The Y’all Duck Inn’s parking lot was separated from the Rockyard’s lot by a fringe of grass. A shabby two-story building, it showed two long rows of gray-green doors facing the highway, with a small window next to each door. The parking lot was gravel, the stairs and walkways were concrete and outside in the weather: a fifteen-dollar-a-night motel used as a crash pad by truckers and refugees from the Rockyard who were too drunk to drive home.
They didn’t bother with the office; they climbed the stairs and walked south until they got to twenty-five and knocked. They were lucky the first time: Dove answered.
She probably looked good in a bar, in the evening, Lucas thought. During the day, and outside, she wasn’t quite pretty. Twenty years old, maybe, with a pasty face that didn’t like the light, and hips that already ran to wobbly fat. She answered the door wearing a yellow halter top, white shorts, three-inch-thick platform flip-flops, and too much makeup; she was chewing gum.
She saw Lucas first, and a frown flitted across her face: “You don’t, uh. .” Then she saw Sloan and blurted out, “Jesus Christ, don’t arrest me. My mother doesn’t know I do this.”
“Your mother,” Sloan said.
Lucas stepped toward her, and Dove backed into the motel room, and Lucas stepped in after her. Sloan followed and pushed the door shut. A soap opera was playing on the TV. A furry moose doll with crooked velvet horns sat on top of the TV. Lucas found the remote control, pushed the power button, and the noise went away. “Do you know Adam Rice?”
“Ohmagod,” she said. She looked from Lucas to Sloan, chewed once on her gum. “I wasn’t sure it was him.” She sat on the bed, picked up a pillow, and squeezed it around her chest, looking up at them, eyes big.
“We’re running down everything we can find,” Lucas said. “We understand you were his favorite date.”
She stared slack mouthed into the open bathroom. “We were wondering today if it was him in the newspaper.”
“Anything unusual about him?” Lucas asked. “Strange sex stuff. .”
She shook her head. “Nope. Always the same. Wanted me to get naked and go down on him. He’d watch. I mean mostly people watch, but he was like, you know, curious.”
“Never pushed you around, never wanted you to push him around. .”
She shook her head, her hair bouncing around her shoulders. A dark streak ran down the middle of her part: she needed a new blond job. “Nope. When he was finished, he’d tip me, and then he’d wait until I got dressed, and if there was nobody else ready to go at the bar, he’d buy me a beer. He was a sweet guy, sort of. Maybe a little corny.”
Lucas spotted her purse, picked it up. She said, “Hey,” but he ignored her, took out her wallet, looked at her driver’s license. It said Bertha Wolfe.
“Bertha-did he ever talk about friends, ever come in with friends?”
“C’mon, man, don’t mess with my stuff. .”
Lucas put the wallet back in the purse and tossed it back on the dresser.
“Friends?”
“Just one guy, he came along two or three times,” she said. “The friend never went with one of us guys-Adam said he was an old school buddy, they knew each other for years.”
“A name?” Sloan prompted.
She squinted, rolled her eyes, thinking, then, “Larry Masters? That’s not right, but it’s something like that.”
Sloan suggested Andy Sanders, and Dove pointed her finger at him and said, “That’s it. Exactly.”
“Nobody else.”
She turned down the corners of her mouth and said, “Nope. Not that I can think of.”
“Think harder.”
She tried to put a thinking look on her face, but shook her head. “Do you guys. . I mean, do you think whoever did it comes to the bar? This girl up in the Twin Cities, was she working?”
“We don’t know any of that,” Lucas said. “You might think of taking a vacation for a couple weeks, though. Until we get him.”
“You’re sure you’re gonna get him.” A small edge of skepticism?
“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “We just don’t know how many more people he’ll kill before we do.”
She shivered and said, “The paper said Adam was mutilated.”
With Lucas pushing her, Dove took them down to the next two rooms, rented by Andi and Aix; both, like Dove, were thin, a little flabby, and unnatural blondes. Andi claimed that she hardly remembered Rice and wasn’t even sure she’d had sex with him.
Aix had had sex with him, twice, she thought, and with some prodding, said, “I did see him talking to a pretty strange guy, once. Kind of a snaky guy. He looked like a pool hustler, or something, somebody who works at night or maybe was in prison, because he was like dead white. Adam didn’t know him, but he was teasing Adam about being such a fresh-faced guy hanging around with the likes of me. . this guy knew, I guess, you know, even though I never went with him or anything.”
“How often did you see the guy?”
“That was the last time,” Aix said. “I might have seen him once before, shooting pool. He said he used to be a sailor, and sailed yachts. I’m like, right, a yachtsman right here at the Rockpit.”
“Rockyard,” Sloan said.
Her little joke: “Pit. You look at the place?”
“Their idea of culture is a wet-T-shirt contest,” Dove said, snapping her fingers, as though flicking a flea off her shirt.
“This guy, this sailor. . you said he was snaky. How? What do you mean?” Lucas asked.
“Like he was thin, but he looked strong, wiry, you could see these muscles working in his arms. Black hair but really pale white. Oh: he had a tattoo, one of those barb-wire dealies that go around your biceps.”
“A biker,” Lucas suggested.
She nodded and wrinkled her nose: “He might’ve known his way around a Harley,” she said. “But he never mentioned anything.”
They all sat looking at her for a moment, then Sloan said to Lucas, “Not much.”
“No.”
Aix shook her finger at him: “But it was something. You know? There was something going on. One of those things you think might go on and be a fight. The guy kept teasing Adam about his fresh face. . This newspaper story made me think there might have been something gay going on. .”
“What made you think that?”
“Just. . something. You know how you can tell sometimes? And the thing is, the thing that was going on with the snaky guy. . there was something a little gay in that, too. Neither one of them looked gay, or talked gay, but there was something there.”
A few more minutes of pushing got them nothing. Lucas turned to Sloan and said, “You happy?”
“I guess.”
Dove said, “You’re not going to arrest us, are you?”
Lucas shook his head. “Nah. But really-maybe take a vacation?”
And to Aix: “If you see the snaky guy again, call us. And if you see him, get somebody to walk you out to the parking lot. Somebody you know.”
Andi, shivering: “You really think he’s around here?”
Sloan stood up and said, “Listen, if any of you’d seen the woman up in Minneapolis, you wouldn’t want to take any chance. Any chance.”
They all nodded, and Lucas and Sloan backed out of the room. As they walked down to the car Sloan said, “If you wind up in Room twenty-seven at the Y’All Duck Inn, you probably made a bad career choice somewhere.”
“What if everybody in three counties calls you Booger?”
“Another bad sign,” Sloan said. “A bad sign.”
7
The press conference was held in a beige-walled, tile-floored, odor-free, windowless meeting room with a podium and rostrum at one end, in front of a blue Minnesota state flag that hung slightly askew on the wall behind the rostrum. The room was full of cheap Chinese plastic chairs with loud steel feet, which scraped and squealed when they were pushed around.
Reporters started drifting in a half hour before the press conference, led by the TV cameramen, who pushed the chairs around to make room for themselves and their lights. The newspaper guys, scruffy next to the TV on-air people, pushed the chairs around some more, the better to bullshit with one another. They were a little noisier than usual, a combination of off-camera cheer and on-camera solemnity, because the story was a good one.