'people living in this nightmare, people encouraging this nightmare, willingly doing the business of the devil '
He'd turned to Rose Marie, who was watching him openmouthed, and for a moment he looked as if he was going over the desk at her. Lucas moved quickly, from behind the desk, saying, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, man, slow down'
Olson stopped talking, but continued to vibrate, then turned away and stepped to the back of the office and leaned on the door. After a moment, in the silence, he turned, with tears running down his cheeks. 'Can I see her?' he asked.
Del was working down a line of junkies and dealers, trying to find the source of the drugs going through SillyHansons apartment the night before. Lucas's other guy, Lane, was working on Alie'e's genealogy.
'I want all of her family, and I want a chart that shows how they're related,' he told Lane. 'I want all of her ex-husbands'
'Aren't any.'
'all of her ex-fiancйs, ex-boyfriends, anyone else who might want to do her. Same with this other chick'
'Lansing.'
'Yeah. I want the whole chart.'
'Listen, I think if we sorted through the people who were at the party last night, ran them'
Lucas shook his head. 'Homicide's halfway through the list. I'll get it tonight or tomorrow, if they don't have a ease by then.'
'Or working on the cat-burglar angle. I got some sources down there from when I was on patrol.'
'Lanego with the genealogies. Homicide and Property are working the cat-burglar thing. We want stuff that Homicide won't get around to right away. 'Cause if Alie'e getting killed isn't a random thing, if it's not a cat burglar, then it's somebody who knows her well enough to have a motive, and it's gotta be somebody reasonably close.'
'But'
Lucas pointed a finger at him. 'The fuckin' genealogies.'
He spent an hour in Homicide, listening to returning cops talk about what they'd found, what looked good. Not much looked good. Lester came back from his talk with Tom Olson. 'He says his parents trained her like a dog. That's his word. Like a show dog. Used to drag her all over the country for beauty competitions and youth talent contests and modeling gigs.'
'Butabuse?'
'He didn't mean sexual abuse, that wasn't part of the deal,' Lester said. 'And he doesn't think his parents could have had anything to do with her death. He said they wereliving through her. That they took her life as a kid away from her, and that they were still taking.'
'Did Alie'e fight it?' Lucas asked.
Lester shook his head. 'He says no. He said she never knew anything else.'
'Huh. He seemed a little nuts.'
'He's a preacher of some kind,' Lester said. 'He says he actually loves his parents, but he just doesn't like them very much.'
Then Del was on the phone, and said, 'Hold on to your shorts.'
'What happened?'
'Boo McDonald called me. I'm over at his place.' McDonald was a paraplegic who monitored police scanners for a half-dozen TV and radio stations, and sometimes back-fed information to the cops. 'He's been cruising the Internet, searching under 'Alie'e.' There's a story out, from here in the Cities, called 'Muff-Divers' Ball Goes Homicidal.' Guess what it's about.'
'Muff-Divers' Ball?' Lucas repeated.
Lester's eyebrows went up. 'That doesn't sound good.'
Del was still talking. 'Yeah. This is an online rock 'n' roll rag calledSpittle. And they got some detail. It's gotta come out of the department.'
'How bad?'
'Well, see, the rag says it's semidocumentary, which means they make up a lot of stuff. You know, to enhance the reality of the moment.'
'Enhance?'
'Let me read a part. Move over, Boo.' Lucas could hear them clunking around for a moment, then Del read, 'Alie'e stretched back toward the brass bars at the head of the bed and grasped them in her hands, holding on tight as the waves of pleasure rippled through her lean, taut body. Jael's head bobbed between her thighs, her long pink tongue parting Alie'e's glistening labia, finding at last that little man in the canoe, the center of Alie'e's heat and being'
'Ah, fuck me,' Lucas said. Then he laughed. 'You'd sound like a porno flick if you had somebody playing a saxophone behind you.'
'Probably will be, sooner or latera movie, not a saxophone. I called the kid atSpittle and asked where he got this shit. He told me he wouldn't talk because of First Amendment considerations. But he said that he had interviews lined up with Channels Three and Four and Eleven.'
'An asshole,' Lucas suggested.
'Actually, I kinda liked him. Reminded me of myself when I was his age. I tried a little threat, but he told me he was a minor and I could go fuck myself.'
'So what'd you say?'
'What could I say? I said, 'The bed wasn't brass, you little prick.' '
'How old is he?'
'Sixteen,' Del said.
'So we go fuck ourselves. Anyway, the lesbian thing is out.
'It's out. Another ring in the circus.'
Lucas called Rose Marie to warn her, and when he got off the phone, walked down to his office and a silent space, kicked back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.
His ceiling was dirtier than it should be.
That's all he got. The case had a bad feel to it: too many suspects, and not enough serious possibilities. Clean murders were the hardest to solve: somebody's killed, everybody denies everything. There were a half-dozen killers walking around the Twin Cities who'd never been touched; the cops knew everything about the murders, without any proof. Husbands killing wives, mostly. Whack the old lady on the head, throw the pipe in the river, go back home and find the body.
What can you do?
He was mulling it over when the phone rang again. More bad news?
No. Catrin.
'Lucas. I've been thinking about you all morning,' she said. 'God, it was good to see you. I've been thinking about the UDo you remember Lanny Morton? Do you know what happened to him?'
'Yeah, as a matter of fact,' Lucas said, getting comfortable. 'He moved to L. A. to get involved in film, and got into real estate instead. He was pretty rich the last time I saw him; he was on his fourth wife.'
'Fourth? What happened to Virginia?'
Lucas hunched forward in his chair. 'Virginia died. Didn't you know that? Jeez, it was only maybe five years after we graduated. She had a heart attack one day on the Venice Beach. She was, like, twenty-eight.'
'Oh, my God. Do you remember that football game with all the mums, everybody had to buy his girlfriend a mum'
'The Iowagame. '
'Yeah. Virginia was like she was going to live forever.'
They talked for twenty minutes, catching up on old times. Catrin remembered all the names from their few months together, and the faces came swimming up from Lucas's memory, along with the sights and the sounds and even the smells of all those old glory days: the field houses all over the Big Ten, smelling of popcorn and dirt; the ice arenas and the odors of cold and blood, wet wool and sweat; diesel fumes from the buses; cheerleaders.
