"Around the refrigerator. Then under boxes in the cupboard. Of course, there's not much left there."
The yard outside the house had been flattened by ice and the army of people working around it. They tramped across the frozen ground, pushed past a heavy canvas sheet, and went inside. Banks of tripod-mounted lights lit most of the interior; two refrigerator-sized electric heaters kept it vaguely warm. Most of the loose wreckage had been cleared away from the floors. Through the open door to the mudroom, Lucas could see a white chalk circle around the hole where they'd found the.44 slug.
"All right: around the refrigerator, on the kitchen counter," Crane muttered.
Wearing plastic gloves, he began sifting carefully through the wreckage on the kitchen counter top. The counter top had been yellowed by heat except where it had been covered. A bowl, a peanut butter jar, salt and pepper shakers left their bottom-shapes stenciled in white.
"No paper… how about the refrigerator?"
Crane found the remains of the photograph behind the magnetic message slate on the door of the refrigerator. He pried the message slate away from the door, was about to put it back and then said, "Whoa…"
"What is it?" Lucas felt a thump in his stomach.
Crane carried it to the window, held it to the light. A square of folded newsprint was stuck to the back of the slate, half of it charred black and imbedded in melted plastic. The other half was brown.
"I don't know; maybe we ought to send it down to Madison, have them separate it," Crane said. But as he said it, he slipped a finger under one edge of the newsprint and lifted. It broke at the burn line, and the browned part came free. Crane turned it over in his hand.
"It's kind of fucked up," he said. He looked at the paper melted into the plastic. "We might be able to recover part of that."
The browned portion of the paper was the left side of a photo, showing the back and buttocks of a nude man. The remaining caption under the photo said: LOOK AT THIS BIG BOY. DINNER.
Beneath the photo and caption was a series of jokes:
Guy walks into a bar, he's got a head the size of a baseball, says, "Gimme a beer." The bartender shoves a glass of Bud across the bar and says, "Listen, pal, it's none of my business, but a big guy like you-how'd you get a little teeny head like that?" The guy says, "Well, I was down in Jamaica, walking on the beach, when I see this bottle. I pull the top off, and holy shit, a genie pops out. I mean, she was gorgeous. She had a body that wouldn't quit, great ass, tits the size of watermelons. And she says I can have a wish. So I said, 'Well look, you know, what I'd wish for, is to make love to you.' And the genie says, 'Sorry, that's one thing I'm not allowed to do.' So then I say, 'Okay, how about a little head?' "
"Who does this kind of shit?" Lucas asked. He held the paper on the flat of his open hands, peering at the type. There was no indication of where it might have come from.
"Anybody and everybody who can afford a Macintosh computer, a laser printer, and a halftone scanner. You could set up a whole magazine with a few thousand bucks' worth of equipment. Not the printing, just the type."
"Is there any way to run it down?"
Crane shrugged. "We can try. Do the best possible copies, circulate it, see what happens."
"Do that," Lucas said. "We need to see the picture."
Crane put the photo into an envelope and they carried it back to the garage. Carr was walking up from the car park, and they waited for him at the garage door. Inside, Crane showed him the remnants of the photo.
"Damn," Carr said. "That could have made us, if we'd got all of it."
"We'll try to trace it, but I can't promise anything," Crane said.
Carr looked at Lucas and said, "Come on outside a minute."
Lucas pulled his parka back on, zipped it, followed Carr through the door.
"We got Bob Dell's birthdate off his DMV records and ran those through the NCIC," Carr said. "He was arrested a few times in Madison, apparently when he was going to school there. Disturbing the peace and once for assault. The disturbing the peace things were for demonstrations, the assault was for a bar fight. The charge was dropped before it got to court and apparently didn't amount to much. I called Madison, and it was just an ordinary bar, not a gay bar or anything. The demonstrations involved some kind of political thing, but it wasn't gay rights, whatever it was."
"Nothing there," Lucas said.
"Well, you remember what Lacey's wife said about Dell not liking women? I called her up, and asked her what she meant, and she hemmed and hawed and finally said yeah, there were rumors among the eligible women in town that you'd be wasting your time chasing Dell."
"How solid were the rumors? Anything explicit?" Lucas asked.
"Nothing she knew about."
"Where's this place he works?"
"Sawmill, about ten minutes from here," Carr said.
"Let's go."
Carr led the way down to the sawmill, a yellow-steel pole barn on a concrete slab. A thirty-foot-high stack of oak logs was racked above a concrete ramp that led into the mill.
Inside the mill, the temperature hovered just above freezing. A half-dozen men worked around the saws. Lucas waited in the work bay while Carr poked his head into the office to talk to the owner. Lucas heard him say, "No, no, no, there's no problem, honest to God, we're just trying to run down every last…" And then a cut started, and he watched the saws until Carr came back out.
"That's Bob in the vest," Carr said. "I'll get him when they finish the cut."
Dell was a tall man, wearing jeans and a sleeveless down vest with heavy leather gloves and a yellow hard hat. He worked with the logs, jockeying them for the cut. When the cut was done, they took him outside, away from the noise of the mill. The tall man lit a cigarette and said, "What can I do for you, Sheriff?"
Lucas said, "Did you have any visitors, or see anybody out around your place the night the LaCourts were killed?"
Dell shook his head. "Nope. Didn't see anybody. I came home, watched TV, ate dinner, and then my beeper went off and I hauled my butt up there."
Carr snapped his fingers. "That's right: you're with the fire department."
Dell nodded. "Yeah. I figured you'd be around sooner or later, if you didn't catch somebody. I mean, me being a single guy and all, and just down that road."
"We don't want to cause you any trouble," Carr said.
"You already have," Dell said, looking back at the mill.
"So you saw nobody that night. From the time you left work until the time you went to the fire, you saw nobody," Lucas said.
"Nobody."
"Didn't Father Bergen stop by?" Lucas asked.
"No, no." Dell looked mystified. "Why would he?"
"Aren't you one of his parishioners?"
"Off and on, I guess," Dell said, "But he doesn't come around."
"So you're not close to him?"
"What's this about, Sheriff?" Dell asked, looking at Carr.
"I gotta ask you something here, Bob, and I swear it'll go no further than the three of us," Carr said. "I mean, I hate to ask…"
"Ask it," Dell said. He'd stiffened up; he knew what was coming.
"We've heard some rumors in town that you might be gay, is what I guess it is."
Dell turned away from them, looked up into the forest. "That's what it is, huh?" And after a minute, "What would that have to do with anything?"
The sheriff stared at him for a minute, then looked at Lucas and said, "Sonofabitch."
"I never saw Father Phil," Dell said. "Think whatever you want, I never saw him. I haven't laid eyes on him for three weeks, and that sure doesn't have anything to do with… my sex choices."
The sheriff wouldn't look at him. Instead, he looked at Lucas, but said to Dell, "If you're lying, you'll go to jail. This is critical information."