line flashed by, and then the Pine Island exit.

  "Slow down a little, can you? Lemme look at these directions again. Okay, within a mile or two here, we’re looking for a graveled road on the right, with four mailboxes together—" I read aloud the names to look for. When we found a wagon wheel fixed on a post carrying four boxes with the right names, Bo turned east.

  I’d been wishing I’d brought my truck since I noticed how much snow there was out here; the trees and even the fences were heaped with it. When the sun broke through the clouds, the glare on that vast expanse of white was blinding. But the road we turned onto was freshly plowed, and Bo got along all right.

  We poked along, reading mailboxes again, till we found one with "Norm Schellhammer" printed on the side. The driveway wasn’t plowed, but half a dozen vehicles had carved a track; Bo poured on speed and fishtailed into the yard, stopping midway between the house and barn. A beefy guy walked out of the barn. We got out and showed him our badges.

  "Norm Schellhammer," he said, shaking hands. "You wanna see the truck?"

  "Yes," I grabbed my camera out of the backseat. "Is it far?"

  "It’s right out back of the calf pasture," he said. "Easiest way is through the barn." We followed him into the yeasty gloom, past the black-and-white rumps of a dozen Holsteins, and stepped out into a reeking brown space where a tractor with a scraper blade was parked by a colossal pile of manure. Schellhammer led us to a gate on the far side and into a pasture, where a dozen small copies of the cows inside peered at us out of a small corral.

  "Couple of my calves got out, is why I found it," Schellhammer said. "Knuckleheads knocked the gate down. That’s why they’re all penned up, they can’t come out till I get the gate fixed."

  "So you had a big calf roundup this morning, huh?"

  "Well, fortunately I heard the commotion, and so did Charlie." The dog looked up at the sound of his name and nudged his owner’s knee. "We got ahead of all but three of ’em, chased ’em into the corral there, and then went looking for the rest. Right out here, I’ll show you—" he and Charlie led us out through the damaged gate and along the rough track that Schellhammer and his animals had just stomped into two feet of loose snow. "I was following their tracks around this little grove of trees here, looking down. We came around the corner and Charlie barked—" he pointed "—and there she was."

  Taller than a room, looking top-heavy and truncated with its trailer missing, the cab was nosed into the small trees on the south edge of the woodlot. Its door logos advertised Clearwater Truck Lines. The sunlight glinted off its chrome. I set my camera for minimum exposure to the glare and took a few pictures.

  "Right there’s where they came in," Schellhammer said. He pointed across his plowed field toward the highway. "See that track, under the snow? They pulled off down there on the dirt road that runs between my two wheat fields, and then just headed across the field to here."

  "Shee-ee," Bo breathed, in descending tones of awestruck tribute, staring up at the gleaming expanses of bright red paint and flawless chrome.

  "Tell me about it," Schellhammer said, "this here's one very sexy rig, ain't she? Or was, anyway, till somebody made that mess inside."

  "You looked inside?"

  "Yup. It’s not locked." He looked from one to another of our dismayed faces. "What?" he said, and then defensively, "I didn’t take anything!"

  "I understand," I said quickly. "I guess we’ll have to ask you to let us take your fingerprints, though. So we can eliminate them from the others we find in there."

  "Oh. Damn, I never thought of that. Well, sure," he said, looking chagrined, "you can do that. Sorry to put you to all that trouble."

  "That’s okay," I said. "If I found this baby in my yard I’d look in it, too." I fished two pairs of surgical gloves out of my coat pocket; Bo and I put them on. I climbed up on the high step and opened the door on the driver’s side. Bo broke trail around the front, opened the passenger door, and said, "Oh."

  "Careful," I said, "it’s mostly on that side." He closed the door and came back around to my side. I stepped into the space behind the seat. "Well, there's a mess in the bunk, too." I took one careful step sideways, and Bo slid in beside me. Sunlight flooded across the awesome array of gauges and gadgets on the dashboard, the nifty little laptop cantilevered above it, and the complex gearshift box on its high console between the seats. In the brightness we could see, with merciless clarity, the gory mess of blood and tissue and bone fragments that had turned John Dietz’s fancy new tractor into a slaughterhouse.

  The biggest splash of blood and tissue seemed to be concentrated around the front doorpost on the passenger’s side. The glass on both sides of it had been cleaned off, but blood had soaked the door padding and the seat, the floor in back, and the covers on the bunk. Blood had run down the door in streaks and pooled on the doormat, and the passenger’s seat was black with blood.

  "BCA will take pictures of all this," I said. "But as long as I brought the camera—" I reset the exposure, turned the flash on, and started.

  "Some above your head too," Bo said. I looked up. A double track of tiny blood spatters marched across the ceiling.

  "Now look at that," I twisted my neck half off to get the picture. "It looks like the blood spatters we found on the overpass. Two rows of little drops. Wait’ll I tell Pokey. He said there wasn’t any wound on the body that would make a spatter pattern like that. But this blood had to come from over there. Didn’t it?"

  "Hard to see how, though."

  "Let Jimmy Chang figure it out," I said, flashing away, "blood spatters are his specialty. I wonder how that tow truck’s doing?"

  "When you’re done taking pictures," Bo said, "can we look under the bunk?"

  "Uh...I don’t think we’d better mess around, Bo, till the lab guys have finished with it. Bad enough Norm got in here and looked around." Good lawyers win appeals by showing crime scenes have been compromised.

  "Okay. Then if you don’t need me, I’m gonna take a look outside." By the time I climbed down he was under the truck, on his back with only his feet showing.

  I knelt and peered under; he was feeling up the back of the jockey box under the step. "Need any help?"

  "Nah. Be out in a minute."

  I walked back to the car, dug out my phone, and called the station. Lulu said the tow should be along shortly and was bringing the impound papers. I got her to transfer me to Rosie’s phone and said, "Have you processed the clothes yet?"

  "I just got ’em, Jake, I’ll go to work on it right away."

  "Good. And remind Darrell to go get my pictures, will you? We should be back there in less than an hour, and I want to pick up the jacket and pictures and head right out for St. Paul."

  While we waited, I called John Dietz and gave him the address of the storage yard where his truck was going, but cautioned him not to touch it if he got there when the BCA crew wasn’t around. I gave him a number to call at BCA, to coordinate his visit with theirs. Then I hung up and stood in the yard, watching steam rise off a bare spot on the barn roof.

  Norm Schellhammer stuck his head out the barn door and asked, "When do you want me to come in, then?"

  "What?"

  "For fingerprints."

  "Oh...you don’t have to do that, Mr. Schellhammer—"

  "Norm," he said.

  "Okay. Norm, well, you certainly don’t have to come all the way in town. We can send a team out here at your convenience."

  "No, listen, I feel bad, putting my stupid hands where they didn’t belong, I shoulda thought. Besides," he said, brightening suddenly, "I’ve always wanted to see how that fingerprinting stuff works. Where do I go? That government center there in the middle of town?"

  Norm Schellhammer wanted to get a look at our bells and whistles, I realized. Probably he needed a midwinter break from chasing calves and watching snow melt off his barn. I gave him directions to the station and the number to call.

  When the tow truck arrived, I walked the driver out behind Schellhammer’s manure pile to show him the problem. He said, "Okay, yes, well...," wheeled his outfit back out to the highway, and came in across the field on the original track. Bo crawled out from under the high cab while the tow truck turned and backed up to it. He stood beating snow off himself while the driver hooked on, hoisted the rear wheels in the air, and followed his own track out to the road. We were all out of there in fifteen minutes.

  "Besides getting your pants wet," I said when we were headed back to town, "what were you doing under there?"

  "I didn’t think about it till I saw the truck," Bo said, "but these guys were on a regular run to Nogales, weren’t they?"

  "Yes." I waited through one of his impenetrable silences and finally said, "So?"

  "I haven’t seen it lately," Bo said, "but once in New Orleans and a couple of times in St. Louis I worked on big trucks like this that had been customized to haul drugs. Long-haul tractors assembled in a plant in Sonora, Mexico. They’d built special compartments under the bunk and behind the jockey box, and in those round fuel tanks that are lashed under the cab. They make ’em like a false bottom in a trunk, invisible from the outside, hard for an inspector to spot unless he takes the whole thing apart."

  "You’re suggesting this shooting might be drug-related?"

  "Think about it," Bo said. "A shot like that, at point-blank range. Two guys on a long haul to the Mexican border, and they’re new to each other. Maybe one of them got his arrangements disrupted. Or they started to make a deal, and it didn’t hold up."

 

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