Why didn't he call Goodhue? Because he had no real knowledge that Marshall was involved and didn't want to damage a friend if he was wrong, and had been so disturbed by the possibility that he'd launched himself onto the road without his cell phone, and once on the way, it seemed best to continue… blah, blah, blah.
Cops and lawyers came and went, but as long as Lucas's story stayed simple, there were no seams to cut onto. On the day after the shooting, he sent a crime-scene crew to St. Patrick's to talk to the janitor, with instructions to search the overhead on the skeleton floor, and anything else the janitor suggested. The crew found the computer an hour into the search, and the laptop had Qatar's prints all over it. The computer forensics people did their work, and up popped drawings of Aronson and another woman from the graveyard.
At the same time, an illegal copy of the tape recording that Marshall made of Qatar found its way to Channel Three, and then to every TV and radio station that wanted it. Lucas didn't know who leaked it-he suspected Del, but Del professed to be mystified, as did Marcy, Sloan, and Rose Marie. Qatar's babbling confession, and his naming of names, led to quick IDs on the unidentified bodies from the graveyard, and to a new search in the countryside a few miles east of Columbia, Missouri.
The usual Minnesotans were shocked by the police misconduct that had led to Qatar's killing, but Rose Marie had a quiet word with old friends in the Democratic Party's political-feminist hierarchy; with that, and with the constant playing of the tape across nine-tenths of the electromagnetic spectrum, the controversy withered. There was some expected grumbling from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union about police-sponsored lynchings, which everybody agreed was the MCLU's perfect right. Free speech, and all that.
That cleaned up the case.
Del had wondered, privately, just how early Lucas had suspected Marshall. Lucas shook his head and walked away from the question. Avoided the lie, but Del knew him well enough to understand the walk.
Rose Marie also had a few questions that she didn't ask. She did take Lucas aside and said, "The governor was impressed. I gave him ten minutes on what a great crime-detection bunch we have over here, and you know what he said?"
"What'd he say?" They were in her office, and she was looking more cheerful than she had in weeks.
"He said, 'I don't care about how good they detected-what I liked was the way they handled it.' "
"So that's good," Lucas said.
"That's very good."
TIDYING UP THE loose ends on the case hadn't tidied up Lucas's head. A vague melancholia settled over him, a mood that Weather picked up. She began arranging events and talked to Marcy behind his back; Marcy began arranging events, and suggested that Lucas and Weather and she and Kidd go out to dinner. Lucas said "Sometime," and kept wandering around town.
He could have stopped the whole train, he thought. He'd never made up his mind; he'd never gotten clear on what he should do. He could have made a decision, but he hadn't-a private failing, and a serious one, he thought.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER the sailboat, after a salad of roasted chicken breasts and walnuts and lettuce, after a bowl of wild rice soup, after a beer or two, he was puttering in his study, the whole case still tingling at the back of his brain. After a while, he sighed and walked down to the bathroom. The door was shut and locked.
"Weather?"
"Yes. Just a minute."
"That's okay, I can run down-"
"No, no, just a minute." He could hear her moving around, and tried the door. Locked.
"What are you doing?"
"Uh…"
"Okay, I'll run down to the-"
"No, no… I'm, uh, I'm just, uh, peeing on a stick."
"What?"
"Peeing on a stick."
"Weather? What…?"
"I'm peeing on a stick. Okay?"