‘We got a usable slug, though, right?’
‘The one out of the missus is still in pretty decent shape, but there were no hits in the database, so it doesn’t count for squat without the weapon. So right now we’ve got no witnesses, no physical evidence to speak of, and only one more thing to look for to shine some light on this thing.’
‘Motive,’ Danny said without hesitation, and for the second time that morning, Halloran smiled. The kid was going to do all right.
There was a gate at the end of the Kleinfeldts’ driveway, with a padlock that glinted in the cold sun, a taunting reminder. ‘Damnit, damnit, damnit.’ He banged his hand on the wheel.
‘Sir?’
‘I forgot the keys.’
‘Some of the guys say you’re real good with a pick.’
But apparently he wasn’t that good. In the end he’d said the hell with it and taken the bolt cutters to the chain.
It wasn’t much of a house, for someone sitting on seven million dollars. Just a boxy, two-story farmhouse, unchanged, as far as he could tell, from when the Tikalskys raised Holsteins and children here.
Halloran had gone to CalumetHigh School with Roman, their youngest, and the day after that boy graduated they’d turned the house over to Countryside Realty and moved to Arizona.
Smart people, he thought, tugging up the fur collar of his jacket and still feeling the promise of winter crawl down his neck. The Kleinfeldts bought the house three months later, according to Nancy Ann Kopetke at Countryside, who had apparently been knocked over with a feather when they paid the asking price without a twitch. The idea of Nancy Ann Kopetke, three bills if she was a pound, being knocked over with anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler had given him the only other smile of the morning.
He climbed the front porch with Danny, eyed the heavy plate of a good dead bolt, but still tried the knob. Stupid, of course. You didn’t padlock your driveway and leave your house wide open.
‘Should I try the back, Sheriff?’ Danny was almost on the toes of his spit-shined shoes, eager to get into the house, find the clue and solve the crime.
‘Go ahead. I’ll try running the picks through this one.’
For all the good it’ll do, his thoughts grumbled a sullen accompaniment to the strangely merry sound of Danny trotting around the house through a crackling carpet of dried leaves. He’d played with this kind of dead bolt before and knew damn well that it was far beyond his meager skills. Still he went down into a crouch and started fooling with it, going through the motions, just as he was doing with the whole investigation.
The minute he’d seen that cross carved into Mary Kleinfeldt’s chest, he’d had the bad feeling that this was probably one of those crimes that would haunt his old age. From that point on it had just been a matter of how much of his budget and how many of his resources he would use up before the county commissioners shut him down. Unless there were clues inside this house with big red arrows pointing to them, there was no way he could justify keeping the whole department committed.
He gave up on the lock, pushed against his knees, and felt a crick he swore hadn’t been there yesterday. He rapped once against the door just to feel the weight of it, and frowned. One of those heavy metal numbers you usually saw only in the city. Hinges on the inside. Weird. Unless Danny worked miracles and found a way in through the back, they were going to have to break some glass here, because there was no way he was going to drive all the way back to town for the keys.
He glanced down the porch at the old-fashioned six-over-six windows, thinking they’d have to break some hundred-year-old woodwork, too, and that was a shame. He reached inside his jacket for the package of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket. The cellophane wrapper crackled in the silence.
The house muffled the sound of the shotgun blast, as much as such a thing can be muffled. It was still loud enough, or maybe just so unexpected, that Halloran jumped backward away from the door, heart pounding. Instinct kicked in before thought, dropping him to a crouch, 9mm already in his hand. See that, Bonar? he thought crazily. How’s that for a quick draw?
Before the thought was finished he was down the steps, off the porch, still crouched but running now, below the windows, around the house to the back corner. He stopped with his shoulder pressed against steel siding, gasping in silent, shallow breaths, listening so hard he could hear dried cornstalks rustling in the back field.
Goddamnit, where are you, Danny?
The part of the backyard he could see was treeless, lifeless; nothing but brown, close-cropped grass stretching a good hundred yards to the corn. He stooped, shot his head out to look around the corner, and jerked it back. Nothing. No bushes, no trees, no place for a shooter to hide, just a shallow cement stoop at the back door. He hugged the house and crept toward it.
A few minutes later he found the first bloody pieces of Danny Peltier spattered all over the small mudroom. He walked a little farther into the house and found the rest of him, and almost wished that he hadn’t.
Bonar found Halloran an hour later in the middle of the Kleinfeldts’ backyard. He’d dragged a kitchen chair out there and was sitting hunched over with his arms across his thighs, staring at the house.
Bonar dropped to a squat next to him and started pulling out blades of dried grass. ‘Warming up,’ he said.
Halloran nodded. ‘Sun feels good.’
‘You okay?’
‘I just had to get out of there for a minute.’
‘I hear you.’ He held out a ballpoint pen stuck in a pack of Pall Malls. ‘Found these on the porch. Yours, or do we have to print them?’
Halloran patted his pocket, then reached for the cigarettes and tapped one out. ‘Must have dropped them when I heard the shot.’ He lit one, drew on it deeply, then leaned back in the chair with a long exhale. ‘You ever out here when we were in high school? When Tikalskys owned this place?’
‘Nah. Different bus route.’
‘Used to be a lot of trees in this yard back then.’
‘Yeah?’
Halloran nodded. ‘Bunch of apples, couple oaks, biggest cottonwood I ever saw stood right over there, with a big old tractor tire hanging from a rope as thick as my arm.’
‘Huh. Storm damage, maybe. They had those straight-line winds out here six, seven years ago, remember?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Halloran thought about it for a while. ‘Wouldn’t think a wind would strip a place this clean. You could hardly see the house for the bushes; those droopy things with the white flowers . . .’
‘Bridal wreath, generic name, spirea.’
Halloran looked at him. ‘Where do you get this stuff?’
Bonar found a blade of dried grass long enough to stick between his teeth. ‘I am a man of great and varied and mostly useless knowledge. What’s your point?’
‘All the hiding places are gone. They got rid of them.’
Bonar spit out the grass and looked around, eyebrows and brain working. ‘Fits, I guess. You see the stockpile of guns in there?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Seventeen of them so far, just on the first floor. Do you know how weird that is? I mean, these people were old. You got Polident and bifocals and a .44 Magnum all in the same drawer. Survivalist books and magazines all over the damn place. And the rig they used to set up that shotgun? That thing’s so high-tech even Harris is spooked. He’s got the boys on their hands and knees, moving by inches, looking for more trip wires. These people were seriously paranoid.’
‘Maybe money does that.’
Bonar shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’