Broken Prey ld-16

by John Sandford

  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 gues
s. 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.

  There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the passenger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.

  “Okay,” he told the group, “This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it.”

  They called references listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.

  They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed “none” under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who’d had an abortion but had listed “none” under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.

  One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he’d not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to “explode.” The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.

  “Ouch,” said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. “Here’s a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness. .”

  He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan’s only appearance in public print. Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn’t figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.

  Elle came in late in the afternoon, to look at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.

  “The quality of information you’re getting is not the right kind to pull him up,” she said. “You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each person to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of suspects.”

  “The list would include them?”

  “Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the winners of political races. . All the suspects know one another, and most of them, given their jobs, are intelligent, so you would wind up with dozens of evaluations that would include all kinds of things that you don’t get on paper. Personal feelings, rumor, gossip, personal encounters.
. you should probably survey the patients, too. They may have psychological problems, but lots of them are actually hyperperceptive, hypersensitive, to the qualities of other people. .”

  “You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people,” Lucas said.

  “Not really-you’d just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you’d get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?”

  “About eighty.”

  “If you were to give questionnaires to all eighty people, and if the killer is one of them, I would bet that his name is in the top five,” she said.

  Lucas scratched his chin. “If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don’t you put together the questionnaire, have it ready?”

  “Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he’s still out there. .”

  “Because we’d have all kinds of legal and labor problems,” Lucas said. “We’re already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We’re gonna hear from the unions any time now. . And the media would go crazy about invasion of privacy and all that. I mean, we are on a fishing expedition.”

  “If he kills somebody else. .”

  “That’s why I say I’ll do it if we don’t get anything in the next day or two,” Lucas said. “Right now, I think he’s hunkered down. He’ll start moving again, if he’s like you say, if he doesn’t have any choice. .”

  “There’s something else. If you let me do this market thing. . it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of Forensic Psychology would be all over it.”

  The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.

  The co-op center had pretty much closed down by seven o’clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they’d seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn’t done well at a previous job.