I didn’t know if I was more surprised that Curtis Poling knew who I was or that he had just told me my boss was related to my murdered lover. I didn’t see the resemblance, as Lartel had struck me as a fairly creepy loner, which suited his job perfectly. I had no idea he had any family, particularly not a dashing young archaeologist cousin. Besides, Lartel was on vacation in Mexico for another week. Another dead end. I sighed. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poling. It’s been nice talking to you.”

He raised an eyebrow, and for a second I was sure he was going to goose me, too. “You know where to find me.”

I nodded and walked off, halfway to the door before I heard him say something so soft I might have imagined it: “Thanks for the fish.”

I tipped my head glumly toward the ladies at the door and didn’t notice when Ida and Freda followed me. I was almost out the front when Freda tugged at my shirt. I turned to look at her, and she pointed to Ida.

“We overheard your conversation with Curtis,” Ida said. “We thought you ought to know that Kennie Rogers was also out here asking questions about the Jorgensen land. She was with Curtis, in his room, for nearly an hour.” Ida seemed indignant, obviously thinking Kennie had brought her own brand of tuna to the table.

“When was that?” I asked.

“Saturday sometime, because it was the day Freda and I got our hair set, and we always get it rinsed and set on Saturdays.” Freda nodded vigorously in agreement, looking at her shoes. I was thinking that old people in nursing homes made great narcs. If only they could get some sort of network set up, they’d be a secret force to be reckoned with.

“Thanks, Ida,” I said sincerely. I scribbled down my phone number on the corner of the sign-in sheet, ignoring the attendant’s skimpy-browed glare. “Call me if you think of anything else, OK?”

“OK,” Ida said happily, turning with a swish and walking back down the hall. That swish was beginning to grow on me.

As I walked out the door and toward the Village Apothecary, the May sun shining warmly on my head, I struggled to fit all this together. The Jorgensen land was cursed, Jeff was dead, and Kennie was asking questions, hot on Jeff’s heels. I didn’t know when Jeff had talked to Curtis, but it had to be Saturday because he was with me Friday and hadn’t mentioned it then. So Kennie visited shortly thereafter. And she could have been the mystery woman Jeff met Saturday night. Yuck. I didn’t want to go there. It was much more palatable imagining Jeff had screwed around on me with a glamorous, big-city type than a former-prom-queen-cum-mayor who couldn’t let go of high school.

I walked into the Apothecary, a stock-two-of-everything drugstore, hoping they sold costumes. I was pleased and a little surprised to find a wide selection of masks in the corner. They weren’t cartoon-emblazoned kids’ masks either, although I was disappointed that I couldn’t be Wonder Woman, replete with glittery tiara and bullet-
repelling bracelets. Instead I found tasteful Mardi Gras half-masks with embroidering elaborately sewn around the eyeholes, or full masks with Harlequin faces. I picked a full mask because I didn’t want to be remotely recognizable and headed up front to pay. “You have a great selection of masks,” I said to the teenage cashier. “Why so many?”

“Because we sell lots.” She snapped her gum, the unspoken “Duh” hanging between us, looking for a source and a place to land. She had dishwater blonde hair hanging in strings around her face, and her cornflower blue eyes were intolerably bored.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that you sell lots?” I asked, making my eyes as big as hers.

She looked at me, her face saying, “Don’t you think it’s weird that you’re asking me stupid questions?” She rang up my purchase, and I fought the petty urge to ask for a pack of condoms from behind the counter. It would be a wasted effort at making her feel inferior, because I knew I wasn’t going to get laid and she could probably guess. In fact, she was probably having better, more frequent sex then me. I exhaled noisily, took my change and my bag, and trudged back to the library.

The after-lunch crowd was pretty brisk considering that the summer people hadn’t arrived in full force yet and the locals didn’t normally set much store by recreational reading. As an unfamiliar group of people browsed, I realized I was witnessing a continuation of the library ambulance chasing. There were older men in feed caps, bills perfectly straight, hats barely resting on their heads. A good number of housewife types had also appeared, some brazen enough to bring their children as cover, and even some of the rare breed known as “young male professional” were around. They were considered exotics in this town. All in all it was a full and diverse crowd, everyone drawn by a need to solidify their lives by verifying death.

“Minnesota nice,” that uniquely Midwestern quality that keeps natives from confronting anything directly or expressing any emotion deeper than a kind smile, stopped most of the women and younger men from asking me any outright questions, so I appreciated it when two men in feed caps invited me into the local information dance.

“I remember that Jeff Wilson playing football with my son back in the day. Heckuva good ball player, and an even nicer kid,” began a man with a brown and used-to-be white Cenex hat, leaning his elbow on my counter. His hands were clean, but I could smell car grease on him.

“Yup,” his John Deere friend said. He switched his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other while he fiddled with the short pencils on my desk. I looked at his yellowed fingernails, each thick enough to unscrew a rusty bolt.

“Damn shame,” Cenex continued, “especially in a small town like this. We don’t have room for murder.”

I wondered how many animals he had killed in the past year. Murder is a sanctioned sport in Otter Tail County. As a meat eater, I appreciated my hypocrisy as well as his. I was having a hard time staying out of the conversation, though. I had learned the unspoken rules of this game from the social table at the Turtle Stew: they were trading me what they knew for what I knew. I just had to pick the right time to jump in, because once I entered, I would stop receiving any information and would have to start supplying.

“Lartel is going to be surprised when he comes back, then,” John Deere said.

“Oh ya,” Cenex shook his head sadly. “His star player killed in his library.”

“What do you mean, ‘his’ star player?” I was in.

Cenex had the good grace not to acknowledge how little prompting it had taken for me to cash in. He acted like he just noticed I was there. “Lartel was the football coach back in the days Battle Lake was good. They went to state that year with Jeff. 1982. Would have won, too, if Jeff had played. Yup, Lartel stopped coaching that year.”

“Hunh,” I said, sitting back in my tall chair. Lartel’s name sure was coming up a lot today. When I had applied for the library position, he had been the picture of politeness, yet there was something slightly off about him, some smell or color that hinted at food about to go bad. It wasn’t his shiny head or his swishy pants, either, though those didn’t help.

Come to think of it, those swishy pants were a red flag. Of course he had been a high school sports coach. No other adult male wore swishy pants. Although his demeanor pegged him more as the wrestling coach type, what with the sport’s promise of leotards and constant touching, I supposed football would make sense, too.

I realized I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversational bargain. “Jeff didn’t talk about his football career when I interviewed him.” Both men relaxed slightly. “Why didn’t he play that last game?”

Cenex sucked something invisible out of his front teeth. “Depends who you ask. Everyone agrees it had something to do with Gary Wohnt, though. He was a good player, but it was hard to tell with Jeff shining so hard. Yup, that Jeff Wilson could play ball.”

“Like I said, he didn’t mention his ball playing when I interviewed him. He just talked about the Jorgensen land and the theme park they were thinking of building here. We were supposed to meet Monday night so I could, um, interview him some more, but he never showed up. And then I found his body here Tuesday morning.”

“That finding a body can be tough,” John Deere said, twirling his toothpick with his tongue. He was a regular oral circus attraction. “I found my grandma in her bed when I was about eleven. I can still see her lying there, Reader’s Digest stuck in her hands . . .”

I would never understand this Norwegian relish for conversation. I knew these men would talk all day about everything and nothing if I encouraged them, and anything up to and including picking my nose would be seen as encouragement. Personally, I’d rather be alone with my thoughts. I mustered my best “sudden library emergency” look, directed it over their shoulders, whispered, “Oh, darn!” under my breath, and excused myself from behind the counter.

I escaped down the nearest aisle, hoping for privacy so I could sort through what I had just heard. Lartel McManus was my boss, and I had learned more about him in the last two hours than I had since I started the job. He was Jeff’s cousin. And he had been Jeff’s football coach back in the glorious eighties. And he was on vacation in Mexico while his star football player had been murdered, said player’s body turning up in the S section of his library. It occurred to me that I had no proof that Lartel had actually gone to Mexico, nothing but his word.

I was thinking it might be time to call Lartel back early. Unfortunately, he had not left an emergency contact number, which I suppose made sense. This was a library in Battle Lake. The closest thing to an emergency here had been years earlier, when the one copy of V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic had not been returned, setting the waiting list back weeks.

“Excuse me,” a voice behind me said.

I turned to see one of the semi-suited young men I had noticed before. “What?” I said.

“I was wondering if I could check this out.” He held a large paperback toward me.

“You can have it,” I said. I walked away from him and down to the next aisle so I could do some more thinking.

“Really?” he said, following me into the next aisle. “I’ll need to get a library card first.”

I wanted to assemble this new information, and I was irritated at his interruption. I put my fists on my hips and stared at the poor man while I tapped my foot impatiently.

The man looked at the paperback in his hands and back at me. “Um, I’m not from around here. I just moved to town and was hoping I could get a library card and check out a book or two on my lunch hour so I’d have something to do tonight. Are you the librarian?”

I rolled my eyes and snatched the book from his hand, walking toward the counter. “Of course I’m the librarian. I’ll need two forms of picture ID.” I hoped I turned fast enough that he couldn’t see me blush. I was pretty sure I had a special kind of Tourette’s that made me be rude to perfectly nice people when I was on a mental bender and then rendered me incapable of apologizing. It was a tough cross to bear.

I was happy to see the front area empty. John Deere and Cenex had moved on to greater distractions. I stepped behind the desk, punched the enter key on the library computer’s keyboard, and then looked at the screen, expecting to see the flashing sign-in prompt. Instead, a note had been taped there, an ominous message written in large, slanting pencil:

STOP SNOOPING. UR GOING TO FIND
THE SAME TROUBLE AS WILSON.

I read it twice. I was pretty sure it was a threat, but my skin was crawling so loudly that it was hard for me to concentrate. I sat down hard on my chair and tried to make some spit.

“Are you all right? Ma’am, are you all right?”

I turned my head to the noise and found myself looking at the young professional. He had called me “ma’am,” which was way worse than being called “lady.” I had never been called “ma’am” before, and short of finding myself at a point in my life where my boobs brushed my knees and you could see my pink scalp like some cloud-covered ant farm through my thinning white hair, I thought it was completely uncalled for.

“You know what, I’m not all right. I just got laid right for the first time in my life by a guy who could actually converse and was sensitive, and the next thing I know, he’s dead. And now I have a threatening letter on my computer. And the icing on this cake is that you just called me ‘ma’am.’ So no, I’m pretty far north of all right.”

He looked at me like I was something itchy he had found in his pants. I stood up on my chair and cupped my fingers around my mouth. I figured it was time to take the bull by the horns before I started yelling at kids and pulling hair. “Library closed! Everyone out!” I was not discouraged by the surprised glances. “Out! Out! We will reopen at the same time tomorrow.” Still nobody moved. “OK, people, I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but there is going to be a private viewing for the deceased this afternoon, and we need to start setting up. Come back
tomorrow.”

This drew understanding nods, even from the out-of-towner I had just verbally accosted. These people understood funerals. Anybody who chose to live in a place where the wind chill could reach sixty degrees below zero without causing a hitch in the daily giddy-up respected the great circle of life. Plus, funerals were another opportunity to talk about other people, or nothing.

As the crowd filed past me, I studied them for beady weasel eyes. I was sure anyone who made death threats must have clear and shifty animal features, but no such luck. For the most part, the looks I got were reassuring or sympathetic, all the eyes clear blue or brown.

When they were all gone, I locked the door and went back to the note. I imagined the police could have it fingerprinted, but I didn’t think they really did that stuff around here, and if they did, it would take a really long time. Besides, at this point I had suspicions about Chief Wohnt since discovering he had known Jeff pretty well back in high school.

I ripped the note off the screen and looked at it closely. Nothing telltale except the cutesy “UR” in place of “you are.” Stuff like that bugged me. If you’re going to threaten someone’s life, you should probably take the extra twenty seconds to spell out all the words. Jesus.

All this was really starting to get my goat. I had felt I was to blame for Jeff’s death. The article I wrote came out the day before I found his body, and I was worried that somehow the article had killed him. At first, it scared me. Now I was getting pissed. Wasn’t it enough that the murderer had taken away the one man I was starting to trust, not to mention the only decent recreation I’d had in longer than I cared to remember? Now they were threatening me directly.

I folded the note and tucked it in my pocket. It took me about fifteen minutes to close the library up, and then I headed to the liquor store. I found myself with a case of Rolling Rock in my hands, knocking on Gina’s door with my foot. It was midafternoon. If she had worked the early shift, she would be home.

“Christ, Mira, I was wondering when you were gonna stop by!” She pulled me in and locked the door behind me.

I flopped on her couch and reached for the open beer she handed me. “You heard?”

“I heard about Jeff’s death yesterday on my lunch break. I didn’t hear about you snaking him first until I was almost done with my shift.”

I grimaced. “What is up with this town?”

“It’s the seven degrees of sexual separation, Mir. You live in Otter Tail County long enough to get laid by a native, and I can guarantee you’re no more than seven degrees from having slept with everyone in the county. A new member in the club is a big deal. Word’s gonna spread.” She shrugged her shoulders and chuckled, taking a pull off her beer.

I shuddered. That meant I was likely only one degree from having slept with Kennie Rogers, and that slippery slope could lead anywhere. “What do I do, Gina?”

“About what?”

I filled her in, beginning with the first meeting with Jeff, our excellent sex, the article I wrote, him standing me up, Kennie’s weird treatment of me at the café, Karl telling me who Jeff really was, finding Jeff’s body, finding the invitation and checking it out in the yearbook, the interview with Curtis, finding out about Lartel’s connections, and finally the note on the computer today. It was a great relief to say it all out loud at once. The only detail I left out was about the petroglyphs I had found. I still felt protective of that information for a reason I didn’t know.

“Hoe-lee shit,” Gina said.

“I know.” And suddenly, I was crying so hard I was hiccupping. Since finding Jeff’s body, I had made a point of being busy to the point of crazy, but talking about it with another person, and one who cared about me, was too much.

Gina rushed over to the couch and put her arms around me. “It’s not your fault, Mir. None of it is.”

“But the article came out the day before I found his body, and . . . and . . .”

“And nothing. No one even reads that rag, and for sure they don’t kill over it. Jeff had something going on that you didn’t even know about.”

I tried to wipe the hot tears from my face but managed only to blend them with the snot gushing from my nose. “Yeah, he had lots I didn’t know about going on,” I said darkly.

Gina pulled back a little but kept her arm around me. “You tell him about your dad?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve got no right to be upset at him for not telling you about growing up in Battle Lake. He used to date Kennie Rogers, for chrissake. That’s worse than being Manslaughter Mark’s daughter any day of the week.”

I sniffled and laughed a little.

“Here, have another beer.” She handed me my third, along with a box of Kleenex from off the coffee table. “You know, I’ve heard about those class of ’82 parties. I don’t think it’s a reunion thing.”

I blew my nose hard. “What is it, then?”

“I don’t really know. People never answer you when you ask them straight on. I think it’s one of those direct sales things, like Tupperware or lingerie parties in your home. Better bring some extra cash.”

“I don’t think I’ll be buying anything. I just want to check it out. Why would there be an invitation to the party right by where I found Jeff’s body?”

“Who knows? Why do I have the body of Nell Carter when I have the personality of Cameron Diaz?” Gina laughed her throaty, contagious laugh, and I felt myself loosening up.

“You know,” I said, “beer can be so delicious. It makes me want to smoke cigarettes again.”

“But don’t,” Gina said, firing up a Marlboro Light 100. “If I could quit, I’d never start again. By the way, what’re you doing for lunch tomorrow?”

“Nothing. Wanna meet?”

Instead of answering me, she charged me with another question. “So what was Jeff like in bed?”

My hiccups were gone, and the beer was lubricating my joints and my tongue. “Mmm, you know how he’s an archaeologist?”

Gina nodded, leaning forward.

“Well, let’s just say he knew how to use his digging tools, and he was definitely into finding value in things discarded by past civilizations.” We both laughed at this until tears came out of our eyes. Gina knew the story of my first boyfriend, a clitoriphobic bass player in some lame garage band based in the Cities. I should have known better when he told me their name was Ancient Chinese Penis. I misread his quietness for intelligence and confidence, and we were together for four months. I pretended that it was OK that he thought foreplay was rubbing an erection against my leg, and he pretended that he had a personality. It was enough that we were both not lonely for a while, and then I moved on. It was that being-happier-with-my-own-thoughts thing.

By the time Gina’s husband, Leif, got home, we were both completely in the bag and playing the “Would You Sleep with . . .” game. He offered me a ride home, but I chose the couch instead. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s wheels the next day, even though I knew her husband to be a reliable man. I woke up before sunrise, a bad habit I’d developed this past week, and drove home to shower and change. My head was only slightly throbby, and I shoved aside my guilt about getting drunk.

The Thursday morning library crowd was a lot more reasonable than the Wednesday afternoon one had been, and some of those who showed up even dropped off memorial cards in the basket at the front counter that held slips of scratch paper. I had forgotten about the “viewing.” I was reaching for the phone when it rang. It was Ron Sims, the Battle Lake Recall’s editor, desktop publisher, only full-time reporter, photographer, and salesman, and I hadn’t called him back after he had left a message telling me to come up with an article on Jeff’s murder.

“Mira.” Ron wasn’t one for small talk. “I got good news. We’ve had a staff illness, so I have some extra work for you.” The only other people besides Ron on staff were me and Betty Orrinson, who wrote the “Tittle-Tattler” and “Hometown Recipes” columns. If you wanted to know who had dined with whom and whose relatives were visiting from where and what to cook them, you read her stuff. She apparently had a good following and actually had to turn down tidbits and recipes from readers on a regular basis.

“Betty’s sick?”

“Sick of writing the recipes. She says there’s nothing new out there. The job’s yours. I need one recipe a week, starting tomorrow, and make it original with a Battle Lake feel. Questions?”

Only a hundred. “What do you mean by a ‘Battle Lake feel’? Where do I get the recipes? How long do they have to be?”

“You’ll figure it out. I’ll be in the office all day today. Get me a recipe before lunchtime.” Click.

Ron had come at me so quick that I’d forgotten to tell him I was working on the Jeff article. This recipe mandate was Battle Lake’s version of cutting-edge, push-the-deadline journalism; I would have complained if Ron hadn’t hung up on me.

Instead, I plopped myself in front of my computer, fired up Word, and made a sign advertising a contest for “Homegrown Minnesota Recipes. Winners will be published.” I printed the sign and stuck it on the other side of my counter, where it would stay, at least until Lartel returned. I folded another sheet of paper in half and stapled the edges, making a pocket for people to slip their recipes into. I visualized it full and plump.

Being a realist, I also went online and punched “Minnesota recipes” into a search engine. A lot of wild rice and game recipes, along with carb-heavy hotdishes, popped up, but none of them spoke to me like the recipe for “Phony Abalone.” Some clever woman had discovered that if you marinate chicken breasts in a bottle of clam juice overnight, wake them up and pound them between wax paper, roll them in flour, corn flakes, and egg, and cover them in tartar sauce, they taste just like fish. To me, this had a Battle Lake feel. I especially loved the phrase “Fool your friends and family!” at the top of the recipe. I retyped it and e-mailed it to Ron.

Then, I returned to what I had been doing when he called. It took me twelve minutes of wait time to track down the Fergus Falls coroner. When she got on the phone, I explained who I was and that I was writing an article on Jeff Wilson’s death for the Battle Lake Recall. She placed Jeff’s time of death at sometime Sunday evening. She said his corpse had been in surprisingly good shape but that there wasn’t enough fluid to do a toxicology report. She told me that’s common in a shooting. Something about the heart pumping after the person is dead.

The strange thing is I didn’t feel anything when she told me all of this. I filed it away with the rest of the information, knowing that I was going to have to schedule a full-blown nervous breakdown in the near future. For now, there was too much work to do.

After I hung up the phone, I tried to chase down more information about building on sacred Indian land. I had no reason to doubt Karl, but it would be my name on the Recall article I was working on, and I wasn’t in the habit of using secondary information. After some Internet searching, I found out Minnesota had a state archaeologist, and I tracked down his e-mail address. I wanted to know what the rules were. I was pleased with the quick reply but disappointed to find what Karl had told me corroborated:

M—

Non-burial archaeological sites (incl. petroglyphs), and non-burial-related archaeological artifacts are private property
if they occur on private property. There are no restraints on sale/use/etc. of such property/sites/artifacts by property owner. E-mail with any more qs.

MD

So it was true. The petroglyphs wouldn’t slow Trillings down. On a hunch I decided to see if the company had a website. I clicked on the blank bar at the top of my computer screen and was about to type
in the address for my favorite search engine when my eyes caught on the word Trillings in the list of addresses that dropped down. I knew I hadn’t typed it in before. I opened up the whole list and didn’t see anything else familiar—just some doll sites, a couple links to state casino home pages, and the URL for WebPALS. I clicked on the Trillings address and looked over their bland home page, trying to figure out what Lartel had been looking for. It had to be him who had gone to the site before. He and I were the only ones who used this computer.

After finding nothing of note on the page, I opened up the field book and jotted down a contact number for the company, which was located in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know what I was going to do with that number, but it seemed like a good thing to have. I imagined they would begin building soon. Jeff had said he was going to give them a report on Saturday, and Karl said they had called him Monday to say that they wanted the land, so that seemed like a done deal.

I was so caught up in researching that when the tall, salt-and-pepper-haired man with deep brown eyes stood at my counter, it took me ten beats to notice him and another ten to figure out who he was.

“Mira?”

“Yes, I’m Mira.” My heart was beating fast and deep, like a techno beat in a smoky club. I wasn’t just playing dumb.

He held out his hand. “I’m Jake. We were supposed to meet for lunch?”

Gina. The big, hairy hagasaurus had e-mailed the Moorhead State professor with an online ad and set up a lunch date for us, and here he was, squiring me at the Battle Lake Public Library. That’s why Gina had asked me if I was free for lunch today. I thought quickly. “Sure. Right. I have some things to shut down. Can I meet you at the Turtle Stew, the diner right on the corner?”

“Absolutely.” His smile revealed an underbite that hadn’t been apparent in his online picture, and his hands were small and soft, the hands of an academic. He was cute, but the last thing I wanted to do was date someone. Apparently that hadn’t been of concern to Gina. I told myself she must have set this up before she knew about Jeff and me, but that didn’t make me dread it any less. I abhor small talk, and the thought of mining someone for compatibility instead of responding to the natural thrust of chemistry was repellent, particularly in the wake of my most recent lover’s death. Sigh. But this wasn’t the professor’s fault, and I didn’t need to make this any harder on him.

I put up the Out to Lunch sign and pouted all the way to the Stew. When I got there, Professor Jake was waiting, his bark-brown eyes eager as a puppy’s. He was around six foot one and wore a suit, vest, and button-down-collar shirt, and his hair was close trimmed and neat.

“I hope this booth is OK.”

“It’s fine,” I said, in what I hoped was a magnanimous voice. I took the menu out of the waitress’s hand and scanned it for the quickest items. “I only have a short lunch break today. So sorry. How was your drive?”

“Fine, thank you.” He had a soft accent, maybe Mississippi. “What’s good?”

“I always get soup and a sandwich,” I lied.

“Deal.” He closed his menu and ordered for both of us. Lunch was quick and not memorable. He was pleasant and attentive, asking me about my cat and my friends and college. Actually, he was remarkably easy to talk to for a man, but I found myself spending most of forty-five minutes counting the ways he was not Jeff, and the rest of the time counting the number of times he mentioned his mother. Eleven. I wondered from a distance how odd that was. I could go whole months without mentioning my mother to another living person, and here this environmental sciences professor had mentioned his eleven times.

“I really enjoyed our lunch. Can I see you again?” he asked politely when he paid the bill.

“Sure. E-mail me.” I stepped back from what was looking like an attempted cheek kiss, scurried out the door, and cursed my weakness. I couldn’t turn him down to his face. I didn’t look behind me until I got to the library, and by then Professor Jake was gone.

My lunch date, by making me miss Jeff even more, only gave me one more reason to solve his murder in record time. Someone was going to pay for his death, and I had to find out who. The rest of the day I actually spent doing library-related duties. They say that idle hands are the devil’s minions, but for me it’s the opposite. When my hands are busy with mentally untasking duties, my mind plays. That’s what I blamed for the plan to case Lartel’s house—working and a bad date. If I had been doing anything else, I never would have come up with something so asinine.

Lartel was caught up in all this somehow. He was related to Jeff, he had been Jeff’s coach in high school, and he had been researching Jeff’s employer shortly before the murder. If nothing else, Lartel would be the easiest to eliminate as a suspect. I just needed to verify that he wasn’t in Battle Lake at the time of the murder and only pretending to be in Mexico. A quick peek into his windows would tell me that. If I couldn’t get enough proof that Lartel wasn’t involved by spying from the outside, the way I figured it, I had done a pretty good job getting into the Battle Lake Motel. How hard would a house be? Most people around here didn’t lock their doors anyhow.