Page 38

If Harry knew anything, it was that you couldn’t count on people to keep their mouths shut. In this town, gossip was a brushfire. Once it got going, there wasn’t much to stop it. Wouldn’t be long before Rachel Bosma, that reporter for theLucknow Leader, would be calling him.

After he’d given the bacon sandwich to Gavin and met, briefly, the owner of that train shop, he felt rejuvenated and went back to the scene. With the sun up, he’d be able to get a better look at things. He’d sent out one of his other officers, Nancy Clarkson, to relieve Stick, telling her to set up barriers about a quarter mile in each direction from where the body had been found. Not just to keep gawkers away, but to walk that stretch in case something might have been missed. Someone might have had more than just that one body to dispose of. After all, there weretwoLucknow men missing.

“Hey, Nancy,” Harry said when he walked up to her cruiser. She had the driver’s-side back door open, her legs and butt sticking out as she searched for something on the floor.

She crawled back out, stood at attention, and made a brushing-herself-off gesture even though there was nothing on her. Looking sheepish, she said, “Hey, boss.”

“Lose something?”

“My stupid Palm Pilot thing. With all my phone numbers and appointments and everything.”

“When’d you lose it?”

“Haven’t seen it in a couple of days. My whole life’s in there.”

Harry smiled. “I have this thing called a day planner. I write stuff in it with a pencil.”

Nancy sighed. She been with the Lucknow Police for five years, and, lost Palm Pilot aside, she was as sharp as they came. Harry figured he’d lose her one day to someplace like Burlington or Montpelier, or maybe she’d make the jump to Boston or Albany. More money, more challenges. She was married, with a three-year-old son.

“Marty’s been and gone, took the body with him,” she said. The coroner.

“Okay.”

“And I’ve walked both sides of the road, quarter mile in each direction, and didn’t see a thing, but I can take another run at it, go a little farther off the road.”

“Sounds good,” Harry said. “You knocked on any doors?”

There were several houses along this stretch but spaced far apart and set back some distance from the road.

“No,” Nancy said. “Needed to stay close, in case anyone drove around the barriers. Had one guy give me a hard time, said he was gonna be late for work. I started to get out my ticket book and he turned around. We don’t know yet who it is?”

Harry shook his head.

“I had a look,” Nancy said, looking grim. “You think an animal did that to him?”

He shook his head again. “No. You hang in, I’ll ask around.”

Harry went to the house closest to where the body had been left, a simple one-story with peeling white paint, several missing shingles, and a rusted tractor in the front yard tangled in enough weeds and grasses that it had become an integral part of the landscaping.

There was a battered Chevy in the drive that dated back to the seventies. The car looked familiar to Harry, who thought he’d pulled it over more than once. He rapped on the front door and waited for the sounds of footsteps within.

The door creaked open twenty seconds later. A man in pajama bottoms and a stained sleeveless undershirt, what Harry thought of as a “wife-beater,” squinted at him.

“Yeah?”

Harry introduced himself, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the patrol cars stationed out on the road. “Had a bit of an incident last night and I was hoping you might be able to help us.”

“What kinda incident?”

“Wondering if you saw or heard anything out of the ordinary last night between, say, eleven and two or three in the morning?”

The man continued to squint. “Don’t I know you?”

“It’s possible, sir. What’s your name?”

“Darrell Crohn, Esquire.”

Harry’s eyebrows rose briefly. “Esquire. So, you’re a lawyer, Mr. Crohn?”