Chosen Prey ld-12

by John Sandford

  "You'll get talk," she said. "You can bet your ass on it."

  BACK AT THE office, Lucas barely had time to get his coat off before the department's public relations officer called and said that the Channel Three reporter wanted to speak to him. "He says it's urgent. He's got a camera with him. You know what it's about?"

  "I got an idea," Lucas said. "Send him down."

  "The movies?" Marcy asked when Lucas hung up.

  "Absolutely," Lucas said. "You want to take it? I got this goddamned hickey."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. I'll just pass him on to you."

  "Jesus, I gotta… I gotta… my hair looks like somebody peed on it. I gotta…" She dashed out of the office.

  Del came in a step ahead of the camera. Lucas was shocked when the reporter asked about the drawings. "Where do you guys get this shit?" Lucas looked sideways at Del, who said, "Hey, I just met them in the hallway. I never said a word."

  "I got sources," the reporter said with a sly smile. "You gonna give us something? We got most of it already."

  "Sergeant Sherrill's handling it. We'd decided we might talk to you guys tomorrow. I guess a day early wouldn't hurt, but the other stations-"

  "Fuck the other stations," the reporter said. The cameraman was leaning against the wall, and appeared to have gone to sleep. Marcy came back five seconds later. Her hair looked neater and she had some color in her cheeks, either from cold water or slapping herself. And she'd unbuttoned one more button on her blouse; Lucas thought she looked terrific. The cameramen, sensing the presence of an unbuttoned blouse, woke up.

  "What're we doing?" she asked.

  "Whatever you want to do," Lucas told her. "You want to go with it?"

  "Say yes," the reporter said. "We'll owe you big."

  "I guess it wouldn't hurt," Marcy said, shrugging. "Sure I'll talk to you."

  "SO WE GOT two favors owed to us on one story," Marcy said forty minutes later, as they sat in the bay area of the office watching a portable TV. Carey was on the City Hall steps, reporting that the mayor had confirmed that he wouldn't be running for reelection in the fall. Channel Three had led with a few shots from the drawings as a teaser-police fear killer-artist stalks Minneapolis woman-and then cut to Carey with the exclusive from the mayor's office. From that report, she segued into the murder story:

  "This major story breaks exclusively on Channel Three just as police officials are huddling on another nightmarish problem: A killer is stalking Twin Cities women, and before he strikes, he apparently lures them into posing nude."

  Lucas sat up. "That's not right," he said to the television.

  "Close enough for TV work," Del said.

  The drawing of Aronson appeared on the screen, ass included. "Julie Aronson was strangled eighteen months ago by a man who apparently had intimate knowledge of her."

  "Gonna scare the shit out of the other women," Marcy said. "I mean, we're gonna get some attention. I better call them."

  "That's what we wanted," Lucas said. "Attention." They watched as the Channel Three reporter came up, on tape, with the details, and then Marcy was on, with an explanation.

  "Great blouse button," Del said, leering at her.

  "Fuck you, it just fell open," Marcy said, flushing.

  "No, no, don't say that," Lucas said. "That's great technique. If you hadn't thought of it, I would have suggested it, except I probably wouldn't have thought of it. But you know, it doesn't hurt to have a sexy cop talking to TV. Gives you some leverage, God help us all."

  "Look at the way they framed you. Not just your face, but from the cleavage up," Del said. "That is really good."

  "It just occurred to me that there've only been two women on the newscast," Marcy said. "And you've slept with both of them, Lucas. Was Carey better than me, or was I better?"

  Del looked at Lucas and said, "Run."

  THE TWO STORIES on Channel Three pulled all the other TV stations and both newspapers into City Hall. The mayor confirmed that he would not be running and Rose Marie outlined what was known in the Aronson case, correcting the impression that more than one woman had been threatened.

  Rose Marie called as soon as she was off the air. "I assume that was you, pulling strings with Carey."

  "Yeah. They owe us."

  "Good. Talk to you tomorrow. I'm gonna go home and cry."

  Lucas hung up, looked at his watch, then called Weather and suggested they get together for a late sandwich.

  "I'll bring pajamas," she said.

  "Yeah? You have any idea how old I am?"

  "Not nearly as old as you're gonna be by midnight."

  He was pulling on his jacket when the phone rang again. He thought it might be Weather with a quick call-back. "Yeah?"

  "Lucas?" A man's voice.

  "Yeah."

  "This is Gerry Haack. You remember me?"

  "Yeah, Gerry. What's happening?" Lucas looked at his watch again.

  "I'm the lawn-care guy. I had that thing."

  The thing with crystal meth and the rampage through the men's fine accessories department at Dayton's. "Yeah, yeah, what can I do for you?"

  "You said I owed you, and I should call if I ever got anything. I got something."

  "Yeah?" Weather would be walking out the door already. "What you got?"

  "I'm not in the lawn business anymore, I'm working at the Cobra Lounge over in St. Paul. It's not the greatest place, but I'm trying to get back on my feet, you know-"

  "That's great, Gerry. So, what you got?"

  "You know this woman that got strangled? Aronson?"

  "Yes."

  "I just saw the picture on TV, but they didn't say anything about her selling it."

  "What?"

  "She was on the corner, man." Haack's voice dropped a half-octave and got cozy. Man-to-man.

  "What? What're you talking about?"

  "She was doing the hokey-pokey for money," Haack said.

  "You know that for sure?"

  "Yeah. I know a guy she dated a couple of times. Cost him a hundred bucks a time, nothing but blow jobs and straight fucking. Nothing kinky. They sit around here and talk about it at night."

  "You say you know him?"

  "Well, yeah. You couldn't ever tell him who let on. They'd kill me." Now his voice was nervous, as though he were having second thoughts about the tip.

  "Nobody'll know," Lucas said. "What's his name?"

  AFTER TALKING TO Haack, Lucas stole another ten minutes to go back through the file on Aronson. Swanson noted that he'd searched state and national records on her and checked her fingerprints with the feds, and she'd come up clean. Still, if Aronson had been on the corner, somebody should have picked it up.

  He'd worked himself into a fury by the time he arrived at the restaurant. "How in the hell can you have a criminal investigation going on for a year, and you don't know the chick is hustling?"

  "It wasn't going on for a year. It was a halfhearted missing-persons investigation for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, and then it wasn't anything," Weather said. "And maybe she was an amateur. You said she'd never been arrested."

  "But you gotta know that stuff," he said. "You gotta talk to enough people that you find it out. Now there's a question about these other women. Are they pros? One of them claims that she's still a virgin-not that anybody got out his flashlight and looked. If they're pros, then we've got a whole other problem than the one we started with."

  "Is that bad, or is that good?"

  He thought about it and said, finally, "Too early to tell. Actually, it might be good. If the guy is hitting on hookers, we've limited the number of people we have to look at, and I've got pretty good connections in the area."

  "So twelve hours into the investigation, you're already a genius. And you look like you're enjoying yourself, pissed off as you are."

  "Hmph." He remembered the mayor's announcement. "Did you watch any TV tonight?"

  "No. Were you on?"

  "No, but there were a cou
ple of stories… The thing is, I might be out of a job in a few months." He told her about it, and the unlikeliness that he'd be reappointed by a new chief.

  "So if we do get pregnant, we won't have to find a nanny," Weather said.

  "That's not exactly how… You're jerking my chain. This is serious."

  "If you really want to keep the job, you can figure out a way to do it," Weather said. "But maybe it's time to try something else."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Something else. You've done one thing all of your life. Maybe you could do something…"

  He picked up her direction. "Kinder and gentler."

  "Yeah. Maybe," she said. "You were sorta good at business." Lucas had briefly been the nominal CEO of a computer company that produced simulations for police 911 systems. He'd hired another guy for the job as soon as he could, and had gone back to the police department.

  "Nothing I've ever done is as brutal as what corporate execs do all the time," Lucas said. "I've never fired anybody. Never taken a perfectly innocent hardworking guy and screwed up his life and his family and his kids and his dog, because somebody needed to put an extra penny on the fuckin' dividend."

  "Communist," she said.

  LATER THAT EVENING, Lucas sat up in bed and sighed.

  "Oh, go on," Weather said. She pulled a blanket up to her chin.

  "What?" But he knew.

  "Go on, see if you can find this guy. The one getting the blow jobs."

  "Not much of a night for finding guys," Lucas said, his eyes drifting toward the bedside clock.

  "Lucas, you've been twitching ever since we got in bed," she said.

  "Del was gonna be out late," he said, tentatively.

  "Then call him. I'm working tomorrow so I've got to go to sleep anyway. I won't if you keep twitching. Go."

  Lucas pretended to struggle with the idea for a moment, then kicked back the sheet, crawled across her to reach the telephone on the nightstand, and called Del's cell phone. Del answered on the first ring. "What?"

  "You awake?"

  "I hope so. If I'm not, I'm dreaming that I'm standing in a puddle of slush at Twenty-ninth and Hennepin, with snow blowing down my neck."

  "It's snowing?"

  "Yeah. The snow pushed the rain right out of the picture."

  "I'm in bed with Weather. We're warm and naked," Lucas said. Weather reached beneath his chest and gave one of his nipples a vicious pinch. "Ow. Jesus Christ…" He bounced away from her.

  "What?" Del asked.

  "Never mind," Lucas said, rubbing his chest. "You know the Cobra over in St. Paul?"

  "My home away from home," Del said.

  "There's a guy who hangs out there, a Larry Lapp. Julie Aronson was playing his bagpipe at a hundred bucks a toot. That's what I'm told."

  "Do tell. Want to look him up?"

  "Yeah. Meet me there in half an hour," Lucas said.

  "If you meet me there in half an hour, and you're really naked and warm in bed right now, you're a crazier fuck than I ever knew. It's bad out here."

  "See you then," Lucas said.

  As he dropped the phone on the hook, Weather asked, "Playing his bagpipe? Where do you guys come up with that trash?"

  "That was really bad," Lucas said. "Pinching me. It still hurts."

  "Aw. What are you going to do about it?"

  He looked at the clock. He was ten minutes from the Cobra. "I'm gonna have to turn you over my knee," he said.

  "Fat chance," she said.

  THE WEATHER WAS as bad as Del had said it was. A bitter winter wind was blowing the snow directly into the car's windshield as he headed north along the river, and created an illusion of a funnel; Lucas felt as though he were staring into the small end of a tornado. Ten minutes later, he spotted Del standing under a streetlight, and parked next to him.

  "The place is cursed," Del said, as Lucas got out of his Tahoe. Del was wearing his winter street outfit, an East German Army greatcoat with home-knitted mittens and matching toque. He was looking across the street at the Cobra. The place was a storefront with venetian blinds covering the windows, Busch and Lite signs in the window, and a gold-on-black sign that said "Cobra" and flickered from a bad fluorescent tube.

  "Cursed? You mean Minnesota?"

  "I mean the Cobra. I bet there've been ten businesses in there in the last fifteen years," Del said. "Nobody makes it."

  "That snake place," Lucas remembered. "Is that how the Cobra got its name?"

  "Yeah, I think so. I knew that guy who owned it, the snake place. Herpetology Grand. He said snakes were the coming yuppie pets, the next new thing. They were beautiful, clean, quiet, and they only ate once a week. Plus there was a big markup on them. He wanted me to invest; he was going to start a whole chain of them."

  "What could possibly have gone wrong?" Lucas asked, as they crossed the street.

  "You had to feed them live gerbils," Del said. "Turns out that yuppie women can't get tight with the idea of feeding live gerbils to big snakes. You know, as an everyday thing."

  THE COBRA WAS as dim inside as out, a narrow entry past the bar with its red leatherette stools, a couple of tables in the back with a color TV, a shuffleboard bowling game, and what appeared to be a little-used dartboard. The smell of beer and peanuts and smoke. A unisex toilet in the back showed down a back hall, next to a lighted sign that said "Caution, Alarm Will Sound: Emergency Exit Only." Two customers sat at a table in the back, watching a Lakers game. A third huddled over the bar. Lucas pointed at a stool and said, "Beer?"

  "You buy," Del said.

  The bartender drifted over, pulled two beers, gave Lucas change on a five. Lucas laid his badge case on the bar and said, "We're cops. We're looking around for one of your regulars."

  "Yeah?" The bartender was friendly enough. "I seen you on TV once or twice. You the Minneapolis guy?"

  "Yeah. We're looking for Larry Lapp," Lucas said. "You know him?"

  "Larry?" The bartender was surprised. "What'd he do?"

  "Nothing, really. We need to talk about a friend of his."

  "I wondered. He's a good guy… He was here tonight, must've left two hours ago. He only lives two or three blocks away, I think, but I don't know where, exactly."

  "Couldn't find him in the phone book," Lucas said.

  "He's got an old lady, I think it's her house." He spread his hands apologetically. "All I know about her is that her name is Marcella."

  Del nodded toward the back of the bar. "Any of those guys know him?"

  The bartender looked. "Those guys?" He thought about it. "Yeah, maybe."

  Lucas and Del collected their beers and walked to the back, where the two guys were watching the basketball game; they were painters, Lucas thought, still in paint-spattered jeans. Both were in their mid-twenties; one was wearing a Twins baseball hat and the other a Vikings sweatshirt with a plastic football on the chest. Lucas and Del watched the game for a minute, then Lucas said to the guy in the baseball cap, "We're police officers. We're looking for a friend of yours."

  The two men looked at each other, then the guy in the baseball hat shrugged and said, "Who? What'd he do?"

  "Larry Lapp, and he didn't do anything. We just need to talk to him about a woman he used to know."

  "Oh, jeez… You're talking about that girl that got killed?" the Vikings fan asked.

  They nodded, and Del asked, "You knew her?"

  "Knew who she was," the Vikings fan said. "She was from the neighborhood, until her folks moved out-state somewhere. She knew some other kids from over here."

  "I understand she was… seeing this Lapp guy," Lucas said, giving a little extra to the "seeing."

  "Oh, man, I don't think so-and you could get Larry in big trouble with his wife, talking that way," the guy said. "Him and this girl went back a long way, you know, to junior high or something. They weren't doin' nothing, but Marcella ain't gonna believe that if you go knockin' on her door."

  Del said, "Mind if we sit for a minute?" and pu
lled around a chair without waiting for an answer. Lucas pulled one up for himself, leaned on the table, and said quietly, "We were told that this girl… might have been selling it. Hundred bucks a throw. Nobody's gonna get in trouble for talking about it, or even going with her-we're just trying to get some traction on the murder. Either of you guys ever hear anything like that?"

  "That's bullshit," said the baseball cap, sitting back. "Whoever told you that is an asshole."

  "Never heard nothing like that," the football-shirt guy said, shaking his head. "She was a nice kid. Shy. I mean, if she was selling it, she could've sold it to me, and she never offered or even let on that, you know, it might be possible."

  The baseball cap said, "Same with me. We get a pro in here every once in a while, and it's not like you don't figure it out pretty goddamn quick."

  "Look around," the football shirt said. They looked down the bar at the cheap stools, at the used booths sloppily cut into the new space, at the crap littering the floor. "You think you're gonna find a hundred-dollar girl working this place? Twenty-nine-ninety-five is more like it."

  "This Lapp guy," Del said.

  "You're gonna fuck him up if you talk to him with his wife around," the baseball cap said. "He has a troubled marriage."

  "If you want, I could go get him," the Vikings guy said. "He's only two blocks from here."

  "That'd be cool," Lucas said. "If I could get your names first… for the notebook."

  "In case we decide to run for it?" the baseball cap asked. He grinned at Lucas.

  "Well. For the notebook, you know."

  LARRY LAPP WAS short and square, wore a heavy, short, square dark coat, and a Navy watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He followed the painters into the bar, nodded at the bartender, and continued back to the table where Lucas and Del were waiting. He nodded, quickly, and sat down, hands in his coat pockets. He had a flat, wide face and a day-old beard that looked like it was made of nails. "What's this shit about Julie?"

  "We're trying to follow up on some information."

  "If somebody told you she was selling it, that guy oughta be investigated, because he's full of shit," Lapp said. He was angry, his face tight and white despite the cold. "She was one of the nicest goddamn girls you could want to meet."