Storm Prey

there?” the sheriff asked.

15
    LUCAS DROVE SOUTH on Highway 61, crossed the Mississippi into Hastings, took Highway 55 to the law enforcement center, checked in with the sheriff’s office and was escorted to forensics. A tall, narrow, dark-haired woman met him at the door and stuck out a hand: “Lucas? Nancy Knott. Come on through. What’s up?”
    Lucas followed her to a cubbyhole office, took the visitor’s chair as she settled behind her desk. Lucas asked, “You processed the scene at the Haines-Chapman murder, right?”
    “Basically, Lonny Johnson did, but I was out there for a while,” she said. “Lonny’s off today. I did most of the in-house processing.”
    “So when I read your forensics report yesterday, it said that you found hay—wait, not hay, you said straw —stuck to the back of one of the victims. You thought that he might have died in an agricultural area. I understand the bodies were found in a ditch under a little bridge, in an ag area. So my question is, so what? Was there something about the straw?”
    “There wasn’t any straw there,” Knott said. “It was one of those seasonal creeks, grown up with dead weeds. There was a bean field up the hill, so no straw there. And the bodies were in plastic bags, and the straw was stuck to the outside of their clothing, inside the bags.”
    Lucas dug in his pocket and pulled several pieces of straw from his pocket. “Hay like this?”
    He dropped it on her desk and she leaned over and looked at it, then took a pencil out of a cup and pushed it around. “Straw. Yeah. Like that. Exactly. See this cut? Cut like that. Same color and texture.”
    “Is there any way to tell if it’s the same straw? Or hay? Like genetically the same?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe the FBI could. Maybe one of the big ag schools could tell you what variety of straw it is, if that would help.”
    “I’m not exactly following—I’m a city kid. Hay, straw ...”
    Hay, she said, was essentially different from straw. Hay was a dried food crop, like alfalfa or clover, heavily fed to cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and sometimes other animals. Straw was the support stalk for cereal grains, like wheat, oats, and rye, didn’t have much nutritive value, but was used for animal bedding.
    “And what we had on Haines’s back was several pieces of straw, not hay. It looked exactly like what you’ve brought in, and I suspect a lab could tell you that they were both, say, oat straw, or not. Or wheat straw, or not. About the genetics, I bet they could figure it out, but I’m not sure.”
    “Bedding material. For what kind of animals?” Lucas asked.
    “Horses. You know, horses in a barn,” she said.
    “Huh.”
    “If you want to leave this, I can check around, see if we can find a place to compare it. If you have a scene where you think they might’ve been killed, well, just me eyeballing it, your samples look identical to what we took off Haines,” she said. “And Haines and Chapman were living in the city, too—they wouldn’t have just picked it up anywhere. So ... I bet you found it. Uh, where was it?”
     
     
    LUCAS CALLED JENKINS from the road: “You still got her there?”
    “Yes. Having a nice chat.”
    “Hold her there.”
     
     
    GABRIEL MARET pulled the surgical team together outside the operating theater. “One more day. The cardiologists say there could be some benefit by holding off for another twelve to twenty-four hours, but not after that. So tomorrow morning, at seven o’clock, we’re going, and we have to go the whole way, regardless of what happens.”
    Virgil had been leaning against the wall down the hall, and when Weather broke free of the group, asked, “Back home?”
    She said, “I was thinking. About these latest killings. Lucas thinks that the hospital guy has to be involved somehow. He’s one guy they don’t have any ideas about, except for the accent.”
    Virgil nodded. “So?”
    “So they killed this one man last night, and another one probably this morning. Who do we know who has a French accent, who didn’t show up for work today?”
    Virgil’s eyebrows went up. “Not a bad thought. Who’d we ask about that?”
    “Let’s go down to admin.”
     
     
    LUCAS GOT BACK to the BCA office and found Jenkins and Honey Bee in a conference room finishing a pepperoni pizza. Lucas took a chair, pulled it close to her, and said, “Ms. Brown. Harriet. Honey Bee. When the bodies of Haines and Chapman were