Mail walked in the thin oval of illumination from the flashlight, smelling the corn and the dust; and when he crossed the crest of the hill and turned the light toward it, the old farmhouse came up like a witch-house in a Gothic novel, glowing with a faint, ghostly luminescence often found in old clapboard houses that had once been painted white.
As Mail passed the porch, on the way around back, a nervous chill trickled down his spine: a finger of graveyard fear as he passed the cistern. Scratching sounds? No.
He clumped inside.
GRACE HEARD HIM coming and pushed herself against the wall. She wasn’t sure that her mother had heard: Andi had been lying on the mattress for hours, one arm crooked over her eyes, not asleep, but not conscious. She had drifted away again, after the last attack. Grace had tried to rouse her, but Andi wouldn’t respond.
Grace had decided to go after Mail.
Mail had attacked her mother four times now, battering her each time, raping her after the beating. She could hear the crack of his hand through the steel door, and thinner, weaker sounds that must have been her mother’s voice, pleading. He slapped, Andi had told her. Hit her with an open hand, but it was like being hit with a board. This last time, something had broken, and Andi was out of it, Grace thought.
She’d have to go after Mail, even if she had nothing but her fingernails. He was killing her mother, and when he’d done it, she’d go too.
“No.” Andi pushed herself up. Blood ringed her nostrils, a dark reddish-black crust. Her eyes were like holes, her lips swollen. But she’d heard the footsteps, and roused herself, half-turning to croak the single warning word.
“I have to do something,” Grace whispered. He was coming.
“No.” Andi shook her head. “I don’t think…I don’t think he’ll do anything when I’m like this.”
“He’s killing you. I thought you were dying already,” Grace whispered. She was crouched on the back corner of the mattress, like a cowering dog at the pound, Andi thought. The girl’s eyes were too bright, her lips pale, her skin stretched thin like tracing paper.
“He might be, but we can’t fight him yet. He’s too big. We need…something.” She pushed herself up, feeling the impact of Mail’s footsteps on the stairs. “We need something we can kill him with.”
“What?” Grace looked wildly around the cell. There was nothing.
“We have to think…but I can’t think. I can’t think.” Andi put her hands to her head, at the temples, as though trying to hold her skull together.
He was close, on the stairs. “You have to lie down, just like you were,” Grace said fiercely. “With your hands over your eyes. Don’t say anything, no matter what.”
She pushed her mother down, and they heard the slide-lock pulled back. Andi, too weak to argue, and without the time, nodded and put her arm up and closed her eyes. Grace pulled back in the corner, her feet pulled tight to her thighs, her arms around her legs, looking up at the door.
Mail peered through the crack, saw them, undid the chain, opened the door. “Get up,” he said to Andi.
Grace, frightened, said, “You did something to her. She hasn’t moved since you left.”
That pushed him back.
Mail’s forehead wrinkled and he said, harshly, “Get up,” and he pushed Andi’s foot with his own.
Andi rolled half over, then pulled herself away from him, toward the wall, like a cartoon woman dying of thirst in a desert. She inched away, pathetic.
“You really hurt her, this time,” Grace said, and she began to bawl.
“Shut up,” Mail snarled. “Shut up, goddamnit, little fuckin’…whiner…”
He took a step toward her, as though to hit her, and Grace choked off the sobs and tried to pull herself tighter to the wall. Mail hesitated, then pushed Andi again. “Get up.”
Andi rolled some more, and began to inch away again. Mail caught her feet and twisted them, and she flipped onto her back. “Water,” she whimpered.
“What?”
Her eyes closed and she lay limp as a rag. Grace began bawling again, and Mail shouted, “Shut up, I said,” and backed away, uncertain now.
“You hurt her,” Grace said.
“She wasn’t like this when I put her back in,” Mail said. “She was walking.”
“I think you did something to her…mind. She talks to Genevieve and Daddy. Where’s Gen? What did you do with her? Is she with Daddy?”
“Ah, fuck,” Mail said, exasperated. He probed Andi again, pushing her left foot with his own. “You’d best get better, ’cause I’m not done with you yet,” he said. “We’re not done, at all.”
He backed out of the room, and said to Grace, “Give her some water.”
“I do,” Grace sobbed. “But then she…wets on the floor.”
“Ah, for Christ sakes,” Mail said. The door slammed, but the bolt didn’t slide shut. Grace held her breath. Had he forgotten? No. The door opened again, and Mail threw in a towel.
Grace had seen it, when he’d taken her mother out of the cell, lying on the floor beside the mattress he used when he raped her. “Clean her up,” Mail said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
The door closed again, and they heard his footsteps on the stairs. They waited, unmoving, but he didn’t return.
“That was great,” Andi whispered. She pushed herself up and felt the tears running down her face and she actually smiled through her cracked lips. “Grace, that was wonderful.”
“That’s once we beat him,” Grace whispered back.
“We can do it again,” Andi said. She propped herself up and tilted her head back. “But we’ve got to find something.”
“Find what?”
“A weapon. Something we can kill him with.”
“In here?” Grace looked around the barren cell, her eyes wide but not quite hopeless. “Where?”
“We’ll find something,” Andi said. “We have to.”
MAIL TOOK THE van—the van was blue now, and the sign on the side doors was clear: “Computer Roses”—and rode it down to Highway Three and I-494, filled the tank, and put a little more than four gallons in the red, five-gallon plastic gas can in the back. Inside the convenience store, he bought two quarts of motor oil and paid for it all with a twenty.
He took forty minutes riding out to Minnetonka, thinking it over. Mail thought a lot about crime, about the way things worked. If he were in a movie, he’d break into the boat works, use a flashlight, go through the files, and then play a breathless game of hide-and-seek with a security guard.
But this wasn’t a movie, and his best protection was simply timing and invisibility.
Irv’s Boat Works was tucked into a curve in the road just off the lake, along with a shabby gas station, a grocery store, and an ice cream parlor, all closed. He drove by once, looking for movement, looking for cops. He saw two moving cars, one in front and one behind, and no cops. Nobody walking. The only light in the buildings was in an ice cream freezer.
He drove a half-mile down the road to an intersection, did a U-turn, and went back the same way. Another car passed; a house a quarter mile past the station was fully lit, although he didn’t see anybody around. He drove out to a Super-America store, parked, walked around to the back of the van, and let himself inside. He took just a minute to mix the motor oil with the gas, the fumes giving him a small mental charge: he hadn’t done this since he got out of the hospital—he didn’t need it anymore—but it still held something for him.
When he finished mixing, he went into the Tom Thumb and bought a cheap plastic cigarette lighter and a Coke. He already had a role of duct tape in the glove compartment. Back in the truck, he put the tape on the lighter so it’d be ready, opened the Coke and put it in the van’s can-holder, and drove back toward Irv’s.
The place was little more than a wooden shack, with a dock, gas pump, and launching ramp out back. Twenty aluminum fishing boats bobbed off the dock. Inside, he remembered a counter with a cash register, a half-dozen tanks f
or minnows and shiners, a few pieces of cheap fishing gear in wall racks, and a big, loose pile of green flotation cushions and orange round-the-neck life preservers. The whole place smelled of gas and oil, waterweed and rot.
Mail drove by once more, did his U-turn, looked for cars coming up behind, waited until one passed, and then followed it back to Irv’s. Nothing out ahead. He swerved into the parking lot, stopped just outside the dusty picture-window where the fading red stick-up letters said, IRV’S BOAT WORK with a missing final “s.”
He left the engine running, walked quickly around to the back of the van, took a jack-knife out of his pocket, and cut a grapefruit-size hole in the top of the plastic gas can. The smell of gas was thick. He picked the can up, ready to ease it out the door, when headlights came up. He stopped, listening, but the car purred past.
He climbed out, got the lighter off the passenger seat, turned it up full, taped the sparking-lever down so he had a miniature torch, then picked up the five-gallon jug and heaved it through the window.
The window shattered with the sound of a load of dishes dropped in a diner: but nobody yelled, nobody came running. He tossed the lighter after the gas, and the building went up with a hollow whoom. By the time he was out of the parking lot, the fire was all over the inside of the building.
Damn. Wished he could stay.
He watched the building in the rearview mirror, until it disappeared behind a curve. When he was a kid, he’d torched a house in North St. Paul and had come back to sit on an elementary school embankment to watch the action. He liked the flames. Even more, he’d liked the excitement and companionship of the crowd, gathered to watch the fire. He felt like an entertainer, a movie star: he’d done this.
And listening, back then, he realized that everybody could find a little joy in watching one of their neighbors get burned out.
On the way back home, under the night sky, he thought about Andi Manette. Maybe this break was for the better. He’d been fucking her a lot, he could use the rest.
Tomorrow, though, he’d need her—need one of them, anyway.
He could feel that already.
11
LUCAS GOT UP a few minutes after Weather, struggling with the early hour, the morning light pale in the east windows. Weather put breakfast together while Lucas cleaned up. When he was dressed, Lucas got the ring from his sock drawer, fiddled with it, then dropped it in his pants pocket as he had almost every day for a month.
In the kitchen, Weather was standing at the sink, humming to herself as she sliced the orange heart out of a cantaloupe. Lucas still felt like he’d been hit in the forehead with a gavel.
“Anything good today?” he asked. His morning voice sounded like a rusty gate, but she was used to it.
“Not especially interesting,” she said. “The first one is a woman with facial scarring from an electrical shock.” She touched her cheek in front of her ear, to indicate where the scarring was. “I’m going to take out as much of the scar as I can—all of it, I hope.”
“Sounds like she needs a plastic surgeon,” Lucas said. He pushed two slices of bread into the toaster and started looking for the cinnamon.
“Sometimes I am a plastic surgeon,” Weather said. “We do have that child coming up; that will be interesting. Six operations, probably. We’re going to have to rotate her skull backwards…”
He liked watching her talk, her enthusiasm for the work, even when he had no idea of what she was talking about. He’d seen a half-dozen operations now, gowning up and learning where to stand, how to stay out of the way. The precision of it astonished him as did her easy way of command, and he found himself thinking that he could have done the work and been happy with it.
Although there was an odd, steely ego that went with surgeons, Weather had it—she ran the operating room like a sergeant major might—and so did George Howell, Weather’s mentor. Howell was a fiftyish reconstructive surgeon who often stopped by when Weather was working, and Lucas usually felt a small, controllable urge to stuff the guy in a sewer somewhere, though Howell was a good enough guy.
“Are you listening?” Weather asked.
“Sure,” Lucas said, peering down into the toaster. “It’s just that I’m near death.”
“There’s something wrong with your metabolism.” she said. “How can you be doing six things at three o’clock in the morning, but you can’t add two and two at six o’clock in the morning? You should have a physical. How long has it been?”
Lucas rolled his eyes. “Having some guy shine his flashlight up my asshole isn’t gonna improve my addition,” he said. He looked glumly out the kitchen window. A robin hopped in the yard, peering this way and that for worms. “Christ, where’s my .45 when I need it?”
Weather, up from the table, stopped to look outside, saw the robin and said, “I’d turn you in to Friends of Animals. You’d have bird lovers over here at five in the morning, making dove calls on the front porch.”
“More fodder for the .45,” he said. They ate together, talking about the daily routine, then Lucas kissed her good-bye, patted her on the ass, and went to lie facedown on the couch.
SHERRILL AND BLACK were finishing at Manette’s office. Lucas stopped by at eight o’clock, still feeling that he was out of his time zone. Black was the same way, grumping at his partner, shaking his head at Lucas. “Six guys. No women. Anderson has the rundown on all of them. They’ll all be in today’s book. We’re looking at all of them, and the FBI’s going through its records. Now we’re going back and looking at the second choices…the not-so-looney tunes.”
“How about the six?”
“Severe goofs,” Black said.
“Severe,” Sherrill repeated. Like Weather, she was fairly chipper; in fact, seemed to soak up chipperness from Lucas and her partner. “I’d still like to know what we’re doing about the sex cases.”
“We’ll get to them,” Lucas promised. “We just don’t want the media up in smoke. Not any more than they already are.”
“I think Channel Three set new records in stupidity last night,” Sherrill said. “The stuff they were saying was so stupid it made my teeth hurt.”
“I don’t understand what those guys are about,” Black said. “I really don’t.”
“Making money,” Lucas said. “That’s all they’re about.”
As Lucas was leaving Manette’s office, the receptionist, who’d been so flustered the first day, held up a hand, then looked both ways into the inner offices, a furtive look that Lucas recognized instantly. He continued out into the hall, looked back, caught her eye, and turned left. At the end of the hall was an alcove with Coke, coffee, and candy machines. A second later, she found him there, sipping a Diet Coke.
“I feel not so good, talking to you,” the woman said. She wore a name tag that said “Marcella,” and her voice was tentative, as though she hadn’t made up her mind.
“Anything might help,” Lucas said. “Anything: There are two kids out there.”
She nodded. “It’s just that with all the arguments and lawyers, it makes me feel…disloyal. Nancy doesn’t have to know?”
Lucas shook his head. “Nobody will know.”
The woman glanced nervously back at her office again. “Well: Andi’s files are complete, but only for here.”
Lucas frowned, gestured with the cup of Coke. “Only for here? I was told that this is the only place that she worked.”
“On her own. But when she was doing her post-doc work, at the U, she did lots of people in the Hennepin County jail. You know, court-ordered evaluations. Most of them were juveniles, but that was so long ago that lots of them would be adults by now.”
“Did she ever mention anyone in particular?”
“No, she really couldn’t, because, you know…confidentiality. But they scared her—she’d talk about that sometimes—about how a guy’d get her up against a door, or he’d hiss at her like a cat, and she could feel them getting ready to come at her. The sex ones scared her, especially. She
said you could feel the hunger coming across the room. She said some of them would have attacked her right there, in the jail interview rooms, if they hadn’t been restrained. I think the people she saw there…those are the worst ones.”
“Well, Jesus, why didn’t somebody say something?” Lucas asked.
The woman looked down at the floor. “You know why, Mr. Davenport. Everybody hates you getting these records. I’m not even sure you should. You might be undoing a lot of work. But then there’s Andi, and I keep thinking about the girls.”
“Okay. You’ve been a help, Marcella,” Lucas said. “I’m serious. This is all between you and me, but if something comes out of it, and you approve, I’ll let Miz Manette know you helped.”
Lucas let her get back into the office while he finished the Diet Coke, then returned himself.
“What?” Sherrill asked, when she saw him coming back.
“I think we’ve been euchred—there’s a whole other set of records. Criminal stuff. C’mon, we’re way behind.”
THE UNIVERSITY MIGHT have objected on grounds of patient privacy, but the chief called the governor, the governor called three of the Regents, and the Regents called down to the university president, who issued a statement that said, “Given the circumstances—that we may have a monster preying on innocent women and girls, and helping oppress all genders and races by making the streets unsafe—we have agreed to provide the City of Minneapolis limited access to limited numbers of psychological records.”
“How limited?” Lucas asked the records section supervisor at the university. He’d gone with Black and Sherrill because his title added weight.
“Limited to what you ask for,” the supervisor said wryly.
“These guys will do the asking,” Lucas said, tipping his head at Black and Sherrill. “We really appreciate anything you can do.”
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