and Del gathered around the back of Flowers’s boat and drank Diet Cokes and Flowers pulled out a fishing rod and reel and rigged a slip sinker on it, talking about going down to the river and trying for some catfish.

“Got a shovel, we’ll find some worms somewhere…”

The crime-scene guy came over and said, “It’s out. Whoever it is had a short black haircut and wore thirty-six/thirty-four Wrangler jeans, Jockey shorts, and size-eleven Adidas.”

Lucas was bewildered. “Size eleven? Jockey shorts?”

AND, one of the crime-scene guys said a few minutes later, whoever it was still carried his wallet. Inside the wallet was an Illinois driver’s license issued eight years earlier in the name of Theodore Lane.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Del asked.

THE CRIME-SCENE guy called for a bigger crew with ground-penetrating radar and a gas sniffer. Two dozen people milled around, talking about secret graveyards, but there was no real graveyard.

At three o’clock they found the only other grave that they would find. It was fifty yards south of the first one, in an area that Lucas, Del, and Flowers had walked right over. The top of the grave was occupied by a driftwood stump, which was why they missed it. The bottom was occupied by Gabriella Coombs, curled into a knot in a green plastic garbage bag, wasted and shot through with maggots, almost gone now…

AT HOME THAT NIGHT, after taking a twenty-minute shower, trying to get the stink of death off him, Lucas went down to dinner and grumped at everyone. Coombs was going to haunt him for a while; chip a chunk off the granite of his ass.

The other thing that bothered him a bit was that he knew, from experience, that he’d forget her, that in a year or so, he’d have put her away, and would hardly think of her again.

He’d gotten down a beer and was watching a Cubs game, when Weather came with the phone, and handed it to him. The medical examiner said, “I took a look and can tell you only one thing: it’s gonna be tough. Nothing obvious on the body, nothing under her fingernails. We’ll process anything we find, but if there wasn’t much to start with, and it’s been days since she went into the ground…”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “There’s gotta be something.”

There was; but it took him a while to think of it.

27

LUCY COOMBS CAME to the door barefoot and when she saw Lucas standing there, hands in his pockets, asked through the screen door, “Why didn’t you come and tell me?”

Coombs had gone to look at her daughter at the medical examiner’s. Lucas had avoided all of it: had sent Jerry Wilson, the original St. Paul investigator in the Marilyn Coombs murder, to tell Lucy that her daughter’s body had been found.

Now, standing on her porch, he said, “I couldn’t bear to do it.”

She looked at him for a few seconds, then pushed the screen door open. “You better come in.”

SHE HAD a plastic jug of iced tea in the refrigerator and they went out back and sat on the patio, and she told him how she, a man that she thought may have been Gabriella’s father, and another couple, had traveled around the Canadian Rockies in a converted old Molson’s beer truck, smoking dope and listening to all the furthest-out rock tapes, going to summer festivals and living in provincial parks…and nailing a couple of other good-looking guys along the way. “I always had this thing for hot-looking blond guys, no offense.”

“None taken.”

“Summer of my life. Good time, good dope, good friends, and knocked up big-time,” she said, sitting sideways on a redwood picnic-table bench. “God, I loved the kid. But I wasn’t a good mother. We used to fight…we started fighting when she was twelve and didn’t quit until she was twenty-two. I think we both had to grow up.”

She rambled on for a while, and then asked the question that had been out there, in the papers and everywhere else. “Are you sure Amity Anderson did it?”

“No,” Lucas said. “In fact, I don’t think she did. She might have, but there are some problems…”

HE’D GONE BACK to Eau Claire, he told her, and talked to Frazier, the sheriff’s deputy, and all the other investigators they could reach. Amity Anderson had no boyfriend, they said. Just didn’t have one. They accounted for her nights, they looked at phone records, at gasoline credit-card receipts, they checked her mail. She had no boyfriend…

And she had that