Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Think harder.”

  She tried to put a thinking look on her face, but shook her head. “Do you guys . . . I mean, do you think whoever did it comes to the bar? This girl up in the Twin Cities, was she working?”

  “We don’t know any of that,” Lucas said. “You might think of taking a vacation for a couple weeks, though. Until we get him.”

  “You’re sure you’re gonna get him.” A small edge of skepticism?

  “We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “We just don’t know how many more people he’ll kill before we do.”

  She shivered and said, “The paper said Adam was mutilated.”

  WITH LUCAS PUSHING HER, Dove took them down to the next two rooms, rented by Andi and Aix; both, like Dove, were thin, a little flabby, and unnatural blondes. Andi claimed that she hardly remembered Rice and wasn’t even sure she’d had sex with him.

  Aix had had sex with him, twice, she thought, and with some prodding, said, “I did see him talking to a pretty strange guy, once. Kind of a snaky guy. He looked like a pool hustler, or something, somebody who works at night or maybe was in prison, because he was like dead white. Adam didn’t know him, but he was teasing Adam about being such a fresh-faced guy hanging around with the likes of me . . . this guy knew, I guess, you know, even though I never went with him or anything.”

  “How often did you see the guy?”

  “That was the last time,” Aix said. “I might have seen him once before, shooting pool. He said he used to be a sailor, and sailed yachts. I’m like, right, a yachtsman right here at the Rockpit.”

  “Rockyard,” Sloan said.

  Her little joke: “Pit. You look at the place?”

  “Their idea of culture is a wet-T-shirt contest,” Dove said, snapping her fingers, as though flicking a flea off her shirt.

  “This guy, this sailor . . . you said he was snaky. How? What do you mean?” Lucas asked.

  “Like he was thin, but he looked strong, wiry, you could see these muscles working in his arms. Black hair but really pale white. Oh: he had a tattoo, one of those barb-wire dealies that go around your biceps.”

  “A biker,” Lucas suggested.

  She nodded and wrinkled her nose: “He might’ve known his way around a Harley,” she said. “But he never mentioned anything.”

  They all sat looking at her for a moment, then Sloan said to Lucas, “Not much.”

  “No.”

  Aix shook her finger at him: “But it was something. You know? There was something going on. One of those things you think might go on and be a fight. The guy kept teasing Adam about his fresh face . . . This newspaper story made me think there might have been something gay going on . . .”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Just . . . something. You know how you can tell sometimes? And the thing is, the thing that was going on with the snaky guy . . . there was something a little gay in that, too. Neither one of them looked gay, or talked gay, but there was something there.”

  A FEW MORE MINUTES of pushing got them nothing. Lucas turned to Sloan and said, “You happy?”

  “I guess.”

  Dove said, “You’re not going to arrest us, are you?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Nah. But really—maybe take a vacation?”

  And to Aix: “If you see the snaky guy again, call us. And if you see him, get somebody to walk you out to the parking lot. Somebody you know.”

  Andi, shivering: “You really think he’s around here?”

  Sloan stood up and said, “Listen, if any of you’d seen the woman up in Minneapolis, you wouldn’t want to take any chance. Any chance.”

  THEY ALL NODDED, and Lucas and Sloan backed out of the room. As they walked down to the car Sloan said, “If you wind up in Room twenty-seven at the Y’All Duck Inn, you probably made a bad career choice somewhere.”

  “What if everybody in three counties calls you Booger?”

  “Another bad sign,” Sloan said. “A bad sign.”

  7

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE was held in a beige-walled, tile-floored, odor-free, windowless meeting room with a podium and rostrum at one end, in front of a blue Minnesota state flag that hung slightly askew on the wall behind the rostrum. The room was full of cheap Chinese plastic chairs with loud steel feet, which scraped and squealed when they were pushed around.

  Reporters started drifting in a half hour before the press conference, led by the TV cameramen, who pushed the chairs around to make room for themselves and their lights. The newspaper guys, scruffy next to the TV on-air people, pushed the chairs around some more, the better to bullshit with one another. They were a little noisier than usual, a combination of off-camera cheer and on-camera solemnity, because the story was a good one.

  All of it was enhanced in the eyes of the attendees by an entertaining spat between Sloan and Ruffe Ignace.

  AT FIVE, THE TV PEOPLE brought the lights up, and Lucas did the intro:

  “We have two murders. As you may have read in the paper, there is a possibility that the two are related. Representatives of the two jurisdictions in which the murders occurred are with us today and will describe the murders and the scenes . . .”

  Nordwall, large and intense in a jowly, paternal, slow-moving way, said that his men were following several leads in the most recent murder but that overall coordination had been moved to the BCA. Then Sloan stood up and said that Minneapolis was coordinating with Nordwall and the BCA and that Minneapolis also had several investigators running down leads, which was a bald-faced lie but was not contradicted.

  Lucas, following Sloan, said that the BCA had established and staffed a co-op center to coordinate information on the case.

  Some of the reporters had started looking at their watches when he announced that they were looking for Charles “Charlie” Pope, a convicted Level-2 sex offender who had been recently released from the St. John’s Security Hospital and who had cut off a leg bracelet and disappeared.

  The reporters stopped looking at their watches.

  “At this point, we have no reason to believe that he is involved, except for general proximity and the fact that he has violated parole,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know where he is and what he’s been doing. If he sees this, we urge him to call us. If anybody has seen him, please call. Photographs are available and are being distributed. They were taken at St. John’s before his release and are only about two months old.”

  Channel Three’s principal talking head, self-assigned to his semiannual story, one that wouldn’t wrinkle his shirt, jumped up and demanded, “Are you telling us that the state of Minnesota recently released an insane sex offender who immediately went into the community?”

  That got it going; Nordwall, improbably, kept it going when he said, gruffly, “We don’t have lifelong preventive detention in the United States, and we won’t get it, no matter what the media wants, because we’re not Nazis.”

  Lucas winced, and a happy Pioneer Press reporter, jabbing a yellow number-2 pencil at Nordwall, asked, “Are you implying that Channel Three in some way supports the tenets of National Socialism . . . ?”

  AFTER BLEEDING OUT all the details on Charlie Pope, Lucas was pushed into admitting that the details in Ignace’s story were generally accurate. “They weren’t disclosed at the time of the murders to spare the victims’ families the trauma of seeing these brutal murders used as entertainment on television,” Lucas said.

  Channel Eight’s weekend fill-in talking head leaped to his feet: “Are you trying to imply . . .”

  Well, yes. Lucas’s implication pissed a few people off, in a pro-forma way, but since they all knew that the story would be used as entertainment, and were hoping that it might be used for several days if not weeks, the irritation was more about the public rudeness of mentioning the fact than because of any inherent unfairness. They wouldn’t use the clip of Lucas’s comment anyway, so no damage would be done.

  Besides, Lucas knew most of the reporters, including the talking heads,
and got along with them. He hadn’t met Ruffe Ignace, though, and when Ignace asked the predictable self-aggrandizing question “Would you say the recent Star-Tribune story on the murders spurred this sudden effort to track down Pope and create this so-called co-op center?”

  Sloan jumped in. “Well, uh, Rufus . . .”

  “Ruffe,” Ignace snapped, looking up at him suspiciously.

  “Roo-fay? Okay. Roo-fay. Sorry. No, I don’t really think that the story got us moving any faster on anything, to tell you the truth. We were already pounding on it. This killer is a monster. We know that. We’re working on it as hard as we can, including using civilian experts to advise us. Your story was okay. Some of your details of the supposed display in the Larson case weren’t exactly correct, but I really can’t go into the precise problems . . .”

  “They were exactly correct,” Ignace said. He added something under his breath, which might have been, You fucking twit, or something close to that.

  Sloan stepped away from the microphone, as if to have a personal word with Ignace, but he spoke loud enough that everyone could hear. “Not exactly,” he said. “You weren’t at the scene, and I was. That whole thing about the way, mmm . . .” He glanced at the TV cameras. “. . . about the sexual aspects of the arrangement of the body, were not exact. I don’t know where you got your information, but you have to be more careful about hearsay . . . or maybe the way your imagination works.”

  “It wasn’t hearsay, and it was exact,” Ignace insisted.

  “I won’t argue,” Sloan said, and he stepped away from microphone, turning it back to Lucas.

  “It’s not right for you to stand up there and suggest that I wrote something that was incorrect when both you and I know it was correct,” Ignace said.

  “I won’t argue,” Sloan said again, dismissively.

  The other reporters were enjoying the show, a little hand-to-hand combat at Ignace’s expense. They would all mention in the report that Sloan suggested that some of Ignace’s details were incorrect, revenge for his having beaten them.

  At the end of the press conference, with all questions repeated three times so the various media representatives could be shown on tape asking them, Lucas, Sloan, and Nordwall moved off the podium and out through the conference room’s back door.

  Ignace followed them through the door and said, “Wait a minute.”

  Lucas turned: “Uh, you’re not supposed to be back here . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Ignace went after Sloan: “What was that all about? About my details being wrong? You know that’s not right.”

  “I know,” Sloan said. “I’m trying to figure out where our leak is. If all the details were right, and they were, and you insisted on it, and you did, then you probably saw photographs. There are about six people who could have made copies for you. I didn’t, so that gets it down to five. I’ll figure it out.”

  Ignace stared at him for a moment, then turned, shoved his notebook in a hip pocket, walked back out the door, and as he went through it, said, “Fuck you.”

  “Talk to you later, Rufus,” Sloan called back, adding, in a slightly lower tone, “You little asshole.”

  THE INFORMATION ABOUT POPE, and the press conference, froze the investigation: the routine continued, but there weren’t a lot of decisions to be made until the DNA came back. Lucas talked to the BCA director about space and personnel for the co-op center, then went home and ate a microwave dinner. He reread the murder file as he ate, talked to Elle by phone: she had no more suggestions.

  “I saw you on television,” she said. “This will add pressure to find somebody.”

  “Yup.”

  “And it might also put pressure on the perpetrator to act again—when the attention starts to fade away in a day or two, he may move to get it back.”

  “Thanks for the thought.”

  He read the file some more, he went out to a used bookstore, then on to a movie, a spy thriller about an assassin who’d lost his memory. None of it seemed likely, but it had a decent car chase involving BMWs and Mercedes Benz Yellow Cabs.

  The next morning, at eight o’clock, Weather called, and he told her about the press conference.

  “Has there ever been a crime solved by matching DNA from a scene to something that was already in the bank?” she asked. “I mean, the primary solution, rather than an after-the-fact thing?”

  “Yeah. A couple of times. But it’s rare.”

  AFTER CLEANING UP, he took 35E to the BCA headquarters, settled into his office, signed papers that Carol put in front of him, and then checked with Bill James, who was doing the biographical research on Adam Rice and who’d uncovered Rice’s connection to the hookers.

  “Not getting much more,” James said. “I’m doing background on the people he worked with, neighbors, like that, you know, but nothing is popping up. The hookers thing was . . . way out of control. If you knew everything else about him, you never saw that coming.”

  “Maybe just sex,” Lucas said.

  “I think it was. But it’s the only point where he sorta connected with the underworld . . . the Minnesota underworld. If you’re doin’ hookers, you’re not too far from the drugs and all the rest of it. So if he knew the killer, a sex killer, where’d he meet him? Those hookers seem like a possibility.”

  “Exactly. Keep digging. Look for a snaky guy, real white complexion, with a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps.”

  “Who’d that be?”

  “Maybe just a fantasy,” Lucas said. “Good job on the hookers.”

  HE CALLED MARK FOX, Charlie Pope’s parole officer: “Could you ask the people Pope worked with, if he ever hung out at a place called the Rockyard, in Faribault? It’s not too far . . .”

  “I know it, and it’s Charlie’s kind of place,” Fox drawled. “I’ll ask around and get back to you today. Still haven’t found a car, have we?”

  “No. I worry about that.”

  LUCAS TALKED TO SLOAN. Sloan said, “I can’t get Angela Larson and Adam Rice together, except for one thing and it’s weak.”

  “What?”

  “If you look at the transcript of Nordwall’s interview with Rice’s mother, they talk for a minute about Rice’s wife. Laurina Rice says, quote, ‘She liked doing artistic things,’ unquote. Larson worked at an art-supply store . . .”

  “So your theory is . . .”

  “No, no, no, it’s not a theory,” Sloan said. “It’s not that strong. But maybe . . . they could have met? Like on an art-supply buying trip up here? And after his wife dies, when he starts thinking about companionship, he remembers Larson. That they hit it off a little, so he drops by.”

  “Then what?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe some sort of kinky artist guy is fixated on her, and sees them together . . .”

  Lucas: “That’s not weak—it’s just not quite ridiculous. Why don’t you get one of your millions of investigators and see if he can make the link?”

  “Ah, jeez, they’d think I was crazy.”

  “Get a young one,” Lucas said.

  WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE with Sloan, Lucas went down the hall and bought a pack of almonds from a snack machine: they were his permitted midmorning snack. He was back at his desk, counting out the allotted fifteen almonds, when John Hopping Crow stuck his head in the door and said, “They fuckin’ match.”

  Lucas sat up, astonished: “They fuckin’ match?”

  “They fuckin’ match,” Hopping Crow repeated, stepping inside. He was wearing the largest smile Lucas had ever seen on him, big white teeth like Chiclets. “How about that for a little CSI: Minneapolis bullshit, huh? We’re going network.”

  “You got enough goop to repeat the procedure?” Lucas asked.

  “We don’t have to . . .”

  “For the trial? For the defense, if there is one?”

  Hopping Crow caught on: “Yes. We’ve got the evidence chain nailed down, everything passed hand to hand and signed for, and we’ve got enough for three or
four more tests.”

  “I’d French-kiss you if you weren’t married,” Lucas said, picking up the telephone.

  “It’s always something,” Hopping Crow said.

  SLOAN WAS AS ASTONISHED AS LUCAS.

  “Got him. Goddamn it, Lucas. Got him.” Lucas heard him turn away from the phone and shout to somebody, “They matched it. We got him.” Then, back to the phone, “If you get the media hooked up, we can have his face all over five states by six o’clock.”

  “I’m going down to St. John’s today, talk to the people who worked with him. If you’re loose . . .”

  “How soon?”

  “I want to make those media calls, set up a four-o’clock press conference. Say, an hour?”

  “Pick me up at the Mall of America. I’ll go down there now, I wanna buy some shoes.”

  LUCAS TOLD CAROL, his secretary, to set up a press conference for four o’clock; called Nordwall and told him.

  “Goddamnit, that’s wonderful,” Nordwall said, his voice warm with relief. “But why four o’clock? Why wait?”

  “I’ve got stuff to do. We need more background on the guy, we should organize some more pictures, and besides, it doesn’t matter—we can’t do it in time for the noon news, and at four o’clock they’ll have it in time for every single evening news program, and both papers.”

  “I’ll see you at four,” Nordwall said.

  THE NEXT CALL WAS to St. John’s. A secretary told him the administrator, Dr. Lawrence Cale, was fishing in Bemidji, but would be on his cell phone. Lucas called and found the guy in a boat.

  “Haven’t caught a goddamned thing,” he grumbled. “I’m saying it loud enough for the guide to hear me.”

  Lucas explained about the DNA: “I need to talk to the people in St. John’s who were the closest to Pope.”

  “That’d be his treatment team,” Cale said. “My second’s name is Darrell Ross. I’ll call him and tell him to hang on to the team until you get down there. They normally get off at three o’clock . . .”