“Ah . . . Listen, keep working. I’m gonna try to make it over.”
“You know where it is?”
“Yeah. And listen, let me give you a number. . . .” He gave the cop Del’s number and said, “He was looking for some other women who worked for Randy, and they might have seen this chick, too, if you can’t find the neighbor.”
“All right to call him in the middle of the night?”
“Oh, hell, yes. Del’s an early riser—I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up already,” Lucas said.
HE TOOK THE Tahoe for its cup holders, stopped at a Super America and got two big cups of coffee and a box of powdered doughnuts, and pulled into the Kanpur’s parking lot a half hour after the call from the St. Paul cop. The back of the store was dimly lit by two distant orange sodium-vapor security lights, a variety of lights from the cop cars, and the light from a video camera. Several cops turned to look when Lucas pulled into the lot, and when he got out, a sergeant broke away from the group and walked over.
“John Davis,” he said, and they shook hands. “She looks pretty bad.” The dumpster was against the back wall of the store, and they walked over together. “She might have gone right into the truck, except that the dumpster was overfilled and the driver got out to toss a couple of bags before he hooked it up.”
“She was right on top?”
“She was down a way. The driver threw a couple of bags off and saw her arm.”
“Pretty dark,” Lucas said.
“They have lights on the truck so they can see to hook up the dumpster.”
Lucas looked in. The dead woman was naked, as advertised, her face innocent but gray, her eyes half open. She had deep ligature wounds on her neck, a rime of blood around her mouth. One arm was bent sideways and disappeared under the garbage bags to her right. The other was sitting on top of her chest.
“She does fit the profile,” Lucas said. “You got a flashlight?”
Davis handed him a flashlight and he pointed it at the visible hand, and bent farther into the dumpster.
“What?” David asked.
“She’s got a broken fingernail . . . two broken fingernails,” Lucas said.
“Trying to defend herself.”
“We’ve got a guy with a theory,” Lucas said. “If he’s right, we gotta take a close look at the rug up at Randy’s.”
As Lucas pushed back from the dumpster and handed the flashlight to Davis, Del pulled into the lot and got out of the car. He didn’t look much like a cop, and he held up a badge to the St. Paul cops who started toward him.
“Coffee in the truck,” Lucas called.
Del swerved over to the Tahoe, opened the door, and a moment later continued across the lot to where they were standing and introduced himself to Davis. To Lucas he said, “I was planning to kill you for having them call me, but with the coffee . . .” He slurped at the cup.
“There’s a possibility that she’s Randy’s girl,” Lucas said.
“John told me,” Del said. “There’s one chick living with DDT—not Charmin’, but the one named Melissa? She might have seen her last week at a party up on Como.”
“You called DDT?”
“Yeah. There was a game last night over at the Target Center, and Melissa was working it. She didn’t expect to get back last night, and she didn’t.”
“So she’s shacked up somewhere downtown with a fuckin’ basketball player.”
“Yeah, and I hope one of the Chicago guys,” Del said. “She didn’t look that healthy.”
“Does he have any idea when she might get back?” Lucas asked.
“He thought maybe midmorning.”
“Goddamnit. Be nice if he could have tossed her in the backseat and dragged her ass over here.”
“Early enough to miss the rush, too,” Del said, taking another hit of the coffee.
Davis said, “We rousted the guy who talked to Whitcomb’s neighbor, and we got her name and sent a squad over. I haven’t heard back yet.” He turned and looked across the lot at a couple of St. Paul cops who were blocking the parking lot but not doing much else. “Hey, one of you guys call Polaroid and ask him if he’s found that neighbor.”
One of the cops lifted a hand and fit himself inside a squad. A few seconds later, he slid out of the car and said, “They’re on the way back here. They got her.”
Lucas nodded. “All right.”
“These other strangled chicks . . . were they on the corner?” Davis asked.
“The idea came up, but it doesn’t look like it,” Lucas said. “This is”—he waved a hand at the dumpster—“out of whack.”
“And Whitcomb can’t talk.”
THE NEIGHBOR WAS named Megan Earle. She’d put on her red parka for the trip across town, and walked over to the dumpster with the hood up. “Do I gotta look?”
“You gotta,” Davis said. “Just a minute, though.” He turned to one of the crime-scene cops and said, “Put one of them empty bags over her. You know.”
The cop covered the dead woman’s body and neck with an empty plastic garbage bag, nodded, and Earle shuffled over to the dumpster and stood on her tiptoes and looked in. “Oh, God,” she said. She stepped back, looked at Davis, and said, “That’s Suzanne.”
“Her name’s Suzanne?” Lucas asked.
“That’s what she told me. I only talked to her once or twice when she was taking garbage out.”
“You’re sure it’s her.”
Earle nodded. “It’s her. Oh, God . . .”
The cop who’d been with her peered into the dumpster, then took a camera out of his pocket and fired it into the dumpster—a Polaroid, Lucas realized when the photo whirred out of the front of the camera.
Lucas stepped over to Del but didn’t say anything for a moment. Del said finally, “Randy’s too young to have done the first ones.”
“What if there are two of them, working separately? But then the graveyard doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“What if this is just a big fuckin’ coincidence?”
“Then what about the jewelry?”
Del scratched his head. “We got all these pieces, but they don’t fit.”
“Randy can make them fit,” Lucas said.
“If he will.”
“He’s looking at a murder rap if he doesn’t. If this girl’s blood is all over his apartment.”
“Maybe I ought to go baby-sit him. Just sit there until he wakes up,” Del said.
“Not be a bad idea,” Lucas agreed. “First guy who talks to him probably gonna break the case.”
They hung around long enough to make sure there was nothing under the body. When it came out clean, and the medical examiner’s people were bundling it away, Davis said, “We’ll do some quick processing, and I imagine we’ll know if we’ve got a blood match by the middle of the morning. Take a while to get people going.”
“Gimme a call?” Lucas asked.
“I’ll be off. Allport will know, though.”
“All right. I’ll call him.”
“How many murders have you had this year, City of St. Paul?” Del asked.
“I think this is five,” Davis said.
“Jeez. We got ten in almost three months,” Del said. “Nobody’s killing anybody anymore. Even ag assault’s way down.”
“Same here. Drugs are down. Rape’s still cooking along.”
“Yeah, rape’s a bright spot,” Del agreed.
“We’re talking about consolidation—moving guys out of violent crimes and hitting property crimes a little harder,” Davis said. “Some of the new plainclothes guys are sweatin’ a transfer back to patrol.”
“No offense, but I couldn’t go back,” Del said. He shivered. “Patrol, man—I feel for you guys.”
“Ah, we like it. Not as many assholes.”
“You mean on the force, or on the street?” Del asked.
“Whichever,” Davis said, and they all laughed, and Lucas said, “I resemble that remark.”
LUCAS WENT B
ACK home, unplugged the bedroom phone, closed the door, and fell facedown on the bed. The next time he moved, it was after ten o’clock. He groaned, pushed himself up, shaved, showered, and headed downtown.
Marshall was talking with Marcy. He saw Lucas and stood up and said, “I heard about the girl in the dumpster. What do you think?”
“Gotta call St. Paul. They were gonna try to match her blood to the blood at Randy’s—but I’d say the chances are about ninety-five percent that it’s the right woman. Let me call Allport and see if they’ve got anything.”
Allport had the tests. “She was killed in Whitcomb’s apartment, that’s her blood on the wall,” he said. “It makes me feel a little better about what happened—the docs are pouring on the steroids, but that spine thing is looking worse. They don’t think he’s gonna walk again.”
“Is he gonna be able to talk?” Lucas asked.
“Probably not today. They’re keeping him sedated until they get the spine managed. They’re going back in this afternoon to try to consolidate it, and now they think they might have some outside soft tissue in the spinal cord itself, which they didn’t pick up on the X rays the first time around. Like some of his skin got blown into the cord and they couldn’t see it.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. He may be dead tomorrow.”
“Not really.”
“No, not really, but . . . man, they aren’t saying much. He is pretty fucked up, and they really don’t know when we can talk to him.”
“It’s like a goddamn TV show,” Lucas said. “The next thing is, he’s gonna fall out of the bed and hit his head and get amnesia.”
He told Marshall, and Marshall shook his head. “I’d give a thousand dollars if we could take back what happened yesterday,” he said. “That boy getting shot.”
“He’s a major asshole,” Lucas said.
“I don’t much give a shit about that. That’s your problem,” Marshall said. “My problem is, I want a name out of him. He gives me the name, and after that, he can get run over by a steamroller. But I want the name first.”
“Did you look at that event over at St. Pat’s?” Lucas asked.
“Yup. Copied out every one of Miz Qatar’s names into a laptop, gave the disk to Harmon, and he ran them late last night,” Marshall said. “Didn’t come up with much—except that we figured out one more thing. They got a college alumni magazine called the Shamrock. Some pictures from this get-together were in there, and it was all these women out on a lawn and they were all wearing name tags. So if our guy was there, taking pictures, he could take a shot and know who the woman was, without even asking her name. Or even talking to her.”
“Goddamnit. That doesn’t help us much,” Lucas said. “How many guys on your list?”
“Maybe a hundred and fifty. Harmon’s running them against the sex-offender files right now.”
Del called from Regions hospital: “They let me in to see Randy, and he is seriously fucked up. He makes a little goddamn noise once in a while, and that’s it. His folks got a lawyer and they gave me some shit. . . . I don’t know, it’s getting tangled up over here.”
“Might as well come back,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. Nothing’s gonna happen today, unless he bites it.”
“Allport says that’s not much of a risk.”
“I dunno,” Del said. “The docs say he’s got so many weird drugs in him that they’re fighting withdrawal symptoms along with everything else. He’s got heroin in him, cocaine, maybe some PCP—he was using inhalers. . . . The little prick.”
MARCY AND MARSHALL left for St. Paul, the first meeting of the interagency board on what the papers and TV stations were now calling the gravedigger case. The label was created by a Channel Eight anchorman, was picked up by Channel Three, which began using a graphic of a hillside grave with its stories, and finally by the papers. The named looked like it would stick.
After they’d gone, Lucas continued to read through the accumulating paper in the case, without any penetrating insights. When he went out for lunch at midday, he found the clouds had closed down again and a miserable cold drizzle was whimpering through the streets. Cold and damp, he loafed around City Hall, talking with Lester and Sloan, then went through the secret tunnel to the medical examiner’s office and talked to an investigator there about strangulation.
At two o’clock, he was back in the office, when Weather called. “Why don’t you invite the Capslocks and the Sloans over tomorrow night. We’ll get some lobsters.”
“All right. Short notice, though,” he said.
“They never do anything. And it’s been a while since we all got together.”
“Who knows,” he said. “Tomorrow night—maybe it’ll all be over by then.”
But he didn’t really think so. The case felt like it was slowing down. Everything was pinned on Randy, and Randy had gone to never-never land.
18
THE KILLING OF the unnamed hooker at Randy Whitcomb’s brought a temporary semblance of peace to Qatar’s soul. He mentally replayed the scene every few minutes, especially the last part, when he hung over her and she began to quiver. . . .
It’s the killing, stupid.
He’d always thought it was the sex, that the killing was punishment for the sexual disappointments the woman had inflicted upon him. He knew better now. Any sexual practice he’d ever remotely considered he’d now tried with Barstad. He’d found it, ultimately, to be boring. It was the killing, he thought, and it felt fine —fine—to have that clarified.
He searched for a metaphor. His realization of the exact nature of the beast was, he decided, the psychological equivalent of the first taste of a great French white wine, properly cool, properly tart; a bit of an intellectual tangle, perhaps, but there was a wonderfully clear, clean response at the sensual level.
He wanted another one.
Barstad.
They were meeting twice a week and the sex had gone past strenuous, lurching off into the weeds of intricate variation. He was not so much entertained as amazed, he thought. The last time they met, he’d spanked her with the Ping-Pong paddles until her ass was fiery red, yet she seemed to feel that he’d done an inadequate job. The pain, she said, had been on the very periphery of her pleasure, rather than at the center, where it should have been. She sounded, he thought, like a French literary theorist writing on sex.
Today, he thought, things would be different. He had the starter rope in his back pocket when he arrived at her apartment, and a duffle bag and spade in the backseat of the car. He would bury her so far out in the countryside that she would never be found. If the police wanted to attribute her disappearance to the gravedigger, he thought, let them do it.
He no longer cared. The power was in him. He even enjoyed his new media appellation: “the gravedigger.” All right. He whistled as the elevator took him up to Barstad’s.
SHE WAS NUDE when she met him at the door: propped it open with one arm and posed, her eyelids drooping. “James,” she said. “I’ve already started.”
“I see that,” he said. “And I’ve got a new movie,” she said. “A DVD. I pushed the couch back so we could put the futon in front of the TV.”
Sex first, he thought. First the sex, and when he’d been emptied out of all the stray emotions that sex seemed to dissolve, he could better appreciate the clear, cool strangulation. There was, he thought, an aesthetic to it all.
They began with the movie and masturbation, moved on to oral sex, and then the intricacies. He found his mind wandering in the middle of it all, and he looked down at her neck below him and then around for his pants. They were out of reach, and he was unable to detach himself at the moment. He continued, looking down at her neck and the fine groove of her spine, thrilled already by what was coming. . . .
She finished, and he did, and they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder. She always wanted a long second bout, had even urged him toward chemical reinforcement. He would have another opportuni
ty with the rope. What, he thought, would it be like to strangle a woman who was at that moment in the throes of orgasm? Would she stop? Would he?
“James,” she murmured into his neck, “I am going to make you very, very unhappy. If you want to punish me, I would accept that. But I want you to hear me out first.”
He pulled back, said nothing. What was this?
“It’s time to enter a new stage of exploration,” she said. She’d always been formal about the sex, as though she were filling out a lab book. What would she do when she got to the end, when she’d exhausted all the possibilities? Build hot rods? Write Haiku? “I’ve been talking to a woman that I’ve known for several years. She has had some sexual relationships with other women, and we have decided that we would like to explore that together. Intergender sexuality.”
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