7
THE PRESS CONFERENCE was held in a beige-walled, tile-floored, odor-free, windowless meeting room with a podium and rostrum at one end, in front of a blue Minnesota state flag that hung slightly askew on the wall behind the rostrum. The room was full of cheap Chinese plastic chairs with loud steel feet, which scraped and squealed when they were pushed around.
Reporters started drifting in a half hour before the press conference, led by the TV cameramen, who pushed the chairs around to make room for themselves and their lights. The newspaper guys, scruffy next to the TV on-air people, pushed the chairs around some more, the better to bullshit with one another. They were a little noisier than usual, a combination of off-camera cheer and on-camera solemnity, because the story was a good one.
All of it was enhanced in the eyes of the attendees by an entertaining spat between Sloan and Ruffe Ignace.
AT FIVE, THE TV PEOPLE brought the lights up, and Lucas did the intro:
“We have two murders. As you may have read in the paper, there is a possibility that the two are related. Representatives of the two jurisdictions in which the murders occurred are with us today and will describe the murders and the scenes . . .”
Nordwall, large and intense in a jowly, paternal, slow-moving way, said that his men were following several leads in the most recent murder but that overall coordination had been moved to the BCA. Then Sloan stood up and said that Minneapolis was coordinating with Nordwall and the BCA and that Minneapolis also had several investigators running down leads, which was a bald-faced lie but was not contradicted.
Lucas, following Sloan, said that the BCA had established and staffed a co-op center to coordinate information on the case.
Some of the reporters had started looking at their watches when he announced that they were looking for Charles “Charlie” Pope, a convicted Level-2 sex offender who had been recently released from the St. John’s Security Hospital and who had cut off a leg bracelet and disappeared.
The reporters stopped looking at their watches.
“At this point, we have no reason to believe that he is involved, except for general proximity and the fact that he has violated parole,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know where he is and what he’s been doing. If he sees this, we urge him to call us. If anybody has seen him, please call. Photographs are available and are being distributed. They were taken at St. John’s before his release and are only about two months old.”
Channel Three’s principal talking head, self-assigned to his semiannual story, one that wouldn’t wrinkle his shirt, jumped up and demanded, “Are you telling us that the state of Minnesota recently released an insane sex offender who immediately went into the community?”
That got it going; Nordwall, improbably, kept it going when he said, gruffly, “We don’t have lifelong preventive detention in the United States, and we won’t get it, no matter what the media wants, because we’re not Nazis.”
Lucas winced, and a happy Pioneer Press reporter, jabbing a yellow number-2 pencil at Nordwall, asked, “Are you implying that Channel Three in some way supports the tenets of National Socialism . . . ?”
AFTER BLEEDING OUT all the details on Charlie Pope, Lucas was pushed into admitting that the details in Ignace’s story were generally accurate. “They weren’t disclosed at the time of the murders to spare the victims’ families the trauma of seeing these brutal murders used as entertainment on television,” Lucas said.
Channel Eight’s weekend fill-in talking head leaped to his feet: “Are you trying to imply . . .”
Well, yes. Lucas’s implication pissed a few people off, in a pro-forma way, but since they all knew that the story would be used as entertainment, and were hoping that it might be used for several days if not weeks, the irritation was more about the public rudeness of mentioning the fact than because of any inherent unfairness. They wouldn’t use the clip of Lucas’s comment anyway, so no damage would be done.
Besides, Lucas knew most of the reporters, including the talking heads, and got along with them. He hadn’t met Ruffe Ignace, though, and when Ignace asked the predictable self-aggrandizing question “Would you say the recent Star-Tribune story on the murders spurred this sudden effort to track down Pope and create this so-called co-op center?”
Sloan jumped in. “Well, uh, Rufus . . .”
“Ruffe,” Ignace snapped, looking up at him suspiciously.
“Roo-fay? Okay. Roo-fay. Sorry. No, I don’t really think that the story got us moving any faster on anything, to tell you the truth. We were already pounding on it. This killer is a monster. We know that. We’re working on it as hard as we can, including using civilian experts to advise us. Your story was okay. Some of your details of the supposed display in the Larson case weren’t exactly correct, but I really can’t go into the precise problems . . .”
“They were exactly correct,” Ignace said. He added something under his breath, which might have been, You f*cking twit, or something close to that.
Sloan stepped away from the microphone, as if to have a personal word with Ignace, but he spoke loud enough that everyone could hear. “Not exactly,” he said. “You weren’t at the scene, and I was. That whole thing about the way, mmm . . .” He glanced at the TV cameras. “. . . about the sexual aspects of the arrangement of the body, were not exact. I don’t know where you got your information, but you have to be more careful about hearsay . . . or maybe the way your imagination works.”
“It wasn’t hearsay, and it was exact,” Ignace insisted.
“I won’t argue,” Sloan said, and he stepped away from microphone, turning it back to Lucas.
“It’s not right for you to stand up there and suggest that I wrote something that was incorrect when both you and I know it was correct,” Ignace said.
“I won’t argue,” Sloan said again, dismissively.
The other reporters were enjoying the show, a little hand-to-hand combat at Ignace’s expense. They would all mention in the report that Sloan suggested that some of Ignace’s details were incorrect, revenge for his having beaten them.
At the end of the press conference, with all questions repeated three times so the various media representatives could be shown on tape asking them, Lucas, Sloan, and Nordwall moved off the podium and out through the conference room’s back door.
Ignace followed them through the door and said, “Wait a minute.”
Lucas turned: “Uh, you’re not supposed to be back here . . .”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ignace went after Sloan: “What was that all about? About my details being wrong? You know that’s not right.”
“I know,” Sloan said. “I’m trying to figure out where our leak is. If all the details were right, and they were, and you insisted on it, and you did, then you probably saw photographs. There are about six people who could have made copies for you. I didn’t, so that gets it down to five. I’ll figure it out.”
Ignace stared at him for a moment, then turned, shoved his notebook in a hip pocket, walked back out the door, and as he went through it, said, “F*ck you.”
“Talk to you later, Rufus,” Sloan called back, adding, in a slightly lower tone, “You little a*shole.”
THE INFORMATION ABOUT POPE, and the press conference, froze the investigation: the routine continued, but there weren’t a lot of decisions to be made until the DNA came back. Lucas talked to the BCA director about space and personnel for the co-op center, then went home and ate a microwave dinner. He reread the murder file as he ate, talked to Elle by phone: she had no more suggestions.
“I saw you on television,” she said. “This will add pressure to find somebody.”
“Yup.”
“And it might also put pressure on the perpetrator to act again—when the attention starts to fade away in a day or two, he may move to get it back.”
“Thanks for the thought.”
He read the file some more, he went out to a used bookstore, then on to a movie, a spy thriller about an assassin who’d lost his memory. None of it seemed likely, but it had a decent car chase involving BMWs and Mercedes Benz Yellow Cabs.
The next morning, at eight o’clock, Weather called, and he told her about the press conference.
“Has there ever been a crime solved by matching DNA from a scene to something that was already in the bank?” she asked. “I mean, the primary solution, rather than an after-the-fact thing?”
“Yeah. A couple of times. But it’s rare.”
AFTER CLEANING UP, he took 35E to the BCA headquarters, settled into his office, signed papers that Carol put in front of him, and then checked with Bill James, who was doing the biographical research on Adam Rice and who’d uncovered Rice’s connection to the hookers.
“Not getting much more,” James said. “I’m doing background on the people he worked with, neighbors, like that, you know, but nothing is popping up. The hookers thing was . . . way out of control. If you knew everything else about him, you never saw that coming.”
“Maybe just sex,” Lucas said.
“I think it was. But it’s the only point where he sorta connected with the underworld . . . the Minnesota underworld. If you’re doin’ hookers, you’re not too far from the drugs and all the rest of it. So if he knew the killer, a sex killer, where’d he meet him? Those hookers seem like a possibility.”
“Exactly. Keep digging. Look for a snaky guy, real white complexion, with a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps.”
“Who’d that be?”
“Maybe just a fantasy,” Lucas said. “Good job on the hookers.”
HE CALLED MARK FOX, Charlie Pope’s parole officer: “Could you ask the people Pope worked with, if he ever hung out at a place called the Rockyard, in Faribault? It’s not too far . . .”
“I know it, and it’s Charlie’s kind of place,” Fox drawled. “I’ll ask around and get back to you today. Still haven’t found a car, have we?”
“No. I worry about that.”
LUCAS TALKED TO SLOAN. Sloan said, “I can’t get Angela Larson and Adam Rice together, except for one thing and it’s weak.”
“What?”
“If you look at the transcript of Nordwall’s interview with Rice’s mother, they talk for a minute about Rice’s wife. Laurina Rice says, quote, ‘She liked doing artistic things,’ unquote. Larson worked at an art-supply store . . .”
“So your theory is . . .”
“No, no, no, it’s not a theory,” Sloan said. “It’s not that strong. But maybe . . . they could have met? Like on an art-supply buying trip up here? And after his wife dies, when he starts thinking about companionship, he remembers Larson. That they hit it off a little, so he drops by.”
“Then what?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe some sort of kinky artist guy is fixated on her, and sees them together . . .”
Lucas: “That’s not weak—it’s just not quite ridiculous. Why don’t you get one of your millions of investigators and see if he can make the link?”
“Ah, jeez, they’d think I was crazy.”
“Get a young one,” Lucas said.
WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE with Sloan, Lucas went down the hall and bought a pack of almonds from a snack machine: they were his permitted midmorning snack. He was back at his desk, counting out the allotted fifteen almonds, when John Hopping Crow stuck his head in the door and said, “They f*ckin’ match.”
Lucas sat up, astonished: “They f*ckin’ match?”
“They f*ckin’ match,” Hopping Crow repeated, stepping inside. He was wearing the largest smile Lucas had ever seen on him, big white teeth like Chiclets. “How about that for a little CSI: Minneapolis bullshit, huh? We’re going network.”
“You got enough goop to repeat the procedure?” Lucas asked.
“We don’t have to . . .”
“For the trial? For the defense, if there is one?”
Hopping Crow caught on: “Yes. We’ve got the evidence chain nailed down, everything passed hand to hand and signed for, and we’ve got enough for three or four more tests.”
“I’d French-kiss you if you weren’t married,” Lucas said, picking up the telephone.
“It’s always something,” Hopping Crow said.
SLOAN WAS AS ASTONISHED AS LUCAS.
“Got him. Goddamn it, Lucas. Got him.” Lucas heard him turn away from the phone and shout to somebody, “They matched it. We got him.” Then, back to the phone, “If you get the media hooked up, we can have his face all over five states by six o’clock.”
“I’m going down to St. John’s today, talk to the people who worked with him. If you’re loose . . .”
“How soon?”
“I want to make those media calls, set up a four-o’clock press conference. Say, an hour?”
“Pick me up at the Mall of America. I’ll go down there now, I wanna buy some shoes.”
LUCAS TOLD CAROL, his secretary, to set up a press conference for four o’clock; called Nordwall and told him.
“Goddamnit, that’s wonderful,” Nordwall said, his voice warm with relief. “But why four o’clock? Why wait?”
“I’ve got stuff to do. We need more background on the guy, we should organize some more pictures, and besides, it doesn’t matter—we can’t do it in time for the noon news, and at four o’clock they’ll have it in time for every single evening news program, and both papers.”
“I’ll see you at four,” Nordwall said.
THE NEXT CALL WAS to St. John’s. A secretary told him the administrator, Dr. Lawrence Cale, was fishing in Bemidji, but would be on his cell phone. Lucas called and found the guy in a boat.
“Haven’t caught a goddamned thing,” he grumbled. “I’m saying it loud enough for the guide to hear me.”
Lucas explained about the DNA: “I need to talk to the people in St. John’s who were the closest to Pope.”
“That’d be his treatment team,” Cale said. “My second’s name is Darrell Ross. I’ll call him and tell him to hang on to the team until you get down there. They normally get off at three o’clock . . .”
“No problem, we can be down there in an hour and a half. We’ve got to be back here by four, anyway.”
“Wish I could be there, especially since I’M NOT CATCHING ANY FISH,” Cale said. “Charlie Pope, huh? I’ll tell you what—we’re not taking the fall on this one. We saw it coming from a long way back, and we told everybody who’d listen.”
LUCAS GOT OUT OF THE BUILDING, cut across town, and found Sloan, with a shoe bag, standing on the sidewalk outside Nordstrom’s. They headed south down the Minnesota River again. “Pope’s face will be all over the Northern Plains. He won’t be able to stand outside his car to take a leak without somebody recognizing him,” Lucas said. “That’s one good thing about a really ugly murder; people pay attention. Maybe we oughta make all murders ugly.”
“All murders are ugly,” Sloan said. He was trading his old shoes for the new ones. Both pairs were nearly identical black wingtips. “If they were pretty, I wouldn’t be quitting.”
“Aw, man . . .”
THE RICE MURDERS had taken place just south of the city of Mankato; St. John’s Security Hospital was located eight miles to the north, in a red-brick riverside hamlet originally built around a grain elevator and a creamery. Now the town was mostly a bedroom community for hospital employees.
The hospital sat in the hills west of the town and came in two parts. A reception center for new inmates and visitors sat down a short access road; the road continued through the parking lot and farther up the hill, to the main hospital.
The reception center was a new, low, brick building that looked like an elementary school, except that the back side had a chain-link prison pen attached, with glistening concertina wire looped through the fence. The main hospital was an older brick-and-concrete-block building that was just Gothic enough to scare the shit out of people who saw it.
THEY CHECKED IN at the lower building, and a chunky young woman named Nan escorted them up the hill. The hospital was set up like a prison: an outer area for administration and support, a hard wall running through the center of the building, with confinement areas behind the wall.
From an earlier visit, Lucas knew that the level of confinement varied from section to section: the worst sexual psychopaths were kept in hard cages under twenty-four-hour surveillance, while the inmates of other areas, where there was no immediate threat of violence, had a good deal of freedom. Some sections housed both men and women, which had caused some problems with sex and even the occasional pregnancy, but which also gave those areas a greater feeling of normal human society.
“Most of the people here really are . . . a little lost,” Nan said. “They’re not bad people. Most of them aren’t stupid. The world is just a little too much for them.”
“Most of them,” Sloan said. “There are a few . . .” He shook his head.
“Sure,” she said.
THEY SIGNED IN AND LEFT their weapons with a security officer. Entry to the confinement area went through twin electronic barred doors, with a hardened guard’s booth between the two doors. The booth was called “the cage” and was made of concrete block up to waist height, and from there to the ceiling with thick armored glass set into concrete pillars. The people inside the cage controlled the entry, the locks in the confinement blocks, and monitored the cameras that were spotted through the hospital.
Nan took them as far as the first barred gate, pointed out a man leaning against the wall in the confinement area, behind the second gate. “That’s Harvey Bronson. He’ll take you to your conference.”
They said good-bye and stepped through the first door, which slowly closed and locked behind them. They then walked through an airport-like metal scanner, emptying their pockets and removing their shoes. When they were through and had their shoes back on, one of the men in the cage opened the second door, and they stepped through into the secure area.
“Gives me the creeps, being inside,” Sloan said, looking back at the doors.
“Never get used to it,” said their new escort. He pointed down the hall. “You’re down this way.”
The inside of the hospital reminded Lucas of an aging high school. Bronson took them to a conference room where a principal’s office should have been, popped open the door, said, “Have a seat—I’ll see what happened to the team.”
They dropped into the chairs and looked around: the place had the same architectural neutrality as the press-conference room back at the BCA, except for a dark glass plate in one wall, which hid a camera and microphones; they both looked at it, and Lucas said, “Big Brother.”
A few seconds later, the door popped open, and a guy stuck his head inside: “Davenport and Sloan?”
Sloan raised a hand: “That’s us.”
The man said over his shoulder, “Here they are,” and then, as he stepped inside, “They told us the wrong room.”
TWO MORE MEN and a woman followed the first man inside. They were dressed casually, in white staff coats and pastel shirts, tan slacks, pens in their breast pockets. All four wore the masked expressions Lucas recognized as Prison-Guard Face: tight, watchful, controlled. There was always an edge of fear, held in a mental fist, never allowed to leak out when there was a prisoner around. Fear in a prison was like blood in a shark pen. The four of them shuffled around the conference table, put papers on the table, files. Two of the men had coffee cups. The first man said, “You guys want coffee?”
“We’re okay,” Lucas said. He said, “I’m Lucas Davenport, with the BCA, and this is Detective Sloan from Minneapolis PD. You guys are . . . ?”
They introduced themselves: three were psychologists; the fourth, the woman, was an M.D. She was pretty in a careful way, slender, with brown hair, brown eyes, short nose, and a few freckles. She held Lucas’s eyes for an extra second, and he thought, Hmm. Then one of the men said, “Charlie Pope?”
“Yeah. We got this DNA result . . .”
Lucas spent ten minutes outlining the details of the case, both of the killings and the DNA match. Prison people liked that—to be treated like brother cops—and they got on a first-name basis.
One of them, a burly, crew-cut guy named Dick Hart, kicked back from the table and said, “I’ll tell you what, Lucas, you ask me if Charlie could do this, I’d say, ‘Absolutely.’ He was crazy enough. They should never have let him out of here. I knew something would happen. I said so before they let him go.”
Karen Beloit, the M.D., agreed: “We’d take him for treatment—he had stomach and hemorrhoid troubles—you could watch him watching the women. The doctors and the nurses, watching them. You knew what he was thinking.”
“But one of the victims was a man,” Sloan objected.
Leo Grant said, “I was one of his therapists, and, uh, mmm . . .” He glanced at Beloit, grinned, and said, “Put your fingers in your ears.”
“Spit it out, cowboy,” she said.
“You know that movie, American Pie, where the guy puts his dick in the pie ’cause it’s kinda warm? Charlie was like that. But with a mean streak. He’d just go around and he needed to f*ck something. You’d see one of the younger guys go by, and Charlie would kinda look at his ass . . . Charlie’d do that. He wouldn’t even consider it gay.”
Hart agreed with Grant. “It’s pretty common in here for the dominant member of a homosexual couple not to consider himself gay. The, mmm, receiver, everybody agrees that he’s gay. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Charlie had a sexual relationship of that kind. I’m a little surprised by this beating, this methodical torture you’re talking about. Charlie might enjoy hurting people but didn’t seem to me to be the kind who’d be methodical about it. To plan it. He might beat somebody to death or strangle somebody—hell, we’re pretty sure he did—but this is a little different. With Charlie, sex was the thing, the violence was the way he got it. With these killings it seems like the violence is the thing, the sex is an afterthought.”
Leo Grant was shaking his head, said, “Nah, nah, Dick, that’s not right. The sex is central. The sex is central. The torture is part of the sex act; the actual penetration is the culmination. I wouldn’t be surprised if the moment of murder, the throat cutting, comes simultaneously with orgasm.”
“Jesus.” Sloan stroked his throat with his fingers.
“You’re saying the torture is the foreplay,” Lucas said.
Grant nodded: “Exactly.”
Sam O’Donnell, the third psychologist, said, “We tried everything we could to hang on to him. I would . . . there’s a way of getting to a guy sideways. I’d read a newspaper report to him, a sex crime somewhere, and get him to imagine how they would track down the criminal. He had the reticence of a longtime prisoner, but when you went at him sideways, got him thinking about it, you could watch the control slip away. In the end, giving him potential access to sex would be like putting an ounce of cocaine next to somebody just out of rehab.”
Sloan said, “Okay. So . . . where did he go?”
Hart glanced at the others, then shrugged and said, “F*ck if I know.”
Beloit said, “He shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’d start by looking in strip bars and topless places. Someplace where there’s alcohol and women.”
Grant was shaking his head again. “He isn’t as dumb as he looks. He’ll stay away from those too-obvious places. He might try for, like, a college place. Someplace where there are a lot of targets. I’m not sure he’d go for an obvious place like a strip joint. Not if he thinks somebody might be looking for him.”
“We’re already looking at a bar in Faribault,” Lucas said. “They’ve got some hookers working out the back door.”
O’Donnell looked at Grant: “That might be something he couldn’t stay away from. Get off, and nobody to talk about it.”
Grant seemed skeptical: “Maybe.”
Lucas: “Now that we’re gonna put his face all over the place, he won’t be able to hang out in any bar. Where would he hide?”
“Someplace close,” Hart said. “He’s a homeboy. Even Iowa scares him.”
“I can see that,” Sloan said. “Iowa scares me a little.”
“He’s been out for what? Couple months? I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that he has a beard and maybe has dyed his hair,” O’Donnell said. “Maybe even gotten a toupee somewhere. What’s he driving? He didn’t have any money when he left here. Have you looked for stolen cars? Or friends who might loan him a car?”
“That’s one of our biggest questions,” Lucas said, tapping his finger on the tabletop. “How’s he getting around? He had to get a car from somewhere. Do you have any records of him talking about friends? Or did he have any friends here who might have hooked him up?”
“There were a couple of people he sort of hung with,” Hart said. “But they’re all still here, as far as I know.”
“Mike West,” Beloit said.
Grant snapped his fingers: “I never thought of him.” To Lucas: “West is a schizophrenic personality who can’t stay on his meds. He’d get freaked out, you know, sometimes life would get on top of him, and he’d get violent—though it was aimless, more like excitement than rage. He never hurt anyone, maybe a couple of cut lips, but he scared people. Anyway, he knew Charlie on the outside, when they were growing up.”
“That’s good,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”
“He’s right in Minneapolis, at a halfway house,” Hart said. “We can check before you leave. I’m not sure, but it seems to me he might’ve gotten out a couple of months before Charlie did.”
Beloit said, “That’s a possibility, I guess. But you know what bothers me?” She paused, getting her thoughts together, and then again held Lucas’s eyes. “When Charlie was out in the population, sometimes he’d stop and talk to the Big Three. They were friends, I think. Much as those people can be.”
Lucas: “Big Three?”
Hart: “Chase, Lighter, and Taylor. Lawrence Chase, Benjamin Lighter, and Carl Taylor. We think he killed at least two women, Charlie did, so they had something in common.”
Sloan said, “Ah, shit. Biggie Lighter was a friend of his?”
Lucas leaned back and grinned at him. “Your old buddy.” To the others: “Sloan’s the guy who put Biggie away.”
“I’d be more worried about Carl Taylor,” O’Donnell said. “He’s the one who spins out all these theories about why women need to be killed. He’s the preacher. And some of these guys . . . I mean, some of them, go along.”
But Sloan looked at Lucas: “Biggie Lighter used to cut the . . .” His eyes flicked sideways at Beloit, then back, “. . . penises off his victims, after he raped them. I don’t know if he posed them.”
Hart said, “Rice had his penis cut off?” When Lucas nodded, he said, “That does sound like Biggie. His files say that he . . . there was some cannibalism involved.”
Beloit: “Oh, yuck.”
“He’s not a guy you mess with,” Grant said. “When we’re dealing with him, we use full protective restraints.”
THEY ALL SAT AROUND silently for a moment, looking at one another, until Hart picked it up again.
“But you know, when it’s all said and done, none of this really sounds much like Charlie Pope. He’s a crazy killer, but he was clumsy,” Hart said. “Sam is right: that first one, the woman, sounds more like Carl Taylor. He’s the one who goes on all the time about punishment. He told me once, in a therapy session, that if he had to do it all over again, he’d punish the women before he killed them so that they’d have a taste of hell before they went there. He said he’d hang them up naked and whip them like Jesus was whipped. He’s welded together sex and punishment like . . .” He shrugged. “Listening to him is like reading the Marquis de Sade.”
“Hang them up naked,” Lucas repeated.
“Yes. You know, so they were dangling and he could whip them all around . . .”
“Goddamnit,” Sloan said.
Lucas: “Do you guys think Taylor and Lighter could be operating Pope by remote control?”
Dick Hart jumped in: “Couldn’t really be remote control, because they can’t talk to him. These are the most highly restricted prisoners in the state. They have no contact with the outside.”
“Not even their families?” Sloan asked.
“Their families have disowned them,” Beloit said. “Chase’s sister said we should kill him if we ever got the chance. She was serious. Nobody in any of their families has ever come here or even called, except Taylor’s, years ago. He was left some property, and his brother came in here to get him to sign it away. But that’s been five or six years.”
Grant said, “We know everything that goes in and out of their cells. We have people comb through their food before it goes in.”
“Do they have access to TV news?” Sloan asked.
“Well, sure . . . They have TVs in their cells.”
“So, if they programmed him, they could be getting off on it by watching the news.”
O’Donnell nodded: “They could. Maybe that would be enough . . . to get them off, anyway.”
“If Pope’s a robot,” Lucas asked, “do you think they sent him out there deliberately, or he just went?”
“Charlie was going after women no matter what,” Grant said. He was the skeptical one: “But this? Robots? I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk to Taylor and Lighter and Chase,” Sloan said to Lucas. “What have we got to lose?”
Lucas looked at the others: “What do you think?”
They all shrugged or nodded. “Really don’t have anything to lose—but don’t go making any deals with them unless you get an okay in advance,” Hart said. “They’re gonna want something for talking.”
Beloit looked at Grant, who showed a small smile and said, from the corner of his mouth to Hart, “Better read them the semen warning.”
Sloan bit first: “What’s that?”
“Lighter tends to hide semen around his cell. Or just keep it in his hand. We have a screen we keep up most of the time, but when we need to talk to him . . . Well, when you’re least expecting it, zip, it’s all over your face.”
“That’s why prison guards carry clubs,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, clubs,” Hart said. He stood up and stretched. “We’ll keep him under control. But if the worst should happen . . .”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a reflex to lick your lips. Don’t do that.”
THEY HAD TO GO BACK to the unsecured side of the administration building to arrange the visit to Taylor, Lighter, and Chase. Darrell Ross, the assistant administrator, was a friendly codger with a ring of white hair around his bald pate and a pipe rack on his desk. He leaned back in his leather chair and said, congenially, “There’s a question here of whether you’re investigating them for a crime. If you’re investigating them for a crime, you’ll have to read them their rights. Then they’ve got a right to an attorney.”
“They’re nuts,” Lucas said. “They’re locked up in a nuthouse.”
Ross frosted up: “We don’t use that language here. It’s a little like referring to a paralyzed person as a crip. Most of them are harmless, and their problems are not of their own making.”
Lucas held his hands up: “Sorry. I know that.”
Ross nodded at him, laced his fingers over his ample gut, and twiddled his thumbs for a second. “Anyway, the Supreme Court says they get a lawyer. So if they ask, they get one. There are ways to work around that, and we’ll try, but I’m just letting you know that there could be a hangup.”
“What ways to work around it?” Lucas asked.
“We’ll tell them that if they want a lawyer, we’ll have to isolate them for a few days before we can bring them up to the visiting room. Just to make sure that they don’t have any contraband concealed inside their bodies. They hate the isolation. That might convince them that they don’t need an attorney.”
“Is that legal?” Sloan asked.
“Supreme Court says we can use reasonable security measures.” The friendly old codger smiled a smile that suddenly looked a lot like a prison guard’s smile. “We get to say what’s reasonable. Anyway—we’ll try to get you in.”