Lake of Tears (15 page)

“I know we have one somewhere. That’s a good thought.”

“You know,” the doctor drew the phrase out, “whoever did this might have taken off the ring before putting her there.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that too.”

“Nasty business.”

“No doubt. But I’m going to try to find it.”

“There’s a lot of metal in those old pallets, so you’re going to find nails and staples galore.”

As Claire drove down to Fort St. Antoine with the metal detector in the back seat, she felt like she was on a hopeless mission. She also knew she should have sent someone else to do this search, but she had to get out of the office. She wasn’t used to being under fluorescent lights all day long.

The day was warm for early October, and she rolled a window down to feel the air. If they didn’t make a significant step forward on this case today, she was calling in the crime lab from Madison for help. She had been resisting because somehow she felt like the big guns would just trample what little evidence there was and not understand how people in this small county passed on information.

Just like the way she had been fifteen years ago, coming down from Minneapolis and thinking she knew it all. Rich had gently showed her she didn’t. Her fellow deputies had not been quite so gentle. It had been painful, but it worked, and she had adjusted her skills to the ways of the country.

When she drove into the park, she saw two trailers were still parked near the beach. Odd for trailers to be in the park so late in the year, but the weather was holding. The one closest to the burn site she guessed was Mr. Swenson, and she needed to find out who the other one was, although Amy had probably already talked to them.

As she got out of the car, the wind picked up. The branches of the enormous cottonwoods creaked above her head and the wind whipped up whitecaps on the lake. But the air felt good to her, blowing some fatigue away.

Claire walked over and stood next to the charred remnants of the boat. She could vaguely make out the outlines of the body that had been lifted from the ashes. Yes, Dr. Pinkers had been very careful in removing the bones. He had disturbed little else. It made sense that something metal, being heavier than bone, might drop down farther into the remains of the fire.

She put on the metal detector headphones, turned on the machine, held out the search coil and swung it over the site. The detector crackled to life. She wondered if it really was going to be of much use. She was getting a lot of squeal. As Dr. Pinkers had predicted, the burn site was littered with metal, according to how much noise she was hearing from the machine.

Claire decided she’d have to notch it down to disregard objects that have a phase shift comparable to a pop-can tab or a small nail. Once she made this adjustment, she swung it slowly over the site again, getting much less squeal out of it.

In the middle of the site, she heard the pitch of the detector climb to a new height, almost like a fire siren. She swung the search coil over the area again and it squealed even louder. Time to take a look.

Claire turned off the detector, set it to the side, and knelt down by the burned boat. She pulled on latex gloves that went up to her elbows. She had also thought to bring a sifter with her. Digging in to the ash, she put it through the sifter, finding nails and bottle caps.

Going a little deeper, she felt something that had the shape of a tin can top, but seemed heavier. She grabbed it and pulled it out of the ash. Wiping it off, she saw that it was in the shape of a large coin.

Any trace of fingerprints that might have been on the object would have burned off in the fire, so she felt comfortable walking down to the water and dipping the metal piece into the lake. When it was washed off, she could make out some writing on it—for bravery in duty. A military medal. It looked recent.

She did not like this one bit. Why was everything pointing at Andrew?

Andrew drove Amy out to his family’s farm, which was about fifteen miles out of Durand. Amy felt uncomfortable sitting next to him—as if he was driving her to his own funeral or something. If they knew each other better, maybe they could joke about it, but she still felt like she didn’t know Andrew that well. They hadn’t worked together long and they weren’t often partnered.

They were silent for most of the drive, but then she decided she better say something. “You know we have to do this. Just to check it off the list. Claire’s real careful about stuff.”

“I have no trouble with this search at all. I’ve got nothing to hide. So let’s get it over with. I just want to do my job, and the sooner this is behind me the better. Tammy Lee’s caused me enough trouble.”

“I didn’t know Tammy Lee hardly at all.”

“Yeah, she was all right. For high school. But once I got out into the world, she didn’t really want to know anything about what I was doing. She’d talk about friends from school, as if I cared. It was just such a disconnect from where I was—in a frigging war zone.”

“I bet.” Amy had always been curious about what he had done in Afghanistan. “How long were you over there?”

“Nearly four years.”

“What was it like?”

He was quiet for a few moments. “Like it wasn’t even on the same planet as here. I felt like we were on Mars or something. Astronauts in this weird land. The aliens not only didn’t speak our language, but hated us, wouldn’t look at us. Except for going out on forays we were pretty much confined to our little fortress. Life there was this odd mixture of boredom and fear.”

They turned down the long driveway to the farm. Amy could see an old John Deere tractor parked next to the garage.

“That old tractor run?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. Dad doesn’t use it much any more, but he won’t give up on it. It’s a real workhorse.”

They parked close to the house, and Andrew pointed to a Jeep. “It’s open. Here’s the keys.”

Amy took them.

“I’m going in. Come in and have a cup of coffee when you’re done.” He turned to walk toward the house, then turned back. “Are you going to check for fingerprints?” he asked.

“Should I?” Amy hadn’t planned on that unless she found something incriminating.

“Well, Tammy Lee was in my car once.”

“Oh?” Amy waited.

“Yeah, I gave her a lift home from the bar a while ago. No big deal.”

“You tell Claire?”

“I didn’t think it was that important. Nothing happened. I mean, I just drove her home. You’re not going to find anything else, but I thought you should know.”

“Yeah, I’ll come and get you when I’m done.” His admission left Amy feeling even more uneasy than she had driving out. She felt like he wasn’t telling them everything, and yet at the same time she couldn’t believe he would kill Tammy Lee. When he talked about her, there just wasn’t that much emotion in his voice. Hard to kill someone when you didn’t care about them, one way or another.

Amy put on gloves and then opened the passenger side door. If Tammy Lee had been in the car, she might have left something around the seat. The vehicle was remarkably clean. A few gas receipts in the cup holder, car manual and a flashlight in the glove compartment, an orange peel under the passenger seat.

She went around and checked both the driver’s side and the back seat. Again, not much. A windshield scraper for winter, a tire wrench tucked under the back seat, an empty bag of Fritos, a blanket folded on the back seat.

Amy carefully picked up the blanket. It was a Biederlack blanket, made out of some kind of polar fleece material. She unfolded the blanket, but nothing fell out. It smelled clean. Not a bad idea to keep something like that in a vehicle, especially in winter. She could see that Andrew liked to be prepared. If he hadn’t been a Boy Scout, she’d be surprised.

As she was putting the blanket back on the seat, something caught her eye. A flash of silver by the front seat belt. She leaned forward and looked more closely. It looked like a pop can pull tab was stuck in the seat belt holder. She was able to wiggle her finger down into the holder and pull it out.

The object that she dropped into her hand was not a tab, but a ring with what looked like a tiny diamond. The ring size was so small that Amy didn’t think it would even fit on her pinky finger. As she recalled, Tammy Lee was quite petite.

She put it in a plastic bag and walked slowly up to the farmhouse. When she stepped inside, Andrew and his mother were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. They both looked up and smiled at her. Then the smiles died.

“I found this,” Amy said. She held out the bag so that Andrew could see it clearly. “It’s a ring.”

His mother drew in her breath. “Andrew,” she said.

Andrew looked at the bag and then raised his eyes to Amy’s. “I don’t know anything about that ring. I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

Claire took the two of them back in the sheriff’s office and closed the door. Since there were only three chairs in the room, Claire put herself behind the desk and Andrew and Amy sat in the folding chairs facing her.

“Okay, what do you know about this ring?” Claire asked.

Andrew shook his head, his head lowered between his shoulders. “Not a blasted thing.”

“But now you say that Tammy Lee was in your car?” Amy had told her that as she had handed her the bag with the ring.

“Yes, I would have said it before but I didn’t think it was that important. It happened on Wednesday. You asked me about Friday. I had stopped in for a quick brew on my way home, she was at the bar, and I offered her a lift home. We’re not on bad terms or anything. Hell, she’s engaged. Or she was.”

“Which is where this ring comes in. Her mother will be here shortly to identify it. So how did it get in your car? Could it be anyone else’s?”

“I doubt it. I suppose it could be. I don’t know anything about it.”

“When you gave Tammy Lee a ride home was she wearing a ring?” Claire asked, feeling exasperated with him. He was a cop. He should notice things.

“I didn’t notice, but I’d guess she was since she was engaged.”

Calm down, she told herself, just ask him the questions you would ask any suspect. “What did the two of you talk about on that ride?”

Andrew started to say something, then stalled out. He looked up above Claire’s head, out the window. The silence stretched on. Then he lowered his head and said, “She wanted to get back together with me again.”

Claire leaned over the desk. “What do you mean?”

“She never wanted to break up. It was my idea. She said she didn’t want to marry Terry and she wanted to get back with me.”

“Did you want that?”

Andrew’s eyes widened and then he snorted. “No way. Absolutely not. I was done with her years ago.”

“How so?”

“Tammy Lee was fun for a while, but she wasn’t someone I wanted to grow old with, much less grow up with. I felt that even more strongly when I came back home. We had nothing in common. She didn’t want to know about Afghanistan. I don’t even think she could find it on a map.”

“But she broke up with you,” Amy jumped in. “At least that’s what her sister told me.”

“Maybe that’s what Tammy Lee told her, but that’s not the way it went down. I e-mailed her and told her she should see other guys. I said that we should call it quits while I was gone.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound like breaking up,” Claire pointed out.

“I wanted to let her down easy.”

Then Claire slapped something down on the desk and asked, “So do you recognize this?” When she lifted her hand away, the military medal became visible, the side with the words Afghanistan Campaign and a map of Afghanistan on it.

Andrew stared at it. “Looks like a medal.”

“Is it yours?”

He stood up and looked down at it. “Hard to say. Everyone who was in Afghanistan for longer than three months got one of those.”

“Do you still have yours?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I gave it to Tammy Lee.”

“Why and when?”

“I sent it to her. I thought she would like it. It was before we broke up. Nothing special. But she liked to have things.”

“Well, it appears she had it with her when she was burned. I found it in the ashes right where her body had been.”

“Oh, geez. I had no idea she still had it.” He sat down and put his head in his hands.