husband. 'How's Corbeau?'
'She's in the can. By herselfI checked. I think you made an impression on her this morning, and it wasn't fatherly,' Sherrill said. 'My personal feeling is that she's too young for you.'
'She can't be any younger than you are.'
'Iwas too young for you,' Sherrill said.
'I was much younger when we started going together,' Lucas said, 'than when we called it off.'
'Bullshit. You were rejuvenated,' Sherrill said. 'Anyway, we're shopping. And I'm on the lookout for maniacs.'
'St. Paul brought in a guy,' Lucas said. He told her about it and said, 'I don't think it's anything.'
'So what do I do? Stick with Corbeau?'
'Yeah. If anything heats up, I'll call.'
He was walking down the hall to the chief's office, to get the computer disk, when Lane returned. He was walking fast, an intent look on his face.
'What?' Lucas asked.
'That genealogy. Excuse me, I meant, thatfuckin' genealogy. I was getting everything I could on Sandy Lansings friends, so I went by the hotel to see who she hung out with there. Everybody in the place was looking for Derrick Deal.'
'Deal? He's gone?'
'They haven't seen him since he talked to you. Or about then. They been calling his housenobody home.'
'Huh. So I'm not doing anything. I'll go knock on his door.'
Chapter 14
Derrick Deal lived in a town house in Roseville, eight miles northeast of the Minneapolis loop and off Highway 36. The town house, a split-entry end unit with a tuck-under garage, was one of twenty arranged around a pond full of Canada geese.
Lucas knocked on the door, waited, and got the hollow response that an empty house gives. The garage door was locked, so he walked around back. There were windows on the side of the garage and the back door, and he peered inside, but couldn't see much: a corner of the kitchen table from the back door, and on the table, what looked like a stack of bills and a checkbook. The garage was empty. He walked back around to the front, noticed that the mail slot was open just a crack; he pushed it the rest of the way, and could see mail on the floor. More than one day's worth, he thought. No newspapers, though.
He knocked again, then went next door and knocked. No answer from there, either. If you lived in a town house, you worked. Maybe check back in the evening.
As he was leaving, Lucas cranked up his cell phone, called Dispatch and asked that they find Deal's license tag, and put it out.
'Lucas, the chief has been trying to get in touch with you,' the dispatcher said. 'There's a meeting going on well, it's gonna start in ten minutes, in her office. She wants you to come.'
'Ten minutes,' he said. 'I might be a couple minutes late. Tell her.'
As he ran the Porsche out onto the interstate, he glanced back toward the town houses. Maybe, he thought, Deal had gone to the same place as Trick Bentoin, wherever that was. But he didn't think so. Deal's disappearance was a shadow across the day.
A huge detective named Franklin was climbing the stairs toward the City Hall's main level when Lucas caught up with him. 'What's going on?'
'Just gettin' a Coke and an apple,' Franklin said. 'Something going on?'
'Meeting,' Lucas said. 'I was afraid another body had fallen out of a closet somewhere.'
'Probably has. But not here, as far as I know,' Franklin said.
Lucas went on ahead. The chief's secretary nodded at the closed office door and said, 'We've got a crowd. Alie'e's family and some friends. You're supposed to go right in.'
Rose Marie was barricaded behind her desk. To her left, Dick Milton, the department PR guy, perched on the edge of a folding chair, his jaws tight. Eight people were arrayed in visitors' chairs in front of the desk: Alie'e's parents; Tom Olson, unshaven, apparently in the same clothes he'd worn at the last visit; and three other men and two women Lucas didn't recognize.
'Lucas, come in, we're just getting started.' Rose Marie glanced at one of the men Lucas didn't know and added, 'I guess we're trying to get some ground rules going here. Everybody, this is Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief, who often works as a kind of, mmm, key man in these kinds of investigations. Lucas, you know Mr. and Mrs. Olson; and this is Mr. and Mrs. Benton, and Mr. and Mrs. Packard, the Olsons' best friends from Burnt River, who're down to help out; and Lester Moore, the editor of the Burnt River newspaper.'
Moore was a gangly man with reddish hair and green watery eyes. He wore wash pants that were an inch too short, and showed a rind of pale skin between the top of his white socks and the cuff of the green pants. 'I'm the ground rules problem,' he said affably.
'The problem,' Rose Marie said, 'is that Mr. Moore is also one of the Olsons' good friends.' The Olsons both nodded at once, as did the Bentons and the Packards. 'They want him here. But if we give him the confidential family briefing that is not available to all the press'
'So will you use what we tell you in confidence?' Lucas asked.
Moore shook his head. 'Of course not. I'm here as a friend, not as a reporter. We have our reporter down here right now, and she'll do our coverage.'
Milton piped up. 'Suppose you think your reporter is reading something wrong, because of privileged information you happen to have.'
'We'll go with her story,' Moore said. 'The people of Burnt River have the right to the informationbut not necessarily at this exact minute.'
Rose Marie looked at Lucas, who shrugged. 'So, you trust him or not. I'd say, go ahead and trust him now, and stop if something comes out.'
After thinking about it for a second, Rose Marie nodded. 'All right. Mr. Moore stays with the understanding that what is said in this room, stays in this room.'
As Rose Marie briefed the group on what had been done in the past twenty-four hours, and filled them in on the murder of Amnon Plain, Lucas watched Tom Olson. Olson sat squarely and solidly in his chair, his chin down almost to his chest, staring fixedly at Rose Marie as she spoke. He really wasn't porky, Lucas thought, although an observer at a distance might think soespecially since pork was almost the default body shape for men in the upper Midwest. But Olson looked hard; he was barrel-shaped and square-faced, but you could see the bones in his cheeks and at his wrists. Helooked like a farm mechanic: somebody used to pushing around machines, and maybe throwing bales.
The Bentons and Packards, on the other hand, had the pale, round blandness of prosperous Minnesota small- town people. They were not quite blond, but not quite brunette, either. They all spoke softly in rounded Scandinavian vowels, with perfect grammar, and finished each others sentences. They were, Lucas thought, like two pairs of sugar cookies out of the same nonsexist male-female cookie cutter.
Tom Olson was the one to speak when Rose Marie finished. 'So what you just said is, you didn't find out anything. There's no new information.'
'That's not at all what I said,' Rose Marie snapped. 'There was a lot of negative informationwe eliminated a lot of possibilities. I will tell you, Mr. Olson, and Chief Davenport will tell you the same thing, that if you don't find the killer standing over the victim and arrest him on the spot, then the elimination of possibilities is one of the most important things we do. Wewill find the killer. We know it's going to take time'
'Oh, horseshit,' Olson said.
His mother looked at him and said, 'Thomas.'
The older Olson cleared his throat and said, 'The funeral is the day after tomorrow, if you can release Alie'e to us. The ME said he thought that was likely.'
'It's done, or will be in the next few minutes,' Rose Marie said.
