5
LUCAS WAS HALF AWAKE when he heard the whap of the Pioneer Press hitting the front porch, and the deliverywoman reversing her car out of the driveway. Ten minutes later, as he was about to go under again, having punched his pillow flat, the second deliverywoman came in, with two whaps: the Star-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.
He tried to get back to sleep but was only marginally successful, slipping in and out of confused dreams that sometimes seemed like memories, sometimes like fantasies.
His problem was the empty bed. He’d slept by himself for years, and now, groaning through his later forties, he couldn’t sleep without Weather beside him.
On the other hand . . .
The house was certainly neater than when the family was home.
THE FAMILY WAS IN LONDON. Weather had gotten a prestigious fellowship in maxillo-facial surgery, and had first thought to go alone. But she hated the idea of three months away from Sam, the baby. And Letty, their ward, started whining around about never getting to go anywhere, and the housekeeper wondered what she’d do if everybody left . . .
Finally, Weather decided to pick up the whole bunch of them and transplant them to London for the summer. “We don’t have a money problem, so why not?” she asked.
“I’d be happy to take care of everybody, and you’d have the time to yourself,” Lucas had said. She was suspicious—he got along quite well on his own and often seemed to pull a loneliness around himself. And she really didn’t want to be away from Sam . . .
So they packed it all up, everything they would need for three months, surgeon, baby, ward, and housekeeper, and at enormous cost, left for London, leaving him alone in the house.
He’d cluttered the place the first few days the family was gone. Then he’d picked it up and resumed his bachelor ways: he’d never been exactly tidy, but he kept things in their places. When the family was around, nothing was ever where it was supposed to be. The amount of junk that came in the door was befuddling: new clothes and electronics and DVDs and school supplies and Pampers and snack food and medical journals and what seemed like an endless pile of cardboard boxes and wrapping plastic and empty bottles.
That all stopped.
Still. The hole in his life seemed to be getting larger; and he waited every morning until she called from her office in London, to tell him about the day she’d had, and what the kids were doing.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG, he sat up, groggy, looked at the clock: too early. She never called this early. He picked up the phone, and Rose Marie Roux said, “Your secret serial killer is all over the front page of the Strib.”
“What?”
“This guy really is a monster,” she said, conversationally. She sounded as though she had a cup of coffee in front of her and a cigarette in her hand, which she probably did. Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of public safety, and, indirectly, Lucas’s boss. “Cutting their throats with a straight razor and scourging them with a wire whip? Where do you even get a straight razor these days?”
Lucas said, “Shit,” scratched under his left armpit, and said, “They get straight razors from the same place they get lead pipes. The cliché mine. What else do they say?”
“Pretty well-written piece, if you have a taste for the Gothic,” Rose Marie said. “You’re still in bed, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ll read it to you.” She did; and when she finished, she said, “This is gonna be trouble for my favorite cop. The newsies are in it now.”
“I better call Sloan,” Lucas said.
HE DIDN’T CALL SLOAN RIGHT AWAY. He went back to sleep, and the next time he cracked his eyelids it was two minutes to eight o’clock. He fumbled past the lamp, through the pocket junk that he dropped on the bed stand each night, past watch and wallet and lucky stone and cash receipts from the gas station, a small wad of currency and two dollars in change, and finally dug out the cell phone, turned it on, and lay with it on his chest.
Two minutes later, right on time, it rang.
“Do anything good today?” he asked.
“Gave a lecture on the . . . on a facial muscle and the nerve that operates it,” Weather said.
“I wish I’d been there. Did you show slides?”
“You’re pulling my weenie.”
“You don’t have a weenie, unless you’ve grown one in London.”
They talked for fifteen minutes: she told him about the work; he told her about the story in the Star-Tribune.
“The thing is, you like that,” she said. “You like being in the newspaper.”
“Only when I’m standing over the bad guy’s body with my gun in my hand, wearing a new gray suit with a thin chalk stripe, and the Porsche in the background.”
“You’ll take it any way you can get it, buster. Maybe I should worry about you hanging out with newspaperwomen, again.”
“Ah, I’m too p-ssy-whipped to do anything questionable.”
“I beg your pardon . . .”
AS SOON AS THEY BROKE OFF, he said, “Sloan,” and punched in Sloan’s office phone from memory.
Somebody else answered. “Where’s Sloan?” Lucas asked.
“Who is this?”
“Davenport.”
“Hey, Lucas. This is Franklin. Sloan was talking to Anderson out in the hall a minute ago, let me go look. He’s been calling you at the office and on your cell phone . . .”
Franklin dropped the phone and went away. Lucas looked at his cell phone’s screen: sure enough, three missed calls. Then Lucas heard Franklin’s voice again but couldn’t make out what he said, then Sloan picked up: “We got some ink. This little f*cking weasel from the Strib picked it up.”
“I know,” Lucas said. He yawned. “What do you think?”
“Are you still in bed? You sound like you’re in bed.”
“Yeah, yeah, so what do you think?”
“The chief is jumping up and down, which is what you get when you hire a small-town guy. He’s scared to death that the city council might pee on him. Or even worse, the TV people,” Sloan said.
“You worried?”
“Not yet. Not as long as he doesn’t kill another one in town. I suppose you’re gonna have the governor on your ass.”
Lucas yawned again. “Don’t know yet,” he said when he had the yawn under control. “Dead people don’t have any political clout, but it could come from somewhere else, I suppose.”
“How about a sense of moral obligation?” Sloan said.
“Ah, you f*ckin’ Republicans, nothing ever makes you happy.”
“F*ck a bunch of Republicans,” Sloan said. “Anyway, I had Anderson send a whole book over to you by e-mail. You could have your secretary print it out for you before you get there. It’s everything we got, plus some medium-rez pictures from the Larson scene. You can have your co-op guys put it all in the database.”
“All right. I’ll be over there by ten. Want to hook up, say ten-thirty?”
“You got the case now?”
“I’m giving it to myself,” Lucas said. “If they want to put somebody else on it, too, that’s okay.”
“See you at ten-thirty,” Sloan said. “By the way, I got my papers.”
Lucas didn’t immediately track the reference. “Huh?”
“My retirement papers. I got them. I’m filling them out,” Sloan said.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake, Sloan, you aren’t gonna quit.”
“Yeah, I am. Talk to you at ten-thirty.”
LUCAS CALLED HIS SECRETARY and told her to print out Sloan’s murder file, and get it to the co-op group. Then he dressed, went downstairs, into a silent house, sat at the bar in the kitchen, and ate cholesterol-free, fat-free, carbohydrate-free, salt-free, puffed oatmeal air with a splash of fat-free milk. Still hungry, he went, feeling furtive, even though Weather was six thousand miles away, into Weather’s home office, opened the file cabinet, picked up a stack of medical reports, found the gold box of Godiva birthday bonbons hidden under them, stole the two he figured would be least conspicuously missing, and let them melt in his mouth as he headed for the door.
The second one had a maraschino cherry in the center: excellent. Feeling much better and hardly guilty at all, he wheeled out onto Mississippi River Boulevard, over to Cretin, and down to I-94, playing with the Porsche’s engine as he went.
CAROL WAS POKING FRANTICALLY at her computer when Lucas arrived at the office. Lucas ran the BCA’s Office of Regional Research, a bullshit title invented by Rose Marie Roux created to cover up the fact that he did what he wanted, or what the governor wanted him to. A fixer, in some ways.
He had two full-time investigators, and since the office was so small, Carol, technically a secretary, was effectively the office manager. She was a cheerful young woman with auburn hair and blue eyes and freckles, black plastic glasses, a little too heavy, and sometimes a little too loud. Despite her cheerful personality, she’d had a reputation around the Department of Public Safety for ruthless efficiency. Lucas had stolen her from the Highway Patrol, in a transfer arranged by Rose Marie Roux as a payoff for solving a series of horse shootings.
She propped herself in the doorway as Lucas hung up his jacket: “You didn’t sign the overtime.”
“You sign it,” he said. She’d have to forge his signature.
“I did. I’m just saying. You gotta start signing it, or someday they’re gonna put me in jail. Also, Lanscombe called and said that Del put eight hundred miles on a state car last weekend.”
“Ah, jeez, could you handle that? Make up some shit and tell him I said it.”
“You want me to kick Del’s ass?”
“Find out what he was doing, anyway. You get that stuff from Minneapolis?”
“Yup.” She’d bound the paper into a blue report cover. “Photos are in the back. I borrowed the photo printer down in crime scene. You should buy one for us. You’re rich enough.”
He ignored the suggestion. “Is Del coming in?”
“He was in. He went back out on the Ransom thing. Dannie’s with him. Husband and wife.”
“Christ, like Jack Sprat and his old lady.”
She smiled, a white-tooth Wisconsin dairy smile as Lucas headed into his office: “But who’d suspect they were cops?” she called after him.
Ransom was not a payoff. Ransom was a man who’d run a series of home-improvement scams with the help of a local lawyer and an outstate bank. Del and Dannie Carson were about to take out a second mortgage on a house they supposedly owned, to pay for a new roof, windows, garage door, and driveway, work that would never be done, even though the money had been paid. When the bank came around to foreclose on the mortgage, two or three months down the road, the governor would hold a press conference. Ransom would go to jail, the bank would cough up a few million dollars, and the governor would be hailed as the champion of the poor and benighted . . .
With any luck.
But why had Del driven eight hundred miles over the weekend? That was as far as Kansas City and back . . .
LUCAS WAS HIGH ENOUGH in the BCA hierarchy to get an extra seventy square feet of office space and rich enough—Carol was right about that—to buy two comfortable chairs to fill it with. He got a steno pad from his desk, dropped into one of the chairs, and started reading through the bound murder file: much of it he already knew from talking with Sloan and Elle the week before.
And he thought, “Elle.” He should give her a call.
He made a note to do that and pushed farther into the file. Made another note: Larson worked in some kind of artsy-crafty store, and Rice worked in a hardware store. A craft connection? Weak. A retail connection, people whom a killer might see in the routine course of business? Also weak. Larson was single, just breaking off a relationship, maybe. Rice was out looking?
He was poring over the photos when Carol came to the door: “There’s a parole officer on the phone for you. About the case. He says it might be urgent.”
Lucas nodded: “Put him through.”
HE STEPPED OVER to his desk and when the phone rang, picked it up. “Davenport.”
“Mr. Davenport, agent, uh . . . Yeah, this is Mark Fox down in Owatonna. I’m a parole officer. I just read the Star-Tribune story about this serial killing and I called Gene Nordwall and he said I should call you . . .”
“What’s up?”
“There’s this guy . . . A few weeks back a guy named Charlie Pope was turned loose from St. John’s,” Fox said. “He was a Level Two, convicted in St. Paul of raping a woman and trying to strangle her. There was evidence that he might have killed another woman or maybe two, way back.”
“I don’t remember the case.”
“It was years ago. And he didn’t kill anyone in the case he was convicted on.” Fox spent a couple of minutes outlining Pope’s career and added, “Frankly, he’s nuts. He doesn’t say much, but he’s crazier than a loon.”
“They let him go?”
“He was only convicted on the one rape, and he was coming to the end of his sentence. They couldn’t hold him. They decided the best thing to do was to let him go a few months early—he was pretty desperate to get out—and make a long-term ankle bracelet a part of the deal. A few weeks back, he cut the bracelet off and split. He was staying in a trailer down here in Owatonna. When I went over to look for him, there was no sign of him.”
“Trailer still there?”
“Yeah. I sealed it and told the manager to keep an eye on it,” Fox said. “I didn’t know what had happened to him. I still don’t. Anyway, I thought this might have something to do with your problem.”
“Good call,” Lucas said.
“I would have gotten in touch after the Larson thing, but I didn’t know about it until I saw the Star-Tribune story.”
“Bureaucracy,” Lucas said. “Give me a number—I’ve got a meeting with the Minneapolis homicide people in about ten minutes, but I might come down there and bring some guys with me. Do we need a warrant to look at that place?”
“Not if you’re with me. I’d be happy to meet you there,” Fox said.
“I’ll get back to you within the hour, tell you one way or the other,” Lucas said.
“One last thing,” Fox said. “He’s in your DNA database. They made damn sure of that before he left St. John’s.”
SLOAN CAME IN, with Elle Kruger trailing behind, looking a little abashed. She was wearing street clothes, as she had started to do more often: the full traditional nun’s habit, she said, had started to feel too much like an affectation. “I wasn’t sure I should come,” she said, near-sightedly peering around, checking out Carol. Elle came to dinner twice a month, had become tight with Weather, but she’d never been to his new office.
“Glad to have you, as long as I don’t have to put you on my budget,” Lucas said. He put them in the soft chairs and dropped in behind his desk. “I just got a call from a parole officer . . .”
He filled them in on what Mark Fox had said, and Sloan said, “So Pope disappeared just before Larson was killed? That’s the best lead we’ve had so far. Why didn’t we hear about it?”
“Usual BS. He didn’t know about Larson, nobody knew to ask about Pope, time passes,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I’m getting Pope’s file sent up from St. John’s.” To Elle: “Sloan has you all filled in on the Rice killings?”
“Not so much on the detail, as on the behavior,” she said.
“One important detail,” Lucas said. “Adam Rice apparently tried to fight the guy off, and there was blood and skin under his fingernails. If it’s not his own blood . . . well, we have Pope’s DNA in the database here. We oughta know tomorrow if we’ve got a match.”
“We’re looking for him now?” she asked.
Lucas nodded. “Yes. There’s a bulletin out, I’m sending it to Iowa and Wisconsin, too. We’ve got a six-week-old picture from St. John’s. They took it just before they let him go.”
“Gonna be a black eye for the state, letting him go,” Sloan said.
Elle said, “Could I see Pope’s file?”
“Sure. Don’t tell anybody. It’s supposed to be a confidential medical file . . . I’ll get Carol to make a copy for you. What about behavior . . . ?”
Elle had a simple nylon briefcase with her and said, “I’ve got a note . . .” As she dug into it, it occurred to him that the old nun’s costume, by isolating her face, had kept her young even as she aged. Now, dressed in the gray-and-black garb of her order, she looked like a thin, middle-aged woman who’d lived an ascetic, but sedentary, life. Her hair, which he hadn’t seen for twenty years after she’d gone into the convent, had turned steel gray, and her wrists and ankles seemed frail.
Then she looked over the note at him, and her eyes were as young as a kindergartener’s: “There are some interesting aspects to the behavior of this man. I think, after looking at the material that Mr. Sloan gave me, that he is probably intelligent. A planner. Nothing spontaneous or extemporaneous about this—he chose his victims, he knew when they would be alone and when he could get them without being interrupted. He knew where to leave Angela Larson’s body where it would have the greatest impact, but at a place where he could stop, take a little time to arrange her, and then leave, without being seen or noticed or monitored in any way. That’s not necessarily easy to do in a large city. Security cameras are everywhere, and as far as we know, he has not been seen by a single one.”
Lucas pointed a finger at Sloan: “Security camera at the store where Rice worked?”
“I’ll call.”
Elle continued: “There’s also something interesting in the way he tortures his victims. He’s methodical. I pointed this out to Mr. Sloan . . .”
“She won’t call me by my first name,” Sloan said to Lucas, grinning at Elle. Then, “Sorry, go ahead.”
“He beat both of them with some kind of whip, but not in an uncontrolled frenzy. If he were in a frenzy, he would keep hitting them in the same place, but these victims look like they had been put through a mechanical shredder—some of the slashes cross each other, but most of them are carefully laid in, proceeding down and around their bodies, as though he’s being . . . careful. Thorough.”
“Nuts,” Lucas said.
“He’s crazy, but it’s not an uncontrollable frenzy. Not mechanically uncontrollable, at any rate. He’s like a punisher: remote from his victim. Like a paid torturer in a prison.”
“Is he taunting us? Is he going to call somebody? Will he look for publicity?” Lucas asked.
“He could very well,” she said, nodding. “He’s intelligent, but the way he displays the bodies, he’s looking for attention. I don’t think he’ll call the TV stations—he’ll call a newspaper, if he does call.”
Sloan asked, “Why not TV?”
“Because they would record him, and he wouldn’t want his voice on tape. He will be careful.”
“What else?” Lucas asked.
“He’s strong. Probably attractive. Quite likely charismatic—a person who might attract his victims’ attention in some way. Not necessarily a pleasant way, but somebody they would notice.”
“You think they knew him?”
She considered it for a moment, then nodded: “Maybe. That’s a hard call. These two people were unattached—it’s possible that he seduced them in some way before the attack. Or he might simply be visually appealing to them. That would get him close without a fuss. They may have welcomed his attention—he could very well be soft-spoken, somebody you would trust.”
She looked up at Lucas. “One thing I would do is this: I would check on current and previous relationships that the victims had, and see if the men with whom they were involved are similar in some ways. The same appearance, somehow, the same attitude, or some particular status. Did they both like tall, dark men? Then the killer may be tall and dark . . .”
“You’re assuming . . . a sexual connection with Rice. The sheriff says Rice was absolutely straight,” Lucas said. “A widower with a kid. Nothing we’ve got would suggest that he had any homosexual contacts ever, even as a boy. We’ve talked to people who have known him for his entire life.”
Elle pulled at her lower lip, and Sloan said, “Yeah, but . . . in that culture down there, out in the countryside, an interest in homosexuality might be pretty well hidden.”
Elle nodded: “Very much hidden, especially if a man were essentially bisexual—he would always have his relationships with women as a cover. Even if somebody else knew about it, about any homosexual impulses that Rice might have had, that man might not admit it because of the implication that he might be gay . . .”
Lucas to Elle: “One of the crime-scene guys said he’d seen similar violence and it was usually gay, and the specific sexual mutilation usually came from a former lover, a jilted lover . . .”
“This is not like that,” she said quickly. “I know precisely what your technician was saying, but as I said, this was not done in an emotional frenzy. This was cold and calculated and, I think, enjoyed. This does not seem to me to have been done in anger.” She paused: “I could be wrong. Nothing is for certain.”
“Good.” Lucas made a note.
Carol knocked and stuck her head into the office: “The stuff from St. John’s is here, on the Pope guy. You want paper or electronic?”
“Paper. Three copies,” Lucas said. “Right away.”
Carol’s eyes involuntarily ticked over to Elle, raised perhaps a millimeter, and then she said, “Three copies,” and left.
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER twenty minutes, then Elle looked at her watch and said, “I’ve got a seminar.”
“Pick up the copy of the Pope file on your way out,” Lucas said. “I’ll be on my cell phone.”
“I’ll read it right after the seminar,” she said. “I’ll call this afternoon.”
WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas asked Sloan, “Are you going to Owatonna with me?”
“Absolutely, but we got some bureaucratic shit to figure out first,” Sloan said. “Pennington absolutely doesn’t want to be the media face on this. And he doesn’t want me involved. He says you guys gotta do it.”
“Ahhh . . . ,” Lucas said. Pennington was the Minneapolis chief. Lucas didn’t like him. “Nordwall didn’t want to do it, either. Maybe Rose Marie could do it. She can screw something out of Pennington in trade.”
Lucas got Rose Marie on the phone, outlined the problem.
“I’m not going to do it,” she said. “I’m trying to pull the string on this special session. Either you or McCord can do it. I’ll talk to McCord this afternoon and figure it out. I’ll talk to the governor, too . . . Be helpful if you could get the guy before he kills anyone else.”
“We might’ve had a break,” Lucas said. He told her about Pope. “If it’s him, we’ll look pretty good. Otherwise . . . right now, we don’t have anything that would point at anybody in particular.”
“So he’s going to do somebody else; if he’s not this Pope guy.”
“If he’s careful, he could do a few,” Lucas said.
“Goddamnit, we don’t want that. I’ll talk to the governor, I’ll talk to McCord, and we’ll figure something out and get back to you.”
“I’m on the cell,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Sloan: “Let’s go.”
OWATONNA WAS AN HOUR south of St. Paul, straight down I-35, back in the sea of corn and beans. A few miles out of Owatonna, they took a phone call from Nordwall. “Where you at?”
“In my car, on the way to Owatonna.” He told Nordwall about Charlie Pope.
“Okay, that’s something,” Nordwall said. “I got something else for you. Bill James, the guy I got doing the biography you wanted? He says that Rice was almost perfectly straight.”
“Almost,” Lucas said.
“Yeah—almost,” the sheriff said. “There’s a bar in Faribault called the Rockyard. Country bar, bunch of shit kickers, fights in the parking lot, Harleys and trucks, and so on. Live music Fridays and Saturdays. Anyway—a friend of Rice’s named Andy Sanders said there’s a bartender there, named Carl, who everybody calls Booger. If you talk to Booger, he can introduce you to some young ladies who will fall in love with you, if you’ve got the money. Sanders said Rice had been going up for the girls.”
“Hookers.”
“We just have girls down here, Lucas,” Nordwall said mildly. “Some of them have hasty love affairs.”
“But straight: male on female.”
“Straight. Sanders says no-way, no-how would Rice ever have gotten friendly with a gay guy. But I figure, you could meet some bad people at the Rockyard. There’s always a little shit going through there, a little cocaine, a little meth, and you could probably buy yourself an untraceable pistol if you asked just right.”
“All right. We just went past there. We’ll hit it on the way back.”
“Good.”
“Anybody gonna give us shit?” Lucas asked.
“No, no, it’s not that tough. It’s just a little . . . sleazy.”
“With some guys who like to fight.”
“Occasionally.”