“Okay. What’re you gonna do next?” Ignace was taking it all down in Gregg, word for word, trying to get it precisely right, every ain’t and nothin’ with a dropped g.
“I’m gonna hunt somebody down. Gonna take her out someplace, I’m gonna give her a head start, and then I’m gonna hunt her down. A woman this time. Take her out to the Boundary Waters, strip her out of her clothes, then turn her loose and watch her run. Give her a hope. A forlorn hope.”
Ignace could feel the skin tighten at the back of his neck: there was no longer a question in his mind-he was talking to Charlie Pope.
“But what’s all this bulls. . What’s all this stuff about hunting people? I mean, I’m sorry, but. .”
“That’s nuts.” The whispery laugh again: “Of course it is. I am nuts. You seem to have a hard time getting over that. Write it down: N-U-T-S. The state says I’m nuts, and I’m nuts. What’d they think I was gonna do, lift garbage cans all the rest of my life? Fuck ’em.” He laughed then, his ragged voice sounding as though a piece of paper were being torn through.
Ignace was writing frantically. “How did this get started? You never. . I mean, your reputation wasn’t for this kind of thing.”
“There were some Gods Down the Hall from me, at St. John’s. They made me see how much like God you can get to be, if you got the balls to go out and do it. I talked to them and they talked to me, and I can still hear their voices. They were right: it’s just like being God.”
“How are you staying ahead of the police?” A woman from the desk walked up, a piece of paper in her hand, and Ignace waved her away. She said, “We need. .”
Ignace said into the phone, “Hang on just a second,” turned to the woman and barked, “Go away. Go away.”
She persisted. “We need. .”
“Go the fuck away,” he shouted and, as she stepped backward, he went to the phone again. “I’m back.”
“Little trouble there, Ruffe?”
“I’m the night guy; they want me to do some horseshit. Listen, how’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t. I just kept calling your line every couple hours, until you answered.”
“I can’t hear you very well. .”
Louder: “I said, I kept calling your line every couple of hours. . that damn Rice tried to kick me, caught me one in the throat, I think he fucked me up. I can’t hardly eat nothin’.”
“You’re hurt?”
“Yeah, I’m hurt. Nobody said this was gonna be easy,” the whisperer said. “You can’t believe the shit I go through. I gotta plan, I gotta find the right person. I’m already watching two or three of these chicks, now I gotta decide which one to take. There are a lot of angles to figure out. You know, how much will they fight, will there be anybody around who might jump in to help them, maybe they got a gun, there’s all kinds of shit to figure out. Makes my head hurt. Hard work. But I’m gonna do it soon. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day.”
“What do you. .”
“I gotta go. I can see a cop car on the next street. I don’t want him looking at me. Maybe I’ll call again, after I do the next one.”
“Wait, wait. If you’d like to talk to a doctor, or a lawyer. .”
The whispery laughter, then, “Too late for that. But I do got one more thing for you, a message for the cops. I ain’t gonna quit. I’m gonna do twenty or thirty of them if I can. If they catch me, they better be ready for a fight, because I got me some guns and I know how to use them. They fucked with me all my life. Now I’m gonna fuck with everybody. I’m not going back to St. John’s. I’m not coming in alive.”
Click.
Ignace pushed back from his desk, staring at the phone and his steno pad. A guy from the desk was coming his way, trying to assemble some authority, trailed by the woman Ignace had chased off: “Holy shit,” Ignace said. “Holy shit!”
Sloan and his wife were in bed. Sloan had come down with a bug, and his sinuses felt like overinflated basketballs; his wife was asleep, but Sloan was rolling around restlessly, fighting to breathe, when the phone rang. His wife said, “What?” and groaned. The phone never rang at that time of night unless it was trouble: Sloan rolled over and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Sloan, this is Ruffe Ignace. Charlie Pope just called me.”
“What?” Cobwebs.
“Charlie Pope just called me. I need you to call Davenport and have him call me back-I assume you don’t have jurisdiction in the Mankato kill.”
Sloan recognized Ignace’s voice. “Is this a joke?”
“This is no fuckin’ joke.” Ignace was shouting into the phone. “I need to talk to Davenport right now or we’re just gonna put this story in the paper raw and you can read it tomorrow morning when you get up.”
Sloan woke up Lucas. “Give him my number,” Lucas said. Then he lay facedown on Weather’s side of the bed, in the faint lingering odor of her perfume, until the phone rang again: “This is Davenport.”
“Did the killer cut off Adam Rice’s penis?” Ignace asked without preamble.
“What?”
“The guy who called me-I assume Sloan told you I was called by a guy who said he was Charlie Pope-the guy said he cut off Adam Rice’s penis,” Ignace said.
“Ah, man, are you going to use that?”
“That’s negotiable-but did he? ’Cause if he did and if this was really Pope, I have some other information.”
“What information?”
“Did he cut off Adam Rice’s penis?”
Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “If you use that specific information, I will find some way to fuck you up. That’s not fair to any of the survivors.”
“So I was talking to Charlie Pope.”
“I don’t know, but that information is accurate,” Lucas said.
“All right. He said he killed the kid with an aluminum baseball bat, wiped it with Adam Rice’s undershirt, and then threw the bat into a field next to the house. Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. Of course, it’s possible,” Lucas said. “We’ll look tomorrow morning. . Listen, I need to know exactly what this guy told you.”
“Then you can either come over here and I can give you a transcript, or I can read it to you. . Hang on, hang on.”
Lucas could hear the phone being fumbled, then a woman’s voice said, “Lucas, this is Sharon White.”
“Hey, Sharon.”
“You better come over here. We don’t want to use anything that would mess anybody up or interfere with the investigation, but we’re going to run something, and I would like to discuss it with you. And Ruffe. If you can get here in like, fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“I’ll meet somebody at your door in fifteen,” Lucas said.
When Lucas turned the corner in downtown Minneapolis, Sloan was already standing in the street outside the Star-Trib building. Thin, gray, unshaven, with hair sticking sideways out over his ears, he looked like a bum; and his nose seemed to be swollen. Lucas dumped the Porsche behind Sloan’s Chevy, put a cop-on-duty sign on the dashboard-they were both parked in a no-parking zone-and got out.
“Gotta be the guy,” Sloan said. He held a handkerchief to his face and coughed into it. “Man. I’m sick.”
“What happened?” Lucas leaned away from him.
“I don’t know. I was fine at dinner, and now I’m all fucked up. I took four green Nyquils, and my nose keeps getting bigger.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, don’t sneeze on me.”
A young man was standing behind the Strib’s front doors. When Lucas and Sloan walked up, he lifted an eyebrow, and Sloan held up a badge case. The young man pushed the door open and said, “They’re waiting.”
They followed him into an elevator, then down through the cluttered newsroom to a cluster of people standing and sitting around a desk where Ruffe Ignace sat behind a computer, typing.
Lucas recognized Sharon White, the executive editor, and Phil Stone, the paper’s attorney. White nodded and said, “It’s a problem
,” and Stone said, “You guys look like I feel.”
“I was sleeping like a baby,” Lucas said. “What’re we doing?”
“Ruffe is putting together the maximum story that we have,” White said. “You have no approval over it at all. We decide what goes in and what stays out. We’re telling you what we have in advance so we don’t . . mmm. . step on some aspect of the investigation.”
Lucas looked at Stone, who smiled the way an attorney smiles: with his lips.
“Good of you,” Lucas said. “Could we get Ruffe to give us a couple of printouts of what he has?”
Ignace looked at White, who nodded, and he hit a button on his keyboard. A printer started humming in the quiet background, and Ignace said, “Fifteen seconds.” The young man who’d brought them up said, “I’ll get them.” He headed for the printer.
Lucas asked Ignace, “What time did the call come in?”
Ignace, pitching up his voice: “I think there’s a real question of how much cooperation we owe you guys. .”
Lucas put his hands in his pants pockets, sighed, and said, “Ruffe, I’ve sat around with newspaper guys for years having philosophical discussions about this kind of thing, and I’d be happy to talk to you, but we, all of us. .” Lucas gestured to White and Stone “. . have sort of worked out an understanding. You don’t help me investigate, so you stay pure, but you don’t fight me on what might help catch a criminal, if I’m going to get the information anyway. If I have to, I can take you in for questioning, we can get lawyers and judges working on it, we can get the paper all kinds of bad publicity and maybe sued by some future victim, and I’ll get the information anyway and all you’ll have done is delay things in favor of the asshole who’s killing these people. Is that what you want to talk about?”
“He’s not talking about that,” Stone said genially.
“Yes, I was,” Ignace said.
“No, you’re not,” Stone said. The young man came back with copies of the story printout, and Lucas and Sloan took them. Lucas scanned it, then said, “What time did the call come in?”
“A few minutes before eleven o’clock,” White said. “We don’t know the exact minute.”
Lucas to Ignace: “Was it direct-dial or did it come in through the switchboard?”
“Probably switchboard,” Ignace said, with a show of reluctance. “We’re not listed individually.”
Sloan said to Lucas, “I’ll get it.” He stepped away and took a cell phone out of his jacket pocket.
Stone frowned and asked, “What’s wrong with Sloan?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t shake hands,” Lucas said. To Ignace: “He said he might call back?”
“That’s what he said.” Ignace had gotten past his pro-forma objections and was enjoying himself now. He said to White, “I think we should get something for all this cooperation. Some kind of access.”
White lifted an eyebrow, and Lucas said, “We’ll take care of you, one way or another. You know.”
She nodded, and Lucas asked Ignace, “How did he sound? He’s supposed to be sort of a shit kicker. .”
“His voice was weird. He says Rice kicked him in the throat, he didn’t say when or how. . so he whispered. It all sounded like. . something you’d see in a movie. Hoarse whisper.”
“How about his language?”
“I took it down verbatim,” Ignace said. He took his notebook off his desk, and Lucas saw that it was covered with shorthand. Despite himself, he was impressed-the kid had some tools. “You want me to read it, word for word?”
“We don’t have much time here,” White said, looking at her watch. “You got a problem with the story?”
“If you want to print the penis thing, that’s up to you,” Lucas said. “I think it’s in bad taste. The usual formula is ‘mutilated,’ but I don’t see why you’d want to put this in so Rice’s mother can read it, after she has lost both her son and her grandson.”
White said to Ignace, “Change it.”
“Man. .”
“We’ve got no time,” White said. “Change it.”
Ignace’s hand rattled across the keyboard, then he asked Lucas, “Do you have an official comment?”
“You can say, ‘Davenport said authorities will immediately begin investigating the Star-Tribune report and indicated that there are aspects of inside information in the phone call that make it possible or even likely that the caller was Charles Pope.’ That work for you?”
“That works for me,” Ignace said, taking it all down.
“You can add this,” Lucas said. He dictated: “Davenport added that any woman who feels that she is under surveillance, or might have been, or who has seen anyone who resembles Charlie Pope, should call her local police department and report it. Even a weak feeling-it’s better to be wrong than to be dead.”
Ignace’s keyboard rattled along, keeping pace with the statement. “Good,” he muttered. “That’s great.”
Sloan called, “Lucas,” and Lucas stepped over to him. “Rochester pay phone.”
“Call the Rochester cops. Get them out on the street, make stops on any single males, on foot or in cars. Give them a description. Tell them to be careful, he’s probably got a gun. Tell them right now. Right now.”
“I better put that in,” Ignace said.
Sloan walked off, working the cell phone, and Lucas asked Ignace to read his shorthand notes, and Ignace did. Lucas stopped him once or twice: “You say he said, ‘He come down the stairs. .’ He didn’t say, ’He came down the stairs. .’ ”
“Just like I’ve got it,” Ignace said. He trailed his finger farther down the page of Gregg script. “And here he says, ‘wouldn’t have no fingerprints.’ ”
“Not grammatical,” Lucas said.
“No, he wasn’t. I picked it up a couple of times.”
Then, a few seconds later, with Ignace reading, Lucas interrupted again, “He said he threw it into a field of ‘whatever-it-is’?”
“That’s what he said.” Ignace nodded. “That’s what verbatim means. It’s exactly what he said.”
One of the junior editors said, “He’s gotta push the button on the story. .”
White said to Lucas, “Do you have any other suggestions?”
Lucas shook his head: “You’re gonna run it, so run it. I notice you shaded over the fact that he went out and bought a razor because of Ruffe’s earlier story.”
“I don’t think that’s essential to the thrust of the story,” White said. “It confuses the issue.”
“Besides, it’s embarrassing,” said Sloan, stepping up, wiping his nose. To Lucas: “Rochester’s working it; and they’re bringing in an on-duty Highway Patrol guy and the Sheriff’s Department.”
Ignace pushed the button on the story, sending it on its way, and said to Lucas and Sloan, “You guys owe me big.”
“Bullshit. You’re about one inch from being busted as a material witness,” Sloan said. He sounded defensive.
Ignace smiled, calling the bluff: “So bust me. I might enjoy it.”
“You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Sloan said.
“What, you’d put me in some cell with some big faggot?”
Sloan shook his head. “No, we’d put you in a locked room by yourself with a toilet and a sink and let you sit there. It’d be like taking a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Duluth for three straight weeks. Except that the food would be better.”
“Fuck you,” Ignace said, linking his fingers together over his soft gut. “You owe me, and you know it. When you get this guy, I want a phone call. If you get him.”
“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll call, maybe we won’t.”
They talked for another ten minutes, going over the story. Ignace gave Lucas a shortened transcript of the conversation, only the material covered in the story. Lucas told Stone that the state would subpoena Ignace’s shorthand notes. “Keep them safe.”
“We’ll probably fight the subpoena,” Stone said.
“
Probably-but don’t lose the notes.”
Out on the street, Sloan said, “Ruffe is a noxious little motherfucker,” and then, “Stand back, I’m gonna sneeze.”
Lucas stepped away, Sloan sneezed, and Lucas said, “One good thing-Pope’s staying in his home territory. He’s not off in some goddamn weird place where nobody’s seen the stories about him. He’s hiding out. That means somebody has seen him, whether or not they know it, and all we have to do is find the connection.”
“So now what?”
Lucas yawned and said, “I’m going over to the office to work the phones. I’ll put together a meeting in Rochester, tomorrow morning. Everybody I can find.”
Sloan looked at his watch: “It’s way late.”
“So I jerk a few people out of bed. Big deal. Uh-you personally might want to take some more pills.”
“No kiddin’. My face is coming off. What about the baseball bat?”
“We can run down to Mankato early, check on the bat, then over to Rochester. We gotta find this woman he’s looking at. That’s the thing: if he’s telling us the truth, we might not have a lot of time.”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t have anybody. I couldn’t deal with another woman like Larson.”
“Just. . hold on, man,” Lucas said. “You’re going through a tough spot.”
“It’s all been tough,” Sloan said. “Now, it’s breaking me up.”
The man with the throaty whisper felt better after talking with Ignace; more complete. Talking about what he was doing actually helped him to think through it, to appreciate it. Though. . what a weird fuckin’ name the guy had. Ruffe Ignace. Who’d name their kid something like that? Why not something decent, like Bob, or Roy? With a name like Ruffe, you were bound to grow up queer.
And it was nice to talk about Millie, even if just a little.
One thing Millie found out early was that sex in the shower sounded good in books but was less fun in real life. First of all, you were standing up, and you had to concentrate on not falling down. The way you did that was, you hung on the water faucet handles, and then just about the time you got a rhythm going, you pushed too hard on the cold handle and Mihovil got a shot of icy water down his back and his dick retracted like a snail in a shell. That wasn’t good.
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