'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 grand-mother 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 red-winged 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.'
'Had the kid in school,' Sloan said.
'Yeah…' He flipped through the register in Rice's checkbook. Four hundred dollars in checking, seventeen hundred in savings. He didn't write many checks…mostly at the supermarket, and bills.' He found an address book, but nothing that looked like a particularly new entry but Lucas set it aside for the database they'd be creating.
A cop stuck his head in:'They're picking up the kid.'
'All right.'
Two minutes later, the same cop came by: 'One of your crimescene guys says to stop by for a minute.'
They were upstairs, in Rice's bedroom. They followed the cop down and found a technician working with a small sample bag and some swabs. He looked up when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the room: 'Thought you'd want to know. The fingernail blood, I'm almost sure it isn't Rice's. There's skin with it, and a little hair follicle that's darker than Rice's. I think.'
'Anything else?'
'The usual stuff-lots more hair around. We're picking it up, but who knows where it came from? And the guy took a trophy- he cut Rice's penis off, and there's no sign of it around here. Just the penis, not the testicles. The anus seems to have some lubricant still on it, so I think the killer or killers used a condom. Probably won't be any semen.'
Lucas looked at Sloan, who shrugged. 'Hard to tell what that is,' he said. 'Maybe he didn't want there to be any DNA, so maybe he knows about DNA and worries about it. Maybe he's afraid of AIDS, which might mean something if we could show that Rice had some homo-sexual contacts.'
'The sexual…um, aspects…really look like a gay thing to me,' the tech said. 'The violence and the sexual trophy-taking.'
Lucas and Sloan nodded. 'But why was the first one a woman?'
'Maybe there was a gay thing, then Rice went after the woman, and his gay partner blew up,' the tech said. 'Maybe he was punishing them, and that's what all this whipping stuff is about.'
'Maybe,' Lucas said doubtfully.
'It's a concept,' Sloan said. He didn't care for the idea either. 'We need to get this biography. I need to see if I can link Angela Larson to anything down here.'
'You said she was a student; there's a state university branch down here.'
'I'll look,' Sloan said. 'But I did all that background on her, and nobody said nuthin' about Mankato.'
WHEN THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE were done, the medical examiner's came in and picked the body up, zipped it into a bag,and carried it out. The blood splotch on the floor, which retained the impression of the kneeling body, looked like strange black modern art.
They stood over it for a moment, and then Sloan said, 'I don't think there's much more here.' They'd been inside, looking for something, anything, for five hours. If they'd found anything useful, it wasn't apparent.
'This guy…,' Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. He was thinking about the killer. 'This guy
