Monkeewrench Read Online Free PDF

“Oh.”
    “You all right with that?”
    “Sure, Mike …”
    Danny was instinctively careful, waiting until they were out of the lot and on the county road before he asked his question. That was a good sign, Halloran thought. The kid might make a fair deputy, given time. “Seriously? Sharon Mueller’s your best interrogator?”
    “She is that. Works child protection, mostly, and if you can get a six-year-old to tell you her daddy’s climbing into bed with her every night, you can get an adult to tell you almost anything.”
    “Oh.” A single syllable, and then silence.
    “Sometimes the job sucks, Danny.”
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    Highway 29 flattened out and stretched for about five miles before it climbed a ridge on the edge of the state forest, and that was where the wind always hit you. As far as Halloran was concerned, it was about the ugliest piece of land in the county, especially this time of year: treeless and flat with the cornfields cut to dead brown stubble, as if somethingbig had come along and sucked all the life out of the earth. He punched the cruise up to seventy and kept his eyes on the center line.
    “Going to have an early snow,” Danny murmured, as if there were finally enough miles behind Halloran’s mention of incest to make talking safe again. It was still a touchy subject in this part of the country, and not all the media blitzes and public awareness campaigns in the world would change that. Some people—good people, mostly—just didn’t want to believe such things happened.
    “How can you tell?”
    “Highway Department’s two weeks late putting up the snow fence along here. Almost a surefire guarantee we’ll have an early blizzard.”
    “Just what we need,” Halloran said, and that was enough small talk. “You know what we’re looking for out here, Danny?”
    “Yes, sir. Information.”
    “That’s right. Paperwork, mostly. Anything at all that’ll tell us something about the Kleinfeldts. Phone records, credit card receipts, legal papers, like that.” He slowed the car at Steiger’s House of Cheese and Video and turned right onto a narrow strip of washboard gravel. “The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have figuring out who might have wanted them dead.”
    Danny unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, folded it in thirds, and pushed it into his mouth. “Diaries, journals …”
    “They’re good.”
    “… calendars …”
    “Anything.”
Something
, he added mentally, because a dead end loomed large. “Forensics didn’t get anything useful from the church, and Doc Hanson said that all he got from the bodies was nightmares.”
    “We got a usable slug, though, right?”
    “The one out of the missus is still in pretty decent shape, but there were no hits in the database, so it doesn’t count for squat without the weapon. So right now we’ve got no witnesses, no physical evidence to speak of, and only one more thing to look for to shine some light on this thing.”
    “Motive,” Danny said without hesitation, and for the second time that morning, Halloran smiled. The kid was going to do all right.
    There was a gate at the end of the Kleinfeldts’ driveway, with a padlock that glinted in the cold sun, a taunting reminder. “Damn it, damn it,
damn it.
” He banged his hand on the wheel.
    “Sir?”
    “I forgot the keys.”
    “Some of the guys say you’re real good with a pick.”
    But apparently he wasn’t that good. In the end he’d said the hell with it and taken the bolt cutters to the chain.
    It wasn’t much of a house, for someone sitting on seven million dollars. Just a boxy, two-story farmhouse, unchanged, as far as he could tell, from when the Tikalskys raised Holsteins and children here.
    Halloran had gone to Calumet High School with Roman, their youngest, and the day after that boy graduated they’d turned the house over to Countryside Realty and moved to Arizona.
    Smart people, he thought, tugging up the fur collar of his jacket