“And you came down and picked up the body with your wrecker, and put her in the ditch.”

“I guess,” he said. “That’s the goddamnedest thing,” the Goodhue deputy said. “You should have gone right straight to the police."

"You weren’t there,” Davis moaned. “You weren’t there."

"And you loved her?” Lucas asked. “I did then, but that’s gone away,” Davis said. “That crazy bitch. I see her looking at me… she was scaring me. I think, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be around when she had a knife in her hand.”

“When she killed the other ones, were you around for that?” Lucas asked.

“What?"

"When she killed-"

"She didn’t kill anybody else,” Davis said. “I mean, I know that. We were together when those other people were killed, and we weren’t anywhere around there.”

“What about Frank?” Del asked. “Frank who?"

"Frank Willett?"

"I don’t know any Frank Willett. Who’s he?”

GOODHUE COUNTY was part of a sheriff’s co- op and the deputy called in the crime- scene team, and they all trucked back to the trailer. Davis told them where the pistol was, the one he’d used to shoot at Lucas, and they marked it. And they dug out the folder from the Riverside bank, the one that would have Emily Wau’s fingerprints on it.

“Whose idea was the Francis thing-calling you Frank, so the ID would be good?” Lucas asked.

“Helen figured that out,” Davis said. “Where’d you get the ID?”He shrugged: “Trucker. Them things float around, you can get any name you want.”

“Did you have one of Frances’s credit cards or something? I understand you had to have two forms of ID.”

Davis’s head bobbed. “Yeah… Helen got one of those offers in the mail, for a credit card, already approved. She mailed it back, and the card came. That’s what started the whole thing. That right there.”

THEY WERE OUTSIDE, in the dark, about to put Davis in the deputy’s car, when another car topped the hill by the neighbor’s farmhouse, and Davis said, “That’s Helen, coming home from work.”

Sobotny’s car slowed at the turnoff, as Lucas hustled back to the truck, and then straightened and continued down the road. Del piled into the passenger seat, and they went after her, caught her a mile away, flashers going, and she finally pulled over by a stop sign.

They came up behind her, slowly, carefully, and found her with her head resting on the center pad of the steering wheel.

Lucas said, “Come out of there.” She sat up for a moment, staring straight ahead, like she was considering other possibilities, then turned the key and shut down the car, and got out.

“Agent Davenport,” she said. “Helen."

"What’s happened?"

"Ricky rolled the truck. You might have seen it back there in the ditch,” he said. “I thought…” she began. Then: “Never mind.” Del said, “Tell you what, ma’am. Ricky sort of spilled his guts."

"Yes, that’s what he’d do,” she said. She looked at Del and sighed

“We weren’t smart enough to get away with this. We just weren’t smart enough. Maybe I was, but Ricky… Ricky’s a lunkhead.”

“Why’d you kill the other three?” Lucas asked. She frowned. “The other three? You mean… We didn’t kill those people. We’re not crazy. This has all been a mistake, that’s what it was. We didn’t want to hurt anybody-we certainly didn’t kill anybody else.”

Lucas looked at Del and said, “Ah, boy. I thought we had it wrapped.”

And to Sobotny: “You have the right to remain silent…”

24

THEY PROCESSED Davis and Sobotny in St. Paul. Sobotny asked for an attorney; Davis, miserable, declined an attorney, and made a statement, admitting that he’d moved the body and destroyed evidence: the knife used in the killing was in the woods, somewhere between the Austin house and the spot where the body was found, and he had no exact idea where.

He said that he moved the body in the wrecker, which made good the evidence taken off the plastic sheet, and out of the wrecker bed.

Sobotny actually hadn’t driven to the Austin house that morning, because her car’s water pump was out, and Davis had driven her to the Austins’. After the killing, they’d hastily cleaned up with paper towels and some “cleaning stuff” taken from the broom closet, which made good the crime- scene lab reports on the floor. Then they’d loaded the body into the wrecker, and Davis had taken it out a few miles and pitched it in a ditch. Sobotny had driven Frances’s car back to Frances’s neighborhood, and parked it, in an effort to conceal the fact that Frances had been at the house that afternoon.

“Honest to God, I was so freaked out that I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “She was telling me what to do, pushing me around, and by the time I got to thinking about it, it was all done and I was in the shit. I knew it wasn’t gonna work. My dad said, ‘If you ever do anything crooked, the ’thorities will get you.’ He said that all the time, and we kids all believed it, and here it is, the proof.”

“If you didn’t plan to do anything bad, what about the money?” Lucas asked. “You had to plan the fifty thousand dollars.”

Davis’s tongue flicked out. “Yeah. I guess. I just kept thinking about them birds. No cholesterol, no fat. Them birds were gonna be my career.”

He said he was sorry, that he would never do anything like that again, and asked who would feed his birds. They had to be fed that evening and again the next morning. Del called the Goodhue County Humane Society, and the woman who answered the phone said that one way or another, they’d take care of it.

The statement was recorded. Lucas, Del, and the Goodhue cop made statements about the arrest procedure, the reading of the Miranda warning, which was critical, because Davis had simply blurted out the confession.

And when they were done, Del said, “I think we’re good.” The Goodhue deputy, a cheerful farm boy with a blond flattop, slapped Del on the back, hitched up his gun belt, and said, “Man, I was in on a murder arrest. First time for that, eh? You’re looking at the deputy of the month.”

BY THE TIME they got out, it was nine o’clock, a small, cold- looking moon coming up in the east, with clouds ripping across it, almost like at Halloween.

They stood together in the parking lot while Lucas talked to Jenkins, who’d relieved Shrake at the drugstore apartment, watching Heather.

“She took a long hot bath tonight,” Jenkins said. “Now I gotta find another woman."

"What happened to the last one?"

"Wore me out,” Jenkins said. “And she always listening to that fuckin’ piano music, that Well- Tempered Clavier shit. Enough to drive a saint to drink.”

“But nothing going on."

"Well, I’d call that bath something, but in your cop frame of reference, no. No sign of anybody,” Jenkins said. “But you know, I got the feeling that she’s doing this on purpose: she’s holding us here.”

“She’s a performer,” Lucas said. “She’s a goddamn snake,” Jenkins said. “Though I gotta say, that’s the kind I like.”

LUCAS HAD CALLED Weather to tell her about the arrests, and she was waiting to hear more when he got home. “I couldn’t believe it-the case was like an egg that got broken. All of a sudden, crack,” she said. “What did Alyssa say?”

“I haven’t told her,” Lucas said. “I’m going to call her now, I’m going over there. I’d like you to come along.”

“Me?"

"Won’t take long,” Lucas said. “You’re cutting tomorrow morning?"

"Yes, but nothing big. I’ve got to graft some skin on a tumor site. I could do it in my sleep."

"So come on with me to Alyssa’s,” Lucas said.

LUCAS CALLED AHEAD, and told Austin they had some news, and that he wanted to come over. She’d be waiting.