ROSE MARIE ROUX had once been a state senator from Minneapolis and knew how the legislature worked, which didn’t always help. The financial crisis had escalated to the point that a special session had to be called if the state wanted to keep the parks open and continue to pay for cops, snow removal, and highway repair.
Rose Marie was in charge of cops, and she was pulling her hair out: when Lucas showed up at her door, she looked like somebody had tried to electrocute her, her parlor-blond hair standing out from her ears like fighter-jet wings.
“Tell me you got good news,” she said.
Lucas groped for words for a minute, then said, “We found Charlie Pope.”
Her eyes lit up.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, she said, “I’ll get even with you, someday, for that ‘We found Charlie Pope’ line.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. “The question is, What do we do?”
“I’ll talk to the governor,” she said. “Usually, it’s a bad idea to keep this sort of thing from the media. They’ll eventually find out, then they’ll start screaming ‘cover-up’ . . .”
“Which it is . . .”
“. . . and nobody in public office wants to hear that,” she said. “The media’s their own judge and jury on cover-ups, and we’ve got no say.”
“So you think we should make an announcement?” Lucas asked. He was skeptical, and showed it.
She turned in her chair so she could look out her window, rocked back and forth a couple of times; her face took on the blank expression she assumed when she was plotting. After a moment, she said, “No . . . We start talking secretly to a few sheriffs about the white car and the silver car and about a probable second man. You’ve been kicking that idea around for a few days anyway. Sloan will back us up on that. The media already has the white car, and sooner or later they’ll hear about the second man and the silver car. They’ll know that something is going on, and they’ll write about it . . .”
“And?”
“And then we tell them that we knew that Charlie Pope wasn’t the guy, and that we were trying to outwit the real killer by not letting him know that we were on to the frozen-blood thing,” she said. “That they—the media—ruined it all by releasing the second-man theory. It’s all their fault.”
“Jesus.” Lucas was impressed.
“I have to run this by the governor.” She poked a finger at Lucas: “In the meantime, you gotta find this guy. Start filtering out the word on the second man, for the media. Then find this motherfucker. If you find him soon enough, all this becomes moot.”
SLOAN AND ELLE had to know.
Lucas didn’t want to tell them on the phone. Sloan hadn’t been officially working that day and had come down to the Blue Earth murder scene on his own hook. Lucas called his office, was told that he was probably at home. Called Sloan’s home and got his wife.
“He’s out walking, Lucas. He’s pretty shook up about Peterson.”
“I need to talk to him about the case. We’ve got a thing going on . . . Could you ask him to call me?”
“I will, but listen, Lucas: don’t try to talk him out of quitting,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
“Ah, jeez . . .”
“Lucas, he needs to do something else. I remember when you had your little problem, and Sloan’s working on something like that. I don’t know if he’ll go into a full-blown clinical depression, but he’s walking around the edges of it. Work’s making it worse.”
“Is he sleeping at night?”
“No. That’s why this cold got on top of him,” she said. “He’s completely exhausted. He hasn’t slept since he found Angela Larson, and then couldn’t find who’d killed her.”
“All right. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“I’ll have him call you, as soon as he gets back.”
ELLE.
Lucas decided that he needed to talk to her in person. He stopped at his office, saw Del, Jenkins, and Shrake gathered around his desk. Carol stopped him in the outer office and said, “You need to fill in some paper on the guys in the co-op center. It can’t wait, and I don’t know the answers; payroll needs it an hour ago.”
As he filled in, signed, and initialed the papers, he could hear the three cops talking through the open door of his office; they were talking about Sloan:
“He’s got the angst,” Jenkins said in his gravelly voice.
“I thought it was the zeitgeist,” Shrake drawled.
Del said, “I thought angst was the zeitgeist.”
After a pause, somebody said, in a midwestern male version of valley-girl-speak, “Well, duh.”
LUCAS, A LITTLE PISSED, signed the last of the documents, stepped into his office, and said with a little heat, “Off Sloan’s back, for Christ’s sake. He’s fucked up.”
“Hey,” Del said. “He’s our friend, too.”
“All right.” Lucas bobbed his head and backed off: “Sorry: I got a problem. It’s biting me. You three gotta find Mike West. Del: Jenkins and Shrake will fill you in. They’ve looked, came up empty, but now: this is critical.”
“What about Pope?” Shrake asked.
“We’re working on a two-man theory,” Lucas lied. “We need West.”
“There wasn’t much . . . ,” Jenkins began.
“Fuck that. Roust people. Everybody. Take your saps with you,” Lucas said.
Jenkins’s eyebrows were up. “You’re serious.”
Lucas was cold as ice: “Find that fucker. I want you to find him today. You want to know why, ask Crime Scene for some photos of Carlita Peterson.”
“We heard about that,” Del said.
“Look at the pictures. Then get out there. And fuck that take-it-easy shit,” Lucas said.
TEN MINUTES TO ST. ANNE’S. Lucas parked in an illegal spot, threw a “Police” card on his dashboard, and hustled across campus. The Psychology Department secretary told him that Elle was having office hours and invited him to wait. He sat outside Elle’s door, in a wooden chair of solid brown oak, watching the college girls coming and going in their summer clothes, big and blond and athletic, Minnesota Catholics.
He waited for ten minutes before Elle’s door opened, and another blond Catholic girl popped out, carrying a stack of books. Elle was a couple of steps beside her, saw Lucas, and said, “Oh, no—what happened?”
“We gotta talk,” Lucas said.
HE TOLD HER about the discovery of Pope’s body, and about Peterson, about the chase the night before, about the phone call, about the hanging stand. She sat silently, intent, nodding, leaning toward him, her rimless glasses glittering in the overhead fluorescents.
When he finished, she said, “Yes. He is intelligent. He is a planner. He is daring. This is the man I told you about.”
“And that’s all you’ve got to say.”
“I can’t give you his fingerprints, Lucas. I can tell you that he is probably physically attractive, in some way, enough to attract the interest of single women. He won’t stop . . . and I’d say that something happened to him, to trigger him . . . To get him started on this.”
“Like what? You mean, like he was in a car wreck and smacked his head and came out crazy?”
She smiled at him: “No. But something made him start. Something exposed him to a trigger. Oh, one other thing: I think, because the two women were markedly different in age, that he most likely is between them in age—young enough to attract the younger women, old enough to interest the older woman.”
They talked for a few more minutes about the killer, and then Lucas switched the topic to Sloan: “His old lady says he’s depressed. Maybe cycling down.”
“Your job will do that. You should know that, of all people.”
Lucas had suffered through a clinical depression a few years earlier; it hadn’t recurred, though on bad days, he could still feel the beast out there.
“He’s thinking about retiring,” Lucas said.
“Might not be a bad idea. Retirement can sometimes trigger depression, but
in Sloan’s case . . . Your job is too much. Not many people can take it, and those who can, if they do it long enough, can start to lose it,” she said. “They self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Or they turn into monsters. This is all very complicated, Lucas. Sloan’s wife should get him to a doctor if he really gets down.”
“I’ll get him to go, if he seems like he’s falling off the edge,” Lucas said. “He knows what happened to me—and I’ve told him that if I ever go back down, I’m going on the pills. I’m not gonna try to sweat it out again.”
“That was so foolish . . . ,” she said.
“I don’t like the idea of chemicals messing with my brain.”
“When you’re depressed, chemicals are messing with your brain,” she said. “You’re just using other chemicals to fight back.”
“Yeah, yeah . . .” Lucas’s cell phone rang. “That’s probably Sloan now.”
HE MET SLOAN at the Odyssey, a Greek beer joint and pool hall near the Lake Street Bridge on the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi. Sloan did look tired; Lucas suggested a round of nine ball might wake him up, but Sloan shook his head. “Don’t have the edge,” he said. “I could use a beer.”
They got a couple of Leinies long necks and carried them to a booth. A couple of hard-looking guys were shooting pool in the back, leather vests, oily jeans, fat leather wallets sticking out of their back pockets, tied to their belts with brass chains. They looked dirty, as they should: they were Minneapolis intelligence cops, and they ignored Lucas and Sloan.
Sloan said, “Okay, so something’s up. What is it?”
Lucas said, “Some fishermen down in Le Sueur County snagged a body in the Minnesota River. Actually, all they got was a piece of a hand. Scuba divers brought up the rest of the body, big chain wrapped around it. Medical examiner said the guy’d been in the river for a month.”
Sloan jumped to a conclusion: “Another Rice thing? He did a guy first?”
“No. It was, uh, Charlie Pope.”
SLOAN LOOKED AT HIM for a long time over the beer; he seemed almost amused. And smiling, he said, “You gotta be shitting me.”
“I said that exact same thing to another guy about an hour ago.”
Sloan took a pull on the long neck, smacked his lips, sighed, and said, “I’m gonna fuckin’ quit.”
“I talked to Elle when I couldn’t get you. She says this clears up the confusion. The guy we’re looking for is smart, organized, probably good-looking. Probably in his thirties . . .”
He ran down the rest of it for Sloan, who then asked, “But what about Mrs. Bird? She saw Pope standing by that wall phone.”
“I thought about that,” Lucas said. Then, “We did it.”
“Huh?”
“We contaminated her. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
Sloan pulled his feet into the booth, onto the seat, closed his eyes, thinking, and finally, reluctantly, nodded. “All she did all day was watch TV. Nobody ever came to visit her. Pope’s picture was on TV every fifteen minutes. So then we came with my photo book, and we treated her like she was important, and she looked in the book and sure enough . . .”
“She sees a familiar face, and picks it out,” Lucas said. “That doesn’t mean she didn’t see somebody on the street. She probably did.”
“But not Pope. And now she’s got Pope’s face in her head, and she’ll never think different.”
“We were too fast with the book,” Lucas said. “We should have tried to get a description. We fucked up.”
“So who knows about the white Olds,” Sloan said. “That always seemed a little weird . . . she could have pulled that right out of an old movie.”
“So. Pope’s dead. Where does that leave us?”
“First, but not most important, we start covering our asses,” Lucas said. He told Sloan about the second-man theory. “Do you know who’s leaking to Ignace?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“Get your group together, leak the second-man thing to him. It’d be nice to have it in the paper tomorrow. Then, the most important thing . . . we gotta find the guy. We’ve gotta think about it. We’ve got quite a bit of information, we need more.”
“How about another trip down to St. John’s? See if we can scare anything more out of those assholes?”
“I thought of that, too. That’s where it all starts. Let’s do it tomorrow morning. I’ve got to get some sleep, and I’ve got three guys out looking for Mike West: I’d really like to get that guy.”
“I’ll get my guys working on it, too. Have Del call me.”
“Good. I’ll be at home. Call when anything happens. I’ll call St. John’s right away, set up the trip. Why don’t you come over to my place at, like, seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“See you then.”
16
LUCAS TRIED TO SLEEP but was too wired; he watched CNN for a while, went out for a walk, trying to smooth himself out. Got a sandwich, walked back home. Read the murder file again, the latest information from the co-op center.
Called around: nothing moving but the news.
“We’re starting to attract some serious attention now,” Rose Marie said, in a late-afternoon call. “We’ll make the networks tonight. We’ll start getting some out-of-towners.”
“That always helps,” Lucas said.
He finally got to sleep at seven o’clock, only to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, disoriented, worried about the sudden silence around him, and the beeping sound, like a truck backing up. His face hurt, but a dull pain: the worry came from something else.
Then boom/crackle/flash: a thunderstorm rolling in. What else? There was more. He sat up, glanced at the clock. No clock. He got out of bed, listened, flipped on the lights. No lights. He looked out the window, the hair rising on the back of his neck, the killer’s phone call in his mind. The guy knew who he was . . .
No lights on the street. He got his pistol, padded out through the living room, moving confidently through the house in the dark. He’d designed the place; he knew every inch of it. In the kitchen, he looked out the back windows: no lights.
Power outage. The beeping sound continued. He went into the study, crawled under the desk, turned off the computer’s battery backup system, and the beeping stopped. He flipped on the lights in the kitchen; nothing happened, but they would tell him when the power came back on. He moved into the living room, awake now, feeling the impulse from a spurt of adrenaline, dropped into a chair, the .45 in his lap.
Thought about it. He was still thinking about it, getting nowhere, when the lights came back twenty minutes later.
IN THE MORNING, before he shaved or showered, he called Del. The phone rang for a moment, then Del came up; he sounded as wired as Lucas had been.
“You up?” Lucas asked.
“I haven’t been to bed yet. We got a line on West, but it’s thin.” Tires squealed and a horn honked in the background. “We’re looking for a guy named Gary who begs for money at the McDonald’s stoplight in Dinky Town,” Del said. “Problem is, Gary is drunk somewhere and probably won’t show up before his shift starts at eleven o’clock. He supposedly has been hanging out with West.”
“Where does he work? Gary?”
A moment of silence. Then, “I just told you. At the McDonald’s stoplight in Dinky Town. That’s where I am now.” In his mind’s eye, Lucas could see exactly where Del was standing—a pay phone famous for dope deals.
“He has a shift?”
“It’s a good spot. He works it from eleven to three. These two other guys have it from seven to eleven, and three to six or seven. They share the sign: HOMELESS IRAQ VETERAN, STRUGGLING WITH AIDS. The night guy might be West, but we’re not sure.”
“You don’t know where this Gary guy sleeps?”
“One of the tunnels, I guess,” Del said. “We’re trying to figure that out now.”
“Shrake and Jenkins still with you?”
“Yeah. Shrake had some leftover amps, and we’re
feeling pretty good,” Del said.
“Shhh . . .”
Del said, “Well, we took you serious when you told us to take our saps.”
“That’s right. I’m heading down to St. John’s. You find this guy, call me.”
SLOAN WAS RIGHT on time. They took the truck, headed south. Sloan wanted to talk about the security hospital, and rock ’n’ roll.
“If the Big Three trained somebody, they had to have access to him. We know that Charlie Pope had access,” he said. “The question is, Who else had that kind of access? The training couldn’t have been quick, it would have taken awhile.”
Lucas wasn’t sure about that. “Why would it take awhile? Assume that the guy is already nuts, and just needed to be pointed.”
“Ah. But he’s not just nuts, he’s smart,” Sloan said. “Smart people have their own ways of doing things, even if they’re crazy. They really got to this guy. They remodeled his brain. They had to convert him.”
“I’VE GOT A bad feeling that nobody’ll really know about who-all had access,” Lucas said. “The place is only halfway a prison—all kinds of people go in and out of the secure wing. Half the menial work in the hospital is done by inmates.”
“But this guy—the killer guy is major nuts. How many people who were major nuts have been recently released, and had extensive access?”
“Other than Mike West.”
“Ah, he’s not major nuts,” Sloan said. “He’s just one of those poor-fuck schizophrenics who can’t deal.”
THEY RODE ALONG for a minute, and Lucas said, “We would have asked all these questions one day after the Rice killings, if we hadn’t found Pope’s DNA. Absolutely sidetracked us.”
“No it didn’t,” Sloan said. “We would have had no idea about the hospital if it hadn’t been for the DNA. He actually put us on track.”
“Not if he was going to kill them like the Big Three wanted them killed,” Lucas said. “Angela Larson might have been a coincidence, being killed like Taylor would kill her. But when Rice was killed like Biggie Lighter would have . . . cut off Rice’s dick . . . we would have noticed. Somebody would have.”
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