Prey: Night Prey Part 4

"Exactly. And that's what makes you perfect," Roux said. "You're one of the most experienced serial-killer investigators in the country, outside the FBI. Inside this department, politically, you're both old-line and hard-line. You could chase a cop."

"Why does she think it's a cop?"

"One of the victims, a woman in Des Moines, a real estate saleswoman, had a cellular phone in her car. She had a teenaged daughter at home, and called and said she was going out with a guy for a drink, that she might be getting home late. She said the guy was from out of town, and that he was a cop. That's all."

"Christ." Lucas ran his hand through his hair.

"Lucas, how long have you been back? A month?"

"Five weeks."

"Five weeks. All right. I know you like the intelligence thing. But I've got all kinds of guys running different pieces of intelligence. We got the division, and the intelligence unit, and the gang squad in that, and vice and narcotics and licensing . . . I brought you back, gave you a nice soft political job, because I knew I'd eventually run into s.h.i.+t like this and I'd need somebody to handle it. You're the guy. That was the deal."

"So you can run for the Senate."

"There've been worse senators," she said.

"I've got things-"

"Everybody's got things. Not everybody can stop insane killers," Roux said impatiently. She came and stood next to him, looking out the window, took another greedy drag on her cigarette. "I could give you some time if we hadn't had this Wannemaker thing. Now I gotta move, before the press catches on. And if we don't do something heavy, Connell might very well leak it herself."

"I-"

"If it gets out and you're already on it, it'd go easier for all of us."

Lucas finally nodded. "You saved my a.s.s from the corporate life," he said. "I owe you."

"That's right," she said. "I did, and you do." Roux pushed her intercom b.u.t.ton and leaned toward it. "Rocky? Round up the usual suspects. Get their a.s.ses in here."

ROUX TOOK FIVE minutes to put together a meeting: Lester, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, his deputy Swanson, and Curt Myer, the new head of intelligence. Anderson, the department's computer freak, was invited at Lucas's request.

"How're we doing?" Roux asked Lester.

"The bodies are piling up. I've honest to G.o.d never seen anything like it." He looked at Lucas. "Sloan tells me there's not much chance that Wannemaker got it in Hudson. She was probably transported there."

Lucas nodded. "Looks like."

"So we got another one."

Roux lit another cigarette and turned to Lucas. "What do you need?"

Lucas looked back at Lester. "Same deal as last time. Except I want Sloan."

"What's the same deal?" Roux asked.

Lester looked at Roux. "Lucas works by himself, parallel to my investigation. Everything he finds out, and everything from the up-front investigation, goes into a book on a daily basis. Anderson does the book. He essentially coordinates."

Lester hooked a thumb at Anderson, who nodded, then turned to Lucas. "You can't have Sloan."

Lucas opened his mouth, but Lester shook his head. "You can't, man. He's my best guy and we're f.u.c.kin' drowning out there."

"I've been off the street. . . ."

"Can't help it," Lester said. To Roux: "I'm telling you, pulling Sloan would kill us."

Roux nodded. "You'll have to live with it, at least for a while," she said to Lucas. "Can't you use Capslock?"

He shook his head. "He's got something going with this deputy that was killed. We need to stay on it."

"I could let you have one guy," Lester said. "He could run errands. Tell you the truth, you could help him out. Show him how it's done."

Lucas's eyebrows went up. "Greave?"

Lester nodded.

"I hear he's an idiot," Lucas said.

"He's just new," Lester said defensively. "You don't like him, give him back."

"All right," Lucas said. He looked at Anderson. "And I need to know where a guy is. A knife guy from years ago."

"Who's that?"

"His name was Junky Doog. . . ."

WHEN THE MEETING broke up, Roux held Lucas back. "Meagan Connell is gonna want to work it," she said. "I'd appreciate it if you'd take her."

Lucas shook his head. "Rose Marie, d.a.m.nit, she's got a state badge, she can do what she wants."

"As a favor to me," Roux said, pressing him. "There's no way homicide'll take her. She's really into this. She's smart. She'd help you. I'd appreciate it."

"All right, I'll find something for her to do," Lucas said. Then: "You know, you never told me she was dying."

"I figured you'd find out by yourself," Roux said. Roux's secretary had a dictation plug in her ear. When Lucas walked out of Roux's office, she pointed a finger at Lucas and held up her hand to stop him, typed another half-sentence, then pulled the plug out of her ear.

"Detective Sloan stopped by while you were talking," she said, her dark eyebrows arching. She took a manila file-folder from her desk and handed it to him. "He said fingerprints confirm that it's Wannemaker. She had a piece of an unfiltered cigarette in her hand, a Camel. They sent it to the lab in Madison. He said to look at the picture."

"Thanks." Lucas turned away and opened the folder.

"I already looked at it," she said. "Gross. But interesting."

"Umm." Inside the folder was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a body in a snowdrift. The faceup att.i.tude was almost the same as that of the Wannemaker woman, with the same ma.s.sive abdominal wound; pieces of a plastic garbage bag were scattered around in the snow. The secretary was looking over his shoulder, and Lucas half-turned. "There's a state investigator who's been in and out of here, name of Meagan Connell. Could you find her and ask her to call me?"

4.

LUCAS'S OFFICE WAS fifteen feet square, no window, with a door that opened directly to a hallway. He had a wooden desk and chair, three visitor's chairs, two file cabinets, a bookcase, a computer, and a three-b.u.t.ton phone. A map of the Twin Cities metro area covered most of one wall, a cork bulletin board another. He hung his jacket on a wooden hanger and the wooden hanger on a wall hook, sat down, pulled open the bottom desk drawer with his toe, put his feet on it, and picked up the telephone and dialed. A woman answered.

"Weather Karkinnen, please." He didn't recognize all the nurses' voices yet.

"Doctor Karkinnen is in the operating room. . . . Is this Lucas?"

"Yes. Could you tell her I called? I might be late getting home. I'll try her there later."

He punched in another number, got a secretary. "Lucas Davenport for Sister Mary Joseph."

"Lucas, she's in Rome. I thought you knew."

"s.h.i.+t . . . Oh, jeez, excuse me." The secretary was a novice nun.

"Lucas. . . ." Feigned exasperation.

"I forgot. When is she back?"

"Two weeks yet. She's going on some kind of dig."

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit . . . Oh, jeez, excuse me."

Sister Mary Joseph-Elle Kruger when they had gone to elementary school together-was an old friend and a shrink, with an interest in murder. She'd helped him out on other cases. Rome. Lucas shook his head and opened the file that Connell had put together.

The first page was a list of names and dates. The next eight pages were wound photos done during autopsies. Lucas worked through them. They were not identical, but there were inescapable similarities.

The wound photos were followed by crime-scene shots. The bodies had been dumped in a variety of locations, some urban, some rural. A couple were in roadside ditches, one in a doorway, one under a bridge. One had been simply rolled under a van in a residential neighborhood. There was little effort to hide them. In the background of several, he could see shreds of plastic garbage bags.

Going back and forth from each report to the relevant photographs, Lucas picked up a thread that seemed to tie them together in his mind. The women had been . . . littered. They'd been thrown away like used Kleenex. Not with desperation, or fear, or guilt, but with some discretion, as though the killer had been afraid of being caught littering.

The autopsy reports also showed up differences.

Ripped was a subjective description, and some of the wounds looked more like frantic knife strikes than deliberate ripping. Some of the women had been beaten, some had not. Still, taken together, there was a feel about the killings. The feel was generated almost as much by the absence of fact as by the presence of it.

n.o.body saw the women when they were picked up. n.o.body saw the man who picked them up, or his car, although he must have been among them. There were no fingerprints, v.a.g.i.n.al smears turned up no s.e.m.e.n, although signs of s.e.m.e.n had been found on the clothing of one of the women. Not enough for a blood or DNA type, apparently; none was listed.

When he finished the first reading, he skipped through the reports again, quickly, looking at the small stuff. He'd have to read them again, several times. There were too many details for a single reading, or even two or three. But he'd learned when he looked back from other murders that the files often pointed at the killer way before he was brought down. Truth was in the details. . . .

His rummaging was interrupted by a knock. "Yeah. Come in."

Connell stepped through, fl.u.s.tered, but still pale as a ghost. "I was in town. I thought I'd come by, instead of calling."

"Come in. Sit down," Lucas said.

Connell's close-cropped hair was disconcerting; it lent a punkish air to a woman who was anything but a punk. She had a serious, square face, with a short, Irish nose and a square chin. She was still wearing the blue suit she'd worn that morning, with a darker stripe of what might have been garbage juice on the front of it. An incongruous black leather hip pack was buckled around her hips, the bag itself perched just below her navel: a rip-down holster for a large gun. She could take a big gun: she had large hands, and she stuck one of them out and Lucas half-rose to shake it.

She'd opted for peace, Lucas thought; but her hand was cold. "I read your file," he said. "That's nice work."

"The possession of a v.a.g.i.n.a doesn't necessarily indicate stupidity," Connell said. She was still standing.

"Take it easy," Lucas said, his forehead wrinkling as he sat down again. "That was a compliment."

"Just want things clear," Connell said crisply. She looked at the vacant chair, still didn't sit. "And you think there is something?"

Lucas stared at her for another moment, but she neither flinched nor sat down. Holding her eyes, he said, "I think so. They're all too . . . not alike, but they have the feeling of a single man."

"There's something else," Connell said. "It's hard to see it in the files, but you see it when you talk to the friends of these women."

"Which is?"

"They're all the same woman."

"Ah. Tell me. And sit down, for Christ's sakes."

She sat, reluctantly, as if she were giving up the high ground. "One here in the Cities, one in Duluth, now this one, if this latest one is his. One in Madison, one in Thunder Bay, one in Des Moines, one in Sioux Falls. They were all single, late twenties to early forties. They were all somewhat shy, somewhat lonely, somewhat intellectual, somewhat religious or at least involved in some kind of spirituality. They'd go out to bookstores or galleries or plays or concerts at night, like other people'd go out to bars. Anyway, they were all like that. And then these shy, quiet women turn up ripped. . . ."

"Nasty word," Lucas said casually. "Ripped."

Connell shuddered, and her naturally pale complexion went paper-white. "I dream about the woman up at Carlos Avery. I was worse up there than I was today. I went out, took a look, started puking. I got puke all over my radio."

"Well, first time," Lucas said.

"No. I've seen a lot of dead people," Connell said. She was pitched forward in her chair, hands clasped. "This is way different. Joan Smits wants vengeance. Or justice. I can hear her calling from the other side-I know that sounds like schizophrenia, but I can hear her, and I can feel the other ones. All of them. I've been to every one of those places, where the murders happened, on my own time. Talked to witnesses, talked to cops. It's one guy, and he's the devil."

There was a hard, crystalline conviction in her voice and eyes, the taste and bite of psychosis, that made Lucas turn his head away. "What about the sequence you've got here?" Lucas asked, trying to escape her intensity. "He was putting a year between most of them. But then he skipped a couple-once, twenty-one months, another time, twenty-three. You think you're missing a couple?"

"Only if he completely changed his MO," Connell said. "If he shot them. My data search concentrated on stabbings. Or maybe he took the time to bury them and they were never found. That wouldn't be typical of him, though. But there are so many missing people out there, it's impossible to tell for sure."

"Maybe he went someplace else-L.A. or Miami, or the bodies were just never found."

She shrugged. "I don't think so. He tends to stay close to home. I think he drives to the killing scene. He picks his ground ahead of time, and goes by car. I plotted all the places where these women were taken from, and except for the one in Thunder Bay, they all disappeared within ten minutes of an interstate that runs through the Cities. And the one in Thunder Bay was off Highway 61. So maybe he went out to L.A.-but it doesn't feel right."

"I understand that you think it could be a cop."

She leaned forward again, the intensity returning. "There are still a couple of things we need to look at. The cop thing is the only hard clue we have: that one woman talking to her daughter. . . ."

"I read your file on it," Lucas said.

"Okay. And you saw the thing about the PPP?"

"Mmm. No. I don't remember."

"It's in an early police interview with a guy named Price, who was convicted of killing the Madison woman."

"Oh, yeah, I saw the transcript. I haven't had time to read it."

"He says he didn't do it. I believe him. I'm planning to go over and talk to him if nothing else comes up. He was in the bookstore where the victim was picked up, and he says there was a bearded man with PPP tattooed on his hand. Right on the web between his index finger and thumb."