Broken Prey

phone. He saw Lucas and said into the phone, “Just a minute,” and then, to Lucas, “Lucas Davenport?”
    “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 purple-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