“No problem, we can be down there in an hour and a half. We’ve got to be back here by four, anyway.”
“Wish I could be there, especially since I’M NOT CATCHING ANY FISH,” Cale said. “Charlie Pope, huh? I’ll tell you what—we’re not taking the fall on this one. We saw it coming from a long way back, and we told everybody who’d listen.”
LUCAS GOT OUT OF THE BUILDING, cut across town, and found Sloan, with a shoe bag, standing on the sidewalk outside Nordstrom’s. They headed south down the Minnesota River again. “Pope’s face will be all over the Northern Plains. He won’t be able to stand outside his car to take a leak without somebody recognizing him,” Lucas said. “That’s one good thing about a really ugly murder; people pay attention. Maybe we oughta make all murders ugly.”
“All murders are ugly,” Sloan said. He was trading his old shoes for the new ones. Both pairs were nearly identical black wingtips. “If they were pretty, I wouldn’t be quitting.”
“Aw, man . . .”
THE RICE MURDERS had taken place just south of the city of Mankato; St. John’s Security Hospital was located eight miles to the north, in a red-brick riverside hamlet originally built around a grain elevator and a creamery. Now the town was mostly a bedroom community for hospital employees.
The hospital sat in the hills west of the town and came in two parts. A reception center for new inmates and visitors sat down a short access road; the road continued through the parking lot and farther up the hill, to the main hospital.
The reception center was a new, low, brick building that looked like an elementary school, except that the back side had a chain-link prison pen attached, with glistening concertina wire looped through the fence. The main hospital was an older brick-and-concrete-block building that was just Gothic enough to scare the shit out of people who saw it.
THEY CHECKED IN at the lower building, and a chunky young woman named Nan escorted them up the hill. The hospital was set up like a prison: an outer area for administration and support, a hard wall running through the center of the building, with confinement areas behind the wall.
From an earlier visit, Lucas knew that the level of confinement varied from section to section: the worst sexual psychopaths were kept in hard cages under twenty-four-hour surveillance, while the inmates of other areas, where there was no immediate threat of violence, had a good deal of freedom. Some sections housed both men and women, which had caused some problems with sex and even the occasional pregnancy, but which also gave those areas a greater feeling of normal human society.
“Most of the people here really are . . . a little lost,” Nan said. “They’re not bad people. Most of them aren’t stupid. The world is just a little too much for them.”
“Most of them,” Sloan said. “There are a few . . .” He shook his head.
“Sure,” she said.
THEY SIGNED IN AND LEFT their weapons with a security officer. Entry to the confinement area went through twin electronic barred doors, with a hardened guard’s booth between the two doors. The booth was called “the cage” and was made of concrete block up to waist height, and from there to the ceiling with thick armored glass set into concrete pillars. The people inside the cage controlled the entry, the locks in the confinement blocks, and monitored the cameras that were spotted through the hospital.
Nan took them as far as the first barred gate, pointed out a man leaning against the wall in the confinement area, behind the second gate. “That’s Harvey Bronson. He’ll take you to your conference.”
They said good-bye and stepped through the first door, which slowly closed and locked behind them. They then walked through an airport-like metal scanner, emptying their pockets and removing their shoes. When they were through and had their shoes back on, one of the men in the cage opened the second door, and they stepped through into the secure area.
“Gives me the creeps, being inside,” Sloan said, looking back at the doors.
“Never get used to it,” said their new escort. He pointed down the hall. “You’re down this way.”
The inside of the hospital reminded Lucas of an aging high school. Bronson took them to a conference room where a principal’s office should have been, popped open the door, said, “Have a seat—I’ll see what happened to the team.”
They dropped into the chairs and looked around: the place had the same architectural neutrality as the press-conference room back at the BCA, except for a dark glass plate in one wall, which hid a camera and microphones; they both looked at it, and Lucas said, “Big Brother.”
A few seconds later, the door popped open, and a guy stuck his head inside: “Davenport and Sloan?”
Sloan raised a hand: “That’s us.”
The man said over his shoulder, “Here they are,” and then, as he stepped inside, “They told us the wrong room.”
TWO MORE MEN and a woman followed the first man inside. They were dressed casually, in white staff coats and pastel shirts, tan slacks, pens in their breast pockets. All four wore the masked expressions Lucas recognized as Prison-Guard Face: tight, watchful, controlled. There was always an edge of fear, held in a mental fist, never allowed to leak out when there was a prisoner around. Fear in a prison was like blood in a shark pen. The four of them shuffled around the conference table, put papers on the table, files. Two of the men had coffee cups. The first man said, “You guys want coffee?”
“We’re okay,” Lucas said. He said, “I’m Lucas Davenport, with the BCA, and this is Detective Sloan from Minneapolis PD. You guys are . . . ?”
They introduced themselves: three were psychologists; the fourth, the woman, was an M.D. She was pretty in a careful way, slender, with brown hair, brown eyes, short nose, and a few freckles. She held Lucas’s eyes for an extra second, and he thought, Hmm. Then one of the men said, “Charlie Pope?”
“Yeah. We got this DNA result . . .”
Lucas spent ten minutes outlining the details of the case, both of the killings and the DNA match. Prison people liked that—to be treated like brother cops—and they got on a first-name basis.
One of them, a burly, crew-cut guy named Dick Hart, kicked back from the table and said, “I’ll tell you what, Lucas, you ask me if Charlie could do this, I’d say, ‘Absolutely.’ He was crazy enough. They should never have let him out of here. I knew something would happen. I said so before they let him go.”
Karen Beloit, the M.D., agreed: “We’d take him for treatment—he had stomach and hemorrhoid troubles—you could watch him watching the women. The doctors and the nurses, watching them. You knew what he was thinking.”
“But one of the victims was a man,” Sloan objected.
Leo Grant said, “I was one of his therapists, and, uh, mmm . . .” He glanced at Beloit, grinned, and said, “Put your fingers in your ears.”
“Spit it out, cowboy,” she said.
“You know that movie, American Pie, where the guy puts his dick in the pie ’cause it’s kinda warm? Charlie was like that. But with a mean streak. He’d just go around and he needed to fuck something. You’d see one of the younger guys go by, and Charlie would kinda look at his ass . . . Charlie’d do that. He wouldn’t even consider it gay.”
Hart agreed with Grant. “It’s pretty common in here for the dominant member of a homosexual couple not to consider himself gay. The, mmm, receiver, everybody agrees that he’s gay. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Charlie had a sexual relationship of that kind. I’m a little surprised by this beating, this methodical torture you’re talking about. Charlie might enjoy hurting people but didn’t seem to me to be the kind who’d be methodical about it. To plan it. He might beat somebody to death or strangle somebody—hell, we’re pretty sure he did—but this is a little different. With Charlie, sex was the thing, the violence was the way he got it. With these killings it seems like the violence is the thing, the sex is an afterthought.”
Leo Grant was shaking his head, said, “Nah, nah, Dick, that’s not right. The sex is central. The sex is c
entral. The torture is part of the sex act; the actual penetration is the culmination. I wouldn’t be surprised if the moment of murder, the throat cutting, comes simultaneously with orgasm.”
“Jesus.” Sloan stroked his throat with his fingers.
“You’re saying the torture is the foreplay,” Lucas said.
Grant nodded: “Exactly.”
Sam O’Donnell, the third psychologist, said, “We tried everything we could to hang on to him. I would . . . there’s a way of getting to a guy sideways. I’d read a newspaper report to him, a sex crime somewhere, and get him to imagine how they would track down the criminal. He had the reticence of a longtime prisoner, but when you went at him sideways, got him thinking about it, you could watch the control slip away. In the end, giving him potential access to sex would be like putting an ounce of cocaine next to somebody just out of rehab.”
Sloan said, “Okay. So . . . where did he go?”
Hart glanced at the others, then shrugged and said, “Fuck if I know.”
Beloit said, “He shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’d start by looking in strip bars and topless places. Someplace where there’s alcohol and women.”
Grant was shaking his head again. “He isn’t as dumb as he looks. He’ll stay away from those too-obvious places. He might try for, like, a college place. Someplace where there are a lot of targets. I’m not sure he’d go for an obvious place like a strip joint. Not if he thinks somebody might be looking for him.”
“We’re already looking at a bar in Faribault,” Lucas said. “They’ve got some hookers working out the back door.”
O’Donnell looked at Grant: “That might be something he couldn’t stay away from. Get off, and nobody to talk about it.”
Grant seemed skeptical: “Maybe.”
Lucas: “Now that we’re gonna put his face all over the place, he won’t be able to hang out in any bar. Where would he hide?”
“Someplace close,” Hart said. “He’s a homeboy. Even Iowa scares him.”
“I can see that,” Sloan said. “Iowa scares me a little.”
“He’s been out for what? Couple months? I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that he has a beard and maybe has dyed his hair,” O’Donnell said. “Maybe even gotten a toupee somewhere. What’s he driving? He didn’t have any money when he left here. Have you looked for stolen cars? Or friends who might loan him a car?”
“That’s one of our biggest questions,” Lucas said, tapping his finger on the tabletop. “How’s he getting around? He had to get a car from somewhere. Do you have any records of him talking about friends? Or did he have any friends here who might have hooked him up?”
“There were a couple of people he sort of hung with,” Hart said. “But they’re all still here, as far as I know.”
“Mike West,” Beloit said.
Grant snapped his fingers: “I never thought of him.” To Lucas: “West is a schizophrenic personality who can’t stay on his meds. He’d get freaked out, you know, sometimes life would get on top of him, and he’d get violent—though it was aimless, more like excitement than rage. He never hurt anyone, maybe a couple of cut lips, but he scared people. Anyway, he knew Charlie on the outside, when they were growing up.”
“That’s good,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”
“He’s right in Minneapolis, at a halfway house,” Hart said. “We can check before you leave. I’m not sure, but it seems to me he might’ve gotten out a couple of months before Charlie did.”
Beloit said, “That’s a possibility, I guess. But you know what bothers me?” She paused, getting her thoughts together, and then again held Lucas’s eyes. “When Charlie was out in the population, sometimes he’d stop and talk to the Big Three. They were friends, I think. Much as those people can be.”
Lucas: “Big Three?”
Hart: “Chase, Lighter, and Taylor. Lawrence Chase, Benjamin Lighter, and Carl Taylor. We think he killed at least two women, Charlie did, so they had something in common.”
Sloan said, “Ah, shit. Biggie Lighter was a friend of his?”
Lucas leaned back and grinned at him. “Your old buddy.” To the others: “Sloan’s the guy who put Biggie away.”
“I’d be more worried about Carl Taylor,” O’Donnell said. “He’s the one who spins out all these theories about why women need to be killed. He’s the preacher. And some of these guys . . . I mean, some of them, go along.”
But Sloan looked at Lucas: “Biggie Lighter used to cut the . . .” His eyes flicked sideways at Beloit, then back, “. . . penises off his victims, after he raped them. I don’t know if he posed them.”
Hart said, “Rice had his penis cut off?” When Lucas nodded, he said, “That does sound like Biggie. His files say that he . . . there was some cannibalism involved.”
Beloit: “Oh, yuck.”
“He’s not a guy you mess with,” Grant said. “When we’re dealing with him, we use full protective restraints.”
THEY ALL SAT AROUND silently for a moment, looking at one another, until Hart picked it up again.
“But you know, when it’s all said and done, none of this really sounds much like Charlie Pope. He’s a crazy killer, but he was clumsy,” Hart said. “Sam is right: that first one, the woman, sounds more like Carl Taylor. He’s the one who goes on all the time about punishment. He told me once, in a therapy session, that if he had to do it all over again, he’d punish the women before he killed them so that they’d have a taste of hell before they went there. He said he’d hang them up naked and whip them like Jesus was whipped. He’s welded together sex and punishment like . . .” He shrugged. “Listening to him is like reading the Marquis de Sade.”
“Hang them up naked,” Lucas repeated.
“Yes. You know, so they were dangling and he could whip them all around . . .”
“Goddamnit,” Sloan said.
Lucas: “Do you guys think Taylor and Lighter could be operating Pope by remote control?”
Dick Hart jumped in: “Couldn’t really be remote control, because they can’t talk to him. These are the most highly restricted prisoners in the state. They have no contact with the outside.”
“Not even their families?” Sloan asked.
“Their families have disowned them,” Beloit said. “Chase’s sister said we should kill him if we ever got the chance. She was serious. Nobody in any of their families has ever come here or even called, except Taylor’s, years ago. He was left some property, and his brother came in here to get him to sign it away. But that’s been five or six years.”
Grant said, “We know everything that goes in and out of their cells. We have people comb through their food before it goes in.”
“Do they have access to TV news?” Sloan asked.
“Well, sure . . . They have TVs in their cells.”
“So, if they programmed him, they could be getting off on it by watching the news.”
O’Donnell nodded: “They could. Maybe that would be enough . . . to get them off, anyway.”
“If Pope’s a robot,” Lucas asked, “do you think they sent him out there deliberately, or he just went?”
“Charlie was going after women no matter what,” Grant said. He was the skeptical one: “But this? Robots? I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk to Taylor and Lighter and Chase,” Sloan said to Lucas. “What have we got to lose?”
Lucas looked at the others: “What do you think?”
They all shrugged or nodded. “Really don’t have anything to lose—but don’t go making any deals with them unless you get an okay in advance,” Hart said. “They’re gonna want something for talking.”
Beloit looked at Grant, who showed a small smile and said, from the corner of his mouth to Hart, “Better read them the semen warning.”
Sloan bit first: “What’s that?”
“Lighter tends to hide semen around his cell. Or just keep it in his hand. We have a screen we keep up most of the time, but when we need to talk to him . . . Well,
when you’re least expecting it, zip, it’s all over your face.”
“That’s why prison guards carry clubs,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, clubs,” Hart said. He stood up and stretched. “We’ll keep him under control. But if the worst should happen . . .”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a reflex to lick your lips. Don’t do that.”
THEY HAD TO GO BACK to the unsecured side of the administration building to arrange the visit to Taylor, Lighter, and Chase. Darrell Ross, the assistant administrator, was a friendly codger with a ring of white hair around his bald pate and a pipe rack on his desk. He leaned back in his leather chair and said, congenially, “There’s a question here of whether you’re investigating them for a crime. If you’re investigating them for a crime, you’ll have to read them their rights. Then they’ve got a right to an attorney.”
“They’re nuts,” Lucas said. “They’re locked up in a nuthouse.”
Ross frosted up: “We don’t use that language here. It’s a little like referring to a paralyzed person as a crip. Most of them are harmless, and their problems are not of their own making.”
Lucas held his hands up: “Sorry. I know that.”
Ross nodded at him, laced his fingers over his ample gut, and twiddled his thumbs for a second. “Anyway, the Supreme Court says they get a lawyer. So if they ask, they get one. There are ways to work around that, and we’ll try, but I’m just letting you know that there could be a hangup.”
“What ways to work around it?” Lucas asked.
“We’ll tell them that if they want a lawyer, we’ll have to isolate them for a few days before we can bring them up to the visiting room. Just to make sure that they don’t have any contraband concealed inside their bodies. They hate the isolation. That might convince them that they don’t need an attorney.”
“Is that legal?” Sloan asked.
“Supreme Court says we can use reasonable security measures.” The friendly old codger smiled a smile that suddenly looked a lot like a prison guard’s smile. “We get to say what’s reasonable. Anyway—we’ll try to get you in.”
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