“And did she say something?” Lucas asked.

“She was really scared,” John said intently. His ears reddened, sticking out from his head like small Frisbees. “She had this picture, from school.”

“What was it?”

“It was from a newspaper,” John said. “It was a picture of Jim Harper, the kid who got killed. You know about him?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Yeah, it was really like . . .” John looked away and swallowed, then back. “He was naked on the bed and there was this naked man standing next to him with, you know, this, uh, I mean it was stickin’ up.”

Lucas looked at him, and the kid peered solemnly back. “He had an erection? The man?” Lucas asked.

“Yup,” John said earnestly.

“Where’s the picture?” Lucas felt a tingle: this was something.

“Lisa took it home,” John said. “She was going to show it to her mom.”

“When? What day?” Lucas asked. Rusty and Dusty watched the questioning, eyes shifting from Lucas to the kid and back.

“Last week. Thursday, ’cause that’s store night and Mom works late, and when I got home Dad was cooking.”

“Do you know where she got the picture?” Lucas asked.

“She said she got it from some other kid,” John said, shrugging. “I don’t know who. It was all crinkled up, like it had been passed around.”

“What’d the man look like? Did you recognize him?”

“Nope. His head wasn’t in the picture,” the boy said. “I mean, it looked like the whole picture was there, but it cut off his head like somebody didn’t aim the camera right.”

Dammit. “So you could only see his body.”

“Yeah. And some stuff around him. The bed and stuff,” John said.

“Was the man big or small? His body?” Lucas asked.

“He was pretty big. Kind of fat.”

“What color was his hair?” asked Lucas.

John cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t notice a lot of chest hair or stomach hair or hair around his crotch?” Lucas fished for a word the kid could relate to: “I mean, like really kind of gross?”

“No. Nothing like that . . . but it was a black-and-white picture and it wasn’t very good,” John said. “You know those newspapers they have at the Super Valu . . . ?”

“National Enquirer,” Rusty said.

“Yeah. The picture was like from that. Not very good.”

If the hair didn’t strike him as gross, then the guy was probably a blond, Lucas thought. Black hair on cheap paper would blot. “If it wasn’t very good, could you be sure it was Jim?” Lucas asked.

The boy nodded. “It was Jim, all right. You could see his face, smiling like Jim. And Jim lost a finger and you could see if you looked real close that the kid in the picture didn’t have a finger. And he had an earring and Jim wore an earring. He was the first guy in the school to get one.”

“Mph. You say Lisa was scared? How do you know she was scared?”

“Because she showed it to me,” John said.

“What?” Lucas frowned, missing something.

“She’s a girl. And the picture—you know . . .” John twisted in his chair. “She wouldn’t show something like that to a boy if she wasn’t scared about it.”

“Okay.” Lucas ran over the questions one more time, probed the contents of the picture the boy had seen, but got nothing more. “Is your dad out at his shop?”

“Sure—I guess,” the kid said, nodding.

“Did you tell him about the picture?”

“No.” John looked uncomfortable. “I mean . . . how could I tell him about that?”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Let’s ride out there and I’ll tell him about you talking to us. Just so everything’s okay. And I think we ought to keep it between us.”

“Sure. I’m not going to tell anybody else,” John said. “Not about that,” he said earnestly, eyes big.

“Good,” Lucas said. He relaxed and smiled. “Go get your stuff, and let’s go out to your place.”

“Did we do good?” Rusty asked lazily when John had gone.

“Yeah, you did good,” Lucas said.

The two deputies slapped hands and Lucas said, “You’re all done with Lisa’s friends?”

“Yeah, all done,” Rusty said.

“Great. Now do this other kid’s friends. The Harper kid. Look for connections between Lisa and Harper,” Lucas said. “And if this picture was passed around, find out who passed it.”

Lucas used a pay phone in the teachers’ lounge to call the sheriff’s office. “You sound funny,” he said when Carr came on.

“You’re being relayed. What’d you need?”

“Are we scrambled?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll talk to you later. Something’s come up.”

“I’m on my way to the LaCourts’.”

“I’m heading that way, so I’ll see you there,” Lucas said. He hung up momentarily, then redialed the sheriff’s office, got Helen, the office manager, and asked her to start digging up the files on the Harper murder.

John Mueller had gone to put his books away and get his coat and boots. As Lucas waited for him at the front door, a bell rang and kids flooded into the hallways. Another, nonstudent head bobbed above the others in the stream, caught his eye. The doctor. He took a step toward her. He’d been a while without a woman friend; thought he could get away from the need by making a hermit of himself, by working out. He was wrong, judging from the tension in his chest . . . unless he was having a heart attack. Weather was pulling on her cap as she came toward him, and oversized mittens with leather palms. She nodded, stopped and said, “Anything good?”

“Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head. Not pretty, he thought, but very attractive. A little rough, like she might enjoy the occasional fistfight. Who is she dating? There must be someone. The guy is probably an asshole; probably has little tassels on his shoes and combs them straight in the morning, before he puts the mousse on his hair.

“I was doing TB patches down there.” She nodded back down the hall, toward a set of open double doors. A gymnasium. “And one kid was scared to death that somebody was going to come kill him in the night.”

Lucas shrugged. “That’s the way it goes.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was wrong.

“Mr. Liberal,” she said, her voice flat.

“Hey, nothing I can do about it except catch the asshole,” Lucas said, irritated. “Look, I didn’t really . . .” He was about to go on but she turned away.

“Do that,” she said, and pushed through the door to the outside.

Annoyed, Lucas leaned against the entryway bulletin board, watching her walk to her car. Had a nice walk, he decided. When he turned back to the school, looking for John, he saw a yellow-haired girl watching him.

She stood in a classroom doorway, staring at him with a peculiar intensity, as though memorizing his face. She was tall, but slight, angular with just the first signs of an adolescent roundness. And she was pale as paper. The most curious thing was her hair, which was an opaque yellow, the color of a sunflower petal, and close-cropped. With her pointed chin, large tilted eyes and short hair, she had a waifish look, like she should be selling matches. She wore a homemade dress of thin print material, cotton, with short sleeves: summer wear. She held three books close to her chest. When he looked at her, she held his eyes for a moment, a gaze with a solid sexuality to it, speculative, but at the same time, hurt, then turned and walked away.

John arrived in a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood and mittens. “Do you have a cop car?” he asked.

“No. A four-by-four,” Lucas said.

“How come?”

“I’m new here.”

John’s father was a mild, round-faced man in a yellow wool sweater and corduroys. “How come you didn’t tell me?” he asked his son. He sat on a high stool. On his bench, a fox skin was half-stretched over a wooden form. John shrugged, looked away.