Candice and John’s alarm clock went off far too early to suit either of them. The bed felt awfully good; both of them would just as soon have stayed there rather than rising to greet the morning.

Wishful thinking, Candice knew. There were things that had to be done today, important things. Most important of them was getting Janice’s status settled. She’d known since Saturday that Matt Schindenwulfe had been successful in his attempt to get the emancipation hearing shuffled to the head of Judge Dieball’s docket. That meant that they were going to have to be down at the courthouse at nine, perhaps a little earlier than that just to be sure, which meant that everybody had to be up and running early so they could be neatly dressed and awake enough to make sense.

“Well, shit,” she said to her half-awake husband. “Guess there’s nothing to do but do it, whether I feel like it or not.”

“Yeah, crap,” he agreed, not moving but levering his eyes open a little. “That night just wasn’t enough to hold me.”

“Me, either,” she replied as she surrendered to the inevitable. “And I suppose that I need to wear business clothes and get my face on this morning, too.”

“It’d be the right thing to do,” he agreed, perking up a little. He liked the way that Candice looked when she was dressed for business, back when she’d worked in a bank in Decatur, and he didn’t see it often enough living in Spearfish Lake.

“It’s going to take me a while in the bathroom,” she sighed. “I guess we can let the kids sleep for a little bit longer.”

“You go first, take your time,” he offered, hoping that it would buy him a few more minutes in the nice warm bed before having to face the cold morning air.

“Oh, all right,” she sighed, realizing what he was up to but with little choice but to let him get away with it; she really needed more time to get around, after all. She pulled a robe on over her sleep shirt since there was no point in freezing her buns while she was messing around in the bathroom, and she started out the door.

The door to Shay’s room – well, Janice’s room now – was standing wide open, which is how she’d left it; this time of year the upstairs rooms would get cold if the air wasn’t allowed to circulate. Might as well look in on her, she thought and walked the few steps to where she could look in. There was just a little bit of surprise to see the covers thrown back, and no sign of Janice. That seemed a little strange; it was pretty early for her to be up, as tired as she had been the night before. She glanced down the hall, to see the bathroom door was open so it seemed unlikely Janice could be in there.

Could she have gone downstairs? It seemed doubtful to Candice – Janice hadn’t handled the stairs well yesterday, and someone had always been with her the few times she’d been up or down them. Curious now, Candice headed back up the hall in the other direction, and took a peek in the open door of Cody’s room, to see the two of them lying there in bed, sound asleep.

Seeing the two of them sleeping together was not exactly something that Candice was happy to see, but as she stood there watching she noticed the two weren’t exactly cuddled up together; they were lying well apart. From her viewpoint Candice could see ridges in the covers that seemed to indicate they were holding hands. Maybe that was it, she thought, remembering the two of them holding hands in the hospital as one or the other of them, sometimes both of them were asleep, so the sight in front of her was probably innocent. Maybe Janice had trouble sleeping or something and fell back to something comfortable, just knowing that Cody was there. They most likely hadn’t done anything more than just sleep; Janice wasn’t really physically capable of it, and Cody, well, it was hard to think something like that about Cody.

Then, she noticed the .357 sitting on the bedside stand. Now what, she wondered as a chill went down her spine, was that all about?

Patrolman Fred Piwowar really wasn’t all that crazy about working third shift, but figured that working full time beat working part time, so it was something that he could put up with for a while if he had to. Most of the time things were pretty boring. Oh, once in a while there might be a little bit of trouble before the bars closed at two AM, but that wasn’t often and usually fell on Friday night. Sometimes he might pick up someone driving under the influence, but not very often. After the bars closed, though, they might as well have rolled up the streets, because usually not much happened at all – everyone was asleep, even the drunks.

Just for the sake of having something to do, Fred usually hit one of the breakfast-lunch places around town fairly early on, and at least tried to be out on the streets when workers were heading out to the plywood plant. A little later he often maintained a little visible presence over around the school, just to tone down the kids who liked to hot-rod their way to school. It had actually been a while since there had been a school-related traffic incident, but to him it seemed like only a matter of time.

Figuring it was getting on toward pointless to hang around the plywood plant looking for trouble, Fred decided to head back to the shop and put a little time in on paperwork. He knew Abernathy was due back this morning, so he might as well make sure all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. Abernathy was a real stickler on paperwork, often pointlessly, but he was the boss, that was that. Fred suspected that Abernathy wasn’t going to be around too much longer – he kept talking about wanting to get back to civilization – and the sooner the better as far as both were concerned. At least Fred didn’t have to deal with him very much, which suited him just fine – the chief usually came in just as Fred was getting his coat on to leave, and since usually nothing much had happened there wasn’t much to say before he could get out of there.

But it didn’t work like that this morning. Fred was reviewing some reports on the computer a good hour before he was to knock it off for the day when Abernathy walked in. “Morning, Bill,” he said, trying to act cheerful. “Have a good trip?”

“Not as good as I’d like, but at least it’s warmer than here. Hell, anything is warmer than here. So I hear it hasn’t been quite as dull up here as normal.”

“Not quite,” Fred admitted. “Since Charlie and Steve found that meth lab last Thursday, it’s been a little more interesting than normal.”

“Yeah, Charlie told me that he’d turned up a meth lab, but I didn’t realize Stoneslinger was involved.”

“The sheriff was the only backup available at the time when Charlie responded to the shooting scene,” Fred told him. “Boy, let me tell you that you’re just as glad you weren’t there. That place was really a mess. Blood all over the damn place.”

“Shooting? Oh, yeah, Charlie said he found the place when he responded to a shooting report,” Abernathy recalled. “There wasn’t any officer involvement in the shots being fired, was there?” The amount of paperwork and hassles involved if an officer was involved in a shooting, even peripherally, had to be seen to be believed.

“Naw, everything was quiet when Charlie got there,” Fred reported. “They didn’t find the meth lab till they were sorting things out afterwards.”

“So what’s the deal on this shooting? Anybody hurt?”

“You could say that,” Fred replied. “But I don’t think they hurt for long. You know that Archer kid we see out at the range sometimes?”

“The one who outshoots everyone in the department?”

“Yeah, him. Seems he found Jack and Bobby Lufkin raping Janice Lufkin in the middle of the living room floor. He told them to stop, one or both of the Lufkins dove for a shotgun. The Archer kid is just as good under pressure as he is on the range. Two head shots, right between the eyes with a nine millimeter. Like I said, it made a hell of a mess. The girl had pretty well had the crap beat out of her already. Charlie had me ride the ambulance down to Camden to get a statement out of her. I didn’t know about the meth lab till I got back.”

“Son of a bitch,” Abernathy snorted. “Isn’t that just like that fuckin’ Wexler? Some kid offs two citizens and all I hear about is some stupid meth lab. I hope he has the kid all signed, sealed and delivered.”

“The way I hear it, the prosecutor is going to let the kid walk. Self-defense, justifiable homicide.”

“That sounds like Wexler work, all right. God damn local yokel. Maybe we’d better go over to the jail and see if we can refine his statement a little bit.”

“Well, he’s not at the jail. From what I hear, there was no arrest made and no charges filed. Like I said, the prosecutor has it now.”

“Now isn’t that just horseshit?” Abernathy snorted again. “If it was a fucking fender bender that fucking Wexler would fucking sit on it for a fucking week, but shit, murder two, maybe even murder one, and it goes to the prosecutor and gets kissed off so quick the ink doesn’t fucking dry. That fucking pisses me off. Get him in here, I want to talk to him.”

“He’s not going to be in for a while,” Fred told the chief. “He said he had to run down to Camden real early, something about his sister. I mean, you could call but don’t expect to find him home.”

“Jesus Christ,” Abernathy fumed. “It’s a fucking wonder anything happens at all around this place. Jesus, in a real police department you wouldn’t have shit like this going on.”

Against her better judgment, Candice just decided to let the kids sleep for a bit. There probably was a logical explanation for Janice being in bed with Cody, and getting to sleep might well be what had happened. What the .357 was doing on the bedside stand was another question, but Candice suspected there might be a logical reason for it, although she had no idea of what it could be.

Besides, the kids were going to be facing a tough morning, Janice especially so under the circumstances, and another half hour or hour of sleep would probably help both of them. And she needed some time to think out the implications of what she had seen.

Right from the beginning, Cody had told John and her that Janice wasn’t a girlfriend, but just a friend. And that might still be the case – although having seen the two of them together in bed was more than enough to raise suspicions. True, Janice was hurt and frail and weak right now, but that was something Candice hoped to help fix, and as soon as possible. What’s more, Cody seemed to care for Janice a lot, and she had an absolute fixation on him. It almost seemed to Candice that as far as Janice was concerned Cody could do no wrong. Maybe that would clear up in the passage of time, but for right now it was thoroughly understandable.

The problem lay up the road. Seeing them together in bed now – well, it seemed like it could be a real harbinger of the future. If this was a one-time thing, well, that was one thing, but six months up the road? Good God, they were both still juniors in high school! They were too young for that sort of thing . . . but then, she thought, Cody was too young to be shooting two men, just as Janice was too young to have to endure the hell that she had been through.

Better take it easy, she thought. Don’t fly off the handle. Take it as it comes. This might turn into a problem, but it isn’t a problem yet.

The logical thing to do, she thought, is to go get pretty well done in the bathroom, and then John and I can wake the kids up and find out what’s really going on.

Chief Abernathy was fuming even after Piwowar clocked out and headed for home. What really pissed him off was that here was a chance for the department to really look good, but that goddamn Wexler had punted the whole thing. His first mistake was letting Stoneslinger get involved; his second for letting the Archer kid’s case go to the prosecutor without more thorough investigation, especially investigation that might have had the kid in jail where he could be reasoned with a little more freely. Third, he’d called in the drug task force – not that they didn’t know what they were doing, but it would have looked better for the department if the whole damn thing could have been done in house.

Worst of all, that damn Wexler had slid everything under his nose, got it out of the department’s hands before he could get his hands on it! Shit, he was supposed to be chief of this jerkwater department, not finding out what happened after it was all over with. Hell, if he’d been lucky enough to be here, to have been in charge, he could have left the department looking pretty good, especially with a little shine on himself that could finally get him out of this godforsaken town. But no, that damn Wexler had let a perfectly good criminal charge get right out of his fingers. Murder one? Probably not, but murder two or manslaughter a good chance. In a place where the biggest cases the department was usually involved with was the Friday night bar room brawls, this was a big deal shot in the foot.

It was not exactly what he’d expected to find when he came back from a few days off, but he should have expected it. People up here didn’t have any idea what police work was. Shit, they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot.

Abernathy had a pretty good head of steam up when the front door opened and a couple guys walked in. Though they were in plain clothes, it was just as clear as hell that they were cops – a good cop can smell another cop. His suspicion was confirmed when they pulled out wallets with badges and IDs that made it clear they were from the drug task force. Thank God, some professionals after all the fucking amateurs he had to endure on this department! “So what can I help you guys with this morning?” Abernathy said, trying to cover up the anger he’d been holding when they walked in.

“Well, we’re working on this meth lab thing, as you probably know,” Livingston, the older of the two drug task force guys said. “You know about that shooting that led to the finding of the lab, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve been out of town, I just got filled in on it,” Abernathy admitted.

“Something smells fishy about the whole damn thing,” the drug cop replied. “Yeah, we know what the official story is, but come on? A kid that shoots like that? That’s bullshit! That had to be a setup! We can’t quite figure how the whole thing came down, but this Archer kid has to be up to his ass in it. I mean, we know that the Lufkins knew a lot of people and some of them were pretty lowlife, but nothing seems to connect. You don’t set up a lab like that in isolation, and you don’t move the stuff in isolation. There has to be some connection somewhere, and in our mind the Archer kid and the Lufkin girl seem to be pretty good prospects.”

“I’ll agree, something is goddamn fishy about the whole thing,” Abernathy agreed. “But I’ll tell you what, just between us, if it goes to the Archer kid it doesn’t stop there. There has to be a reason that the case went out of the door, over to the prosecutor and stomped on before anyone competent could even have a look at it.”

“Yeah, it seems pretty fishy to us, too,” LaFayette chimed in. “We went over to try and talk to the kids yesterday, but they are so lawyered up it ain’t funny. I mean, the old man wouldn’t even let us in the front door without his mouthpiece there, and fuck, it was cold out there.”

“Why wouldn’t he let you in the house?”

“Some bullshit about thinking that we’d turn an invitation to get in out of the cold to justify a search of the house,” the younger cop snorted. “Well, yeah, it’s been known to happen, but we’d have to get some kind of an admission, first.”

“Yeah, if we could have gotten to talk to the kids without a lawyer, we could probably have reasoned with them enough to get some idea of what the hell is going on,” Livingston agreed. “But you know goddamn well a lawyer wasn’t going to let them say anything but ‘fuck you.’ The way the old man acted, it was just as obvious as shit that he was hiding something in that house, something that should crack this whole damn case wide open.”

“You’re probably right,” Abernathy agreed. “But what do you want from me?”

“A little assistance,” Livingston said. “Actually, what we really need is a warrant to search the place, but from what we can tell the local judge is pretty tight about issuing open-end warrants. I mean, down in Camden, some other places, we can pretty well go to this one judge and tell him we think there’s drugs in the place and we’ll get a warrant. But from what we can tell, this guy wants to see some kind of evidence.”

“And you don’t have any evidence,” Abernathy nodded.

“Well, basically, no,” LaFayette shrugged, “but shit, you know how it is. Sometimes you don’t exactly need evidence to be able to see what the hell is going on. We were sort of hoping you could use a little local influence to get the judge to see reason.”

“Well,” Abernathy sighed, “you pretty much heard right. The judge here likes to have things pretty cut and dried before he’ll issue a warrant. I mean, it depends. Sometimes if the person is a known low life, he doesn’t need a lot of evidence, but if you want a warrant to search John Archer’s house you’re going to need hard evidence, not just knowing that something is going on. He’s a pretty upstanding citizen, not a lowlife.”

“Yeah, but what about his kid? Shoots two people and walks?”

“Shit, that makes the point,” Abernathy snorted. “That ought to tell you who has the drag in this community. Like I said, you want a warrant you’d better pretty well not need it in the first place. Now, if you had some hard evidence, different story.”

“But shit, we know there has to be something there,” the older cop said. “Any reasonable judge would take our word for it.”

“You said it, any reasonable judge,” the chief replied. “But you don’t find many professionals like that in a town like this.”

“Well, there’s got to be something there. If not drugs, guns or something.”

“I can tell you for damn sure there’s guns in the house and I don’t need a warrant to know it,” Abernathy snorted again. “The kid is a competitive shooter. He’s got a P226 that I know is up at the prosecutor’s office, but I’ll bet that doesn’t even scratch the surface. But this is a northwoods town. Two out of three houses are going to have at least several guns in them. Hell, when deer season rolls around this place turns into a ghost town. I mean, hell, a big chunk of the people in this town are out in the woods.”

“Well, it could be something,” LaFayette shook his head. “I mean, if it was presented right. Maybe it might be enough to get a warrant.”

“Might be,” Abernathy agreed. “But I’ll tell you this much, if you do manage to get a warrant to go through the Archer place, you’d damn well better find something or you’re not going to get another one, not in this town.”

Livingston got a big smile on his face. “You know,” he said. “That is something that could be arranged.”

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