“Why would he park so far away? Doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. But most killers are stupid. And they usually don’t plan on killing anybody, so they don’t think about details like the best getaway route.”
Jake grunted to let me know he wasn’t on board with a cross-country escape.
“We’re going to need dogs to go over the fields. A mile in every direction. Call Mick in Rochester. And get the boat out on the lake with a metal detector. The killer might have tossed the knife in on his way back to the car.”
“I agree with that. I’ll have them go over every inch of the lake and shore.”
We left the scene and bumped the cruisers back over the fields to Winifred Erickson’s house. Jake kept on going toward town, but I tried her door first. No answer. Didn’t mean she wasn’t home. Most folks around here threw open the screen door at the first dust trail over the horizon, but Winifred took her notions. Sometimes she’d go weeks without showing her face in town, and I’d been sent more than once to see if she’d fallen over dead in her kitchen. She never answered the door until I was ready to bust it down and then it was with curlers tying up the leftover strands of gray on her scalp and Lars’s old pipe jutting out of her mouth, asking me if I knew how much doors cost and was I damn ready to buy her a new one. A few days later she’d appear on Main Street again, as friendly as you please. She’d been odd like that ever since she killed her husband.
I left her a note about the dog search and headed back to town.
The phones were ringing like fire alarms when I got into the office, but Nancy wasn’t at the desk. I found her in the break room getting a cup of coffee. Jake was scarfing down a sandwich while holding his phone.
“I’m on hold with Rochester,” he got out between bites. Glad to see the kid’s appetite wasn’t affected by a mutilated corpse.
“Grab me some coffee, too, Nance, will you?”
“They won’t stop, Del. They’ve been pouring in like water since about twenty minutes after you got called out there.”
“Who?” Jake asked.
“Everybody I’ve ever met, for starters, and I’m telling them to keep their noses in their own business. But the papers, too, and Shel called to see if you wanted him to come in.”
Shel was one of our four full-time deputies. With only twelve people in the whole office, we were gonna be pretty thin on the ground during a murder investigation.
“How the hell did he hear about it so quick?”
“He’s cousin to the Sanders. They called him as soon as the boy came home.”
“No, tell him we’re fine. Jake can take any emergencies from here.”
“But I’ve got to open the case,” Jake protested.
“I’m opening this case.”
“I lead the investigations unit, Del.”
“And I’m the sheriff of this county.”
I didn’t pull rank on him that often and he didn’t look any too pleased that I had now. Didn’t matter. This was my case. Nancy followed me into my office with the coffee.
“No calls for the next twenty minutes. And this case needs to be locked down. Not a word or a nod to anyone before I tell you. We can confirm one dead female by stabbing. That’s all.”
“You know me, Del. I’m a black hole.”
She made to leave and then turned around. “Was it bad?”
I looked up the number on my phone and sighed. “It’s going to get worse.”
“I’m sorry, Del. I’ll get a press release ready for when the ID is confirmed.”
Nancy shut the door behind her. I sighed and looked at the picture on the wall of me holding up a thirty-pound muskie on Lake Michigan, the biggest fish I’d ever caught in fresh waters. Bud had called him my monster and then practically outdid me the very next day with a twenty-six-pounder of his own. Jesus Christ. I hit the call button before I could think any more about it.
He answered on the first ring. “Is it her?”
I gritted my teeth, took a breath. “You’ve heard.”
“Mona’s out of her mind for worrying. What do you know?”
“Can’t say who it is yet.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Bud’s voice didn’t rise or change at all, but I’d never heard him ask that kind of question of me in the twenty-five years we’d been friends.
“Can’t, Bud. There was some . . . trauma . . . to the face and we can’t make a positive ID.” He didn’t say anything to that, although I knew he was taking it in somehow, and his picture of the dead girl who could be his daughter just got a whole lot uglier.
The last time anybody’d seen Hattie, according to Bud, was on Friday night after her play up at the school. Bud and Mona’d gone to see it and they hugged her afterwards and said not to be too late, but Hattie never came home.
“You remember what Hattie was wearing last night, Bud?”
“Her costume. It was a dress.”
“A sundress?”
“No, a white dress with blood all over it. Fake blood. And she had a crown on.”
“Would she have changed out of that before leaving?”
“I guess.”
“Does she own a yellow sundress with some ruffly stuff on it?”