Lucas pulled onto the lawn next to the end cop car, and he and Sloan got out.
“Davenport, goddamnit, you got the crime scene coming?” the sheriff asked. He was a tall man, and wide, with white hair, a red-tipped button nose, and worry lines on a head the size of a gallon milk jug; he was anxious.
“You call them?”
“I called them, and they said they were rolling.”
“Takes awhile,” Lucas said. He turned to the house. “You shut everything down?”
“Everything.” Nordwall was looking at Sloan. “Who’s this guy?”
Lucas introduced them, and Sloan told him about Angela Larson. “Ah, jeez, I saw that in the paper,” Nordwall said. “But I don’t remember . . . you must not have given them all the details.”
“No, we didn’t,” Sloan said. Sloan dropped the cooler on the ground, and said, “Cokes, if anybody’s thirsty,” and started passing around the cans.
“Might get some to Miz Rice and Miz Carson,” Nordwall said to one of the deputies. He looked past Lucas at the Buick and said, “Rice’s mom, and her sister, and a friend. Miz Rice wants to see them, but I ain’t gonna allow it. Not until after they’re bagged. She’d have that picture in her head until she went to the grave.”
Lucas nodded and gestured toward the farmhouse. “Who found them?”
“One of my deputies, George,” Nordwall said.
One of the deputies, a thin man with shaggy black hair and a ricocheting Adam’s apple, lifted his Coke.
“Me,” the deputy said.
“Tell me,” Lucas said.
The deputy shrugged. “Well, Rice didn’t come to work. He’s the manager of a hardware store in Mankato, and he has the keys to the place. Today he was supposed to open the store. When he didn’t show, the gals who worked there called the owner, who came down to open up. He tried to call Rice, but got a phone out-of-order thing. When he still didn’t show up by ten o’clock, the owner got worried and called us.”
“And you came out?”
“Well, first Sandy, she takes our calls . . .”
“Yeah . . .”
“Sandy’s chatting with the store owner, and he says Rice had a boy in grade school. So Sandy called over to the elementary school and asked if the kid showed up. They said no, and that Rice hadn’t called in an excuse. I was down this way patrolling, and they asked me to swing by. I come up, saw a car around back, but nobody answered. The doors were open and then, uh, I went around back and looked in through the back door and I saw the boy lying on the floor, and man, he looked like, you know, he was dead. He looked like a rag doll. Then I come in and found him and I got the heck out of there and alerted the sheriff.”
“Didn’t touch anything?”
“I been trying to think,” the deputy said, looking over at the house. “The door handle, for sure. And I think I put my hand on the door frame on the way out. The main thing was, I didn’t know if somebody was still in there, and I wanted to get outside where I could see somebody running, if they were. Then I stood here until everybody come in.”
“Sounds like you did okay,” Lucas said, and the deputy bobbed his head, taking the compliment. Lucas said to Nordwall, “We gotta have your guys figure out if they touched or moved anything. It’ll make things easier. We’re gonna be looking for DNA, and that’s a touchy thing.”
“I figured,” Nordwall said. He looked up at the house. “You gonna go in?”
“Just for a quick look,” Lucas said.
LUCAS HAD LITTLE FAITH in crime-scene analysis as a way of breaking a case, but it often came in handy after they caught somebody. He got thin vinyl throwaway gloves from his car, handed a packet to Sloan. They went in through the back door, since that entry route had already been contaminated, trying not to bump anything, or scuff anything. The door opened into a mudroom, six feet square with coat hooks on the wall, ancient linoleum flooring, then through a glass-paneled door into the kitchen. The boy was lying in the kitchen, a pool of dried blood around his head; he was wearing pajamas.
“Been there awhile,” Sloan said. He stepped closer, squatted. “He was hit on the head with something. Something crushed the skull.”
“He never moved, the skid marks lead right into the blood,” Lucas said. Lucas had a toddler at home, and swallowed, the bitter taste of acid in his throat. “Must have killed him outright.”
Sloan sighed, put his hands on his thighs, and pushed himself back up. “I’m gonna quit,” he said.
“Yeah, right.” Lucas led the way toward the next room, a hall. They could see the living room beyond it.
“I’m serious,” Sloan said. “I got the time in. I’m gonna put this guy away, and then I’m gonna do it. That dead kid is one dead kid too many.”
Lucas looked at him: “Let’s talk about it later.”
“Fuck later. I’m gonna quit.”
ADAM RICE WAS IN THE NEXT ROOM. He was naked, kneeling, his hips up, his head on the floor. He had duct tape on both wrists, as though they’d been taped together, and then cut loose. His body was a mass of blood, a hundred bloody stripes across his chest and stomach and thighs. Scourged, Lucas thought. Blood spattered the walls, a round oaken dinner table, two short bookcases full of books and china; and splashed across the faces of a dozen people smiling down from pictures on the living-room wall.
Sloan looked at him and said, “That’s our guy. No question about it.”
“No question.”
“None.”
RICE’S CLOTHES HAD BEEN flung in one corner, and were rags. The killer had cut them off with some kind of razor knife or box cutter or scalpel. He’d brought it with him, Lucas thought, and had taken it away with him.
“He’s got some muscle,” Sloan said, looking at the dead man. “The killer must have had a gun on him. Doesn’t look like he fought back much.”
Lucas nodded. “The guy comes in, he has a gun, points it at Rice, tells him it’s a robbery and that there’ll be no trouble if he cooperates. Rice is worried about the kid, who’s up in bed. He cooperates. He gets his hands taped up and then the shit starts. They’re struggling, knocking around, maybe, the kid hears it, comes down, sees what’s going on, and runs for the door. The killer gets him in the kitchen. Maybe whacks him with the butt of a shotgun.”
Sloan nodded: “I’ll buy that, for a start.”
“The thing is, the killer came for Rice, the father. He wasn’t pulled in by the kid. The kid looks like an accident, or an afterthought. Maybe the killer didn’t even know he existed.”
“Huh.” Noncommittal.
“Look, if he’d known about the kid, he’d have put the old man on the ground, then he’d have gone up to the bedroom to take care of the kid, to make sure that he didn’t get out somehow. Instead, he has to go after him in the kitchen, whack him with something.”
“Okay . . .”
Rice made an awkward pile in the middle of a large puddle of blood. The light fixture on the ceiling was bent, cocked far off to one side: a lot of weight had been put on it.
The weight had been Rice: he was a slender blond man, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. The killer had taped his wrists, then put a rope through them, and hung him from the light fixture. Rice had tried to twirl away from him when the beating began, and his blood sprayed in an almost perfect circle. When the killer cut him down to pose him, he centered Rice’s body in the blood puddle.
Rice’s eyes were open, blue now fading to translucent brown; his palms were facing up, his fingers crooked. Lucas looked at one hand, then the other, and squatted as Sloan had squatted next to the boy.
“Got some blood here, under his nails. Maybe some skin . . .”
“Could be something,” Sloan said. “All the other blood on him is running down his body—he hung him up like he hung up Larson. Wonder if he tried to fight at the last minute, and scratched the guy?” He squatted next to Lucas, then bent to look at the fingernails. “Skin, for sure, I think. Your guys gotta be careful or they could lose it.”
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“They’ll get it,” Lucas said. He stood up and made a hand-dusting motion. “What do you think? Look around, or wait for crime scene?”
Sloan shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll find anything looking around. I’ve done everything I could think of with Angela Larson—went over her apartment inch by inch, the place she worked, did histories on her until they were coming out of my ears. I don’t think this has much to do with the victims. They’re stranger-killings. He stalks them and kills them.”
“Trophies?”
“I don’t know. We never found Larson’s clothes or her jewelry, so maybe they were taken as trophies . . . but then . . . Rice’s clothes are right here.”
“Never found out where he killed Larson.”
“No. Probably a basement. The soles of her feet were dirty, and there was concrete dust in the dirt. So . . . could have been a basement.”
THEY STOOD NEXT TO THE BODY for a minute, a strange comradely cop-moment, their shoes just inches from the puddle of blood, a half dozen fat lazy bluebottle flies buzzing around the room; bluebottles, somebody once told Lucas, were actually blowflies. One landed on the far side of the blood puddle, and they could see it nibbling at the crusting blood.
“You can’t really quit,” Lucas said.
“Sure I can,” Sloan said.
“What would you do?” A fly buzzed past Lucas’s head, and he swatted at it.
“Ah . . . talk to you about it sometime. I got some ideas.”
Lucas got up, looked around: a pleasant, homey place, the house creaking a bit, a sound that must have seemed warm and welcome; a glider-chair lounged in one corner, comfortably worn, facing a fat old Sony color TV with a braided rug on the floor in front of it. A couple of nice-looking quilts hung from the walls, between yellowed photographs of what must have been grandparents and great-grandparents.
“YOU KNOW THE PROBLEM,” Lucas said softly. He was looking at a log-cabin quilt; he didn’t know anything about quilts, but he liked the earth colors in it. “We’re not going to pick up much here, not unless we get lucky. Maybe DNA. But where’s that gonna get us?”
“A conviction when we get him.”
“The problem is getting him. That’s the fucking problem,” Lucas said. “A conviction . . . that can always be fixed, when we get the right guy. Getting him . . .”
“Yeah . . .”
“I want all the paper from Minneapolis,” Lucas said.
Sloan nodded. “I’ll get Anderson on it.”
“And I’ll get the crime-scene guys to copy everything to you, from here. You got nothing off the Larson killing?”
“I got names. That’s one thing I got.”
“Okay. That’s a start. I’ll get a co-op center going, get them to set up a database. We’ll pipe in everything from here, from Nordwall’s guys.”
“There’s gotta be more from here. There’s gotta be,” Sloan said, looking around, an edge of desperation in his voice. “If we don’t get anything, then we won’t get him before . . .”
Lucas nodded and finished his sentence: “. . . before he does it again.”
OUTSIDE ON THE LAWN, Nordwall and the other deputies were sitting on the grass, in the shade of an elm, looking like attendees at the annual cop picnic. The summer was at its peak, the prairie grasses lush and tall, just starting to show hints of yellow and tan. A mile or so away, across a wide, low valley, a distant car kicked up a cloud of gravel dust.
Nordwall was chewing on a grass stem; when they came up, he stood and asked, “What do you think?”
“Same guy,” Sloan said.
“Sloan did a lot of research on the first one, up in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna set up a co-op center out of the BCA. We need a complete biography on Rice and the kid—who did they know, who had they met recently. The guy knew about him—something about him. He didn’t come out here by accident. And he knew about the first one, too. Maybe the two of them, Rice and Larson, intersect somewhere.”
“You think . . . maybe some kind of boy-girl romance thing?” one of the deputies suggested. “A jilted lover? Rice’s wife got killed in a car accident a couple years ago, he might have been looking around.”
“You get a jilted lover, you get a gun in a bedroom or a knife in the kitchen, but you don’t get the boyfriend raped,” Sloan said mildly.
Nordwall swiveled and looked at another of the deputies and said, “You get right on this biography, Bill. Don’t hold back, and don’t worry about the overtime. I’ll cover anything you need.” To Lucas, he said, “This is Bill James. I’ll get his phone number for you.”
The deputy stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants with a couple of slaps: “I’ll go right now. Get started.”
“What happened with the wife?” Lucas asked. “A straight-up accident, no question?”
“In the winter, winter before last,” said Nordwall. “She came around a snowplow, didn’t see the pickup coming the other way. Boom. Died in the ditch.”
“So . . .”
“Whole goddamn family up in smoke,” a deputy said.
“Here comes a truck,” somebody else said.
A white Mission Impossible–style van was rolling down the gravel road toward them. “That’s the crime-scene guys,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you guys get them inside? Me and Sloan’ll go talk to Mrs. Rice.”
LAURINA RICE WAS IN HER SIXTIES, with white puffy grandmother hair and a round, leathery face lined by age and the sun. She was too heavy, too many years of potatoes and beef. She wore a dress with small flowers on it. Her sister, Gloria, was perhaps three or four years older, and the friend about the same.
Laurina Rice struggled to get her feet on the ground and get out of the car as Lucas and Sloan walked over to it. On the other side of the car, a hundred and fifty yards out over the bean field, a flock of redwinged blackbirds hassled a crow, diving on the bigger bird like fighters on a bomber.
As had happened on other crime scenes, Lucas was for a second struck by the ordinariness of the day around him: nature didn’t know about crime, about rape and murder, and simply went on: blue skies, puffy clouds, blackbirds hassling crows.
“You’re the state man, Mr. Davenport, and Mr. Sloan from Minneapolis . . .” Rice said. Her eyes were like a chicken’s, small and sharp and focused.
“Yes. I’m terribly sorry about what happened, Mrs. Rice.”
She twisted the fingers of her right hand in her left, literally wringing them. “I need to see my boy, to see that it’s him.”
Lucas shook his head: “I’m afraid we have to process the scene first. We have to try to catch this man—he killed a young woman up in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, and he’s going to kill more people if we don’t catch him. We can’t move the bodies until we have the crime scene processed . . .”
“Like on the TV show?” Gloria suggested.
“Something like that, but better,” Lucas said. “These people are real.”
“How long?” Rice asked.
Lucas shook his head again. “I can’t tell you. It depends on what has to be done. It would be best if you went home and rested. The sheriff will call you before they move the bodies. That would be the time.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
Sloan smiled at her, his best sympathetic smile, and said, “We understand. If you need anything, ask the sheriff. And would you . . . we have some questions about your son.”
“Okay,” she said. She sniffed. “We knew there’d be questions.”
They did the routine biography—who might not like him, whom he had arguments with, debts, women, jealous husbands, where he spent his nights, what he did for entertainment.
Lucas asked the hard one: “Mrs. Rice, as far as you know, did your son have any homosexual friends, or acquaintances?”
She looked to Sloan, then back to Lucas. “Are you . . . he was married. He didn’t hang around with homosexuals.” She started to tear up.
“This is routine,” Lucas
said. “We have to ask. There was a good deal of violence here, which sometimes characterizes homosexual murders, especially murders of passion.”
She knew what he was asking. “My boy was not a homo,” she snapped. The women behind her all nodded. “He was married, he was widowed, he would have remarried someday, but he just hadn’t got started since Shelly was killed. He was not a gay person.”
“But did he know any gays?” Lucas persisted. “Somebody who might have built up a fantasy about him? He was a good-looking man.”
Laurina looked at Gloria, and they simultaneously shook their heads. “I don’t think he even knew any gays,” she said. “He would have mentioned it. We had supper together once a week, we talked about everything.”
“Okay,” Lucas said.
THEY CHATTED A BIT LONGER, then moved back into the house, leaving Rice and the others in the car.
The next four hours were taken up with the technicalities and legalities of murder: the crime-scene technicians worked the murder scene, the medical examiner came and went, leaving behind an assistant and two men to handle the bodies. A state representative, who lived ten miles away, stopped and talked to the sheriff, said something about the death penalty, wanted to look inside but accepted the “no,” and went on his way.
“Dipshit,” Nordwall said, as the legislator’s car trundled down the driveway.
When the crime-scene techs had decided that the murders took place pretty much in the area of the two bodies, Lucas and Sloan began working through the small intimacies in other parts of the house, looking at bills and letters, collecting recent photographs, checking the e-mail in the five-year-old Dell computer, stopping every now and then for a Diet Coke. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for in the house, but that was okay; they were impressing images and words on their memories, so they would be there if anything should trip them in the future.
“He has a Visa card about due,” Sloan said at one point. “We oughta get the bill and see where’s he’s been.”
“I looked at his Exxon bill out on the kitchen table. He hasn’t been far away, not for the last year or so,” Lucas said. He was digging through Rice’s wallet. “One tank of gas every Friday or Saturday.”