"Yeah."
"I'm Jim Goode. If you hook the edge of the screen with your fingernails, you can pull the door open. The house is contaminated up to where I am."
Lucas hooked the door open, carefully avoiding the door handle. He was in the kitchen, a small room with laminate cupboards and a narrow, U-shaped counter covered with plastic; a double porcelain sink, chipped and yellowed with age; and a floor of curling vinyl.
The walls were real plaster, and there were pots everywhere, several with flowers, geraniums and cut yellow roses. A small breakfast table, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, sat under a bright window, with two brilliant blue chairs, one on each side. The arrangement looked both tidy and lonely. The house probably dated to World War II, he thought, and had last been updated in the seventies.
THERE WAS A FOOT-LONG smear on the floor, the people-black color of blood. Somebody had stepped in it and smeared it. Not too much blood, Lucas thought: less than he'd lost when he was hit in the nose. On the other side of the kitchen was a curl of yellow plastic rope, the kind used to tie down tarpaulins. Goode was saying into the cell phone, "I do think we have to get them farther out now. Uh-huh. At least that far. And Dakota has to push down this way… Okay. Maybe we could try the Highway Patrol… Uh-huh. Okay. Davenport's here now, I'll be back pretty quick."
He rang off, put his hand out, and as Lucas shook it, he said, "We've got everybody we can find out on country roads. If he's really going to hunt her down, and do it around here, he's got to be moving around. We downloaded pictures of Pope and Peterson, Xeroxed off a few hundred of them, and we've got students from St. Olaf and Carleton going out in their cars, leafleting everything inside of twenty miles."
"Hope nobody stumbles on Pope."
"They're out in groups of three, except where they're putting up public posters in stores and phone poles, and then they're in twos," Goode said. "Everybody's got cell phones."
"Great," Lucas said. And it was-somebody had been moving fast. "What about this place?"
Goode pointed: "The blood and the rope. That's all we've got-but it really is blood, it isn't chocolate syrup or anything. It's pretty dry, but not completely, so he probably got her this morning." He was talking quickly, nervously, the words tumbling out. "We checked the house to make sure there was nobody here. Other than the check, we've stayed out. We're hoping your crime-scene crew…"
"They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won't help us find Peterson," Lucas said. "We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?"
"There's a little office in the second bedroom." Goode pointed down a hallway.
"Then that's where I'll be," Lucas said. "What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?"
"Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband's a teacher at the high school."
"Check him?"
"At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It's not a copycat."
"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…"