9
JUST OFF THE SOUTHWEST corner of the metro area, Lucas called his secretary and was told that he had two dozen phone messages, one each from Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of public safety; from John McCord, the superintendent of the BCA; and from Neil Mitford, the governor’s top political operator. The rest came from various members of the media asking for interviews and updates.
He answered the first three immediately: all three wanted updates, and he gave them a quick recap of the trip to St. John’s.
To McCord: “I got an address for a schizophrenic guy, a Mike West, that we need to talk to. He’s an old pal of Pope’s.”
“Shrake and Jenkins are sitting on their asses; I could send them,” McCord said.
“Okay, but for Christ’s sake, tell them to take it easy.”
“We got a charge?”
“Just hold him for questioning; have them bring him in, we’ll get him a public defender if we need to, and see if we can work something out,” Lucas said. “But if we do find him just sitting around, then maybe he’s clear. If he’s gone, if he’s skipped, that’d be a little more interesting.”
“I’ll send them over,” McCord said.
“Tell them to leave their goddamn saps in their car, okay?”
“I don’t know about any saps,” McCord said. “Saps would be against policy.”
“Then tell them to follow policy.”
“All right. If you need anything else, let me know.”
“Mitford and Rose Marie called, and I told them I’d be doing another press conference this afternoon,” Lucas said. “Same deal as yesterday, except we’ve probably made Pope for another murder.”
He explained, briefly, and McCord said, “Put Sloan in the press conference. Spread the publicity around. We’ll make some points with Minneapolis.”
The publicity cut two ways: by putting Sloan out front, some of the glory was reflected onto the Minneapolis police department; and if they didn’t catch Pope fairly quickly, some of the blame, as well.
“Press conferences are like f*ckin’ the neighbor lady,” Sloan said, as he dialed up his own chief after Lucas finished with McCord. “Feels good at the time, but you’re gonna have to pay in the end.”
THEY GOT BACK AT three-forty-five and went to Lucas’s office, where Carol had piled up everything that had come in from Albert Lea and the Freeborn County sheriff on the Louise Samples killing. They read through it, looked at everything else they had on Pope, and then walked down to the conference room.
The press conference itself was the same routine: scraping chairs, posturing TV people. Ruffe Ignace was in the front row, but his story that morning had been anticipated by the TV news the night before. He was now behind in the cycle, had lost his edge, and wasn’t happy: he snapped questions out at Lucas, thrashing around, looking for something, anything. Lucas was polite.
Lucas described how Sloan picked up on the Samples killing, outlined what had happened, and what they believed. The Albert Lea cops were going through the retained evidence from the case, he said, looking for anything that might have a dab of Pope’s DNA on it. When he finished, the reporters gave Sloan an only moderately sarcastic round of applause. That was a first, ever.
Sloan said, “It really was nothing much,” but Lucas said, “It was amazing.”
WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED, they headed back to Lucas’s office. Halfway back, they bumped into Shrake and Jenkins, the BCA’s designated thugs, who’d been sent to Mike West’s designated halfway house to pick him up.
Jenkins was a square man who smoked too much; Shrake was tall and thin, and smoked more than Jenkins. They both wore sharp, shiny European-cut suits that had fallen off a truck somewhere; Shrake referred to them as quasi-Armanis.
“F*ckin’ waste of time,” Jenkins said. He habitually walked around with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, so all his jackets had stretched-out pockets. “The guy’s been gone for a month. We talked to the administrator over there. He said West’s meds were fogging him up so bad that he couldn’t stand them. The house rules are that you have to take your meds—and since he couldn’t stand doing that, he took off.”
“Any idea where he might be?”
“Doc says he’s probably on the street. His parents live in Arizona—they’re retired. We could check with the Scottsdale cops.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “See if they could have somebody stop by. And get a bulletin out to the local uniforms, get them to poke around. We really would like to talk to him.”
AT LUCAS’S OFFICE, they found a note from Carol: “Dr. Grant called from St. John’s and asked that you call him back. He’s on his cell phone.”
“Grant was the shrink,” Sloan said.
Lucas called him, and Grant answered on the third ring: “Listen, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I pulled out all my session tapes on Pope,” he said. “There’re five or six hours of material. Most of it was just talk. How was he feeling, what was he doing. But there’s an hour or so when he’s talking about getting out, what he’ll do, about the women he attacked. I edited down to the good stuff, an hour or so.”
“I need that,” Lucas said. “Can you messenger it up?”
“I’m coming up there tonight. If you want to tell somebody that I’m coming, I could drop it at the BCA office . . . it’s just a regular cassette tape.”
“Where’re you going in the Cities?”
“Downtown Minneapolis.”
“Why don’t you drop it at my house? That’ll save you a half hour, and it’s easy to find.”
LUCAS WENT HOME, ate a steak-and-onions low-carb, low-fat, low-protein microwave meal that had apparently been made purely from coal tars and goobers, perhaps seasoned with industrial phlegm; watched the television news; thought his suit looked pretty good but that his face looked too harsh—maybe from the diet? He looked at himself in the mirror, wondered if he should use a moisturizer—Weather’s solution for anything that didn’t involve bleeding or broken bones—but was embarrassed by the thought and eventually went out to the garage.
When Grant showed up, a few minutes before eight o’clock, Lucas was lying in the driveway, his head under the ass end of his Lexus, trying to rewire the trailer harness. The harness hung in an exposed position and had gotten trashed while he was dragging a boat around Wisconsin. More fine auto design.
“You under there? Lucas?”
“Yeah.” Lucas turned his head, saw a pair of cordovan loafers, and pushed himself out. “Just a minute. I almost got it.”
He didn’t, though. After fooling with the inadequate male-female connection for a moment, he decided he’d have to readjust the wiring distance between a support bracket and the connection. That would take more light than he had. He pushed himself out again and got to his feet.
“How’s it going?” Lucas hadn’t paid special attention to Grant at St. John’s, but now he looked him over. He was about Lucas’s height, but maybe fifteen pounds lighter, with edges. He didn’t look like he worked out, but there was a feral toughness about him.
Grant fished a tape cassette out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Lucas. “There’s not really anything hard on it; it just sort of shows you what he thinks about.”
“That could help,” Lucas said. “I’ll listen to it tonight . . . I hope you didn’t come all the way up to bring the tape.”
“No, there’s not much to do down by St. John’s, so I hang out up here. I’m too old to chase college girls.”
“Especially Lutheran college girls,” Lucas said.
“Especially intellectual Lutheran college girls,” Grant said. He drifted over toward the Porsche, which was crouched in the garage. “Of course, if I had a car like this . . . this is the wide one, right? Wide enough for Lutheran girls?”
“I’m a happily married man,” Lucas said.
“Yeah . . . And if you happened to be unhappily married, I can tell you that Karen Beloit liked your looks. She was sort of bubbling about you.”
Lucas laughed and said, “Hmm . . . Listen, you want a beer? What do you think about the Big Three? Is that just bullshit, or did they really do something with Pope?”
LUCAS GOT A COUPLE of beers and a step stool for Grant to sit on, and while Lucas hauled some work lights and tools out to the truck, Grant unwound a tangled coil of orange extension cord, plugged it into a garage outlet, and trailed it out to the truck. Lucas crawled back underneath and went to work on the wiring harness, while Grant sat on the stool, handed him tools, and they talked about Pope, the Big Three, and Mike West.
“I was pretty skeptical about Charlie, when I heard about it. But then, I heard about the reaction from Lighter and Taylor, and I thought—okay, I’ll buy that, somewhat. But Charlie might tend to drift. They could wind him up and send him out, but after a while, he’d sorta . . . run down. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s somebody else involved. A battery kind of guy. Somebody to provide the energy.”
“Mike West?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know—I didn’t have much contact with him.”
“But two guys makes sense to you.”
“More than Charlie by himself. You need something or somebody to provide the intensity. If you had that, I don’t doubt Charlie would go along. These murder scenes you laid out for us . . . I can see Charlie enjoying all that.”
“Hand me that small Phillips.” Grant handed him the screwdriver, and Lucas asked, “But if Pope is doing all of this, with or without the West guy, and if one or both of them were programmed by the Big Three . . . why did they wait so long before they started killing? You think they’d come right out, when the programming was the strongest . . .”
“I don’t know. To get organized? To locate targets?”
“Mmm.”
“We don’t even know if they were programmed. That might all be bullshit,” Grant said.
Lucas tightened the last screw and pushed out from under the car. “That’s not bullshit. They did something. You had to be there to see it—those motherf*ckers are involved,” Lucas said.
THEY PUT THE TOOLS AWAY, and Grant handed Lucas his empty beer bottle. “Give me your bottom line,” Lucas said.
Grant shrugged: “Something’s wrong. Something stinks. For one thing, you should have caught Charlie by now. He’s the kind of guy who would flee on a Greyhound bus.”
“You worry me.”
“I’m not a cop, so I don’t know how you work, or how, mmm, efficacious your methods are. But if I were you, I’d at least consider the possibility that Charlie Pope is working with somebody. That there’s a second man out there.”
“A second man.”
“Or woman.” Grant touched his chin with steepled fingers, as though he’d surprised himself with the thought. “A woman. A woman adds a sexual element to the equation.”
“You think . . .”
Grant said, “Listen, Lucas: the right woman could do anything with Charlie Pope that she wanted. Anything.”
LATE THAT NIGHT, Lucas sat in a pool of light in his study, eyes closed, listening to the tape Grant had brought with him. Grant had a sly interviewing technique. He would profess ignorance of some point, or some event, or make an assertion that was clearly faulty, and then he’d let Charlie Pope straighten him out.
Charlie Pope said:
“. . . They tease you all the time. They drive you out of your mind. I used to try to take care of myself, I’d get all cleaned up and shaved and put on new shoes, but nobody would ever go out with me. A man’s gotta have some sex, and what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to go hire a hooker somewhere? That’s how you get AIDS, all the hookers in the Cities got AIDS or some other disease.
“. . . It’s like advertising, they wear these skirts and these tight pants and these see-through blouses and show off their legs and their asses and their tits, and then what? They don’t think a guy is gonna want what they’re advertising?
“. . . I whacked her around a little bit but I didn’t plan to kill her or nothing, that’s just what the cops said. I mean, I did f*ck her, but I was just trying to hold her down on her chest and the cops said it was around her neck. I didn’t want her to scream . . .
“. . . I tried to talk to her, and she didn’t want to talk to me. I mean, look at me. I’m not a good-looking guy. When I was a kid I’d look in the mirror and try to make myself good-looking. I’d think, well, you’re not bad-looking, there are lots of guys not as lucky as you were, but I always knew that I’m not a good-looking guy. I mean, not like Tom Cruise or anybody. I got okay teeth, though, and that’s important . . .
“I thought maybe a truck would be a big idea, and maybe it would be. I got an eighty-six Ford F-one-fifty. It’d been wrecked but it’d been fixed, a cherry red color, best truck I ever had. I was working at an assembly plant building computer cases and making good money, six bucks an hour, nine bucks on overtime, pretty good job but it was all piecework, some weeks I’d work six days and some weeks I’d work two days . . .
“. . . Women, you know, they’re the big shots in the courts now, judges and lawyers and everything, they don’t know about blue balls, because they don’t have them. So how can they know about it? They don’t know that you’re forced to get some sex. Have you ever tried coke? I tried some once and the thing I thought was, it’s like getting the blue balls. It makes your head different. I’d get me some sex and then my head would be all right, but if I’d go awhile without it, and get the blue balls, my head would get all weird and I’d have to get some.
“. . . Okay, I paid a couple of times, but it was just a couple girls in Rochester that you sorta knew were okay. What’s the difference between that and maybe taking some chick out to TGI Fridays and maybe blowing twenty dollars, just to try to get some, and then you don’t get it. Maybe if you know a couple of girls it’s better just to give them the money . . .
“I wouldn’t ever go with a colored girl, their pimp’d catch you and he’d cut your nuts off. I seen some good-looking colored girls, though. If I thought, you know, they could go for me, and if they didn’t have a boyfriend around . . .
“. . . I don’t remember strangling her. I don’t think I did. I think the cops just made it up. I just whacked her a few times. I wouldn’t do it again, you know, unless it was self-defense or something. Okay, so it probably wouldn’t be self-defense, but some of these chicks, they can really fight . . .”
LUCAS LISTENED FOR ALMOST two hours, running the tape back and forth, made a few notes. Charlie Pope was afraid of big cities, he thought, and blacks and Latinos and Hmong. If he were hiding someplace, it would be in a small city or a town.
He would be looking for sex. The shrinks had been emphatic about it, and Lucas was convinced: sex seemed to soak through Charlie Pope’s view of the world. A note should be sent to all the law-enforcement agencies to warn the local hookers against him, and to circulate his photograph where hookers would see it. In most smaller cities, that would be one or two bars.
Pope would definitely go for a car, Lucas thought, or most likely, a truck, and almost certainly already had one. Unless . . .
Could he be hiding out in the countryside? Literally living in the woods? Did he have that capability? He’d been working as a garbageman and Lucas had known a couple of guys who’d lived on dumps, eating garbage and furnishing their hand-built hovels with whatever they could find on the piles of trash.
If not that, he must be disguised. At a minimum, he would have grown a beard. But what could he be doing? Stealing stuff to live on? How about just one holdup, where he scored a couple of grand, and continued to live on that? Lucas made a note to have the co-op guys check muggings and robberies by bearded men who fit Charlie’s physical form.
WHEN HE FINISHED with the tapes, Lucas thought he knew Charlie Pope. But where was he? A Charlie Pope didn’t hide well. Unless . . .
A second man or woman was hiding him. Was running him.
Or, maybe after the second killing he’d run so far that the news hadn’t caught up to him. Maybe he was working as a janitor or a garbageman or an assembly worker in backwoods Florida.
That was possible, but Charlie was rooted in the Upper Midwest. He was nuts, but he was a small-town boy. He was afraid to go to big places, afraid of the people he might meet. And he didn’t seem to be smart enough, or to have the will, to ignore those fears.
A village idiot.
Lucas sighed and put down his pen. A second man—or a woman. Something to lose sleep over.