An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, "You see these rods going into your arm?"
Lucas looked down and said, "Yeah?"
"That's what orthopods call 'sutures.'"
THE MORNING AFTER THAT, he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace's story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn't in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.
"Go ahead," Lucas kept saying, "I'm really okay."
His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppresed a wince.
"I feel like I'd be ditching you," she said.
"No, no… I'm gonna be busier than hell."
She started giving him more trouble about lying to her- although the night before, she'd settled most of his sexual problems, and he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.
Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John's, said, "I've got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?"
BELOIT CAME UP, and she and Weather sniffed each other's credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, "I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared."
"I'd be interested," Lucas said.
"I don't know how to do this," she said. "I don't want anyone to hear it from me. I don't want to testify. I'd lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest…"
"So, we'll call you a confidential source," Lucas said. "If there's no way to prove it, we'll just pretend nobody said anything."
She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: "We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope."
Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.
"Leo had the connection," she said. "He knew the guy who brought it in from Canada. When the guy was coming by, he'd call Leo, but Leo didn't have much money. So Sam would front the money, and he and Leo would go pick up a can of the stuff- it usually came in one of those big tobacco cans. Sam would parcel it around to the people in our group. We'd pay him our share, and he'd put the money back. He wasn't making money on the deal, he was just… facilitating."
"So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through…"
"And it was time. We'd been low, or out, for a while," she said. "People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming."
"Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy's name?"
"Um, Manny," Beloit said, with a tentative smile. "They used to call him Manny Sunshine."
Lucas smiled. "It's always Somebody Sunshine."
"You can get this out, without my name?" she asked.
"I'll have our dope guys look into Manny. If we can find him, we'll have a talk. We don't really want to bust a bunch of potheads. But it would be nice if we could explain the money withdrawal."
"Please, please, keep my name out of it."
"I will." He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.
"Do you think we'll ever find Sam?" she asked.
"I don't know," Lucas said. "We shouldn't have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So… I don't know."
THREE DAYS AFTER Lucas's truth appeared in the Star-Tribune, DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the hospital. The word was, they'd never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.
Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.
THE LEGISLATURE SCHEDULED hearings,and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, "You know, it never occurred to me."
"What?"
"That somebody; might make a buck on this," she said, as she turned the page.
A WEEK AFTER the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, "The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here."
Lucas said, "Huh. He's smarter than I thought."
WEATHER CAME BACK from London with the kids and the house keeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas's arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an in-geniously bent clothes hanger.
Letty, his ward, said, "You know, every time you scratch, there's a bad smell."
"Thank you.You do so much to help my self-confidence in social situations," he said.
She was still teasing him when the phone rang. When Lucas picked it up, Nordwall told him that O'Donnell's body had been found in the middle of a cornfield two miles from his home. The body was found by a farmer responding to his wife's complaints of a persistent bad odor from across the road. O'Donnell had been shot once in the forehead. "Grant, Rogers, whoever he was, must have been looking him right in the eyes when he pulled the trigger," Nordwall said.
THEY NEVER FIGURED out who the killer was. He was buried under the name Roy Rogers, though nobody really thought that was his name. DNA records were kept in case anybody ever came looking for him.
AND FINALLY, a month after the shootings, deep in the bowels of the security hospital, nine patients and a doctor met for a group-therapy session. One of the patients, a man known for his silence, timorously raised a hand as soon as everybody had a chair.
Sennet, who was running the group, suppressed a look of surprise and said, "Lonnie? You have something for us?"
Lonnie, who feared many things-too many things, hundreds of them, a new one every minute-dug into his pocket and took out a tattered roll of yellow paper. "I found this the day everybody got shot. I didn't steal it, it was lying in the hall."
"Okay," Sennet said, encouraging him. "What is it?"
Lonnie unrolled the paper. "It's a list. It says, Best Songs of the Rock Era. It has a hundred songs on it."
"May I see it?" Sennet asked.
"May I have it back?" Lonnie looked frightened, as though the list might be seized. "I think about it a lot."
"Sure. If it's only rock songs," Sennet said.
Lonnie passed the paper round the circle of the group, each person glancing at it. When Sennet got it, he scanned the list, then passed it around the rest of the circle, and back to Lonnie.
"Do you have some thoughts about it?" Sennet asked.
"Well, these are the one hundred best rock songs, okay?"
"Okay."
Lonnie's lip trembled. "But, there are no Beatles on the list. Don't you see? There are no Beatles…"