There was the two-headed calf one of Barkley Widen's prize Guernseys had dropped back in the 70s, a loose-lipped moose with a giant, moldy rack, and every other woodland animal you could think of, including a family of chipmunks fastened to a wall plaque with fake moss falling off. To the best of Bonar's knowledge, Joe hadn't killed a single one. The man couldn't bear the thought of taking the life of any creature, but the animals had been hanging since his grandfather's day and, as he put it, taking them down would be a pure waste of good taxidermy.
And then there was the cat-the one and only dead thing Joe himself had contributed to the grisly decor. Lord, how he had loved that cat, every one of the twenty-three years the tabby stray had prowled around the bar, taking the occasional swipe at a paying customer with his long, untrimmed claws, relenting only when he licked enough suds from where the beer tap dripped to put him to sleep. Seemed a strange way to honor the memory of a companion, Bonar thought- stuffing it and having it mounted on a wall.
"I don't think I can eat here," he said unhappily.
Halloran gave him a tired grin. "You'll eat in your coffin."
"This is like eating in someone else's coffin."
His discomfort slowed him down, and it took him a full ten minutes to put away the cheeseburger, and another five to polish off the french fries, onion rings, and coleslaw.
Halloran watched him eat, sipping a fresh cup of coffee to keep him awake on the road. When Bonar pushed his plate away, he threw down a handful of bills and slid out of the booth. "We need to go."
Bonar nodded, reluctant to move. "Man, I'm tired. You want to check with Green Bay again before we take off?"
"Called them before you got here. Sharon and the others still haven't shown up. The detective I talked to earlier went home an hour ago, but the patrols up there are running a watch-and-stop on the Rover."
Bonar held his gun tightly in the holster as he got up. "Not so long ago, I was thinking we were like a couple of old ladies, worrying about a woman who won't even give you the time of day just because she's a few hours late. But I started counting those hours while I was loading the car, and there's just too many of them."
Halloran gave him a steady look and nodded.
"Damn, Mike, this is scaring me to death."
THE GOOD THING about Bonar's Camaro-aside from the 427 big-block Chevy-was that he'd put in one of the county's new radio units just last year.
There was the usual weekend chatter coming out of Kingsford County-a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies, a bar fight with minor injuries, and poor old Ron Rohner, who saw aliens landing in his back forty almost every Saturday night-but when Bonar switched over to Missaqua's frequency, there was nothing but dead air.
"Ah," Bonar sighed. "The soothing sounds of the FBI."
"Why don't you put out a prank radio call to that jackass Well-spring up at the lime quarry? They'll never catch us in this car."
"Not with you driving."
"I'm not even going forty-five, which is just about impossible in this thing."
"Seems like you're going faster."
Halloran reined back the Camaro's 450 horses even further as they hit the Missaqua County line, which was a cruel irony, since this was the one place in the state they knew for sure didn't have a single patrol on the road. They both kept a close watch for Gretchen Vanderwhite's car, Grace's Range Rover, and anything else out of sorts, but the roads across the county were as quiet as the radio.
Exactly two minutes on the other side of Missaqua County and still twenty miles from Hamilton, Bonar fell sound asleep, and judging by the depth and volume of his snoring, he would probably stay that way for a while. He didn't even stir when Halloran pulled into the gas station where they were meeting Magozzi, got out and slammed the door. By the time Halloran finished his calls in the station and came back out, there was a shiny silver thing big enough to be its own tourist attraction pulled up in the truck lot. Bonar was walking around it with his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and his mouth open. Harley Davidson, bearded, tattooed, and leathered, looking like a biker version of the gigantic Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidji, walked next to him. Magozzi and his partner, Gino, were stretching their legs in the lot, heads close together as they talked, and Roadrunner was bent in half under one of the big station lights, a collection of sticks hanging on to his ankles for some reason Halloran didn't even want to think about.
They gathered in a circle in the far corner of the lot. Greetings and quick handshakes were exchanged before Halloran got into it. "We've got a new wrinkle. I just talked to Ed Pitala-the Sheriff over in Missaqua County that the FBI shut down-and sometime in the last ninety minutes, one of his deputies went missing. Guy was off shift on his way home in his patrol and just disappeared."
Bonar's face tightened. "Which one?"
"Doug Lee. Know him?"
"Hell, yes, I know him. That guy drank me under the table with the most god-awful sloe gin you ever tasted at the association dinner last year. What the hell was he doing on the road, anyway? I thought the Feds pulled all the patrols."
Halloran scuffed at a stray stone on the asphalt. "He was already on his way home and in one of the radio dead zones when the order came down. As far as Ed knows, Lee never even heard about it. Thirty minutes ago, Lee's wife called in a panic and the agent that set up shop in Ed's office tried to keep him from sending out his officers to look, so Ed slammed the guy against the wall and gave him a black eye."
Bonar grinned happily. "Good old Ed. Pushing sixty-five, and he's slamming Feds against the jailhouse wall and looking at twenty years. They just don't make them like that anymore."
"Amen," Magozzi added.
"So the agent finally agreed to let him put all his people on the road, as long as they used their personal cars," Halloran continued. "No patrols. No radios. They're all checking in on landlines, and they all have the descriptions of the Rover and the cake lady's car, too, but you know they're looking hardest for their own man."
Gino threw up his hands. "Jesus Christ, they've got four women and now a cop gone missing in that cluster fuck they've got going on over there, and they won't tell us whatthe fuck is going on?"
Halloran started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly. "That agent who took over our scene at the lime quarry said it was a national security operation. I didn't put a whole lot of stock in that, because that's what they told me five years ago when they were trying to bust some morons who were running a multistate dog-fighting ring out of Wisconsin. Back in those days, the Feds hollered national security whenever they wanted the local law to butt out. Thinking anything they ever said was a load of crap was a way of life. Hell, maybe this time they really meant it. Maybe something bigger than missing people is going on here, and we're about to storm right into the middle of it." He looked around at each of them. "Anybody here have a problem with that?"
"Hell, no." Harley spoke for them all. "As far as I'm concerned, Grace, Annie, and Sharon missing is about as big as it gets. I don't give a shit what kind of operation the Feds are running, national security or not. But if those women are somewhere in the middle of that operation, and figuring out what the hell is going on will help us find them, then I say let's just get down to it."
Magozzi said, "Any way you and Roadrunner can tap into the land-lines coming out of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office?"
Roadrunner bobbed his head enthusiastically. "No problem."