Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  As they crossed the bridge, Lucas looked down at the Dumpster and saw Connell still talking to Helstrom. Lucas asked, “What’s the story on Connell?”

  “Chief’ll tell you all about her,” Sloan said. “She’s a pain in the ass, but she invented the case. I haven’t seen her for a month or so. Goddamn, she got here fast.”

  Lucas looked back toward the ramp. “She’s got a major edge on her,” he said.

  “She’s in a hurry to get this guy,” Sloan said. “She needs to get him in the next month or so.”

  “Yeah? What’s the rush?”

  “She’s dying,” Sloan said.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The chief’s secretary was a bony woman with a small mole on her cheekbone and overgrown eyebrows. She saw Lucas coming, pushed a button on her intercom, and said, “Chief Davenport’s here.” To Lucas she said, “Go on in.” She made her thumb and forefinger into a pistol and pointed at the chief’s door.

  Rose Marie Roux sat behind a broad cherrywood desk stacked with reports and memos, rolling an unlit cigarette under her nose. When Lucas walked in, she nodded, fiddled with the cigarette for a moment, then sighed, opened a desk drawer, and tossed it inside.

  “Lucas,” she said. Her voice had a ragged nicotine edge to it, like a hangnail. “Sit down.”

  When Lucas had quit the force, Quentin Daniel’s office had been neat, ordered, and dark. Roux’s office was cluttered with books and reports, her desk a mass of loose paper, Rolodexes, calculators, and computer disks. Harsh blue light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures pried into every corner. Daniel had never bothered with computers; a late-model IBM sat on a stand next to Roux’s desk, a memo button blinking at the top left corner of the screen. Roux had thrown out Daniel’s leather men’s-club furniture and replaced it with comfortable fabric chairs.

  “I read Kupicek’s report on the tomb burglaries,” she said. “How is he, by the way?”

  “Can’t walk.” Lucas had two associates, Del and Danny Kupicek. Kupicek’s kid had run over his foot with a Dodge Caravan. “He’s gone for a month.”

  “If we get a media question on the tombs, can you handle it? Or Kupicek?”

  “Sure. But I doubt that it’ll ever get out.”

  “I don’t know-it’s a good story.” A persistent series of tomb breakins had first been attributed to scroungers looking for wedding rings and other jewelry, though the departmental conspiracy freaks had suggested a ring of satanists, getting body parts for black Masses. Whatever, the relatives were getting upset. Roux had asked Lucas to look at it. About that time, polished finger and toe bones had started showing up in art jewelry. Kupicek had found the designer/saleswoman, squeezed her, and the burglaries stopped.

  “Her stuff does go well with a simple black dress,” Lucas said. “‘Course, you want to match the earrings.”

  Roux showed a thin smile. “You can talk that way because you don’t give a shit,” she said. “You’re rich, you’re in love, you buy your suits in New York. Why should you care?”

  “I care,” Lucas said mildly. “But it’s hard to get too excited when the victims are already dead… What’d you want?”

  There was a long moment of silence. Lucas waited it out, and she sighed again and said, “I’ve got a problem.”

  “Connell.”

  She looked up, surprised. “You know her?”

  “I met her about an hour ago, over in Wisconsin, running her mouth.”

  “That’s her,” Roux said. “Running her mouth. How’d she hear about it?”

  Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Goddamnit, she’s working people inside the department.” She nibbled at a fingernail, then said, “Goddamnit,” again and heaved herself to her feet, walked to her window. She stuck two fingers between the blades of her venetian blinds, looked out at the street for a moment. She had a big butt, wide hips. She’d been a large young woman, a good cop in decent shape. The shape was going now, after too many years in well-padded government chairs.

  “There’s no secret about how I got this job,” she said finally, turning back to him. “I solved a lot of political problems. There was always pressure from the blacks. Then the feminists started in, after those rapes at Christmas. I’m a woman, I’m a former cop, I’ve got a law degree, I was a prosecutor and a liberal state senator with a good reputation on race relations…”

  “Yeah, yeah, you were right for the job,” Lucas said impatiently. “Cut to the chase.”

  She turned back to him. “Last winter some game wardens found a body up in the Carlos Avery reserve. You know where that’s at?”

  “Yeah. Lots of bodies up there.”

  “This one’s name was Joan Smits. You probably remember the stories in the papers.”

  “Vaguely. From Duluth?”

  “Right. An immigrant from South Africa. Walked out of a bookstore and that was it. Somebody stuck a blade in her just above the pelvic bone and ripped her all the way up to her neck. Dumped her in a snowdrift at Carlos Avery.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay.”

  “Connell got the case, assisting the local authorities. She freaked. I mean, something snapped. She told me that Smits comes to her at night, to see how the investigation is going. Smits told her that there’d been other killings by the same man. Connell poked around, and came up with a theory.”

  “Of course,” Lucas said dryly.

  Roux took a pack of Winston Lights from her desk drawer, asked, “Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “This is illegal,” she said. “I take great pleasure in it.” She shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter, and tossed the lighter back in the desk drawer with the cigarettes. “Connell thinks she’s found the tracks of a serial sex-killer. She thinks he lives here in Minneapolis. Or St. Paul or whatever, the suburbs. Close by, anyway.”

  “Is there? A serial killer?” Lucas sounded skeptical, and Roux peered across her desk at him.

  “You’ve got a problem with the idea?” she asked.

  “Give me a few facts.”

  “There are several,” Roux said, exhaling smoke at the ceiling. “But let me give you another minute of background. Connell’s not just an investigator. She’s big in the left-feminist wing of the state AFSCME-American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “That’s an important piece of my constituency, Lucas. AFSCME put me in the state senate and kept me there. And maybe sixty percent of them are female.” Roux flicked a cigarette ash toward her wastebasket. “They’re my rock. Now. If I pull off this chief’s job, if I go four, maybe six years, and get a little lucky, I’ll go up to the U.S. Senate as a liberal law-and-order feminist.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. Everybody hustles.

  “So Connell came down to talk to me about her serial-killer theory. The state doesn’t have the resources for this kind of investigation, but we do. I make nice noises and say we’ll get right on it. I’m thinking Nut, but she’s got contacts all over the women’s movements and she’s AFSCME.”

  Lucas nodded, said nothing.

  “She gives me her research…” Roux tapped a thick file-folder on her desk. “I carried it down to homicide and asked them to make some checks. Connell thinks there have been a half-dozen murders and maybe more. She thinks there have been two here in Minnesota, and others in Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, just across the border in Canada.”

  “What’d homicide say?” Lucas asked.

  “I got the eye-rolling routine, and I started hearing Dickless Tracy comments again. Two of the killings had already been cleared. The Madison cops got a conviction. There’re local suspects in a couple other cases.”

  “Sounds like-”

  He was about to say bullshit, but Roux tapped her desk with an index finger and rode her voice over his. “But your old pal Sloan dug through Connell’s research and he decided there’s something to it.”

/>   “He mentioned that,” Lucas admitted. He looked at the file folder on Roux’s desk. “He didn’t seem too happy with Connell, though.”

  “She scares him. Anyway, what Connell had was not so much evidence as an…” She groped for the right word: “… argument.”

  “Mmmm.”

  The chief nodded. “I know. She could be wrong. But it’s a legitimate argument. And I keep thinking, What if I ditch it, and it turns out that I’m wrong? A fellow feminist, one of the constituency, comes to me with a serial killer. We blow it off and somebody else gets murdered and it all comes out.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Besides, I can feel myself getting in trouble here. We’re gonna set a new record for murders this year, unless something strange happens. That doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I’m the chief. I take the blame. You’re starting to hear that ‘We need somebody tough up there.’ I’m getting it from both inside and outside the department. The union never misses a chance to kick my ass. You know they backed MacLemore for the job.”

  “MacLemore’s a fuckin’ Nazi.”

  “Yes, he is…” Roux took a drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, coughed, laughing, and said, “There’s even more. She thinks the killer might be a cop.”

  “Ah, man.”

  “It’s just a theory,” Roux said.

  “But if you start chasing cops, the brotherhood’s gonna be unhappy.”

  “Exactly. And that’s what makes you perfect,” Roux said. “You’re one of the most experienced serial-killer investigators in the country, outside the FBI. Inside this department, politically, you’re both old-line and hard-line. You could chase a cop.”

  “Why does she think it’s a cop?”

  “One of the victims, a woman in Des Moines, a real estate saleswoman, had a cellular phone in her car. She had a teenaged daughter at home, and called and said she was going out with a guy for a drink, that she might be getting home late. She said the guy was from out of town, and that he was a cop. That’s all.”

  “Christ.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair.

  “Lucas, how long have you been back? A month?”

  “Five weeks.”

  “Five weeks. All right. I know you like the intelligence thing. But I’ve got all kinds of guys running different pieces of intelligence. We got the division, and the intelligence unit, and the gang squad in that, and vice and narcotics and licensing… I brought you back, gave you a nice soft political job, because I knew I’d eventually run into shit like this and I’d need somebody to handle it. You’re the guy. That was the deal.”

  “So you can run for the Senate.”

  “There’ve been worse senators,” she said.

  “I’ve got things-”

  “Everybody’s got things. Not everybody can stop insane killers,” Roux said impatiently. She came and stood next to him, looking out the window, took another greedy drag on her cigarette. “I could give you some time if we hadn’t had this Wannemaker thing. Now I gotta move, before the press catches on. And if we don’t do something heavy, Connell might very well leak it herself.”

  “I-”

  “If it gets out and you’re already on it, it’d go easier for all of us.”

  Lucas finally nodded. “You saved my ass from the corporate life,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I did, and you do.” Roux pushed her intercom button and leaned toward it. “Rocky? Round up the usual suspects. Get their asses in here.”

  Roux took five minutes to put together a meeting: Lester, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, his deputy Swanson, and Curt Myer, the new head of intelligence. Anderson, the department’s computer freak, was invited at Lucas’s request.

  “How’re we doing?” Roux asked Lester.

  “The bodies are piling up. I’ve honest to God never seen anything like it.” He looked at Lucas. “Sloan tells me there’s not much chance that Wannemaker got it in Hudson. She was probably transported there.”

  Lucas nodded. “Looks like.”

  “So we got another one.”

  Roux lit another cigarette and turned to Lucas. “What do you need?”

  Lucas looked back at Lester. “Same deal as last time. Except I want Sloan.”

  “What’s the same deal?” Roux asked.

  Lester looked at Roux. “Lucas works by himself, parallel to my investigation. Everything he finds out, and everything from the up-front investigation, goes into a book on a daily basis. Anderson does the book. He essentially coordinates.”

  Lester hooked a thumb at Anderson, who nodded, then turned to Lucas. “You can’t have Sloan.”

  Lucas opened his mouth, but Lester shook his head. “You can’t, man. He’s my best guy and we’re fuckin’ drowning out there.”

  “I’ve been off the street…”

  “Can’t help it,” Lester said. To Roux: “I’m telling you, pulling Sloan would kill us.”

  Roux nodded. “You’ll have to live with it, at least for a while,” she said to Lucas. “Can’t you use Capslock?”

  He shook his head. “He’s got something going with this deputy that was killed. We need to stay on it.”

  “I could let you have one guy,” Lester said. “He could run errands. Tell you the truth, you could help him out. Show him how it’s done.”

  Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “Greave?”

  Lester nodded.

  “I hear he’s an idiot,” Lucas said.

  “He’s just new,” Lester said defensively. “You don’t like him, give him back.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. He looked at Anderson. “And I need to know where a guy is. A knife guy from years ago.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His name was Junky Doog…”

  When the meeting broke up, Roux held Lucas back. “Meagan Connell is gonna want to work it,” she said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d take her.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Rose Marie, damnit, she’s got a state badge, she can do what she wants.”

  “As a favor to me,” Roux said, pressing him. “There’s no way homicide’ll take her. She’s really into this. She’s smart. She’d help you. I’d appreciate it.”

  “All right, I’ll find something for her to do,” Lucas said. Then: “You know, you never told me she was dying.”

  “I figured you’d find out by yourself,” Roux said.

  Roux’s secretary had a dictation plug in her ear. When Lucas walked out of Roux’s office, she pointed a finger at Lucas and held up her hand to stop him, typed another half-sentence, then pulled the plug out of her ear.

  “Detective Sloan stopped by while you were talking,” she said, her dark eyebrows arching. She took a manila file-folder from her desk and handed it to him. “He said fingerprints confirm that it’s Wannemaker. She had a piece of an unfiltered cigarette in her hand, a Camel. They sent it to the lab in Madison. He said to look at the picture.”

  “Thanks.” Lucas turned away and opened the folder.

  “I already looked at it,” she said. “Gross. But interesting.”

  “Umm.” Inside the folder was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a body in a snowdrift. The faceup attitude was almost the same as that of the Wannemaker woman, with the same massive abdominal wound; pieces of a plastic garbage bag were scattered around in the snow. The secretary was looking over his shoulder, and Lucas half-turned. “There’s a state investigator who’s been in and out of here, name of Meagan Connell. Could you find her and ask her to call me?”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Lucas’s office was fifteen feet square, no window, with a door that opened directly to a hallway. He had a wooden desk and chair, three visitor’s chairs, two file cabinets, a bookcase, a computer, and a three-button phone. A map of the Twin Cities metro area covered most of one wall, a cork bulletin board another. He hung his jacket on a wooden hanger and the wooden hanger on a wall hook, sat down, pulled open the bottom desk drawer with his toe,
put his feet on it, and picked up the telephone and dialed. A woman answered.

  “Weather Karkinnen, please.” He didn’t recognize all the nurses’ voices yet.

  “Doctor Karkinnen is in the operating room… Is this Lucas?”

  “Yes. Could you tell her I called? I might be late getting home. I’ll try her there later.”

  He punched in another number, got a secretary. “Lucas Davenport for Sister Mary Joseph.”

  “Lucas, she’s in Rome. I thought you knew.”

  “Shit… Oh, jeez, excuse me.” The secretary was a novice nun.

  “Lucas…” Feigned exasperation.

  “I forgot. When is she back?”

  “Two weeks yet. She’s going on some kind of dig.”

  “Goddamnit… Oh, jeez, excuse me.”

  Sister Mary Joseph-Elle Kruger when they had gone to elementary school together-was an old friend and a shrink, with an interest in murder. She’d helped him out on other cases. Rome. Lucas shook his head and opened the file that Connell had put together.

  The first page was a list of names and dates. The next eight pages were wound photos done during autopsies. Lucas worked through them. They were not identical, but there were inescapable similarities.

  The wound photos were followed by crime-scene shots. The bodies had been dumped in a variety of locations, some urban, some rural. A couple were in roadside ditches, one in a doorway, one under a bridge. One had been simply rolled under a van in a residential neighborhood. There was little effort to hide them. In the background of several, he could see shreds of plastic garbage bags.

  Going back and forth from each report to the relevant photographs, Lucas picked up a thread that seemed to tie them together in his mind. The women had been… littered. They’d been thrown away like used Kleenex. Not with desperation, or fear, or guilt, but with some discretion, as though the killer had been afraid of being caught littering.

  The autopsy reports also showed up differences.

  Rippedwas a subjective description, and some of the wounds looked more like frantic knife strikes than deliberate ripping. Some of the women had been beaten, some had not. Still, taken together, there was a feel about the killings. The feel was generated almost as much by the absence of fact as by the presence of it.