‘Son of a bitch,’ Gino said, slamming down his phone. ‘The Brainerd sheriff’s been out of his office for two hours, and you want to know why? He’s out on some lake with damn near every other officer in the county, trying to save some deer that went through ice.’

Magozzi looked out at the city sizzling under the day’s heat. ‘They’ve got ice?’

‘Are you kidding? It’s April in Brainerd. They’ll have ice for another month. Besides, they’re north of the warm front, haven’t gotten any of the heat we’re getting. You know what this reminds me of? Hansel and Gretel.’

‘You’re going have to explain that to me.’

‘Come on, it’s obvious. The old witch keeps the kids for a while to fatten ’em up before she eats them. That’s just what these guys are doing. Saving a deer one of them’s going to pop next fall and turn into link sausage. And in the meantime I’m here sitting on my thumbs trying to solve sixty murders while they’re out on a venison rescue…’

Magozzi’s phone rang, cutting Gino’s rant short. He listened for a minute, then held the phone to his chest. ‘Get everybody off their calls. We may have caught a break.’

A few minutes later Langer, McLaren, and Peterson had rolled their chairs over to hear what Magozzi had to say.

‘According to Grace’s list, Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler made a trip to Kalispell, Montana, a few years ago, but there was no Montana kill on any of Schuler’s pictures. So I called law enforcement up there, just to check it out. There was no homicide the day our threesome was there, but there was a shooting. Some old kook who lives in the woods with his adult son – apparently they’re survivalists or something like that – comes into the hospital with a.45 slug in his leg. The only thing he could give the cops was that a black pickup pulled up to the cabin, and someone inside opened fire on him and his son while they were sitting on the porch. Neither one of them got a make or a plate.’

Gino thought about that. ‘Or maybe they did, and just didn’t share it with the law. I can’t see a couple of survivalists waiting for the cops to take care of their business. Those guys hate us.’

McLaren whistled softly. ‘Wow. So maybe they left one alive.’

‘It’s possible. The old guy was the right age. And the best part is that the sheriff just took a run out there, and when there was nobody around, he talked to a neighbor. Seems the old man and his son took off in their camper a couple weeks ago, supposedly to Vegas, but the neighbor thought that was a little peculiar since they hadn’t left the property in over twenty years, and as far as he knew, they weren’t gamblers.’

Langer got up from his chair. ‘Did you get a plate?’

‘And the names.’ Magozzi passed over a scrap of paper. ‘Langer, why don’t you take Vegas, get an APB out on the plate, try to sweet-talk somebody down there into checking the campgrounds. McLaren, you get an APB on the air here, the rest of us will hit the yellow pages and split up the campgrounds around the Cities.’

The sheriff in Brainerd caught Gino between campground calls, and kept him on the phone for fifteen minutes.

‘The good news,’ Gino told Magozzi after he’d hung up, ‘is that the deer’s okay.’

‘That’s a load off.’

‘The bad news is the sheriff was tickled to death we might have a lead on who killed his resort owner, and depressed as hell when I told him they were dead. He wanted to wring their necks personally.’

‘He knew the victim?’

‘Yeah. Salt-of-the-earth, hardworking type. The old guy had a wife and two sons, one in high school, one in college in California. Six months after he bought it the resort folded and the wife killed herself.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It gets worse. The college kid died in a car wreck on his way home for his mother’s funeral.’

Magozzi stared at him. ‘Are you making this up?’

‘I wish. Anyway, the high school kid had some kind of a breakdown after that, and went to live with some of his dad’s relatives in Germany, see if he couldn’t get a life together.’

‘Germany?’

‘Right. Ties in with the Nazi thing. The sheriff’s going to pull the file and fax us everything.’ Gino blew out a sigh and pushed away his notebook. ‘But you know what? Maybe the old guy was a bad-ass and the world’s better off without him. But his wife and kids? What did they do? Makes you wonder if Morey and his crew ever stopped to think about the wreckage they were leaving behind.’

Magozzi thought about sixty pictures, sixty groups of children who might not have known that Dad was a Nazi – only that he was Dad.

‘Did you get a contact for the surviving son?’

‘Better than that. The kid called the sheriff yesterday. They got kind of close after everything started to go bad, and still keep in touch. He gave me the number. Think I should call?’

‘I think we’d better. Just to make sure he’s still there, cross him off the list.’

Gino picked up the phone. ‘Oh, happy day.’

Outside the window, the thunderheads were piled even higher, turning dark, moving in. Langer got up from his desk and turned on the lights.

37

It was hard for Marty to leave the bedroom where Hannah had slept as a child. Even though nothing of her remained in that room, he’d been able to look at the walls and the doorknob and the old wavy glass in the windows, knowing that she had seen the same things a thousand times; that wherever he walked, she had walked before him. After he’d put Morey’s.45 back in the tackle box, he couldn’t feel her around him anymore. It was almost as if she’d seen the gun and the story behind it, and had left the room forever.

He sat cross-legged on the floor for a long time after that, letting himself feel empty as the world darkened outside the windows. He had to turn the light on to finish packing his duffel, then turned it off as he headed downstairs, leaving the room dark behind him.

He found Lily alone in the living room, her face stark in the light of a table lamp. She was watching a baseball game with the sound muted. A weather warning scrolled across the bottom of the screen next to a miniature map of the state. Almost every county was colored orange.

‘Where’re Jack and Becker?’ he asked her.

‘They went out to the greenhouse. Jack left his bag out there.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Right after you went upstairs.’

Marty glanced at his watch and frowned, trying to remember what time it had been when he went up to shower and pack.

‘They’ve been out there about an hour,’ she told him. ‘You took a long time up there, Martin… Where are you going?’

‘Out to get Jack. I want to talk to him a few minutes before we leave.’

‘So talk in the car, or at the hotel.’

‘No offense, Lily, but if he knows something about who killed Morey, I don’t think he’ll talk about it in front of you.’

Lily snorted. ‘He hasn’t exactly been running off at the mouth with you, either, has he?’

‘I think I have a little more leverage now.’

That got her attention. ‘You found this in the shower?’

‘Lock the doors after me.’

‘Don’t be silly. Nobody shot at me. I’m the good person in the family.’

Marty smiled. He couldn’t help it. And that had probably been her intention. ‘I mean it, Lily. I already locked the back, and I’m going to stand outside the front door until I hear you turn the lock. And pack an overnight bag while I’m out there.’

Lily sighed in annoyance and got up to follow him to the door. ‘I already packed. Five minutes. You men are so pokey, it’s a miracle you ever get anything done.’

Marty felt the sweat bead up on his skin the minute he stepped outside. It was still breathlessly hot and oppressive. The clouds to the west had blackened, bringing on an early twilight in that eerie, grayish green that always precedes a summer storm, distorting the true colors of the world like cheap sunglasses with yellow lenses. The winding path from the house through the back planting beds was shadowed, grayed, and dulled by the strange light.