Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

by John Sandford

  “That video of Connell was pretty weird, if she’s the one who tipped them,” Anderson suggested.

  “Aw, they phonied it up,” Roux said, waving her cigarette hand dismissively. “I did the same goddamned thing when I was sourcing off the appropriations committee. They take you out on the street and have you walk into some building so it looks like surveillance film or file stuff. She did it, all right.” Roux looked at Davenport. “I’ve got the press ten minutes from now.”

  “Good luck.” He smiled, a very thin, unpleasant smile.

  “You were never taken off the case, right?” Her left eyebrow went up and down.

  “Of course not,” Lucas said. “Their source was misinformed. I spent the evening working the case and even developed a lead on a new suspect.”

  “Is that right?” The eyebrow again.

  “More or less,” Lucas said. “Junky Doog may be working at a landfill out in Dakota County.”

  “Huh. I’d call that a critical development,” Roux said, showing an inch of satisfaction. “If you can bring him in today, I’ll personally feed it directly and exclusively to the Strib. And anything else you get. Fuck TV3.”

  “If Connell’s their source, they’ll know you’re lying about not calling off the case,” Lester said.

  “Yeah? So what?” Roux said. “What’re they gonna do, argue? Reveal their source? Fuck ’em.”

  “Is Connell still working with me?” Lucas asked.

  “We’ve got no choice,” Roux snapped. “If we didn’t call off the investigation, then she must still be on it, right? I’ll take care of her later.”

  “She’s got no later,” Lucas said.

  “Jesus,” Roux said, stopping in midpace. “Jesus, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  THE TV3 STORY had been a mélange of file video, with commentary by a stunning blond reporter with a distinctly erotic overbite. The reporter, street-dressed in expensive grunge, rapped out long, intense accusations based on Connell’s file; behind her, floodlit in the best Addams Family style, was the redbrick slum building where Mercedes Bey had been found slashed to death. She recounted Bey’s and each of the subsequent murders, reading details from the autopsy reports. She said, “With Chief Roux’s controversial decision to sweep the investigation under the rug . . .” and “With the Minneapolis police abandoning the murder investigation for what appear to be political reasons . . .” and “Will Mercedes Bey’s cry for justice be crushed by the Minneapolis Police Department’s logrolling? Will other innocent Minneapolis-area women be forced to pay the killer’s brutal toll because of this decision? We shall have to wait and see. . . .”

  “Nobody fucks with me like this,” Roux was shouting at her press aide when Lucas left her office with Anderson. “Nobody fucks with me. . . .”

  Anderson grinned at Lucas and said, “Connell does.”

  GREAVE CAUGHT LUCAS in the hall. “I read the file, but it was a waste of time. I could have gotten the executive summary on TV this morning.” He was wearing a loose lavender suit with a blue silk tie.

  “Yeah,” Lucas grunted. He unlocked his office door and Greave followed him inside. Lucas checked his phone for voice mail, found a message, and poked in the retrieval code. Meagan Connell’s voice, humble: “I saw the stories on TV this morning. Does this change anything?” Lucas grinned at the impertinence, and scribbled down the number she left.

  “What’re we doing?” Greave asked.

  “Gonna see if we can find a guy down in Dakota County. Former sex psycho who liked knives.” He’d been punching in Connell’s number as he spoke. The phone rang once, and Connell picked up. “This is Davenport.”

  “Jeez,” Connell said, “I’ve been watching TV. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah. There’re three guys in town don’t know who the source is, and none of them are Roux. You better lay low today. She’s smokin’. In the meantime, we’re back on the case.”

  “Back on.” She made it a statement, with an overtone of satisfaction. No denials. “Is there anything new?”

  He told her about Anderson’s information from the Wisconsin forensic lab.

  “Ligatures? If he tied her up, he must’ve taken her somewhere. That’s a first. I bet he took her to his home. He lives here—he didn’t at the other crime scenes, so he couldn’t take them. . . . Hey, and if you read the Mercedes Bey file, I think she was missing awhile, too, before they found her.”

  “Could be something,” Lucas agreed. “Greave and I are going after Junky Doog. I’ve got a line on him.”

  “I’d like to go.”

  “No. I don’t want you around today,” Lucas said. “It’s best, believe me.”

  “How about if I make some calls?” she asked.

  “To who?”

  “The people on the bookstore list.”

  “St. Paul should be doing that,” Lucas said.

  “Not yet, they aren’t. I’ll get going right now.”

  “Talk to Lester first,” Lucas said. “Get them to clear it with St. Paul. That part of the investigation really does belong to them.”

  “ARE YOU GONNA listen to my story?” Greave asked as they walked out to the Porsche.

  “Do I gotta?”

  “Unless you want to listen to me whine for a couple hours.”

  “Talk,” Lucas said.

  A schoolteacher named Charmagne Carter had been found dead in her bed, Greave said. Her apartment was locked from the inside. The apartment was covered by a security system that used motion and infrared detectors with direct dial-out to an alarm-monitoring company.

  “Completely locked?”

  “Sealed tight.”

  “Why do you think she was murdered?”

  “Her death was very convenient for some bad people.”

  “Say a name.”

  “The Joyce brothers, John and George,” Greave said. “Know them?”

  Lucas smiled. “Excellent,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I played hockey against them when I was a kid,” he said. “They were assholes then, they’re assholes now.”

  The Joyces had almost been rich, Greave said. They’d started by leasing slum housing from the owners—mostly defense attorneys, it seemed—and renting out the apartments. When they’d accumulated enough cash, they bought a couple of flophouses. When housing the homeless became fashionable, they brought the flops up to minimum standards and unloaded them on a charitable foundation.

  “The foundation director came into a large BMW shortly thereafter,” Greave said.

  “Skipped his lunches and saved the money,” Lucas said.

  “No doubt,” Greave said. “So the Joyces took the money and started pyramiding apartments. I’m told they controlled like five to six million bucks at one point. Then the economy fell on its ass. Especially apartments.”

  “Aww.”

  “Anyway, the Joyces saved what they could from the pyramid, and put every buck into this old apartment building on the Southeast Side. Forty units. Wide hallways.”

  “Wide hallways?”

  “Yeah. Wide. The idea was, they’d throw in some new drywall and a bunch of spackling compound and paint, cut down the cupboards, stick in some new low-rider stoves and refrigerators, and sell the place to the city as public housing for the handicapped. They had somebody juiced: the city council was hot to go. The Joyces figured to turn a million and a half on the deal. But there was a fly in the ointment.”

  The teacher, Charmagne Carter, and a dozen other older tenants had been given long-term leases on their apartments by the last manager of the building before the Joyces bought it, Greave said. The manager knew he’d lose his job in the sale, and apparently made the leases as a quirky kind of revenge. The city wouldn’t take the building with the long-term leases in effect. The Joyces bought out a few of the leases, and sued the people who wouldn’t sell. The district court upheld the leases.

  “The leases are $500 a month for fifteen years plus a two-percent rent increase per year, an
d that’s that. They’re great apartments for the price, and the price doesn’t even keep up with inflation,” Greave said. “That’s why these people didn’t want to leave. But they might’ve anyway, because the Joyces gave them a lot of shit. But this old lady wasn’t intimidated, and she held them all together. Then she turned up dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “Last week, she doesn’t make it to school,” Greave continued. “The principal calls, no answer. A cop goes by for a look, can’t get the door open—it’s locked from the inside and there’s no answer on the phone. They finally take the door down, the alarms go off, and there she is, dead in her bed. George Joyce is dabbing the tears out of his eyes and looking like the cat that ate the canary. We figured they killed her.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “Yup. Not a mark on her. The toxicology reports showed just enough sedative for a couple of sleeping pills, which she had a prescription for. There was a beer bottle and a glass on her nightstand, but she’d apparently metabolized the alcohol because there wasn’t any in her blood. Her daughter said she had long-term insomnia, and she’d wash down a couple of sleeping pills with a beer, read until she got sleepy, and then take a leak and go to bed. And that’s exactly what it looks like she did. The docs say her heart stopped. Period. End of story.”

  Lucas shrugged. “It happens.”

  “No history of heart problems in her family. Cleared a physical in February, no problems except the insomnia and she’s too thin—but being underweight goes against the heart thing.”

  “Still, it happens,” Lucas said. “People drop dead.”

  Greave shook his head. “When the Joyces were running the flops, they had a guy whose job it was to keep things orderly. They brought him over to run the apartments. Old friend of yours; you busted him three or four times, according to the NCIC. Remember Ray Cherry?”

  “Cherry? Jesus. He is an asshole. Used to box Golden Gloves when he was a kid. . . .” Lucas scratched the side of his jaw, thinking. “That’s a nasty bunch you got there. Jeez.”

  “So what do I do? I got nothing.”

  “Get a cattle prod and a dark basement. Cherry’d talk after a while.” Lucas grinned through his teeth, and Greave almost visibly shrank from him.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Mmm. I guess not,” Lucas said. Then, brightening: “Maybe she was stabbed with an icicle.”

  “What?”

  “Let me think about it,” Lucas said.

  THERE WERE TWO landfills in Dakota County. Adhering to Murphy’s Law, they went to the wrong one first, then shifted down a series of blacktopped back roads to the correct one. For the last half-mile, they were pinched between two lumbering garbage trucks, gone overripe in the freshening summer.

  “Office,” Greave said, pointing off to the left. He dabbed at the front of his lavender suit, as though he were trying to whisk away the smell of rotten fruit.

  The dump office was a tiny brick building with a large plate-glass window, overlooking a set of truck scales and the lines of garbage haulers rumbling out to the edge of the raw yellow earth of the landfill. Lucas swung that way, dumped the Porsche in a corner of the lot.

  Inside the building, a Formica-topped counter separated the front of the office from the back. A fat guy in a green T-shirt sat at metal desk behind the counter, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He was complaining into a telephone and picking penny-sized flakes of dead skin off his elbows; the heartbreak of psoriasis. A door behind the fat man led to a phone booth-size room with a sink and a toilet. The door was open, and the stool was gurgling. A half-used roll of toilet paper sat on the toilet tank, and another one lay on the floor, where it had soaked full of rusty water.

  “So he says it’ll cost a hunnert just to come out here and look at it,” the fat guy said to the telephone, looking into the bathroom. “I tell you, I run up to Fleet-Farm and I get the parts . . . Well, I know that, Al, but this is drivin’ me fuckin’ crazy.”

  The fat guy put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Be with you in a minute.” Then to the phone, “Al, I gotta go, there’s a couple guys here in suits. Yeah.” He looked up at Lucas and asked, “You EPA?”

  “No.”

  The fat man said, “No,” to the phone, listened, then looked up again. “OSHA?”

  “No. Minneapolis cops.”

  “Minneapolis cops,” the fat man said. He listened for a minute, then looked up. “He sent the check.”

  “What?”

  “He sent the check to his old lady. Put it in the mail this morning, the whole thing.”

  “Terrific,” Lucas said. “I really hope he did, or we’ll have to arrest him for misfeasance to a police officer on official business, a Class Three felony.”

  Greave turned away to smile, while the fat man repeated what Lucas said into the phone, then after a pause said, “That’s what the man said,” and hung up. “He says he really mailed it.”

  “Okay,” said Lucas. “Now, we’re also looking for a guy who supposedly hangs around here. Junky Doog. . . .” The fat man’s eyes slid away, and Lucas said, “So he’s out here?”

  “Junky’s, uh, kind of . . .” The fat man tapped his head.

  “I know. I’ve dealt with him a few times.”

  “Like, recently?”

  “Not since he got out of St. Peter.”

  “I think he got Alzheimer’s,” the fat man said. “Some days, he’s just not here. He forgets to eat, he shits in his pants.”

  “So where is he?” Lucas asked.

  “Christ, I feel bad about the guy. He’s a guy who never caught a break,” the fat man said. “Not one fuckin’ day of his life.”

  “Used to cut people up. You can’t do that.”

  “Yeah, I know. Beautiful women. And I ain’t no softy on crime, but you talk to Junky, and you know he didn’t know any better. He’s like a kid. I mean, he’s not like a kid, because a normal kid wouldn’t do what he did . . . I mean, he just doesn’t know. He’s like a . . . pit bull, or something. It just ain’t his fault.”

  “We take that into account,” said Greave, his voice soft. “Really, we’re concerned about these things.”

  The fat man sighed, struggled to his feet, walked around the counter to a window. He pointed out across the landfill. “See that willow tree? He’s got a place in the woods over there. We ain’t supposed to let him, but whatcha gonna do?”

  LUCAS AND GREAVE scuffed across the yellow-dirt landfill, trying to stay clear of the contrails of dust thrown up by the garbage trucks rumbling by. The landfill looked more like a highway construction site than a dump, with big D-9 Cats laboring around the edges of the raw dirt; and only at the edges did it look like a dump: a jumble of green plastic garbage bags, throwaway diapers, cereal boxes, cardboard, scraps of sheet plastic and metal, all rolled under the yellow dirt, and all surrounded by second-growth forest. Seagulls, crows, and pigeons hung over the litter, looking for food; a bony gray dog, moving jackal-like, slipped around the edges.

  The willow tree was an old one, yellow, with great weeping branches bright green with new growth. Beneath it, two blue plastic tarps had been draped tentlike over tree limbs. Under one of the tarps was a salvaged charcoal grill; under the other was a mattress. A man lay on the mattress, faceup, eyes open, unmoving.

  “Jesus, he’s fuckin’ dead,” Greave said, his voice hushed.

  Lucas stepped off the raw earth, Greave tagging reluctantly behind, followed a narrow trail around a clump of bushes, and was hit by the stink of human waste. The odor was thick, and came from no particular direction. He started breathing through his mouth, and unconsciously reached across to his hipbone and pulled his pistol a quarter inch out of the holster, loosening it, then patted it back. He moved in close before he called out, “Hello. Hey.”

  The man on the mattress twitched, then subsided again. He lay with one arm outstretched, the other over his pelvis. There was something wrong with the outstretched arm, Lucas saw, moving closer. Just off the m
attress, a flat-topped stump was apparently being used as a table. A group of small brown cylinders sat on the stump, like chunks of beef jerky. Beside the stump was a one-gallon aluminum can of paint thinner, top off, lying on its side.

  “Hey. . . .”

  The man rolled up farther, tried to sit up. Junky Doog. He was barefoot. And he had a knife, a long curved pearl-handled number, open, the blade protruding five inches from the handle. Doog held it delicately, like a straight razor, and said, “Gothefuckaway,” one word. Doog’s eyes were a hazy white, as though covered with cataracts, and his face was burned brown. He had no teeth and hadn’t shaved in weeks. As he stood, his graying hair fell down on his shoulders, knotted with grime. He looked worse than Lucas had ever seen him: looked worse than Lucas had ever seen a human being look.

  “There’s shit all over the place,” Greave said. Then: “Watch it, watch the blade. . . .”

  Junky whirled the knife in his fingers with the dexterity of a cheerleader twirling a baton, the steel twinkling in the weak sunlight. “Gothefuckaway,” he screamed. He took a step toward Lucas, fell, tried to catch himself with his free hand, the hand without the knife, screamed again, and rolled onto his back, cradling the free hand. The hand had no fingers. Lucas looked at the stump: the brown things were pieces of finger and several toes.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. He glanced at Greave, whose mouth was hanging open. Junky was weeping, trying to get up, still with the knife flickering in his good hand. Lucas stepped behind him, and when Junky made it to his knees, put a foot between his shoulder blades and pushed him facedown on the worn dirt just off the mattress. Pinning him, he caught the bad arm, and as Junky squirmed, crying, caught the other arm, shook the knife out of his hand. Junky was too weak to resist; weaker than a child.