Broken Prey

3

THEY WERE SLOWED BY ROADWORK north of the city of Mankato, where one side of the divided highway had buckled, and traffic was switched to the east lane.

"Wonder if they bother to put concrete in the fuckin' roads anymore," Sloan grumbled. "Everything falls apart. The bridge over to Hudson was up for what, six or seven years, and they're tearing the whole thing apart again?"

"Thinking about it will drive you crazy," Lucas said. When he had a chance, he pulled the Porsche onto the shoulder of the road, hopped out, stuck a flasher on the roof, and used it to jump the waiting lines of traffic.

On the way down, Lucas told Sloan what Nordwall had said about the killing, and Sloan had grown morose: "If I'd just gotten a break. One fuckin' thing. I couldn't get my fingernails under anything, you know?"

"Maybe it's not your guy,or it's a coincidence. The victim this time is male," Lucas said.

"Seen it before, nut cases who go both ways."

They talked about serial killers. All major metro areas had them, sometimes two and three at a time. The public had the impression that they were rare. They weren't.

"I remember once, I was in LA on a pickup. The L.A. Times had a story that said that the cops thought there might be a serial killer working in such-and-such a neighborhood," Sloan said. "The story just mentioned it in passing, like it was going to rain on Wednesday."

THEY CAME UP BEHIND a pickup struggling through the traffic, and flicked past it. A woman's hand came out of the passenger-side window and gave them the finger. Lucas caught it in the rearview mirror and grinned. Generally, he felt some sympathy for women who'd give the finger to cops, especially if they were good-looking. The women, not the cops.

"ONE THING ABOUT THIS GUY-he's leaving the bodies right in our faces. He took Larson somewhere to torture her, killed her somewhere else, and then brought her back and posed her almost in her own neighborhood…the neighborhood where we're most likely to take a lot of shit, where it'd get the most attention," Lucas said. "This guy, this Rice guy, he tortures and leaves in his own house…"

"He's probably scouting locations, putting them where they attract attention, but he feels safe doing it."

"For sure," Lucas said. "None of this feels spontaneous."

BESIDES THE SERIAL-KILLER TALK, they argued a little about Lucas's rock'n' roll list. Lucas's wife, Weather, had given him an Apple iPod for his birthday and a gift certificate for one hundred songs from the Apple Web site. He'd taken' the limit of one hundred songs as an invitation for discipline: one hundred songs, no more, no less, the best one hundred songs of the rock era.

Word of the list had spread through the BCA, and among his friends, and after a month of work, he had a hundred and fifty solid possibili-ties with more coming in every day. He still hadn't ordered a single tune."What bothers me is, I think I'm just about set, and then I'll hear something I completely forgot about, like 'Radar Love,'" he told Sloan. "I mean, that's gotta go on the list. What else did I forget?"

"One thing, since you're mostly making it for road trips-it can't be hard stuff. It can't be all AC/DC," Sloan said. "You've got to have some mellow stuff. You know, for when you're just rolling along. Or at night, when the stars are out and it's cold. Billy Joel or Blondie."

"I know, I know. I got that. But right now, the way I'm thinking, you're going on a road trip-you start off with ZZ Top, right? Gotta start off with ZZ. 'Sharp-Dressed Man,' 'Legs,' one of those."

"I can see that," Sloan said, nodding. "Something to get you moving." He turned away, stared at the acres and acres of corn. "Jesus Christ, if I'd just gotten a single fuckin' break."

"COULD BE DRY OUT THERE," Sloan said, as they came down on Mankato. "Hot and dry."

"We'll stop," Lucas said.

Mankato was the site of the largest mass hanging in American history, thirty-eight Sioux Indians in a single drop. The Sioux said that thirty-eight eagles come back to fly over the riverbank site every year on the anniversary of the hanging. Lucas didn't believe in that kind of thing, but then, one time he'd been in the neighborhood, on the anniversary, and he'd seen the eagles…

"There," Sloan said. "Holiday store. They got Krispy Kremes."

They picked up twenty-four-packs of Coke, Diet Coke, and Dasani water; a throw-away Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice; a couple of hot dogs; and a couple of Krispy Kremes.

"I thought you South Beach Diet guys weren't even supposed to eat the buns, much less a doughnut," Sloan said through a mouthful of hot dog, as they headed back into the country.

"Fuck you," Lucas said. The Krispy Kreme tasted so good that he felt faint.

THEY FOLLOWED HIGHWAY I 69 for three or four miles south of town, turned east across a thirty-foot-wide river, took a narrow black-topped road out a mile or so, then jogged onto a gravel lane. As soon as they got onto the gravel, they could see a covey of cars, mostly cop cars with light bars, arranged under an old spreading elm tree next to a white clapboard farmhouse.

The farmhouse, with a detached one-car garage on its east side, sat on an acre of high ground. A grassy lawn supported a dozen old elms and oaks and two apple trees. A tire swing hung from one of the oaks, and bean fields crept right up to the unfenced lawn. A hundred feet out behind the house, a series of old sheds or chicken houses were slowly rotting away, slumping back into the soil. Not a working farm, Lucas thought, just the remnants of one.

"How'd he find them?" Lucas asked, as they came up. "How'd he pick them out?"

THEY WENT PAST a mailbox that said rice, in crooked black hand-painted letters, and spotted a cop up on the lawn, looking at them through a camera lens. Four cops, including the sheriff, were standing on the lawn, just as Nordwall said they'd be. Four more people, including three women, civilians, and a cop sat in an aging Buick on the grass beside the driveway. A red-eyed woman drooped in the backseat, the door open, and looked toward them as they came up.

"Relatives," Sloan said.

Lucas pulled onto the lawn next to the end cop car, and he and Sloan got out.

"Davenport, goddamnit, you got the crime scene coming?" the sheriff asked. He was a tall man, and wide, with white hair, a red-tipped button nose, and worry lines on a head the size of a gallon milk jug; he was anxious.

"You call them?"

"I called them, and they said they were rolling."

"Takes awhile," Lucas said. He turned to the house. "You shut everything down?"

"Everything." Nordwall was looking at Sloan. "Who's this guy?"

Lucas introduced them, and Sloan told him about Angela Larson. "Ah, jeez, I saw that in the paper," Nordwall said. "But I don't remember…you must not have given them all the details."

"No, we didn't," Sloan said. Sloan dropped the cooler on the ground, and said, "Cokes, if anybody's thirsty," and started passing around the cans.

"Might get some to Miz Rice and Miz Carson," Nordwall said to one of the deputies. He looked past Lucas at the Buick and said, "Rice's am, and her sister, and a friend. Miz Rice wants to see them, but I ain't gonna allow it. Not until after they're bagged. She'd have that picture in her head until she went to the grave."

Lucas nodded and gestured toward the farmhouse. "Who found them?"

"One of my deputies, George," Nordwall said.

One of the deputies, a thin man with shaggy black hair and a ricocheting Adam's apple, lifted his Coke.

"Me," the deputy said.

"Tell me," Lucas said.

The deputy shrugged. "Well, Rice didn't come to work. He's the manager of a hardware store in Mankato, and he has the keys to the place. Today he was supposed to open the store. When he didn't show, the gals who worked there called the owner, who came down to open up. He tried to call Rice, but got a phone out-of-order thing. When he still didn't show up by ten o'clock, the owner got worried and called us."

"And you came out?"

"Well, first Sandy, she takes our calls…"

"Yeah…"

"Sandy's chatting with the store owner, and he says Rice had a boy in grade school. So Sandy called over to the elementary school and asked if the kid showed up. They said no, and that Rice hadn't called in an excuse. I was down this way patrolling, and they asked me to swing by. I come up, saw a car around back, but nobody answered. The doors were open and then, uh, I went around back and looked in through the back door and I saw the boy lying on the floor, and man, he looked like, you know, he was dead. He looked like a rag doll. Then I come in and found him and I got the heck out of there and alerted the sheriff."

"Didn't touch anything?"

"I been trying to think," the deputy said, looking over at the house. "The door handle, for sure. And I think I put my hand on the door frame on the way out. The main thing was, I didn't know if somebody was still in there, and I wanted to get outside where I could see somebody running, if they were. Then I stood here until everybody come in."

"Sounds like you did okay," Lucas said, and the deputy bobbed his head, taking the compliment. Lucas said to Nordwall, "We gotta have your guys figure out if they touched or moved anything. It'll make things easier. We're gonna be looking for DNA, and that's a touchy thing "

"I figured," Nordwall said. He looked up at the house. "You gonna go in?"

"Just for a quick look," Lucas said.

LUCAS HAD LITTLE FAITH in crime-scene analysis as a way of breaking a case, but it often came in handy after they caught somebody. He got thin vinyl throwaway gloves from his car, handed a packet to Sloan. They went in through the back door, since that entry route had already been contaminated, trying not to bump anything, or scuff anything. The door opened into a mudroom, six feet square with coat hooks on the wall, ancient linoleum flooring, then through a glass-paneled door into the kitchen. The boy was lying in the kitchen, a pool of dried blood around his head; he was wearing pajamas.

"Been there awhile," Sloan said. He stepped closer, squatted. "He was hit on the head with something. Something crushed the skull."

"He never moved, the skid marks lead right into the blood," Lucas said. Lucas had a toddler at home, and swallowed, the bitter taste of acid in his throat. "Must have killed him outright."

Sloan sighed, put his hands on his thighs, and pushed himself back up. "I'm gonna quit," he said.

"Yeah, right." Lucas led the way toward the next room, a hall. They could see the living room beyond it.

"I'm serious," Sloan said. "I got the time in. I'm gonna put this guy away, and then I'm gonna do it. That dead kid is one dead kid too many."

Lucas looked at him: "Let's talk about it later."

"Fuck later. I'm gonna quit."

ADAM RICE WAS IN THE NEXT ROOM. He was naked, kneeling, his hips up, his head on the floor. He had duct tape on both wrists,as though they'd been taped together, and then cut loose. His body was a mass of blood, a hundred bloody stripes across his chest and stomach and thighs. Scourged, Lucas thought. Blood spattered the walls, a round oaken dinner table, two short bookcases full of books and china; and splashed across the faces of a dozen people smiling down from pictures on the living-room wall.

Sloan looked at him and said, "That's our guy. No question about it."

"No question."

"None."

RICE'S CLOTHES HAD BEEN flung in one corner, and were rags. The killer had cut them off with some kind of razor knife or box cutter or scalpel. He'd brought it with him, Lucas thought, and had taken it away with him.

"He's got some muscle," Sloan said, looking at the dead man. "The killer must have had a gun on him. Doesn't look like he fought back much."

Lucas nodded. "The guy comes in, he has a gun, points it at Rice, tells him it's a robbery and that there'll be no trouble if he cooperates. Rice is worried about the kid, who's up in bed. He cooperates. He gets his hands taped up and then the shit starts. They're struggling, knocking around, maybe, the kid hears it, comes down, sees what's going on, and runs for the door. The killer gets him in the kitchen. Maybe whacks him with the butt of a shotgun."

Sloan nodded: "I'll buy that, for a start."

"The thing is, the killer came for Rice, the father. He wasn't pulled in by the kid. The kid looks like an accident, or an afterthought. Maybe the killer didn't even know he existed."

"Huh," Noncommittal.

"Look, if he'd known about the kid, he'd have put the old man on the ground, then he'd have gone up to the bedroom to take care of the kid, to make sure that he didn't get out somehow. Instead, he has to go after him in the kitchen, whack him with something."

"Okay…"

Rice made an awkward pile in the middle of a large puddle of blood. The light fixture on the ceiling was bent, cocked far off to one side: a lot of weight had been put on it.

The weight had been Rice: he was a slender blond man, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. The killer had taped his wrists, then put a rope through them, and hung him from the light fixture. Rice had tried to twirl away from him when the beating began, and his blood sprayed in an almost perfect circle. When the killer cut him down to pose him, he centered Rice's body in the blood puddle.

Rice's eyes were open, blue now fading to translucent brown; his palms were facing up, his fingers crooked. Lucas looked at one hand, then the other, and squatted as Sloan had squatted next to the boy.

"Got some blood here, under his nails. Maybe some skin…"

"Could be something," Sloan said. "All the other blood on him is running down his body-he hung him up like he hung up Larson. Wonder if he tried to fight at the last minute, and scratched the guy?" He squatted next to Lucas, then bent to look at the fingernails. "Skin, for sure, I think. Your guys gotta be careful or they could lose it."

"They'll get it," Lucas said. He stood up and made a hand-dusting motion. "What do you think? Look around, or wait for crime scene?"

Sloan shook his head. "I don't think we'll find anything looking around. I've done everything I could think of with Angela Larson- rent over her apartment inch by inch, the place she worked, did histories on her until they were coming out of my ears. I don't think this has much to do with the victims. They're stranger-killings. He stalks them and kills them."

"Trophies?"

"I don't know. We never found Larson's clothes or her jewelry, so maybe they were taken as trophies…but then…Rice's clothes are right here."

"Never found out where he killed Larson."

"No. Probably a basement. The soles of her feet were dirty, and there was concrete dust in the dirt. So…could have been a basement."

THEY STOOD NEXT TO THE BODY for a minute, a strange com-radely cop-moment, their shoes just inches from the puddle of blood, a half dozen fat lazy bluebottle flies buzzing around the room; bluebottles, somebody once told Lucas, were actually blowflies. One landed on the far side of the blood puddle, and they could see it nibbling at the crusting blood.

"You can't really quit," Lucas said.

"Sure I can," Sloan said.

"What would you do?" A fly buzzed past Lucas's head, and he swatted at it.

"Ah…talk to you about it sometime. I got some ideas."

Lucas got up, looked around: a pleasant, homey place, the house creaking a bit, a sound that must have seemed warm and welcome; a glider-chair lounged in one corner, comfortably worn, facing a fat old Sony color TV with a braided rug on the floor in front of it. A couple of nice-looking quilts hung from the walls, between yellowed photographs of what must have been grandparents and great-grandparents.

"YOU KNOW THE PROBLEM," Lucas said softly. He was looking at a log-cabin quilt; he didn't know anything about quilts, but he liked the earth colors in it. "We're not going to pick up much here, not un-less we lucky. Maybe DNA. But where's that gonna get us?"

"A conviction when we get him."

"The problem is getting him. That's the fucking problem," Lucas said. "A conviction…that can always be fixed, when we get the right guy. Getting him…"

"Yeah…"

"I want all the paper from Minneapolis," Lucas said.

Sloan nodded, "I'll get Anderson on it."

"And I'll get the crime-scene guys to copy everything to you,from here. You got nothing off the Larson killing?"

"I got names. That's one thing I got."

"Okay. That's a start. I'll get a co-op center going, get them to set up a database. We'll pipe in everything from here, from Nord-wall's guys."

"There's gotta be more from here. There's gotta be," Sloan said, looking around, an edge of desperation in his voice."If we don't get anything, then we won't get him before…"

Lucas nodded and finished his sentence: "…before he does it again."

OUTSIDE ON THE LAWN, Nordwall and the other deputies were sitting on the grass, in the shade of an elm, looking like attendees at the annual cop picnic. The summer was at its peak, the prairie grasses lush and tall, just starting to show hints of yellow and tan. A mile or so away, across a wide, low valley, a distant car kicked up a cloud of gravel dust.

Nordwall was chewing on a grass stem; when they came up, he stood and asked, "What do you think?"

"Same guy," Sloan said.

"Sloan did a lot of research on the first one, up in Minneapolis," Lucas said. "We're gonna set up a co-op center out of the BCA. We need a complete biography on Rice and the kid-who did they know, who had they met recently. The guy knew about him-something about him. He didn't come out here by accident. And he knew about the first one, too. Maybe the two of them, Rice and Larson, intersect somewhere."

"You think…maybe some kind of boy-girl romance thing?" one of the deputies suggested. "A jilted lover? Rice's wife got killed in a car accident a couple years ago, he might have been looking around."

"You get a jilted lover, you get a gun in a bedroom or a knife in the kitchen, but you don't get the boyfriend raped," Sloan said mildly.

Nordwall swiveled and looked at another of the deputies and said, "You get right on this biography, Bill. Don't hold back, and don't worry about the overtime. I'll cover anything you need." To Lucas, he said, "This is Bill James. I'll get his phone number for you."

The deputy stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants with a couple of slaps: "I'll go right now. Get started."

"What happened with the wife?" Lucas asked, "A straight-up accident, no question?"

"In the winter, winter before last," said Nordwall. "She came around a snowplow, didn't see the pickup coming the other way. Boom. Died in the ditch."

"So…"

"Whole goddamn family up in smoke," a deputy said.

"Here comes a truck," somebody else said.

A white Mission Impossible-style van was rolling down the gravel road toward them. "That's the crime-scene guys," Lucas said. "Why don't you guys get them inside? Me and Sloan'll go talk to Mrs.Rice."

LAURINA RICE WAS IN HER SIXTIES, with white puffy grand-mother hair and a round, leathery face lined by age and the sun. She was too heavy, too many years of potatoes and beef. She wore a dress with small flowers on it. Her sister, Gloria, was perhaps three or four years older, and the friend about the same.

Laurina Rice struggled to get her feet on the ground and get out of the car as Lucas and Sloan walked over to it. On the other side of the car, a hundred and fifty yards out over the bean field, a flock of red-winged blackbirds hassled a crow, diving on the bigger bird like fighters on a bomber.

As had happened on other crime scenes, Lucas was for a second struck by the ordinariness of the day around him: nature didn't know about crime, about rape and murder, and simply went on: blue skies, puffy clouds, blackbirds hassling crows.

"You're the state man, Mr. Davenport, and Mr. Sloan from Minneapolis…" Rice said. Her eyes were like a chicken's, small and sharp and focused.

"Yes. I'm terribly sorry about what happened, Mrs.Rice."

She twisted the fingers of her right hand in her left, literally wringing them. "I need to see my boy, to see that it's him."

Lucas shook his head: "I'm afraid we have to process the scene first. We have to try to catch this man-he killed a young woman up in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, and he's going to kill more people if we don't catch him. We can't move the bodies until we have the crime scene processed…"

"Like on the TV show?" Gloria suggested.

"Something like that, but better," Lucas said. "These people are real."

"How long?" Rice asked.

Lucas shook his head again. "I can't tell you. It depends on what has to be done. It would be best if you went home and rested. The sheriff will call you before they move the bodies. That would be the time."

"I'm not going anywhere," she said.

Sloan smiled at her, his best sympathetic smile, and said, "We understand. If you need anything, ask the sheriff. And would you…we have some questions about your son."

"Okay," she said. She sniffed. "We knew there'd be questions."

They did the routine biography-who might not like him, whom he had arguments with, debts, women, jealous husbands, where he spent his nights, what he did for entertainment.

Lucas asked the hard one: "Mrs. Rice, as far as you know, did your son have any homosexual friends, or acquaintances?"

She looked to Sloan, then back to Lucas. "Are you…he was married. He didn't hang around with homosexuals." She started to tear up.

"This is routine," Lucas said. "We have to ask. There was a good deal of violence here, which sometimes characterizes homosexual murders, especially murders of passion."

She knew what he was asking. "My boy was not a homo," she snapped. The women behind her all nodded. "He was married, he was widowed, he would have remarried someday, but he just hadn't got started since Shelly was killed. He was not a gay person."

"But did he know any gays?" Lucas persisted. "Somebody who might have built up a fantasy about him? He was a good-looking man."

Laurina looked at Gloria, and they simultaneously shook their heads. "I don't think he even knew any gays," she said. "He would have mentioned it. We had supper together once a week, we talked about everything."

"Okay," Lucas said.

THEY CHATTED A BIT LONGER, then moved back into the house, leaving Rice and the others in the car.

The next four hours were taken up with the technicalities and legalities of murder: the crime-scene technicians worked the murder scene, the medical examiner came and went, leaving behind an assistant and two men to handle the bodies. A state representative, who lived ten miles away, stopped and talked to the sheriff, said something about the death penalty, wanted to look inside but accepted the "no," and went on his way.

"Dipshit," Nordwall said, as the legislator's car trundled down the driveway.

When the crime-scene techs had decided that the murders took place pretty much in the area of the two bodies, Lucas and Sloan began working through the small intimacies in other parts of the house, looking at bills and letters, collecting recent photographs, checking the e-mail in the five-year-old Dell computer, stopping every now and then for a Diet Coke. They didn't know exactly what they were looking for in the house, but that was okay; they were impressing images and words on their memories, so they would be there if anything should trip them in the future. "He has a Visa card about due," Sloan said at one point. "We oughta get the bill and see where's he's been."

"I looked at his Exxon bill out on the kitchen table. He hasn't been far away, not for the last year or so," Lucas said. He was digging through Rice's wallet. "One tank of gas every Friday or Saturday."

"Had the kid in school," Sloan said.

"Yeah…" He flipped through the register in Rice's checkbook. Four hundred dollars in checking, seventeen hundred in savings. He didn't write many checks…mostly at the supermarket, and bills." He found an address book, but nothing that looked like a particularly new entry but Lucas set it aside for the database they'd be creating.

A cop stuck his head in:"They're picking up the kid."

"All right."

Two minutes later, the same cop came by: "One of your crimescene guys says to stop by for a minute."

They were upstairs, in Rice's bedroom. They followed the cop down and found a technician working with a small sample bag and some swabs. He looked up when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the room: "Thought you'd want to know. The fingernail blood, I'm almost sure it isn't Rice's. There's skin with it, and a little hair follicle that's darker than Rice's. I think."

"Anything else?"

"The usual stuff-lots more hair around. We're picking it up, but who knows where it came from? And the guy took a trophy- he cut Rice's penis off, and there's no sign of it around here. Just the penis, not the testicles. The anus seems to have some lubricant still on it, so I think the killer or killers used a condom. Probably won't be any semen."

Lucas looked at Sloan, who shrugged. "Hard to tell what that is," he said. "Maybe he didn't want there to be any DNA, so maybe he knows about DNA and worries about it. Maybe he's afraid of AIDS, which might mean something if we could show that Rice had some homo-sexual contacts."

"The sexual…um, aspects…really look like a gay thing to me," the tech said. "The violence and the sexual trophy-taking."

Lucas and Sloan nodded. "But why was the first one a woman?"

"Maybe there was a gay thing, then Rice went after the woman, and his gay partner blew up," the tech said. "Maybe he was punishing them, and that's what all this whipping stuff is about."

"Maybe," Lucas said doubtfully.

"It's a concept," Sloan said. He didn't care for the idea either. "We need to get this biography. I need to see if I can link Angela Larson to anything down here."

"You said she was a student; there's a state university branch down here."

"I'll look," Sloan said. "But I did all that background on her, and nobody said nuthin' about Mankato."

WHEN THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE were done, the medical examiner's came in and picked the body up, zipped it into a bag,and carried it out. The blood splotch on the floor, which retained the impression of the kneeling body, looked like strange black modern art.

They stood over it for a moment, and then Sloan said, "I don't think there's much more here." They'd been inside, looking for something, anything, for five hours. If they'd found anything useful, it wasn't apparent.

"This guy…," Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. He was thinking about the killer. "This guy is gonna bust our chops."