Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  Nobody saw the women when they were picked up. Nobody saw the man who picked them up, or his car, although he must have been among them. There were no fingerprints, vaginal smears turned up no semen, although signs of semen 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, flustered, 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 vagina 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.”

  “So we’re looking for a cop with PPP on his hand?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody else saw the tattoo, and they never found anybody with PPP on his hand. A computer search doesn’t show PPP as an identifying mark anywhere. But the thing is, Price had been in jail, and he said the tattoo was a prison tattoo. You know, like they make with ballpoint ink and pins.”

  “Well,” Lucas said. “It’s something.”

  Connell was discouraged. “But not much.”

  “Not unless we find the killer-then it might help confirm the ID,” Lucas said. He picked up the file and paged through it until he found the list of murders and dates. “Do you have any theories about why the killings are so scattered around?”

  “I’ve been looking for patterns,” she said. “I don’t know…”

  “Until the body you found last winter, he never had two killings in the same state. And the last one here was almost nine years ago.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  Lucas closed the file and tossed it back on his desk. “Yeah. That means different reporting jurisdictions. Iowa doesn’t know what we’re doing, and Wisconsin doesn’t know what Iowa’s doing, and nobody knows what South Dakota’s doing. And Canada sure as hell is out of it.”

  “You’re saying he’s figured on that,” Connell said. “So it is a cop.”

  “Maybe,” said Lucas. “But maybe it’s an ex-con. A smart guy. Maybe the reason for the two gaps is, he was inside. Some small-timer who gets slammed for drugs or burglary, and he’s out of circulation.”

  Connell leaned back, regarding him gravely. “When you crawled into the Dumpster this morning, you were cold. I couldn’t be that cold; I never would have seen that tobacco on her.”

  “I’m used to it,” Lucas said.

  “No, no, it was… impressive,” she said. “I need that kind of distance. When I said we only had one fact about him, the cop thing, I was wrong. You came up with a bunch of them: he was strong, he smokes-”

  “Unfiltered Camels,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah? Well, it’s interesting. And now these ideas… I haven
’t had anybody bouncing ideas off me. Are you gonna let me work with you?”

  He nodded. “If you want.”

  “Will we get along?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” he said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  She regarded him without humor. “Exactly my attitude,” she said. “So. What are we doing?”

  “We’re checking bookstores.”

  Connell looked down at herself. “I’ve got to change clothes. I’ve got them in my car…”

  While Connell went to change, Lucas called Anderson for a reading on homicide’s preliminary work on the Wannemaker killing. “We just got started,” Anderson said. “Skoorag called in a few minutes ago. He said a friend of Wannemaker’s definitely thinks she was going to a bookstore. But if you look at the file when she was reported missing, somebody else said she might have been going to the galleries over on First Avenue.”

  “We’re hitting the bookstores. Maybe your guys could take the galleries.”

  “If we’ve got time. Lester’s got people running around like rats,” Anderson said. “Oh-that Junky Doog guy. I got lots of hits, but the last one was three years ago. He was living in a flop on Franklin Avenue. Chances of him being there are slim and none, and slim is outa town.”

  “Give me the address,” Lucas said.

  When he finished with Anderson, Lucas carried his phone book down the hall, Xeroxed the Books section of the Yellow Pages, and went back to his office for his jacket. He had bought the jacket in New York; the thought was mildly embarrassing. He was pulling on the jacket when there was a knock at the door. “Yeah?”

  A fleshy, pink-cheeked thirties-something man in a loose green suit and moussed blond hair poked his head inside, smiled like an encyclopedia salesman, and said, “Hey. Davenport. I’m Bob Greave. I’m supposed to report to you.”

  “I remember you,” Lucas said as they shook hands.

  “From my Officer Friendly stuff?” Greave was cheerful, unconsciously rumpled. But his green eyes matched his Italian-cut suit a little too perfectly, and he wore a fashionable two days’ stubble on his chin.

  “Yeah, there was a poster down at my kid’s preschool,” Lucas said.

  Greave grinned. “Yup, that’s me.”

  “Nice jump, up to homicide,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, bullshit.” Greave’s smile fell away, and he dropped into the chair Connell had vacated, looked up. “I suppose you’ve heard about me.”

  “I haven’t, uh…”

  “Greave the fuckup?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Davenport.” Greave studied him for a minute, then said, “That’s what they call me. Greave-the-fuckup, one word. The only goddamned reason I’m in homicide is that my wife is the mayor’s niece. She got tired of me being Officer Friendly. Not enough drama. Didn’t give her enough to gossip about.”

  “Well…”

  “So now I’m doing something I can’t fuckin’ do and I’m stuck between my old lady and the other guys on the job.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Advice.”

  Lucas spread his hands and shrugged. “If you liked being an Officer Friendly…”

  Greave waved him off. “Not that kind of advice. I can’t go back to Officer Friendly, my old lady’d nag my ears off. She doesn’t like me being a cop in the first place. Homicide just makes it a little okay. And she makes me wear these fuckin’ Italian fruit suits and only lets me shave on Wednesdays and Saturdays.”

  “Sounds like you gotta make a decision about her,” Lucas said.

  “I love her,” Greave said.

  Lucas grinned. “Then you’ve got a problem.”

  “Yeah.” Greave rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Anyway, the guys in homicide don’t do nothing but fuck with me. They figure I’m not pulling my load, and they’re right. Whenever there’s a really horseshit case, I get it. I got one right now. Everybody in homicide is laughing about it. That’s what I need your advice on.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” Greave said. “We’ve got it pegged as a homicide and we know who did it, but we can’t figure out how.”

  “Never heard of anything like that,” Lucas admitted.

  “Sure you have,” Greave said. “All the time.”

  “What?” Lucas was puzzled.

  “It’s a goddamned locked-room mystery, like one of them old-lady English things. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Connell pushed through the door. She was wearing a navy suit with matching low heels, a white blouse with wine-colored tie, and carried a purse the size of a buffalo. She looked at Greave, then Lucas, and said, “Ready.”

  “Bob Greave, Meagan Connell,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, we sorta met,” Greave said. “A few weeks ago.”

  A little tension there. Lucas scooped Connell’s file from his desk, handed it to Greave. “Meagan and I are going out to the bookstores. Read the file. We’ll talk tomorrow morning.”

  “What time?”

  “Not too early,” Lucas said. “How about here, at eleven o’clock?”

  “What about my case?” Greave asked.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow,” Lucas said.

  As Lucas and Connell walked out of the building, Connell said, “Greave’s a jerk. He’s got the Hollywood stubble and the Miami Vice suits, but he couldn’t find his shoes in a goddamn clothes closet.”

  Lucas shook his head, irritated. “Cut him a little slack. You don’t known him that well.”

  “Some people are an open book,” Connell snorted. “He’s a fuckin’ comic.”

  Connell continued to irritate him; their styles were different. Lucas liked to drift into conversation, to schmooze a little, to remember common friends. Connell was an interrogator: just the facts, sir.

  Not that it made much difference. Nobody in the half-dozen downtown bookstores knew Wannemaker. They picked up a taste of her at the suburban Smart Book. “She used to come to readings,” the store owner said. He nibbled at his lip as he peered at the photograph. “She didn’t buy much, but we’d have these wine-and-cheese things for authors coming through town, and she’d show up maybe half the time. Maybe more than that.”

  “Did you have a reading last Friday?”

  “No, but there were some.”

  “Where?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” He threw up his hands. “Goddamn authors are like cockroaches. There’re hundreds of them. There’s always readings somewhere. Especially at the end of the week.”

  “How do I find out where?”

  “Call the Star-Trib. There’d be somebody who could tell you.”

  Lucas called from a corner phone, another number from memory. “I wondered if you’d call.” The woman’s voice was hushed. “Are you bringing up your net?”

  “I’m doing that now. There’re lots of holes.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it. How about the readings?”

  “There was poetry at the Startled Crane, something called Prairie Woman at The Saint-I don’t know how I missed that one-Gynostic at Wild Lily Press, and the Pillar of Manhood at Crosby’s. The Pillar of Manhood was a male-only night. If you’d called last week, I probably could have gotten you in.”

  “Too late,” Lucas said. “My drum’s broke.”

  “Darn. You had a nice drum, too.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks, Shirlene.” To Connell: “We can scratch Crosby’s off the list.”

  The owner of the Startled Crane grinned at Lucas and said, “Cheese it, the heat… How you been, Lucas?” They shook hands, and the store owner nodded at Connell, who stared at him like a snake at a bird.

  “Not bad, Ned,” Lucas said. “How’s the old lady?”

  Ned’s eyebrows went up. “Pregnant again. You just wave it at her, and she’s knocked up.”

  “Everybody’s pregnant. I gotta friend, I just heard his wife’s pregnant. How many is that for you? Six?”

  “Seven… what’s hap
pening?”

  Connell, who had been listening impatiently to the chitchat, thrust the photos at him. “Was this woman here Friday night?”

  Lucas, softer, said, “We’re trying to track down the last days of a woman who was killed last week. We thought she might’ve been at your poetry reading.”

  Ned shuffled through the photos. “Yeah, I know her. Harriet something, right? I don’t think she was here. There were about twenty people, but I don’t think she was with them.”

  “But you see her around?”

  “Yeah. She’s a semiregular. I saw the TV stuff on Nooner. I thought that might be her.”

  “Ask around, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s Nooner?” Connell asked.

  “TV3’s new noon news,” Ned said. “But I didn’t see her Friday. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was somewhere else, though.”

  “Thanks, Ned.”

  “Sure. And stop in. I’ve been fleshing out the poetry section.”

  Back on the street, Connell said, “You’ve got a lot of bookstore friends?”

  “A few,” Lucas said. “Ned used to deal a little grass. I leaned on him and he quit.”

  “Huh,” she said, thinking it over. Then, “Why’d he tell you about poetry?”

  “I read poetry,” Lucas said.

  “Bullshit.”

  Lucas shrugged and started toward the car.

  “Say a poem.”

  “Fuck you, Connell,” Lucas said.

  “No, c’mon,” she said, catching him, facing him. “Say a poem.”

  Lucas thought for a second then said, “The heart asks pleasure first/And then excuse from pain/and then those little anodynes/that deaden suffering. And then to go to sleep/and then if it should be/the will of its inquisitor/the privilege to die.”

  Connell, already pale, seemed to go a shade paler, and Lucas, remembering, thought, Oh, shit.

  “Who wrote that?”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  “Roux told you I have cancer?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t thinking about that…”