“Could it be a code word, telling them that the killing was done?” Sloan asked. Jansen glanced sideways at him, an idiot glance, and Sloan said, defensively, “All right, it’s not a code word.”
“There’s gotta be something,” Lucas said. He’d written down a list of names of the people who’d gone through the security area; there were thirty of them.
“Every single person you’ve seen in there-half the staff, I didn’t know that many people went in and out, to tell you the truth-but every single person knows he’s on tape,” Jansen said.
“You can’t see them very well, unless they’re right up against the viewing panel,” Lucas said. “Is there another angle?”
“Yeah, we have one of the scanning cameras at the end of the hall.”
“Let’s see that.”
They spent ten minutes fast-forwarding through three days of the staff coming and going. “I keep thinking, the food,” Sloan said. “It’s the only thing that consistently goes into the cells.”
They thought about that for a moment, and then Jansen said, “Suppose one of the guys delivering the food wrote down what happened, like a little strip of paper, and put it in the mashed potatoes. .”
“Let’s look at the guys bring in the food.”
Seven different staff members delivered food over the three days. The food went into the cell on a kind of metallic lazy Susan device. “Wouldn’t even have to put it in the food-you could just drop it on the tray when you put the food in the slot,” Sloan said. “The cameras aren’t so good that you could pick that up.”
They watched the three men eating, saw nothing out of the ordinary, except that Biggie had bad manners, eating with his hands as much as with his spoon.
“Okay,” Lucas said, when they were done. He was discouraged. “Maybe this isn’t it. Goddamnit, I thought I was on to something.”
“Want me to go down and drop Peterson’s name on Biggie? Or on all three of them?” Jansen asked. “I could mention ‘a Peterson thing’ in passing, see if we get any reaction.”
“It’s an idea,” Lucas said, considering him. “You’re not going to get anything from Chase, though. He was hypermanic this morning.”
“He’s gone over the top and is on the way back down,” Jansen said. “If I go now, I might catch him before he crashes. You could watch from here, in real time.”
Lucas nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Chase gave it away. Jansen rolled the observation window back and said, “How’re you doing? Sleepy?”
“Man, I’m dying,” Chase whimpered. “I’m going out. I’m like a light, I’m going out.” He put his hands on both sides of his head and squeezed: “Why am I like this, Mr. Jansen?”
“We don’t know, man.” There was a note of sympathy in Jansen’s voice, and it resonated.
Chase said, still holding his face, “If I could just, if I could just. . If I could get out of here just for a couple of hours. .” He sounded desperate, like a man who needed water.
“That’s gonna be tough, since the Peterson thing. The director is adamant about keeping the three of you under wraps. That might not seem fair. .”
Lucas liked the way he did it: in passing, as part of another idea, the raisin in the rice pudding. Chase’s hands came down; his face was brighter, and his thin lips turned up in a joker’s smile. “You know about that? How he got her. .”
“I’ve heard the usual stories,” Jansen said, noncommittally. He looked over his shoulder, as though he shouldn’t be talking about it.
“So cool. He fucked her all night. He had her tied up, he had this rope around her neck like a fuckin’ bridle, he fucked her all night. Six, seven, eight times. The bitch could hardly walk in the morning. He took her up there, rolled her out of the car, naked as the day. Then he says, ‘You got a hundred yards and then I’m coming.’ ”
“She ran, but there was no place to go, so she ran into the woods.” Chase was leaning on the viewing glass now, face only inches from Jansen’s.
“She was screaming: but there was nobody out there. He caught her by this big tree, and she tried to run around it, keep the tree between them. Then he caught her and there was a creek and she fell into it, and that’s when he got her; right on her shoulder blades. She had this long black hair and he pulled it up and zip with the razor. Then you know what he did? He did like this victory scream, he screamed. .”
And Chase screamed, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes glazed. . and then he staggered backwards onto his bed, as though he’d been struck by lightning, his tongue out now, his body vibrating, words bubbling out, all nonsense.
Jansen disappeared from the camera view, and they could hear his voice from down the hall. Calling for help?
Sloan said, “That’s not something you see every day.”
They were back in Cale’s office: “They got the message somehow. In detail. There’s nothing on the tape, so it wasn’t oral. It must have been written and delivered with the food,” Lucas said. “We’ve got a list of the people who were around when food was delivered. Seven orderlies, three therapists. There were also two doctors and two more therapists in and out of the hallway, who looked or spoke to the Big Three at one time or another.”
“Goddamnit. I can hear them building the crucifix, up at the Capitol,” Cale said. He spun his chair, looking out his window. “And it’s so hard to believe. I’ve known Dr. Hart for ten years, and he’s a fine man. So is O’Donnell, despite all the hair and the hip bullshit. Dr. Sennet has been controversial sometimes, but he’s a good therapist.”
“I’m most interested in O’Donnell, Sennet, and Halburton,” Lucas said. “They were both nearby when the food deliveries were made. I mean, right there.”
Cale spun back to face them and shook his head. “I can make one suggestion: we could hope that whatever went into the cell stayed there. They could have flushed it, or eaten it, but sometimes. . people like this will hold on to something as an artifact. A trophy. If we lock them down and shake down the cells, we might come up with one of the notes. That might give us something.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “There’s nothing we can do to help you-but I want the personnel files on those fourteen people. I’ll need to copy them and take them back to St. Paul; and I’d like to get copies of the tapes, if I could. I don’t know-maybe we missed something, because we were going through them too fast.”
“I’ll get it started,” Cale said. He pushed himself heavily out of his chair and said, “God Almighty.”
Lucas called the Blue Earth County sheriff’s office and gave them the information about the murder having been done in a creek, in a place remote enough that Peterson could scream and not be heard; but because of the search for a white car, Lucas couldn’t believe that the killer would drive far with the body.
So: a creek close to the point where the body was found.
That done, he joined Sloan in Xeroxing the fourteen personnel files, while Cale organized the shakedown. They were halfway through with the paper when Cale came back to say that they were doing all three cells simultaneously, and included body-cavity searches.
“We’re taking out every piece of cloth in there, including the mattresses, all the books, the clothing, everything. We’ll shred all of it.”
“How long?”
“Another hour. We’ve got six people working on it. Biggie was very unhappy. Taylor acted like he didn’t care, and Chase is gone. I’m thinking of moving him to the medical ward.”
They waited the hour, browsing through the personnel files. Cale came back shaking his head. “Not a thing.”
“You couldn’t have missed it.”
“No. You don’t even want to know where we looked.”
Lucas exhaled, slapped his knees, and stood up. “Dr. Cale, thank you. You’ve been a big help. We’ve made serious progress here. We’re gonna tear up these files and maybe call you back tomorrow with some questions.”
“You’re gonna get the guy?” Cale asked.
“Yeah. Soon, now. A few days, at most.”
Cale looked down the hall, where a woman was pushing another woman in a wheelchair, both of them laughing. “I wish we heard more of that around here. Not enough of that.”
They drove back north through one of the long, beautiful summer twilights, a few stars poking out like theater lamps, a moon coming up in the east, lopsided but nearly full. They didn’t talk much; they were both running through the tapes in their heads. Sloan would occasionally turn on the reading light and look at one of the Xeroxed files.
After a while, Sloan said, “Besides Hart, O’Donnell, and Sennet, I think we should take a close look at Grant and Beloit. For reasons that are a little stupid.”
“How stupid?”
“They both get great ratings from the patients. I figure, that’s maybe because they identify with them.”
“Ah, Beloit’s out. The guy I talked to the other night-that was a guy. Regardless of the voice, he talked like a guy would. Like a shitkicker, like you’d expect from Charlie Pope. And didn’t Taylor, when he was yelling at us about the license, say him, or he?”
Sloan thought for a moment. “I think it was, ‘Our boy.’ ”
“ ’That’s right,” Lucas said. “ ‘Our boy.’ You think that might have been put on to steer us away from a woman?”
“It’s possible, but. . not likely.”
“If he was, he was giving away the license thing at the same time. I don’t think that was deliberate,” Lucas said.
“Right. I knew that. So we scratch Beloit.”
“About ninety percent,” Lucas said.
A bit later, Sloan said, “Cale was right about building a crucifix. He’d be a prime candidate for it.”
“Or us, depending on where we are when the music stops,” Lucas said.
Lucas dropped Sloan with a Minneapolis cop car on the south end of the city, went on to St. Paul, and picked up a tape machine that would work with his home television; took a long walk to a Baker’s Square restaurant on Ford Parkway and ate dinner; stuck his head in a Half-Priced Books; window-shopped a jewelry store, thinking about a welcome-home gift for Weather; and ambled back home, hands in his pockets, a tattered, pirate copy of Ernest Hemingway’s poems under his arm. Mulling, all the way, the assemblage of information.
They were like squirrels who kept coming up with nuts they couldn’t crack, he decided.
They had a guy who’d deliberately faked DNA, knowing that it would point the finger in the wrong direction. Who’d know about that? When he thought about it, he decided that. . just about everybody would know.
A medical doctor, for sure-and Beloit was a medical doctor, though, unfortunately, she was also female, and the voice wasn’t female. And almost any of the professionals at St. John’s would know, because the state DNA bank made a big deal out of getting samples from all convicted sex criminals. Besides, after the rash of crime-scene investigator shows on TV, half the TV watchers in the country knew about DNA. Hell, even George Bush would probably know about it.
So that went nowhere.
The killer used, or tried to use, Ruffe Ignace to point them in the wrong direction. Serial killers occasionally talked to the press or the cops, so that was nothing new, but usually they were looking for glory or turning themselves in. This guy pretended to be looking for glory, but he was actually trying to use Ignace in a manipulative way; or maybe he was doing both, but the manipulation was certainly there.
Lucas thought about the meth lab. Could the killer have met Charlie Pope there? It was one nexus of criminals. . but he didn’t really need that. He had a nexus of criminals in the security hospital, all that he required. The hospital was part of it. .
And then the real nut of the thing.
How had the Big Three learned of Peterson?
If he could crack that. .
But then, how’d they known of Rice and Larson?
Back at the house, he read the personnel files with the tapes running behind them, at about four times actual. The staff members came and left in a herky-jerky speeded-up way reminiscent of old silent films; every once in a while, he would slow the tapes down to watch the action.
The only people to actually go into a cell were Beloit and another doctor named Rosen, and they were always escorted by two orderlies, and they never went into the cells of the Big Three, only into the cell of the fourth man, who was being disciplined for attacking another patient. They went in, gave him an insulin shot, and left. Routine.
O’Donnell and Sennet actually helped deliver food, keying back the security panels, chatting with the Big Three as their meals were delivered. Chase went from slow to manic to crazed to cooler to slow and finally to catatonic as he watched. O’Donnell moved in a way that blocked the hall camera from the food tray. Lucas picked it up on the second delivery. He made a note.
Sennet did nothing but chat, and sometimes not even that, standing beside the meal-delivery man as the food went into the cell. He would occasionally make a note on a clipboard.
Grant went only once, with Hart. He carried a notebook but never opened it; peeled off a good-looking sport coat, rolled up his sleeves, talked with Biggie; walked down toward the camera, following Hart to Chase’s cell, chatted with him for a moment; said nothing to Chase, only watched as the other man wandered helplessly around his cell.
When they closed the window to Chase’s cell, Grant said to Hart, “His personality is coming apart. We’ve got to get him out of here.”
“I don’t think they’ll let us do that, not until they catch Mr. Torture Guy.”
Hart actually leaned against the security glass with one hand. Lucas ran the tape back: Hart had done that several times, at the different cells. Could he have written something on the palm of his hand? That seemed far-fetched; but Lucas made a note.
He didn’t find much in the personnel files: he’d give them to the coordination center in the morning, have them run them.
That night, trying to sleep, he kept coming back to the tapes. Something went into the cells, right under his eyes. How had they done it?
Or maybe the killing had been planned in the smallest of details beforehand, and Sloan had been right in talking about a code. All it would take would be something like. . he tried to think of something.
Like Grant taking off his sport coat.
Like Hart leaning against a window.
Like Sennet or O’Donnell using some kind of key word, or perhaps something as simple as eye contact, with a nod and a smile.
Something, and it was right there, and he couldn’t see it.
19
The man with the whispery voice was worried now. He’d thought to easily take ten, or fifteen, or twenty. . and then maybe drift away, and start again somewhere. He’d toyed with the idea of faking his own death in the style of himself, just for the implicit humor of the situation. . Set it up by killing a couple of people and never revealing where he left them. .
Now, that’d be tough. The cops were nipping at his heels-that goddamn Pope was the one who did it to him. He’d come back like the ghost of Christmas. If he hadn’t. .
Without that accident, without those fuckin’ fishermen, they would have been looking for Pope for another year. He’d seen the activity down by the bridge, the divers, the cops, and as soon as he’d seen it, he’d known that Charlie had come back.
The Gods Down the Hall had said that this might happen; that some weird happenstance would trip him. They’d told him in detail how they’d been caught, how small slips led to bigger ones, until finally they stepped on the fatal banana peel. To prevent that, to prevent the cops from isolating one man, they had to be fed options until they choked on them, Biggie said. Feed them leads that point away, he said.
If all else failed, they said, it was better to go out in a blaze than in a cage.
Biggie Lighter had grinned at him and said softly, “They got a name for it, the good Christians do.”
“Yes?”
; “Armageddon. The final battle. If it comes to it, think how good that would feel. .”
If the final battle was coming, the man with the whispery voice wouldn’t leave Millie behind. Couldn’t do that-he’d waited so long to take her. .
The night that the killer came to visit, Charlie Pope had been dozing on a broken-back couch in front of the TV. The killer, who’d scouted the trailer park the night before, nosed the state car past Charlie’s back door, then reversed and snugged up to the trailer. He sat for a moment, watching and listening, then took the book-sized medical kit off the front seat, climbed out, and knocked on Charlie’s back door.
The killer was a slender man, dead white and muscular in a knotty, workman’s way, with a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps and a German art-deco eagle on his back, just above his buttocks. He had three black dots in a triangle on the web of skin between his right thumb and forefinger, and he told people-mysteriously reticent about the details-that he’d gotten them in the army. Everyone in the unit had one, he said. He couldn’t say what unit that was. Always the wisecrack, delivered with the well-practiced, engaging grin: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Charlie took a minute to answer the knock. He was burly-gone-to-fat, hairy, still half asleep, dressed in jeans and a yellow smiley-face T-shirt, his gut pushing out in the gap between shirt and pants; he stood blinking in the porch light. “Hey, man. What are you doin’ here?”
“Drop-in drug check, Charlie. Required by law,” the killer said. “I need a blood sample.”
“Ah, shit. This time of night?” But Charlie stepped back so the killer could step inside with him. “I didn’t even know you could do that. .”
“Required by law-and I’ve got some questions to ask,” the killer said. There was steel in his voice now. Never let an inmate get on top of you, even after they stopped being inmates. “Take fifteen minutes. How’ve you been feeling?”
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