Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “If there was a killer . . .”

  Marshall flushed, bobbed his head. “There was. The thing is, we brought in a crime-scene crew. There was nothing obvious, no big pools of blood or anything, no sign of violence except . . . she had this old carpet, a fake Oriental rug. They found her fingernails in it.”

  “Fingernails.”

  “Three of them. She was trying to pull herself away from somebody, clawing across this rug. Snapped her fingernails off. There was a little fresh blood on one of them, and we type-matched it. It was hers.”

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, “I can see that. A strangulation.”

  Marshall nodded. “If you think about it, it fits . . . and she was going with a guy her housemates called ‘the artist.’ ”

  Lucas leaned forward again. “The artist?”

  “Yeah. He met her at the Union, sort of picked her up. He told her he was an art student and that his name was Tom Lang or Tom Lane. She went out to meet the guy a couple of times, and her housemates had teased her about him—what he looked like, was he ugly, and so on. She said he was cute, blond, skinny, not very tall. She told one of the girls that he looked like a movie star.”

  “Not Bruce Willis?”

  Marshall, puzzled, shook his head. “No, no. Like a guy named Edward Fox. He played the bad guy in a movie called Day of the Jackal.”

  Lucas said, “The assassin? The guy trying to kill Charles de Gaulle?”

  “That’s the guy. I’ve seen the picture about a hundred times. And she said he rode a bike.”

  “A bike.”

  “A bike. That was what we got on him. That was it,” Marshall said.

  “He never drew a picture of her or anything?” Lucas asked.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Any forensics at all?”

  “No. Not except for the fingernails.” Marshall was floundering, and Lucas looked at him curiously.

  “Did you know this girl?”

  “Yeah, yeah, she was my niece. My sister’s girl. She was like a daughter—I never had a kid, and I just . . .” He shook his head and stopped talking; her image was in his eyes, Lucas thought.

  “Jeez. I’m sorry,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Marshall came back from wherever he’d gone. “I just hope I haven’t gone goofy. When I saw that thing on TV last night, there wasn’t one thing that didn’t sound like our guy.”

  Lucas leaned back in his chair. “I hate to tell you this, but we found a guy last night who might’ve seen him. He supposedly looks like Bruce Willis. Kind of stocky, buzzcut hair, dark. We do think he might’ve met Aronson in a restaurant, like the guy picking up your niece in the Union,” Lucas said. “Hang on a second. . . .”

  He went to the outer office and retrieved Marcy’s drawing of Willis, brought it back, and passed it to Marshall. “We found an old friend of Aronson’s last night who might’ve seen the guy, just by accident. This is what we think he might look like.”

  Marshall looked at the picture for a moment, then up at Lucas, shook his head, and said, “Just the opposite of what Laura told her housemates. Perfect opposite.”

  “Pretty much,” Lucas said.

  Marshall peered at the picture for another moment, sighed, and then said, “Maybe I’m on the wrong track. But there are a couple of other things there in the file. I’ve kept a lookout for women who might have been victims. We didn’t have much to go on, so there are quite a few candidates—people drop out of sight all the time. There was a young girl here in Minnesota who disappeared about two years after Laura was killed: Linda Kyle. Came from Albert Lea and was going to Carlton College in Northfield. Anyway, she disappeared one day, never has been found. She was an art student and had been hanging around galleries up here in Minneapolis when she got bored. She’d had a couple of dates with a guy in the city, but none of her friends ever saw him. No suspects.”

  “Huh. None of her friends ever saw him. It’s like a technique,” Lucas said. Then: “I don’t remember her. I don’t remember the case.”

  “Not too surprising—seven years ago, and they never found anything, and she wasn’t from here,” Marshall said. “Then there’s another one, three years ago, from New Richmond, Wisconsin, just across the St. Croix River.”

  “I know the town,” Lucas said. He drove through it sometimes on the way to his cabin.

  “A woman named Nancy Vanderpost, married but separated, twenty-two years old, and one day she disappeared. Hasn’t been found. She’d been talking about going to Los Angeles and doing performance art. She also had a romance going on here in the Twin Cities, but they never identified the guy. She was living in a trailer home, and when they went in there was no sign of a struggle or anything, but they found . . . fingernails. Two broken fingernails. And they found her purse next to a couch, all of her clothes were there as far as they knew, and the main thing is, all of her insulin was there. She wouldn’t have left that.”

  “The connection is the fingernails and the art in the Cities?” Lucas asked. “And the thing about nobody ever seeing who the woman is dating?”

  Marshall nodded, his Lennon glasses opaque with reflected light, hiding his eyes. “One other thing, a guess. All the trailers in this trailer court are right next to each other. Ten feet apart. If her purse was in the place, then I think that’s where the guy took her out of . . .”

  “If somebody took her out.”

  “Yeah. If. If somebody did, he didn’t shoot her, didn’t beat her to death, didn’t do anything that gave her a chance to scream, didn’t get involved in any loud arguments, wasn’t drinking, and didn’t stab her to death. They brought the state crime lab in to look at her trailer, and there was no trace of blood at all. I think he strangled her. I think that’s what the fingernails mean: These women are beating their hands on the floor.”

  “No drawings?”

  “Only hers. She did drawing and music and dance and acting and poetry and journaling and photography and everything else, but I’m told she wasn’t very good at any of it. Just sort of a . . . fucked-up soul, looking for something a little bigger than she was.”

  “Some kind of art guy,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what I think,” Marshall said. “I pushed it hard as I could from Dunn County, but there was nothing to go on, and there was always the possibility that she was in L.A., or that she’d had an insulin problem and had wandered off somewhere and died. There’s all kinds of places around New Richmond where you could get lost.”

  “Her car?”

  “Was parked in town. They found it the day after they went into her place.”

  “I see one difference between what you’ve got and what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “Yours are all small-town kids, and ours isn’t. Like maybe your guy is picking on kids who are a little naive. Aronson was living here in the Cities, and had been—”

  “But the paper said she was originally small-town. Maybe it’s an attitude that pulls him in.”

  “Maybe. . . .” Lucas got his feet up on his desk for a moment, thinking about it, and then said, “You heading back home?”

  “I’d like to hang around this afternoon. It was snowing like crazy when I went through Hudson. I’m afraid they’re gonna close the Interstate over the river. I’d like to see what you’ve got going. I know our part of the case backwards and forwards, and maybe something’ll occur to me.”

  “You’re welcome to hang out long as you want. Get Marcy to run that name—Tom Lang?—through the lists we’re compiling. Maybe you should go over and look at Aronson’s body—talk to the docs, see if she’s missing any nails, or if there’s any abrasions on her hands.”

  “What do you think about my list?”

  “Interesting. Somebody’s probably out there operating.”

  “Somebody always is,” Marshall said.

  DEL CAME BACK a few minutes after Marshall left and found Lucas staring at the ceiling of his office. Del said, “I ran those guys from the ad agencies.
One of them doesn’t pay his parking tickets. The other one has never talked to a cop, far as I can tell.”

  “Did you run them against the lists?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet. Marcy was entering stuff. . . .” Lucas had turned in his chair, his eyes drifting away as Del was talking. Del said, “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Huh?”

  “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Lucas explained about Marshall. “I’ve been looking through his file. It’s got a bad feel to it, Del.”

  “You think he’s onto something?”

  “I’m afraid he might be,” Lucas said.

  “He got anyplace we can go with it?”

  Lucas pushed himself onto his feet. “Not right away. So let’s go look up Morris Ware.”

  Del nodded. “That dickhead. I was hoping he’d moved to one of the fuckin’ coasts with the rest of the perverts. Where’d you hear about him?”

  Lucas pulled his coat on. “That Lori chick over at Hot Feet Jazz Dance, down on . . .”

  “. . . Lyndale. Yeah. Strange chick.”

  “I was over there a couple of days ago. She did one of those dance things where you hold on to a bar and stretch your leg over your head. I spent five minutes talking to her crotch.”

  “And her crotch said Morris Ware . . .”

  “. . . is back out on the street with his Brownie, looking for the young stuff again.”

  “Not surprised,” Del said. “That’s not something you get over.”

  Lucas asked, “Didn’t Ware run with the art crowd, like from over at the Walker?”

  “Yeah, for a while, I think. He did this book, Little Women on the Edge, or something like that. Like on the edge of puberty. It was supposed to be art, naked girls, but it had the smell of puke about it.”

  7

  MORRIS WARE LIVED in a tidy two-story stucco house under the northern approach lanes for Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. A Miracle Maids van sat in front of the house, and a pink plastic Miracle Maids bin sat on the porch, next to the front door. The porch might have held a porch swing—there were hooks in the ceiling, and worn spots on the deck—but didn’t. Both the back and front yards were surrounded by low dark-green chain-link fences. A clapboard garage sat astride the driveway behind the fence, and on the lawn, next to the driveway, a Macon Security sign warned against burglary: “Armed Response Authorized.”

  “Light in the window,” Lucas said.

  “Of course. It’s almost two o’clock,” Del said. “This fuckin’ place.”

  “Not very cold, though,” Lucas said, as they pushed through the front gate and headed for the stairs.

  “Not for Moscow,” Del said. “For any other place, this is cold.”

  A machine was whining inside the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and they both heard a thump. A man’s eyes appeared in the small window cut in the front door, and a second later, the door opened.

  “Yeah?” The guy in the doorway wore white coveralls and a white paper hat that covered his hair. He was thin, slat-faced, with a two-day stubble.

  “Minneapolis police,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for Morris Ware.”

  “Uh, Mr. Ware isn’t here. We’re the housecleaners.”

  “You’re a Miracle Maid?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. That’s what I am.” He sounded like he didn’t believe it himself.

  “Do you know where Ware’d be?” Del asked.

  The man’s eyes flicked to Del, lingered for a moment, and a rime of skepticism appeared. “Do you guys have any ID?”

  Both Lucas and Del nodded automatically and flipped their IDs. “So . . .”

  “I don’t have an address or anything, but I do have a contact number. I think it’s his office,” the man said.

  Lucas and Del waited on the porch while he went to get the number, and Del said, “I’m not sure he believes I’m a cop.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Lucas said.

  The housecleaner returned with the number. Lucas jotted it down and then said, “You don’t have to call him and tell him we were here.”

  “Maybe I should just forget it entirely.”

  “Good policy,” said Del.

  LUCAS CALLED THE phone number in, and a minute later got an address back. “It’s off 280, off Broadway somewhere, in those warehouses,” the dispatcher said. “You know where that Dayton’s office furniture place is? Around there somewhere.”

  They took I-35 north, then 280, falling in behind a highway patrol cruiser. The cruiser cut a yellow light at Broadway, while Lucas eased into the turn lane. As they sat at the stoplight, waiting to make a left, a half-dozen teenagers in nylon jogging suits ran in a pack down a hill on the golf course across the highway.

  “That’s what you ought to do, get in shape,” Lucas said.

  “Life’s too short to spend it getting in shape,” Del said. “Besides, it’d ruin my credibility on the street.”

  MORRIS WARE’S OFFICE was in a long line of low, yellow-painted concrete-block warehouse spaces that mostly held distributors of one kind or another. The address was obscure: They finally spotted it as a signless window between a pressure-hose distributor and something called “Christmas Ink.”

  The warehouse was fronted by a service street with diagonal parking. Lucas pulled in fifty feet past Ware’s, and they both got out. As they did, a woman pulled in at Christmas Ink, walked around to the back of her minivan, and popped the hatch. She was struggling with a cardboard box when Lucas and Del walked up.

  “Let me get that for you,” Lucas said.

  She stepped back and took them in. “Thanks.”

  The woman was in her fifties, with elaborate gold-frosted hair and electric-red lipstick. She wore a hip-length nylon parka and rubber snow boots. She waited until Lucas had the box out, locked the van, and led the way to the door of Christmas Ink.

  Inside, a counter ran from wall to wall, and another woman and two men sat at metal desks in the back peering at computer screens. A bookcase was stuffed with catalogs and directories; one wall was covered with holiday cards, with header signs that said “Memorial Day,” “Mother’s Day,” “Father’s Day,” and “New Sympathy Cards from Leonbrook.” The woman in the parka lifted a countertop gate, went through, said, “You can just leave it on the counter. Thanks again.”

  Lucas put the book on the counter and said, “We’re Minneapolis police.”

  The woman said, “Yes?” and the three people in the back all looked up.

  “We’re looking for a guy named Morris Ware. We’d like to talk to him.”

  One of the men looked at the woman behind the computer screen and said, “Told you.”

  “ ‘Told you’ what?” Del asked.

  The man said, “We don’t want any trouble with our neighbors. . . .”

  Lucas shrugged. “There’s no need for Mr. Ware to know we stopped in here.”

  The woman in the parka unzipped the coat and said, “There’s some pretty peculiar goings-on over there.”

  Del asked, “Like what?”

  One of the men said, “I was out back, hauling some trash to the dumpster. This kid who works over there was hauling out some bags of trash. . . . When he went back in, I could see this light coming out of there and just caught a shot of this girl. She was naked.”

  “How old?” Lucas asked.

  The guy shrugged. “Not very. I mean, old enough to do that kind of stuff, maybe. I mean, she had breasts and everything.”

  “But there have been some people going in there that were too young,” said the woman, who was taking off the parka. She tossed it at an office chair and said, “We don’t know that anything was going on with them, but I’ve come here a couple of times in the morning and there were a couple of kids hanging around outside, waiting for those people to show up. They looked like orphan kids or something.”

  “You mean street kids?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. They always look old,” she said.

 
“Younger than eighteen?”

  “We don’t want to get involved in a huge hassle here,” said the second man, who’d kept quiet.

  “You never want to get in hassles, George,” the second woman said. “We should have called somebody.”

  “I’m just trying to keep our head above water,” he said.

  “We still should have called.”

  “Younger than eighteen?” Lucas asked again.

  “A couple of them looked like they were maybe fifteen, at the most,” said the woman who had worn the parka.

  Lucas said, “Please don’t mention this to anyone, okay? And thanks. Del, let’s go outside.”

  Outside, they turned away from Ware’s window and walked back toward Lucas’s car. “We can call Benton, he’d give us a warrant.”

  “Take an hour,” Del said.

  “So we go eat some black beans and rice. . . .”

  “He won’t talk, Ware won’t. If we find anything. He’ll get lawyers and they’ll shut him up.”

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, “Aronson isn’t coming back to life, and if Ware’s doing that child shit . . . We ought to put him in Stillwater regardless of Aronson. We can have the Sex guys find us somebody else who knows the city.”

  Del nodded. “All right. Let’s go for the warrant.” After a moment, he added, “I’ve been on the street for so long that sometimes I forget that there’s something more than deals. You know?”

  “Absolutely.”

  THEY SPENT AN hour at a health-food place in Roseville, eating black beans with cheese, and drinking water faintly flavored with lemon, waiting for the phone call. They got it from an assistant county attorney named Larsen.

  “I’d like to come along, but I’m stuck in court,” she said.

  “Next time,” said Lucas.

  On the way back to Ware’s, Lucas mentioned to Del that Larsen would have liked to come. “I wonder why,” Del said. “She gonna run for something? Get her picture taken?”

  “I think she just likes the rush,” Lucas said. “She’s been along on a couple of entries.”