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every Friday or Saturday.”
    “Had the kid in school,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah . . .” He flipped through the register in Rice’s checkbook. “Four hundred dollars in checking, seventeen hundred in savings. He didn’t write many checks . . . mostly at the supermarket, and bills.” He found an address book, but nothing that looked like a particularly new entry, but Lucas set it aside for the database they’d be creating.
    A cop stuck his head in: “They’re picking up the kid.”
    “All right.”
    Two minutes later, the same cop came by: “One of your crime-scene guys says to stop by for a minute.”
    They were upstairs, in Rice’s bedroom. They followed the cop down and found a technician working with a small sample bag and some swabs. He looked up when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the room: “Thought you’d want to know. The fingernail blood, I’m almost sure it isn’t Rice’s. There’s skin with it, and a little hair follicle that’s darker than Rice’s. I think.”
    “Anything else?”
    “The usual stuff—lots more hair around. We’re picking it up, but who knows where it came from? And the guy took a trophy—he cut Rice’s penis off, and there’s no sign of it around here. Just the penis, not the testicles. The anus seems to have some lubricant still on it, so I think the killer or killers used a condom. Probably won’t be any semen.”
    Lucas looked at Sloan, who shrugged. “Hard to tell what that is,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t want there to be any DNA, so maybe he knows about DNA and worries about it. Maybe he’s afraid of AIDS, which might mean something if we could show that Rice had some homosexual contacts.”
    “The sexual . . . um, aspects . . . really look like a gay thing to me,” the tech said. “The violence and the sexual trophy-taking.”
    Lucas and Sloan nodded. “But why was the first one a woman?”
    “Maybe there was a gay thing, then Rice went after the woman, and his gay partner blew up,” the tech said. “Maybe he was punishing them, and that’s what all this whipping stuff is about.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said doubtfully.
    “It’s a concept,” Sloan said. He didn’t care for the idea either. “We need to get this biography. I need to see if I can link Angela Larson to anything down here.”
    “You said she was a student; there’s a state university branch down here.”
    “I’ll look,” Sloan said. “But I did all that background on her, and nobody said nuthin’ about Mankato.”
     
    WHEN THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE were done, the medical examiner’s assistants came in and picked the body up, zipped it into a bag, and carried it out. The blood splotch on the floor, which retained the impression of the kneeling body, looked like strange black modern art.
    They stood over it for a moment, and then Sloan said, “I don’t think there’s much more here.” They’d been inside, looking for something, anything, for five hours. If they’d found anything useful, it wasn’t apparent.
    “This guy . . . ,” Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. He was thinking about the killer. “This guy is gonna bust our chops.”

4
    HE WAS SHORT, big nosed, red haired, pugnacious, intense, loud, never wrong, willing to bend any ethical rule, and three years out of journalism school. He had a facility with words admired by some in the newsroom. The admiration was offset by the undeniable fact that he was an ambitious weasely little asshole; and saved, to some extent, by the additional fact that at the Star-Tribune , being an ambitious weasely little asshole was not a distinguishing characteristic.
    Ruffe Ignace stood on the corner, talking to himself—nothing in particular, snatches of old songs, possible story leads, bits of internal dialogue, comments on the passing cars and the women inside them. He bounced on his toes like a boxer, and talked to himself, all the time, like humming, or buzzing. He called the ongoing dialogue