by P. J. Tracy
Today she and Annie were driving to Green Bay to set up for a case that they wouldn't have given a second glance if Sharon Mueller hadn't asked them to take it on. Once Sheriff Halloran's deputy in Wisconsin, now on temporary loan to the Minneapolis FBI office as a profiler, Sharon was convinced a serial killer was just beginning a spree in the Green Bay area, even if her superior at the FBI wasn't. Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer refused to authorize bureau time and resources on what seemed to be three very dissimilar murders, so technically Sharon was off the clock on this weekend jaunt. The Green Bay police didn't see a connection either, but they had three unsolveds on the books and were more than happy to take any help Monkeewrench was offering free of charge. After reviewing the file, the Monkeewrench crew wasn't so sure they had a serial, either, but Sharon had nearly died saving Grace's life last year, and if she'd asked them to go to the moon, they would have found a way.
Harley sank down into the broad, padded leather chair at his workstation and propped his jackbooted feet up on the desk. "So what do you think? Is Sharon going to stay in Wisconsin?"
Annie was delicately picking through a drawer in her desk, trying to capture a favorite tube of lip gloss without chipping her manicure. "Who knows? She's got the cushy FBI job here if she wants it, but then again, Mr. Dreamboat is waiting for her in the sticks."
Harley blew a raspberry. "Mr. Dreamboat is a dumbshit, or he would have dragged her back to Wisconsin a long time ago."
"I thought you liked Sheriff Halloran."
"I do like him. He's a hell of a sheriff and a hell of a nice guy, but that doesn't make him any less of a dumbshit. If I had some red-hot pixie like Sharon all googly-eyed over me, I sure as hell wouldn't be cooling my heels in the hinterlands, waiting for her to come knocking. Even the Italian Stallion knows better than that, doesn't he, Grade?"
Grace gave him one of those long, steady looks that frightened children and strangers, but it didn't work on Harley at all.
"Leo Magozzi's just not the kind of guy who lies in the weeds with his fingers crossed," he went on. "I'll bet he's been on your doorstep every night since we got back from the Southwest, hasn't he? Hallo-ran could take a lesson from that guy."
Annie drummed her rainbow nails on her desk, instantly capturing his attention. "For a man with no discernible love life, you're pretty free and easy with the sage advice."
"What do you mean? I have several discernible love lives."
"I'm talking about relationships where you actually know the other person's name. Come on, Grace. I told Sharon we'd pick her up by ten."
The computer Grace was working on chimed, and she pulled the finished disk from its drive. "Okay, that's the last one."
She patted Harley on the head as she passed his desk on the way to Roadrunner's bank of computers. He turned off the monitor before she got close enough to decipher the scrolling lines of code.
"Something you don't want me to see?" she asked, a little amused.
Roadrunner lifted one angular shoulder. "It's a surprise Harley and I are working on."
"Really?"
"Aw, shit." Harley came storming over. "You didn't let her see it, did you?"
"No, I didn't let her see it. . . ."
"See what?"
Harley folded his arms over his chest and grinned at her. "Never you mind. Besides, if we told you, you'd be an accessory, and this has got to be the most illegal thing we've ever done."
"I like the sound of that."
"I went on the criminal justice board. Fifty, sixty years if we get caught."
"And I like the sound of that," Annie drawled from the doorway.
"You're going to call when you get there, right?" Roadrunner asked Grace.
"Of course we will."
"Because your cell phones probably won't work, you know. I checked it out. There are hardly any towers in northern Wisconsin."
"Excuse me?" Annie sounded like a kid who'd just learned that Santa Claus wasn't real.
Roadrunner sighed. "No cell towers, no cell coverage. Northern Wisconsin is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to telecommunication. You might not be able to call out until you get close to Green Bay."
Annie looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "That is absolutely impossible. I called Paris from the top of the ski lift on Aspen Mountain last winter, and Aspen iswilderness."
"Yeah, right," Harley scoffed. "That's why every friggin' couture house in the world has a shop there. Let me tell you, you haven't begun to see wilderness until you've been to northern Wisconsin."
"Like you would know."
"Well, as it happens, I do know. Drove an Ojibwa friend up to the Bad River Rez once. Saw nothing but black bear for about three hours straight, and not one of them was carrying a cell phone."
"See?" Roadrunner said to Grace, his forehead wrinkled with worry. "You're going to be totally out of touch for a really long time."
Grace smiled at him. Roadrunner somehow managed to be both the child and the fretting mother of the Monkeewrench crew. His outlook had always been dark, his general philosophy one of blanket pessimism. "It's only a six-hour drive, Roadrunner."
"Yeah, well, a lot can happen in six hours. The car could blow up. You could hit a moose or have a blowout, and then veer off the road into a tree and lie there unconscious with all your arms and legs broken. . . ."
Harley smacked him on the back of the head.
Ten minutes later, Harley, Roadrunner, and Charlie stood at the end of the driveway like three abandoned puppies, watching Grace and Annie pull away in Grace's Range Rover.
"We should have gone with them," Roadrunner said.
Charlie whined his agreement.
"No room in that puny little SUV for two big, strapping men like ourselves and three women with all their makeup. Annie took a frig-gin' trunk, can you believe that? For a weekend in Green Bay, where nobody ever wears anything except Packers sweatshirts."
"We could have taken the RV. . .."
"Damnit, Roadrunner, how many times do I have to tell you not to call it that' It's a luxury motor coach."
"Whatever. We could have taken it. There's plenty of room for all of us."
Harley stared at the clump birch in the yard across the street. He rocked back and forth on his run-down heels. "I hate goddamned Wisconsin."
"The Harley-Davidson plant is in Wisconsin."
Harley's big head moved up and down a little. "Yeah. There is that."
A LOT OF PEOPLE assumed that Chicago was the windiest city in the country, just because of the "Windy City" moniker someone had slapped on the place more than a century ago. The truth was that Chicago wasn't anywhere near the top on any known list, and Minneapolis was windier by a whopping tenth of a mile per hour. Perched on the northern edge of the Great Plains, it was an easy target for the prairie winds that swept across the Midwest during the summer, which made the warm months tolerable for a population that wore parkas six or seven months out of the year. But every August, the prairies seemed to run out of breath, the wind stopped, and the heat settled over the city like shrink-wrap.
Grace had never minded the heat-or the cold, for that matter. Even after eleven years in the state, she was still baffled by the local fixation on the weather. But Annie had succumbed to the obsession almost immediately. Like almost every other resident, she watched every weathercast on every channel every chance she got, and spewed statistics like a meteorologist on uppers. They'd been in the car exactly two minutes when she started tapping the digital temperature readout on the dash.
"Lord, would you look at that. Eighty-eight degrees and it's not even ten in the morning. Another hour and we'll be fish poachin' in a kettle."
"We'll turn up the air-conditioning."
"Hah. As if air-conditioning could put a dent in the dew point we're expecting today. Did you hear how high it's going to be?"
"I don't even know what the dew point is."
"Honey, no one really knows what the dew point is, but it's going to be
bad. Tropical. And Fat Annie is going to suffer. Is that Sharon?"
Haifa block ahead, Sharon was standing at the curb outside her apartment building, wearing her little navy FBI pants suit and her dreadful black lace-ups. She wore her brown hair in a short pixie cut, and would have been button-cute if it hadn't been for the mean-little-dog expression on her face. She had a big leather handbag over one shoulder and a canvas duffel at her feet. "Look at that bitty thing. Was she that short last week?"
"Shorter. She was sitting down."
The three of them had arranged to meet at a bar and grill on the fringes of downtown to take a look at the documentation Sharon had gathered on the case. She had already commandeered a large booth in the back by the time Grace and Annie had arrived, and was frightening the regulars with a spread of autopsy photos she'd laid on the table. "Are those all from the Green Bay case?" Grace had asked, and Sharon had swept the photos aside immediately. "Lord, no. I just take these along whenever I'm going out alone. No one hits on a woman looking at dead people."
Grace smiled at the memory, as she had smiled then. Most women would have worn a ring on their left hand to avoid unwanted male attention; Sharon brought pictures of corpses, and Grace liked that about her.
Annie rolled down her window when they pulled up to the curb. "Sharon Mueller, what on earth are you doing standing out there in this heat, especially in that sorry synthetic getup?"
Sharon stepped up to the window and breathed mint into the car. "I am a representative of the Federal government, and this is my Federal government outfit. In the back?" She hefted her duffel.
Grace nodded and got out to open the back gate for her. As Sharon tossed her duffel in, she eyed Annie's trunk suspiciously. "Somebody planning to stay awhile?"
"Only the weekend, honey," Annie answered as she climbed out of the passenger seat and held the door open for Sharon. "I bring at least two trunks for anything longer than that. Now, you come on up here and sit in the front. I'll be needing the backseat to accommodate this dress. If it gets wrinkled, the appliqués poke out this way and that, and I end up looking like I've been run through a paper shredder."
"It's a pretty amazing dress," Sharon said, giving her the once-over.
"I knew there was hope for you, darlin'."
After a minute on the road, Sharon said, "This feels weird."
"What, the car?"
"Nah. Going on a road trip with a couple of women."
"You've been on road trips with men?" Annie asked from the backseat, immediately intrigued.
"A couple. I wouldn't recommend it, though. Guys have this thing about getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. No side trips.
They never want to stop and look at anything. And they never have to go to the bathroom either."
"Yeah, yeah, I know all that, but who'd you go on a road trip with? Sheriff Halloran?"
"God, no. Elias McFarressey. He played the accordion, among other things."
Annie's jaw dropped. "You dated a man who played the accordion?"
"It was Wisconsin. You kind of had to be there."
"I'm seeing Lawrence Welk."
"It wasn't quite that bad. Grace, do you know where you're going?"
"I figured I'd head east until you tell me to make a turn."
"That'll work. I'm better than any GPS, at least in Wisconsin."
"Good thing, because I don't have one."
"I thought all these fancy rides had GPS."
"Grace wouldn't hear of it," Anne said. "Too Big Brother. They always know where you are with a GPS."
Sharon cocked her head at Grace. "And who is 'they'?"
Grace shrugged. "Could be anybody."
DOWN THE LONG DRIVE that led to the Wittig farm, behind the barn and out of sight of the road, three figures in bulky white suits stood motionless in the tall grass bordering a paddock fence, looking as alien in this landscape as the barn would have looked on the moon.
Through the thick transparent shields in their helmets, three pairs of busy eyes watched the slow progress of a big green tractor with a blade doing work it was never designed for. Flattening the grass with heavy, dirt-caked treads, the machine lumbered inexorably toward a lip of land behind the paddock that sloped down to a small lake. Behind the tractor, at the end of a long chain with links as fat as a man's fist, the dairy tanker followed as obediently as a dog on a leash.
Behind his shield, Chuck Novak's lips compressed and he tasted salt. Rivulets of sweat were coursing down his reddened face-sweatborn as much of fear as of the unrelenting heat that turned the heavy suit into a portable sauna. His companions were sweating, too, but their expressions revealed none of the nervousness that was churning in Chuck's stomach like acid in a Mixmaster. Maybe they weren't afraid. Maybe they'd understood the hurried lecture about vacuums and pressure and molecular weights that was so far beyond Chuck's high-school education it might as well have been delivered in Chinese-maybe they were a hell of a lot more certain than he was that all the gas had long since escaped from the milk truck's stainless-steel tank, just like the Colonel had said.
But if that was true-if there was no danger whatsoever that any of the lethal gas lingered-why the hell did they have to wear these suits? Why had all the others been pulled back out of range until they were finished with the truck?
Because somebody wasn't a hundred percent sure,Chuck thought.
He blinked sweat out of his eyes and watched the tractor grind to a halt at the edge of the slope, then ease back to put slack on the chain. For a long moment, none of the three white-suited men moved, then one of them waddled toward the back of the tractor to release the chain. The second man headed toward the front of the truck, and after taking a deep, shaky breath of canned air, Chuck brought up the rear.
The thick, bulky gloves attached to the arms of their suits foiled dexterity, and it seemed to take them a long time to release the chain from the oily undercarriage of the truck. By the time it was accomplished, the tractor had already positioned itself to the rear, its massive blade raised slightly and ready to push. In a stiff-legged hobble, the three men moved as quickly as possible to one side, near the edge of the slope, so they could watch the truck go over.
Someone should at least say some words, Chuck thought, looking first down the hill that slid into the lake, then back up at sunlight glinting off the truck's windshield. After all, there was a man in that truck, and this was his burial. He had a mental flash of Alvin slumped across the seat, the cab around him splattered with things he didn't want to think about, and the bitter taste of nausea crawled up his throat. He stiffened immediately. Even worse than the memory of what had been left of Alvin was the prospect of throwing up in a contained suit.
Bless him, Father, for he has sinned,he thought, paraphrasing the beginning of every confession, but by then the tractor's blade had cupped the truck's rear bumper and the big engine was growling.
There had been some concern about the truck tipping as it rolled down the slope toward the lake, but the distance was short, the angle of descent was steady and relatively shallow, and the truck went in almost gracefully, like some gallant old ship consigned to a watery grave. Momentum pushed it through a bank of cattails to a sharp dropoff, and then its great weight pulled it promptly down to a muddy bottom.
Thirty feet deep, their diver had said-cold, spring-fed, and apparently stocked with walleye. Chuck smiled a little at that, remembering that Alvin had been a fisherman. He thought of the water filling the cab, buoying the dead man up to gaze sightlessly out the windshield at all those fish.
He stood at the edge of the hill for what seemed like a long time, staring down at where the dark water had closed over the shiny steel tank, and then he heard the impatient revving of the tractor behind him.
Turning, he saw the massive blade almost hidden behind a messy pile of black and white and red. As the tractor inched forward, its treads biting into the soft manure-rich soil in the paddock, the pile shifted and started to tumble si
ckeningly.
Shit, Chuck thought. Now came the hard part. Dead cows wouldn't roll down that hill to the lake with the same ease and dignity as the truck.
He shuddered and turned away, imagining a logjam of Holsteins at the bottom of the hill, bobbing around in the shallow water at the lake's edge. There was going to be some handwork involved here, and he wasn't looking forward to it.
THREE AND A HALF hours into the trip to Green Bay, Grace heard a telltale click and glanced right, where Sharon was slouched in the passenger seat, her hands at war with her shoulder harness. This was the universal background music of women traveling by car, Grace mused-the click and rattle of seat belts being constantly adjusted to pass between the breasts instead of smashing one of them flat.
"Damn seat belts," Sharon muttered. "If one of these things ever dared press against a man's balls, you can bet your life the designer would end up hanging by his."
Annie chuckled from the backseat, unbuckling her own seat belt quietly-very quietly, so Grace wouldn't hear.
"Honey, you think you've got it bad? You should be toting my cargo. I swear I added a bra size at that diner, and I still haven't figured out what the hell I ate. Everything was white. Hey, Gracie, just how lost are we? I haven't seen a house or a car in about a million miles."
Grace had never understood the concept of being lost. It was one of those things you had to learn in childhood, a sense of time and place that only had meaning if you belonged somewhere, if you were expected. No one had ever expected Grace to be anywhere, and therefore she had never been late, never been missing, never been lost.
Once when she was very young, she'd ended up in a night-darkened alley in some city or other-cities were basically the same, and differentiating them by name was not a priority in her memory - and there she had watched with unabashed amazement as an ageless, ragged-looking creature poked a needle into her arm. Oblivious to her audience of one, the woman performed her self-destructive magic act on the stage of Grace's curious child-stare, eventually raising foggy eyes and saying, "Hey, kid. What the fuck are you doing here? You lost, or what?"