life. Since he had never gone out of his way to give Mikesh any trouble, Mikesh wasn’t about to stay sore with him.
“What were you doing, anyway, Arnie?”
“I finished my Prairieview shift at one thirty. It was Friday night, and I was tired. I live on Scenic Road over towards Waucoma. County W44 is the most direct route. The fog was so thick, it was tough work just finding my truck in the parking lot, much less seeing the road ahead of me. What was that guy, the driver, doing out there?”
Seegmiller shook his head with knowing self-importance. “Just so happens they knew at state patrol headquarters where King’s people were: down in Des Moines. King’s been down there these last two weeks for some big come-to-Jesus sort of meeting. Had a run-in with authorities for causing some sort of ruckus, but got released on bail. That gave him a little press the last two days in the capital. Dying on the lam like this ought to keep him in the news another day or two.” Seegmiller paused. “It was a church car he was driving. They had another event scheduled for tonight. Sounds like those people also would like to know what he was doing up here.
“His mother and brother and someone from the church are here.” Jimmy jerked a thumb toward the sheriff’s office. “They’ve identified the body. I got done with them about a half hour before you came. They’re talking to the coroner right now, pretty messed up about this. They want to talk to you, Arnie. They asked for your name.”
Seegmiller leaned towards Mikesh and tapped the top of his ballpoint against the desk for emphasis. “This little event is going to put that rat’s-ass church of theirs out of business.”
“So King led a church?” Mikesh realized that this explained why he didn’t know as much about Joshua King as the people around him. Mikesh and religion, like pickles and cake, were a bad mix.
“That’s just it,” Seegmiller frowned. “It ain’t really a church. It’s more like a cult. And what’s a cult got without the head guy? A bunch of hippie-crazy-free-love-anti-government nuts living out of their VW microbuses, and not a clue in the world about how to keep a job.”
Okay. You, my reading sister, my listening brother, I’m going to stop here, to say that what you just read, just heard, is how Jimmy Seegmiller described Josh’s lifework to Arnie Mikesh. It’s what Seegmiller thought of the group of people I have grown to consider family. Don’t hold it against him personally. Seegmiller, like every other law officer from Des Moines to New Albin, was not disposed to think hospitably about Josh.
I’m pausing the story to say that, recording the unconventional way Josh navigated life, I could use the words I place on the page before you like a privacy fence, concealing what isn’t nice. Instead, I am working to make these words, this story, if I can, a window, an open one. I’m going to let you hear the trash talk you would get in reply, yourself, if you chatted with the law in the county where my brother died. So you know that Jimmy Seegmiller considered me, your source for this story, a hippie-crazy-free-love-anti-government nut. And you won’t be surprised to find that Seegmiller smiled as he pictured the grim future he imagined for my brother’s work, my work. I have lived my adult professional life as an archeologist. In that work a projectile point or a fragment of pottery or a piece of charred wood lying in a clean drawer, disconnected from the place of its discovery, can tell me little. But embedded in dirt and grit that I have carefully measured and chronicled and mapped, these objects can begin to speak. I keep Josh in situ. I leave the grit of Josh’s environment intact. I leave the window open.
“The cult sucks a few straight, decent folks in now and then, gets their money or their business, and that keeps the whole thing afloat. If they are just a church, without their main man, that will all dry up, won’t it?”
Jimmy phrased his last question like it wasn’t a question. Cops love to talk smack, and Mikesh didn’t feel like going down that road. He could still feel the cold, and in his mind still see my brother’s eye looking back at him.
“Like I said, I don’t know anything about that,” he replied.
“In your line of work, Arnie, you don’t have to deal with the kind of crap we get from people like that.” Seegmiller hadn’t put the brakes on yet. “A bunch of gypsies is what they are. And if you have to ask them for an event permit, insurance papers, a vehicle registration, or proof of legal residence, you might as well be talking Bohemian. All you get back is an empty look, a holier-than-thou speech. But they don’t fool me. You don’t talk that line of crap without needing to hide something. And, if you ask me, that probably was true for the boss as well.” Seegmiller focused his anger on my brother. “He was south of the border one too many times for me to believe he didn’t have some kind of junk racket going on to keep the whole thing afloat—marijuana, meth, whatever you’ve got to link up with Mexico to score. The guys from state are checking out his vehicle for drugs, I can tell you that. Maybe as far as that part of the business goes, that church of his won’t need him alive to keep the money coming. But if they find drugs, the state might just be able to put an end to their little business.”
“Listen Jimmy. You are talking about someone I watched die last night. Take it easy, okay?”
“Right.” Having made his speech, Seegmiller needed more oxygen and could start breathing again. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? We need a few more details and a signature. The sheriff wants to speak with you and then you can go.”
The sheriff, in his big office, was neither as talkative nor as excited as Seegmiller. Mikesh could see that Paul Fox bore a grudge against him for his earlier entrance. Fox had moved into the county less than five years earlier and spent only two or three years as a deputy before getting elected sheriff. Even though he ran as a Republican, this was no small accomplishment for an outsider in the tight, conservative world of Winneshiek County. Mikesh pegged him for a man who might have his sights on a bigger pond. Fox had the solid, unexceptional look of a guy who might be modeling casual slacks in the men’s section of a farm-and-home store catalog, but also wore the confident authority of a man with county voters’ mandate to sniff out the criminals that made at least a quarter of them lock their doors at night. Fox sat back in his chair with a wide expanse of desktop between the two of them and studied Mikesh. The accident, Fox said, happened on a county road. It was his jurisdiction to assist in the inquiry, although the state police would take the lead, since it was a fatality. To Mikesh’s surprise, Fox announced that he would be taping the interview. Introductory details completed, with a slightly friendlier tone, Fox asked if Mikesh knew the deceased, and reviewed details of what Mikesh reported last night to the deputies. Slowly Mikesh noticed that the questions were getting less friendly. What had Mikesh been doing between nine and ten p.m. the night before? Was there anyone else at the scene who caught his attention? How in all that fog had he happened to notice that a car was in the ditch? Mikesh came to the office thinking of himself as the helpful neighbor. Fox’s questions put him on the defensive.
Fox sat straight-backed and wrote down Mikesh’s answers. “That car went off the side opposite you on a curve. From every report I got from people out on the road last night, you were lucky to be able to see your own lane,” Fox said. “I just want to make sure you didn’t meet him on that road, weren’t in a place because of all that fog that might have caused him to run off the road like that.”
“I was at work from five o’clock on.”
“Anybody there to back you up on that?”
“I checked in at the beginning of my shift. After that, though, I was on my own. It was a quiet Friday night. No evening classes. Everyone who could be off the road was home.” Mikesh scoured his memory. “I talked to the cleanup guy on the last round of milking at the dairy center, but that would have been before that time, eight
