hair that fell to her small but firm breasts. Lucas couldn’t tell for sure—she was wearing a shapeless shift of either gingham or calico, he could never remember which one was the print, with tiny yellow coneflowers, black-eyed Susans—but from the way her body rattled around in the shift, he suspected she could, as his subordinate Jenkins had once observed of another slender blond hippie chick, “crack walnuts between the cheeks of her ass.”

She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.

Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as un-clouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas’s visitor’s chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”

“Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I’m more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You’re quite a bit older than I am.”

“Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.

She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.

“What can I do for you? You are…?”

“Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he’s the one who told me that you’re a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”

“I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad. “So…”

“MY MOTHER, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”

“Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”

“My mom didn’t hear from Grandma the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma’s place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post. You know the kind I mean?”

“Yup.”

“Well, I don’t believe it. She was murdered.”

LUCAS HAD a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.

Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time—true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexively referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn’t that they were stupid—they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly.

Gabriella Coombs…

“I THINK the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.

“No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner’s version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”

“Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.

“Anyway, the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said. “The medical examiner doesn’t find anything that says it wasn’t a fall, so he rules it a fall. That’s the end of the case. Nobody’s curious about it.”

Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly’s body, around the Get Ruffe. “You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “…have you studied psychology at all?”

She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”

He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”

“That sometimes they’re just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it’s moronic.”

He thought, Hmm, she’s got teeth.

She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”

“Say it,” Lucas said.

She did: “My grandmother was killed