Lucas Davenport Collection

by John Sandford

  That got him the basics. Then he said, “The stuff that I got from the survivors, let me just give it to you quick, just to make sure there isn’t anything terribly wrong. I want this to be accurate—you don’t even have to tell me anything else, but just if this is right.”

  He then gave Nordwall everything that Hubbard had given him, plus everything that Laurina Rice had given to him, plus some bullshit that he made up. That got the sheriff rolling, and when they were done, he had a front-page story nailed down.

  He talked to his team leader, who in olden says would have been called an assistant city editor, and she talked to the metro editor, and then the team leader came back and told him they would take everything he had, don’t worry about length.

  A photographer was dispatched to Mankato to get a shot of an empty tire swing, and a graphics artist starting pulling up Internet images of straight razors. Ignace spread his notes over his desk, marked some of them with a red felt-tip.

  Hubbard: he owed him. No question about it.

  HE COULDN’T FIND SLOAN. He had stolen an internal police department phone book, with home phone numbers for all the cops, but nobody answered when he called Sloan’s home. He left a message with the answering service, said briefly what he wanted, and hung up. He toyed with the idea of calling Davenport, thought about Hubbard’s warning, and decided against it.

  Besides, there was an old newspaper maxim that he was happy to honor: too many facts could ruin a perfectly good story. Nobody could complain that he hadn’t done the work—he’d talked to the principal law-enforcement officer of the county where the murder happened, he had talked earlier in the week to Sloan about the Angela Larson murder, he had comments from survivors. He didn’t need Davenport.

  He settled in behind his computer, webbed his fingers together, cracked his knuckles, and started typing.

  A serial killer is loose in Minnesota, a sexual predator armed with a razor, a man who tortures his victims before raping them, male and female alike, and cutting their throats . . .

  Another reporter passed by Ignace’s cubicle as he passed a thousand words, and thought, Jesus: the guy really does buzz.

  AND WHILE IGNACE WAS BUZZING, Millie Lincoln was . . .

  Well.

  MILLIE LINCOLN WAS SHORT and blond and liked men; always had. She liked her father, she liked her uncles, she liked all four of her brothers, and they liked her back.

  Men liked her back.

  Millie gave up her virginity when she was sixteen, fumbling around in her boyfriend’s parents’ bed. By twenty-two, she’d had four additional lovers. She spent her senior year in high school with the second one, after the fumbler, and then messed around with a college kid, an affair begun with another freshman during the first long Mankato winter, then got into a more serious thing that lasted almost two years.

  Then, finally, Mihovil Draskovic.

  MIHOVIL WAS SEVEN YEARS OLDER than she. A strong, ropy man, slightly mysterious; and a doctor.

  Mihovil had made his way from his native Serbia to the United States as a fifteen-year-old, had enlisted in the marines when he was seventeen, became a medic, got out of the crotch, as he called it, went to med school on a marine corps scholarship. He had marine tattoos and now wore his hair long and loose over his wide shoulders, like Jesus. He always had a smile on his face, he was a man perpetually amused, a man with Gypsy eyes . . . a man of slightly fractured English, a crazy mixture of broken grammar and cutting-edge slang.

  Mihovil had spent much of his young life in a refugee camp, where the children slept on one side of the hovel and the parents made love behind an army blanket that hung from the ceiling. Since they didn’t have a TV, they were behind the blanket almost every night, and the activity was almost uncommented-upon. Natural.

  Mihovil and Millie met in the Mankato hospital emergency room. Millie had dislocated a finger playing football, and he’d popped it back in place. They’d talked a little before and after, had bumped into each other in the bagel place a couple of days later, and one thing led to another . . .

  Led to another all over the place.

  Inside, outside, on hospital beds, floors, lawns, under apple trees, standing up, lying down, now one on top, now the other.

  Mihovil taught her to say things like “Wait. Do this—here, move your head right over here and now lick slower and shorter . . . Oh, my God, that’s almost right. Wiggle your finger down . . . Oh, my God . . .”

  He’d gone into instructional mode the second time they slept together. Why was she moving around aimlessly, he wanted to know. Why didn’t she have an orgasm and beat her feet on the sheets? Why was she treating his dick like a shovel handle?

  He was nice enough about it, but blunt. She didn’t think it was a language barrier; he was just a blunt guy.

  For example, they’d gone to an arty party, and a woman had been holding forth on Diverse Ways of Meaning, the Science of Signs and the Clash of Cultures. Millie spotted her for a poseur: not only did she smoke, but she held her cigarette upright, between her thumb and forefinger, like some kind of Russian film director or maybe a Nazi. She made no bones about edging in on Mihovil. After delivering a nearly incomprehensible spate on the Evils of American Cultural Imperialism, she asked Mihovil what he thought.

  He said, “I think what you said is bullshit. No, wait—it’s worse than that. We talk about the black people in Uganda and the brown people in New Guinea, and you say that we push our cultural artifacts upon them . . . You mean, medicine? You mean, TV? You mean, cars? Those people are just as smart as we are. They’d love to sit around a swimming pool and drink lemonade and listen to Eminem and get flu shots when they need them.

  “You want to keep them in some kind of crazy zoo, hunting with spears, so we can look at them and study their culture. That’s bullshit. I’ve done that. I lived in a zoo, I lived in a tent when I was a kid and drank sewage and had the shits for six years in a row. I’d kill somebody to keep from going back to that. I can goddamn well guarantee if you took one of those guys out of the jungle in New Guinea and gave him some jeans and T-shirts and a good pair of shoes, he’d cut your heart out before he’d let you send him back.

  “I’d bet you anything that they’d rather live in a nice apartment with a stereo and a toilet and running water that you can drink. So what I think is, you’re arguing that you have to allow the niggers to stay in their place. That’s about half a step from we gotta keep the niggers in their place. Simple racism is what it is.”

  ANYWAY, HE WAS A BLUNT GUY. She wasn’t the least embarrassed by any of his blunt sexual suggestions, except for the suggestion of ignorance.

  “If you’d tell me what to do, I’d do it,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you want, I only know what I want. You have to tell me what to do, and I tell you what to do, and we’re both happy.”

  “That sounds kind of . . . icky.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, moving his index finger like a windshield wiper, a gesture she’d only seen from people who’d grown up outside the U.S. “Not icky. Icky is the wrong word. Dirty, maybe. Like Catholic dirty. Or . . . I don’t know. But not icky. Icky is like when somebody sneezes and blows snot on your croissant.”

  So she started telling him what she liked.

  She found out that she liked telling him.

  ANY OTHER TIME, she’d have been nothing more significant than a college girl discovering sex. Not this time. This time, there was a predator hovering next to her.

  She was the most vocal woman he’d ever encountered, talking, analyzing, demanding—a long-running commentary that might have been a template for an advanced version of The Joy of Sex.

  All that turned him on. But what really got to him, on an emotional level, something that went beyond any simple erotic twitch, was her orgasms. They started with a growl, a sound that was almost doglike, and proceeded up in pitch and intensity until she was screaming like a cat; yowls that must have woken half the building.

  If h
e had ever sat with her, and told her what he really felt, how he wanted to go a step beyond anything she’d ever contemplated, wanted to go there with steel and rope . . . then they’d lock him up. They’d know that he’d already been there with other women, and they’d put him next to the Gods Down the Hall, and they’d come and look at him like a goldfish in an aquarium.

  But God, he’d like to talk about it; just to tell her how her howls were tearing him apart. To go just one more step with her . . .

  5

  LUCAS WAS HALF AWAKE when he heard the whap of the Pioneer Press hitting the front porch, and the deliverywoman reversing her car out of the driveway. Ten minutes later, as he was about to go under again, having punched his pillow flat, the second deliverywoman came in, with two whaps: the Star-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.

  He tried to get back to sleep but was only marginally successful, slipping in and out of confused dreams that sometimes seemed like memories, sometimes like fantasies.

  His problem was the empty bed. He’d slept by himself for years, and now, groaning through his later forties, he couldn’t sleep without Weather beside him.

  On the other hand . . .

  The house was certainly neater than when the family was home.

  THE FAMILY WAS IN LONDON. Weather had gotten a prestigious fellowship in maxillo-facial surgery, and had first thought to go alone. But she hated the idea of three months away from Sam, the baby. And Letty, their ward, started whining around about never getting to go anywhere, and the housekeeper wondered what she’d do if everybody left . . .

  Finally, Weather decided to pick up the whole bunch of them and transplant them to London for the summer. “We don’t have a money problem, so why not?” she asked.

  “I’d be happy to take care of everybody, and you’d have the time to yourself,” Lucas had said. She was suspicious—he got along quite well on his own and often seemed to pull a loneliness around himself. And she really didn’t want to be away from Sam . . .

  So they packed it all up, everything they would need for three months, surgeon, baby, ward, and housekeeper, and at enormous cost, left for London, leaving him alone in the house.

  He’d cluttered the place the first few days the family was gone. Then he’d picked it up and resumed his bachelor ways: he’d never been exactly tidy, but he kept things in their places. When the family was around, nothing was ever where it was supposed to be. The amount of junk that came in the door was befuddling: new clothes and electronics and DVDs and school supplies and Pampers and snack food and medical journals and what seemed like an endless pile of cardboard boxes and wrapping plastic and empty bottles.

  That all stopped.

  Still. The hole in his life seemed to be getting larger; and he waited every morning until she called from her office in London, to tell him about the day she’d had, and what the kids were doing.

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG, he sat up, groggy, looked at the clock: too early. She never called this early. He picked up the phone, and Rose Marie Roux said, “Your secret serial killer is all over the front page of the Strib.”

  “What?”

  “This guy really is a monster,” she said, conversationally. She sounded as though she had a cup of coffee in front of her and a cigarette in her hand, which she probably did. Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of public safety, and, indirectly, Lucas’s boss. “Cutting their throats with a straight razor and scourging them with a wire whip? Where do you even get a straight razor these days?”

  Lucas said, “Shit,” scratched under his left armpit, and said, “They get straight razors from the same place they get lead pipes. The cliché mine. What else do they say?”

  “Pretty well-written piece, if you have a taste for the Gothic,” Rose Marie said. “You’re still in bed, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll read it to you.” She did; and when she finished, she said, “This is gonna be trouble for my favorite cop. The newsies are in it now.”

  “I better call Sloan,” Lucas said.

  HE DIDN’T CALL SLOAN RIGHT AWAY. He went back to sleep, and the next time he cracked his eyelids it was two minutes to eight o’clock. He fumbled past the lamp, through the pocket junk that he dropped on the bed stand each night, past watch and wallet and lucky stone and cash receipts from the gas station, a small wad of currency and two dollars in change, and finally dug out the cell phone, turned it on, and lay with it on his chest.

  Two minutes later, right on time, it rang.

  “Do anything good today?” he asked.

  “Gave a lecture on the . . . on a facial muscle and the nerve that operates it,” Weather said.

  “I wish I’d been there. Did you show slides?”

  “You’re pulling my weenie.”

  “You don’t have a weenie, unless you’ve grown one in London.”

  They talked for fifteen minutes: she told him about the work; he told her about the story in the Star-Tribune.

  “The thing is, you like that,” she said. “You like being in the newspaper.”

  “Only when I’m standing over the bad guy’s body with my gun in my hand, wearing a new gray suit with a thin chalk stripe, and the Porsche in the background.”

  “You’ll take it any way you can get it, buster. Maybe I should worry about you hanging out with newspaperwomen, again.”

  “Ah, I’m too pussy-whipped to do anything questionable.”

  “I beg your pardon . . .”

  AS SOON AS THEY BROKE OFF, he said, “Sloan,” and punched in Sloan’s office phone from memory.

  Somebody else answered. “Where’s Sloan?” Lucas asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “Davenport.”

  “Hey, Lucas. This is Franklin. Sloan was talking to Anderson out in the hall a minute ago, let me go look. He’s been calling you at the office and on your cell phone . . .”

  Franklin dropped the phone and went away. Lucas looked at his cell phone’s screen: sure enough, three missed calls. Then Lucas heard Franklin’s voice again but couldn’t make out what he said, then Sloan picked up: “We got some ink. This little fucking weasel from the Strib picked it up.”

  “I know,” Lucas said. He yawned. “What do you think?”

  “Are you still in bed? You sound like you’re in bed.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so what do you think?”

  “The chief is jumping up and down, which is what you get when you hire a small-town guy. He’s scared to death that the city council might pee on him. Or even worse, the TV people,” Sloan said.

  “You worried?”

  “Not yet. Not as long as he doesn’t kill another one in town. I suppose you’re gonna have the governor on your ass.”

  Lucas yawned again. “Don’t know yet,” he said when he had the yawn under control. “Dead people don’t have any political clout, but it could come from somewhere else, I suppose.”

  “How about a sense of moral obligation?” Sloan said.

  “Ah, you fuckin’ Republicans, nothing ever makes you happy.”

  “Fuck a bunch of Republicans,” Sloan said. “Anyway, I had Anderson send a whole book over to you by e-mail. You could have your secretary print it out for you before you get there. It’s everything we got, plus some medium-rez pictures from the Larson scene. You can have your co-op guys put it all in the database.”

  “All right. I’ll be over there by ten. Want to hook up, say ten-thirty?”

  “You got the case now?”

  “I’m giving it to myself,” Lucas said. “If they want to put somebody else on it, too, that’s okay.”

  “See you at ten-thirty,” Sloan said. “By the way, I got my papers.”

  Lucas didn’t immediately track the reference. “Huh?”

  “My retirement papers. I got them. I’m filling them out,” Sloan said.

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake, Sloan, you aren’t gonna quit.”

  “Yeah, I am. Talk to you at ten-thirty.”

  LUCAS CALLED HIS SECRETARY and
told her to print out Sloan’s murder file, and get it to the co-op group. Then he dressed, went downstairs, into a silent house, sat at the bar in the kitchen, and ate cholesterol-free, fat-free, carbohydrate-free, salt-free, puffed oatmeal air with a splash of fat-free milk. Still hungry, he went, feeling furtive, even though Weather was six thousand miles away, into Weather’s home office, opened the file cabinet, picked up a stack of medical reports, found the gold box of Godiva birthday bonbons hidden under them, stole the two he figured would be least conspicuously missing, and let them melt in his mouth as he headed for the door.

  The second one had a maraschino cherry in the center: excellent. Feeling much better and hardly guilty at all, he wheeled out onto Mississippi River Boulevard, over to Cretin, and down to I-94, playing with the Porsche’s engine as he went.

  CAROL WAS POKING FRANTICALLY at her computer when Lucas arrived at the office. Lucas ran the BCA’s Office of Regional Research, a bullshit title invented by Rose Marie Roux created to cover up the fact that he did what he wanted, or what the governor wanted him to. A fixer, in some ways.

  He had two full-time investigators, and since the office was so small, Carol, technically a secretary, was effectively the office manager. She was a cheerful young woman with auburn hair and blue eyes and freckles, black plastic glasses, a little too heavy, and sometimes a little too loud. Despite her cheerful personality, she’d had a reputation around the Department of Public Safety for ruthless efficiency. Lucas had stolen her from the Highway Patrol, in a transfer arranged by Rose Marie Roux as a payoff for solving a series of horse shootings.

  She propped herself in the doorway as Lucas hung up his jacket: “You didn’t sign the overtime.”

  “You sign it,” he said. She’d have to forge his signature.

  “I did. I’m just saying. You gotta start signing it, or someday they’re gonna put me in jail. Also, Lanscombe called and said that Del put eight hundred miles on a state car last weekend.”