THEY PUSHED HER A bit more, but she couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be familiar with the place. She’d had a boyfriend for fifteen years, she said, but he lived in Holbein and rarely came out to the farm. “He’s a city boy, like you. When we do an overnight, I’ve got to go to him. He doesn’t like the quiet out here. I’ll tell you, though, he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“I’d like to get his name,” Lucas said. “For the record, you know?”
• • •
OUT IN THE CAR, Del said, “He’s a city boy like you. Likes to hear them cars.”
“Hey. She’s right.”
“Holbein, if I’m not mistaken, is about the size of my dick,” Del said. “There’s probably only one car.”
“Let’s go look,” Lucas said. “It’s not exactly on the way home, but it sort of is, and we’re not wasting our time backtracking.”
• • •
HOLBEIN WAS LARGER than Del’s dick, unless Del had been hiding his light. It was an older place, once a milling town on the East Fork of the Zumbro River, population now 5,706, according to a sign just outside of town. Driving through to the business district, the place seemed . . . usual.
Radically usual.
White- and blue-pastel clapboard houses on small lawns, most of the houses built sometime not long after the turn of the twentieth century. As they drove through the older neighborhoods around the business district, they saw only a handful of houses, obviously infills, that might have been built after World War II.
The East Fork of the Zumbro twisted along one edge of town, piling up in a small lake, behind what had probably been a miller’s dam a century and a half earlier. The dam was not original, and was now a heavy, inelegant chunk of mossy concrete. The lake was surrounded by the city park, with an unoccupied kids’ play area and a band shell, and a thumb-like protrusion of dirt and grass that stuck out into the lake, with a sign that said, “Ol’ Fishin’ Hole.”
“I could live here,” Del said.
“No, you couldn’t. You’d turn into a coot and hang out at the general store, with your fly down,” Lucas said. “You’d be known for goosing middle-aged women. You’d be the town embarrassment.”
Del nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
They did a loop through the business district, which covered maybe a dozen square blocks. As Lucas had noticed before in small-town Minnesota, there seemed to be one of everything. Not many choices, but one of everything: one car dealer, one farm implement dealer, one hardware store, one lumberyard, an off-brand cell phone store, a computer repair shop, a fern restaurant, one diner, a VFW for the Lutherans, a Knights of Columbus for the Catholics, and for those who preferred getting hammered in secular surroundings, a bar. Sometimes more than one bar, even in towns no bigger than Del’s dick.
“Remember when Flowers did that survey in a small town, to see who they all thought might be the bomber?” Del said, as they cruised. “Maybe we could do something like that.”
“It’s a thought. Virgil will be back in three weeks, and if Shaffer doesn’t have anything by then, we could ask him to set it up. The problem is, the killer probably isn’t from here.” Lucas looked out the window at the small, innocent houses. “He’s probably from Red Wing. Red Wing has a lot bigger population, is closer to the cistern. A lot more of the detasseler kids would come from there, than from here.”
“We gotta call the people at this Marks’s Seed Corn, see who’s who,” Del said.
Lucas shook his head: “No. That’s not us. That’s Shaffer, and I’d bet he’s already all over it. He’s got the clerks to handle it.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Think about it, mostly. See what Shaffer gets, read the reports. What we really need to know is who the victims are. Where they came from, what’s the earliest killing. The earliest killing is going to be close to the killer’s home ground. It’ll also give us some idea of how old he is now. He probably started as a young man, late teens, early twenties. If there are twenty dead, and he’s doing four a year, then he’s probably in his mid- to late-twenties. If he’s doing one a year, he’d probably be in his forties, or close to it.”
“He’s not dumb, he’s been getting away with this for a long time, with nobody suspecting,” Del said. “I think that means he probably wasn’t a teenager when he started. He’s not reckless, he’s thought about it. And if he was doing four a year, and they’re all local, we would have noticed.”
“So move the ages a little, make him a little older . . . We’ll know, when we start putting names on the victims.”
“A lot of names, man.”
“Yeah.” They’d made a circle through some of the back neighborhoods, with newer houses, then turned back onto Main Street and rolled down the hill toward the business district. “You seen enough?”
“Mostly. And one of the things I’ve seen is that supermarket. I bet they got donuts. All these small-town markets got bakeries.”
“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. He went on for a block, down a gentle hill, and turned into the supermarket parking lot. “Two cherry-filled, if they’ve got them. Or raspberry.”
“Right.”
“Don’t let them know you’re a cop,” Lucas said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Del disappeared into the store, came back out with a white paper bag, and they sat in the parking lot for five minutes, eating the donuts, looking up the hill at the hardware store, and the lumberyard, and Sally’s Paws and Claws, “For All Your Kitty and Doggy Needs.”
Del said thoughtfully, “I’d like a little pussy.”
Lucas chewed and swallowed and said, “Yeah? Have you talked to Cheryl about it?”
3
Lucas and Del were back in St. Paul by mid-afternoon. Other than reading some of the incoming reports from the crime-scene team and Shaffer’s group, and talking to Shaffer’s crew, they did nothing more about the Black Hole for three weeks.
Three weeks of an odd, edgy summer.
The cops all wanted to get the killer, of course, but it seemed at first that they’d never get any work done. Everybody wanted updates. The FBI sent around a profiler, and the profile was leaked, and the populations of all the small towns south of the Twin Cities began speculating about how well their neighbors fit the profile. That led to a couple of bar fights, screaming front-lawn confrontations, and unnecessary investigations prodded by round-the-clock media coverage.
Media reporting led to further problems. Both Fox and CNBC put investigation teams on the story, and both came up with lists of sexual offenders who fit “serial killer profiles” invented by the news teams with the help of experts from the West and East Coasts.
Disclosure of the lists led to disclosure of specific names, and the kind of conspiratorial “he could have done it” stories that had the cops jumping through their butts just knocking down the stories.
Three weeks in, Shaffer’s crew had turned up almost nothing that they hadn’t known about after the second day. The media, running out of easy stories, began sniffing around for those responsible for what was obviously an incompetent investigation. Rose Marie Roux took the brunt of the attacks. Henry Sands, without saying much about it, took off for a week-long Alaskan fishing trip right in the middle of it. Smart, some people said. Chicken-shit, said others.
All the attention, and the lack of progress, began to have an impact on morale: agents working off the clock, arguing, scratching their fingernails on blackboards of futility.
• • •
LUCAS’S GROUP wasn’t working the Hole, and so were out of the line of fire. Instead, they focused on finding Bryan, the Ponzi guy.
They’d had a minor breakthrough earlier in the investigation when Lucas read through a long list of Bryan’s American Express card purchases from the year before, and on that list he found . . . suits from Gieves & Hawkes, a dozen neckties from Ermenegildo Zegna, a dozen more from Hermès, and boots from John Lobb.
He’d been through Br
yan’s house, including his walk-in closet, after Bryan disappeared. Lucas knew his clothes—and he hadn’t seen anything that’d really rung his bell, as those labels would.
To make sure, he and Shrake went back, and Lucas sifted through the clothes hangers, jacket by jacket. Nice threads—Ralph Lauren Purple Label, etc., but nothing from Gieves & Hawkes, no boots from John Lobb.
Lucas had interviewed Carrie Lee Pitt, Bryan’s last-known lover, the night he got back from the Black Hole.
Carrie Lee was an unnatural blonde with a Missouri accent. She was almost, but apparently not quite, hot enough to be a rich guy’s trophy wife. She was taking on-camera lessons in hopes of becoming a sideline interviewer for NFL broadcasts, trying to pick up the all-important hooker vibe.
“Y’all come right in,” she’d said at the door of her condo in downtown Minneapolis. Her red lipstick was slightly smeared, as by a cocktail glass, and she smelled of Chanel 5. “I want to cooperate in every way possible.”
She left the pink tip of her tongue parked outside of her upper lip, which made Lucas think of oral sex, as it was supposed to.
“What I really need to do is look at Mr. Bryan’s clothes,” Lucas said.
“You’re welcome to it. I don’t think he’ll be needing them.”
“We’ll see,” Lucas said.
They went back to the shuttered double closet, and he went through the labels. Carrie Lee helped him look, one breast pressing comfortably against the back of his arm. The missing clothing was still missing; Lucas went home and jumped the old lady.
• • •
“THAT SONOFABITCH IS ALIVE,” Lucas said the next day. “He’s not hiding out in a jungle. More like Paris.”
Shrake and Jenkins developed a theory: Bryan had among his conquests, somewhere, a nurse. The nurse had taken a pint of blood out of Bryan’s body, just like she would a blood donor, and he’d smeared it around the inside of his car and then snuck away.
When pressed, Jenkins admitted that they had not one scintilla of evidence that would directly suggest that. They couldn’t find a nurse, and Bryan, healthy as a horse, who went to a clinic on the rare occasions when he needed a tetanus or flu shot, had never established a regular doctor.
They continued to push, interviewing Bryan’s bankers, friends, business associates, and his ex-wife. They looked at his known phones, credit cards, the places he’d taken vacations. They had a watch on with Homeland Security and customs.
Bryan had a son going to Yale, and when they checked on him, found that his tuition had been paid in advance—way in advance—and during the school year, he lived in a small house in New Haven, Connecticut, that his father had bought for him. That seemed to suggest that Bryan didn’t think he’d be around to pay the bills on a monthly basis. Asked about it, the kid shrugged: “I guess Father knew he was in trouble, and made arrangements in advance, expecting to go to prison. I don’t think he expected to be killed.”
He didn’t seem to be all that broken up by his old man’s possible demise, Shrake said.
Del suggested that the names of all the money-losing investors be typed into a computer program and run against an FBI database of known associates. That had taken a secretary the best part of a week, and she’d moaned and complained the whole week. When they pushed the button on the computer program, nothing happened.
Like . . . nothing.
• • •
LUCAS HAD TWO OTHER, non-related cases hanging out there.
Del was watching two elderly couples named Case and Waters, from Sartell, Minnesota, who traveled together in an oversized RV, towing a Jeep Wrangler. According to sources on Lucas’s Asshole Database (ADB), they financed their travels—indeed, their entire retirement lifestyle—by buying high-end black rifles on the northern plains, between the Rockies and the Great Lakes, where the cops were few and far between and the weapons were abundant. Once they had a hundred rifles or so, they’d transport them in the RV to the Texas border, where they sold them to a selection of underground dealers, both American and Mexican.
Lucas’s sources said they’d unload batches of twenty or thirty rifles at a time, making anywhere from $400 to $800 each, depending on brand and condition, in profit. If you wanted to pay cash, that was great. If you wanted to pay in cocaine, that was even greater, since the two couples had a tight connection to the Washington Avenue Set of the Black River Lords of Chicago. On cocaine deals, the profit went to $1,500 per rifle. They’d make five or six trips a year.
“That’s getting up to a half-million dollars a year, not counting their Social Security checks,” Del said. Del was coordinating with both the ATF and the DEA on tracking the senior citizens. “Don’t tell anybody I said this, but I think they might be doing some wife-swapping, too. The right spouses don’t always go home together. And sometimes they have sleepovers, where nobody goes home. . . .”
“Yeah, Jesus, I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said.
• • •
IN ADDITION TO the gun peddlers, Lucas was dealing with a . . . peculiarity. A week after the Black Hole discovery, Lucas got an arrest warrant for Emmanuel (Manny) Kent, the brother of a serial bank robber named Doyle Kent.
Doyle Kent had been tentatively identified by Jenkins, after consultation with the ADB, and loosely tracked by the BCA and a variety of metro-area police departments for four months.
When he’d begun to focus on a bank in suburban Woodbury, the tracking got tighter. On a misty day in July, he’d gone into a Wells Fargo branch, wearing a fedora, one leg of a pair of sheer nylon panty hose over his face, carrying a bag for the money and a Colt .45. He’d been killed by the Woodbury cops when he came out of the bank shooting.
In the subsequent round of self-congratulation, Jenkins and Lucas had been credited with the identification of Doyle Kent, while the Woodbury cops got credit for taking him down.
The week after the shoot-out, the Minneapolis cops began picking up talk that Emmanuel Kent was telling his street friends that he was going to kill Lucas and Jenkins as soon as he could get a gun. If he couldn’t get a gun, he was going to stab them to death, with a knife that he already had.
Lucas and Jenkins did some research on him and found that Emmanuel Kent was a thirty-two-year-old schizophrenic with four convictions for assault, and twenty-two arrests over sixteen years for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Nobody had been badly injured in the assaults, which actually appeared to be street fights, rather than straightforward attacks. Several doctors had also testified on Kent’s behalf in the drug cases, telling the courts that his use of marijuana was an attempt at self-medication, because the use of antipsychotics made his thinking so fuzzy that he couldn’t care for himself.
As one doc put it, “He’d rather be crazy than helpless, and the weed makes him less crazy.”
In any case, Lucas and Jenkins found enough people to testify about Emmanuel Kent’s threats that they were able to get a warrant and have him picked up for another psychiatric evaluation, to determine how serious the threats might be.
The Minneapolis cops were familiar with Kent and his habits, and where he usually slept, and so picked him up immediately. He was held at the Hennepin County Jail, and evaluated by a contract psychiatrist named Betty Calvin, who returned a report that said Kent was basically a gentle individual who spent his days collecting recyclable cans, and donations of dog and cat food, which he distributed to stray dogs and cats during the evenings.
When pressed, Kent told Calvin that he really didn’t intend to stab anybody.
But, she said, he was also prone to acting out, and in a specific set of circumstances, might be a threat. She did not think he was capable of planning an attack, but if he should encounter Lucas or Jenkins at random, might be capable of some level of violence.
His animus toward Lucas and Jenkins was based on a news story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that noted that Lucas had been involved in another fatal bank-robbery shoot-out, which had been
controversial at the time, at least among progressive legal theorists.
Two female bank robbers had been gunned down after robbing a bank and shooting one of the customers. Lucas and his team had trailed them for quite a while, being morally certain that the women had been involved in other robberies and shootings, but without evidence to arrest them.
Lucas had then allowed the women to go into the bank, and their killings outside the bank had been only thinly disguised summary executions, even though the two women had opened fire first. The surveillance without supporting evidence had been a violation of the women’s civil rights . . . according to the theorists.
Not much was said about the customers and bank employees who’d been shot during the two-state robbery spree.
Emmanuel Kent, who might be crazy, but who was not illiterate, read the article and picked up on the concepts of “summary execution” and “civil rights.”
Lucas, he said, had done it again, this time, to his brother.
Doyle had been Manny’s only source of financial support during his life on the street. He used the money to feed himself and the cats and dogs, and to buy the weed he used to self-medicate.
Lucas and Jenkins, he said, had gotten his hero brother killed in cold blood.
• • •
“NOT TOO WORRIED,” Jenkins had said, after reading the shrink’s report.
“Not about being stabbed,” Lucas said. “But Jesus, we sort of fucked him, didn’t we? What’s he gonna eat?”
“There are five hundred people out there tonight who are worried about that, Lucas, and none of them are threatening to stab us to death,” Jenkins said. “If we want to worry about somebody, let’s worry about them first.”
But, Lucas thought, he didn’t personally fuck the other five hundred. While he didn’t worry obsessively about Kent, the guy remained like a small dark cloud that occasionally passed over Lucas’s consciousness, bringing rain.
• • •
ON THE NIGHT of August 1, with Lucas still occasionally brooding about Emmanuel Kent, they finally got a definitive indication that Bryan, the Ponzi guy, was still alive, even if not kicking.
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