'How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?'
'Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy… Hang on, There's a photograph.' He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. 'We're not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that's her.'
A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.
Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: 'We don't know if she's been on the town. She's been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.'
'Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope's killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,' Lucas said. 'It's about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here… Or not here, but someplace close by.'
'I'll set something up,' Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. 'My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I'll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.'
'Okay.'
Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, 'What are her chances?'
'Man…,' Lucas shook his head. 'If he's telling the truth, and she's still alive? About one in hundred, I'd say. We're gonna have to take him while he's moving her.'
GOODE LEFT, and Lucas went back to Peterson's home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead-Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon-sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.
The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.
And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley-something woodland, wild, and light.
THE SCENT CAUGHT HIM by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the 'on' button on the Mac, and began going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.
He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be a student? Seemed unlikely-what student would want to hang with Pope? But everything he found, he set aside.
When the computer was up, he went into the mail program and started reading down through the 'in box,' the 'deleted' and the 'sent' listings. More names, with e-mail addresses; most of the e-mail was from students, a few from fellow faculty, one from a woman who was apparently a personal friend who wanted to know if she was going up to MOA Saturday. Mall of America? Two e-mails came from a guy with the initial Z who Lucas thought was probably Peterson's ex-husband, concerning cuts from a jade tree. Most of the rest came from ceramics people scattered around the country. Receipts from Amazon, old travel reservations with Northwest, Hertz, and Holiday Inn, and miscellaneous life detritus made up the rest.
Nothing leaped out at him.
He pulled open the file cabinets: she was meticulous about finances, and one cabinet contained file folders of her American Express and Visa bills. Lucas went through them line by line, noting the few times she'd used her credit cards in what appeared to be restaurants. There weren't many, and most were out of state.
He made notes on all of if and was still working when Goode called back.
'Marilyn Derech is a friend of hers,' Goode said. 'She lives down the street, three houses down. We can use her family room to talk to people. I've got them coming here, we've got a half dozen coming so far. There are a couple here now…'
'I'll come down. I've got some more names,' Lucas said. 'Did you ever find her purse?'
'Uh… we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.'
'Okay.Give me five minutes.'
He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliche about women's handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip-forty dollars-from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.
Car keys to the bottom of the bag. A rock; an ordinary black smooth basaltic stone, and he wasn't the least bit mystified: Weather picked up that kind of stuff all the time. Lipstick. A ChapStick. Another Chap-Stick. More ibuprofen.
Nothing: he felt like throwing the bag through the fuckin' front window.
Turned around in the room. She'd just been here, and now, she was God knows where. His eye caught the clock on the stove in the kitchen, through the archway from the living room: as he glanced at it, the display changed, clicking off a minute.
He could feel the time trickling away.
HE GOT HIS NOTES and hurled outside; a cop was still leaning against the car, designated, he guessed, to keep an eye on the house. 'If the phone rings in there…'
'It won't-they're being routed downtown.'
'Good. Where's this place…?'
The cop pointed farther up the street and across. 'That white house. The one… There's Jim.'
Lucas saw Goode step out on a porch and look down toward him. He went that way, fast.
'GODDAMN TIME,' he said to Goode as he hurried up. 'We've got no time.'
'I know, I know… I got six people here.' Goode looked at his watch. 'We sent a guy downtown to get her ex- husband, he's been down at the station…'
'What's his name?'
'Uh, shit-Zack? Zeke?'
Lucas nodded: 'Okay.'
MARILYN DERECH WAS a plump blond woman who looked scared: wide-eyed and scared. Four other women and a plump man, who all looked scared, sat on the living-room couch and chairs, and two more kitchen chairs Derech had brought into the living room.
Lucas introduced himself, got their names: 'We're really in trouble here,' he said. 'Does anybody know anything about her social life? Who she was seeing, where she went at night? Was she dating, did she go to bars?'
After a moment of silence, one of the women flipped up a hand. 'We went to a restaurant up in the Cities, they have wine and music.' 'The woman had introduced herself as Carol Olson. She looked about forty, with medium-brown hair, a thin nose. 'On Grand Avenue in St. Paul, it's called BluesBerries.'
'BluesBerries-I know where that is,' Lucas said. 'Did you talk to guys, did you…'
'We just went up and had some wine and listened to music, and then we had dinner… we didn't really talk to anybody.'
'Only the one time.'
'I only went the one time, but I think she'd gone up a couple of times.' Then she stopped and put a hand to her lips. 'Listen to me. I'm trying to protect her reputation. I don't think she went up, I know she did. She knew the
