Now he made a decision.
He told Jessie about the so-called Archer and his victim. So far. He sensed there would be more victims.
“He wants to be noticed. There’s almost no other reason he’d use a crossbow. He’s got a gripe of some sort, and he wants television to make him a star.”
Jessie rubbed the back of his head. “What a horrible thing to do to people. Innocent people.” She shivered despite being nestled against him. “I’m not sure how you can keep doing this.”
Being a cop, he figured she meant that.
“Huh, I guess I figure I can help stop things like this, or at least catch the people who do them and try to make sure they’re punished. I know it sounds like a cliché, but that’s it.” To serve and protect.
He didn’t add that he relished the chase, the hunt, the takedown. Maybe that was the Creature in him. He couldn’t remember much about himself from before the bite that drew him to the moon, but he doubted he’d been that… aggressive. That much into the hunt.
Maybe he wasn’t quite as noble as he liked to think. Maybe he was just letting the Creature have an outlet. He’d given the wolf latitude before.
“It’s not a cliché,” Jessie mumbled. “It’s noble. I love that about you. I don’t think you even realize how noble you are.”
He chuckled at the irony. “Noble’s not how I would have put it.” He kissed her hair, then her forehead, her eyes, her nose, and then their mouths met. “But I’ll take it,” he muttered.
Her hand snaked downwards and found him hardening. “Hello,” she said. “I think you have a problem here we need to take care of.” Her fingers caressed his length softly at first, then with more urgency. Her lips were hot, her eyes full of fire again.
And then Lupo put the Archer – and whatever his goddamn gripe happened to be – out of mind for a little while longer. When Jessie straddled him, enveloping his erection with her unchained need, their mouths and tongues still connected, his mind and body were filled with nothing but the heat and the rhythm of the moment.
They made the moment last as long as they could.
Afterwards, as their skin dried yet again, she reminded him that they’d been talking about this Archer.
“You know,” she said, nestling again into his comfortable embrace. “Maybe he doesn’t have a gripe with the people. Maybe he has a gripe with the casino itself.”
“Thought of that,” Lupo said. “But since we don’t know who he is, we don’t know if they ever hired or fired him.” They’d started the process of doing a check of employees and former employees, but it would take time. A lot of time.
But Jessie had a thoughtful look he’d seen before. She had helped him figure out and determine some of Martin Stewart’s deep motivations. Stewart was a serial killer who had targeted Lupo’s friends and partner and eventually Jessie, and ultimately Lupo himself. Stewart been messed up as a kid, messed up by terrible abuse – but it had become obvious that the abuse alone hadn’t made him what he was, it had only triggered his darkest impulses. He’d been miswired from birth, apparently – a true psychopath. Jessie’s insight into Stewart’s fetish and motivation had made things click for Lupo.
Now she was thinking again. They’d been together long enough. He could tell. She was mulling over what he had told her.
“What?” he said. He smiled, encouraging.
“Well, I was just thinking. What if he’s upset because he wasn't hired? What if that’s why you don’t find him as a disgruntled employee – because he’s disgruntled, but because was never hired? Maybe he wanted to be…” She searched for another way to put it. “He wanted to be, but he was rejected.”
Lupo let the idea sink in. He felt his pulse quicken.
“Shit, that's not bad profiling, Jess. I doubt they keep records of interviews, but I’ll check. It’s possible they do.”
“Also, maybe he wasn’t interviewed here…”
“Huh?” Lupo pulled back a little to see her full face. She was intense, thinking hard in brainstorming mode, struck by the problem he faced.
She continued: “What if he’s just acting out of a general anger? What if he was rejected elsewhere? Maybe more than one place? He snaps and decides to take it out on the nearest generic representative of what he’s angry at, in this case… Indian casinos? He’s here so he picks on this one, but maybe this isn’t the one that pissed him off.” Her dusky eyes were more green than grey in the light, and more intense because of her seriousness. He loved to see her like this.
“That’s another great thought.” He fumbled for his phone, which he had slid onto an end table. “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place, at the wrong population. Gotta call Charlie Bear. Then I’m going in to work so they don't think I’m goofing off.” He grinned. “Not too much, anyway.”
“Want to goof off once more before you leave?”
“Jess, you’re wearing me out…”
“That’s the idea, Mr. Lupo. Keeping you busy. And I bet I can keep you busy all over again.” She licked her lips suggestively and reached for him.
“Is keep busy some kind of metaphor?”
“Let’s find out.”
So he did.
THE ARCHER
The day was barely a few hours old and he was sitting in another stolen van. The previous van was now sitting, abandoned, at a Sam’s Club parking lot, where he had left his own car. This new van came from another lot, to which he had bused. His car waited outside the WalMart where he would dump this van. He could pull this switch a hundred times.
He was now approaching the casino from Canal Street west. There were several surface lots spread on both sides of the road that bisected former industrial spaces and buildings, and then came the massive parking structure. He was looking for a specific type of uniform. There was an employees’ lot, and he crawled past it, waiting for someone to exit a car.
The day before he’d taken a chance, going for Tanya. After all, he admitted to himself that he did have a crush on her. They probably had film (or files on a hard drive, whatever the fuck they did these days) of him hanging around her tables. But he wasn’t the only one who had followed her from table to table. He'd seen other lonely guys watching her, trying hard to catch her eye, to start up conversations. She’d been cold, hard and full of sharp angles. Unapproachable. It had galvanized his hate, his need to strike a blow. Somewhere.
But today he was randomizing, muddying the waters for the pattern-seekers. They always caught killers based on their obsessive patterns, didn’t they? And he was a killer now, wasn’t he? The thought gave him a boner.
Random, he thought as he tried to get on track. Random.
At least it had to look random.
He saw a tall black male squeezing out of a five-year-old, light-gold Camry, reaching back in for a leather jacket. He was wearing a white shirt and a black bowtie and the Archer smiled.
This guy was a roulette croupier, one of those dealer-types who spin the old-fashioned wheel and drop in the ball, then scrape up all the house wins off the board. Occasionally they pay out some wins, but it’s almost never as much as the house took in. Too many people think they can hit a number despite the astronomical odds – not realizing they’re safer with spreads and with some of the lesser-paying but easier-winning groups and either-or bets (black or red, odd or even). Roulette looks so medieval, the Archer thought, that it attracts easy marks.
The Archer liked the roulette wheel for that very reason. It was like the wheel of fortune. With a crossbow in his hand, he felt almost like a medieval holdover himself. A protector of castle walls. Anachronistic, and proud of it.
Random, he reminded himself as he watched.
Well, the guy wasn’t actually random, but he would appear to be.
The Archer had played at this guy's table once, but he had studied him from nearby tables a few times. He’d left a fair amount of his aunt’s cookie-jar cash on that green felt, just so he could watch this other guy across the way.
/> He'd deliberately built up a rage about the guy, who didn't know him from Adam. He decided he didn’t like the way this croupier had clearly been hired because he was a minority. The more he thought about it now, the angrier he got. The angrier he got, the more his finger itched.
He pulled the van around in a U-turn so he wouldn’t overshoot his new target. When he came up on the croupier from the rear on his second approach, he had lowered the passenger window. They were still a ways from the camera-swept customer lots. He slowed the van, looked around quickly for a last-second reason to abort, didn’t see any, and raised the crossbow…
And then the croupier turned slightly, perhaps because he heard the van’s rumble nearby. Turning, he made the target – his broad back – quite a bit narrower.
The Archer held his breath. Relaxed. Breathed, then squeezed the trigger, letting loose the bolt he had already prepped.
The deadly projectile took the guy high and maybe to the left and the Archer thought he had missed, that the target’s last-second turn had caused the bolt to fly off harmlessly.
But no, the croupier gave a tiny, almost girlish scream and clapped his hands to his neck and went down in a floppy mess, seemingly all at once, legs twitching so hard the Archer could hear his heels rapping the sidewalk like a snare drum.
The Archer could swear he saw blood squirting from the wound, but it might have been a trick of the lighting above. He really was too far away. He had the flash of a thought that it might be swell to try killing the next one from up close, just walk up to whoever it would be and see if the bolt would drill right through the body. Then he could watch the life leaving the dumb-shit’s eyes, just like he had watched Randy’s eyes as he had snapped the boy’s neck. Why was he so interested to watch someone’s life drain away like that? He wasn’t sure he understood, but why question his own needs?
The croupier might have made one last, loud gargle, or it was a sound the Archer imagined – and then the man’s legs finally stopped their manic tap-tapping on the cement, and the Archer imagined the red stain spreading below him. Must’ve winged the guy right in the jugular, or something.
He nudged the van’s gas pedal and sped gradually away, leaving behind a new sacrifice to – to what? All he knew was that he was starting to feel really alive. The wrongs done to him were now being righted, which was making him feel better. Better about himself and about everything else.
The Archer smiled as he drove away.
His trigger finger was itchy again. Already.
Not long after, he made a cautious u-turn.
JESSIE
Showered and rested…
And righteously well-fucked! The wicked little voice added, interjecting itself directly into the midst of her thoughts. It was a parody of her own voice, given some kind of witch-like quality enhanced by imaginary cackling.
She smiled as she drove, realizing that this was why she’d made the trip down to the city. If it was true that great sex prolongs life, then she thought she’d live to a hundred fifty or more. No, she had no complaints where the sex was concerned.
She piloted the Pathfinder around the east side, exploring. It had been years since she’d spent time in Milwaukee, and now that she was here while Nick was at work she was free to do some bumming, as they’d called it when she was in school. She expanded her circling, reaching the edge of the mostly revitalized downtown area, then slipping a ways south to the trendy Third Ward with its bistros, cafés, bars and osterie.
Reclaimed, remodeled warehouses were now filled with lofts that towered over busy streets no longer filled with lined-up produce trucks but instead overflowing with crawling upscale cars and stylish walkers. The “cream city” brick buildings jostled against newer condo blocks designed to look as old as the real antiques, their lower levels given over to trendy eating and drinking establishments, high-end salons, boutiques, fitness centers, and the odd theatrical costume shop or dance academy.
She gawked like a tourist at the scenery, thumped over one of the bridges that spanned the Milwaukee River (at Water Street, of course), then found herself heading west, toward the city's old industrial valley.
She didn't really know where she was heading until, after bypassing the three blister-shaped characteristic horticultural glass domes, she caught sight of the massive casino building rising out of the formerly unused industrial sprawl of the so-called Valley. Evenly-spaced blue-violet colored spots illuminated the structure's exterior walls, making it resemble an alien mother-ship squatting on the flat ground.
Not sure why the casino seemed to be summoning her, she pulled into one of its exterior parking lots and sat, just soaking in the high walls of the main building. On closer inspection, it was more like a squared-off Aztec or Mayan pyramid, a temple to the goddess Fortuna. Or whatever the goddess of the stupid loser might have been. She chuckled, but she knew she wanted to go inside.
According to Nick, the first murder had taken place nearby, and when he'd called her just after she'd left the shower, he had told her they now had a second victim, also killed in one of the nearby surface lots.
Why was she so interested in the place, suddenly?
Jessie couldn't be sure but she figured her fascination was one part stress-related and one part Nick-related, wanting to lend a hand or moral support. He’d gone to the main police precinct downtown to supervise some of the plodding research, then he’d be heading for the casino later in the morning. Sometime during her drive, she’d decided to do a little investigating on her own and then meet Nick at the casino. She thought she remembered a couple people on the staff here, transplants from Up North who had come to the big city to work. She’d just ask a few questions, look around, and maybe have some more ideas to offer Nick when he got here.
He would have warned her to stay away. To keep away from the crime scene.
She was never one to take a warning to heart.
Once independent, always independent.
LUPO
He’d been in barely an hour when Charlie Bear had called him with grim news.
“Shit,” Lupo said with a growl. “Another one? Crossbow again?”
“Yeah.” Charlie turned the end of the word into a sigh, then briefly described the scene. “This isn’t good. No fucking good at all.”
“Uh, no,” Lupo said. “Means the bastard likes it, needs it, wants to exact some sort of revenge only his twisted mind understands.”
“You got a degree in psychology?”
“Don’t need one. You do this job long enough, you can see into every black soul you come into contact with. And I’ve come into contact with some dark fucking souls, let me tell you.” He stared into his blank computer screen, as if ogling those dark souls now.
“I believe you,” Charlie said. “So now what? I’ve got people on the perimeter. The press will get here again soon, I’m betting. This is gonna blow up into one of those twenty-four hour coverage stories. We’ll try keeping them at bay.”
“Good luck. I’m at police HQ. We’ve got some searches going here. Seems like nowadays half of police work is just looking at online stuff, you know, so we’ve been hiring librarians to help build our searching capabilities. How about you, can you have your people do some searching for me?”
“Sure, what do you need?”
“I’ll be heading over soon to look over this new scene, and my partner when I can find him, but I’ll request the lab guys get to you first. In the meantime, uh, we’re operating on the possibility our guy might be not a casino employee or a former employee, but a would-be employee.”
“Would-be?” Charlie stopped to shush somebody in the background. “Not sure what you mean.”
“Like if he interviewed for a job and was rejected…”
Charlie digested the news. “Shit, I’m not sure we keep records of that.”
“Actually I’d like to see the interviews themselves. Recorded or transcribed. Notes maybe?”
“Not likely we’d have that, either,” Cha
rlie said, his words coming out slow.
“I bet your HR department does. Even if they don’t record video, whenever they interview somebody, they might make a note of it and maybe even scribble something on the app itself. Still using paper?”
“Yeah, we’re still a little old-fashioned. But I know they’re switching over to online applications and some management software any day now. They’ve been testing it.”
“But if they’re not doing it yet, we might be in business. Check with your HR and see if they file the applications. And anything on interviews they conducted.”
“I’ll do that…” Charlie didn’t sound convinced. But the security head was up to his knees in a second vic’s blood and Lupo was sure his administration was probably starting to make noises about containment and prevention. Civilians always want prevention. They’d complain about Orwellian thought-crime crackdowns, but most of ’em would vote for just that kind of intervention if given half a chance. Administrations always want containment, trying to staunch the bleeding of bad press, especially with the constantly hungry media. Especially when scared customers don’t show up to spend. The tribe would be anxious to either resolve this or downplay it any way they could.
“Listen,” Lupo added, as his mind reprocessed what he and Jessie had discussed, “can you also make a couple calls and see if you can get the same kind of list from up in Watersmeet?”
Charlie was silent for a moment. “You think he might have applied up there too?”
“Well, it’s a possibility that he’s after revenge on casinos in general, so maybe in his head one casino could stand in for all of them. Come to think of it, we should try to get the same list from all local casinos.”
Lupo thought the guy could pull up stakes and head for one of the other Indian casinos in the state. He mentioned that possibility, hoping it would bait Charlie into digging harder for this data.
“Huh,” Charlie said.
Chewing it over, Lupo thought. He liked the quality. Too often security guys wore blinders when other, outside people pointed out things. Cops, too, in his experience.
Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) Page 6
