"Butabuse?"

"He didn't mean sexual abuse, that wasn't part of the deal," Lester said. "And he doesn't think his parents could have had anything to do with her death. He said they wereliving through her. That they took her life as a kid away from her, and that they were still taking."

"Did Alie'e fight it?" Lucas asked.

Lester shook his head. "He says no. He said she never knew anything else."

"Huh. He seemed a little nuts."

"He's a preacher of some kind," Lester said. "He says he actually loves his parents, but he just doesn't like them very much."

Then Del was on the phone, and said, "Hold on to your shorts."

"What happened?"

"Boo McDonald called me. I'm over at his place." McDonald was a paraplegic who monitored police scanners for a half-dozen TV and radio stations, and sometimes back-fed information to the cops. "He's been cruising the Internet, searching under "Alie'e." There's a story out, from here in the Cities, called 'Muff-Divers' Ball Goes Homicidal.' Guess what it's about."

"Muff-Divers' Ball?" Lucas repeated.

Lester's eyebrows went up. "That doesn't sound good."

Del was still talking. "Yeah. This is an online rock 'n' roll rag calledSpittle. And they got some detail. It's gotta come out of the department."

"How bad?"

"Well, see, the rag says it's semidocumentary, which means they make up a lot of stuff. You know, to enhance the reality of the moment."

"Enhance?"

"Let me read a part. Move over, Boo." Lucas could hear them clunking around for a moment, then Del read, "Alie'e stretched back toward the brass bars at the head of the bed and grasped them in her hands, holding on tight as the waves of pleasure rippled through her lean, taut body. Jael's head bobbed between her thighs, her long pink tongue parting Alie'e's glistening labia, finding at last that little man in the canoe, the center of Alie'e's heat and being"

"Ah, fuck me," Lucas said. Then he laughed. "You'd sound like a porno flick if you had somebody playing a saxophone behind you."

"Probably will be, sooner or latera movie, not a saxophone. I called the kid atSpittle and asked where he got this shit. He told me he wouldn't talk because of First Amendment considerations. But he said that he had interviews lined up with Channels Three and Four and Eleven."

"An asshole," Lucas suggested.

"Actually, I kinda liked him. Reminded me of myself when I was his age. I tried a little threat, but he told me he was a minor and I could go fuck myself."

"So what'd you say?"

"What could I say? I said, 'The bed wasn't brass, you little prick.' "

"How old is he?"

"Sixteen," Del said.

"So we go fuck ourselves. Anyway, the lesbian thing is out.

"It's out. Another ring in the circus."

Lucas called Rose Marie to warn her, and when he got off the phone, walked down to his office and a silent space, kicked back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.

His ceiling was dirtier than it should be.

That's all he got. The case had a bad feel to it: too many suspects, and not enough serious possibilities. Clean murders were the hardest to solve: somebody's killed, everybody denies everything. There were a half-dozen killers walking around the Twin Cities who'd never been touched; the cops knew everything about the murders, without any proof. Husbands killing wives, mostly. Whack the old lady on the head, throw the pipe in the river, go back home and find the body.

What can you do?

He was mulling it over when the phone rang again. More bad news?

No. Catrin.

"Lucas. I've been thinking about you all morning," she said. "God, it was good to see you. I've been thinking about the UDo you remember Lanny Morton? Do you know what happened to him?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact," Lucas said, getting comfortable. "He moved to L. A. to get involved in film, and got into real estate instead. He was pretty rich the last time I saw him; he was on his fourth wife."

"Fourth? What happened to Virginia?"

Lucas hunched forward in his chair. "Virginia died. Didn't you know that? Jeez, it was only maybe five years after we graduated. She had a heart attack one day on the Venice Beach. She was, like, twenty-eight."

"Oh, my God. Do you remember that football game with all the mums, everybody had to buy his girlfriend a mum"

"The Iowagame. "

"Yeah. Virginia was like she was going to live forever."

They talked for twenty minutes, catching up on old times. Catrin remembered all the names from their few months together, and the faces came swimming up from Lucas's memory, along with the sights and the sounds and even the smells of all those old glory days: the field houses all over the Big Ten, smelling of popcorn and dirt; the ice arenas and the odors of cold and blood, wet wool and sweat; diesel fumes from the buses; cheerleaders.

"God, I wish we'd had time to talk," Lucas said. "What do you do now? Do you still paint?"

"No, no, I do some photography, but the painting, I don't know. I just stopped. My husband's a family practice guy. I helped out at the office when we were first getting started"

"I heard about you marrying a doctor. I remembered on the way over here, after you told me this morning. I think Bill Washington said something about you going out with an older guy."

"Washington. God, I haven't thought about him in years. The last time I saw him, we were all sitting around on a floor in Dinkytown getting high."

"You're a photographer? Say, you don't know a guy named Amnon Plain, do you? He's hooked up with the Alie'e case."

"Really? Did he do it?"

"He says not, and he probably didn't but he says he's some kind of fashion photographer, and I thought"

"Jeez, he's more than that. He does fashion photography, got started that way. But he does these most amazing pictures of the prairie. He's like Avedon, he does fashion but he's got this whole other thing."

"Avedon?"

"You were never an intellectual, were you?" She laughed.

"I was majoring in hockey, for Christ's sakes. Criminal justice."

"Yeah, well Plain's a photographer. Big time. Pretty big time. I'm nothing like thatI mostly take care of the kids. Or try tothey're getting to the point where they don't want to hear from me. Oh, my God"

"What?"

"I just had a terrible thought," she said,

"What?"

"One of them's about to go off to the U. She could run into a Lucas Davenport."

"Hey, how bad could it get?"

But she was laughing. "I read about you in the newspaper. Sometimes I can't believe that, you know, Iknew you once. You're kinda famous."

"Yeah. Like they say, world famous in Minneapolis." Pause. "So let me buy you lunch," Lucas said.

A pause on the other end. "Will you tell me all the inside-cop stuff about Alie'e?"

"If you won't tell anybody else."

She laughed again, and said, "When?"

Catrin. As soon as she was off the phone, he wanted to call her again.

And what was he gonna wear tomorrow? Something really cool and expensive, or something tough, coplike? He'd been a hockey jock when they first got together, but she'd confessed then that she wasn't much interested in sportsor jocks, either. He'd talk about taking somebody out on the ice, or he'd come back after the match with a little ding on a cheekbone, a little rub, and she'd be perplexed and disturbed and sometimes even a little amused by his pleasure in the violence

The adrenaline of Catrin's call got to him. He pushed himself out of the chair, took another turn around the office, and finally launched himself out into the hallway. Frank Lester was sitting in his office, leaning back in his leather chair, the door open, cops coming and going. "Anything new?" Lucas asked.

"Nope. Rose Maries doing another press conference about the lesbo thing."