Night Prey

by John Sandford

  He looked at Helstrom. "When was the dumpster last cleaned out?"

  "Friday. They dump it every Tuesday and Friday."

  "She went missing Friday night," Sloan said. "Probably killed, brought here at night. You can't see into the dumpster unless you stand on your tiptoes, so he probably just tossed her in and pulled a couple of garbage bags over her and let it go at that."

  Helstrom nodded. "That's what we think. People started complaining about the smell this morning, and a guy from the marina came over and poked around. Saw a knee and called us."

  "She's on top of that small white bag, like she landed on it. I'd see if there's anything in it to identify who threw it in," Lucas suggested.

  "If you can find the guy who dumped the garbage, you might nail down the time."

  "We'll do that," Helstrom said.

  Lucas went back for a last look, but there was nothing more to see, just the pale-gray skin, the flies, and the carefully colored hair with the streak of white frost. She'd taken care of her hair, Lucas thought, she'd liked herself for her hair, and now all that liking was gone like evaporating gasoline.

  "Anything else?" Sloan asked.

  "Nah, I'm ready."

  "We gotta talk," Connell said to Sloan. She was squared off to him, fists on her hips.

  "Sure," Sloan said, an unhappy note in his voice.

  Lucas started toward the car, then stopped so quickly that Sloan walked into him. "Sorry," Lucas said as he turned and looked back at the dumpster.

  "What?" Sloan asked. Connell was looking at him curiously.

  "Do you remember Junky Doog?" Lucas asked Sloan.

  Sloan looked to one side, groping for the name, then snapped his fingers, looked back at Lucas, a kernel of excitement in his eyes.

  "Junky," he said.

  "Who's that?" Connell asked.

  "Sexual psychopath who fixated on knives," Lucas said. "He grew up in a junkyard, didn't have any folks. Guys at the junkyard took care of him. He liked to carve on women. He'd go after fashion models. He'd do grapevine designs on them, and sign them." Lucas looked at the dumpster again. "This is almost too crude for Junky."

  "Besides, Junky's at St. Peter," Sloan said. "Isn't he?"

  Lucas shook his head. "We're getting older, Sloan. Junky was a long time ago, must've been ten or twelve years...." His voice trailed off, and his eyes wandered away to the river before he turned back to Sloan.

  "By God, it was seventeen years ago. The second year I was out of uniform. What's the average time in St. Peter? Five or six years?

  And remember a few years ago, when they came up with that new rehabilitation theory, and they swept everybody out of the state hospitals? That must've been in the mid-eighties."

  "First killing I found was in 84, in Minneapolis, and it's still open," Connell said.

  "We need to run Junky," Sloan said.

  Lucas said, "It'd be a long shot, but he was a crazy sonofabitch.

  Remember what he did to that model he followed out of that Dayton's fashion show?"

  "Yeah," Sloan said. He rubbed the side of his face, thinking.

  "Let's get Anderson to look him up."

  "I'll look him up too," Connell said. "I'll see you back there, Sloan?"

  Sloan was unhappy. "Yeah. See you, Meagan."

  Back in the car, Sloan fastened his seat belt, started the engine, and said, "Uh, the chief wants to see you."

  "Yeah? About what?" Lucas asked. "About this?"

  think so." Sloan bumped the car out of the ramp and toward the bridge.

  "Sloan, what did you do?" Lucas asked suspiciously.

  Sloan laughed, a guilty rattle. "Lucas, there's two people in the department who might get this guy. You and me. I got three major cases on my load right now. People are yelling at me every five minutes.

  The fuckin' TV is camped out in my front yard."

  "This wasn't my deal when I came back," Lucas said.

  "Don't be a prima donna," Sloan said. "This asshole is killing people."

  "If he exists."

  "He exists."

  There was a moment of silence, then Lucas said, "Society of Jesus."

  "What?"

  "Society of Jesus. That's what Jesuits belong to. They put the initials after their name, like, Father John Smith, SJ. Like the SJ on Wannemaker."

  "Find another theory," Sloan said. "The Minneapolis homicide unit ain't chasin' no fuckin' Jesuits."

  As they crossed the bridge, Lucas looked down at the dumpster and saw Connell still talking to Helstrom. Lucas asked, "What's the story on Connell?"

  "Chief'll tell you all about her," Sloan said. "She's a pain in the ass, but she invented the case. I haven't seen her for a month or so.

  Goddamn, she got here fast."

  Lucas looked back toward the ramp. "She's got a major edge on her," he said.

  "She's in a hurry to get this guy," Sloan said. "She needs to get him in the next month or so."

  "Yeah? What's the rush?"

  "She's dying," Sloan said.

  The Chief's secretary was a bony woman with a small mole on her cheekbone and overgrown eyebrows. She saw Lucas coming, pushed a button on her intercom, and said, "Chief Davenport's here." To Lucas she said!

  "Go on in." She made her thumb and forefinger into a pistol and pointed at the chief's door.

  Rose Marie Roux sat behind a broad cherrywood desk stacked with reports and memos, rolling an unlit cigarette under her nose. When Lucas walked in, she nodded, fiddled with the cigarette for a moment, then sighed, opened a desk drawer, and tossed it inside.

  "Lucas," she said. Her voice had a ragged nicotine edge to it, like a hangnail. "Sit down."

  When Lucas had quit the force, Quentin Daniel's office had been neat, ordered, and dark. Roux's office was cluttered with books and reports, her desk a mass of loose paper, Rolodexes, calculators, and computer disks. Harsh blue light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures pried into every corner. Daniel had never bothered with computers, a late-model IBM sat on a stand next to Roux's desk, a memo button blinking at the top left corner of the screen. Roux had thrown out Daniel's leather men's-club furniture and replaced it with comfortable fabric chairs.

  read Kupicek's report on the tomb burglaries," she said. "How is he, by the way?"

  "Can't walk." Lucas had two associates, Del and Danny Kupicek.

  Kupicek's kid had run over his foot with a Dodge Caravan. "He's gone for a month."

  "If we get a media question on the tombs, can you handle it? Or Kupicek?"

  "Sure. But I doubt that it'll ever get out."

  don't knowþit's a good story." A persistent series of tomb break-ins had first been attributed to scroungers looking for wedding rings and other jewelry, though the departmental conspiracy freaks had suggested a ring of satanists, getting body parts for black Masses.

  Whatever, the relatives were getting upset. Roux had asked Lucas to look at it.

  About that time, polished finger and toe bones had started showing up in art jewelry. Kupicek had found the designer/saleswoman, squeezed her, and the burglaries stopped.

  "Her stuff does go well with a simple black dress," Lucas said. " Course, you want to match the earrings."

  Roux showed a thin smile. "You can talk that way because you don't give a shit," she said. "You're rich, you're in love, you buy your suits in New York. Why should you care?"

  care," Lucas said mildly. "But it's hard to get too excited when the victims are already dead.... What'd you want?"

  There was a long moment of silence. Lucas waited it out, and she sighed again and said, "I've got a problem."

  "Connell."

  She looked up, surprised. "You know her?"

  met her about an hour ago, over in Wisconsin, running her mouth."

  "That's her," Roux said. "Running her mouth. How'd she hear about it?"

  Lucas shrugged. "I don't know."

  "Goddamnit, she's working people inside the department." She nibbled at a fingernail, then said,
"Goddamnit," again and heaved herself to her feet, walked to her window. She stuck two fingers between the blades of her venetian blinds, looked out at the street for a moment.

  She had a big butt, wide hips. She'd been a large young woman, a good cop in decent shape. The shape was going now, after too many years in well-padded government chairs.

  "There's no secret about how I got this job," she said finally, turning back to him. "I solved a lot of political problems. There was always pressure from the blacks. Then the feminists started in, after those rapes at Christmas. I'm a woman, I'm a former cop, I've got a law degree, I was a prosecutor and a liberal state senator with a good reputation on race relations...."

  "Yeah, yeah, you were right for the job," Lucas said impatiently.

  "Cut to the chase."

  She turned back to him. LLast winter some game wardens found a body up in the Carlos Avery reserve. You know where that's at?"

  "Yeah. Lots of bodies up there."

  "This one's name was Joan Smits. You probably saw the stories in the papers."

  "Vaguely. From Duluth?"

  "Right. An immigrant from South Africa. Walked out of a bookstore and that was it. Somebody stuck a blade in her just above the pelvic bone and ripped her all the way up to her neck. Dumped her in a snowdrift at Carlos Avery."

  Lucas nodded. "Okay."

  "Connell got the case, assisting the local authorities. She freaked.

  I mean, something snapped. She told me that Smits comes to her at night, to see how the investigation is going. Smits told her that there'd been other killings by the same man. Connell poked around, and came up with a theory."

  "Of course," Lucas said dryly.

  Roux took a pack of Winston Lights from her desk drawer, asked, "Do you mind?"

  "No."

  "This is illegal," she said. "I take great pleasure in it." She shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter, and tossed the lighter back in the desk drawer with the cigarettes.

  "Connell thinks she's found the tracks of a serial sex-killer. She thinks he lives here in Minneapolis. Or St. Paul or whatever, the suburbs. Close by, anyway."

  "Is there? A serial killer?" Lucas sounded skeptical, and Roux peered across her desk at him.

  "You've got a problem with the idea?" she asked.

  "Give me a few facts."

  "There are several," Roux said, exhaling smoke at the ceiling.

  "But let me give you another minute of background. Connell's not just an investigator. She's big in the left-feminist wing of the state AFSCMEþAmerican Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees."

  know what it is."

  "That's an important piece of my constituency, Lucas. AFSCME put me in the state senate and kept me there. And maybe sixty percent of them are female." Roux flicked a cigarette ash toward her wastebasket.

  "They're my rock. Now. If I pull off this chief's job, if I go four, maybe six years, and get a little lucky, I'll go up to the U.S. Senate as a liberal law-and-order feminist."

  "Okay," Lucas said. Everybody hustles.

  "So Connell came down to talk to me about her serial-killer theory.

  The state doesn't have the resources for this kind of investigation, but we do. I make nice noises and say we'll get right on it. I'm thinking Nut, but she's got contacts all over the women's movements and she's AFSCME."

  Lucas nodded, said nothing.

  "She gives me her research..." Roux tapped a thick file-folder on her desk. "I carried it down to homicide and asked them to make some checks. Connell thinks there have been a half-dozen murders and maybe more. She thinks there have been two here in Minnesota, and others in Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, just across the border in Canada."

  "What'd homicide say?" Lucas asked.

  got the eye-rolling routine, and I started hearing Dickless Tracy comments again. Two of the killings had already been cleared. The Madison cops got a conviction. There're local suspects in a couple other cases."

  "Sounds likeþ" He was about to say bullshit, but Roux tapped her desk with an index finger and rode her voice over his. "But your old pal Sloan dug through Connell's research and he decided there's something to it."

  "He mentioned that," Lucas admitted. He looked at the file folder on Roux's desk. "He didn't seem too happy with Connell, though."

  "She scares him. Anyway, what Connell had was not so much evidence as an..." She groped for the right word: "... argument."

  "Mmmm."

  The chief nodded. "I know. She could be wrong. But it's a legitimate argument. And I keep thinking, What if I ditch it, and it turns out that I'm wrong? A fellow feminist, one of the constituency, comes to me with a serial killer. We blow it off and somebody else gets murdered and it all comes out."

  "I'm not sure..."

  "Besides, I can feel myself getting in trouble here. We're gonna set a new record for murders this year, unless something strange happens.

  That doesn't have anything to do with me, but I'm the chief. I take the blame. You're starting to hear that We need somebody tough up there."

  I'm getting it from both inside and outside the department. The union never misses a chance to kick my ass. You know they backed MacLemore for the job."

  "MacLemore's a fuckin' Nazi."

  "Yes, he is...." Roux took a drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, coughed, laughing, and said, "There's even more. She thinks the killer might be a cop."

  "Ah, man."

  "It's just a theory," Roux said.

  "But if you start chasing cops, the brotherhood's gonna be unhappy.

  "Exactly. And that's what makes you perfect," Roux said. "You're one of the most experienced serial-killer investigators in the country, outside the FBI. Inside this department, politically, you're both old-line and hard-line. You could chase a cop."

  "Why does she think it's a cop?"

  "One of the victims, a woman in Des Moines, a real estate saleswoman, had a cellular phone in her car. She had a teenaged daughter at home, and called and said she was going out with a guy for a drink, that she might be getting home late. She said the guy was from out of town, and that he was a cop. That's all."

  "Christ." Lucas ran his hand through his hair.

  "Lucas, how long have you been back? A month?"

  "Five weeks."

  "Five weeks. All right. I know you like the intelligence thing.

  But I've got all kinds of guys running different pieces of intelligence. We got the division, and the intelligence unit, and the gang squad in that, and vice and narcotics and licensing... I brought you back, gave you a nice soft political job, because I knew I'd eventually run into shit like this and I'd need somebody to handle it. You're the guy. That was the deal."

  "So you can run for the Senate."

  "There've been worse senators," she said.

  "I've got things " "Everybody's got things. Not everybody can stop insane killers," Roux said impatiently. She came and stood next to him, looking out the window, took another greedy drag on her cigarette.

  could give you some time if we hadn't had this Wannemaker thing.

  Now I gotta move, before the press catches on. And if we don't do something heavy, Connell might very well leak it herself."

  "Iþ" "If it gets out and you're already on it, it'd go easier for all of us."

  Lucas finally nodded. "You saved my ass from the corporate life," he said. "I owe you."

  "That's right," she said. "I did, and you do." Roux pushed her intercom button and leaned toward it. "Rocky? Round up the usual suspects.

  Get their asses in here."

  Roux took five minutes to put together a meeting: Lester, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, his deputy Swanson, and Curt Myer, the new head of intelligence. Anderson, the department's computer freak, was invited at Lucas's request.

  "How're we doing?" Roux asked Lester.

  "The bodies are piling up. I've honest to God never seen anything like it." He looked at Lucas. "Sloan tells
me there's not much chance that Wannemaker got it in Hudson. She was probably transported there."

  Lucas nodded. "Looks like."

  "So we got another one."

  Roux lit another cigarette and turned to Lucas. "What do you need?"