Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment, then blurted out, “An elf?”

  “Yeah, you know, everybody gets a little weird and we have a play . . .”

  “But it could be him.”

  “I don’t . . . I can’t see Sam O’Donnell hurting anyone, for any reason. I mean, he did the karate and all, but that was just exercise. He was really a gentle man, I think.”

  IF THE KILLER was in Chicago, and he certainly was, then there wasn’t much to do except identify him—somebody else would make the eventual bust.

  And though they didn’t have a hard identification on O’Donnell, if it wasn’t O’Donnell, that should be apparent in the morning, when somebody else didn’t show up for work.

  Nothing to do now, at night . . . Lucas tried to sleep, and sometimes made it, mostly not. If they couldn’t make a clear identification, and if the killer ran far enough, interest would fall off . . . he could be gone for years.

  He thrashed around, thrashed around, and finally got up at six o’clock. He’d never make it through the day like this, so he popped an amphetamine, quickly felt a lot better, shaved, showered, and dressed. Still early, but he called Sloan anyway. Sloan had Caller ID and groaned into the phone, “Lucas, you gotta get yourself a life. It’s not even seven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Yeah, yeah, listen . . .”

  Then, Sloan was suddenly awake: “Jesus: he didn’t do another one?”

  “No, but he did call Ignace. He was in Chicago when he called.”

  He and Sloan agreed to meet downtown at nine o’clock. “I’m gonna get Elle to come in. We need some more theory.”

  TWO DAYS WENT BY:

  ON THE FIRST DAY, Sam O’Donnell’s name got out as a “person of interest” in the case. None of the cops would confirm that O’Donnell was the man, and the media outlets were afraid to name him because of libel or slander potential, but most of the newsies knew, and Lucas heard that there were raging arguments going on about when to name him.

  On the second day, the lab finished sequencing the DNA. The blood in the truck was Peterson’s.

  “At some point, Peterson was in the back of that Acura and dribbled a little blood out,” John Hopping Crow told Lucas. “There wasn’t much, maybe an ounce or two . . . maybe blood that had gathered in her throat after he cut her windpipe and trachea when he gutted her . . .”

  “Did you look at it through a scope?”

  “Yeah. It was never frozen.”

  The blood from inside the freezer had been frozen, of course—and the DNA was Charlie Pope’s.

  “The sonofabitch cut a chunk out of Pope, a finger or something, and stored it in his freezer in case he needed it,” Hopping Crow said.

  “He knew he was gonna need it—it was part of a plan that went way back before Pope was even killed,” Lucas said. “There was a lot of planning, strategy, going on. Like they were doing theory. The fuckers down at St. John’s—Lighter, Taylor, and Chase—thought about it for a long time.”

  “But we know some shit now . . .”

  “Maybe. Listen, tell the crime-scene guys to pull anything out of the back of that truck that would carry DNA. We’re looking for something besides blood that has Peterson’s DNA. There must be hair, there must be something. Spit?”

  ON BOTH THE first and second days, Lucas spoke with the Chicago cops and the Illinois State Police.

  An investigator had interviewed the desk staff at the Hilton: “There’s not much,” he told Lucas. “Nobody recognized the O’Donnell mug, but they said probably a hundred people used that phone last night. There were people checking in all the time; this is a major business-travelers’ hotel. One guy said the mug looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t swear that the guy he saw was O’Donnell. Every maid and every staff member will get a copy of the photo when they check in for work, but the way he’s been jerking you guys around, I’d say it’s a million to one that he’d still be here.”

  “Taxis? Car rentals?”

  “We’re covering them with the mug shots. If the Xerox machine don’t break down, we’ll get them to everybody. Not coming up with anything so far.”

  “Nobody saw him in the airport.”

  “A few people said they saw somebody like him, but he’s sort of a type, you know? The long hair, the earring, sort of an upscale rocker. They’re a dime a dozen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what I’m wondering is, Why do we think he stopped at the Hilton, made the call, and then kept going? Maybe he wants us to think he stayed on the ground. How do we know he didn’t hop a ride to the Hilton, make the call, then go right back to O’Hare and fly? He could be in Amsterdam or Hong Kong by now.”

  ON THE EVENING of the second day, Channel Three named O’Donnell as a “person of interest.” The story went network: on the night of the second day, CNN was running O’Donnell’s face every fifteen minutes.

  Neil Mitford, the governor’s top political operator, called Lucas on the afternoon of the second day and said, “We had a press conference this afternoon on the compromises in the aid-to-cities package. Somebody asked if we shouldn’t cut our state hospital staff, since we’re apparently hiring psychopaths.”

  “Ah, jeez. Not even the TV people are that dumb.”

  “Of course not. They were plunking the governor’s magic twanger. But we’re starting to get a little bleed-through. So, if you don’t mind, why don’t you just go ahead and pick this guy up and get him out of our hair?”

  “Why don’t you do it?” Lucas suggested. “The headline would say HATCHET MAN CAPTURES AXE MURDERER.”

  “I’m just sayin’,” Mitford said mildly. “I’m not leaning on you, I’m just sayin’: if you’re not doing anything else, pick him up.”

  “You do a swell job of leaning on a guy,” Lucas said.

  ALSO ON THE FIRST DAY, Elle arrived early, having ditched her summer seminar, and dug through O’Donnell’s personnel file. When she was finished, she came and sat in Lucas’s office, and said, “I want to interview the staff members down at St. John’s. Also, any family members that we can reach.”

  “I can get you down to St. John’s for sure,” Lucas said. “Let’s do it tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do about family members. What do you think so far?”

  “O’Donnell has the intelligence and the planning capability. In school, he had nearly a four-point from his freshman year straight through to his Ph.D. That takes more than intelligence, it takes a ferocious will. If he ran off the tracks, somehow, he could do this. He is what I expected, except . . . he seems to have been very well liked and respected. That would not be typical. Typically, people with this kind of problem are recognized as being odd, and it shows in their histories.”

  “Okay: so family and friends should tell us something. I’ll see what I can do.”

  BOTH THE CO-OP and security hospital people had called O’Donnell’s parents to see if he’d been in touch. His parents were frantic, not knowing what was going on—they’d gotten the impression that their son might have been a victim of the killer. They agreed to talk to Elle at St. John’s.

  ON THE MORNING of the second day, Sloan went with Elle to St. John’s to interview staff members and the parents. When Sloan got back, he pushed into Lucas’s office, and said, “You fucker, you’ve driven with her before. That’s why you didn’t go with us.”

  “Come on, man—if the three of us had gone, I would have driven.” But Lucas half laughed, because he knew what Sloan was talking about.

  “Sometimes, she’d get out of control and penetrate the forty-five-mile-an-hour barrier,” Sloan said. “I thought I was gonna start screaming before we got there. Now I know how Chase feels, down in isolation.”

  “Maybe you should have offered to drive,” Lucas suggested.

  “I did. Several times. She said she needed the practice. Going down was a nightmare. Coming back was . . .” Words failed, and he flapped his arms.

  “Where is she, anyway?” Lucas asked. />
  “She stopped in the ladies’ room. If she pees the way she drives, we could be waiting for a while.”

  ELLE SAID THIS: “I talked to his parents, I talked to his friends. There’s a very interesting thing that goes on with serial killers. When they have longtime friends, or parents, those people usually aren’t surprised by the accusations when they’re caught. They know that there’s something wrong with them. There’s often a history of strange violence during their youth—against animals and insects, against other children; and they’re usually victims of some kind of violence, usually physical, but sometimes purely emotional. There’s often an interest in fire and in general images of destruction. I’m not talking about the interest that you find in game players, but about a kind of fascination with the most grotesque elements of death and dismemberment. Also, there are commonly instances of head injuries . . .”

  “And . . .”

  “There’s none of that in his history. Lucas, I’m coming to the conclusion that he is not our man.”

  “Then he’s dead,” Lucas said.

  “That may be so.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” Lucas said. He was groping: “How about a tumor, or something. Remember the Texas Tower, Whitman?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “There was a song about him, how he had a tumor in his brain,” Lucas said. “Something like that.”

  “Yes. There was a song, I believe by a person named Richard Friedman. And Whitman did have a tumor, although they don’t know if it was responsible for his behavior.”

  “What if O’Donnell had a tumor?”

  “That’s a possibility—when you’re dealing with the brain, almost anything is possible. However, when there’s a tumor involved, there are physical symptoms as well as psychological upsets, and none of his family and friends saw anything like that.”

  “How do you explain the fact that he took all the money out of his bank account the day he disappeared?”

  She smiled and shook her head: “I don’t explain it. I leave that up to you.”

  SLOAN, who had been watching the interchange, said, “Nordwall had a couple of deputies trying to find out where O’Donnell was the night Peterson disappeared. They can’t find him. They can’t find him on the nights that Larson or the Rices were killed, either—but that might not mean much. He lived out in the woods, and the Rices and Larson are far enough back that nobody really can put their finger on whether they saw him or not.”

  “Mention the shift problem,” Elle said.

  “Yeah, the shift,” Sloan said. “He worked a seven-to-three shift, but he always came in early, around six o’clock, to get the handoff from the overnight. That means he had to get up around five o’clock, and if he wanted to get eight hours of sleep, he was in bed by nine. So. People wouldn’t expect to see him late on the nights of the killings, but it would be absolutely normal for him to be in bed. Legitimately.”

  “God . . . bless me,” Lucas said.

  “HERE’S A QUESTION,” Sloan said. “He didn’t come into work—so presumably he was (a) on his way to Chicago or was already there, or (b) he was dead. Assuming he went to Chicago after work on the day he decided to run, sometime around seven o’clock, he would have been there by, say, nine o’clock. He didn’t call Ignace for more than twenty-four hours. What was he doing?”

  “Making . . . arrangements,” Lucas said. Elle wasn’t there at the moment, so he added, “How the fuck would I know?”

  “Maybe we ought to call Chicago Homicide, see if they’ve had anything particularly rude . . .”

  CHICAGO HOMICIDE had one murder reported for the night O’Donnell disappeared: a twelve-year-old boy named Terence Smith had run over his uncle, Roger Smith, with Roger’s own car.

  “They’re sure it’s murder?” Lucas asked Sloan.

  “He ran over him eight or ten times. They said Roger’s head looked like a thin-crust pizza.”

  “Ah.”

  “What next?” Sloan asked. “Where do we go?”

  22

  ON THE MORNING of the third day, Lucas, after a restless night, heard the alarm go off, shut it down, waited; and the phone rang.

  “Catch him yet?” Weather asked.

  “Not yet. Still thrashing around,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

  “Had an interesting case early this morning,” Weather said. “A man was shot in the face. I assisted, putting things right.”

  “That sounds British: putting things right.”

  “I think I’m becoming British. I like it here.”

  “Wish I were there . . . sort of,” Lucas said. “So: You fixed the guy?”

  “Oh, yeah. He wasn’t that badly hurt—depending on how you define ‘hurt,’ I guess. But what struck me as strange was that in the whole time I’ve been working here, that was the first gunshot wound I’ve seen. In Minneapolis, as quiet as it is, it’s an odd week when we don’t have two or three.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a liberal: Want to take away our God-given right to bear arms?”

  “No, no. But it’s weird: there are no guns . . .”

  HE WAS SHAVING, a half hour later, when the phrase struck him:

  There are no guns.

  Huh.

  He finished shaving, got in the shower, thought about it some more. No guns.

  HE CALLED THE airport cops and asked them to round up all declarations of handguns made the night O’Donnell flew. There were only a half dozen: he got the names and addresses, and phoned them to the co-op group, had them check the people behind the names.

  When he got downtown, the co-op people reported that three of the men who checked guns were members of a shooting team who were on their way to a match in Virginia. The co-op had talked to sponsors and spouses of all three men, and then to the men themselves.

  “They aren’t O’Donnell,” the co-op guy said.

  Two of the other three were going prairie-dog shooting with hybrid single-shot pistols, not the .40 and .45 that Lucas was looking for. The co-op had interviewed a woman in the apartment complex where the two men lived. They were told that neither man looked like O’Donnell, that they lived full-time in the apartment complex, and that they were both members of a gay shooting-sports group that often traveled to Wyoming for prairie-dog shoots. The last guy hadn’t been found, but one of the gun inspectors at the airport said that he was a lawyer and a black guy and that the gun he had checked was an antique.

  Lucas called Sloan. “Remember when we found that pistol brass in the basement, I think it was .40 and .45, and the gun safe was open, like something had just been taken out?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If he flew, if he knew he was heading for the airport to fly, what happened to the guns? He couldn’t get on the airplane with them. He didn’t declare them. The guns weren’t in the car. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay—now try this. What is the great similarity between Sam O’Donnell and Charlie Pope?”

  Sloan thought for a few seconds, then said, “They both spent a lot of time in St. John’s . . .”

  “Something more basic than that,” Lucas said. “We can’t find him. Not only that, nobody’s seen him. He’s invisible, but everything we’ve got points directly at him. Just as everything pointed at Charlie—the DNA, the past record, the calls to Ignace. We even had a witness who thought she saw him, but now we know she didn’t.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t like the killer was trying to lead us to Charlie. The lead to Charlie came from that Fox guy, the parole officer . . .”

  “That was not quite a coincidence,” Lucas said. “A guy who is suspected of killing women after raping them, and who has been treated and released, disappears, and suddenly a sex killer is on the loose. What parole officer wouldn’t make a call? Then, because we’d figured that out on our own, when the DNA came in—there was never any doubt. No doubt in anybody’s mind, except maybe Elle’s, until the cat fisherman brought up Pope’s hand.”
>
  Lucas continued: “Now, we have the same situation. Guy disappears. Evidence is found both in the refrigerator and in the car. Charlie Pope’s frozen blood and Carlita Peterson’s blood, not frozen. But nobody ever sees the guy. Nobody sees his face. Nobody sees him anywhere . . . and Elle says he doesn’t fit.”

  “You think we’re being conned?”

  “I’m forty-six percent sure of it,” Lucas said.

  “Forty-six percent. You gotta go with that.”

  “Listen, this is what I think: the guns thing was a fuckup. He’s still out there, and he’s still got the guns.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody on the staff,” Lucas said. “Somebody medical. Somebody who could get to Pope, and then get to O’Donnell. I mean, the guy was using O’Donnell’s play voice when we were still looking for Pope.”

  “Jesus. I can’t even think about that,” Sloan said. “All the way back then, he was faking us out on something we might not ever figure out.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sloan said, “But.”

  “But what?”

  “But all this only works if it really isn’t O’Donnell. Do we stop looking for him?”

  “I will bet you one hundred depreciated American dollars right now that it’s not O’Donnell,” Lucas said. “We’ll keep looking—but I think we go back to square one with the staff. Let’s get everybody together again and start tearing up the staff backgrounds. There’s something in there.”

  “The guy from California, huh?”

  “Yup. The guy from California.”

  LUCAS HIMSELF CLEARED Dr. Cale, while the coordination staff worked on the other staff members whose records they had. When Lucas was convinced that Cale was clear—he never seriously suspected him, he was too old for a new serial killer—he drove to St. John’s, and he and Cale spent two hours in the personnel office Xeroxing staff records for anyone who might have even an indirect connection to the Big Three.