The sheriff had just come back up the hill, after talking with reporters, shook his head and said, "This is gonna get goofy. The governor's statement… it's gonna get goofy."
"Never was gonna be any other way," Lucas said. "Not after those two people went up in that tree."
Lucas got his coat, collected Del, and as they headed for the door, saw a fortyish man in a gray overcoat walking around the line of cop cars in the driveway, closely trailed by a deputy. He was carrying a wallet-sized box, and when he saw the sheriff step out on the porch with Lucas, he called, "Hey, Brad."
"George… you heard about Hale, I guess." Wilson said to Lucas, "Hale's lawyer."
"My God. I was at a wedding, Ken Hendrick's kid," the lawyer said, as he came up to them. He looked back down the hill-"I got here as fast as I could, but I had a heck of a time getting through your boys down there."
"Not much for you to do, here, George."
"Yes, there is. A week ago, Hale gave me a box… " He handed the box to the sheriff. It was about four inches by five, an inch thick. A tough-looking lock was set flush to the polished steel surface at one edge. "He said, I swear to God, that if he should die, I should give this to the authorities. I asked him if it was anything illegal, and he said no, it's just some information that he felt should come to official attention. I thought maybe it was business, but now… "
"What's in it?"
"I don't know," the lawyer said. "He gave it to me, told me to file it and forget it. He said it couldn't be opened without destroying the contents, unless you used a key. He said the key was on his key ring with his car keys."
Wilson looked at the box, then handed it to Lucas. "Ever see anything like that?"
"Yeah. It looks like a magnetic-media safe, for carrying around computer Smart Cards and so on. It's bigger than most of them, and I've never seen a lock before."
"His key ring is on the bedside table," Del said. "I checked to see if there was a Jeep key on it."
"Let's go look," Lucas said.
"Maybe we ought to do it in a lab," Wilson said doubtfully.
"It's not a bomb. It's something he wanted us to get," Lucas said.
DEL RETRIEVED THE key ring, which contained one key with a circular blade. Lucas popped the top on the safe, and inside was an old-fashioned 3.5-inch computer floppy disk.
"Laptop," Del said.
They took Mary Sorrell's IBM laptop out of her briefcase, put it on the floor of the home office. The base unit had no floppy drive, but they found the drive in a separate pouch and plugged it in. Lucas brought the laptop up, slipped the floppy into the drive, and found one file. He clicked on the file. Microsoft Word began opening on the screen, and then the file itself.
A note-a brief note.
Tammy Sorrell was kidnapped by Joe Kelly, Deon Cash, and Jane Warr. Cash is a driver for the Gene Calb truck rehabilitation service in the town of Broderick, near Armstrong, Minnesota. Jane Warr is a card dealer at the Moose Bay casino near Armstrong. Warr and Cash live together in a farmhouse in Broderick. They killed Tammy on Dec. 22 and buried her somewhere nearby. The exact location is unknown. This information has been confirmed.
"Jeez. There it is," Wilson said, looking up at Lucas. "Where did he get the information? The FBI says that the kidnappers never called. The feds even started looking at Hale's background to see if he might have had something to do with Tammy… you know."
Lucas touched the computer screen. "He says Kelly, Cash, and Warr did the kidnapping, and that Cash is a driver for the truck place. He doesn't say anything more about Joe. I think he must've got the information from Joe. Where else would he get it?"
Wilson pursed his lips. "So Joe… "
"I think Joe's outa here," Lucas said. "If Sorrell was Special Forces… maybe he had some training with pliers and fingernails."
"You don't think Joe did this?" Wilson gestured out toward the kitchen, where the two bodies still lay on the floor.
"It's possible-but how the hell would Sorrell know about Cash and Warr? I think he probably grabbed Joe when Joe came for the money," Lucas said. He looked at the note again, frowned. "I thought all the stories were about the rich girl being kidnapped on Christmas Eve, and all the gifts around the tree… "
"She was… " Wilson shook his head. "Maybe it's a typo. Maybe he meant the twenty-fourth, and typed the twenty-second."
"Pretty unlikely," Del grunted. "That's one thing you'd get right, in that kind of note."
"Those bank draft receipts, the ones that went to Vegas… " Lucas had returned them to the briefcase where he found them, to have them checked later. Now he retrieved them, and looked at the dates. "They're dated December twentieth. He took a million dollars in cashier's checks to Las Vegas on the twentieth."
"What do you think?" Wilson asked.
"Could you get one of the bank managers to check on when the drafts were cashed?" Lucas asked.
Wilson looked at his watch. "It's Saturday. Maybe. Let me call somebody."
"Maybe… " Lucas scratched his chin and looked at Del. "Maybe he was collecting money in Vegas. He got drafts from his bank, then spent three days withdrawing the money from his Vegas accounts. He was collecting cash to pay the kidnappers."
Del nodded. "Couldn't just walk into a bank and ask for a million in cash. How else would you get it? But a bunch of bank drafts for Vegas hotels… He could've even passed it off as a business thing, with the banks."
"So Tammy wasn't kidnapped on the twenty-fourth," Lucas said. "They got her sooner than that. Huh." They'd been squatting next to Mary Sorrell's computer, and now they all stood up. "But there was something that Sorrell didn't get from Joe or Cash or Warr. There must be a fourth man. Or woman. Or maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Somebody who knew what it meant when Cash and Warr got hanged."
"And didn't want Sorrell talking about it," Del said. "Couldn't risk it."
"Why couldn't he risk it?" Wilson asked.
Del said, "Because he didn't know if Sorrell was finished-didn't know whether or not Sorrell had his name. Didn't know what Jane and Deon might have told him."
Wilson scratched his head and said, "Shoot," and a moment later, "Goldarnit."
Lucas said to Del, "We better get back up north."
Del nodded. "But we wouldn't get up there before dark, if we left now. We should catch a nap this afternoon, leave really early tomorrow. Three in the morning. Get there when the sun comes up. Take that little town apart."
11
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, JUST after dark, Loren Singleton rolled along Highway 36, listening to the radio. He was tired, despite a long nap, from the overnight round trip to the Sorrells' and back. A snow squall bothered his windshield, little pecks and flecks of ice whirling down from the north.
He'd been horrified by the shooting, as he hadn't been by the killing of the little girls. The little girls just seemed to go to sleep-and he hadn't really done that. He'd just been there.
At the same time, there was something about the Sorrell killings that left him feeling… larger. Tougher. He tried to find the exact word: studlier? That embarrassed him, but it might be close.
The lights of Broderick came up through the blowing snow, the cafe, and the gas station, two dimly lit windows at the church, a beer sign in the bar-and then he noticed the light in the back of Calb's. The office was lit up, as though there were a meeting going on.
He pulled the Caddy into the parking lot, watched for shadows on the window-somebody looking to see who'd pulled in-and when he got none, climbed out of the car and walked over to the shop and tried the door. The door was locked, as it should be after dark on Saturday.