A siren started down in the town, the ambulance. The lanky man looked at Sherrill and then at Lucas. "All right. We’ll see you up there."
"This is just fuckin’ awful,"Sherrill said, on the way back to the motel.
"The fight?" That was odd; she’d always been one of the first to get in.
"Not the fight. The way the fight turns me on. You could bend me over the front fender right now, in front of all those people, I swear to God. Whoo. But you sorta hung me up there, dude. I don’t think I coulda taken that skinny guy." She was vibrating, talking a hundred miles an hour. "Maybe I could have slowed him down. Didn’t take you long with the fat guy, that’s for sure. Man, if the skinny guy had gone for his gun, though, I’d’ve had to do something, and we coulda wound up with dead people out there. Whoa, what a rush. Man, the fuckin’ adrenaline is coming on, now. It always comes about ten minutes too late."
Lucas grinned at her: "About once a year. It cleans out the system."
"What’re you gonna tell the sheriff? I mean, we could be in some trouble."
Lucas shook his head. "There’s something going on. We know it, and now they know we know. I think we might learn something."
"Jeez-I wish I hadn’t used you up before dinner. I’m serious here, Lucas, I could really use some help."
"We might have a couple minutes."
"It won’t take that long…"
The Sheriff showed up a little more than an hour later. Lucas was walking back from the Coke machine with a Diet and a regular Coke, his hair still wet from another shower, when they arrived in two cars; the sheriff, the older deputy named Jimmy, the young, lanky man from the restaurant, all in the sheriff’s squad car, and Dr. Stephen Landis in a two-year-old Buick.
Lucas continued to the room, pushed through the door, said, "They’re here."
Sherrill tucked her shirt in: she’d been worried the room would smell too much like sex, which she thought would seem perverted so close to the fight-which Lucas told her was perverted-so she’d turned up the shower full blast, cold water only, and sprayed it against the back wall of the shower stall. Now the room smelled faintly of chlorine, with a hint of feminine underarm deodorant. "We’re ready," she said, looking around. "Put your gun over on the nightstand. That’ll look nice and grim. I’ll keep mine, but I’ll let them see it." She was wearing her.357 in the small of her back.
He nodded: "You could be good at this."
She came over and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. "Remember that," she said.
The sheriff knocked a second later. Sherrill opened the door and let them in.
"Damn near killed him," the Sheriff said.He was standing in front of the dresser, looking at Lucas, who was sitting on the bed, his back to the headboard. The other three men were standing near the door, while Sherrill stood at the head end of the bed, near Lucas. "He could still be in trouble."
"Bullshit. I cracked his short ribs and busted his nose. He won’t be sneezing for a month or six weeks, that’s all," Lucas said.
"That’s a fairly clinical judgment," Landis said. "You must’ve done this before."
"I’ve had a few fights," Lucas agreed.
"In all my time as sheriff, I haven’t had a man hurt that bad, except one who was in a car accident," the sheriff said. "We’re talking to the county attorney to see if an arrest would be appropriate. We don’t want you going anyplace."
"We’re leaving tomorrow, I think," Lucas said. "But we’ll be available down in Minneapolis. I’m gonna talk to a couple of friends over at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, maybe a guy in the attorney general’s office. About coming up here and deposing you people on the murder of George Lamb: to ask you why you’ve been covering it up all these years. Why you’d send a couple of cops to roust us, in the middle of a murder investigation that you’d been reading about in the Star-Trib."
The sheriff shook his head: "We didn’t send anybody to roust you. These idiots thought of it themselves." He tipped his head toward the lanky man, who shrugged and looked at the curtains covering the single window.
"The thing is, we can take care of Larry," the older deputy drawled. "Cops get beat up from time to time. The real question I got-not the sheriff, just me-is whether you can be talked to. Or if you’re just some big-city asshole up here to kick the rubes."
"I’ve got a cabin outside a town half this size, in Wisconsin. The sheriff’s a friend of mine, and he’s been bullshitting me about moving up to run for the office when he quits, and I’ve thought about it. I’ve worked with a halfdozen sheriffs all over this state and Wisconsin, and this is the first time I’ve had trouble," Lucas said. "You want some references?"
"Already made some calls," the older man said. After a few seconds’ silence, he said, "You want to talk, or do we do this all legal?"
"Talk," Lucas said.
The sheriff looked at the older deputy and said, "You think?"
"Yeah, I think."
The sheriff nodded and said, "The thing is, we don’t know whether or not George Lamb was murdered. But he might have been."
"There were some problems at the time, with the way the death happened," the older man said. "Happened way too early in the morning. He got up early, for his job, but not in the middle of the night. It looked to us like he’d gotten sick the evening before, and they’d let him lay there until he died."
"He came to see me twice in the month before he died. He was feeling sicker and sicker, and at first I thought it was the flu. He’d had some diarrhea, he’d had some episodes of vomiting, dizzy spells, and so on. We’d had some flu going around at the time, and it fit," Landis said. He pulled a chair out from the dresser/desk and sat down. "I gave him some antibiotics for a lung infection he’d developed-nothing serious, he was coughing up some phlegm with pus in it. And we had an argument the second time he came in, and he never came back. Then he dropped dead. Could have been a heart attack."
"But you don’t really think so," Lucas said.
Landis shook his head. "I think maybe it was rat poison. Arsenic. The thing is, when I went out and looked at this body, he had a rash, a particular kind of rash that flakes off the skin when you’ve been taking in arsenic for a while."
"You didn’t take any tissue samples?"
"If we’d taken tissue samples, and sent them to a lab, then the fat would be in the fire," Landis said. "Other people would know about it…"
"You didn’t want other people to know?" Sherrill asked. The sheriff took off his hat, smoothed his hair back, and said, "My daughter went to high school with the Lamb girls. And the older Lamb girl had a reputation as knowing way too much about sex for a girl her age. Then, a couple of months before George died…"
Landis picked it up. "The mother brought in the older girl, Audrey, to the clinic. Said she’d been fooling around with one of the boys at school, wanted me to keep it quiet, but wanted her tested to see if she was pregnant. She wasn’t. But I gave her a little standard lecture that I gave back then, about staying out of trouble, about saying no to boys, about using some protection… She sort of went along with the lecture until she got tired of it, then she got up and left," Landis said. "As she was going out the door, she turned and looked at me. The look was like ninety-five percent hate and fear. And she said, ‘That’s all fine and good, but not relevant in my case.’ "
"Not relevant in my case," the sheriff quoted. "Hell of a line for a kid that age. The fact is, George had been f-" He glanced at Sherrill. "Having sex with her."
"When I told you that his wife had some bruises," Landis said, "I was telling you the truth. But not all of it. The woman had been beaten from head to foot."
"The whole goddamn house was a reign of terror," the sheriff said. "Steve told me what he thought was going on. I talked to the sheriff at the time, Johnny James, and he told me that there was nothing to do, unless somebody complained. So I caught up with George on his mail route one day and said if I ever heard of him screwing that little girl, I’d kill him."