Sharon was preoccupied with a map of Wisconsin tacked to one wall, but Annie was looking around the station, hands on her hips. "Good Lord, who owns this place? The Amish?" She ran a fingernail over the top of the counter, then inspected it. "Harley's kitchen should be so clean."
"Oh, boy." Sharon was tapping a point in the map. "You are here," she pronounced. "We're a little more off the track than I thought."
Grace looked over her shoulder and winced. "Looks like we're still about a hundred miles from Green Bay."
"I'd better call them, give them a heads-up on the delay. I told the detectives we'd be there by four, and there's no way we're going to make that." Sharon went to the phone on the counter, picked up the receiver and put it to her ear, then frowned and pushed the disconnect button a few times before she hung up. "Damn thing's broken."
Annie rolled her eyes and turned in a flutter of limp silk, grumbling about small towns stuck in the dark ages, cars, heat, humidity, and the telecommunicating world in general. She kept up her monologue as Grace and Sharon followed her all the way across the crumbling side street and up the three concrete steps that led to the cafe's screen door. "I'm going to order myself a quart of iced tea and then-" She stopped in mid-sentence as she opened the door, then released a great breath. "All right, ladies. This is starting to get a little weird."
Grace eased the screen door closed behind them, and the three women stood there for a moment in the silence, staring at the empty booths, the empty stools by the counter, the empty galley cooking area behind it. Everything was spotless. If it hadn't been for the odors of fried food and baked goods still lingering under an acrid, antiseptic smell, Grace would have thought the place hadn't been a working cafe for years.
Sharon went to the counter and picked up the phone that sat by the register. She looked sheepishly at the other two when she put it down again. "So the phones are out all over town." She shrugged. "Probably takes the phone company days to get out to a little spot like this and make repairs."
Annie raised one perfectly arched brow. "And the people?"
"Who knows? Fishing, town picnic, siesta..." Sharon looked from Annie to Grace, saw the uncertainty in one face and the hard tension in the other, and realized for the first time how very different they all were. She knew the origins of Grace's paranoia-hell, if she had lived with a serial killer's bull's-eye on her for ten years, she'd be paranoid, too. And from the first time she'd met her in the hospital, she'd pegged Annie as a woman who'd learned the hard way not to trust in much. But Sharon had her own history now-had been living on the edge of panic for months, ever since she'd taken a bullet in the Monkeewrench warehouse. But for the first time since she'd feltthat slug plow into her neck, she felt oddly comfortable and safe in this place where the emptiness and quiet were so disturbing to the other two.
She laid her shoulder bag on the counter and sank onto a stool. "Okay. I get that you're weirded out by this place, but what you have to understand is that this is normal. I spent most of my life in a little town not much bigger than this, and you know the first time I locked a door? When the FBI put me in that Minneapolis apartment nine months ago, right after I got out of the hospital."
Annie scowled at her. "These are businesses. You don't walk away from a business on a Saturday afternoon and leave the door unlocked, no matter where you live. That's just plain crazy."
Sharon sighed. "I'm telling you, that's the way it is in a place like this. What customers are they going to miss? Their neighbors? They'd probably help themselves and leave the money on the counter. And neighbors don't steal from neighbors out here. Grace, what are you looking for?"
She'd been wandering around the cafe, eyes sweeping the floor, the empty booths, and finally the front window. "Hmm?"
"You see something out there?"
"Outside? No. But I'm going to take a walk, check out the house we passed on the way in. Be right back."
Grace started to walk around the side of the cafe toward the frame house behind it, then stopped, blue eyes riveted to the small metal box bolted into the concrete block. A fat sheath of PVC snaked down from the bottom into the ground. She walked a little closer to read the name of the local telephone company imprinted on the box, just to make sure, then felt a shot of adrenaline fire at her heart. The PVC sheath, and the cluster of wires within, had been sliced through.
Grace froze in position, moving only her eyes, and felt her hearing sharpen, trying to pull sounds out of this eerily silent place.
Kids,she told herself.Kids with a pocketknife and a serious streaky of ill-guided mischief.
After a few moments she moved slowly, cautiously, circling the gas station until she found its phone box and severed cord sprouting ragged wire ends. Her mind was moving at light speed, compensating for the restraint she forced on her body.
She found the outside phone box on the house, another clean cut, and then moved warily to the front door, opened it, looked into the shadows, and listened. It wasn't necessary to search the place. She knew instantly that there was no one inside.
She closed the door to the house quietly, then stood there on the stoop for a moment, looking, listening, longing for a breeze to ruffle the silence that threatened to smother her.
She didn't care what Sharon said about normalcy and small towns and unlocked doors on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn't think of any of that now. She was too busy listening to the voice in her head that said they weren't supposed to be there.
SHERIFF MICHAEL HALLORAN was sitting in his office on the second floor of the Kingsford County Government Center, his chair turned toward the big window that looked out over Helmut Krueger's dairy farm.
He'd never heard anyone describe Bonar Carlson as brilliant, but the man saw more than most and paid attention to details that the rest of the world glossed over. That was part of what made him such a good cop. Halloran was now seeing what Bonar had noticed a long time ago, and it made him feel a little inferior, like he'd been walking around with his eyes shut for most of the summer.
Helmut Krueger's pasture wasn't nearly as lush and green as it should have been; it had that autumn cast that happens when grass starts to dry from the roots up and the yellow shows through. And if that wasn't enough to confirm Bonar's predictions of drought, all you had to do was look at the herd of Holsteins. They were crowded into a black-and-white jumble today, butts out like football players in a huddle, tails beating ineffectually at the plague of biting flies that could take a hundred pounds off a heifer in a matter of days.
Bugs of one sort or another were a constant bother during any Wisconsin summer, but when drought threatened, the mosquito population went way down while the deerflies, horseflies, and stable flies reproduced in epidemic numbers to torment the daylights out of farm animals.
The signs had all been there in front of him, and Halloran hadn't seen them. It made him question his own powers of observation, made him wonder what he was doing in a job where success often rested on seeing what other people didn't.
Like this case. This was his second homicide case in as many years, after a decade of thinking that breaking up a bar fight was going to be the pinnacle of his law enforcement career. No way did that kind of background prepare you for making sense of three bodies that looked like war casualties dumped in a rural swimming hole.
He looked down at the case file cover sheet on his desk, the blank lines taunting him with all he didn't know.
Bonar gave the doorjamb a cursory rap on his way in, heading straight for the chair opposite Halloran's desk. When he sat down, the cheap vinyl wheezed like a defective whoopee cushion. "I've got a thumbprint on my birth certificate," he said without preamble. "You do, too."