Broken Prey

away, across a wide, low valley, a distant car kicked up a cloud of gravel dust.
    Nordwall was chewing on a grass stem; when they came up, he stood and asked, “What do you think?”
    “Same guy,” Sloan said.
    “Sloan did a lot of research on the first one, up in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna set up a co-op center out of the BCA. We need a complete biography on Rice and the kid—who did they know, who had they met recently. The guy knew about him—something about him. He didn’t come out here by accident. And he knew about the first one, too. Maybe the two of them, Rice and Larson, intersect somewhere.”
    “You think . . . maybe some kind of boy-girl romance thing?” one of the deputies suggested. “A jilted lover? Rice’s wife got killed in a car accident a couple years ago, he might have been looking around.”
    “You get a jilted lover, you get a gun in a bedroom or a knife in the kitchen, but you don’t get the boyfriend raped,” Sloan said mildly.
    Nordwall swiveled and looked at another of the deputies and said, “You get right on this biography, Bill. Don’t hold back, and don’t worry about the overtime. I’ll cover anything you need.” To Lucas, he said, “This is Bill James. I’ll get his phone number for you.”
    The deputy stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants with a couple of slaps: “I’ll go right now. Get started.”
    “What happened with the wife?” Lucas asked. “A straight-up accident, no question?”
    “In the winter, winter before last,” said Nordwall. “She came around a snowplow, didn’t see the pickup coming the other way. Boom. Died in the ditch.”
    “So . . .”
    “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 grandmother 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 redwinged 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