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“Shhh!”

Andersson draws a finger across his lips, zipping them shut.

It does sound funny, because the caller was using a voice-altering device, maybe a vocoder. It sounds like a man, then a woman, then a man again.

“Hello, Plains Truth. I’m with the Kansas Highway Patrol. I’m not investigating the Yvonne Wicker murder but I’ve seen the reports. Your readers might like to know the man who discovered the body is Daniel M. Coughlin. He’s a janitor at Wilder High School. He lives in the Oak Grove Trailer Park—”

“I never printed the address,” Andersson says. “I thought that would be—”

“Shhh! Go back.”

Andersson flinches and does something with his mouse.

“—Wilder High School. He lives in the Oak Grove Trailer Park in the town of Manitou. You should print that right away.” There’s a pause. “He is KBI’s prime suspect because he claims he had a dream of where the body was. The investigators don’t believe him. You might want to save that for a follow-up. Just a suggestion.” There’s another pause. Then the vocoder voice says, “Fifteen. Goodbye.”

There’s a click, followed by someone who wants Plains Truth to know the July 4th festivities in Wilder County have been postponed until the 8th, very sorry. Andersson kills the sound and looks at Davis. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she says. She’s not. She’s sick to her stomach. “Play it again.”

She takes out her phone and hits record.

48

Back in her car, with the air conditioning on high, Davis listens to it again. Then she turns off her phone and stares through the windshield at Cathcart’s dusty Main Street. She’s thinking of an arson case she worked with Jalbert in the spring. It was in a rural town called Lindsborg. On their way to the site, they passed a field where a few cows were grazing. Ella, riding shotgun that day, counted them aloud, just for something to do.

“Seven,” she said.

“Twenty-eight,” Jalbert replied, with no pause.

She gave him a questioning look and he told her one to seven added up to twenty-eight. He said adding inclusively passed the time and also kept him mentally sharp. She thought her partner might have a little touch of OCD. She’d even looked up the name of that particular compulsion on her phone, then dismissed it. Everyone had their little tics, didn’t they? She herself couldn’t go to sleep until all the dishes were washed and put away… but she had never considered counting them.

Now, sitting in her car, she thinks of Peter Andersson’s outgoing message. Five choices, and when you added one two three four five, the total was…

“Fifteen,” she says. “It was him. Fuck. Fuck!”

She sits awhile longer, trying to convince herself that she’s wrong. She can’t do it. Absolutely can’t. So she calls Troop C of the Kansas Highway Patrol, identifies herself, and asks for a callback from Trooper Calten, as soon as possible.

While she waits for the callback—which she dreads—she asks herself what she’s going to do with what she now knows.

49

Danny gets all the empty boxes he wants at Manitou Fine Liquors. He also gets a fifth of Jim Beam. At four o’clock that afternoon the boxes are piled up in his bedroom and the bottle of Beam is on the kitchen table. He sits there looking at it with his hands folded in front of him. He’s trying to think of the last time he drank whiskey. Not on the night he got arrested for standing on Margie’s lawn and shouting at her house; that night he’d been beered up. He’d downed almost a case of Coors between Manitou and Wichita. He could still remember vomiting it up into the stainless steel toilet of the cell they put him in, then going to sleep not on the bunk but underneath it, as if sleeping on concrete was some kind of penance.

He decides the last time he got into the high-tension stuff was fishing with Deke Mathers. The two of them were so loaded they didn’t find their way out to Route 327 until it was almost dark, by then both of them badly hungover and promising never again, never again. He didn’t know how that had worked out with Deke, Danny had lost touch with him since moving to Oak Grove, but he hadn’t touched brown liquor since. Not any beer for the last couple of years, either.

Jim Beam won’t solve his problems, he knows that. They’ll still be there when he gets up on Tuesday morning, only with a hangover to add to his misery. But what it would do is to blot out DJ’s sad face, at least for awhile. She said What if Ma decides she wants Bobby for a boyfriend again? She said He can’t fix the car if it busts! She said (and somehow this was the worst of all, God knew why) I don’t want cake, I don’t care if I ever have cake again.

“That dream,” he says. “That fucking goddam dream.”

Only the dream isn’t really the problem. Jalbert is the problem. Jalbert has sprayed his goddam life with his version of Agent Orange. He’s trying to poison everything, including a little girl who thought her life was pretty much okey-dokey: her mom finally had a boyfriend Darla Jean liked, who didn’t shout and send her from the table without her supper.

Jalbert.

All Jalbert.

Danny unscrews the cap, tips the bottle toward himself, takes a good long sniff. He remembers how he and Deke Mathers laughed there on the riverbank, everything fine. Then he remembers how they cursed as they shoved through that final blackberry tangle to the road, getting all scratched up and sweating into those scratches, making the sting even worse.

Jalbert would love you to get drunk, he thinks. Get drunk and do something stupid.