Lake of Tears (4 page)

When Doug woke up, he found himself in his car with his head leaning forward on the steering wheel. Watch showed ten hundred hours. Aching. Cold. Stiff. But safe and in his own car in the United States of America. He had to remind himself of this blessed fact. No enemies. No crazy mofos jumping out of the bushes.

He wasn’t really sure where he was, but he knew he was not far from his grandma’s house in Winona. That was where he was aimed. Didn’t have any other place to go. His folks had thrown him out a couple weeks ago. After he lost his job, after he freaked out on them one too many times.

He pushed back the car seat, felt in his pocket for a cigarette. When he lit it, he let the match burn down until it was a moment away from his fingers. Just for practice. How close can you get without dropping it, without letting it get you. He’d spent hours in the OP doing that, staring at the flame before it burned him. Trying to not think about what was all around him. Not to think about the biggest monster he had ever known, a monster with a million legs, like a grubby old centipede, climbing over the mountains and coming after them. It spit fire, that monster, it chewed up rocks, nothing stopped it.

He needed to clean up a little before he went to his grandmother’s. Stop and get something to eat, although probably the first thing she’d want to do was feed him. He remembered she was a good cook. He hadn’t seen her in over four years, before he went overseas. He wondered how old she would look. He wondered what she would think of his new face.

He wouldn’t stay there long.

Just long enough to deal with Andrew.

“Could you get us a list of everyone who worked on this project?” Amy asked, looking at Ellen Becker-Richards, who was married to Stewart Richards and the codirector of the Burning Boat project.

Ellen was in her early forties, Amy would have guessed, but looked younger and dressed very young. She was wearing workout shorts and a ripped T-shirt over a long-sleeved shirt. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and tucked under a matching baseball cap—which read, not surprisingly, Got a Match? Amy was avoiding saying Ellen’s full name because she hated saying hyphenated names—they just bugged her. Why couldn’t they either keep their own name or take their guy’s—why make the whole world suffer from their indecision?

“I think I could put a list together. I’m not sure we have one. People kinda come and go.”

“Your husband mentioned that you had some help from students of his. Were most of the people from outside Pepin County, or did you also have people helping from around here?”

“I’d say it was about half and half. All told, we probably had about twenty to twenty-five people working on the boat.”

“Is anyone missing? Did any of the students not show up?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“If this body was put in the boat on Friday night, why would no one have seen it on Saturday?”

“I’m guessing because the boat was pretty much done. Any work we did to it on Saturday was really external—piling up brush, clearing around it. But we were working on the lanterns on the beach and the other art pieces in the park.”

Amy wrote down a note.

“I have a question for you.” Ellen folded her arms over her chest. “Why do you think that whoever did this has a connection with the project?”

“We don’t know, but it’s a place to start. How would anyone even think to do this if they didn’t know about the boat?”

“Yes, but everyone knew about the boat. The whole community has been watching us build this for the last few weeks. It’s no secret.”

“You’re right. But like I said—it’s a place to start. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a connection. Otherwise what would they be doing around it? Either to hide in the boat, or put someone there.”

Ellen unfolded her arms and dropped them down to her waist, then tilted her head back. “This is not exactly the kind of publicity we had envisioned coming of this project.”

“No, I don’t imagine.”

“But unfortunately, it fits with one of the uses of a longboat.”

Amy wasn’t sure why she had said that. “What do you mean?”

Ellen looked at her funny. “Aren’t you Scandinavian?”

Amy shook her head. “Matter of fact, I’m not. Scotch-Irish. Why?”

“Well, longboats were often used to bury the Viking leaders. They’d lay them out in the bottom of the boat, light it on fire, and push them out to sea.”

“Never knew that.”

“Someone knew what they were for. That’s probably what made them think to use it that way.” Ellen looked around at the tarps going up. “Boy, you’re really gearing up here.”

“Gotta protect the evidence.”

“You think you’ll figure out what happened?”

“We usually do.”

The rain swept in with some wind as evening fell, enough to cause the branches of the cottonwoods to waltz along the shoreline. Claire was sitting in the squad car parked right outside the crime scene barriers, waiting for the bone guy to show up, a forensic osteologist. An official member of BARFAA, of all things. What a name. Stood for Bioarcheology and Forensic Anthropology Association—either they had a great sense of humor, or hadn’t figured out what the acronym would spell out.

The bone expert was coming all the way from Madison, so he might not show up for another hour or so. Dr. Herman Pinkers. What a weird name, she thought. But then, what a weird profession, staring at bones all day long, trying to get them to tell you a story. Maybe not so different from what she did—examining shards of a leftover life, trying to figure out how and why it ended.

An old Volvo station wagon pulled up and a very tall, very thin man with silver-framed glasses perched on his nose got out. He was wearing khaki pants, a black turtleneck, and a vest with a million pockets. On his head was a broad-brimmed canvas hat.

She opened her car door and got out, saying, “Dr. Pinkers?”

“Hello. I’m here about the bones,” he said.

“I’m Deputy … ” she started to say, and then realized that wasn’t who she was any more. “I’m Sheriff Watkins.”

“Sheriff.” He held out his hand.

She shook it. “Doctor.”

“What’ve you got for me?”

“Follow me. We can get under the tarps, away from the rain.” As they walked over to the burn site, she explained what had happened.

“They built a boat and burned it?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s like the Burning Man thing. I guess kind of an ancient fall tradition. Like Guy Fawkes.”

“Or Halloween,” he suggested. “Fire to fight off the falling light.”

“Yes, exactly.” She brought him to the edge of the burn. “We’ve touched nothing. I wanted you to be able to see it as it was found, and also, I’d like you to be the one to extract the bone pieces. I just wasn’t sure that anyone else should do it.”

“You’ve photographed all this?” he asked.

“Yes, very thoroughly, early today, in good light.”

“I can’t work tonight, not in this rain,” he said.

“No, I thought you might not be able to. I’ve got someone on duty here all night. I don’t think it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.”

“I’ll start as soon as the sun is up.”

“That’s about seven-fifteen.”

“You are a farm girl,” he commented dryly.

“Have to be around here.”

“Let me just have a look.” Pinkers folded his body so that he was close to the ground, then he reached up to his hat and turned on a light fastened to the underside of the brim. It was like a mining light, and it shone wherever he was looking. Sounds came out of him as he hovered above the bones for a few minutes, talking to himself, humming, almost grunting.

Claire stepped back and let him work. She knew how much she hated someone looking over her shoulder. She was tired and hungry and worried. The sheriff was going in for surgery bright and early tomorrow morning. She almost felt like praying for him, if she believed in that sort of thing. The rain shrouded the lake, the sky, as if pulling curtains from the bluffs.

Dr. Pinkers came and stood next to her, looking out over the lake. “Well, I’m guessing it was a woman. A young woman, but past puberty.”

“How can you tell?”

“As I said, it’s a guess, but the size of the pubic bone in the pelvis. A small woman who wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.”

Not exactly the way Andrew had hoped to spend his Sunday night, sitting alone in the dark in a squad car, guarding the bones of a burned body. He could see the two of them—the doctor and Watkins—standing out in the rain, facing the lake. While he was used to taking orders, he wasn’t used to not being in on the decision-making process. One more adjustment he had to make to civilian life.

When he had joined the Marines, he had been working in law enforcement for only a year, so coming back he had nil seniority. He would never catch up with everyone who had started in the sheriff’s department at the same time as he had. After all, he had been gone for over four years, off and on. His last deployment to Afghanistan had been for nine months, a long tour of duty.

Now the two of them were walking back to their cars. After saying something to the tall man, Watkins headed toward his squad car. Andrew rolled down the window. She leaned in.

“You going to be okay to stay the night?” she asked.

What a question. Did he really have a choice? So like a woman to ask that. “Yeah, fine.”

“You’ve had dinner?”

“I grabbed a burger before I came.”

“There’re johns over there.” She waved toward the back of the park.

“I know.”

“Someone will relieve you around eight in the morning.”

“Do you really expect anyone to come around here tonight?”

“Not really. This is just a precaution, to establish chain of evidence. More to keep the scene safe from curiosity seekers. With this rain, I don’t guess we’d get many of them. Also, look after those tarps. If you see any problems, make sure they’re tied down. I’m going to take the doctor to get a room in Pepin.”

“So he’s the bone expert.”

“Yeah. Seems to know what he’s doing. Got enough coffee?”

“To swamp a horse.”

She thumped the top of his car and turned to leave.

“Hey, congrats on being our new sheriff.”

She turned back. “Thanks. Not exactly the way I wanted to get that title. We’ll see what happens with Sheriff Talbert. I’m hoping this assignment is just temporary.”

As Claire Watkins walked away, Andrew hoped it wasn’t. He thought Sheriff Talbert was at the end of his run. Everything Andrew had seen about Claire told him that she could more than do the job. She was clear and quiet under pressure. She knew what she wanted and asked for it. Not that she didn’t have emotions—sometimes they played out on her face, but not in her voice, not in her manners, not in her orders.

She would have made a good army officer.

He shut his eyes for a moment. Everything in his life was still overlaid with the war, with the fighting in Afghanistan. As if he was seeing through a film. This rain reminded him of the storms that would brew over the mountains, then come crashing down on top of them in the night, like the worst artillery barrage.

Back four months, and he was still living over there.

The life he had left was not what he had come back to—no apartment waiting for him, girlfriend gone to another.

With darkness closing in around him, the wind blowing the cottonwoods overhead, Andrew felt like he was sitting in a tank again, waiting for the enemy to show. That was always the hardest time, right before the fighting started, waiting for the world to explode in ways you couldn’t even imagine.

He held out his hand and it was shaking. It was going to be a long night. He leaned his head back against the seat and took the long deep breaths the therapist had taught him. All the way from the belly, all through the body. Calm down.

Having bad nerves was no fun, but what was worst was that he wasn’t the same. He had lost something he didn’t even know how to describe. The film he was looking through made everything seem dull and lifeless. Nothing much excited him. He had to force himself to do things with old friends, even to get up in the morning. He felt like he had run a very long race and he just couldn’t get his wind back. But even that didn’t quite describe what he was going through.