Lucas leaned back, his voice rising. “Sounds like bullshit.”
“No, no, I swear to Christ. It’s him. Joe Hillerod. And this Joe-he’s been inside. For sex.” Price reached out and touched Lucas’s hand. His eyes were wide, frightened.
“Sex?”
“Rape.”
“Did you ask Bob… is it Bob in here?”
“Yeah, Bob was here, Joe was out. Joe is the guy. Bob is out now, but Joe is the guy.”
“Did you ask Bob if Joe has the tattoo?”
Price leaned back. “Fuck no. One thing you learn in here is, you don’t ask about those fuckin’ tattoos. You just pretend they’re not there,” he said. “But Joe was inside. He was one of the Seeds. He’s got it, I bet. I bet anything.”
When Connell and the escort returned, Lucas was taking notes. “Harry Roy Wayne and Gerry Gay Wayne,” Price was saying, “They’re brothers and they work at the Caterpillar place down there. They’ll tell you.”
“But that’s all you got?” Lucas asked.
“You got everything else.” D. Wayne slumped on the couch, smoking a second cigarette. He picked up the pack and put them in his pocket.
“I won’t bullshit you,” Lucas said. “I don’t think that’s enough.”
“It will be if you catch the right guy,” Price said.
“Yeah. If there is one,” Lucas said. He stood up and said to Connell, “Unless you’ve got some more questions, we’re outta here.”
CHAPTER
14
“What do we have?” Connell asked as they waited for the car. She was digging into a pack of chive-flavored potato chips, sixty cents from a machine.
“A hell of a coincidence,” Lucas said. He told her briefly about Price’s nervous statement, and about Del’s investigation at the fire, the dead deputy, and the. 50-caliber tubes. “So the Seeds are in the Cities.”
“And this Joe Hillerod was convicted of rape?”
“Price said sex, so I don’t know exactly what it was. If our guy is a member of the Seeds, it’d explain a lot,” Lucas said. “Gimme a couple of chips.”
She passed the pack. “What does it explain?”
Lucas crunched: starch and fat. Excellent. “They’ve had years of hassles with the law, they’ve even got a lawyer on retainer. They know how we operate. They move around all the time, but mostly in the Midwest, the states we’re talking about. The gaps in the killings-this Joe guy might have been inside.”
“Huh.” Connell took the chips back, finished them. “That sounds very good. God knows, they’re crazy enough.”
Connell made a long phone call from the airport, talked to a woman at her office, took some notes. Lucas stood around, looking at nothing, while the pilot avoided him.
“Hillerod lives up near Superior,” Connell said when she got off the phone. “He was convicted of aggravated assault in Chippewa County in March of ‘86 and served thirteen months. He got out in April of ‘87. There was a killing in August of ‘87.”
“That’s neat. He didn’t do any other time?”
“Yeah. A couple of short jail terms, and then in January of ‘90, he was convicted for sexual assault and served twenty-three months, and got out a month before Gina Hoff was assaulted in Thunder Bay.”
“But wasn’t the South Dakota case-”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was in ‘91, while he was inside. But that was the weirdest of all the cases I found. That’s where the woman was stabbed as much as ripped. Maybe that was somebody else.”
“What’s he done since he got out?” Lucas asked.
Connell flipped through her notes. “He was charged with a DWI in ‘92, but he beat it. And a speeding ticket this year. His last known address was somewhere up around Superior, a town called Two Horse. Current driver’s license shows an address in a town called Stedman. My friend couldn’t find it on a map, but she called the Carren County sheriff’s department, and they say Stedman is a crossroads a couple of miles out of Two Horse.”
“Did your friend ask them about the Hillerods?”
“No. I thought we ought to do that in person.”
“Good. Let’s get our ass back to the Cities. I want to talk to Del before we start messing with the Seeds,” Lucas said. He looked across the lounge at the pilot, who was sipping a cup of coffee. “Assuming that we make it back.”
Halfway back, Lucas, with his eyes closed and one hand tight around an overhead grip, said, “Twenty-three months. Couldn’t have been much of a rape.”
“A rape is a rape,” Connell said, an edge in her voice.
“You know what I mean,” Lucas said, opening his eyes.
“I know what men mean when they say that,” Connell said.
“Kiss my ass,” Lucas said. The pilot winced-almost ducked-and Lucas closed his eyes again.
“I’m not interested in putting up with certain kinds of bullshit,” Connell said levelly. “A male commentary on rape is one of them. I don’t care if the guy back at Waupun calls me a girl, because he’s stupid and out of touch. But you’re not stupid, and when you imply-”
“I didn’t imply jackshit,” Lucas said. “But I’ve known women who were raped who had to think about it before they realized what happened. On the other hand, you get some woman who’s been beaten with a bat, her teeth are broken out, her nose is smashed, her ribs are broken, she’s gotta have surgery because her vagina is ripped open. She doesn’t have to think about it. If it’s gonna happen, which way would you want it?”
“I don’t want it at all,” Connell said.
“You don’t want death and taxes, either,” Lucas said.
“Rape isn’t death and taxes.”
“All of the big ones are death and taxes,” Lucas said. “Murder, rape, robbery, assault. Death and taxes.”
“I don’t want to argue,” Connell said. “We have to work together.”
“No, we don’t.”
“What, you’re gonna dump me because I argue with you?”
Lucas shook his head. “Meagan, I just don’t like getting jumped when I say something like, ‘It must not have been much of a rape,’ and you know what I’m talking about. I mean, there must not have been a lot of obvious violence with the rape, or they would have given him more time. Our killer is ripping these women. He might be smoking a cigarette while he’s doing it. He’s a fuckin’ monster. If he rapes somebody, he’s not gonna be subtle about it. I don’t know the details of this rape, but twenty-three months doesn’t sound like our man.”
“You just don’t want it to be that easy,” Connell said.
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious. I keep getting the feeling you’re playing some kind of weird game, looking for this guy. I’m not. I want to nail the asshole any way I can. If it’s easy, that’s good. If it’s hard, that’s okay too, as long as we put him in a cage.”
“Fine. But stay out of my face, huh?”
Del was sitting on the City Hall steps, elbows on his knees, smoking a Lucky Strike. He was watching red ants crawl out of a crack in the sidewalk. His hair was too long and plastered down with something that might have been lard. He wore an olive-drab army shirt with faded spots on the sleeves where sergeant’s stripes had been removed, and a fading name tag over the right pocket that said “Halprin,” which wasn’t his name. The army shirt was missing its buttons, and was worn open, showing a giveaway rock-station T-shirt that said “KQ Sucks.” Tattered khaki pants with dirt on the knees and black canvas sneakers completed his outfit. The sneaks had a hole near the base of his right big toe, and through the hole, the visible skin was as grimy as the shoes.
“Dude,” he said, his head bobbing as Lucas and Connell came up. He had the nervous submissiveness of somebody who has eaten out of garbage cans for too many years.
Connell walked past him with a glance. When Lucas stopped, she said, “C’mon.”
Lucas, hands in his pockets, nodded at Del. “What’re you doing?”
“Watchin’ ants,” Del said.<
br />
“What else?”
Connell, who’d gotten as far as the door, drifted back toward them.
“Asshole’s getting out in a few minutes. I want to see who picks him up.” Del snapped the cigarette into the street and looked up at Lucas. “Who’s the chick?”
“Meagan Connell. Investigator with the state,” Lucas said.
Connell said, “Lucas, we’re in a hurry, remember?”
Lucas said, “Meagan. Meet Del Capslock.”
She looked down, and Del looked up and said, “How do.”
“You’re a…” She couldn’t find the right word.
“A police officer, yes, ma’am, but there’s been some bureaucratic foul-up and I ain’t been paid the last few years.”
“You gotta see this asshole?” Lucas asked him.
“Don’t gotta.”
“Then come on inside. We’re doing this thing…”
“Yeah?”
“The Seeds came up.”
Del had a database on the Seeds known to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois police agencies. Joe Hillerod came in for twenty lines. “His brother Bob is heavily involved,” Del said, scanning a computer file. “He transported drugs out of the port, down here and over to Chicago and maybe St. Louis, for some medium-time dealers. He didn’t retail himself, not at the time, although he might be now. Then he had some hookers working all the big truck stops around Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Joe… the information says he mostly drove for his older brother but wasn’t much of a businessman. Apparently he’s a wild one; likes women and good times. And he seems to be the enforcer when they need one.”
“What’re they doing now?” Connell asked.
“Small-time retailing coke and crank through the roadhouses up there. And they’ve got a salvage yard outside of Two Horse.”
“Any chance that they were involved with those fifty-cals you found?” Lucas asked.
Del shook his head doubtfully. “The Seeds have a bunch of little splinter groups. The fifty-cal guys are into this weird right-wing white-supremacy Christian-Nazi shit. And they’re mostly holdup guys and armored car guys. The Hillerods are a different splinter, mostly based around the old biker gang the Bad Seeds. They’re dope and women. A couple of them supply women to the massage parlors over in Milwaukee and here in the Cities. One of them has a porno store in Milwaukee.”
Lucas scratched his head and looked at Connell, who’d been peering over Del’s shoulder. “I guess the only way we’re gonna find out is go up there and roust them.”
“Be a little careful,” Del said.
“When?” Connell asked.
“Tomorrow,” Lucas said. “I’ll call the sheriff tonight, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”
“Driving?”
Lucas showed a sickly grin. “Driving.”
Lucas and Connell agreed to meet at eight o’clock for the drive up north. “I’ll check the medical examiner on Marcy Lane and see if anything’s come up,” she said. “I’ll get everything I can on the Hillerods. The whole file.”
Lucas stopped at homicide to check with Greave, but was told he was out. Another cop said, “He’s down with that thing at Eisenhower Docks. He should be back by now.”
From his office, Lucas called Lincoln County Sheriff Sheldon Carr at Grant, Wisconsin; touched the scar on his neck as Carr picked up the phone. Carr had been there when Lucas was shot by the child.
“Lucas, how are things?” Carr was hardy and country and smart. “You comin’ up to fish? Is Weather pregnant yet?”
“Not yet, Shelly. We’ll let you know… Listen, I gotta talk to George Beneteau over in Carren County. Do you know him?”
“George? Sure. He’s okay. Should I give him a call?”
“If you would. I’ll call him later on and talk. I’m going up there tomorrow to look at a guy involved with the Seeds.”
“Ah, those assholes,” Carr said with disgust. “They used to be around here, you know. We ran them off.”
“Yeah, well, we’re bumping into them down here now. I would appreciate an introduction, though.”
“I’ll call him right now. I’ll tell him to expect to hear from you,” Carr said. “You take it easy with those bad boys.”
Greave came in with a kid. The kid was wearing a black-and-white-striped French fisherman’s T-shirt, dirty jeans, and stepped-on white sneaks. He had a pound of dirty-blond hair stuck up under a long-billed red Woody Woodpecker cap.
“This is Greg,” Greave said, throwing a thumb at the kid. “He does handyman work around the apartments.”
Lucas nodded.
“Don’t tell nobody you talked to me or they’ll fire my ass,” Greg said to Lucas. “I need the job.”
“Greg says that the day before the old lady died, the airconditioning went out and it got really hot in the apartments. He and Cherry spent the whole day down the basement, taking things apart. He says it was so hot, almost everybody left their windows and even their doors open.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Greave prodded the kid. “Tell him.”
“They did,” the kid said. “It was the first real hot day of the year.”
“So maybe they could have gotten in the old lady’s apartment,” Greave said. “Come in with a ladder and figured out some way to drop the window, locked. We know it couldn’t be the door.”
“What’d they do to her after they came in the window?”
“They smothered her.”
“The medical examiner could determine that. And how do you drop a window, locked? Did you try it?”
“I haven’t got it figured out yet,” Greave said.
“We tried it a lot,” the kid said to Lucas; Greave looked at him in exasperation. “Ain’t no way.”
“Maybe there’s some way,” Greave said defensively. “Remember, Cherry’s the maintenance man, he’d know tricks.”
“Woodworking tricks? Listen, Cherry’s no smarter than you are,” Lucas said. “If he could figure out a way to do it, you could. Whatever it was, must’ve been quiet. The neighbor didn’t hear a thing. He said it was spooky-quiet.”
“I thought maybe you could come down and take a look,” Greave said. “Figure something out.”
“I don’t have the time,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “But if you can figure a way to get them in and out… but even then, you’d have to figure out what killed her. It wasn’t smothering.”
“They must’ve poisoned her,” Greave said. “You know how jockeys dope up horses and still pass the drug tests? That must be what they did-they went out and got some undetectable poison, put it in her booze, and she croaked.”
“No toxicology,” Lucas said.
“I know that. That’s the whole point. It’s undetectable, see?”
“No,” said Lucas.
“That’s gotta be it,” Greave said.
Lucas grinned at him. “If they did, then you should lie down, put a cold rag on your forehead, and relax, ‘cause you’re never gonna convict anybody on the vanishing-drug theory.”
“Maybe,” Greave said. “But I’ll tell you something else I figured out: it’s gotta have something to do with the booze. The old lady takes booze and a couple of sleeping pills. That’s the most noticeable thing she did, far as we know. Then she’s murdered. That shit had to be poisoned. Somehow.”
“Maybe she masturbated at night, and it put a heavy strain on her heart and she croaked,” Lucas said.
“I thought of that,” Greave said.
“You did?” Lucas started to laugh.
“But how does that explain the fact that Cherry did it?”
Lucas stopped laughing. Cherry had done it. “You got me there,” he said. He looked at the kid. “Do you think Cherry did it?”
“He could do it,” the kid said. “He’s a mean sonofabitch. There was a little dog from across the street, belonged to this old couple, and he’d come over and poop on the lawn, and Ray caught it with a rope and strangled it. I seen him
do it.”
Greave said, “See?”
“I know he’s mean,” Lucas said. Then, to Greave: “Connell and I are headed up north tomorrow, checking on a guy.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, man,” Greave said. “I know I’m not helping you much. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Anderson’s doing a computer run: known sex offenders against trucks. Why don’t you start pulling records, looking for any similarities in old charges, anything that refers to the motorcycle gang called the Bad Seeds. Or any motorcycle gang, for that matter. Flag anything that’s even a remote possibility.”
The phone was ringing when Lucas got home: Weather. “I’ll be a while,” she said.
“What happened?” He was annoyed. No. He was jealous.
“A kid chopped his thumb off in a paper cutter at school. We’re trying to stick it back on.” She was both excited and tired, the words stumbling over each other.
“A tough one?”
“Lucas, we took two hours trying to find a decent artery and get it hooked up, and George is dissecting out a vein right now. Christ, they’re so small, they’re like tissue paper, but if we get it back on, we’ll give the kid his hand back… I gotta go.”
“You’ll be really late?”
“I’m here for another two hours, if the vein works,” she said. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have to go for another one. That’d be late.”
“See you then,” he said.
Lucas had been in love before, but with Weather, it was different. Everything was tilted, a little out of control. He might be overcommitting himself, he thought. On the other hand, there was a passion that he hadn’t experienced before…
And she made him happy.
Lucas sometimes found himself laughing aloud just at the thought of her. That hadn’t happened before. And the house in the evening felt empty without her.
He sat at his desk, writing checks for household bills. When he finished, he dropped the stamped envelopes in a basket on an antique table by the front door. The antique was the first thing they’d bought together.
“Jesus.” He rubbed his nose. He was in deep. But the idea of one single woman, for the rest of time…
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