He stopped kicking when Inga (Bloomie) Bryan, the ex-wife, shot Bryan in the groin in the living room of her not-quite-oceanfront house in Palm Beach, tearfully explaining to cops that he’d entered the place in the night, without telling her that he was coming, and she’d mistaken him for an intruder.
Well, not really mistaken him—he was an intruder.
“Two shots,” Jenkins told Lucas the next morning. “I’m told the surgeons were unable to make the necessary repairs, and went to amputation.”
Lucas winced, and Shrake added, “Our current theory is, Bryan and his ex were not cooperating.”
• • •
AN HOUR AFTER THAT, Rose Marie Roux called and said, “I hear Bryan is . . . mmm . . . available for questioning.”
“Yeah, as long as he isn’t talking with his dick,” Lucas said.
“I heard that,” she said.
“Yup. Shot with a very efficient double-tap, a .410 shot-shell followed by a .45 Colt, from a gun called the Governor, on the less expensive of two Persian carpets in his wife’s living room, according to the Palm Beach police,” Lucas said. “They know all about Persian carpets down there.”
“Probably the one that held the room together,” Roux said.
“Dude.”
“Okay. You’re done with that, you can let somebody else do the follow-up, getting Bryan back here, and all of that,” Roux said. “I want you on the Black Hole. Starting tomorrow. Or this afternoon. Shaffer’s moving too slowly and people are getting pissed.”
“Man, that case is dead in the water,” Lucas said.
“If that was a deliberate pun, you’re fired,” Roux said.
“Sorry,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t deliberate. But it’s Friday, I can think about it over the weekend—”
“No. I want you on the case right now. You know: before noon.”
“How bad is it?” Lucas asked. “All the bullshit? I haven’t been paying that much attention.”
“Bad,” she said. “We’ve got people from Fox and CNN renting apartments in Minneapolis. Old friends are getting nervous about talking to me. I think Henry . . . that asshole, that fishing trip was a disaster . . . I think Henry’s put out some résumés.”
“How about the governor?”
“We talk every day. The thing is, Minnesota’s supposed to be squeaky clean, and the closer we get to the next presidential primaries, the less he wants people talking about all those boxes full of skulls. He doesn’t want it to be a thing, if you know what I mean.”
The Minnesota governor wanted the vice presidential nomination, and was in fairly good shape to get it. He had a lot of money, which could be used in a primary campaign, pulling in the national recognition; and he was far enough left to balance out a more centrist Democrat.
“I know what you mean,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. When he leaves the job, I’m gone. When I leave, you’re gone. Probably. But if he makes it as vice president, we get taken care of, one way or another. Life could be very interesting, if we can pull that off.”
• • •
LUCAS PASSED OFF the Bryan follow-up.
Jenkins and Shrake talked with the Palm Beach cops, who said they’d found several hundred files in the trunk of a rental car that Bryan had been driving, along with a couple thousand dollars in cash, two ounces of cocaine, and three fake IDs, including a Honduran passport under the name of Rolando Smoke.
Jenkins suggested that both he and Shrake would be needed to question Bryan about the whereabouts of any remaining money, and to review all that paper.
Lucas got them authorization, and that afternoon, as he and Del began a methodical rereading of all the crime-scene and investigative reports on the Black Hole, they watched, from Lucas’s office window, as the two agents loaded their golf clubs into Shrake’s truck for the ride out to the airport.
“Gonna be a high-quality investigation down in Palm Beach, you betcha,” Del said.
• • •
LUCAS DIDN’T CARE; Bryan was disappearing in the rearview mirror. He turned back to the pile of paper in front of him.
“Twenty-one skulls now,” he said. “Twenty-one girls, before the well went dry.”
“You know, if we take this on, the media will find out, and we’re gonna have media shit raining down on us, too,” Del said.
“We don’t have a choice,” Lucas said. “But let’s try to sneak into it quietly.”
• • •
SHAFFER’S GROUP had identified seven of the victims, which left fourteen unknown. Of the seven, two had been identified through dental work, two through credit cards found in the Hole among a layer of rotting cotton and polyester, one through a driver’s license, and two through DNA samples matched to worried parents or siblings of missing women, who’d volunteered to supply cell samples.
The bodies that had been identified through dental work, credit cards, and the driver’s license had been confirmed through additional DNA comparisons.
All of the identified women came from Minnesota, except the most recent one, and from a roughly trapezoidal area ranging as far north as the southern suburbs of St. Paul, and as far south as Rochester, as far east as the Mississippi River, and as far west as I-35—an area roughly sixty miles long and forty wide. The one exception, Mary Lynn Carpenter, from Wisconsin, had apparently been taken from the banks of the Mississippi across from the Minnesota town of Red Wing. All victims’ homes had been spotted on a map included with Shaffer’s paper.
The earliest known victim had disappeared ten years earlier, but with fourteen yet to be identified, and with the other seven spaced a minimum of a year apart, Shaffer’s team thought it likely that they hadn’t yet found the earliest victim.
• • •
“ALL SEVEN OF THE WOMEN disappeared in mid-summer, ranging from June twenty-second to August eighteenth,” Shaffer had told Lucas, two weeks into the investigation. They were in Lucas’s office: Shaffer had come by to chat, to see if Lucas had been thinking outside the box. He had not been. Shaffer was looking beat-up, though in a tidy way. His clothes were ironed and his shoes were polished, but the dark loops under his eyes were the size of bicycle tires.
“None of them disappeared in the same year,” he said. “Our statistician says that’s probably not a coincidence although it could be—we have a weak theory that he kills every summer, and only once. If that’s true, and he’s killed this year, then the first murder was twenty years ago. That’s not a sure thing—he might have killed more frequently in the early years. If the theory’s right, he’s probably in his late thirties or early forties, and lives somewhere in that trapezoid between Minneapolis and Rochester. I suspect it’s close to the center of it. If he’s smart enough to get away with all these killings, then he’s smart enough not to make long-distance trips with a body in his car.”
“What about the detasseling thing? Or the treasure hunting?”
Shaffer shook his head. “Nothing. We located and talked to a half dozen treasure hunters, pretty much ruled them out. They call themselves ‘detectorists.’ The detasseling information is so fragmented that we can’t say much one way or another, but the ones we’ve been able to check, haven’t panned out. But that’s well under half of the potential detasseling suspects.”
“What about technique? Does the killer scout the girls?” Lucas asked.
“Can’t tell yet. Three of them, at least, seem to be opportunity-based. Women out partying, maybe drunk, alone, at night. He might have scouted them, but he didn’t have to—they were ripe for the picking. When their disappearances were investigated, nobody remembered seeing anyone with the women.”
“Observant and careful,” Lucas said.
“And bold,” Shaffer added. “Maybe with a backup excuse, if somebody should question him.”
“Like what?”
“We’ve been picking around the idea that it could be a cop,” Shaffer said. “We haven’t found anything that would make us think we’re right.”
/> “Hope not,” Lucas said.
“We all do,” Shaffer said. “But we’re having trouble picking up patterns, which makes it seem more likely that he was killing spontaneously—no pattern except opportunity, which is the next thing to random.”
“All blondes,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, and not dishwater—mostly all pale blond. That’s a pattern, but it doesn’t mean much in Minnesota, in terms of prediction.”
“Anything on the ropes?” Lucas asked. They’d found more than a dozen ropes in the cistern, dumped with the bodies.
“Not much. A variety of brands, a variety of materials. Could be . . . this is weak . . . from marinas. Half of them are nylon, which you don’t see that much of, outside marinas. The rest are polypro, which is everywhere.”
“Plenty of marinas around Red Wing,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, and we’ve been in all of them,” Shaffer said.
They talked about some miscellaneous possibilities, all thin, and then Lucas asked, “How much trouble are you having with the TV people?”
Shaffer grimaced. “Ah, you know: they’re waiting outside every morning. I’ve actually had them follow me around town.”
“Be cool,” Lucas said.
“Oh, yeah—but you know, if you could just count on the newsies being as competent as we are, things would be a lot easier.”
• • •
THAT HAD BEEN the last extended conversation they had about the case, although the rumor mill said Shaffer was choking. Lucas doubted that: it had seemed from the beginning that, barring a fantastic piece of good luck, the investigation would be a long one. Shaffer was patient.
The news media, on the other hand, wasn’t. They were looking for a hero, not an accountant.
• • •
AFTER THE DEPARTURE of the golfing twosome, Lucas and Del continued plowing through the Black Hole paper, looking for something they could get their fingernails beneath, something that might suggest a trail.
“Gotta be something in common with the girls,” Del said. “They’re all under twenty-five. Most of them were known to party. . . .”
“They weren’t known to go to the same clubs, or even the same parts of town . . . any town,” Lucas said. “They weren’t known to hang out with the kinds of guys who’d intersect. None of them went to the same school. Ever. They don’t have any relatives in common. Their jobs weren’t similar, so it wasn’t like a UPS man was picking them out. One of them had a night job, and was probably picked up in the early morning . . . so it’s not a cable guy, snatching them out of their apartments.”
• • •
THEY WERE STILL AT IT when Hopping Crow stuck his head in the door. He was vibrating. “We have a developing anomaly in the DNA tests.”
“Is an anomaly the same thing as a break?” Del asked.
“Could be.”
“Since you’re standing in my door, it must be interesting,” Lucas said, leaning back in his chair.
“Not so much interesting, as batshit crazy,” Hopping Crow said. “Getting clean DNA has been a problem. With those water-soaked bones and all the meat that came off them, it was like a DNA stew down that cistern. We’re mostly getting the clean stuff out of teeth, and even then, we haven’t had much to match it to. Three hours ago, we got a cold hit from the criminal database.”
“Really,” Del said.
“Yeah, really—the skull came from a woman named Doris Mead, the mother of Roger Douglas Mead, who was convicted of first-degree sexual assault four years back.”
Lucas’s chair came upright with a bang: “I’d call that some kind of break.”
“Eh, it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, he obviously couldn’t have killed Carpenter or Fisher, because he was locked up when they disappeared. And he has no history of violence. He was a high school social studies teacher, and the girl was sixteen, and cooperative. Anyway, he’s in Stillwater, and Buford talked to him. He says his mom is definitely dead. She died thirteen years ago, of a stroke. She was buried in a cemetery at Demont, which is over by Owatonna. When she went in the ground, her head was still attached.”
Lucas and Del both stared at him for a second, then Del said, “Her skull was . . . grave-robbed?”
“Looks like it,” Hopping Crow said. “The good thing about it is, apparently not all the skulls belong to people who were murdered. The bad thing is, we don’t know yet which is which. That’s going to take some more lab work.”
“Who’s going down to the cemetery?” Lucas asked.
“Shaffer. Got in his car and took off like a big-assed bird. Shaffer told me to tell you about it, in case you wanted to go down yourself—everybody’s heard you’re done with Bryan.”
“How’s he doing?” Del asked Hopping Crow. “Shaffer?”
Hopping Crow said, “He seems to be calm. Unnaturally calm. Especially for a guy who has about fifteen people screaming at him, from the governor on down.”
Del said to Lucas, “Probably why we got the invite. All those screaming people.”
Lucas said to Del, “I’m going. You want to come along? What’s happening with the old folks and the rifles?”
“They’re buying. Betty Case bought two mint Bushmasters from a guy up in Anoka yesterday. They’re pretty close to a full load. Her old man took the RV in for servicing yesterday, probably won’t get it back before tomorrow. So, today . . . I could go.”
“Then let’s.”
• • •
SHAFFER WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES ahead of them. Lucas called him and Shaffer said, “It’s the Valley View cemetery, just west of I-35 at Demont. You don’t go into town, you take a left on the first street you come to, after the exit. That’s Twelfth Street. The cemetery borders the street, about a half-mile down.”
“Are you pulling the coffin?”
“That’s the plan,” Shaffer said. “Buford got authorization from her son—Doris Mead’s husband took off for the Florida Keys after she died, and Roger doesn’t know how to get in touch with him. So, we’re good on that. I talked to the guy at the funeral home down there, they should be digging now.”
“We’re right behind you,” Lucas said.
• • •
THE DRIVE TO THE DEMONT EXIT took forty-five minutes, and another five down to the cemetery, which was between the town and the freeway, on a flat square of ground with cornfields on three sides, and the approach road on the fourth.
Shaffer’s blue Chevy Equinox sat with a couple of sedans on the left side of the square, where an orange Kubota tractor/backhoe sat motionless next to a pile of yellow dirt. Lucas pulled up and he and Del got out, and found Shaffer and two middle-aged men in sober blue suits watching a third man, in coveralls, who was down in the grave, using a spade to scrape dirt off a coffin.
When Lucas came up, Shaffer turned and said, “We’re not going to pull it yet—we’re just going to open it and see what’s inside.” He gestured at the two men in suits: “This is Joe and Leon Murphy, they run Murphy’s Funeral Home in Owatonna. They arranged Mrs. Mead’s funeral.”
“Any idea of what happened?” Lucas asked.
Shaffer said, “Two theories: one, the killer is weird . . .”
“Good call,” Del said.
“. . . and two, he was literally grave-robbing. Roger Mead told Buford that at the funeral, his father put their wedding rings and Mrs. Mead’s engagement ring into her hand, to be buried with her. They were gold. He thinks the engagement ring might have been worth a couple of thousand dollars, and whatever gold is worth in the wedding rings.”
“Not more than a couple of hundred,” Del said.
Shaffer said, “Yes, but: treasure hunters. We’ve been looking at treasure hunters, and the guy who dug this up, in the middle of the night, looking for diamonds and gold . . . what’s that, if it’s not a treasure hunter?”
• • •
THE FUNERAL HOME OPERATORS were brothers, and looked alike, with nearly identical comb-overs, except that one was thin
and the other was fat. The fat one, Leon, said, “You don’t often see that—putting valuables in the coffin. A lot of times, with a cremation, for example, the relatives will ask for the gold that comes out of the loved-one’s teeth. Most people are pretty practical: they don’t bury money.”
“If the grave was robbed, the robbers must’ve known about the jewelry,” Lucas said.
“Had to,” Joe Murphy said. “It might be possible to rob one grave out here with nobody noticing, but you couldn’t go around digging up a whole bunch of them. They had a specific grave in mind.” They all looked around the flat, windswept cemetery. There were only two other graves showing raw dirt; extensive digging would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
The guy in the hole, who hadn’t been introduced, said, “Hand me the key,” and Joe Murphy passed him a slender crank, a long metal handle with a right-angle stem. Murphy said, “Four latches . . .”
“Got ’em,” the guy said. In digging up the grave, he’d cut out a small platform to one side, where he could stand while he opened the coffin lid. He undid the latches with the coffin key, and Lucas looked away when he pulled open the lid: the whole procedure, messing with buried bodies, disturbed him.
He looked back when Shaffer said, “Well, there you go.”
The body remained in the coffin, still preserved, though shrunken. The head was missing, and the hands, which had apparently been crossed over the woman’s midriff, had been turned over. Her hands were empty.
“Took the jewelry and the head,” said Shaffer. “Both a robber and weird.”
“Possible that she had gold fillings,” Leon said.
Lucas looked at the brothers and asked, “Do you know about any other grave robberies around here?”
Joe said, “Years ago . . . not long after Mrs. Mead was buried, so it could be the same bunch. There were some sepulchers over in Holy Angels that were broken into, some body parts were taken.”
“One or two over in Holbein about the same time,” Leon said.
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