7. THE WISCONSIN CALL
seven
"THE WISCONSIN CALL"
The call came in on a Tuesday with the phone face-up on the kitchen table between them, because Casey had already learned, more than once, that Hannah heard things in a voice he missed.
The man on the line was Daniel Wittenberg, sixty-one, a retired pulp-truck driver in Hayward, Wisconsin.
Casey had run him down through a chain of feed-store acquaintances and one persistent message left with a daughter.
Daniel had a slow voice and a habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence to make sure of it before he went on.
"I told the deputy back then," Daniel said. "I told him what I saw. He wrote it in his little book and I never heard another word, so after a while I figured I'd remembered it wrong. A man does that. Talks himself out of a thing nobody else seems to want."
"Tell it to me like you didn't remember it wrong," Casey said.
"I was running a load south on the old cut-zone road.
Evening, late June, light going long." A pause.
"There's a pull-off near the quarry, big enough to turn a rig.
I went to use it. There were two of them up there by the rim, in the last of the light.
A young woman down past them a ways, with a camera, working. "
"Two men," Casey said. "Take your time. Describe them."
"One big. Heavy through the shoulders. Younger, I'd say.
He had a way of standing with his weight back, like he owned the dirt.
" Another pause, longer. "The other one older.
Gray. Smaller. And he's the one I'd know again, because he was the one doing the talking, and the big one stood there and took it like it mattered.
That's the part I'm sure of, mister. It was the older one running the show. Not the big one."
Across the table Hannah had gone still. Casey saw her hear something under the words, the same note she heard under a patient's I'm fine.
"You didn't stop," Casey said.
"No. People hike. Crews work late in June.
I turned my rig and I drove home and I ate supper.
" His voice dropped. "And then a few weeks on I heard a girl went off that rim, and I told myself the two things weren't the same evening, because the other way of telling it meant I'd had supper and gone to bed while it happened.
So that's the thing I've carried. Not what I saw. What I did after, which was nothing."
Casey kept his voice flat and slow, the register he used on a green dog he did not want to spook. "You did the thing most people do. That's not the same as guilt, though I won't talk you out of feeling it."
"I'm not asking you to." Daniel breathed.
"I'll tell you the rest plain. I'll know that older man if you show me his face.
I will not put a name to him out of the dark, because I've disliked one or two old men in my life for reasons that had nothing to do with murder, and I won't hang a stranger to feel better.
Show me a photograph and I'll tell you yes or no. That's the most honest thing I've got."
"You still there, Mr. Wittenberg?" Hannah said gently, leaning toward the phone. "There's a hitch in your voice when you say you'll know him. Not fear. Something else. What's the hitch?"
A long quiet on the line. The wood stove ticked.
"You're the nurse," Daniel said. "He said there'd be a nurse."
"I'm the nurse."
"The hitch is that I half hope it's him and half hope it's not, and a man who's hoping isn't a man you should trust to pick a face out of a row.
So when you bring me the row, you bring me the man's face mixed in with five others I've never seen, and you let my hoping work against me instead of for me.
That's how you'll know my yes is worth anything. "
Casey looked at the phone, then at Hannah, who was looking at the phone like it was a person she had decided to love a little. He had been doing this his whole career and it had not once occurred to him to be taught by the witness how to run the lineup.
"That's as honest as it gets," Hannah said.
They got what they could and let him go with a promise to bring the photographs the right way. Casey set the phone down and turned it face-down out of an old habit, and looked at the grain of the table.
"The photograph is two men," he said. "We've been building this whole thing on Hagen alone. Now there's an older man, and the only living eye we've found says the older one ran it."
"There's a third figure in the photo, too," Hannah said.
"At the margin. Half out of frame. I've never put a name to him, and my gut won't say a word about him either way.
" She wrapped her hands around the mug. "Two men Daniel saw.
Three in the picture. I keep counting and getting a different answer. "
"Then we stop counting and start finding paper." He looked at her. "A coroner who'll sign one lie has signed others. A cut that size needed sign-offs. There'll be names on documents. There always are. Paper outlives everybody."
Two days on, the old dog decided something about Hannah that Casey had been waiting weeks to see.
She had brought a twist of dried venison up out of habit, one of the small comforts she carried into rooms full of the dying, and she held it flat on her open palm and did not ask.
Mose considered the offering. He considered her.
Then he took it off her hand soft as a gentleman, no teeth, all lip, the gravest courtesy a bloodhound owns.
Casey laughed before he could stop himself.
"What," Hannah said, startled.
"Nothing. He likes you, is all." He did not tell her that the old man had just paid her the highest compliment in his vocabulary, because saying it out loud would have meant saying the rest of it, and he was not there yet.
"He took it like a gentleman," she said, wiping her palm on her jeans, pleased and trying not to show it.
"He is one. More than most men I've worked with.
" Casey crouched and rubbed the loose hide at the old dog's throat.
"He decided about you the first night, on the porch.
He doesn't change his mind once it's made.
Neither do I, for what it's worth, though I take longer to get there.
" He stood before she could answer that, and put the kettle on, and the moment closed over gently and was gone.
The long talk came on the sixth night, with the wood-stove damper ticked down low and the dogs asleep and the case spread on the table between them. They circled the wounds without opening them, two people who had both spent their lives in rooms where the not-reaching was the whole kindness.
"You said federal," Hannah said. "You don't have to give me the inside of it. Give me the shape."
He turned his cup a quarter turn on the wood.
"Eighteen years. The back half a handler.
A raid, near the end, that I argued against in the planning room and got overruled on.
Wrong building. A young officer died on the floor of it.
I took a round in the shoulder that ended my pistol hand, which felt, at the time, like the smallest possible bill.
" He stopped there, at the edge of the inside of it, and did not step over.
"There's a folder. I read it once a year. That's the shape."
"That's enough." She didn't reach. "Mine's a sister.
Younger by six years. Our parents were the kind who were always somewhere else being clever, so I raised her more than I mothered her, and then she grew up and got good with a camera and went where the picture was.
I identified her on a Tuesday because I had a Wednesday full of other people's dying to get back to.
I've carried the doubt eight years like a coat I never took off, even indoors.
" She turned her own cup. "That's the shape. "
"That's enough," he said.
Neither of them reached for the other's. The stove ticked.
"Why dogs," she said, into the quiet. "After all that. A man walks away from eighteen federal years, he could do anything. He could do nothing. You picked dogs."
"Because a dog can't be talked into a bad plan.
" He said it before he'd decided to. "Eighteen years, the worst things I saw came out of a room full of people agreeing with each other about something that was wrong.
A dog won't do it. A dog tells you the truth at the end of his nose every single time, and if you've trained him right he tells it to you whether you want to hear it or not.
There's a rest in that. After the other thing, I needed the rest."
"And you breed them. You make more."
"I make more." A corner of his mouth moved.
"It's the most hopeful thing I do. You raise a pup eighteen months and you watch the dog it's going to be come up in it, and none of it has gone wrong yet.
Every litter's a clean start. I had a run of years where nothing was a clean start.
So." He turned the cup again. "Now I sell clean starts to people whose dogs have gone wrong, and tell them to be boring, and mostly it works. "
"That's the most you've said about yourself since I drove up your road."
"It's the wood stove," he said. "It does that to a man." But he didn't take it back, and she didn't make him take it back, and for a moment the not-reaching had a warmth in it that was new, a thing they were both careful around, glad of it and wary of it at once.
She told him a little about Ronja then, the parts that weren't the wound: a girl who would photograph a dead bird for an hour and forget to eat; who once drove to North Dakota at midnight because the storm light was better there; who'd taught Hannah that you don't take the picture of the thing, you take the picture of the light on the thing, and that everything she knew about reading a dying face she'd first learned reading the light her sister chased.
Casey listened to the very bottom of it and asked one good question, and she answered it, and the case sat on the table between them and waited, patient as the dogs.
After a while they went back to the practical, because the practical was a place they both knew how to stand.
They made a plan. Casey would build the photo array Daniel had described, the older man's face mixed in among strangers, nothing to nudge a hoping witness toward a yes.
Hannah would keep working the paper, the permits and the proofs and the long boring middle where the fact always hid.
They divided it by who could read what, the same split they made of everything now, and neither of them said out loud that they had become a thing that divided work between them.
Casey walked her to her car under a hard cold sky.
The photograph was two men. One was Hagen.
One was an older man Daniel Wittenberg would know on sight and would not name into the dark.
Somewhere past both of them, at the margin, was a shoulder neither of them could place.
Casey kept it all and went inside to a desk where a federal email had now sat unanswered for the better part of a week.