"Yes. We think that Hale Sorrell somehow grabbed Joe Kelly and tortured him and got the names of Cash and Warr. We think he found out that his daughter was already dead. We think he then waited until their guard might be down a little, then he came up here, took them and hanged them for the murder of his daughter. But we think there was at least one more person involved, and that person is afraid that somebody will give him away. It's a him, by the way, not a her- he spoke to Letty."
She smiled quickly, a flitting smile that was gone as quickly as it came. "Thanks for the briefing."
"I'm not just chatting," Lucas said. "Something complicated is going on around Broderick, and I don't know what it is. But it's the cause of all these deaths. And people in Broderick are evading us, they're not telling us what they know. I don't know why they're doing that, but they are."
"I more or less know everybody in Broderick. Some of the men from the body shop keep to themselves, but nobody I know well would have done this. Kidnapped those girls or… " She gestured at the burned-out hole in the ground.
Three firemen were standing in the ruins of the basement, and as Lewis gestured and they looked that way, one of them called up to another man, who was standing outside the hole, and he turned and trotted toward one of the fire trucks. Two more firemen dropped into the basement.
"Aw, shit," Lucas said. "I think they found her."
THEY HAD. LUCAS and Del hung around for another hour, watching as the medical examiner crawled down into the basement. Ten minutes later, he climbed back out.
"Martha West?" Lucas asked.
"I assume so, from what I've been told. No way to tell by looking at the body. We'll have to do DNA on the body and on her daughter, and make some comparisons. But-it's her."
"All right." They lingered a few more minutes, then headed back to Armstrong. There was actually traffic on the highway, cop cars and fire department vehicles, and maybe rubberneckers running up to see what had happened.
On the way back, Del asked, "What'd you tell Ruth Lewis?"
"I gave her something to be guilty about. Those kind of women, they guilt-trip pretty easily."
"Just gonna let it percolate?"
"Yeah, overnight. Then I'm gonna go up there tomorrow and ask Lewis if she'll go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother is dead."
"Mmm," Del said. Then after a minute, "Hitting her with a hammer."
"Maybe she'll break," Lucas said.
They stopped at the hospital, found it quiet. The duty nurse told them that the resident had gone back to bed, and that Letty was in the air. "They got here really quickly," she said. She glanced at a wall clock. "She should be at Hennepin in a half-hour."
After leaving the hospital, they drove over to the Law Enforcement Center, where two people were sitting in the comm center eating microwave pizza. Lucas borrowed a computer and wrote a memo to the sheriff, outlining what had happened, and what had been done about it. He made two copies, put one in the sheriff's mailbox, and kept one himself.
AT THE MOTEL, they went to their separate rooms, and though he was tired, Lucas turned on the television, found a movie channel, and watched James Woods, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett get wry with each other in Diggstown. Forty-five minutes later, Weather called.
"We've got her on the ground," she said. "The hand is not good, but it's fixable. Gonna take a while to heal. Do you know if she has insurance? She doesn't seem to think so."
"She doesn't," Lucas said. "I'm buying."
"Is this a Roman Catholic guilt thing that I've got to be psychologically careful about?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Call me tomorrow. I want all the details. She seems like an interesting child. She's scared."
"She jumped out a window, got shot, got stalked in the dark, shot a guy, saw her house burned down, and her mother's dead. She doesn't know about her mother for sure, yet. I'm going to try to get somebody up here to fly down and tell her. Somebody she knows."
"Aw, jeez… All right. I'll stay with her. Call me."
SLEEP WOULD BE tough-coming up to five o'clock in the morning, but he was still too cranked. He clicked around the TV channels, found nothing that he wanted to watch. Eventually, he put on his shoes and walked down to the motel office.
"That black guy from Chicago still here?" he asked the clerk.
"Yup. Said he's checking out tomorrow morning."
"What's the room?"
"Two-oh-eight. Is he gonna be a problem?"
"Naw. I called Chicago, and they say he's gonna win the Nobel Prize for reporting. I just wanted to shake his hand."
WAY TOO EARLY for this, he thought, but what the hell, reporters fucked with him often enough. He knocked on 208, waited, knocked again, and then a man croaked, "What time is it?"
"Five in the morning," Lucas said. "Check-out time."
"What?"
A crack of light appeared between the curtains in the room window, and a moment later, Mark Johnson peered out the door over the safety chain. "Davenport?"
"So, what're you doing?" Lucas asked.
"Trying to sleep."
"You're so young, too," Lucas said.
Johnson took the chain off and opened the door and yawned and asked, "What's going on?"
"Somebody just burned down the West house, murdered Martha West, and shot and wounded Letty. She's been taken to the Twin Cities for surgery."
Johnson stared, then looked back at his bed, then back to Lucas. "You're shitting me."
"I shit you not."
"Come on in. Let me get my pants on. Jesus… What happened?"
"I talked to Deke, and he said you'd be marginally okay to talk to."
"Yeah, margin my ass."
"So the deal is, I tell you what you want to know, and you got it from an informed source. And I've got a lot of stuff that nobody else has picked up."
"Like what?"
LUCAS TOLD HIM, and when he was done, Johnson stared down at his laptop and said, "I can see this as a story. It'll take some work."
"Christ, the best story of his life is handed to him on a platter, and he says it'll take some work," Lucas said.
"The no-attribution is the hard part," Johnson said.
"That's the deal-but I'll tell you what. You come around tomorrow, wearing your sport jacket, and I'll talk for attribution, but I'll also refuse to comment on some of the other stuff, like the locket. You can ask the FBI about that. They'll be up here tomorrow, looking for the kids' bodies."
"That's great. They're like the world's worst media connections. They won't tell me anything."
"They might. Their media training's improved a lot, the last two or three years. And I'll put in a word for you."
"Appreciate it… Look, on my side of the deal, I sorta got a name for you." He slapped a group of keys on the laptop, saving his notes and changing programs, then reached into his briefcase for a pen and paper, scribbled on it, and handed it to Lucas.
A name, Tom Block, and a phone number in an unfamiliar area code.
"This is another guy Deke put me onto, maybe a year ago, down in Kansas City. He's sort of Kansas City's Lucas Davenport, although he's younger and better-looking."
"Could be younger," Lucas admitted. "What's he do?"
"Wanders around town. But he knows a lot about the Cash family and what that whole group does down there. You might want to chat. He told me a couple of things that I can't use, because of libel problems, but it wouldn't be a problem for you."
"Like tell me one thing."
"Like the whole Cash family-it's really more like a clan, with aunts and uncles and nephews and all that-they started out in drugs, and then, when crack came in and all the killing started, they got out. Went into other stuff. Tom says some of the brothers down there went to business school at the University of Missouri, then came back to KC and diversified."