They climbed the stoop and knocked on the door of the old church. Lucas's ears were burning from the cold, and Del said, "Fucking Minnesota" and shuffled his feet in the keeping-warm dance. Lucas reached out to knock again when the door opened, and a woman looked out. She was an older woman, in her sixties, white-haired, round-faced with little pink dots at her cheeks, wearing bifocals, and holding what looked like a dustcloth. The pink dots made her look like Ronald Reagan. When they explained what they wanted, she said, "You'd have to talk to Ruth. Come in."
When the two men hesitated, her bottom lip twitched and she said, "This isn't a nunnery or a dormitory. You're allowed to come in."
"Thanks," Lucas said, feeling a little lame. They followed her through the back of the church, which had been cut into sleeping cubicles, reminding Lucas of an old Washington Avenue flophouse in Minneapolis, except that it didn't smell like wine vomit; past a side room where two women were sitting on a couch, watching the movie Fight Club; and into the kitchen. A small woman sat at a kitchen table, peering through gold-rimmed glasses into a notebook. A pile of what looked like insurance forms sat to one side. She looked up and the woman who'd met them at the door said, "Ruth, these gentlemen are from the police. They wanted to speak to somebody."
"Lucas Davenport," the woman said, closing the notebook. She showed him a thin, cool smile.
Lucas, surprised, said, "I'm sorry… "
She stood up and put out a hand. As they shook, her hand small and cool, she said, "I'm Ruth Lewis. I'm sure you don't remember, but I'm a friend of Elle Kruger. I once played a game with your gaming group, maybe ten years ago, when Elle was running it. I got to be George Pickett at Gettysburg."
"I remember that," he said; and he did, clearly, and with pleasure. She'd learned fast and had been determined to win. "You kept taking out Buford," Lucas said. "No matter how many times we played it, you'd kick Buford out of the way and then you'd get on top of the hills."
"And that was that," she said, dusting her hands together. "The South wins the battle and maybe the war."
"Bad design," Lucas said. "You never came back for Stalingrad."
"Nobody invited me," she said. "I thought maybe it was because I kept messing up the first one."
"No, no, no," Lucas said. "You were invited back, you just didn't come."
"Have you seen Elle?"
"Just the other day… "
THEY CHATTED FOR a few minutes-she'd known Lucas as a Minneapolis cop, and he told her about his move to the state; and Lucas had known her as a nun, and she told him about her migration away from the sisterhood. "I made the mistake of going to the Holy Land," she said. "I saw that the Sea of Galilee was a big, dirty lake and that the Mount of Olives was a neighborhood. Then Jesus didn't seem divine. He seemed more real, but he seemed like another one of the guys that the Old Testament is full of. Down in my heart, I didn't believe anymore-in Jesus, I mean."
"So you quit?"
"Yup. Moved over to Catholic Charities. Got a boyfriend-though that didn't last long. I think he just liked the idea of sleeping with an ex-nun."
Lucas was embarrassed. "Some people," he said.
She smiled, letting him off the male hook, and said, "You're here investigating the lynchings."
"Murders," Lucas said hastily. "Not really-we know who did those-"
"The man from Rochester. I heard about that, the man and his wife. It's hard to believe."
"Yeah. Now we're trying to figure out who killed them. We were told that you guys sometimes make money driving cars for Gene Calb. Since Deon Cash worked over there as a driver, we thought you might have known him."
She was nodding. "I did know him, and he was a bad man. A bad man. Gene was going to fire him, because he thought Deon was taking dope, and Gene was worried about some insurance issues. Like if Deon was driving for him and got in an accident, driving under the influence. Gene was afraid he'd get sued for everything."
"So everybody knew about the drugs?"
"Some of us, anyway," Ruth said. "There was a woman here, Jeanette Raskin, she used to work for Lutheran Social Services down in Minneapolis and she knows a lot about drugs-she said he once had a crack pipe in his car. I wouldn't know what one looked like, but that's what she said. I have her phone number if you need it. She's back in the Cities."
"I know Jeanette," Del said, and to Lucas: "You do, too. She used to run the Love Bug place, the free clinic."
"Oh, yeah," Lucas said. "She would know about drugs."
"How come you guys drive for Calb?" Del asked Ruth.
Ruth shrugged. "Extra money. Pizza money. Easy money. We follow the delivery car in my Corolla. Fifty cents a mile, so we get fifty dollars for a hundred-mile round trip, and we can do that on three gallons of gas. We don't have a lot of money here."
"You did it a lot?"
"A couple of times a week," she said.
"Is Calb straight?" Lucas asked.
"Yes. He's a very nice man, in a… car-mechanic way," Ruth said, meeting his eyes. She had pale eyes, like the moons you could see in daylight. "His wife sometimes helps us out, when we're checking on older people, shut-ins."
"You don't think… if Cash and Warr were involved in a kidnapping, you don't think that Calb would have been involved?"
"Good gosh, no. I mean, the girl… is dead, I guess."
Lucas and Del both nodded.
Ruth continued. "Gene always wanted children, but he and his wife couldn't have any. They've been foster parents, even, for like a half a dozen kids. There's no way he'd ever hurt a child."
Lucas said, "All right. But Deon Cash could."
"Deon… Deon was crazy. I didn't know him very well, but you didn't have to. I once saw him kick a door for two minutes because it didn't open right. He was really crazy-angry with it. With the door." She looked away from them for a minute, thinking about it, then back, and nodded positively. "He could kill children."
"How about his pal, Joe?"
"I hardly knew him, but he always seemed to be walking behind Deon. I think Deon impressed him. Deon impressed Jane, too-she liked him being crazy. Like it gave her status." Again, she looked away, thinking, and then turned back. "We see that quite a bit, actually. Women taking status from the violence of their men."
"A sense of protection, if you live in a slum," Lucas said.
But she shook her head. "Not just in the slums. All kinds of women. Even nuns."
She showed a little smile and Del grinned at Lucas and said, "Ouch."
Lucas said, "Tell me one good fact. One thing that will point me somewhere. Something you know, way down in your head, about Deon."
"I've thought about this, ever since they found Jane and Deon," she said. "I keep thinking, Deon was from the big city, Kansas City. So was Jane. They hated it here. I don't think they even knew anybody, besides a couple of people at Calb's. But they stayed, so there had to be a reason. Something they couldn't do in Kansas City. Maybe they were selling the dope, maybe it was the kidnapping. Whatever it was, came from up here."
"Good," said Lucas.
OUTSIDE, DEL SAID, "Sister Ruth does a little dope herself."
"Yeah?"
"I could smell it on her. Faintly. Raw, not smoke."
"Brownies."
"Maybe." Del looked around at the white-on-white landscape, at their lonely car sitting in the empty, snow-swept parking lot outside the empty yellow building across the highway. "I can't blame her. It's like, it's dope or network TV. There ain't nothin' else."
"I'll ask Elle about her," Lucas said. "I'm not sure the sister was entirely straight with us."