Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  Back at his office, a message was waiting on voice mail: “This is Connell. I got something. Beep me.”

  Lucas dialed her beeper number, let it beep, and hung up. Junky had been a waste of time, although he might be a bone they could throw the media. Not much of a bone…

  With nothing else to do, he began paging through Connell’s report again, trying to absorb as much of the detail as he could.

  There were several threads that tied all the killings together, but the thread that worried him most was the simplicity of them. The killer picked up a woman, killed her, dumped her. They weren’t all found right away-Connell suggested he might have kept one or two of them for several hours, or even overnight-but in one case, in South Dakota, the body was found forty-five minutes after the woman had been seen alive. He wasn’t pressing his luck by keeping the woman around; they wouldn’t get a break that way.

  He didn’t leave anything behind, either. The actual death scenes might have been in his vehicle-Connell suggested that it was probably a van or a truck, although he might have used a motel if he’d been careful in his choices.

  In one case, in Thunder Bay, there may have been some semen on a dress, but the stain, whatever it was, had been destroyed in a failed effort to extract a blood type. A note from a cop said that it might have been salad dressing. DNA testing had not yet been available.

  Vaginal and anal examinations had come up negative, but there was oral bruising that suggested that some of the women had been orally raped. Stomach contents were negative, which meant that he didn’t ejaculate, ejaculated outside their mouth, or they lived long enough for stomach fluids to destroy the evidence.

  Hair was a different problem. Foreign-hair samples had been collected from several of the bodies, but in most cases where hair was collected, several varieties were found. There was no way to tell that any particular hair came from the killer-or, indeed, that any of the hair was his. Connell had tried to get the existing hair samples cross-matched, but some of it had been either destroyed or lost, or the bureaucratic tangles were so intense that nothing had yet been done. Lucas made a note to search for hair crosses on Wannemaker and Joan Smits. All were relatively recent, with autopsies done by first-rate medical examiners.

  Closing the file, Lucas got out of his chair and wandered around to stare sightlessly out the window, working it through his head. The man never left anything unique. Hair, so far, was the only possibility: they needed a match, and needed it badly. They had nothing else that would tie a specific man to a specific body. Nothing at all.

  The phone rang. “This is Meagan. I’ve got somebody who remembers the killer…”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Late in the afternoon, sun warm on the city sidewalks. Greave didn’t want to go. “Look, I’m not gonna be much help to you. I don’t know what you and Connell are into, where your heads are at-but I really want to do my own thing. And I already been to a fuckin’ dump today.”

  “We need somebody else current with the case,” Lucas said. “You’re the guy. I want somebody else seeing these people, talking to them.”

  Greave rubbed his hair with both hands, then said, “All right, all right, I’ll go along. But-if we’ve got time, we stop at my apartment, right?”

  Lucas shrugged. “If we’ve got time.”

  Connell was waiting on a street corner in Woodbury, under a Quick Wash sign, wearing Puritan black-and-white, still carrying the huge purse. An automotive diagnostic center sprawled down the block.

  “Been here long?” Greave asked. He was still pouting.

  “One minute,” she said. She was strung out, hard energy overlying a deep weariness. She’d been up all night, Lucas thought. Talking to the TV. Dying.

  “Have you talked to St. Paul?” he asked.

  “They’re dead in the water,” Connell said, impatience harsh in her voice. “The cop at the bookstore was one of theirs. He drinks too much, plays around on his wife. A guy over there told me that he and his wife have gotten physical. I guess one of their brawls is pretty famous inside the department-his wife knocked out two of his teeth with an iron, and he was naked chasing her around the backyard with a mop handle, drunk, bleeding all over himself. The neighbors called the cops. They thought she’d shot him. That’s what I hear.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “He’s an asshole, but he’s unlikely,” she said. “He’s an older guy, too heavy, out of shape. He used to smoke Marlboros, but quit ten years ago. The main thing is, St. Paul is covering like mad. They’ve been called out to his house a half-dozen times, but there’s never been a charge.”

  Lucas shook his head, looked at the diagnosis center. “What about this woman?”

  “Mae Heinz. Told me on the phone that she’d seen a guy with a beard. Short. Strong-looking.”

  Lucas led the way inside, a long office full of parts books, tires, cutaway muffler displays, and the usual odor of antifreeze and transmission fluid. Heinz was a cheerful, round-faced woman with pink skin and freckles. She sat wide-eyed behind the counter as Connell sketched in the murder. “I was talking to that woman,” Heinz said. “I remember her asking the question…”

  “But you didn’t see her go out with a man?”

  “She didn’t,” Heinz said. “She went out alone. I remember.”

  “Were there a lot of men there?”

  “Yeah, there were quite a few. There was a guy with a ponytail and a beard and his name was Carl, he asked a lot of questions about pigs and he had dirty fingernails, so I wasn’t too interested. Everybody seemed to know him. There was a computer guy, kind of heavyset blond, I heard him talking to somebody.”

  “Meyer,” Connell said to Lucas. “Talked to him this morning. He’s out.”

  “Kind of cute,” Heinz said, looking at Connell and winking. “If you like the intellectual types.”

  “What about…?”

  “There was a guy who was a cop,” Heinz said.

  “Got him,” Lucas said.

  “Then there were two guys there together, and I thought they might be gay. They stood too close to each other.”

  “Know their names?”

  “No idea,” she said. “But they were very well-dressed. I think they were in architecture or landscaping or something like that, because they were talking to the author about sustainable land use.”

  “And the guy with the beard,” Connell said, prompting her.

  “Yeah. He came in during the talk. And he must’ve left right away, because I didn’t see him later. I sorta looked. Jesus-I could of been dead. I mean, if I’d found him.”

  “Was he tall, short, fat, skinny?”

  “Big guy. Not tall, but thick. Big shoulders. Beard. I don’t like beards, but I liked the shoulders.” She winked at Connell again, and Lucas covered a grin by scratching his face. “But the thing is,” she said to Connell, “you asked about smoking, and he snapped a cigarette into the street. I saw him do it. Snapped a cigarette and then came in the door.”

  Lucas looked at Connell and nodded. Heinz caught it. “Was that him?” she asked excitedly.

  “Would you know him if we showed you a picture of him?” Lucas asked.

  She cocked her head and looked to one side, as though she were running a video through her head. “I don’t know,” she said after a minute. “Maybe, if I saw an actual picture. I can remember the beard and the shoulders. His beard looked sort of funny. Short, but really dense, like fur… Kind of unpleasant, I thought. Maybe fake. I can’t remember much about his face. Knobby, I think.”

  “Dark beard? Light?”

  “Mmm… dark. Kind of medium, really. Pretty average hair, I think… brown.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “Let’s nail this down. And let’s get you with an artist. Do you have time to come to Minneapolis?”

  “Sure. Right now? Let me tell my boss.”

  As the woman went to talk to her boss about leaving, Connell caught Lucas’s sleeve. “Gotta be him. Smokes, a
rrives after the talk, then leaves right away. Wannemaker is lingering after the talk, but suddenly leaves, like somebody showed up.”

  “Wouldn’t count on it,” Lucas said. But he was counting on it. He felt it, just a sniff of the killer, just a whiff of the track. “We got to put her through the sex files.”

  The woman came back, animated. “Let’s go. I’ll follow you over.”

  Greave wanted to stop at the apartment complex so Lucas could look at the locked-room mystery. “C’mon, man, it’s twenty fuckin’ minutes. We’ll be back before she’s done with the artist,” he said. A pleading note entered his voice. “C’mon, man, this is killing me.”

  Lucas glanced at him, hands clutched, the too-hip suit. He sighed and said, “All right. Twenty minutes.”

  They took I-94 back to Minneapolis, but turned south instead of north toward City Hall. Greave directed him through a web of streets to a fifties-era mid-rise concrete building with a hand-carved natural-wood sign on the narrow front lawn that had a loon on top and the name “Eisenhower Docks” beneath the bird. A fat man pushed a mower down the lawn away from them, leaving behind the smell of gas and cheap cigar.

  “Eisenhower Docks?” Lucas said as they got out.

  “If you stand on the roof you can see the river,” Greave said. “And they figured ‘Eisenhower’ makes old people feel good.”

  The man pushing the lawn mower made a turn at the end of the lawn and started back; Lucas recognized Ray Cherry, forty pounds heavier than he’d been when he’d fought in Golden Gloves tournaments in the sixties. Most of the weight had gone to his gut, which hung over beltless Oshkosh jeans. His face had gone from square to blocky, and a half-dozen folds of fat rolled down the back of his neck to his shoulders. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He saw Davenport and Greave, pushed the lawn mower up to their feet, and killed the engine.

  “What’re you doing, Davenport?”

  “Lookin’ around, Ray,” Lucas said, smiling. “How’ve you been? You got fat.”

  “Y’ain’t a cop no more, so get the fuck off my property.”

  “I’m back on the force, Ray,” Lucas said, still smiling. Seeing Ray made him happy. “You oughta read the papers. Deputy chief in charge of finding out how you killed this old lady.”

  A look crossed Cherry’s face, a quick shadow, and Lucas recognized it, had seen it six or seven hundred or a thousand times: Cherry had done it. Cherry wiped the expression away, tried a look of confusion, took a soiled rag out of his pocket, and blew his nose. “Bullshit,” he said finally.

  “Gonna get you, Ray,” Lucas said; the smile stayed but his voice had gone cold. “Gonna get the Joyces, too. Gonna put you in Stillwater Prison. You must be close to fifty, Ray. First-degree murder’ll get you… shit, they just changed the law. Tough luck. You’ll be better’n eighty before you get out.”

  “Fuck you, Davenport,” Cherry said. He fired up the mower.

  “Come and talk to me, Ray,” Lucas said over the engine noise. “The Joyces’ll sell you out the minute they think it’ll get them a break. You know that. Come and talk, and maybe we can do a deal.”

  “Fuck you,” Cherry said, and he mowed on down the yard.

  “Lovely fellow,” Greave said in a fake English accent.

  “He did it,” Lucas said. He turned to Greave and Greave took a step back: Lucas’s face was like a block of stone.

  “Huh?”

  “He killed her. Let’s see her apartment.”

  Lucas started for the apartment door, and Greave trotted after him. “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute…” There were a thousand books in the apartment, along with a rolled-up Oriental carpet tied with brown twine, and fifteen cardboard cartons from U-Haul, still flat. A harried middle-aged woman sat on a piano bench, a handkerchief around her head; her face was wind-and sunburned, like a gardener’s, and was touched with grief. Charmagne Carter’s daughter, Emily.

  “… Soon as they said we could take it out. If we don’t, we have to keep paying rent,” she told Greave. She looked around. “I don’t know what to do with the books. I’d like to keep them, but there’re so many.”

  Lucas had been looking at the books: American literature, poetry, essays, history. Works on feminism, arranged in a way that suggested they were a conscious collection rather than a reading selection. “I could take some of them off your hands,” he said. “I mean, if you’d like to name a price. I’d take the poetry.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Carter asked, as Greave watched him curiously.

  “There are…” He counted quickly. “… thirty-seven volumes, mostly paper. I don’t think any of them are particularly rare. How about a hundred bucks?”

  “Let me look through them. I’ll give you a call.”

  “Sure.” He turned away from the books, more fully toward her. “Was your mother depressed or anything?”

  “If you’re asking if she committed suicide, she didn’t. She wouldn’t give the Joyces the pleasure, for one thing. But basically, she liked her life,” Carter said. She became more animated as she remembered. “We had dinner the night before and she was talking about this kid in her class, black kid, she thinks he’ll be a novelist but he needs encouragement… No way’d she kill herself. Besides, even if she wanted to, how’d she do it?”

  “Yeah. That’s a question,” Lucas said.

  “The only thing wrong with Mom was her thyroid. She had a little thyroid problem; it was overactive and she had trouble keeping her weight up,” Carter said. “And her insomnia. That might have been part of the thyroid problem.”

  “She was actually ill, then?” Lucas glanced sideways at Greave.

  “No. No, she really wasn’t. Not even bad enough to take pills. She was just way too thin. She weighed ninety-nine pounds and she was five-six. That’s below her ideal weight, but it’s not emaciated or anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now that kid isn’t gonna get help, the novelist,” Emily said, and a tear started down her cheek.

  Greave patted her on the shoulder-Officer Friendly-and Lucas turned away, hands in pockets, stepping toward the door. Nothing here.

  “You ought to talk to Bob, next apartment down the hall,” Emily said. She picked up a roll of packaging tape and a box, punched it into a cube. She stripped off a length of tape, and it sounded as if she were tearing a sheet. “He came in just before you got here.”

  “Bob was a friend of Charmagne’s,” Greave explained to Lucas. “He was here the night she died.”

  Lucas nodded. “All right. I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “Thanks. I hope you get those… those fuckers,” Emily said, her voice dropping into a hiss.

  “You think she was murdered?”

  “Something happened,” she said.

  Bob Wood was another teacher, general science at Central in St. Paul. He was thin, balding, worried.

  “We’ll all go, now that Charmagne’s gone. The city’s going to give us some moving money, but I don’t know. Prices are terrible.”

  “Did you hear anything that night? Anything?”

  “Nope. I saw her about ten o’clock; we were taking our aluminum cans down for recycling and we came up in the elevator together. She was going off to bed right then.”

  “Wasn’t depressed…”

  “No, no, she was pretty upbeat,” Wood said. “I’ll tell you something I told the other policemen: when she closed the door, I heard the lock snap shut. You could only throw the bolt from inside, and you had to do it with a key. I know, because when she got it, she was worried about being trapped inside by a fire. But then Cherry scared her one day-just looked at her, I guess, and scared her-and she started locking the door. I was here when they beat it down. They had to take a piece of the wall with it. They painted, but you can kind of see the outline there.”

  The wall showed the faint dishing of a plaster patch. Lucas touched it and shook his head.

  “If anything had happened in there, I would have heard it,” Wo
od said. “We share a bedroom wall, and the airconditioning had been out for a couple of days. There was no noise. It was hot and spooky-quiet. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “So you think she just died?”

  Wood swallowed twice, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Jeez. I don’t know. If you know Cherry, you gotta think… Jeez.”

  In the street, Lucas and Greave watched a small girl ride down the sidewalk on a tiny bicycle, fall down, pick it up, start over, and fall down again. “She needs somebody to run behind her,” Greave said.

  Lucas grunted. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Big philosopher, huh?”

  Lucas said, “Wood and Carter shared a wall.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you looked at Wood?”

  “Yeah. He thinks newspaper comics are too violent.”

  “But there might be something there. What can you do with a shared wall? Stick a needle through it, pump in some gas or something?”

  “Hey. Davenport. There’s no toxicology,” Greave said with asperity. “There’s no fuckin’ toxicology. You look up toxicology in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of the old lady and it says, ‘Not Her.’ “

  “Yeah, yeah…”

  “She wasn’t poisoned, gassed, stabbed, shot, strangled, beaten to death… what else is there?”

  “How about electrocuted?” Lucas suggested.

  “Hmph. How’d they do it?”

  “I don’t know. Hook some wires up to her bed, lead them out under a door, and when she gets in bed, zap, and then they pull the wires out.”

  “Pardon me while I snicker,” Greave said.

  Lucas looked back at the apartment building. “Let me think about it some more.”

  “But Cherry did it?”

  “Yup.” They looked down the lawn. Cherry was at the other end, kneeling over a quiet lawn mower, fiddling, watching them. “You can take it to the bank.”

  Lucas glanced at his watch as they got back to the car: they’d been at the apartments for almost an hour. “Connell’s gonna tear me up,” he said.

  “Ah, she’s a bite in the ass,” Greave said.

  They bumped into Mae Heinz in the parking ramp, getting into her car. Lucas beeped the horn, called out, “How’d it go?”