“What's this about a guy with a rifle?” Rose Marie said. “They said a guy with a rifle was waiting for you.”
“Must have changed his mind,” Lucas said. “Come on. Everything's still there. You saw the cops when you came in?”
“Of course. A convention. So tell me about it.”
A guy was out running shortly after first light, Lucas told her. He was a marathoner, running out of his home, weaving down the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi, across the Ford Bridge into St. Paul, weaving some more-he tried to get exactly six miles in-north to the Lake Street Bridge and back across the river to Minneapolis.
One of his zigs took him around the corner from Lucas's house. As he approached the Lexus, in the early-morning light, he noticed a splash on the back window that looked curiously like blood in a thriller movie. As he passed the car, he glanced into the backseat and saw the white face and open mouth of a dead fat man, with a rifle lying across his belly.
“Freaked me out when I looked in there,” Lucas admitted. “Last thing in the world that I expected. Leslie Widdler.”
“Better him than you,” Rose Marie said. “What kind of rifle? If he'd taken a shot at you?”
“A.300 Mag,” Lucas said. “Good for elk, caribou, moose. If he'd shot me with that thing, my ass'd have to take the train back from Ohio.”
“Nice that you can joke about it,” Rose Marie said.
“I'm not laughing,” Lucas said. They walked up to a cop who was keeping a sharp eye on the yellow crime-scene tape. Lucas pointed at Rose Marie and said, “Rose Marie Roux. Department of Public Safety.”
The cop lifted the tape, and asked her, “Can I have a job?”
She patted him once on the cheek. “I'm sure you're too nice a boy to work for me.”
“Hey, I'm not,” the cop said to her back. “I'm a jerk. Really.” To Lucas, as Lucas ducked under the tape, “Seriously. I'm an asshole.”
“I'll tell her,” Lucas said.
Rose Marie had briefly been a street cop before she moved into administration, law school, politics, and power. She walked carefully down the route suggested by one of the crime-scene cops, cocked an eye in the window, looked at Widdler, backed away, and said, “That made a mark.”
“Yeah.”
“He killed Bucher? For sure?” she asked.
“He and his wife, I think. I don't know what all of this is about- except… You've been briefed on the Jesse Barth kidnapping attempt, and the firebombing.”
She nodded: “Screw the pooch.”
“The Screw thing and bomb, might have been an… effort, attempt, something… to distract me,” Lucas said. “To get me looking at something else, while the Bucher thing went away. Might have worked, too, except for the white van, and then Gabriella.”
He scratched his head. “Man, is this a mess, or what?”
“Then he decided on direct action, shooting you with a moose gun, but chickened out and shot himself instead?” She was dubious.
“That's what I got,” Lucas said. “Doesn't make me happy.”
“What about the wife?”
“As soon as the crime-scene guys get finished with the basics, we're going to lift up Leslie's pant legs,” Lucas said. “See if he's got Screw holes. If he does, we go have an unpleasant talk with Jane.”
“If he doesn't?”
“We'll still have an unpleasant conversation with Jane. Then everybody'll talk to lawyers and we go back into the weeds to figure out what to do next,” Lucas said.
“How much of this would have happened if Burt Kline hadn't been banging a teenager?”
Lucas had to think about it, finally sighed: “Maybe… there'd be one or two more people alive, but we wouldn't solve the Bucher case.”
They were standing, talking, when John Smith showed up, looking sleepy, said, “Really?”-looked into the car, said, “Holy shit.”
“You want to come along and talk to Jane?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah,” Smith said. “This whole thing is…” He waved a hand in the air; couldn't think of a phrase for it.
“Screwed up?” Rose Marie offered.
Eventually four guys from the Medical Examiner's Office carefully lifted, pulled, and rolled Leslie Widdler's body out of the Lexus and onto a ground-level gurney.
“Guy shoulda worn a wide-load sign,” one of them said. When they got him flat, one of the ME investigators asked Lucas, “Which leg?”
“Both,” Lucas said.
They only needed the first one. Widdler's left leg was riddled with what looked like small-caliber gunshot wounds, surrounded by half-dollar-sized bruises going yellow at the edges. There were a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Though they didn't really need it, they pulled up the other pant leg and found more bites.
“Good enough for me,” Smith said. “DNA will confirm it, but that, my friends, is what happens when you fuck with a pit bull.”
“Half pit bull,” Lucas said.
“What was the other half?” Rose Marie asked.
“Nobody knows,” Lucas said. “Probably a rat terrier.”
On the way to Widdler's, Lucas and Smith talked about an arrest. They believed that Leslie had been bitten by a dog, but had no proof that Screw had done the biting.
That was yet to come, with the DNA tests. But DNA tests take a while. They knew there had been a second person involved, a driver. They knew that Jane Widdler had probably profited from at least three killings, in the looting of the Donaldson, Bucher, and Toms mansions, but they didn't have a single piece of evidence that would prove it.
“We push her,” Smith said. “We read her rights to her, we push, see if she says anything.
We make the call.”
“We take her over to look at Leslie, put some stress on her,” Lucas said. “I've got a warrant coming, both for her house and the shop.
I'll have my guys sit on both places… look for physical evidence, records. We'll let her know that, maybe crack her on the way to see Leslie.”
“If she doesn't crack?”
“We do the research. We'll get her sooner or later,” Lucas said. “There's no way Leslie Widdler pulled these killings off on his own. No way.”