Silken Prey

with the gun, then shot her,” Cochran said.
    “Or vice versa.”
    “Could be. Can’t tell her posture when she was hit, because the bullet’s still inside. No exit, no trajectory.” As he spoke, Lucas heard a gust of laughter, from somewhere behind the house: children playing.
    “Goddamnit. I need to talk with her,” Lucas said, looking down at the body. “I mean, we could have either a multiple murderer, or a freakin’ weird coincidence.”
    “I might be able to help you with that, with the one-or-the-other,” Cochran said. He squatted, carefully, dug inside his jacket for a pencil, and pointed the pencil at a patch of black fabric under one of her arms. “See that? That’s a man’s glove. It’s pinned under her. There’s only one glove, nothing else like it in the house. We’re thinking . . .”
    “Could be the killer’s.”
    “Yeah. Either pulled off, or dropped out of a pocket,” Cochran said. “Anyway, there’s gonna be all kinds of DNA in it. If we get lucky . . .”
    If they got lucky, they’d get a cold hit from the Minnesota DNA bank. All felons in Minnesota were DNA-typed.
    “How soon?”
    “Tomorrow morning. It’ll be our top priority,” Cochran said.
    “I may send you a couple of swabs.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS SAW A TOTE BAG sitting by the corner of the bed, and what appeared to be the silvery corner of a laptop poking out of it. “Would you mind taking the laptop out and turning it on?”
    Cochran said, “No, I don’t mind. . . . It doesn’t seem too connected to the shooting scene. But it should have been stolen.” He slipped the laptop out and said, “This isn’t good.”
    “What?”
    “It’s a Mac PowerBook, like mine. The first screen you come to is gonna want a password.”
    “Let’s give it a try,” Lucas said. Cochran didn’t want to put it down on anything the killer might have touched, so they carried it back outside, and he handed the laptop to Lucas and sat down in his lawn chair. Lucas sat on the stoop below him and turned it on. When they got to the password, Lucas asked, “What was the daughter’s name?”
    “Callie . . . Roman.”
    Lucas typed “Callie” into the password slot, and the computer opened up.
    “Christ, it’s like you’re a detective,” Cochran said.
    Lucas went to the e-mail and started scrolling backwards. He found a BLTUBBS on the second page down, turned to Cochran and said, “It’s not a robbery.”
    “Do tell?”
    “Well, maybe not. But if it is, we really are ass-deep in coincidence.”
    He found a half-dozen messages from Tubbs in the past three weeks. Tubbs and Roman had been talking about something, but the messages were never specific. “Call you this evening . . .” and “Where will you be tonight?”
    The replies were as short and nonspecific as the questions. The only thing that might mean something was a note from Tubbs that said: “Got the package. Talk to you tonight. Call me when you get home.” The message was sent four days before the porn popped up on Smalls’s computer. The last access of the pornography on the Minneapolis police computers had been five days before.
    Lucas asked Cochran, “Cell phone?”
    He shook his head. “No cell phone, but she didn’t have a landline, either. The killer took the cell. Like he should have taken the computer,” Cochran said. “You want to give me the whole rundown on this?”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS SHUT DOWN the computer and handed it back to Cochran, stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, leaned against the porch banister, and told him about the investigation, leaving out only what was necessary. When he was done, Cochran said, “You never talked to her? I mean, you talked to her, but you didn’t interview her?”
    Lucas rubbed his face and said, “Man, it’s like the old joke. Except the joke’s on me.”
    “What joke?”
    “The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.”
    “I don’t know that one,” Cochran said.
    Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’