Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“We should talk to the publishers and the station managers or the station owners,” Lucas said after a moment’s reflection. “They can order the heat turned down.”

“Think they’ll do it?”

Lucas considered for another moment. “If we do it right. Media people are generally despised, but they’re like anybody else: they want to be loved. Give them a chance to show that they’re really good guys, they’ll lick your shoes. But it’s got to come from you. Like, top guy to top guy. And maybe you ought to take the deputy chiefs with you. Maybe the mayor. That’ll flatter them, show them that you respect them. They’re going to ask some stuff like, ‘You want us to censor ourselves?’ You’ve got to say, ‘No, we don’t. We just want to apprise you of the dangers of public panic; we want you to be sensitive to it.’ ”

“Do I have to share those thoughts with them?” Daniel asked sarcastically.

Lucas pointed a finger at him. “Quit that,” he said harshly. “No humor. You’re dealing with the press. And yeah, say share. They talk like that. ‘Let me share this with you.’ ”

“And they’ll buy it?”

“I think so. It gives the newspapers a chance to be responsible. They can do that because they aren’t making any money off the deal anyway. You don’t get more advertisers because you’re carrying murder stories. And they don’t care much about short-term circulation gains. They can’t sell those, either.”

“What about the TV?”

“That’s a bigger problem, because their ratings do shift, and that does count. Christ, I think I read in the paper last week that the sweeps are coming up. If we don’t cut some kind of a deal with TV, they’ll go nuts with the maddog stuff.”

Daniel groaned. “The sweeps. I forgot about the sweeps. Jesus, this is supposed to be a police department. We’re supposed to catch crooks, and I sit here sweating about the ratings sweeps.”

“I’ll get the names of everybody you want to talk to,” Lucas said. “I’ll give them to Linda in an hour. With phone numbers. Best to call them directly. Then they think you know who they are.”

“Okay. One meeting? Or two? One for the papers and one for the TV?”

“One, I think. The TV people like to be in the same discussions with the newspaper guys. Makes them feel like journalists.”

“What about radio?” Daniel asked.

“Fuck radio.”

Anderson propped himself in Lucas’ office doorway.

“Something?”

“He may drive a dark-colored Thunderbird, new, probably midnight blue,” he said with just the mildest air of satisfaction.

“Where’d that come from?” Lucas asked.

“Okay. The medical examiner figured she was killed sometime Wednesday night or Thursday morning. We know she was alive at seven o’clock because she talked on the telephone with a friend. Then a guy who lives across the street works on the night shift, he got home at eleven-twenty and noticed that her light was still on. He noticed because she usually went to bed early.”

“How’s he know that?”

“I’m getting to it. This guy works a rotating shift out at 3-M. When he was working the day shift, seven to three, he used to see her going down the sidewalk when he left for work. One time he asked her why she got up so early, and she said she always did, it was the best time of day. She couldn’t work at night. So he noticed the light. Thought maybe she had a big test.”

“And . . .”

“So we think she was dead then. Or dying. Then, about ten o’clock—we’re not exact on this time, but within fifteen minutes either way—this kid was walking up toward his apartment and he noticed this guy walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Going the same way. Middle height. Dark coat. Hat. This is the street that runs alongside Wheatcroft’s house. Anyway, they walk along for a couple of blocks, the kid not paying attention. But you know how you keep track of people when you’re out at night on foot?”

“Yeah.”

“It was like that. They walk for a couple of blocks and the guy stops beside this car, this Thunderbird. The kid noticed it because he likes the car. So the guy unlocks it, climbs in, and drives away. When the kid hears about Wheatcroft, he thinks back and it occurs to him that this guy was kind of odd. There were a million parking places on the street around there, and it was cold, so why park at least two or three blocks from wherever you’re coming from?”

“Smart kid.”

“Yeah.”

“So did you look at him?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. He’s okay. Engineering student at the U. He’s got a full-time live-in. The guy across the street looks okay too.”

“Hmph.” Lucas rubbed his lip.

Anderson shrugged. “It’s not a major clue, but it’s something. We’re checking insurance records on Thunderbirds, going back three years, against people who transferred policies up here from somewhere else. Like Texas.”

“Luck.”

The meeting was held the next day at midmorning in a Star-Tribune conference room. Everybody wore a suit. Even the women. Most of them had leather folders with yellow legal pads inside. They called the mayor and Daniel by their first names. They called Lucas “lieutenant.”

“You’re asking us to censor ourselves,” said the head of the Star-Tribune editorial board.

“No, we actually aren’t, and we wouldn’t, because we know you wouldn’t do it,” Daniel said with a treacly smile. “We’re just trying to share some concerns with you, point out the possibility of general panic. This man, this killer, is insane. We’re doing everything we can to identify and arrest him, and I don’t want to minimize the . . . the horribleness—is that a word?—of these crimes. But I would like to point out that he has now killed exactly five people out of a population of almost three million in the metropolitan area. In other words, your chances of dying in a fire, being murdered by a member of your own family, being hit by a car, to say nothing of your chances of dying from a sudden heart attack, are much more significant than your chances of encountering this killer. The point being, news coverage that produces panic is irresponsible and even counterproductive—”

“Counterproductive to what? You keeping your job?” asked a Star-Tribune editorialist.

“I resent that,” snapped Daniel.

“I don’t think it was entirely appropriate,” the paper’s publisher commented mildly.

“He doesn’t have to worry about it anyway,” said the Minneapolis mayor, who was sitting at the foot of the table. “Chief Daniel is doing an excellent job and I intend to reappoint him to another term, whatever the outcome of this investigation.”

Daniel glanced at the mayor and nodded.

“We have a problem here,” said the station manager for TV3. “This is the most intensely interesting story in the area right now. I’ve never seen anything like it. If we deliberately deemphasize the coverage and our colleagues over at Channel Eight and Channel Six and Channel Twelve don’t, we could get hurt in terms of ratings. We don’t have newspaper circulation counts to go by, the ratings are our lifeblood. And since we’re the top-rated station—”

“Only at ten; not at six,” interjected the Channel Eight manager.

“And since we’re the overall top-rated station,” the TV3 manager continued, “we have the most to lose. Frankly, I doubt our ability to work out any kind of agreement that everybody would hold to. There’s too much in the balance.”

“How about if me and a bunch of other cops went through the force man by man and told them how a particular station was hurting us with their coverage? How about if we asked each and every cop, from the watch commanders on down, not to talk to that station? In other words, shut down one station’s contacts with the police force. Froze you out. Would that have an impact on ratings?” asked Lucas.

“Now, that’s a dangerous proposition,” said the representative from the St. Paul papers.

“If we get some media-generated panic, that’s a dangerous proposition,” Lucas said. “If some kid who’s living in the dorm comes home from the university at night unexpectedly, and his old man blows him away because he thinks it’s the maddog, whose fault is that going to be? Whose fault for building up the fear?”

“That’s not fair,” said the TV3 manager.

“Sure it is. You just don’t want it to be,” Lucas said.

“Calm down, lieutenant,” the mayor said after a moment of silence. He looked down the table. “Look, all we’re asking you to do is not to hammer so hard. I timed Channel Eight last night, and you gave more than seven minutes to this case in four separate segments. In terms of television news, I think that’s overkill. There almost weren’t any other stories. I’m just suggesting that everybody look at every piece of coverage and ask, ‘Is this necessary? Will this really build ratings? And what if Chief Daniel and the mayor and the City Council and the state legislators get really angry and start talking about the irresponsible press and mentioning names? Will that help ratings?’ ”

“Bottom line, then, you’re saying don’t make us mad,” said the news director from Channel Twelve.

“Bottom line, I’m saying, ‘Be responsible.’ If you’re not, you could pay for it.”

“That sounds like a threat,” said the news director.

The mayor shrugged. “You take a dramatic view of things.”

As they went through the lobby on the way to the street, Daniel looked at the mayor.

“I appreciate that thing about the reappointment,” he said.

“Don’t go out and celebrate yet,” the mayor said through his teeth. “I could change my mind if you don’t catch this asshole.”

CHAPTER

20

The two days between the taking and the discovery of the body had been days of delicious anticipation. The maddog relaxed; he smiled. His secretary thought him almost charming. Almost. Except for the lips.

The maddog ran the tapes over and over, watching McGowan report from the Wheatcroft scene.

“This is Annie McGowan reporting from the scene of the latest in the series of killings by the man called maddog,” she said, her lips making sensual O’s. “Minneapolis Police Chief Quentin Daniel himself is inside this house just three blocks from the University of Minnesota campus. It was here that a crippled law student, Cheryl Wheatcroft, celebrated as one of the best minds of her law-school class, was tortured, stabbed to death, and sexually mutilated by a man police say is little better than a wild beast . . .”

He liked it. He even liked the “wild beast.” The “pig farmer” was gone, forgotten. He reveled in the papers, read the stories over and over, lay on his bed and reran the memory of Wheatcroft dying. He masturbated, the face of Annie McGowan growing prominent in his visions.

The media reaction built through the weekend, culminating in three pages of coverage in the Minneapolis Sunday paper, a smaller but more analytical spread in the St. Paul paper. On Monday, the coverage died. There was almost nothing, which puzzled him. Burnt out already?

That afternoon, he went to the county recorder’s office and politely introduced himself as a lawyer doing real-estate-tax research. He showed them his card and they instructed him in the use of computerized tax files. McGowan? The names ran up the computer monitor: McGowan, Adam, Aileen, Alexis, Annie. There she was. A sole owner. Nice neighborhood.

The computer gave him square footages, prices. He would need more research. He went from the computer files to the plat books and looked at the neighborhood maps.

“If you need aerial photos, you’ll find them in those cases over there,” said the clerk, smiling pleasantly. “They’re filed the same way.”

Aerial photos? Fine. He looked them over, picking out McGowan’s house, noting its relationship to the neighboring houses, the garden sheds, the detached garage. He traced the alley behind the house with a fingertip. If he walked in from the north side, he could approach from the alley and go straight to the back door, pop it, and go in. If he came in early enough, when he knew McGowan was on the air, he would have a chance to explore it. What if there was another occupant? Easy enough to find out; that was what the telephone was for. He would call night and day, while she was working, looking for a different voice; he knew hers so well now. Maybe she had a roommate. He thought about that, closed his eyes. He could do a double. Two at the same time.

But that didn’t feel right. A taking was personal, one-to-one. It was to be shared, not multiplied. Three’s a crowd.

The maddog left the recorder’s office and walked through another glorious fall day to the library, to the crime section, and began pulling out confessional books by burglars. They were intended, their authors said, to help homeowners protect their property.

From a different perspective, they were also a short course in burglary. He had studied a couple of them before he went into Carla Ruiz’ studio. They helped. The maddog believed in libraries.

He thumbed through the books, picked the four best that he hadn’t read. As he walked out of the stacks, past rows of books on crime and criminals, the name “Sam” caught his eye. Son of Sam. He had read about Sam, but not this particular book. He took it.

Outside in the sunshine, the maddog took a deep breath and watched the people scurrying by. Ants, he thought. But it was hard to take the thought too seriously. The day was too good for that. Like early spring in Texas. The maddog was not unaffected.

The burglary books gave him material for contemplation; the Sam book, even more.

Sam should not have been caught, not when he was.

On his last mission, as the maddog thought of it, he had shot a young couple, killing one, wounding and blinding the other. He had parked some distance away, near a fire hydrant. His car had been ticketed.

A woman out walking her dog had seen both the ticketing and, later, a man running to the car and driving away. When the latest Sam murders hit the press, she called the police. There had been only a few tickets given in the area at that time of night, and only one for parking at a hydrant. The police were able to read the car’s license number off the carbon of the ticket. Sam was caught.

The maddog was reading in bed. He dropped the book on his chest and stared at the ceiling. He had known this story, but had forgotten it. He thought about his last note, the one dropped on Wheatcroft. Isolate yourself from random discovery, it said. He thought about his car. All it would take was a ticket. Now that he thought about it, it was a certainty that police were checking tickets issued near the killings.

He tossed the book on the bed and padded out to the kitchen, heated water in a teakettle, and made a cup of instant cocoa. Cocoa was one of his favorites. As soon as the hot bittersweet chocolate hit his tongue, he was back at the ranch, standing in the kitchen with . . . Whom? He shook it off and went back to the bedroom.

He had done it right with Wheatcroft. He had driven so that he wouldn’t be seen leaving his house on foot. He had parked and walked in to the killing so that his car wouldn’t be spotted at the crime scene.

Walk in to the killing. Keep the car out of the way. Make sure, make doubly sure, that the car was legally parked. And get it close enough to the house that he could reach it in a minute or so, at a run, but far enough away that it would not be immediately remembered as being a strange car near the site of a killing.

Five blocks? What would five blocks be? He got out a sheet of paper and drew streets and blocks. All right, if he parked five blocks away, the cops would have to check some fifty blocks before they got as far out as his car.

If he parked six blocks out from McGowan’s house, they’d have to check seventy-two blocks. It would be double that if it weren’t for that damned creek across the street.

He looked at his map and figured. If he parked north of her house, he could get six blocks out along the end blocks, which were narrow. He would also have access to alleys that came out of the end blocks, good places to hide, if hiding became critical.

The plat books had indicated that the lots were seventy feet deep, with a fifteen-foot alley. The streets were thirty feet. He figured on his piece of paper. A little over two hundred yards. He should be able to run that in less than a minute. He got up, went back into the kitchen, found a city map in a drawer, and counted up six blocks.

Not six blocks, he thought. Five blocks would be better. If he parked five blocks up, he’d be on a street that had access to Interstate 35. Once in the car, he could be on the highway in less than a minute, even driving at the speed limit.

He closed his eyes and visualized it. At a dead run, panic situation, it was two minutes from her house to the highway. Once on the highway, eight minutes to his garage. He would have to think.

The maddog got McGowan’s phone number from a city cross-reference directory. Called her at home, spoke to her: “Phyllis? . . . Sorry, I must have misdialed,” he said. Called back. Called back again. An answering machine, but never a strange voice.

The maddog did one reconnaissance. He did it in his midnight-blue Thunderbird.

Sunday afternoon. Annie McGowan was visiting her parents in Brookings, South Dakota. She was due back to work on Monday. There were still cops watching her house, one in front, from the architect’s, one in back, from the retired couple’s house. The cops out on the wings, in cars, had been temporarily withdrawn while McGowan was out of town.

With McGowan gone, it was hard to take the surveillance seriously. The cop at the post in back was reading through a stack of 1950’s comic books he’d found in the attic, wondering about the possibility of stealing them. God only knew what they were worth, and the old couple certainly didn’t seem to care about them or even remember they were there. Every two or three minutes the cop would glance out the window at the back of McGowan’s house. But everyone knew the maddog never attacked on a weekend. He wasn’t paying much attention.

He was reading a Superman when the maddog rolled past in front. If the maddog had driven down the alley behind the house, the cop would have seen him for sure—would have heard the car going by—and might have caught him or identified him right there. But a garbage can had fallen over at the far end of the alley. When the maddog started to turn in, he saw it, considered it, and backed out. No point in being seen outside the car, in daylight, fooling around with somebody else’s garbage can.

The cop in the architect’s house, across the street from McGowan’s, should have seen him go by in front. He knew the maddog might be driving a dark-colored Thunderbird. But when the maddog went past, he was downstairs, his head in the refrigerator, deciding between a yogurt and a banana to go with the caffeine-free Diet Coke. He was in no hurry to get back to the attic. The attic was boring.

All told, he was away from the window for twenty minutes, although it seemed like only four or five. When he got back, he opened the yogurt and looked out the window. A kid up the street was washing his old man’s car. A dog was watching him work. Nothing else. The maddog had come and gone.

And the maddog thought to himself: Tomorrow night.

CHAPTER

21

When Lucas pulled in, Carla was sitting in the yard, wrapped in an old cardigan sweater with a drawing pad in her lap. He got out of the car, walked through the dry leaves, deep-breathing the crystalline North Woods air.

“Great day,” he said. He dropped beside her and looked at the pad. She was drawing the forms of the fallen leaves with sepia chalk on blue-tinted paper. “And that’s nice.”

“I think—I’m not sure—but I think I’m going to get the best weavings I ever did out of this stuff,” Carla said. She frowned. “One of the problems with the form is that the best of it is symbolic but the best art is antisymbolic.”

“Right,” Lucas said. He flopped back in the leaves and looked up at the faultless blue sky. A light south wind rippled the surface of the lake.

“Sounds like baloney, doesn’t it?” she asked, smiling, her face crinkling at the corners of her eyes.

“Sounds like business,” he said. He turned his head and saw a cluster of small green plants pushing up through the dead leaves. He reached out and picked a few of the shiny green leaves.

“Close your eyes,” he said, holding his hand out toward her and crumbling the leaves in his fingertips. She closed her eyes and he held the crumbled leaves beneath her nose. “Now, sniff.”

She sniffed and smiled and opened her eyes. “It’s the candy,” she said in delight. “Wintergreen?”

“Yeah. It grows all over the place.” She took the crumbled leaves from him and sniffed again. “God, it smells like the outdoors.”

“You still want to go back?”

“Yes,” she said, a note of regret strong in her voice. “I have to work. I’ve got a hundred drawings and I have to start doing something with them. And I called my gallery in Minneapolis and I’ve sold a couple of good pieces. I’ve got money waiting.”

“You could almost start making a living at this,” Lucas said wryly.

“Almost. They tell me a man from Chicago, a gallery owner, saw some of my pieces. He wants to talk to me about a deal. So I’ve got to get going.”

“You can come back. Anytime.”

Carla stopped drawing for a minute and patted his leg. “Thanks. I’d like to come back in the spring, maybe. You’ve no idea what this month has done for me. God, I’ve got so much work, I can’t even fathom it. I needed this.”

“Go back Tuesday night?”

“Fine.”

Lucas rolled to his feet and walked down to the dock, looked at his boat. It was a fourteen-foot fiberglass tri-hull with a twenty-five-horsepower Johnson outboard mounted on the back. A small boat, wide open, just right for fishing musky. There was a scum line around the hull. The boat had not been used enough during the fall.

He walked back up the bank. “I’m going to have to take the boat out before we leave,” he said. “It hasn’t been getting much use. The maddog has killed the fall.”

“And I’ve been too busy walking in the woods to go out on the water,” Carla said simply.

“Want to go fishing? Now?”

“Sure. Give me ten minutes to finish this.” She looked up and across the lake. “God, what a day.”

In the afternoon, after lunch, they walked back into the woods. Carla carried the pistol on her belt. At the base of the hill, firing at the cutbank from twenty yards, she put eighteen consecutive shots into an area the size of a large man’s hand. They were dead center on the silhouette she’d sketched in the sand. When she fired the last round, she put the muzzle of the pistol to her lips and nonchalantly blew off the nonexistent smoke.

“That’s decent,” Lucas said.

“Decent? I thought it was pretty great.”

“Nope. Just decent,” Lucas repeated. “If you ever have to use it, you’ll have to make the decision in a second or so, maybe in the dark, maybe with the guy rushing you. It’ll be different.”

“Jeez. What’s the use?”

“Wait a minute,” Lucas said hastily. “I don’t mean to put you down. That’s really pretty good. But don’t get a big head.”

“Like I said, pretty great.” She grinned up at him. “What do you think of the holster? Pretty neat, huh?” She had sewn a rose into the black nylon flap.

Much later that night she blew in his navel and looked up and said, “This could be the best vacation I ever had. Including the next couple of days. I want to ask you a question, but I don’t want to ruin it.”

“It won’t. I can’t think of any question that would ruin it.”

“Well. First we have a preamble.”

“I love preambles; I hope you finish with a postscript. Even an index would be okay, or maybe—”

“Shut up. Listen. Besides being a vacation, I’ve gotten an enormous amount of work done up here. I think I’ve broken through. I think I’m going to be an artist like I’ve never been an artist before. But I’ve met men like you . . . there’s a painter in St. Paul who’s an awful lot like you in some ways . . . and you’re going to move on to other women. I know it, that’s okay. The thing is, when you do, can we still be friends? Can I still come up here?”

Lucas laughed. “Nothing like a little honesty to destroy an incipient hard-on.”

“We can get it back,” she said. “But I want to know—”

“Listen. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I have had . . . a number of relationships over the years and a lot of the women are still friends of mine. A couple of them come up here, in fact. Not like this, for a month at a time, but for weekends. Sometimes we sleep together. Sometimes we don’t, if the relationship has changed. We just come up and hang out. So . . .”

“Good,” she said. “I’m not going to fall apart when we break it off. In fact, I’m going to be so busy I don’t know if I could keep a relationship together. But I would like to come back.”

“Of course you would. That’s why my friends call it a pussy trap—ouch, ouch, let go, goddammit . . . .”

“You got a minute?” Sloan leaned in the doorway. He was sucking on a plastic cigarette substitute.

“Sure.”

Lucas had gotten back to Minneapolis so relaxed that he felt as though his spine had been removed. The feeling lasted for fifteen sour minutes at police headquarters, talking to Anderson, getting his notebook updated. He had wandered down to his office, the North Woods mood falling apart. As he put the key in his door, Sloan appeared up the hallway, saw him, and walked down.

“Remember me talking about this Oriental-art guy?” Sloan asked as he lowered himself into Lucas’ spare chair.

“Yeah. Something there?”

“Something. I don’t know what. I wonder if you might have a few words with him.”

“If it’ll help.”

“I think it might,” Sloan said. “I’m mostly good at sweet talk. This guy needs something a little harder.”

Lucas glanced at his watch. “Now?”

“Sure. If you’ve got time.”

Alan Nester was crouched over a tiny porcelain dish, his back to the door, when they walked in. Lucas glanced around. An Oriental carpet covered a parquet floor. A very few objects in porcelain, ceramics, and jade were displayed in blond oak cabinetry. The very sparsity of offerings hinted at a storehouse of art elsewhere. Nester pivoted at the sound of the door chimes and a frown creased his lean pale face.

“Sergeant Sloan,” he said crossly. “I told you quite clearly that I have nothing to contribute.”

“I thought you should talk to Lieutenant Davenport here,” Sloan said. “I thought maybe he could explain things more clearly.”

“You know what we’re investigating, and Sergeant Sloan has the feeling that you’re holding something back,” Lucas said. He picked up a delicate china vase and squinted at it. “We really can’t permit that . . . Ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make that sound so severe. But the thing is, we need every word we can get. Everything. If you’re holding back something, it must have some importance or you wouldn’t hold it back. You see where we’re coming from?”

“But I’m not holding back,” Nester cried in exasperation. He stood up, a tall man, but thin, like a blue heron, and stepped across the rug and took the vase from Lucas’ hand. “Please don’t touch anything. This is delicate material.”

“Yeah?” Lucas said. As Nester replaced the vase, he picked up a small ceramic bowl.

“All we want to know,” he said, “is everything that happened at the Rice house. And then we’ll go away. No sweat.”

Nester’s eyes narrowed as he watched Lucas holding the small bowl by its rim.

“Excuse me for a second.” He crossed to a glass case at the end of the room, picked up a telephone, and dialed.

“Yes, this is Alan Nester. Let me speak to Paul, please. Quickly.” He looked across the room at Lucas as he waited. “Paul? This is Alan. The police officers came back, and one of them is holding a S’ung Dynasty bowl worth seventeen thousand dollars by its very rim, obviously threatening to drop it. I have nothing to tell them, but they won’t believe me. Could you come down? . . . Oh? That would be fine. You have the number.”

Nester put the receiver back on the hook. “That was my attorney,” he said. “If you wait here a moment, you can expect a phone call either from your chief or from the deputy mayor.”

“Hmph,” Lucas said. He smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “I guess we’re really not welcome, are we?” He carefully set the bowl back on its shelf and turned to Sloan. “Let’s go,” he said.

Outside, Sloan glanced sideways at him. “That wasn’t much.”

“We’ll be back,” Lucas said contentedly. “You’re absolutely right. The motherfucker is hiding something. That’s good news. Somebody has something to hide in the maddog case, and we know it.”

They called Mary Rice from a street phone. She agreed to talk to them. Sloan led the way up to the house and knocked.

“Mrs. Rice?”

“You’re the policemen.”

“Yes. How are you feeling?” Mary Rice’s face had gotten old, her skin a ruddy yellow and brown, tight and hard, like an orange left too long in a refrigerator.

“Come in, don’t let the cold in,” she said. It wasn’t quite a moan. The house was intolerably hot, but Mary Rice was wrapped in a heavy Orlon cardigan and wore wool slacks. Her nose was red and swollen.

“We talked to the man who bought the ivory carvings from your husband,” Sloan said as they settled around the kitchen table. “And we’re wondering about him. Did your—”

“You think he’s the killer?” she asked, her eyes round.

“No, no, we’re just trying to get a better reading on him,” Sloan said. “Did your husband say anything about him that you thought was unusual or interesting?”

Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. “No . . . no, just that he bought them little carvings and asked if Larry had any other things. You know, old swords and stuff. Larry didn’t.”

“Did they talk about anything else?”

“No, I don’t know . . . Larry said this man was kind of in a hurry and didn’t want any coffee or anything. Just gave him the money and left.”

Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas thought a minute and asked, “What did these carvings look like, anyway?”

“I still got one,” she offered. “It’s the last one. Larry gave it to me as a keepsake when we were married. You could look at that.”

“If you could.”

Rice tottered off to the back of the house. She returned a few minutes later and held her hand out to Lucas. Nestled in her palm was a tiny ivory mouse. Lucas picked it up, looked at it, and caught his breath.