David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

“Who’s we?”

“Well-me.”

Again, Becker was silent. The bastard wasn’t going to help a bit. “And Washington. I’ve been in contact, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And they confirmed my theory.”

This time Becker laughed, a short, nasty bark.

“You’re all right then, aren’t you?” Becker asked. “Ass covered and theory confirmed. What do you want from me that Washington can’t provide?”

Hatcher seriously considered hanging up. Why give the bastard the satisfaction of asking? There was only one good reason-Becker might very well know the answer.

“We were just wondering if you might have any notions-considering your closeness to the case-you know, just wondering if it might occur to you…”

“What.”

“Well-where to look.”

Once more, the damning silence.

“We’re following the standard procedures, of course. I’m getting more agents from New York and Boston, and we’ll go door to door starting in the morning. I mean, if he’s here, we’ll find him, but I, we, thought you might have some-insight-into how he might be thinking right about now.”

This time Hatcher kept silent, too. He had asked him; he wasn’t going to beg. The silence stretched.

“Ty Hoban is six-foot-four and black,” Becker said at last. “Did you think he wouldn’t be noticed?”

“He was sent in to A and D, that’s all. He may have exceeded his brief; we’re looking into it.”

“He would have been noticed anywhere within the town limits, you can’t blame him. Why not send a man in a clown suit to a funeral?”

“I have decisions to make, and I make them.”

“Yeah, and when it counts the most, they’re wrong,” Becker said. Hatcher breathed deeply and let it ride. “You’re a fucking menace. Hatcher.” Hatcher let that one ride, too, waiting. If Becker was belittling him, at least it meant he was still involved.

Another pause. Hatcher studied the woman dashing with her dirty clothes to the laundromat across the street from the public phone. I’m getting wet. Hatcher thought. Why don’t they put pay phones in glass booths anymore? If Becker knows it’s raining he’s probably making me stand here on purpose.

“Where did Dyce live when he was growing up?” Becker broke the silence at last.

Got him, thought Hatcher. He was too good at it to turn his back on it. Or too involved in some way that Hatcher didn’t understand.

“I don’t know.”

“When he applied for work as an actuary he would have had to list his degree. Find out where he got it, wake some people up and see what he gave as a permanent address when he entered college. If it’s in Minnot, and I think it probably was, roust the town clerk out of bed and find out who lives in the house now. Then put a man on the local cemetery where his relatives are buried.”

“The cemetery?”

“Hatcher… An inconspicuous man, out of sight.”

“I know that. Anything else?”

“Try the house where he grew up.”

“He wouldn’t go there if somebody else lives there now.”

“Do what you want, then.”

“I mean, you’re probably right-but why would he go there?”

“Because something happened there. Why would he be back in Minnot in the first place? It was the first place he ran when he was in trouble. First to Waverly, which is close enough for him to drive over every day if he wanted to, then when Ty flushed him, he went straight to Minnot itself, not the highway. Something’s there he wants, or needs.”

“Anything else?”

“Don’t fuck it up again.”

“I can have a plane at the airport for you in ten minutes,” Hatcher said.

“I’m not coming.”

“You’ll have a better feel for things if you’re here on the ground.”

“I go down no more holes for you. Hatcher. I told you that already. Find him or not, it’s up to you now. It’s no longer any affair of mine.”

“I understand,” said Hatcher. “There’s one other thing… Just after your friend the chief of police had someone call us and report that he had seen Dyce and was following him…?”

This time Hatcher made Becker wait.

“… Well, after that. Chief Terhune disappeared.”

The silence had a very different quality to it this time. It was broken only when Becker hung up.

The music came first, before the sound of the tractor, the thrumming of the bass notes cutting through the air as if they were connected directly to the auditor’s viscera. Dyce felt them before he actually heard them, and long before the rest of the music was audible. As it approached, the noise of the tractor obscured the sense of the music, but the steady pulse of the drums and bass came through everything.

Jungle music, Dyce thought again. At grandfather’s house. It must be Birger Nordholm, although the music didn’t sound like anything he would listen to.

With the noise of the tractor to cover the sound of his movements, Dyce crept to the edge and peered out as the tractor entered the yard. He glanced back once to make sure the cop was all right and saw him lying perfectly still on his back. Only the wheels of the tractor could be seen, huge and black and cleated, moving parallel to the house and across the yard-or the space that had once been yard but was now so overgrown with weeds and gouged and flattened by continual passings of the tractor that it was hard to give it a name. Travelling in a blare of racket, the tractor moved out of sight, heading toward the south field, which had once been scrubland where Dyce and grandfather had taken walks through stands of supple sumac, the weed of trees. Grandfather had cut and split the trunks and shaped them into arrows for the bow Dyce had fashioned from a fallen branch of the apple tree by the house. They had spent a summer shooting wayward shafts at a target painted on the barn, but never at a living thing. Grandfather did not approve of hunting, and Dyce was too kind of heart to want to hurt anything. When he cupped in his hands the bewildered moths that made their way into the house and released them out of doors, grandfather called Dyce a “softie,” but always with approval.

Now the scrubland had been cleared and torn by Nordholm’s plow. Dyce had noticed the bushy, stunted tops of soybeans planted there when he drove to the neighbor’s cornfield where he hid his own car. For several hours he could faintly discern the sound of the tractor in the far distance, and when the wind turned and blew toward him, he could occasionally hear something of the music, a phrase or two of melody, or a few lines of the lyrics, not distinguishable as individual words but clearly a human voice. Twice he had started at the sound, thinking it was a real voice he heard, but there was no one there, not even a vehicle all morning on the long approach road that came through the fields to grandfather’s house, then past it to outlying farms. From his vantage point Dyce could see not only the approach road but much of the valley and a long stretch of the county road that led to town. Anyone coming would come from there and he would be able to see them miles away.

At noon the tractor returned and stopped in front of the porch. Dyce could see him clearly as the driver descended and removed his cap, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. It was not Nordholm, but Nordholm’s son, grown now to his mid-twenties and every inch the offshoot of his father. Dyce struggled with the sounds that wanted to come out of his throat, beckoned by the perfect look of the boy. He could have been Dyce’s father himself, the way he kicked his boots against the stone steps, the way he hitched his pants before sitting with his back against the pillar, the way he stretched his legs and sighed as if they had been carrying a dreadful weight. The boy was thin like Dysen, and the sharp bones pressed against his skin so hard it looked as if it would be painful just to wear his face. The Adam’s apple was prominent in his throat when he swallowed and even the hair was right, blond and short and straight as a freshly ironed crease. With the cap off, his ears stuck out from his head.