"You're better at talking to old ladies than I am," Lucas said. "I thought as long as we were down there…"
"Yeah, sure."
When they finished the coffee, Lucas stood at the kitchen sink and rinsed the cups and said, "You don't look so good."
"Ah, I took about four orange Nyquils. I oughta be okay," Sloan said. He didn't look okay: his eyes were rimmed in red, and he occasionally gurgled. He'd brought a box of Kleenex with him.
"Your call," Lucas said.
"HOW ABOUT 'BEAST OF BURDEN'?" Sloan asked, on the way out of town.
"That's one too many Stone's songs," Lucas said. "Besides, what's-her-name covered it, and I never liked the cover."
"How about Def Leppard, 'Rock of Ages'?
"On the possible list, but down a way."
"You know what you oughta do? You oughta make a worst song list from the rock era. That's something nobody's seen before."
Lucas considered the possibilities for a second, then said, "Wouldn't work. You'd play 'American Pie' followed by 'Vincent,' and then any normal human being would throw the iPod out the window."
THEY TOOK THE TRUCK, because the Porsche's paint job didn't like gravel, heading south again, down the four-lane to Mankato, through town, out to the Rice farm. They'd just gone through town when Weather called from London.
"You sound like you're up," she said.
"I just went through Mankato. I've been up since dawn."
"Something broke!"
Lucas told her about it, and about Sloan figuring out a murder, and the press conference. She told him about revising the burns on the face of a little girl who was messing around with the white gas in her brother's camp-stove set.
"At least we're both staying busy," Lucas said.
"What about the music list?"
"We were just talking about it. I've got about a million songs," he said.
"You know, for a few more bucks…"
"That's not the point. The point is the discipline. The best one hundred songs…"
"Have you considered 'Waltz Two' from the Jazz Suite by Shostakovich?" she asked.
He wasn't sure whether she was joking; sometimes it was hard to tell. "Uh, no."
"Well, I know you liked the music."
Lucas smiled into the phone. "Weather, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. I never heard of the thing."
"You know, it was the theme music in Eyes Wide Shut, when what's-her-face took her clothes off."
He remembered. Clearly. "Ah… that was a nice piece."
"I thought you'd remember…"
She said she missed him; he said that he missed her; Letty, their ward; and Sam, the kid; and even the housekeeper.
"Three more weeks," she said. "This is great, but I gotta get back."
WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the farm, they found two cop cars in the driveway, one of them just leaving. Lucas pulled onto the lawn and got out of the truck. Nordwall got out of the passenger side of the cop car that had been rolling down toward them.
"What happened?" Lucas asked, as they crunched toward each other on the gravel drive.
"Took about twenty minutes to find it," the sheriff said, hitching up his uniform pants, looking back over his shoulder at the bean field. "You see the tape over there? Right in there… Right where Pope said it would be. And exactly what he said it would be-an aluminum baseball bat."
"You already pick it up?"
"Yeah. We had our crime-scene guy photograph it, and he's driving it up to your lab right now. He said there's some hair stuck to the end of it, gotta be the kid's, but we, want to nail it down. We don't want some smart-ass saying it was a practical joke."
"It never felt like a joke," Lucas said. They both looked out at the field with the tape strung over the bean plants, the cops tromping up and down the rows. Then, "You coming over to Rochester?"
"Yeah- but that's not for a couple hours. I gotta stop back at the house. I haven't had breakfast yet." A man who didn't miss many meals.
"You see the paper?"
"Yes. Pope scares the shit out of me," Nordwall said "I told my guys to shoot first, ask questions later."
"See you in Rochester."
THEY CUT CROSS-COUNTRY; the trip took an hour. They rolled down a long hill, the towers of the Mayo Clinic in the distance. Sloan sniffed and said, "Look at the fuckin' golf courses; just like a town full of doctors."
"Bigot."
"Ruin a perfectly good cornfield," he said. "What do you want to do? We got some time."
"Let's look at that pay phone. Maybe we can shake something loose."
"Like what?"
"Security camera?"
"Yeah, right," Sloan said. "Fuckin' waste of time."
"Hey, something could happen."
"And Snow White might come over to my house and sit on my face," Sloan said. His voice was nasal, stuffed.
"Okay. So let's sit around with some cops and drink coffee and talk about pensions."
Sloan sighed, pulled out a sheet of Kleenex, and blew into it. Lucas winced. "Okay," Sloan said. "We look at the phone. And don't look like you're trying to crawl out the side window."
ROCHESTER WAS DOMINATED economically and socially by the Mayo Clinic; but there was still a piece of the old downtown stuck to the south side of the hospital district-exfoliating brick and patched concrete block, halfhearted attempts at rehab, streets emptier than they should be in a town jammed with cars; streets from an Edward Hopper painting.
The phone was on a wall of an out-of-business gas station, the only outside phone they'd seen in the city. "Must've known where the phone was," Lucas said. He pulled into the parking area and killed the engine.
"Probably a doc at the Mayo," Sloan said. "Most docs are a little whacko." The words were just out of his mouth when he remembered that he was talking to the husband of a surgeon. "I hope you took offense at that."
"I didn't," Lucas said. "I tend to agree."
They got out of the truck and looked up and down the street. "Two slim possibilities," Sloan said. "The grocery store or the bookstore. Take your choice."
"I'll take the bookstore," Lucas said.
"Maybe they got some poetry," Sloan said. He looked across the street toward the grocery. "Park's Grocery. With any luck, Park is a Korean. They tend to stay open late."
SLOAN WALKED ACROSS the traffic-free street; Lucas headed down the sidewalk toward Krim's Rare and Used Books. The store occupied a twenty-foot-wide retail space with a single large window and a door to the side. The window was rimed with dust and showed two dozen fading hardback covers under an arc of hand-painted black letters: KRIM'S: THE COLLECTOR'S PLACE.
An overhead bell tinkled when Lucas went through the door, and he was hit by the odor of paper mold: not unpleasant, he thought, if you liked books.
Inside, two men huddled together over a book that sat squarely on the counter between them. The book's dust jacket was carefully covered with protective cellophane; collectors did that, Lucas knew.
"Can I help you?" The man behind the counter was overweight, blond, with smooth, ruddy cheeks. He filled a pink golf shirt as though he'd been poured into it; squinted at, he resembled a strawberry milk shake.
"Are you the owner?" Lucas asked.
"Mmm- hmmm." He nodded, friendly.
Lucas glanced at the second man, who was the physical opposite of the owner-reed thin with dark-plastic-rimmed glasses perched on a knife-edge nose, and under the nose, a mustache that looked like it had been sketched in with a pencil. He wore a seedy gray suit and yellow-brown shoes. A tie hung around his neck like a cleaning rag.
Lucas held up his ID: "I'm an investigator with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Do you have a security camera in here?"
The owner's eyebrows arched, and he shook his head: "No. Not much to steal. Never had a break-in. What's going on?"