medical care she needs.”
“You get paid for taking Coop back to Chicago for the police to have a whack at? We know about your methods down here. This may be a spot on the map to a lady from Chicago but we’re not bone ignorant.”
“My father was a Chicago cop and one of the best, most moral people I’ve ever known,” I said. “Chicago and our police are like any other place or occupation—some are bad, some are good, most are in the middle zone. But, no, I don’t want to take Coop back to Chicago. And I’m not a bounty hunter. No one is paying me to look for Coop.
“I’d like to give Bear back to him—he’s a great dog, but I have two of my own and if I take on Bear I’ll be evicted from my apartment. Anyway, anyway, this story keeps sprouting new tentacles, like an octopus with an infinite number of legs. Since I’ve been down here talking to people about Arthur Morton, I realized—there’s no doubt he killed all those people, but a lot of questions about the trial, about his lawyers, about his suicide, could use some probing.”
She thought over what I’d said. “What makes you think Coop is around here?”
“The women I spoke to at Kansas State’s Conservation department remembered him and thought he might have come from somewhere in the Salina area. Coop is a passionate environmentalist—he showed that in Chicago, although maybe not in the smartest way. I was going to backtrack to Black Wolf this morning to look for a man named Franklin Alsop. He helped run the Meet-Up, he’s a conservationist, according to the K-State women. I’m hoping he might know Coop, or at least know about him.”
“Franklin? If you get Franklin to talk to you, you’re better than anyone around him. Ever since the shooting, he hasn’t spoken to a soul beyond ‘hi’ and ‘thank you’ when he goes to pick up his groceries or his mail.”
“I looked at a map this morning. Black Wolf isn’t a town, is it? Can you tell me how to find him?”
She drummed her fingers on a piecrust table next to her chair, then got abruptly to her feet. She went behind the front desk, where she spoke on her phone—possibly to her husband, interrupting his chicken inspection. The conversation went on for a good ten minutes.
She came back with a map, but she sat with it folded in her lap. “I know Coop, sort of know Coop. He’s a drifter, ranch hand sometimes, road work, whatever needs doing that is short-term. I can’t tell you where he’s from.
“Jack and I used to farm. We had three hundred acres not too far from here, and Coop showed up one day in the middle of a thunderstorm. He’d been walking, you could tell that. He had a different dog, not Bear here—this was maybe twenty-five years ago. I had a baby and another on the way and the work was more than Jack and I could do on our own, but we couldn’t afford full-time help. Out here you trade with the neighbors, but to keep the place going, with planting and so on, keeping the machinery working, it’s not a one-and-a-half-person job.
“Coop said he’d help get the winter wheat in and look after the soybeans if we’d put him up. He might have been twenty-one, twenty-two at the time. We did wonder if he was on the run—he had a temper on him, but he was strong and a hard worker so we didn’t want to look too deep. But then he and Jack had a knock-down fight over the pesticides Jack used on the soybeans. Jack started to worry about him being in the house with little Jack and the baby. And then Coop got into a big fight with a neighbor over how they were cultivating. We had to ask him to leave.
“After that, I heard about him from time to time. He wasn’t a bad person, just unsettled. I guess he’d been thrown out of college before he came to us, if the ladies over there at K-State remember their dates right.”
“Did you learn his full name?”
She shook her head. “He always said if one name was good enough for Prince or Madonna, it was good enough for him.”
“What happened to your farm?” I asked. “Sea-2-Sea?”
Clara produced a sour smile. “They don’t own all of Kansas, not yet, anyway. We lease the land. Got so we didn’t feel