The boop-beep-thwack stopped, and a second later a young man with a round face and a short black mustache stepped out of the chief’s office.
"Help you folks?"
"We’re looking for the chief of police, or the duty officer…"
"I’m Chief Mason." The young man hitched up his pants when he saw Sherrill, and walked down toward them. Lucas took out his ID and handed it over. "I’m Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis, and this is Detective Sherrill…"
He explained that they had come up to review documents and interview people who might have any information about the death of George Lamb, Audrey McDonald’s father, twenty-four years earlier. The chief, who had been staring almost pensively at Sherrill’s breasts, started shaking his head. "I been a cop here for four years; nobody in the department has been here more than twelve. Better you should go up and talk to the county clerk, she might be able to point you at some death records or something."
"Second floor?" Lucas asked.
"Yee-up," the chief said.
The County clerk was even younger than the chief, her hair dyed an unsuccessful orange: "Okay, twenty-four years. About this time of year, you say?"
"About this time."
"Okay… We’re computerizing, you know, but all this old paper is hard to get on-line," she said, as she dug through a file cabinet. "Here we go. George Lamb? Here it is."
"You got anything in there on an Amelia Lamb? George’s wife? Four years after George?"
She went back to the cabinet, dug around, then shook her head. "Nothing on an Amelia."
She straightened up, stepped to the counter, pushed a mimeographed form across the counter at them, said to Marcy, "I really like your hair," and Marcy said, "Thanks. I just got it changed and I was a little worried about doing it… used to be longer."
The death form was filled out on a typewriter, and signed by a Dr. Stephen Landis. Lucas scanned the routine report and asked, "Is Dr. Landis still practicing here?"
"Oh, sure. He’s over at the clinic, right down the street to Main, take a left two blocks."
Marcy looked over Lucas’s arm: "Heart attack?"
"That’s what it says."
"You know, Sheriff Mason would’ve been a deputy back then; I bet he would know about it," the clerk said, reading the file upside down. She tapped a line on the file with her fingertip. "This address isn’t right in town-it’s out at County A-so they would have been the law enforcement arm involved in a death."
"We just talked to a Chief Mason," Sherrill said. "They’re not the same guy?"
"Second cousins, though you could never tell," the clerk said. "Sheriff John Mason’s grandparents on his father’s side, and Chief Bob Mason’s great-grandparents on his father’s and grandfather’s side, are the same people, Chuck and Shirley Mason from Stephen."
"Thank you," Lucas said. "Where can we find the sheriff’s office?"
"Down the hall all the way to the end."
As they left, Sherrill asked, "Are Chuck and Shirley still alive?"
"Well, sure," the clerk said. "Hale and hearty. Course, they’d be down in Arizona right now."
The Sheriff was out, the receptionist said, but if it was a matter of importance, he’d be happy to come right back. Lucas identified himself, and the receptionist’s eyebrows went up, and she punched a number in her telephone. A minute later, the phone rang, and she picked it up and said, without preamble, "There’re some Minneapolis police officers here, looking for you."
The sheriff was a chunky, weathered man, going bald; he wore an open parka and was carrying a blaze-orange watch cap when he stepped into the office five minutes later.
"You want to see me?"
"Yes," Lucas said. He introduced himself, produced his ID, and mentioned the death of George Lamb.
"George Lamb? You mean about a hundred years ago, that George Lamb?" The sheriff’s voice picked up a hint of wariness.
"Twenty-four years," said Lucas.
"Come on back," the sheriff said. And to the receptionist: "Ruth, go get Jimmy and tell him to come back too."
To Lucas: "You folks want some coffee?"
"That’d be fine," Lucas said. They were passing a coffeepot in a hallway nook, and Sherrill said, "I’ll get it. Sheriff? Sugar?"
As the sheriff settled behind his desk, and Sherrill brought the coffee, Lucas said, "We’re sorta digging through the background on Lamb. The county clerk said you were around at the time, I don’t know if you’d remember it or not."
"Yeah, I do. He used to be a mail carrier outa here, he had the rural route. Died of a heart attack. Why’re you looking into that? If I might ask?"
"We’ve got a case going on in the Cities, woman just shot her husband," Lucas said. "She’s charged second degree, but that could get dismissed as self-defense. We’re looking into all the deaths that have been associated with her, and we found out that both her father and mother died young…"
"I know the woman," the sheriff said. "Audrey. McDonald. Used to be Lamb. Been reading about the case in the Star-Tribune. What the heck is a chief of police doing way up here on a case like that?"
"Actually, uh, Marcy and I are friends," Lucas said, tipping his head toward Sherrill. "We were both working the case, and we sorta wanted to get away for a weekend… and we were sorta curious about Lamb."
The sheriff glanced at Marcy and then back at Lucas, nodded as if everything was suddenly clear. "I didn’t take the first call on Lamb, but when we got word that somebody out there was dead, I came in," the sheriff said. He spun in his office chair, looking out of the office window toward the back of a line of Main Street stores. "This was early in the morning. I mean real early, like four o’clock. He was dressed in gray long johns, and he was laying on the kitchen floor. One of the girls had called us-Audrey I think, the other one was still pretty young-and the two little girls had their mom out in the living room, and she was sitting on the couch all wailing away. And Lamb was deader’n a mackerel. It was his practice to wake up in the morning by breaking a raw egg in a double-shot glass, then pouring the glass full with rye, and drinking it down. We found him laying on the floor in a puddle of rye, with the egg all over his face. Took him off quick."
"Egg and rye. That’d open your eyes, all right," Sherrill said.
" ’Spose," said the sheriff. Another man, tall, lean as a fence post, ten years older than the sheriff but with a full head of hair, propped himself in the office doorway.
"You wanted me?"
"Yeah, Jimmy, come on in…" The sheriff introduced Lucas and Sherrill and said, "They’re checking around about the time George Lamb died down there on A. You remember that?"
"Yeah. Long time ago. Don’t quite see what you’d be checking on. Dropped dead of a heart attack."
"Was there anything unusual about the circumstances?" Lucas asked. "Something to make you wonder if it was more’n a heart attack?"
The sheriff shook his head, and Jimmy scratched his head and said, "Well, no. Not really. The population up here is older’n average-not much to hold the younger people anymore-so we see a lot of heart attacks. Probably once or twice a week we get a call, and a fair number of times, the victim is dead before the ambulance gets there. I probably seen a few hundred of them in my time, and…" He shrugged. "Soon as I saw him, I thought,Heart."
"Shoot," Lucas said. "How about the mother? Amelia?"
The sheriff shook his head. "They left here after George died-sold the place off and moved down to your territory, I think."