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“Yeah. You remember a judge named Alex Sand?”
“I remember the name...”
Lucas filled her in on what he knew about the murders. “He’s afriend, was a friend, of Edie’s. She asked me to go over there and take a look.”
“Good. That’s really good, going back to work,” Weather said. “Take it easy when you’re walking around. I understand it’s raining, you don’t want to fall on your bad side.”
“You mean my ass?”
“No, I don’t mean your ass. I mean your shoulder and your ribcage.”
She didn’t say she was sorry about Sand because she didn’t know him, and Lucas had been working murder cases since the day they’d met; too many unknown dead people over the years to be genuinely sorry about.
She did say they’d found and connected the arteries in the kid’s fingers and were in the process of connecting veins. “I should be home in two or three hours.”
“See you then,” Lucas said. “I’m not officially on the case, and maybe I’ll never be, so I shouldn’t be out too late.”
2
St. Paul is an old town, and weathered. Two or three affluent avenues were left over from the nineteenth century, where the rich had built their mansions—the railroad executives, the 3M people, the brewery owners.
There were smaller enclaves of newer affluent streets.
Most of the city, though, had been built of pine studs and Sheetrock, for workingmen, from the nineteenth century through the period immediately after World War II. In general, the houses were small and closely spaced, now dilapidated with worn and awkward additions that did not add to their beauty.
The city once had a geographically coherent black community, but that, of course, was where I-94 had been built, and the community had been atomized.
Lucas lived on one of the newer affluent streets, as far to the west as the city got.
Mississippi River Boulevard ran along the east side of the river. He couldn’t see the river from his house because it was at the bottom of a steep-cut, heavily wooded valley; backing out of his garage, the mist-veiled houses of Minneapolis were visible across the gorge, glowing like miniature colored lanterns perched on a shelf.
Lamb had wondered if he could hear the sirens responding to the Sand murders, but his home was five miles from Crocus Circle, one of the old rich streets, so he hadn’t. He took the river boulevard north and then turned east, windshield wipers squeaking away the rain, as the battery-powered car hissed silently along the dark streets.
He managed to hit almost every red traffic light between his house and Sand’s home and got stuck behind a group of plastic-wrapped night-riding cyclists hogging a lane, and so took fifteen minutes to get to the murder scene.
There, he parked behind a collection of cop cars, both marked and unmarked. A forensic van sat directly in front of the house, on the wrong side of the street. A loose crowd of neighbors stood under umbrellas, watching the action.
As he fished his own umbrella out of the passenger-side footwell, he squinted through the rain trickling down the windshield. The Sands definitely had been rich, he thought, or at least well-financed. In a city where housing prices were low, by American standards, the house where they lived would sell for at least a million, and probably more.
Two kids dead. Not a pleasant prospect. He’d seen a lot of ugly in his life, which might have contributed to his depressive episodes.He wouldn’t quit what he was doing because what he was doing was interesting. He could be angered by the ugliness, but not undone. Lucas stepped out of the Cayenne, put the umbrella up, and walked across the street toward the house. A uniformed St. Paul cop moved to intercept him, stopped when he recognized Lucas, and said, “Hey, man.”
“Hey, Steve. How bad is it?” Lucas asked.
“Bad enough,” Steve said. A bulky man, he was wearing a knee-length raincoat and had a plastic wrapper on his uniform hat. His face was wet from the mist, and water droplets glittered from his eyebrows and glasses. “I haven’t seen them.”
Lucas: “Understand they were shot.”
“Yup. All three of them. The wife found them,” Steve said. “I’m told the judge got it four times, the kids twice each. The shooter made a real mess.”
“Wife inside?” Lucas asked.
“Don’t know. Haven’t seen her and I haven’t been inside. They put me out directing raindrops, soon as I got here. Forensics is already working it.”
Lucas nodded: “Saw their van,” and, “Take it easy, man.”
“Yup. You, too. Hey: get well.”
“I’m working on it,” Lucas said.
