Eleven Little Piggies (28 page)

‘Yes. And I thought you might like to stop yelling before you woke Ben too and destroyed your pillow.'

‘My . . . Oh.' I detached from my soggy crumpled pillow and groped my way to the bathroom, where I pissed, splashed cold water on my face and muttered, ‘Shee, what a crazy dream.' I went back to bed and told Trudy, ‘Must've had too many spare ribs.'

I even went back to sleep that night, but on subsequent nights the dream came back. It took slightly different forms each time – sometimes Ben was short a digit, or even a whole limb, and once after we played horsey, his new favorite game when he rode on my back, he turned up in my dreams with a hoof, saying, ‘I don't know, something spilled again, I guess.'

The next day at work, Ray said, ‘Are you all right? You look a little green around the gills.'

I told him about the bad dreams that had been disturbing my sleep. He laughed out loud, which he doesn't do often, and confessed he'd been having his own ecological nightmare, which featured crumbling landscapes – whole mountains tumbling into rivers. He went and found Rosie in her workspace that day, and came back laughing with her story about grotesque dreams – in Rosie's, the rivers began getting thicker and thicker till they were turning to cement, ‘and somehow,' Rosie said, ‘in the dream I always know without a shadow of a doubt that it's all my fault.'

We all knew the sand mining process wasn't causing disasters like the ones in our dreams, but the overnight unease fit in with our feeling that we had stumbled onto an improvement with unknown downsides. So we were all as anxious as the chief was to get this case wrapped up and put away. ‘We're close,' I told Ray. ‘But it would help if we could make it clear that all those so-called accidents on the farm were Matt's doing.'

‘We haven't proved them all,' I told the chief. ‘The lame horse, the vet says he could go either way on that. But the tree falling on the house, yes – we found some marks from a cross-cut saw on the down side.'

‘I haven't heard you say how they got Owen to the field without leaving any blood in the pickup.'

‘That butcher paper that's hanging up there in big rolls, it has to be that they wrapped him in that.'

‘And then trotted all the way home carrying the paper?'

‘Or stashed it somewhere and went back later and burned it. We've built a time line that shows they had time to do all this – that call of Owen's was recorded at a few minutes before six – they still had more than an hour before daybreak.

‘And that works with when Matt arrived at the Burger King nearest River Farm.'

‘He went and had breakfast while his partner planted the body?'

‘Yes. Ordered a big breakfast and stayed there an hour and a half, talking to everybody so he'd have an alibi for the time. We've established that part with the owners. They were wondering why he was so friendly that day – he usually wasn't.

‘It isn't hard to figure the next moves. Maynard probably said he was going to need a bigger cut of the money from the sale or he might have to come clean about putting the body in the field.'

‘But the help from Nicole with the car – you're absolutely sure about that?'

‘Oh, you bet. Jealousy turned Nicole into a real Wicked Queen of the West. Have you seen any of her interrogations? You should take a look – you'd be proud of how Ray got that job done. Slow and steady – he just gradually cornered her behind her own answers.'

‘But in the end you offered her immunity.'

‘Because we knew exactly what she had done but it was going to be hard to prove. We could never get her to admit that she was having sex with Matt – it was Matt who bragged about that. He got a little screwy after he got sick in prison and had to ask for drugs to help with withdrawal. That's when he finally explained the fire starter we found in the cooler. He said Owen came back in the yard and caught him and Maynard getting ready to set fire to the cooler. That was supposed to be the final big calamity that would convince Owen to quit farming and sell out. Matt claimed he never meant to kill Owen, “But he got so mad when he realized I caused all those accidents, he started calling the sheriff right then to turn me in. So I had to shoot him, don't you see? To shut him up”. Nicole's wrecked anyway – Ethan's getting his divorce on very favorable terms, and I think she's going to see her worst nightmare come true: the secretary installed in her place. And we needed her testimony to make certain we nailed Matt. Because his crimes kept getting crazier, it was hard to convince anybody who wasn't there that it could have all happened the way it did. There's a lot about Matt's last two crimes that's pretty . . . uh, far-fetched? Even though I was there and saw what he did.'

‘Henry thinks Matt killed Elmer mainly because he thought it would be the final straw for his father – that Henry would be hurt so much he'd just give up and sell the place for whatever he could get.'

‘I think that was Matt's plan – as near as he came to having a plan by then. He was still concentrated on revenge against his father, and reckoning without Doris – I think he always reckoned without Doris.'

‘Yes, well, his mom still calls her “the pushy Kleinschmidt girl”.'

‘Mom's a dear lady, isn't she? If Matt had been thinking rationally he'd have to know that we couldn't just walk away and let a whole string of murders go unsolved. But somehow he convinced himself that if he could get the family to sell out he could just take his share and go play on a beach. That's a Kester family characteristic, you know – that way of thinking, “If I want it, it's got to happen”.'

‘I guess we all do that sometimes, don't we? For instance, lately I keep thinking that any minute somebody will come and tell me I can quit worrying about the budget, the economy's all fixed.'

‘And that will happen soon, Chief. We've been careful, and better times are coming.'

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not fast enough to suit me. Every month I have more gray hair, and we are still in the weeds on the budget.' He looked at me curiously. ‘You seem to be holding up quite well in spite of the long hours. What's your secret?'

‘I tell myself that if I do this exactly right, Matt Kester will get nothing lighter than life without possibility of parole.'

‘Will that be compensation enough?'

‘It will certainly help. Every hour of overtime I have to work till the budget gets fixed, I'm going to think about Matt Kester in the pokey in an orange jumpsuit, while his white hat and his fancy belt buckles sit unused in a closet. And that will help.'

‘Uh-
huh
. Little vengeful streak beginning to form up there. Probably inevitable, but try to keep it selective, will you?

‘You bet. Bad guys only. Are we done?'

He waved me off. ‘Time to go get the boy, huh? How's he doing?'

‘Pretty good. Two weeks till his first birthday, and he's almost ready to get up off his grubby knees and walk.'

‘Enjoy every minute. Running away comes soon enough.'

Ben was crawling around Maxine's house, looking for something unsanitary to stick in his mouth, when I came in out of a howling March wind that slammed the door behind me.

‘Sorry about that,' I said. ‘Getting a little wild out there.'

‘Sit a minute,' Maxine said. ‘I've got something for you.'

‘For me? It's not my birthday.' I don't really know my birthday, but I've always accepted October the fifteenth, the day Maxine says I was found in a dumpster. She got that information, along with a small plastic sack of clothing and a worn Teddy bear, from a tired elderly black woman named Bernice, who said she was my first foster mother.

Bernice was sorry to let me go, she told Maxine, but, ‘He's speeding up and I'm slowing down, so I think I better do this while I can.' She left an address and phone number, but when Maxine tried to call her a few months later to celebrate my third birthday, she had gone without leaving a forwarding address.

‘Forget your birthday – we've got something else to celebrate. You're always fretting about not knowing your family, so a couple of months ago I contacted the agency that arranged your transfer from Bernice to me.

‘I've talked to them several times and last week they found one of the nurses that worked at that hospital in Red Wing. Where the cops took you after the night janitor at the Holiday Inn found you, you remember that part? OK. Mavis Schwartz is her name. She was a trainee then, thirty-seven years ago. She's retired now but still in good health, married and divorced, goes to the Gulf Coast in the winter.'

‘What color hair dye does she use?'

‘Don't be smart. We just visited a while, she's a nice person. And she told me that some of the nurses were eating lunch the day after you were brought in, and one of them said they should give you a name, so you wouldn't just be Baby Doe – it would give you a better chance of being adopted.'

‘Is that true?'

‘I have no idea. But they all thought being left in a Dumpster was a kind of rough start in life. She said they wanted to give you a little boost. They couldn't tell what race you were, so they said, “Let's give him some straight American name that will work no matter what he turns out to be”.'

‘All these years later, she remembers they said that?'

‘That's what she told me. So one of the other nurses, Gloria, said, “Listen, I have a cat that's the best natured, most lovable pet I've ever owned. I'd be honored if we could call this baby after him – could we?” They all said maybe if it's not too weird and Gloria said, “Not weird at all, his name is Jake”.'

‘Oh, good, a cat.'

‘But the
best
cat, don't forget. Lovable! And then they looked at the condiment tray and saw the ketchup bottle and one of them said, “Well, there, what could be more American than that?” But by the time they went to fill out the form on your registration somebody had moved the tray and Mavis wasn't a very good speller, so your Hines ended up being phonetic.' She beamed at me. ‘There now, isn't that a good story?'

‘Maxine, you guarantee you're not making this up?'

‘Why would I do that? And I could never have found all this information if you hadn't given me that computer. So you see, your generosity has already been rewarded.'

‘Benjamin Franklin,' I said, picking my dirty son up off the floor and grabbing whatever he was chewing out of his mouth, ‘I think you and I had better be off home before the bullshit in this room gets so deep we have to shovel our way out.'

‘Honestly,' Maxine said, ‘you'd think a person would get a little appreciation for a long tough search like that. See you tomorrow, Benny.' She held up a hand and he high-fived it and gave her his crooked-toothy smile. His front teeth were crossing exactly the way mine do, but we were going to straighten his; they would soon be perfect like his mother's.

We went out into the gale and fought our way along a disappearing highway toward the oncoming blizzard. Nothing daunted, I shifted my apple-red pickup into four-wheel drive and clung to the slick pavement like a leech. I had been named after a cat and a ketchup bottle, unless I hadn't, and I had the goods on the black-hearted villain we would take in chains into court in the morning. We were having a little setback with the weather here at the moment, but it was March, almost Benny's first birthday, and better times were just around the corner.