Broken Prey

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 it 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 . . .”
    “I’ll come down. I’ve got some more names,” Lucas said. “Did you ever find her purse?”
    “Uh . . . we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.”
    “Okay. Give me five minutes.”
    He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliché about women’s handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip—forty dollars—from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.
    Car keys in the bottom of the bag. A rock; an