“They got my wife’s jewelry,” Gunther said. He pointed at a small mahogany box, and his hands trembled, although whether from Parkinson’s or shock, Lucas couldn’t tell. “She didn’t have much. I buried her with her wedding ring but kept the engagement ring. The diamonds weren’t more than chips shaped like a daisy. These days the gold was worth more than the diamonds. Thought I’d give it to my granddaughter for her sweet sixteen next month. But they took it.”
Lucas remembered the ring, so similar to the one his own grandmother had lost. As a boy he’d rashly promised her he would find the ring for her, spent hours digging for it in the backyard. Even now when he worked on the plumbing, he automatically kept an eye open for the glint of gold or light refracting off a tiny diamond, insignificant by today’s standards. Even though his grandfather replaced the ring with an anniversary band, Lucas never stopped looking. Then he got busy in Denver, and finally accepted that the ring was gone forever. Sometimes lost things weren’t meant to be found again.
He’d been a cop too long to make those kinds of promises. Instead, he stepped forward and clasped the man’s shoulder. Gunther nodded twice, then seemed to steady himself. “Mind if I take a look in your medicine cabinet?”
As he suspected, Gunther’s supply of pain pills for his herniated disk was missing. Determining what else was missing from the wreckage took an hour. He righted the furniture and straightened what he could while they searched. In the end, the thieves had made off with jewelry, the old man’s laptop he used to e-mail his grandkids living in Sioux Falls and Minneapolis, and a stash of cash they’d found in the freezer.
“Who would do this?” Gunther said.
The old man gave money to anyone who asked, so Lucas wondered the same thing. “Have you had anyone working around the house lately?” he said neutrally.
Gunther stared out the window, his hand hovering over the wooden box’s mother-of-pearl inlay. “Cody Burton needs service hours at the high school. He walks over and helps me download audiobooks.”
Suspect number one. Lucas nodded, but watched Gunther’s expression close off. “Anyone else?”
“I hired your cousin to take down the storm windows and turn over the garden,” Gunther said slowly. “She showed up last week, looking pretty bad. I couldn’t pay her much.”
Suspect number two. Looking pretty bad meant Tanya had found a new source for the prescription painkillers again, and using again meant she needed money. He tried to feel something at the news—anger, regret, sadness, but discovered Tanya’d used up her allotment of empathy a long time ago. Or maybe he just didn’t have anything left to give.
“So they were both in the house at some point in the last couple of weeks.”
Gunther nodded. Dusting for fingerprints was pointless, unless they found someone else’s. Not his cousin’s, and not the kid he’d sent to the library staffed by a shy librarian for community service.
“I need to get back to the station,” Lucas said. “Don’t touch anything until I send someone out to dust for fingerprints. You still attend First Lutheran?” When Gunther nodded, Lucas added, “I’ll call Pastor Theresa. She’ll get the youth group out here to help you clean up.”
Outside the house he stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the prairie rolling away to the horizon. When he was a kid he’d spent summers in Walkers Ford, and thanks to a functioning Chevy Camaro and a steady supply of Tanya’s friends, he knew the surrounding landscape pretty well. When he returned as chief of police, he spent long evenings driving the county roads with a map, marking off farms and ranches, abandoned buildings, homes. So he knew that due south of the Jensen place lay the double-wide trailer that was home to Cody Burton’s mother, three younger half brothers, and his brother, Colt, who’d been released from the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls a couple of weeks earlier.
He’d sent Colt away for burglary. Unlike on television shows where cops had to troll the world looking for perps, in reality, most crimes were committed by people close in relationship or proximity to the victim. The Burton trailer clung to a wide swath of exposed prairie less than a mile away. Tanya’s ramshackle house hunkered by the creek that ran past Brookhaven, the sprawling, grand old house he still thought of as Marissa Brooks’s place, just over two miles north as the crow flew.
No time like the present to do the job. He drove first to the Burtons’ and banged on the door. The trailer’s metal skirt, rusting and loosened from the boxy structure, vibrated in counterpoint to his fist, but he didn’t let up. No way in hell someone wasn’t home. Eventually, Colt Burton opened the door.
“What do you want?”
Stale beer and body odor hung around Colt like Pigpen’s dirt cloud as Lucas peered around him into the trailer’s dimly lit interior. “Courtesy call,” he said. “Someone broke into Gunther Jensen’s place this morning.”
“Wow, Chief, you’re worried we’re next?”
Lucas ignored the sarcasm. “Mind if I take a look around?”
Colt leaned against the door frame, a good eighteen inches higher up than Lucas. “Got a warrant?” he drawled.
“Not yet.”
“Get one and come back.”