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fingers of her right hand in her left, literally wringing them. “I need to see my boy, to see that it’s him.”
    Lucas shook his head: “I’m afraid we have to process the scene first. We have to try to catch this man—he killed a young woman up in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, and he’s going to kill more people if we don’t catch him. We can’t move the bodies until we have the crime scene processed . . .”
    “Like on the TV show?” Gloria suggested.
    “Something like that, but better,” Lucas said. “These people are real.”
    “How long?” Rice asked.
    Lucas shook his head again. “I can’t tell you. It depends on what has to be done. It would be best if you went home and rested. The sheriff will call you before they move the bodies. That would be the time.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
    Sloan smiled at her, his best sympathetic smile, and said, “We understand. If you need anything, ask the sheriff. And would you . . . we have some questions about your son.”
    “Okay,” she said. She sniffed. “We knew there’d be questions.”
    They did the routine biography—who might not like him, whom he had arguments with, debts, women, jealous husbands, where he spent his nights, what he did for entertainment.
    Lucas asked the hard one: “Mrs. Rice, as far as you know, did your son have any homosexual friends, or acquaintances?”
    She looked to Sloan, then back to Lucas. “Are you . . . he was married. He didn’t hang around with homosexuals.” She started to tear up.
    “This is routine,” Lucas said. “We have to ask. There was a good deal of violence here, which sometimes characterizes homosexual murders, especially murders of passion.”
    She knew what he was asking. “My boy was not a homo,” she snapped. The women behind her all nodded. “He was married, he was widowed, he would have remarried someday, but he just hadn’t got started since Shelly was killed. He was not a gay person.”
    “But did he know any gays?” Lucas persisted. “Somebody who might have built up a fantasy about him? He was a good-looking man.”
    Laurina looked at Gloria, and they simultaneously shook their heads. “I don’t think he even knew any gays,” she said. “He would have mentioned it. We had supper together once a week, we talked about everything.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said.

    THEY CHATTED A BIT LONGER, then moved back into the house, leaving Rice and the others in the car.
    The next four hours were taken up with the technicalities and legalities of murder: the crime-scene technicians worked the murder scene, the medical examiner came and went, leaving behind an assistant and two men to handle the bodies. A state representative, who lived ten miles away, stopped and talked to the sheriff, said something about the death penalty, wanted to look inside but accepted the “no,” and went on his way.
    “Dipshit,” Nordwall said, as the legislator’s car trundled down the driveway.
    When the crime-scene techs had decided that the murders took place pretty much in the area of the two bodies, Lucas and Sloan began working through the small intimacies in other parts of the house, looking at bills and letters, collecting recent photographs, checking the e-mail in the five-year-old Dell computer, stopping every now and then for a Diet Coke. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for in the house, but that was okay; they were impressing images and words on their memories, so they would be there if anything should trip them in the future.
    “He has a Visa card about due,” Sloan said at one point. “We oughta get the bill and see where’s he’s been.”
    “I looked at his Exxon bill out on the kitchen table. He hasn’t been far away, not for the last year or so,” Lucas said. He was digging through Rice’s wallet. “One tank of gas every Friday or Saturday.”
    “Had the kid in school,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah . . .” He flipped through the register in Rice’s