“Might not be Pope,” Lucas said.
The two docs stopped in their tracks. “What?”
“You guys suggested it the last time we were here-Dr. Beloit, maybe. Our own psychologist up in the Cities came up with the idea independently. We think Charlie Pope is being handled by a second man, or a second woman. Somebody who does the planning, does the driving. .”
Lucas explained, and they started walking again, the two docs taking it in. When Lucas finished, he asked, “Anything more from any of them? The Big Three?”
“Not really,” O’Donnell said. He flipped his long hair, unconsciously touched a silver earring. “They just bitch and moan about being down in the hole.”
They took an elevator down, a camera looking at them through a recessed glass plate. Two floors below the entrance, they got out, into a tiled corridor that felt like a basement-sound was muffled, and though the air was cool, it felt damp. They passed a couple of staff members, who nodded and went on their way, and stopped at an electronically controlled door with another camera. Hart pushed another button, a woman’s voice said, “Hey, Dick,” and Hart said, “Hey, Pauline. It’s me, Sam and Davenport and Sloan. They should be on your list.”
“Yes, they are. Opening up.”
The electronic lock clicked, and O’Donnell pulled the door open. “What would they do if we were imposters and had a gun in your back?” Sloan wondered.
“They’d know,” O’Donnell said, smiling. Dropping his voice, he said, “Her name ain’t Pauline.”
The corridor was dim. They could see a dozen rectangles set into the walls, eight of them dark, four lit. All one-way glass. “The Big Three and a guy who tried to cut his buddy with a broken plastic spoon,” Hart said. “Where do you want to start?”
“How does it work?” Sloan asked.
“There’s a release button next to each window panel. You push it once and the one-way glass slides back and you’re looking through a glass security panel. That’s if you want him to see you. The talk goes through a microphone with a speaker. The guys in the other cells can’t hear what you’re talking about, unless you want them to. Then you can turn on their mikes.”
The isolation cells were simple: a bed, a toilet, a sink to wash in. The walls were beige, the blanket on the bed was green, the fixtures were white, the uniforms were a washed-out French blue, like the medical scrubs that Weather sometimes wore around the house.
Taylor was sitting on his bunk, staring at the one-way glass. “Can he see us?” Sloan asked.
O’Donnell shook his head. “No, I’ve checked it a hundred times. But I think, sometimes, that things are so quiet down here that they pick up vibrations of people walking by. Half the time we come down here, they’re staring at the glass. When you look at them on the video, they’re hardly ever looking at the glass. There’s nothing to see.”
“Open it,” Lucas said.
Hart pushed a button, and the glass slid slowly back. As soon as it started moving, Taylor stood up and walked toward it. “You guys,” he said, when he saw Lucas and Sloan.
“Yeah, we need to talk to you,” Lucas said. “We need to get a name from you. The name of the guy you sent out there.”
Taylor wagged his head and showed a short, yellow-toothed smile. “I don’t think you got enough for that.” His voice, coming from a lowest-bid speaker, sounded like a robot’s.
“Let me tell you what we got,” Lucas said. Taylor crossed his arms and leaned against the windowsill. “The federal district attorney has decided that your victims. . the victims of the guy you sent out. . were kidnapped. That’s a federal offense, and the victims were killed. They’re going for the death penalty. If we put you with the killer. . well, you won’t have to worry about being penned up anymore.”
“Don’t have the death penalty in Minnesota.”
“The state doesn’t-but we’re talking about the feds. They definitely do.”
Taylor’s gaze seemed to turn inward for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Gotta go sometime. Tell me-did our boy get another one? Did he hunt her down?”
“Hey, you’re not gonna shock us,” Sloan said. “We’ve been dealing with dildoes like you for our whole lives. Let us tell you the rest of it.”
“So?”
“So we’re making this offer to all three of you. Whoever gives us the name, that guy gets a pass,” Sloan said. “The other two get transferred over to Illinois, where they get the shot. One of you will think it over and talk. He’ll get to wave good-bye to the other two.”
“You’re really fuckin’ me up,” Taylor said, his voice flat, and with no change of expression. He ostentatiously looked at his fingernails, “I can hardly stand it.”
“All right,” Lucas said. He reached for the button that opened and closed the panel. “Enjoy the next few months, or however long it turns out to be. .”
Now an expression flicked over Taylor’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped. “Rules say we can’t be kept here for more than two weeks without relief.”
Hart shook his head. “That’s not quite right. Two weeks if you’ve shown recognition and contrition. Every day that you don’t is a new offense. You won’t be out of here until your boy is caught.”
“Or until you get transferred to the federal pen,” Lucas said. He pushed the button to close the glass panel, waited for an objection from Taylor, and got nothing but ten seconds of silence. Then, in a teasing baby voice, Taylor said, “I know you’re still standing there.”
O’Donnell sighed and pushed the microphone button, turning it off. “Next?”
They did Biggie next. Biggie was naked and masturbating. “Go away. I need my privacy to jerk off.” He twiddled his fingers at the surveillance camera.
“I need to tell you about the special offer,” Lucas said. Biggie never stopped while Lucas recited the death-penalty threat.
Biggie said, “Hey, you know what? Having you watch is gettin’ me harder. This is really good.”
“I’ll come and watch you take the needle,” Lucas said, turning away. To Hart: “Shut the window.”
“I’m gonna come. Don’t you wanna watch?” Biggie shouted as the window slid shut, “Maybe you can get our boy for not having a hunting license. .”
O’Donnell punched the microphone button and said, “Hard to threaten a guy when he’s in isolation. Maybe we should have moved them back to their regular cells. Might as well be dead as down here.”
“Almost pointless to talk to Chase,” Hart said. “He’s going downhill fast. The catatonic and manic periods are getting longer, the transitions are getting shorter. He was down for almost thirty-six hours, ending last night, then he went through transition and now he’s going manic. When he’s manic, there’s nothing left but the instinct to kill.”
“Let’s try him,” Lucas said. “Might as well, since we’re here.”
The glass slid back, and Chase hurled himself at it, his fingers like claws, his mouth open, his eyes sparking with hate. Like Biggie, he was naked: he hit the glass like a bug hitting a windshield, bounced off, came back at it, scratching at the glass, prying at its corners, his fingernails breaking, blood slipping across the glass. He was wailing, like an injured big cat, like a jaguar. Hart was shouting, “Easy, easy, easy. . You wanna get out, wanna get out. .”
Chase seemed not to hear him. He hurled himself at the glass again, hitting it with his face, beating it with his fists; behind him, the cell was torn up as much as it could be, as most of it was concrete. He hadn’t simply taken off his clothing, he’d taken it off and shredded it; he’d done the same thing to the blanket, and the mattress, which was covered with nylon and bolted to the bed, was streaked with blood, where Chase had been tearing at it.
“Close it, close it,” Lucas shouted at O’Donnell, and the window slipped shut. The microphone was still on, and they could hear the continuing animal wail until Hart reached out and cut it off.
“Goddamnit,” Sloan said. “Maybe you ought to d
o something. Like sedate him.”
Hart nodded: “We try, but chemicals don’t have much effect on him anymore. If we give him enough to really calm him down, we might kill him.”
“Well, that’d calm him down,” Lucas said. “He’s like a fuckin’ werewolf, or something.” Then, to Sloan: “We’re wasting our time.”
“Listen, we can work on Taylor and Biggie for you, keep talking up the death-penalty thing,” O’Donnell said. “Is that for real?”
“It will be,” Lucas said.
“We sorta. . oppose the death penalty around here,” O’Donnell said. “By and large.”
“So do we,” Sloan said. “By and large.”
They stopped for lunch on the way back, cheeseburgers at a McDonald’s.
“I don’t care what anybody says about the shit McDonald’s feeds you,” Sloan said. “They do know how to make a French fry. You gonna eat those?”
They were finishing the French fries when Del called: he was even more wired than he’d been in the morning.
“Man, you gotta find a place to lie down,” Lucas said. “You’re yelling at me.”
“We’re getting a little frazzled,” Del shouted. “Listen, where are you? How fast can you get up here?”
“Forty-five minutes, depending on where you are. You find West?”
“We know where he is. We talked to a chick who just saw him. He’s walking around with his bag along the riverbank. We’ve got some Minneapolis cops coming over to help. He might be in one of the caves.”
“All right. We’re coming. Be careful in those fuckin’ caves, man.”
17
A Minneapolis patrolman spotted Mike West walking along the riverbank more than a mile downstream from where the woman had seen him-“When she said she saw him five minutes ago, what she meant was, she saw him half an hour ago,” Del told Lucas and Sloan.
Del was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and for some reason-odd on a hot day in the middle of the summer, though nobody mentioned it-a navy-blue watch cap. With his weathered face, he looked like the Ancient Mariner, except in a Metallica T-shirt. “We spent another half hour crawling all over the riverbank by the university, and he was already down by St. Thomas.”
“So where is he?” Lucas asked. They were parked with a half dozen cop cars on Mississippi River Boulevard, looking down into the river gorge that separated St. Paul from Minneapolis. The sides of the gorge were steep, but not sheer, and covered with trees and brush. Outcrops of sandstone were showing through the greenery; the Mississippi snaked through the bottom of it, in its usual summer dress, mud and beached carp.
Del shrugged: “He must’ve seen us coming, because he fuckin’ vanished. Dick Douglas spotted him, called it in, then went down after him. Never saw him again.”
“Caves,” Sloan said.
“Douglas was sure it was him?” Lucas asked.
“It’s the guy we were told about. We found Gary, the panhandler. He said this was our guy, this Mike West. Calls him Mikey. He pointed us at Sandy, this woman, who knows West pretty good. She’s a graduate student up at the U, she works in a cafeteria and gives him leftover food.”
“We ought to get Sandy down here,” Sloan said.
Del nodded: “She’s on the way. Jenkins and Shrake went to get her.”
“Jesus, I hope you told them to go easy,” Lucas said. Shrake bragged that when it came to pickups, they had a.740 slugging percentage. He wasn’t sure Shrake was joking.
“Ah, they’re all right,” Del said. “They get a little antsy sometimes.”
They found West before the woman arrived. A couple of cops halfway down the hill, and two hundred yards south, started yelling and humping around one spot on the hill. A group of college students, who had gathered on the sidewalk, cheered, then booed. Lucas could see the cops bending into the hillside and then yelling some more. “What the hell’s going on down there?” Del wondered. They all started down the hillside, holding on to tree limbs and brush, skidding along in their slick-soled city-cop shoes.
“What?” Lucas asked when they got to the cops. More cops were crossing the hillside to where they were standing.
“There he is,” said one of the cops. He was hot and pissed off. He pointed at the hillside, and Lucas took a moment to see what he was pointing at-the worn white soles of two gym shoes, six or eight inches into a hole so small that it seemed impossible that a man could be on the other side of them. The hole, worn by water out of the rotten rock, apparently extended straight back into the hillside.
Lucas stooped to look, and Sloan and Del scrambled around behind him “Come out of there,” Lucas said. He heard what might have been a muffled reply.
“He’s holding on to something, inside there,” one of the cops said. “We tried to pull him out, but we couldn’t budge him.”
“How about some shovels?” Del asked.
“It’s mostly rock; we’d need jackhammers.”
“We could try dynamite,” somebody suggested, with a snigger. Most of the cops were now enjoying themselves: watching the heavyweight detectives looking at those two fuckin’ feet. “Or maybe we oughta send for a proctologist,” somebody else said. “I bet he could hook him out.”
“He’s not going to smother in there, is he?” Lucas asked, looking at the shoe soles.
“Fuck if we know,” said the cop.
Del started to laugh, and Sloan shook his head and turned away.
“Stop laughing and give me a hand,” Lucas said, irritated. Del came over and they managed to wedge their hands into the hole and grab hold of the man’s ankles. There were more muffled comments from inside the hole. “Pull.”
They pulled, pulled some more, and nothing moved. “We’re gonna hurt him if we pull too hard,” Del said. “We’re gonna pop his knees.”
“Why can’t anything be easy?” Lucas asked, giving up, dusting his hands together.
Sloan said, “Anyway, here’re Shrake and the woman.”
They saw Shrake coming down the hill, one hand on the woman’s arm. Jenkins, who had apparently stopped to light a cigarette, trailed unhappily behind.
The woman, Sandy, was young and round faced, and dishwater blond. She looked concerned in the way that nurses looked concerned when told of pain and illness-a kind of reflexive sympathy.
“Can you help us?” Lucas asked. “He’s wedged himself inside.”
“I can try,” she said, looking doubtfully at the soles of the gym shoes. “He gets scared sometimes.” She knelt: “Mike? This is Sandy,” she shouted. “This is Sandy from the cafeteria. The police don’t want to arrest you, they want you to help them. They need you to help them catch somebody else.”
Nothing.
“Mike, you’re going to hurt yourself if you stay in there. You’ll run out of air. .”
She continued to talk, reassuring sometimes, pleading other times. There were muffled replies, but no movement, and nobody could decipher what West was saying. West twisted and retwisted his feet, but gave no sign of giving up. Lucas finally stepped away and asked Shrake, “How’re you guys doing?”
“Gettin’ tired. I’m too old for this all-night and all-day shit.”
Jenkins blew some smoke and nodded: “Me too.”
Shrake said, “Butt me,” and Jenkins held out a pack of Marlboros. Shrake took one and lit it with an antique brass Zippo; the smell of lighter fluid hung in the air for a moment.
“I really appreciate all this,” Lucas said, gesturing down the hillside. “Put in for every minute of overtime. I’ll sign anything reasonable. And you don’t have to stay here-you can take off if you want.”
“I’d like to see the little asshole’s face before we go,” Shrake said. “That’s all I’ve seen of him.” He nodded at the hole. “The bottom of his feet.”
Sandy shouted, “We’re having pumpkin pie tonight, that’s your favorite.”
“You want me to get him out of there?” Jenkins asked.
“With whipped cream,” Sandy yelled.
“Fuck a bunch of wedges. Let me talk to him for a minute. And get that broad out of there, she ain’t helping the situation.”
“I don’t want him gassed. .,” Lucas warned.
“I ain’t gonna gas him, for Christ’s sake,” Jenkins said. “Just let me talk to him.”
“Whatever,” Lucas said. “No saps.”
“Get the broad out of there.”
They told Sandy that they might have to work on another concept and eased her away from the hole. She went up the hill white-faced, looking back, afraid the cops were going to do something weird, like shoot West in the feet.
Jenkins did do something weird. He leaned into the hillside, fumbled around West’s shoes for a moment, then started untying one. He took his time getting it loose: West twisted his feet around, trying to get away from the hands, but apparently couldn’t get any deeper into the hole.
“You know what I’m doing, Mikey?” Jenkins shouted into the hole. “I’ve been looking for you for two days. I’m really tired, and now you’re fuckin’ with me. So I’m gonna take your fuckin’ shoes off, and if you don’t come out of there, I’m gonna throw them in the fuckin’ river. ’Cause I’m pissed off.”
There was more muffled noise from inside the hole, more foot twisting, and then Jenkins, still taking his time, pulled the first shoe off. There was a sock under it, black and shriveled and wet with sweat or river water. The ankle above it was almost as black as the sock. Jenkins touched neither.
“That’s one shoe,” he yelled into the hole. “I’m gonna put it right here, until I get the second one. Then I’m going to throw them into the fuckin’ river, I swear to God.”
He started working on the second shoe, taking time to untie it, and suddenly one of West’s legs extended a few inches, and then the other, and then the first one a few more. Somebody said, “He’s coming,” and with some muffled shouting, Mike West squirmed out of the hole, tears in his eyes, dragging a plastic garbage bag behind him. “Don’t take my shoes, man,” he said to Jenkins. “Don’t take my shoes.”
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