"We need to talk," Sloan said, low-keyed, relaxing. "She may be involved with the man who did the Manette kidnapping. We need to know as much about her as we can-who her friends are."
"Well…" She was reluctant, but finally pushed the door open and stepped back. Sloan followed her in.
"She's not here, is she?" Sloan asked.
"No. Of course not." Crosby frowned. "I wouldn't lie to the police."
Sloan looked at her, nodded. "All right. Where's your back door?"
"Through there, through the kitchen… What?"
Sloan walked through the kitchen with its odor of old coffee grounds and rancid potatoes and pushed open the back door.
"Lucas… yeah, c'mon."
"You had me surrounded?" Crosby seemed offended.
"We really need to find your daughter," Sloan said. Lucas came inside, and Sloan said, "So let's talk. Is your husband home?"
"He's dead," Crosby said. She turned and walked back into the house, Sloan and Lucas trailing behind. She led them to a darkened living room, with a shag carpet and drawn curtains. The television was tuned to Wheel of Fortune. A green wine bottle sat next to a lamp on a corner table. Crosby dropped into an overstuffed chair and pulled up her feet.
"He was out cutting a limb off an apple tree, got dizzy, and went like that." She snapped her fingers. "He had seventy thousand in insurance. That was it. I can't get at his pension until I'm fifty-seven."
"That's a tragedy," Sloan said.
"Three years ago last month, it was," she said, looking up at Sloan with rheumy eyes. "You know what his last words to me were? He said, 'Boy, I feel like shit.' How's that for last words?"
"Honest," Lucas muttered.
"What?" She looked at him, the suspicion right at the surface. Sloan turned so Crosby couldn't see his face, and rolled his eyes. Lucas was stepping on his act.
"Have you seen this man? He might have been younger when he came around," Sloan said, turning back to Marilyn Crosby. He handed her the composite drawing. She studied it for a moment and then said, "Maybe. Oh, last winter, maybe, he might have come around once. But his hair was different."
"Were they with anyone else?"
"No, just the two of them," she said, passing the composite back. "They were only here for a minute. He was a big guy, though. Sort of mean-looking, like he could fight. Not the kind Gloria usually came back with."
"What type was that?"
"Bums, mostly," Crosby said flatly. "No-goods who never did anything." Then, confidentially, to Sloan: "You know, Gloria's crazy. She got it from her father's side of the family. Several crazy people there-though, of course, I didn't know it until it was too late."
"We need the names of all her friends," Lucas said. "Friends or relatives that she might turn to. Anybody. Doctors."
"I don't know anything like that. Well, I know a doctor."
"There's a reward for information leading to an arrest," Lucas said. "Fifty thousand."
"Oh, really?" Marilyn Crosby brightened. "Well, I could go get the things she left here. Or maybe you'd like to come up and look in her room. You'd know better than I do what you're looking for."
"That'd be good," Sloan said.
Gloria Crosby's bedroom was an eleven-foot-square cubicle with a window in one wall, a bed, and a small pine desk and matching dresser. The dresser was empty, but the desk was stuffed with school papers, music tapes, rubber bands, broken pencils, crayons, rock 'n' roll concert badges, drawings, calendars, pushpins.
"Usual stuff," Sloan said. He went through it all. Lucas helped for a few minutes, then found Marilyn Crosby in the kitchen, drinking from the wine bottle, and got the name of Gloria's last doctor. He looked the name up in the phone book, noted the address, and called Sherrill, who was doing phone work on the patients they'd uncovered at the university. "Anything you can get," Lucas said.
When he got back to the bedroom, he lay down on Gloria Crosby's bed, a narrow, sagging single-width that was too short by six inches. A Mr. Happy Tooth poster hung on the wall opposite the bed. "Hi! I'm Gloria!" was written in careful block letters on the cartoon molar. The molar was doing a root dance on a red line that might have been an infected gum.
"Three names so far," Sloan said, nodding at the pile of junk on the desk. He was halfway through it. "From high school."
"We've got a better shot at the pharmacy. She'll have to go in there sooner or later," Lucas said. He sat up. "We should check the places she was hospitalized and get the names of patients who overlapped with her, and run them against Manette's patient list."
"Anderson's already doing that," Sloan said.
"Yeah?" Lucas dropped back on the bed and closed his eyes.
After a minute, Sloan asked, "Taking a nap?"
"Thinking," Lucas said.
"What do you think?"
"I think we're wasting our time, Sloan."
"What else is there to do?"
"I don't know."
As they were leaving, Marilyn Crosby leaned in the kitchen doorway. She held a twelve-ounce tumbler of what looked like water, but she sipped like wine. "Find anything?"
"No."
"If, uh, my daughter got in touch-you know, if she wanted more money or something-and if I put you in touch with her, who'd get the reward?"
"If you put us in touch and we got the information from her, you'd get it," Lucas said. "We know she knows who it is. All we have to do is ask her."
"Leave a number where I can get you quick," Marilyn Crosby said. She took a sip from the glass. "If she calls, I'll get in touch. For her own good."
"Right," Lucas said.
Sloan took the wheel again, and Lucas slumped in the passenger seat and stared out the window as they dropped past the wooded lawns and headed toward the gate.
"Listen," he said finally, "have you met the new PR chick? I only talked to her a couple of times."
"Yeah. I met her," Sloan said.
"Is she decent?"
Sloan shrugged. "She's okay. Why?"
"I'd like to get a story written about my company, but I don't want to go around and ask somebody to do it. I'd like to get the PR chick to talk the idea around, and have the TV people come to me."
Sloan said doubtfully, "I don't know, it's a private business and all. What're you thinking?"
"This guy, whoever he is, is fairly intelligent, right?"
"Right."
"And he plays computer games. I'd be willing to bet that he's a computer freak. Ninety percent of male gamers are," Lucas said. He was staring sightlessly out the window, thinking of Ice, the programmer. "His girlfriend knows my computer games, 'cause she said they suck. So I'm wondering, if there were stories on TV and in the papers about how my computer guys were counter-gaming this asshole, I wonder if he'd take a look? You know, cruise the building. How about if we had a really… progressive-looking woman talking to him?"
"Sounds a little thin," Sloan said. "He'll be suspicious after that radio gag. But he might."
"I'll talk to the PR chick," Lucas said. "See if we can get something going."
"Don't call her a chick, huh? You make me nervous when you talk that way. She carries a can opener in her purse," Sloan said.
"Okay."
Sloan was driving too fast through traffic, and when Lucas tilted his head back, he punched the radio up, a country station, and they listened to Hank Williams, Jr., until Lucas said, "I feel like my head's stuffed with cotton."
"What?"
"Nothing's going through it at all." He was fumbling with his hand and looked down and saw the ring on his thumb at the same moment that Sloan saw it.