Eleven Little Piggies (26 page)

‘A word or two. This morning, he said a whole sentence.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He had a copy of that picture – the one your detective Winnie was leaving around on tables in the hospital? Evidently Alan picked one up last night. This morning he held it up to me and said, “That man carried Daddy”.'

‘Maynard? He's saying Maynard carried your husband?'

‘That's what he said. Yes.'

‘Where? Were you able to ask him where?'

‘Yes. I asked him if he could show me, and he made his little come-along sign . . . it's one of the signs he only does with me. So I followed him and he led me to the walk-in cooler.'

I was breathing funny myself by now. I asked her, ‘Doris, did you ask him where Maynard carried him from there?'

‘Sure. And he tried to answer but . . . he was getting tired. His attention span is very short, so staying on one subject exhausts him. But for just a second he made that rum-rum noise that he uses to mean a vehicle.'

‘So you think he's saying Maynard carried your husband from the cooler room to the pickup?'

‘I think so. But his concentration was gone by then, so when I asked him, “Did he carry Daddy to his pickup?” he just nodded his head once or twice and looked away. But he must have meant the pickup – that's what Owen had there.'

‘It would have been right there nearby, wouldn't it? Where Owen meant to load it with supplies?'

‘Yes.'

‘Doris, this is very exciting – this is more of a break than we've had. But listen, who else knows about this?'

‘Nobody. Alan and I were all alone here; we'd just gotten out of bed when he showed me the picture. And I haven't told anybody else yet.'

‘Good, then don't.'

‘OK, fine.'

‘No, Doris, I mean be totally certain you do not tell another living soul about this until I say it's OK, understand?' I could hardly explain to her that the buildings at her farm seemed to be leaking information. I didn't believe that myself, literally, but something was going on that enabled this killer to stay one step ahead of us. I could feel it in my bones, and I was beginning to think it put her and Alan in awful danger. ‘Promise me,' I said.

‘
All right
, I won't! But . . . you do believe me about this, don't you?'

‘Absolutely. And we're going to go to work on it right away. We've already got a search going for Maynard's records, and now we'll . . . accelerate the search.' The last sentence sounded lame to me even as I said it, but luckily I was able to fold up my phone before Doris told me I was talking baloney.

I hurried over to Ray's office and found him, of course, on the phone. But he was wearing a look that said his caller was telling him something extremely interesting, so when he pointed to the chair in front of his desk I sat down in it and waited. ‘Good, good,' he said, and, ‘fine.' Buoyed up by those pleasant words, and the fact that he was making rapid notes while he said them, I waited some more, even though waiting made me want to jump out of my skin.

Finally he said, ‘And you're faxing all that down to me? That's great, Doug. Thanks.'

He hung up and gave me a most un-Bailey-like smile.

I said, ‘What?'

He said, ‘Maynard Phelps's real name was Artie Pritzer, and he was one naughty boy.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Arrests stretching back twenty years, three convictions . . . the first one for assault, as a juvenile.' He read from his notes. ‘The other two for dealing, in ascending order of magnitude. Artie was pretty big in the drug trade, a little farther down the Mississippi. Mostly down around Saint Louis, looks like.'

‘So what the hell was he doing on a farm in Minnesota?'

‘A whole lot that wasn't in his job description, I bet.'

‘Including one very puzzling thing I just heard about.' I told him about Doris Kester's phone call.

Ray said, ‘I feel like my brain's going into gridlock.'

‘Me too, but we can't freeze now, because I can feel this coming to a
point
, can't you? Something's going to pop and when it does we need to be ready to – oh, shit, that phone!'

But he was already answering it, and this time his face was folding into the old familiar Bailey gloom. ‘Andy,' he said, ‘I don't have time to . . . wait, what?' And then his face changed, a little, and he said with more respect, ‘Wait a minute, Andy, I never said . . . OK, yes, I
hear you,
Jesus, don't get so – I'll be right there.'

He hung up the phone and got up in one move. In the next he was clipping on his Glock, pulling his vest out of the console. He looked a little pale.

‘Ray,' I said, ‘what did Andy say?'

‘He said, “Quit being such a shithead and get out here. Winnie found something”.'

‘So now you're headed for the farm?'

‘Yup.' He patted himself all over, nodded, and walked out of his office.

I opened my mouth to say that I would field his calls when the rogue thought surfaced:
He's going where all his calls would
come from
. I darted into my own office and repeated most of the moves I had just watched Ray make. Glock, Taser . . . I couldn't find a can of Mace, but I took my Streamlight and an extra clip for the Glock. I reached the top of the stairs just as Ray was going out the door. Bo was on the other side, reaching for the handle. I saw Ray say something, without breaking stride, and Bo turned and followed him to his car.

A skanky wind was raising dust and ice-crusted snow off the parking lot, as the first flakes of the coming storm drifted down. The sky was a dirty puce color. I pulled on my lights and turned into the street, where everybody else had their lights on too. I shivered and turned up the heat, and at the first stop light I zipped my jacket and pulled on gloves. Minnesota was getting ready to show us her ugly side.

Three department vehicles were parked in the yard at the farm. Ray and I pulled into line beside them and the three of us walked to the barn, where Winnie stood waiting for us. Doris was there, too, with Alan in his usual position, near her side but not touching.

Winnie said, ‘The others are waiting for us in the loft.' She led us down the aisle, past stalls that were suddenly all occupied. The small arena in the center of the barn was filled, too, with unhaltered animals eating hay out of haysacks hung from the posts, and I noticed that the building was a lot warmer than outside, thanks to the body heat of so many animals.

‘I've been moving them in all day,' Doris said. ‘It's going to be too cold outside for a few days, especially for the ones that have been in the barn and don't have full winter coats.'

We walked on, to the back of the barn where a long wooden trapdoor was pulled down and tied off to bolts at the side of the aisle, so the steps built onto the back of it formed a stairway up.

Up in the fragrant loft we found Andy, Clint and Rosie kneeling around the trove of evil treasure Winnie had found.

‘There's the package of . . . Andy thinks it's cocaine,' Doris said, pointing to a tight-wrapped white brick, well taped. Doris's voice was muffled; she spoke in the hushed tones of a person at a wake. And every time the barn timbers creaked in the rising wind, I noticed, she looked around. The fearless farmer lady of yesterday was a little spooked now.

‘Well, it stands to reason,' Andy said. ‘It isn't pot, and the autopsy showed coke in Maynard, right? And this, I think, is the short-handled crowbar that killed poor Elmer.' He was wearing spandex gloves, as were Clint and Rosie – they were getting the items packed in cartons, ready to move to town.

‘But this . . . elegant little blue rope,' Winnie said. ‘What is it good for? So nicely finished on both ends, see? Almost looks like a lariat except it's too small.'

‘Ah, so you used to ride horses but you didn't ever try rodeo riding, huh?' Clint held it up, and I felt a little balloon forming over my head. I looked at Ray. He looked as if he felt a balloon growing too.

‘A piggin string,' Ray said.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘Perfect.'

Clint looked up from the carton he was holding. ‘For what?'

‘For a garrote. I believe we're going to prove it killed the felon named Artie Pritzer.'

‘That's the no-good formerly known as Maynard?'

‘Yes, indeed.'

‘Ray, you look downright happy,' Rosie said. ‘Is that appropriate at this time?'

‘Maybe not, but I can't help myself. A piggin string, is that a hole in the boat or what?'

‘It is.' I knelt by the group. ‘What about this twine gizmo? Looks like it might be a plant holder.'

‘Probably was,' Andy said. ‘Looks like it was adapted by some clever climber to help him up and down through those hay chutes.'

‘Winnie,' Ray said, ‘where'd you find all this stuff?'

‘Up in the eaves under the roof,' she said, ‘where the swallows roost, and the owls. You want to see it now?'

We followed her across the hollow-sounding floorboards of the hayloft. The front rows of hay bales had been used up, so there were bare spots to walk in, next to the front wall of the barn. All the rest of the space was packed tight with clover-smelling hay.

When Winnie stopped, she said, ‘These pieces of wood nailed onto the uprights here, they make a ladder to climb up on, see? And there's a kind of cubby built up there. You can see the bottom from here.' She pointed. ‘Almost like a child's tree house.'

‘I think that's what it was, once,' Doris said. ‘Owen said they used to play up here when they were kids. Pirates and explorers, games like that.'

‘How'd you find it, Winnie?' I asked her.

‘Alan showed me,' she said. The boy was standing by his mother but, at the mention of his name, when everybody turned to look at him, he shrank back.

‘He made a little gesture that I took to mean, follow me,' Winnie said. ‘And when we got over here he shinnied up this hand-built ladder. So I followed him up . . .'

Doris's face was filled with conflicting emotions: jealousy that he'd shown someone else one of his secret signs, fear for his obvious vulnerability – and then pride won out. ‘I've always let him wander all he likes when we're out here in the barn together,' she said. ‘I guess he knows this place better than I do by now.'

‘How'd you get all that stuff down, though, Winnie?'

‘Well, I couldn't, by myself, so I went down and told the others, and everybody gloved up and followed me.' Behind her hand, she giggled discreetly. ‘Rosie climbed right up behind me. The others came part-way and we passed things down.'

A big gust of wind shook the sides of the barn suddenly, followed by a bullet-like sound of wind-driven sleet.

‘The weather's closing in,' Andy said. ‘We'd better pack up and get this stuff downtown.'

‘Doris,' Ray said, ‘we would all like to urge you to move into town until this is over.'

‘No. I've hired two more security guys to stay in the house and barn with me at night. They'll be inside, and the other two outside – we'll be fine.'

Sure. Just like Elmer was fine here last night
. It was in my mind to say it, and when I looked around I saw all the other detectives thinking it too. But she owned this place – it was her call. So we all turned toward the back.

Bo led down the stairs, Andy and Clint and Rosie coming behind him each carrying a piece of the evidence Winnie had found. Doris came behind them looking at her watch, saying to Winnie, ‘I've got to get over to the dairy now, and help Charlie get the milk ready for the haulers.'

I was last, coming down those noisy wooden steps into the yeasty-smelling barn where the crowded animals fed and the barn timbers creaked in the wind. Halfway down I heard the cry – was it an owl? But Doris turned toward it and said, ‘Alan?' And then screamed, ‘Alaaann!' and pushed Rosie ahead of her down the last two steps. Then all the detectives dropped what they were carrying and streaked out of the barn with her.

We reached the yard in time to see Alan's terrified face in the rear window of a gray Silverado pickup I'd never seen before. As we reached the yard it drove out the gate and disappeared into a white cloud of whirling snow.

We all ran to our vehicles and set out in pursuit of a vehicle we couldn't see any more – all but Bo, who ran to the little open-air Jeep that was parked by the front gate. He must have noticed when he came in that the keys were in the ignition. He climbed in and started it now, and roared out the driveway at the head of the pack, directly behind the pickup.

We could see each other, intermittently – the snow would let up a little and we'd see Bo in the Jeep just behind the dark gray truck. Driving fast into a white-out, surrounded by other vehicles doing the same thing, felt like every bad dream I ever had.

The next time the storm lifted I saw Bo in the ditch alongside the driveway, pulling even with the pickup and then a little ahead. Then I saw nothing but white-out for a terrible couple of seconds that felt like a week. But just as we reached the main road I saw Bo ahead veering the Jeep broadside in front of the pickup, which rammed into it and took it aboard.

Bo disappeared across the top of the Silverado into the ditch on the other side. But even a high-powered pickup with snow tires wasn't going far in a snowstorm with a Jeep draped across its windshield. It slowed to a crawl and then we were all there, swarming the pickup on both sides, tearing the doors open, pulling the driver out. Andy had him, holding him aloft like a newborn calf squealing and kicking. Not cool at all anymore.

Winnie had Alan almost out of the backseat, turning to give him to his mother. But Doris wasn't beside her any longer; she had stooped to take something out of her boot and now was running full tilt toward the viciously struggling figure of Matt Kester, who was clamped in Andy's iron embrace. Doris's face was terrible now, she had the knife raised and she was going to reach him before any of us could get there to stop her.