Christ: she’d seen him close, from two inches.
Another flash.
Man’s voice: “Get away from that woman, police are coming, get away.”
And another light, steady this time: somebody was making movies.
The rage roared out of him, like fire; the knife with a mind of its own.
Koop grabbed the woman by the throat, lifted her off the sidewalk, the woman kicking like a chicken.
And the knife took her. She slipped away from him, onto the sidewalk, almost as though she had fainted.
Koop looked down. His hands were covered with blood; blood ran down the sidewalk, black in the streetlight. . . .
“Get away from that woman, get away. . . .”
No need to be told. Panic was on him, and he ran to the truck, climbed in, gunned it.
Around the corner, around another.
Two minutes, up the interstate ramp. Cop cars everywhere, down below lights flashing, sirens screeching. Koop took the truck off the interstate, back into the neighborhoods, and pushed south. Side streets and alleys all the way.
He stayed inside for ten minutes, then jumped on the Crosstown Expressway for a quick dash to the airport. Took a ticket, went up the ramp, parked. Crawled in the back.
“Motherfucker,” he breathed. Safe for the moment. He laughed, drank the last mouthful from the pint bottle.
He got out of the truck, hitched his pants, walked around behind, and climbed in.
Safe, for the time being.
He rolled up his jogging jacket to use as a pillow, lay down, and went to sleep.
Eloise Miller was dead in a pool of black blood before the cops got there.
In St. Paul, a patrol cop looked at Ivanhoe the dog and wondered who in the fuck would do that. . . .
26
“WE GOT PICTURES of him,” Connell said. Lucas found her on the sixth floor, in the doorway of a small apartment, walking away from a gray-haired woman. Connell was as cranked as Lucas had ever seen her, a cassette of thirty-five-millimeter film in her fist. “Pictures of him and his truck.”
“I heard we got movies,” Lucas said.
“Aw, man, come on . . .” Connell led him down the stairs. “You gotta see this.”
On four, two cops were talking to a thin man in a bathrobe. “Could you run the tape?” Connell asked.
One of the cops glanced at Lucas and shrugged. “How’s it going, chief?”
“Okay. What’ve we got?”
“Mr. Hanes here took a videotape of the attack,” the older of the two cops said, pointing a pencil at the man in the bathrobe.
“I didn’t think,” the man said. “There wasn’t any time.”
The younger cop pushed the button on the VCR. The picture came up, clear and steady: a picture of a bright light shining into a window. At the bottom of it, what appeared to be two sets of legs doing a dance.
They all stood and watched silently as the tape rolled on: they could see nothing on the other side of the window except the legs. They saw the legs only for a few seconds.
“If we get that downtown, we should be able to get a height estimate on the guy,” Lucas said.
The bathrobe man said, mournful as a bloodhound, “I’m sorry.”
The older cop tried to explain. “See, the light reflected almost exactly back at the lens, so whatever he pointed it at is behind the light.”
“I was so freaked out. . . .”
In the hallway, Lucas said, “How do we know we don’t have the same thing on the film?”
“ ’Cause she went out on her terrace and shot it,” Connell said. “There was no window to reflect back at her . . . There’s a one-hour development place at Midway, open all night.”
“Isn’t there a better—”
She was shaking her head. “No. I’ve been told that the automated processes are the most reliable for this Kodak stuff. One is about as good as another.”
“Did you see enough of the woman on the street?” Lucas asked.
“I saw too much,” Connell said. She looked up at Lucas. “He’s flipped out. He started out as this sneaky, creepy killer, really careful. Now he’s Jack the Ripper.”
“How about you?”
“I flipped out a long time ago,” she said.
“I mean . . . are you hanging in there?”
“I’m hanging in,” she said.
TH EQUICK-SHOT OPERATOR was by himself, processing film. He could stop everything else, he said, and have prints in fifteen minutes, no charge.
“There’s no way they can get messed up?” Lucas asked.
The operator, a bony college kid in a Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt, shrugged. “One in a thousand—maybe less than that. The best odds you’re going to get.”
Lucas handed him the cassette. “Do it.”
SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER, the kid said, “The problem is, she was trying to take a picture from a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet away, at night, with this little teeny flash. The flash is supposed to light up somebody’s face at ten feet.”
“There’s nothing fuckin’ there,” Connell shouted at him, spit flying.
“Yeah, there is—you can see it,” the kid said, indignant, peering at one of the almost-black prints. That particular print had a yellow smudge in the middle of it, what might have been a streetlight, above what might have been the roof of a truck. “That’s exactly what you get when you take pictures in the dark with one of those little fuckin’ cameras.”
There was something going on in the prints, but they couldn’t tell what. Just a lot of smudges that might have been a woman being stabbed to death.
“I DON’T BELIEVE it,” Connell said. She slumped in the car seat, sick.
“I don’t believe in eyewitnesses or cameras,” Lucas said.
Another three blocks and Connell said suddenly, urgently, “Pull over, will you? Right there, at the corner.”
“What?” Lucas pulled over.
Connell got out and vomited. Lucas climbed out, walked around to her. She looked up weakly, tried to smile. “Getting worse,” she said. “We gotta hurry, Lucas.”
“W E ’ R E TALKING FIRESTORM,” Roux said. She had two cigarettes lit at the same time, the one on the window ledge burning futilely by itself.
“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “We’ve still got the surveillance at Sara Jensen’s. There’s a good chance he’ll come in.”
“This week,” Roux said. “Gotta be this week.”
“Very soon,” Lucas said.
“Promise?”
“No.”>
LUCAS SPENT THE day following the Eloise Miller routine, reading histories, calling cops. Connell did the same, and so did Greave. Results from the street investigation began coming in. The guy was big and powerful, batted the woman like a rag doll.
There were three eyewitnesses: one said the killer had a beard, the other two said he did not. Two said he wore a hat, the other said he had black hair. All three said he drove a truck, but they didn’t know what color. Something and white. There wasn’t much dirt in the street to pick up tire tracks, even if two cop cars and an ambulance hadn’t driven over them.
The autopsy came in. Nothing good. No DNA source. No prints. Still checking for hair.
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, he gave up. He went home, took a nap. Weather got home at six.
At seven, they lay on top of the bedsheet, sweat cooling on their skin. Outside the window, which was cracked just an inch or two, they could hear the cars passing in the street a hundred feet away, and sometimes, quietly, the muttering of voices.
Weather rolled up on her elbow. “I’m amazed at the way you can separate yourself from what you’re doing,” she said. She traced a circle on his chest. “If I was as stuck on a problem as you are, I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t do this.”
“Waiting is part of the deal,” Lucas said. “It has always been that way. You can’t eat until the cake is baked.”
“People get killed while you’re waiti
ng,” she said.
“People die for bad reasons all the time,” Lucas said. “When we were running around in the woods last winter, I begged you to stay away. You refused to stay away, so I’m alive. If you hadn’t been out there . . .” He touched the scar on his throat.
“Not the same thing,” she objected. She touched the scar. Most of it, she’d made herself. “People die all the time because of happenstance. Two cars run into each other, and somebody dies. If the driver of one of them had hesitated five seconds at the last stoplight, they wouldn’t have collided, and nobody would die. That’s just life. Chance. But what you do . . . somebody might die because you can’t solve a problem that’s solvable. Or like last winter, you seemed to reach out and solve a problem that was unsolvable, and so people who probably would have died, lived.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but she patted him on the chest to stop him. “This isn’t criticism. Just observation. What you do is really . . . bizarre. It’s more like magic, or palm reading, than science. I do science. Everybody I work with does science. That’s routine. What you do . . . it’s fascinating.”
Lucas giggled, a startling sound, high-pitched, unlike anything she’d ever heard from him. Not a chuckle. A giggle. She peered down at him.
“Goddamn, I’m glad you moved in with me, Karkinnen,” he said. “Conversations like this could keep me awake for weeks at time. You’re better than speed.”
“I’m sorry. . . .”
“No, no.” He pushed up on his elbow to face her. “I need this. Nobody ever looked into me before. I think a guy could get old and rusty if nobody ever looked into him.”
WHEN WEATHER WENT into the bathroom, Lucas got up and wandered around, naked, hunting from room to room, not knowing exactly what for. A picture of the dead Eloise Miller hung in his mind’s eye: a woman on the way to feed a friend’s dog while the friend was out of town. She’d made that walk, late at night, just once in her life. Once too often.
Lucas could hear Weather running water in the bathroom, and thought guiltily about the attractions of Jan Reed. He sighed, and pushed the reporter out of his mind. That’s not what he was supposed to be thinking about.
They knew so much about the killer, he thought. Generally what he looked like, his size, his strength, what he did, the kinds of vehicles he drove, if indeed he drove that Taurus sedan in addition to the truck. Anderson was now cross-indexing joint ownerships, green Taurus sedans against pickups.
But so much of what they knew was conflicting, and conflicts were devastating in a trial.
Depending on who you believed, the killer was a white, short or tall police officer (or maybe a convict), a cocaine user who drove either a blue-and-white or red-and-white pickup truck, or a green Taurus sedan, and he either wore glasses or he didn’t, and while he probably wore a beard at one time, he might have shaved it off by now. Or maybe not.
Terrific.
And even if that could be sorted out, they had not a single convicting fact. Maybe the lab would come through, he thought. Maybe they’d pull some DNA out of a cigarette, and maybe they’d find the matching DNA signature in the state’s DNA bank. It had been done.
And maybe pigs would fly.
Lucas wandered into the dining room, tinkled a few keys on the piano. Weather had offered to teach him how to play—she’d taught piano in college, as an undergraduate—but he said he was too old.
“You’re never too old,” she’d said. “Here, have some more wine.”
“I am too old. I can’t learn that kind of stuff anymore. My brain doesn’t absorb it,” Lucas said, taking the wine. “But I can sing.”
“You can sing?” She was amazed. “Like what?”
“I sang ‘I Love Paris’ in the senior concert in high school,” he said, somewhat defensively.
“Do I believe you?” she asked.
“Well, I did.” He sipped.
And she sipped, then put the glass on a side table and rummaged, somewhat tipsily, through the piano bench and finally said, “Ah-ha, she calls his bluff. I have here the music to ‘I Love Paris.’ ”
She played and he sang; remarkably well, she said. “You have a really nice baritone.”
“I know. My music teacher said I had a large, vibrant instrument.”
“Ah. Was she attractive?”
“It was a he,” Lucas said. “Here. Have some more wine.”
LUCAS STRUCK A few more notes, then wandered back toward the bedroom, thinking again about his eyewitnesses. They had more than a dozen of them now. Several had been too far away to see much; a couple of them had been so scared that they were more confusing than helpful; two men had seen the killer’s face during the attack on Evan Hart. One said he was white, the other said he was a light-skinned black.
And some had seen the killer too long ago, and remembered nothing about him at all. . . .
WEATHER WAS NAKED, bent over the sink, her hair full of shampoo. “If you touch my butt, I’ll wait until you’re asleep and I’ll disfigure you,” she said.
“Cut off your nose to spite your face, huh?”
“We’re not talking noses,” Weather said, scrubbing.
He leaned in the doorway. “There’s something women don’t understand about good asses,” he said. “A really good ass is an object of such sublime beauty, that it’s almost impossible to keep your hands off.”
“Try to think of a way,” she said.
Lucas watched for a moment, then said, “Speaking of asses, some deaf people thought they saw the killer’s truck. They were sure of it. But they gave us an impossible license plate number. A number that’s not issued—ass, as in A-S-S.” He touched her ass.
“I swear to God, Lucas, just ’cause you’ve got me helpless . . .”
“Why would they be so sure, and then have such a bad number?”
Weather stopped scrubbing for a moment and said, “A lot of deaf people don’t read English.”
“What?”
She looked at him from under her armpit, her head still in the sink. “They don’t read English. It’s very difficult to learn English if you’re nonhearing. A lot of them don’t bother. Or they learn just enough to read menus and bus signs.”
“Then what do they do? To communicate?”
“They sign,” she said.
“I mean, communicate with the rest of us.”
“A lot of them aren’t interested in communicating with the rest of us. Deaf people have a complete culture: they don’t need us.”
“They can’t read or write?” Lucas was astonished.
“Not English. A lot of them can’t, anyway. Is that important?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I’ll find out.”
“Tonight?”
“Did you have other plans?” He touched her ass again.
She said, “Not really. I’ve got to get to bed.”
“Maybe I’ll make a call,” he said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.”
ANNA LISE JONES WAS a sergeant with the St. Paul Police Department. Lucas got her at home.
“We had an intern do the translating. A student at St. Thomas. He seemed to know what he was doing,” she said.
“Don’t you have a regular guy?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, but he was out.”
“How do I get the names of these people? The deaf people?”
“Jeez, at this time of night? I’d have to call around,” Jones said.
“Could you?”
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK he had a name and address off St. Paul Avenue. Maybe two miles away. He got his jacket. Weather, in bed, called sleepily, “Are you going out?”
“Just for a while. I gotta nail this down.”
“Be careful. . . .”
The houses along St. Paul Avenue were modest postwar cottages, added-to, modified, with small, well-kept yards and garages out back. Lucas ran down the house numbers until he found the right one. There were lights in the window. He walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell. After a moment,
he heard voices and then a shadow crossed the picture-window drapes, and the front door opened a foot, a chain across the gap. A small, elderly man peered out. “Yes?”
“I’m Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Lucas showed his ID card and the door opened wider. “Does Paul Johnston live here?”
“Yes. Is he all right?”
“There’s no problem,” Lucas said. “But he went in and talked to the St. Paul police about a case we’re working on, and I need to talk to him about it.”
“At this time of night?”
“I’m sorry, but it’s pretty urgent,” Lucas said.
“Well, I suppose he’s down at the Warrens’.” He turned and called back into the house, “Shirley? Is Paul at the Warrens’?”
“I think so.” A woman in a pink housecoat walked into the front room, clutching the housecoat closed. “What happened?”
“This is a policeman, he’s looking for Paul. . . .”
THE WARRENS WERE a family of deaf people in Minneapolis, and their home was an informal gathering spot for the deaf. Lucas parked two houses away, at the end of a line of cars centered on the Warrens’ house. A man and a woman were sitting on the front stoop, drinking beer, watching him. He walked up the sidewalk and said, “I’m looking for Paul Johnston?”
The two looked at each other, and then the man signed at him, but Lucas shook his head. The man shrugged and made a croaking sound, and Lucas took out his ID, showed them, pointed toward the house and said, louder, “Paul Johnston?”
The woman sighed, held up a finger, and disappeared inside. A moment later she came back, followed by a stringy blond teenage girl with a narrow face and small gray eyes. The first woman sat down again, while the blonde said, “Can I help you?”
“I’m a Minneapolis police officer and I’m looking for a Paul Johnston who contacted the St. Paul police about a case we’re working on.”
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