“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 looked to Sloan, then back to Lucas. “Are you. . he was married. He didn’t hang around with homosexuals.” She started to tear up.
“This is routine,” Lucas said. “We have to ask. There was a good deal of violence here, which sometimes characterizes homosexual murders, especially murders of passion.”
She knew what he was asking. “My boy was not a homo,” she snapped. The women behind her all nodded. “He was married, he was widowed, he would have remarried someday, but he just hadn’t got started since Shelly was killed. He was not a gay person.”
“But did he know any gays?” Lucas persisted. “Somebody who might have built up a fantasy about him? He was a good-looking man.”
Laurina looked at Gloria, and they simultaneously shook their heads. “I don’t think he even knew any gays,” she said. “He would have mentioned it. We had supper together once a week, we talked about everything.”
“Okay,” Lucas said.
They chatted a bit longer, then moved back into the house, leaving Rice and the others in the car.
The next four hours were taken up with the technicalities and legalities of murder: the crime-scene technicians worked the murder scene, the medical examiner came and went, leaving behind an assistant and two men to handle the bodies. A state representative, who lived ten miles away, stopped and talked to the sheriff, said something about the death penalty, wanted to look inside but accepted the “no,” and went on his way.
“Dipshit,” Nordwall said, as the legislator’s car trundled down the driveway.
When the crime-scene techs had decided that the murders took place pretty much in the area of the two bodies, Lucas and Sloan began working through the small intimacies in other parts of the house, looking at bills and letters, collecting recent photographs, checking the e-mail in the five-year-old Dell computer, stopping every now and then for a Diet Coke. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for in the house, but that was okay; they were impressing images and words on their memories, so they would be there if anything should trip them in the future.
“He has a Visa card about due,” Sloan said at one point. “We oughta get the bill and see where’s he’s been.”
“I looked at his Exxon bill out on the kitchen table. He hasn’t been far away, not for the last year or so,” Lucas said. He was digging through Rice’s wallet. “One tank of gas every Friday or Saturday.”
“Had the kid in school,” Sloan said.
“Yeah. .” He flipped through the register in Rice’s checkbook. “Four hundred dollars in checking, seventeen hundred in savings. He didn’t write many checks. . mostly at the supermarket, and bills.” He found an address book, but nothing that looked like a particularly new entry, but Lucas set it aside for the database they’d be creating.
A cop stuck his head in: “They’re picking up the kid.”
“All right.”
Two minutes later, the same cop came by: “One of your crime-scene guys says to stop by for a minute.”
They were upstairs, in Rice’s bedroom. They followed the cop down and found a technician working with a small sample bag and some swabs. He looked up when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the room: “Thought you’d want to know. The fingernail blood, I’m almost sure it isn’t Rice’s. There’s skin with it, and a little hair follicle that’s darker than Rice’s. I think.”
“Anything else?”
“The usual stuff-lots more hair around. We’re picking it up, but who knows where it came from? And the guy took a trophy-he cut Rice’s penis off, and there’s no sign of it around here. Just the penis, not the testicles. The anus seems to have some lubricant still on it, so I think the killer or killers used a condom. Probably won’t be any semen.”
Lucas looked at Sloan, who shrugged. “Hard to tell what that is,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t want there to be any DNA, so maybe he knows about DNA and worries about it. Maybe he’s afraid of AIDS, which might mean something if we could show that Rice had some homosexual contacts.”
“The sexual. . um, aspects. . really look like a gay thing to me,” the tech said. “The violence and the sexual trophy-taking.”
Lucas and Sloan nodded. “But why was the first one a woman?”
“Maybe there was a gay thing, then Rice went after the woman, and his gay partner blew up,” the tech said. “Maybe he was punishing them, and that’s what all this whipping stuff is about.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said doubtfully.
“It’s a concept,” Sloan said. He didn’t care for the idea either. “We need to get this biography. I need to see if I can link Angela Larson to anything down here.”
“You said she was a student; there’s a state university branch down here.”
“I’ll look,” Sloan said. “But I did all that background on her, and nobody said nuthin’ about Mankato.”
When the crime-scene people were done, the medical examiner’s assistants came in and picked the body up, zipped it into a bag, and carried it out. The blood splotch on the floor, which retained the impression of the kneeling body, looked like strange black modern art.
They stood over it for a moment, and then Sloan said, “I don’t think there’s much more here.” They’d been inside, looking for something, anything, for five hours. If they’d found anything useful, it wasn’t apparent.
“This guy. .,” Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. He was thinking about the killer. “This guy is gonna bust our chops.”
4
He was short, big nosed, red haired, pugnacious, intense, loud, never wrong, willing to bend any ethical rule, and three years out of journalism school. He had a facility with words admired by some in the newsroom. The admiration was offset by the undeniable fact that he was an ambitious weasely little asshole; and saved, to some extent, by the additional fact that at the Star-Tribune, being an ambitious weasely little asshole was not a distinguishing characteristic.
Ruffe Ignace stood on the corner, talking to himself-nothing in particular, snatches of old songs, possible story leads, bits of internal dialogue, comments on the passing cars and the women inside them. He bounced on his toes like a boxer, and talked to himself, all the time, like humming, or buzzing. He called the ongoing dialogue Ruffe’s Radio, and he played it all the time.
Boy in a Bubble, maybe there’s something there; Mmm, Lexus GX470, you old fart; hey, look that, look at that ass. Yes, Pat, there he is, Ruffe Ignace, supposedly the richest man in America. He was with the Special Forces before that, you know, a war hero, in Afghanistan, killed twenty-four Afghanis with a Bowie knife. He’s got more money and had more supermodel pussy than any other six guys in the country. Say, I’d like to get that jacket-that’s a good-looking coat. .
Like that.
All the time.
A co-worker once complained that sitting next to Ignace was like sitting next to a bad-tempered bee. Ignace ignored her; and now he stood on the corner, bouncing, waiting, and buzzing.
Hubbard came down the other side of the street, bright blue double-knit blazer from JCPenney, gray slacks, brown shoes. From a hundred yards away, he held Ignace’s eyes, then turned and went into the front doors of the public library. Ignace waited through another light, then followed him.
Ruffe Ignace hated his name. Both first and last, but especially Ruffe. Ruffe-Roo-Fay-came from a French word meaning “red haired.” Since he was red haired, and since his parents had been French, he could hardly deny the truth of it. The newsroom people learned early in his career that Ruffe hated being called Rufus, which also meant red haired, so they called him that at every opportunity. A few people even tried Iggy, but that drew a response so violent and poisonous that they decided to leave it alone.