the cuts, and the way they wrapped around her body, he expected her back to be in the same condition.
“You got a name?” he asked.
“Angela Larson,” Sloan said. “College student at the U, from Chicago. Worked in an art store. Missing since yesterday.”
“Cut her throat like she was a goddamn beef,” said one of the cops. A strobe went off, a flash of white lightning. Lucas walked around the body, down to stand next to Sloan.
Because his feet were lower than the victim, he could get closer to her face. He looked at the cut in the throat. As with the wire cuts, it was bloodless, washed clean by the rain, resembling a piece of turkey meat. He didn’t doubt that he could have buried a finger in it up to the knuckle. He could smell the rawness of the body, like standing next to the meat counter in a supermarket.
“The neck wound’s what killed her, I think,” Sloan said. “No sign of a gunshot wound or a stab wound. He beat her, whipped her, until he was satisfied, and then cut her throat.”
“Ligature marks on her wrists,” said a man in plainclothes. His name was Stan, and he worked as an investigator for the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, and was known for his grotesque sense of humor. His face was as long as anyone’s.
“We got a call last night when Larson didn’t get back to her apartment,” Sloan said. “Her roommate called. We found her car in the parking lot behind Chaps; she worked at a place called the MarkUp down the block . . .”
“I know it,” Lucas said. Chaps was a younger club, mixed straights and gays, dancing.
“. . . and used to park at Chaps because the store didn’t have its own parking, the street is metered, and the Chaps lot has lights. She got off at nine o’clock, stopped and said hello to a bartender, had a glass of white wine. Bartender said just enough to rinse her mouth. Probably about twenty-after she walked out to her car. She never got home. We found her car keys in the parking lot next to the car; no blood, no witnesses saw her taken.”
Lucas looked at the ligature marks on her wrists. The rope, or whatever she’d been tied with—it was rope, he thought—had been a half inch thick and had both cut and burned her. There were more burns and chafing wounds at the base of her thumbs. “Hung her up,” Lucas said.
“We think so,” Sloan said. He tipped his head down the bank. “Give me a minute, will you?”
THEY STEPPED AWAY, twenty feet down the bank, into the privacy of the darkness.
Sloan took off his hat, brushed his thinning hair away from his eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”
“Pretty bad,” Lucas said, turning back to the circle of lights. Even from this short distance, the body looked less than human, and more like an artifact, or even an artwork. “He’s nuts. You’ve checked her friends . . .”
“We’ve started, but we’re coming up empty,” Sloan said. “She was dating a guy, sleeping with him off and on, until a couple of months ago. Until the end of the school year. Then he went back home to Pennsylvania.”
“Didn’t come back to visit?”
“Not as far as we can tell—he says he hasn’t, and I sorta believe him. He was there when she disappeared, we talked to him ten hours after she dropped out of sight—and the Philadelphia cops called a couple people for us, and he checks out.”
“Okay.”
“He said they were a little serious, but not too—she knew he planned to go in the army when he got out of school, and she didn’t like the idea. Her friends say he’s a pretty straight guy, they can’t imagine that he’s involved. They don’t know she was involved with anyone else, yet. And that’s what we’ve got.”
Lucas was still looking at the body, at the rain falling around the cops. “I’d put my money on a semistranger. Whoever did this . . . This guy is pushed by brain chemistry. He’s got something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair. The way she’s displayed . . .”
Sloan half turned back to the lights: “That’s what I was thinking. The goddamned display.”
THEY JUST STOOD AND WATCHED for a minute, the cops moving around the lights, talking up and down the bank. The two of them might have done this two hundred times. “So what can I