Broken Prey

13

Lucas went to the Regions Hospital emergency room, where a doctor with warm soft fingers pushed his nose around, said the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and asked how Weather was doing in England.

“You know her?”

“I used to talk with her when I was doing my surgical rotation over at the university,” the doc said. “She’s got some amazing skills.”

“I’ve seen her work,” Lucas said.

The doc smiled at him and said, “I know. The famous tracheotomy. She used to tell us that if we really wanted to impress our boyfriends, we’d cut their throats.”

She smiled; but Lucas thought of Angela Larson and Adam Rice, and grimaced. The doc, whose hands had been on his face, said, “Ooo-did that hurt?”

“No-so what’s the diagnosis?”

She crossed her arms and looked at him with what might have been skepticism. “You got punched in the nose. It looks likes your poor nose has been through the routine before, I could feel some scar tissue on the bone. .”

“Yeah, playing hockey. . and one time. . never mind.”

“This time, it’s only a crack, not a clean fracture. Best thing to do is to leave it. I’ll put a plastic protective cup on it and give you a prescription for some pain medication. You may need it to get to sleep.”

Even with the pain medication, he couldn’t sleep; but because of the pain medication, his brain got foggy and he couldn’t think about the case, either. The protective cup drove him crazy, and at two A.M., he got up, pulled it off, and threw it away. He spent the rest of the night sitting in a leather club chair, semiupright, vacillating between slumber and stupor.

He did get a few hours: he last looked at the clock at five A.M. When Weather called at eight, he was asleep. The phone rang a second and a third time before he got to it; his back hurt from the unaccustomed position in the chair, and his face and neck hurt from Clanton’s punch.

He picked up the phone: “How are you?” she asked.

When he got off the phone, he went into the bathroom and looked at his face. He had a bruise the size of a saucer, a stupendous black eye; rather, a purple eye, with stripes of crimson and yellow-gray.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.

He went back to his chair, closed his eyes. Another hour of unconsciousness, and the phone rang again. Sloan said, “I heard you got your nose busted.”

Lucas groaned and looked at the clock. Time to go. “Yeah. My whole goddamn head hurts. I gotta sleep sitting up.”

Sloan might have choked back a chuckle. “They splint it? Your nose?”

“Naw. They pushed it around a little and gave me some pills.”

“Got a shiner, huh?”

“You’re a ray of sunshine,” Lucas said. “How’s the disease?”

“I’m dying. Every hole in my body’s got junk running out of it.”

“I’d rather have the busted nose.”

“I’d have to think about it for a while. .”

Lucas filled him in on the meth-lab bust. Sloan summed it up: “You got nothing but hit in the face.”

“No. I got something,” Lucas said seriously.

“Yeah?”

“This Clanton guy, the guy who knocked me on my ass. We were on the lawn after we busted him, and I was pushing him on Pope. He didn’t know who I was talking about. I was looking at his face when he figured it out-and, man, he couldn’t believe it. He called Pope a retard.”

“Mr. Politically Correct.”

“Hey-we’ve been fighting the same thing. We’ve got all these really smart professionals at St. John’s talking about Pope in a professional way. They’d never call him a retard. What they know about Pope is too complicated. But Clanton made it simple: he knew a retard when he saw one. And he’s right.”

“Huh.” Sloan knew what Lucas was saying. “You think we’re chasing the wrong guy.”

“We could be,” Lucas said.

“What about the DNA?”

“Oh, Pope was there, all right,” Lucas said. “He did it, some of it. But he’s not setting it up. Maybe he does the act, but somebody else does the directing. Somebody else has a car, somebody else has the money, somebody else does his shopping for him-Christ, the guy can barely feed himself. There’s gotta be somebody else.”

“We need to find this Mike West guy.”

“We need to find everybody who might ever have talked to Charlie Pope,” Lucas said. “We need to get back to St. John’s, talk to people.”

“Not me,” Sloan said. “I’m out of it for a while. I can barely fuckin’ walk. I walk across the house, I get so dizzy I wanna puke.”

“Hey-I’m not saying you gotta do it yourself, but that’s what’s gotta be done. I’ve got to talk to Elle some more. She was right from the beginning-it’s not Charlie Pope.”

When he got off the phone, Lucas went into the bathroom to look in the mirror again. His face hadn’t changed: it was still the color of an eggplant. The pain had changed: though it was duller than it had been, it had spread all through his skull, and he felt as though his front teeth might come out.

He couldn’t use the pain pills. They kicked his ass. Instead, he took two Aleves, got a drawing pad from the study, along with the all the paper and reports generated so far, and headed back to the chair.

He was trying to get comfortable when the phone rang again.

Sloan said, “Me again. You got me thinking.”

“Okay. .”

“You say there’s gotta be another guy.”

“Yup.”

“Then where do the Big Three come in? We know they’re involved. Somehow. Who did they influence, Charlie Pope or this other guy?”

Lucas thought about it for a moment. A puzzle. “I dunno. We come back to Mike West again.”

“Or somebody like Mike West,” Sloan said. “I can’t believe that they made a robot out of Charlie Pope, and then he just went out and found some brains for himself. You know, a smart crazy guy to manage him.”

“Maybe. . maybe it was somebody one of the Big Three knew before he went inside. Did any of those guys have accomplices? Did they work with anyone?”

“I don’t know. I can get Anderson to pull all those old records, if you think it’s worth doing.”

“It is. We don’t want to miss anything.”

“I’ll call him. Like, in ten minutes. Right now, I gotta get back to my toilet.”

Lucas put his knees up and propped the drawing pad against it, stared at the blank page. Got on the phone again, called Shrake, the BCA muscle who’d gone after Mike West. Shrake picked up on the first ring.

“You get even a sniff of him?” Lucas asked.

“Not even a sniff.”

“What’s his history? Does he wander all over the country, or does he stay close?”

“He’s got family here, and they say he’s generally around somewhere,” Shrake said. “They do know he goes out west from time to time. Washington, Oregon, California.”

“Look, call Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all the burbs. Tell them we need to drag the streets-this is a big priority now. This is right there with finding Charlie Pope.”

In the sketchbook he wrote,

1. DNA

2. Kills in Minneapolis, Mankato

3. Prison in St. John’s

4. Positive visual ID in Rochester, positive phone ID

5. Mother in Austin, worked in area, seen in July

6. Worked Owatonna; meet somebody there?

7. Rice goes to Faribault bar

8. Pope told Ignace that he’ll kill somebody in the Boundary Waters. .

How in the hell would somebody like Charlie Pope know anything about the Boundary Waters? Pope was a pickup guy, not a canoe guy. The second man again? He had to force himself to think or woman.

The Aleve were taking hold. He pushed himself out of the chair, found a Minnesota road map, and unfolded it. If you drew a cross made up of major highways south of the Twin Cities, he realized, you would encompass Charlie Pope’s world.

Pope had killed Angela Larson at the northern point of the cross, a couple of miles from I-35 in Minneapolis. He’d been living in Owatonna, which was right on I-35, halfway between Minneapolis and the Iowa border. That was the center point. And he’d grown up in Austin, Minnesota, just a few miles from the Iowa border and not far east of I-35. That was the southern point.

The east-west arm of the cross ran through Owatonna, with Rochester on the east, where he was seen making a phone call, and Mankato to the west, where he’d killed the Rices. All three towns were linked by Highway 14.

As a matter of fact, it was almost perfect. He drew a circle connecting the four outlying cities, with Owatonna in the middle. The circle together with the highways looked like the crosshairs on a rifle scope.

He carried the map back upstairs to the sketchbook:

9. Must limit exposure; short drives?

10. Too dumb to act alone; must be second guy. .

Lucas thought about (10) for a moment, then added,

. . who knows the Big Three.

He went into the bathroom and shaved; the warm water felt good, but his nose was still clogged with blood, and he could only breathe through one side. That fuckin’ Clanton. .

In the shower, he decided that Pope was in his circle. Not for sure, but 80 percent. Somewhere, in a rough circle maybe a hundred miles across. He tried to do the math with the water pounding on his back. Something like 7,800 square miles, he thought. Lots of rabbit holes in 7,800 square miles of corn and beans.

With the water pouring on his head, he thought, forlorn hope? And then he thought, beans?

He got out of the shower, toweled off, went back to the bedroom, and sorted through the case reports. When they’d talked to Ruffe Ignace after the call from Pope, Ignace said a couple of times that he’d taken down everything Pope said “verbatim.” He’d emphasized his own precision.

Lucas found the Ignace/Pope transcript in the report, and thumbed through it. According to the transcript, Pope had used the words forlorn hope. The words rattled around in Lucas’s brain because he’d seen them in a Richard Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell. In the novel, the words had referred to a group of men who volunteered to be the first to attack a breach in a city wall during a siege. The survivors got otherwise impossible promotions. . but they were also unlikely to survive.

Lucas put on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the study, opened his Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Forlorn hope meant, exactly, a “faint remaining hope” or a “desperate enterprise.”

He snapped the dictionary closed: Charlie Pope, the retard, had used the phrase precisely. And something else. . He ran back up the stairs, still carrying the dictionary, and picked up Ignace’s transcript. Didn’t Pope say he’d thrown the baseball bat into a field of “whatever-it-is?”

Lucas found the line. Yes, he had. The whatever-it-is was beans.

Charlie Pope spent his entire life in a sea of soybeans, and he didn’t know what a soybean field looked like when he was standing next to it? Now that was stupid, something you might expect from Charlie Pope.

He went back over the transcript. The language was what he’d expect from Charlie Pope, except for the “forlorn hope.” And, come to think of it, Ruffe had him referring to a razor strop. Maybe he’d said strap and Ruffe had misspelled it.

Back to the dictionary: strop meant “a strip of leather for sharpening razors.” Huh. Again, the precision. He’d have to talk to Ruffe. .

He finished dressing, picking out a good-looking Versace blue suit and tie, a subtle Hermes necktie, blue over-the-calf socks with small coffee-colored comets woven into them, and soft black Italian loafers. He looked at himself in a mirror, took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket, and tried a smile.

Fuckin’ Jack Nicholson, he thought. Except taller and better-looking. He tried to whistle going out the door, but his face hurt when he pursed his lips.

Ruffe Ignace took two big phone calls.

The first was from Davenport. Ignace was sitting in the basement of Minneapolis’s scrofulous City Hall, reading about the New York Yankees-his team-when his phone rang.

Davenport: “You sure he said ‘forlorn hope’ and ‘razor strop’?”

“Hey. How many times do I explain the word verbatim to you?” Ignace asked. “That’s what he said.”

“But maybe he said strap, instead of strop.”

“Sounded like strop to me. I don’t even know what a strop is. It’s like a sharpening stone, right?”

“No, it’s more like a strap.”

“Strop, strap, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Then later, the second call.

Ignace was walking along Sixth Street, heading back toward the paper, playing Ruffe’s Radio: Thought I was a bum, shit, this jacket cost four hundred bucks. Wonder why they put the street cars right down the middle of the main street so they screw up traffic for the whole town? Look at that skinny chick, wonder if she’s bulimic? She looks bulimic, looks sour. . wonder how much Macallister makes, can’t be two grand, can it? Maybe I oughta ask for another hundred, my review’s when, when was the last one? March? Gotawaytogo. .

Like that. He was mumbling to himself, standing on a street corner, watching the WALK light when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and slipped it open:

“Ignace.”

“Roo-Fay. . it’s me.” The coarse whisper. No question.

“Mr. Pope? Is that you?” Ignace had a reporter’s notebook stuffed in his back pocket. He fished it out, walked sideways to the wall of the nearest building, and sat down on the sidewalk, the cell phone trapped between his right shoulder and ear. “How’d you get my number?”

“I called at the newspaper and told them I was a cop and it was an emergency and they gave me your cell phone. And I was telling the truth: it’s an emergency, all right.”

“What?”

Pope laughed. “I got her.”

Ignace didn’t make the connection for a second, and again said, “What?”

“I got her. The next one.”

Ignace started taking notes. “Who?”

“Carlita Peterson. I been watching her for three weeks. Got her in my car and I’m leaving right now, taking her up the thirty-five right into the deep woods. Know where’s this old empty cabin up there, you can camp out.”

“Ah, Jesus, man, you gotta stop. You gotta stop. .”

“I ain’t gonna stop, Roo-Fay,” the whisperer said. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna spend a little time with her tonight, take the starch out of her. Then I’m gonna kick her out in the woods tomorrow, give her a one-minute head start-I won’t look, either, I won’t look which way she runs. Then I’m going out with my razor. Maybe she’ll get away.”

“Ah, Jesus. .”

“My other woman drove me to it; I been walking around with a hard-on for three days, the way she talks, she just drives me to distraction. But this’ll fix it for a while. You know how, after you fuck, you don’t have to fuck again for a while? Well, after I take this next one, I won’t have to worry about taking my woman.”

“Ah, jeez. .”

“Hey, don’t tell me it don’t give you a little tingle in the back of your balls, thinking about it.”

“Listen, Mr. Pope. Please. Let her go. C’mon, you gotta get help, please let her go. I’ll write whatever you want, I’ll write your whole story, whatever you want to say, if you just let her go. .”

“Hey, fuck you, Roo-Fay. Too late for all of that shit. But I’ll tell you what-you got the rest of today and all of tonight to find us. I won’t do her until tomorrow morning; but that’s as long as I’m gonna go. You tell that to the cops.”

Click.

Ignace stared dumbfounded at the phone for a moment, then pushed himself up, unconsciously brushed the seat of his pants, took a couple of walking steps, then broke into a run, running as hard as he could, arms pumping, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, down to the paper, buzzing all the way: Man, man-oh-man, Jesus, man.

Carol stuck her head in Lucas’s office and said, “If your nose doesn’t hurt too bad to talk, a guy named Rufus is on the telephone. He says he’s a reporter from the Star-Tribune and it’s urgent.”

Lucas picked up the phone: “Davenport.”

“He just called me,” Ignace blurted. “One minute ago. On my cell phone.”

“Ah, shit. .,” Lucas said.

“He said he took a woman whose name is Carlita Peterson, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got the number he was calling from. .”

Lucas sat up and shouted at Carol, “We’re gonna need a phone number run. . Get Dave, get Dave on the line. .”

Ignace said, “You ready? Here it is. .”

He recited the number and Lucas shouted it to Carol, who shouted back, “Dave’s running it. .”

Lucas went back to the phone: “He said he’s already got this woman?”

“That’s what he said. He said he’s going to take her up north and fuck with her for a while and then tomorrow morning he’s going to turn her loose and hunt her down with his razor.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Same guy as last time.”

Carol shouted, “Carlita Diaz Peterson, Northfield. It’s a cell phone. The address is coming up.”

Lucas yelled back, “Get the sheriff on the line. I think it’s Rice County, but it might be Dakota. Get somebody over to her house. Tell the phone guys I want to know the location of the cell phone when he called. .”

Back to Ignace, the phone: “Are you at your office?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can. I’ll need a typescript.”

“I’ll have it by the time you get here,” Ignace said. He suddenly left his asshole persona and sounded like a worried human being: “Jesus, Davenport, he said he had her in his car, that he was already heading north.”

Lucas banged out the number for the co-op office, talked to Ray Reese: “Pull your socks up. The Star-Trib reporter got another call from Charlie Pope; he says he’s taken a woman from Northfield and he’s in his car heading for the Boundary Waters. Pull the trigger on the network. Now.”

“Hang on.”

Ten seconds later, Reese was back: “We’re doing it. Anything else? You know where he’s starting from?”

“Gonna get that in a minute. Tell everybody that Pope says he already picked up the woman. Tell them that: that he says he’s got her, that if we miss him, she’s gonna die. Tell them to be careful.”

He threw the phone back at the receiver and realized his hands were slippery with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”

She waved him off.

He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”

She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.

“Damnit. If he’s heading north. . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W. .”

“Or city streets,” Carol offered.

“Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”

He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.

Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.

If he was going north. He’d never gone north before.

Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going north, he’s in the metro area, so move the search area north about as fast as he could be traveling. Then, when the network is set, I want you to call all of the major nodes in the south end. He may be jerking us around when he keeps saying that he’s going north. He didn’t leave his home ground with the others, and from what I’ve been able to tell, Pope doesn’t know anything about the Boundary Waters. So tell the people down south that he may be down there. Tell them that it’s really critical that they don’t ease off because they think he’s going north. .”

“I can get that out in five minutes.”

“Do that.”

Carol stuck her head in the office: “Two calls-Northfield police and Ruffe Ignace, that reporter. .”

“I want both of them. Give me Northfield first.”

He picked up his phone and a voice said, “Agent Davenport, this is Jim Goode down in Northfield. We’ve got a car at the Peterson house, and it doesn’t look good. She didn’t show up at work this morning. She’s a ceramics teacher at St. Olaf, and the guys looked in the window of her house and they saw some cut rope on the kitchen floor. They called that probable cause, went in, they say the house is empty, but there’s a smear of what looks like dried blood on the kitchen floor, not much, but a smear, and that cut rope.”

“Seal the place off,” Lucas said. “I’ll send down our crime-scene crew. .”

“It’s sealed off now. I’m calling in all our guys, we’re gonna do the streets, and the sheriff is running the county.”

“Don’t quit on it-there’s a possibility that he’s still down there.”

“That cocksucker, if he’s killed Carlita Peterson, he’s a dead man,” Goode said.

“You know her?”

“Yes, a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady.”

“I’m coming down,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a guy to talk to first, I might be a couple of hours.”

Ignace came up: “Listen, instead of running over here, I got a transcript that I can cut and paste to Microsoft Word and ship it to you. You could have it in one minute.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “I should have thought of it myself. Here’s the address. .”

He checked three times, five seconds apart, and then the document came rolling in. At the top: “This is verbatim.”

Lucas read down through the conversation between Pope and Ignace. Pope said they had until tomorrow morning. Some time, then. Not much, and he might be lying. Still, there was a chance.

He sent the document to the printer, then looked again at the language, searching for the kind of things he’d pulled out of the first call. Nothing struck him that seemed particularly important. Pope said he had the woman in his car, which implied a sedan or coupe, but not a pickup or an SUV. That eliminated about half the vehicles heading north. . unless he was lying. Pope said he was “leaving.”

Leaving from Burnsville? Was that where he was hiding? A big town, a major suburb. Lots of people around.

Most likely, Lucas thought, Pope meant that he was leaving the area, not that he was leaving that very minute. Lucas was still mulling over the conversation when Carol came in: “Channel Three just called. They’ve heard about the network alert from their cops reporter. Everybody else will hear about it in the next ten minutes. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell them that we’ve got no comment at this time. . Do they have Peterson’s name yet?”

“They didn’t say anything.”

Lucas stood up, picked up his sport coat. “Put them off. Tell them you can’t talk without an okay from me, and I’m somewhere in my car. You don’t know where.”

“So where will you be?”

“Northfield. I’ll be on the cell,” Lucas said.

“And you’re okay to drive?”

“Huh?”

“Your nose-your face. You don’t look so good.”

“Nah. I’m fine. Couple more Aleves, I’m good for the day.” He touched his nose, gave it a tentative push, and winced. For ten minutes there, he’d forgotten about it.

He stopped at the co-op center, three guys, three computers, and three telephones in a room the size of a closet. Lucas said, “Probably a sedan or coupe. White, maybe an Olds.”

They all nodded, and he was out the door.

Every once in a while, Carlita Peterson would get together both the energy and the angle to give the backseat a good thump. She was lying on her face, or had been, and it gave him a hard-on thinking about her back there, desperate, trying to kick, feeling the rope cut into her.

Knowing the power.

The Gods Down the Hall always said that was the best part. The killing and the pain were fine, but when you could look into their eyes, and know they were feeling the power. .

He’d stash her for the rest of the day, take her out tonight, just like he’d told Ruffe that he would. And tomorrow morning. . He could feel the need coming on him, stronger than ever. The Gods Down the Hall had talked to him about this, about the power and the need, so closely tied together, about the ecstasy that was coming. .

One night walking back to Millie Lincoln’s town house, Mihovil said, “Is Sherrie a very close friend with you?”

“Well. . yeah. I guess,” she said. “I mean, we don’t hang out so much now that you’re around, but we used to, you know. Hang out.”

“I think she watches us make love.”

“What?”

“The other night when I came over and we go back to the playroom and do it, and then we are resting, and I see a spot of light on the door. A minute later, I look back and it’s gone. No light. Then a couple of minutes later, I see the light again. Just a little spot. So then we are doing it again, and I see no light.”

“What was it?” Millie was intrigued.

“There is a very small hole in the door, like a nail hole, right under the bar that runs across the middle of it. When we are done, and you and Sherrie are in the kitchen, I look through the hole. All you can see is the bed, but you can see all of the bed. I think. . when there is no light, she is watching. When you can see light, then her eye is not at the hole.”

Millie could feel herself going a flame pink. The witch. What did she see? What had they been doing the last time. .? Millie thought about it and, if anything, got a little pinker.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Well, I am not sure. And you are friends. And I’m not sure she was watching. But I think she was.”

Now a surge of anger. “Goddamnit. We’re gonna have it out right now. .” She stepped out a little faster.

“Wait, wait wait. .,” Mihovil said. “Maybe, let it go this night.”

“What?”

“What can it hurt? She watches, she doesn’t do anything. You can’t take pictures through the hole. She has no boyfriend, she just enjoys herself.”

“You sound like you liked it.”

“Well. .” He shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I did like it. .”

“God, Mihovil. .” But, in fact, his comment produced a little thrill.

That night, when they were doing it, Millie kept an eye on the door-and that meant she had to keep her glasses on, because she couldn’t see the little spot without them. Would Sherrie be suspicious? Millie didn’t know, but she wanted to see if the little spot was there-and before they went in the bedroom, Mihovil had carefully turned on a living-room desk lamp that they’d calculated would provide the light.

And Millie saw the tiny light blink at her. This time, she got more than a little thrill: Mihovil had his head down between her thighs, and her head was propped on the pillow, her eyes cracked just enough to watch the light, and when the light blinked out-when Sherrie started watching-Millie felt a rush so intense that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

She cried out once, and again, and felt her heels drumming on the mattress as Mihovil had said they would, when she really got into it, and then an orgasm rolled over her brain like a tsunami. She could remember yipping, a noise she’d never heard herself make before, and then nothing was anything except the feeling of Mihovil’s tongue in the middle of her existence, and her own self, going off. .