Grabbing my coat, I left them both with their heads full of nonsense and headed back over to Bud’s place. I needed to dig into Hattie’s life more, see where she was spending her time, and I also wanted to see Bud and Mona. Make sure they had pulled themselves off the floor.
Curses. Jesus. It took all kinds. There wasn’t anything to a curse but words. Just like blessings and prayers and all the rest of it. People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference. I drove past the turnoff to Bud’s and kept going for a ways, just to let the land settle into me and put everything back in perspective.
They called Montana big sky country and that’s what it was here, too. This land was all soft hills of corn and soybeans rolling out into the clouds in every direction. Farmhouses hid in clumps of trees here or there, but there wasn’t anything to break up the horizon. The sky ruled, whether it was the sun baking the crops or the wind whipping dust devils across the roads. Some mornings the sky wouldn’t even let you see the land; it’d lay a fog so thick you couldn’t make out the car ahead of you. Everything came from the sky and it put you in your place, made you feel how small you were. For years after Nam, I parked out next to the highway and watched those big old thunderheads roll in. It was like a balm, seeing how they made everything under them dark and cowering, like seeing a piece of my soul laid out. That’s why we had such good church people here. In the city the sky was all covered up by buildings and bridges and everything else. People forgot how little they were. They forgot they weren’t in charge. Out here it was plain as day. You just looked out in front of you and saw God. Now, I didn’t take to those ministers who said God listened to each and every one of us and intervened in our daily lives like some meddling boss. I used to believe it as a kid, I guess, but I’d seen too much to put any stock in it now. Look at Hattie. Who could see that mutilated, bloated body and tell me it was God’s will? No, God had nothing to do with that. He had bigger things to worry about than how we managed to muck up our lives and deaths.
Just as I was turning back toward Bud’s I got a call from the morgue.
“Sheriff Goodman,” a voice said. Fran didn’t say hi like everybody else. Made you feel like you were being allowed to talk to her, even when she was the one calling you.
“What do you have?”
“No foreign fibers or hairs anywhere on her. No sign of a struggle either.”
“So she didn’t see it coming?”
“I would say the blow to the chest came first and she either didn’t have the time or the inclination to fight before it was delivered. The slashes to the face were postmortem.”
“How can you tell?”
“No struggle. The trauma to the face wasn’t deep enough to cause her to lose consciousness, so it would have elicited a defensive response.”
“So it was quick.”
“As quick as any of us can die.”
Well, that was something. At least I could tell Bud that. “Anything else?”
“Yes. There were traces of semen on her underwear.”
“Jesus Christ.” I swung over to the side of the highway and hit the brakes. A few cars swerved around me, slowing down like I might ticket them for speeding. I rubbed my forehead, thinking it through.
“Someone raped her before killing her?”
“It doesn’t appear to be rape. I noted some mild abrasion. Nothing more serious.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It was aggressive, but probably consensual sex.”
“And the semen survived the water?” I asked.
“Only her legs appeared to be submerged. Her torso was dry, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to observe any sexual activity.”
“Can you tell when it happened?”
“It could have been anytime within a few hours of death, based on the abrasion.”
Had to have been after the play, then. Either Tommy wasn’t telling all about parking with her at the beach or she’d gone off to meet a lover, an aggressive lover, who might have done her in.
“Well, we’ve got some DNA now.”
“That you do.”
“Good. I’ve got at least one suspect to test against.”
“The Hennepin County crime lab can do the comparison. It could take weeks, depending on their wait list. Have him come in to Mayo to submit the specimen.”
“He’ll be there in the morning.” I’d make sure of that.