fast. “What about this place?”

Goode pointed: “The blood and the rope. That’s all we’ve got—but it really is blood, it isn’t chocolate syrup or anything. It’s pretty dry, but not completely, so he probably got her this morning.” He was talking quickly, nervously, the words tumbling out. “We checked the house to make sure there was nobody here. Other than the check, we’ve stayed out. We’re hoping your crime-scene crew . . .”

“They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won’t help us find Peterson,” Lucas said. “We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?”

“There’s a little office in the second bedroom.” Goode pointed down a hallway.

“Then that’s where I’ll be,” Lucas said. “What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?”

“Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband’s a teacher at the high school.”

“Check him?”

“At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It’s not a copycat.”

“How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?”

“Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy . . . Hang on. There’s a photograph.” He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. “We’re not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that’s her.”

A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.

Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: “We don’t know if she’s been on the town. She’s been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.”

“Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope’s killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,” Lucas said. “It’s about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here . . . Or not here, but someplace close by.”

“I’ll set something up,” Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I’ll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.”

“Okay.”

Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, “What are her chances?”

“Man . . . ,” Lucas shook his head. “If he’s telling the truth, and she’s still alive? About one in hundred, I’d say. We’re gonna have to take him while he’s moving her.”

GOODE LEFT, and Lucas went back to Peterson’s home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead—Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon—sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.

The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.

And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley—something woodland, wild, and light.

THE SCENT CAUGHT HIM by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the “on” button on the Mac, and began going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.

He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be