41.

Leaving the Clinton Street police station, Kirsten hurried back to the Impala. At this point she wouldn’t bother with newspaper archives about the murder of Father Lasorda. Frontera’s statements that the priest was cut up pretty bad, and that there were rumors of him messing around with little girls, seemed to tell the tale. Besides, right now the big questions were: Where was Aunt Angela’s farm? Who owned it? Who sold it? And to whom?

It was just past six o’clock. Traffic was heavy and it would be getting dark soon, so she just headed out of town as fast as she could. She’d never heard of Sanilac County, but she knew the “Thumb” of Michigan was straight up from Detroit.

She took I-94 northeast, got off when she’d left the city behind, and cut back west and then north. At I-69 she stopped for gas and a look at the road atlas. She found Sanilac County, and then Waterton, which had to be the town Frontera meant. It was a dot on a thin gray line with no route number. North of Decker, which was west of Sandusky. Those last two towns sounded familiar for some reason, but she couldn’t think why they would.

Probably the easiest way to find Debra’s aunt’s old farm would be to talk to local law enforcement at Waterton. Except they’d want to know what she was up to, and word might get back somehow to the FBI and she didn’t want those two idiot agents trying to get her PI license pulled. She had a little clout of her own, and didn’t know how easily they could do that, but since 9/11 and the Patriot Act the feds had more power than ever and she didn’t want to take a chance. So, no cops.

She had over fifty miles still to go. By the time she got up there it would be dark, and most people more easily put up with annoying questions from strangers in the light of day. The best time was in the morning, when the whole world seemed a little more open and optimistic, and a little less suspicious and hostile.

Actually, she thought, maybe all that time-of-day stuff was in her own mind. But at any rate, she was tired of driving, and she wanted a comfortable place to call Dugan from. She didn’t plan to tell him where she was. He didn’t have to know everything that was going on.

There were several motels near the interstate and she picked a Red Roof Inn.

*   *   *

It was a warm, sunny morning. Waterton was a bigger town than Kirsten had expected. The downtown was an old-fashioned square. She drove the perimeter, with stores on her right and a well-kept plot of grass with a statue of a soldier and some benches on her left. A lot of the stores were vacant, but there seemed to be a resurgence trying to take place, for the most part cutesy gift and antique stores. There was, though, a real grocery store—a Kroger’s—and a drugstore, an appliance store, a diner, a hardware store, and … yes … a real estate office.

BAGGS’ REALTY was painted in an arc on the window and there were a dozen photocopied notices of properties for sale, with fading black and white pictures of houses and farm buildings taped to the glass facing the sidewalk. The front door was held wide open with a piece of clothesline looped around the handle and then over a hook in the wall.

The office was very small, and the woman at the first of two desks—no one sat at the other—looked up from her computer monitor. She was maybe fifty years old, with short gray hair and a bright, helpful smile. A copy of The Tao of Pooh sat on the desk, and under it a New Yorker magazine. “May I help you?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Kirsten said. “Although I have to say I’m not looking to buy or sell any property.”

The eyes took on a what-else-is-new look, but the smile faded only a trace. “Rent, maybe? We handle some nice fishing cabins along the river.”

“Maybe next summer,” Kirsten said. She introduced herself and said she was a writer. “A freelance journalist, actually. I’m working on a story about the history of organized crime in Detroit, and about the homes in the country some of the gangsters used to have … to sort of get away from it all.”

Before Kirsten had finished, the woman was up and walking across the little room to a coffeemaker on a table against the opposite wall. She turned. “Have a seat,” she said, and nodded to a chair beside her desk. “Coffee?”

“That’d be great.” Kirsten sat down and noticed a game of solitaire on the computer screen. “No cream, no sugar.” She took the large white ceramic mug the woman gave her and sipped. “Wow!” she said. “That’s delicious.”

“Thank you.” The woman sat down again and sipped her own coffee. “It is good. My name is Eleanor Baggs, and I don’t know a thing that could help you at all in your search.” She sounded refreshingly truthful, and not just trying to avoid something. “But that must be so interesting. To be a writer, I mean.”

“I always thought so, too,” Kirsten said. “But truthfully? I’m not one.” She dug her ID out of her purse. “I’m a private investigator, from Chicago.”

The woman stared, wide-eyed, at the card in the folder, then handed it back. “Oh my,” she said.

Kirsten nodded. “Um … if you want to kick me out, Eleanor, wait until I finish this coffee, would you?”

“The part about gangsters’ hideouts? That was true, right?”

“Pretty much so.” Kirsten smiled. “But I’m looking for just one place. It’s a—”

“Gangsters I’m not so sure of, but I moved here from New Jersey last year to help out my uncle, and found out they have more than their share of crazies around here. Militia groups, skinheads, extremists who think Armageddon’s around the corner.” Eleanor clearly felt like talking. “People say maybe it’s something in the soil, or the water. Remember Timothy McVeigh? The Oklahoma City bomber?” When Kirsten nodded she went on. “One of his buddies lived not far from here.”

“Decker,” Kirsten said, knowing now why the name had seemed so familiar. The address on McVeigh’s driver’s license had been Decker, Michigan.

“Yes. It’s a shame, too.” Eleanor shook her head and sipped her coffee. “A lovely little town, and the only thing the world knows about it now is—”

“Memories fade,” Kirsten said. “But I’m looking for a farm where a woman named Morelli lived. The address is Waterton.”

“Is she a gangster?”

“Her brother was. I understand she had a place up here. At least she did until as late as four years ago. I’m told it’s been sold since then.”

As Kirsten spoke, Eleanor started typing on the keyboard, her eyes on the monitor. “Is that M-O-R-E-L-L-I?” she said.

“Yes. First name Angela.”

Eleanor typed some more. “Can’t find any Morelli at all.”

“Well…” Kirsten thought. “Maybe she got married … or divorced … Maybe your uncle would remember something.”

“My uncle doesn’t remember things any more. He … he’s getting old.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kirsten said. “Well, are there other real estate agents in town? Maybe someone—”

“There’s Cassie Jones. She’s the wife of the police chief, and she’s not very—”

“Right. Well … how many farm sales could there be, anyway?”

“I suppose I could find all sales of record, and then cull out…” Eleanor went back to her keyboard. “I take it you don’t have an address?”

“What I have is ‘a rundown house on a rundown farm, near Waterton.’ That’s it.”

Eleanor laughed. “We got lots of those. Is it north of here? South? What?”

“I don’t know. Look, maybe I—”

“Let me try something.” Eleanor seemed to be really into this search, maybe because it beat computer solitaire. “When was the sale?”

“Two or … let’s see … make it within the last four years.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later Eleanor Baggs had printed out a list of nine farms with Waterton mailing addresses that were bought and sold within the previous four years. Five were working farms whose owners she had either met personally or knew by reputation. Two were purchased by the same large agricultural conglomerate. “Damn them,” Eleanor said. “They have no—”

“Uh-huh.” Kirsten said. “What about the last two?”

“Let’s see.” Eleanor typed and consulted the screen. “This one was purchased three years ago, by something called the Dearborn Hunt Club.” She typed some more. “And this one … ah … two and a half years ago. Seller was … First Bank of Waterton as trustee under trust number blah blah. Purchaser … Mapleleaf Bank of Toronto as trustee under trust number blah blah.”

“Which means what?” Kirsten said. “Some Canadian bank holds the title, but just as a trustee? And whoever’s the beneficiary of the trust is the real owner?”

“That’s right. That’s pretty common. Sometimes the beneficiary of the trust transfers his interest to someone else—essentially sells the property—and it won’t show up as a sale because—”

“Because the owner of record stays the same, the bank.”

“Which means,” Eleanor said, “that if this Angela Morelli’s farm was held in trust, she could have sold it to someone and I wouldn’t be able to find the sale.”

“So,” Kirsten said, “I’d be better off looking around town for someone who actually knew Angela Morelli, and where her farm was.”

“Maybe. But like I say, there’s a lot of oddballs out there that nobody really knows. Mostly they keep to themselves, do their shopping at some place like the Wal-Mart over at Saginaw. You’ll find plenty of places with fences and huge dogs and KEEP OUT signs, and you never know if it’s just an ornery farmer or someone building bombs in—”

“So how many pieces of property are out there, big enough to be called a farm, that have a Waterton address?”

“That’s a tough one. Around here a farm could be over a thousand acres, or just a few. People from the city see a house with a stand of corn along a country road and they call it a farm.”

“So what are we talking about? Dozens of places?”

“With a Waterton address, but outside town proper? I’d say dozens, easy. Fifty, maybe. George Kleeman might know. He’s the postmaster.”

Postmaster, Kirsten thought. Duh.