Broken Prey

15

Wayne’s Four Corners Inn was a rambling white structure that sat on top of a ridge where Blue Earth County 122 and County 131 crossed each other. There were two nonfunctional gas pumps out front, with crown-shaped glass globes on top, left over from the 1950s, and left in the parking area as a statement of the inn’s antiquity. To the left side of the inn, just outside the gravel parking area, was a pi-shaped structure that might have been a medieval gallows, built of rough four-by-four lumber.

Lucas recognized the structure as soon as he pulled into the parking lot, outside the collection of cop cars. They were rare, in recent times, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s they had been ubiquitous in the countryside. They were hanging bars, meant to display the carcasses of the biggest local bucks taken during deer season.

Carlita Peterson’s body hung by the neck from the crossbar.

Not so much a body, as a carcass; Lucas had already been told, and walked toward the hanging bar with his eyes averted, not wanting to look.

A cop was there, and said to Lucas, “This is awful.”

Lucas looked now: no way to avoid it.

Peterson’s throat had been slashed; that had been the killing stroke. But after she’d been killed, she’d been gutted, and her empty body, slashed from throat to anus with a cutting tool, hung in the cool still morning air.

Lucas looked away, then stepped away, shaking his head, his hands trembling. He’d thought that they might get her back.

Nordwall scuffed up in his cowboy boots, not looking: “He fuckin’ gutted her.”

“You gotta get some people out in the woods, looking for the. .” Lucas stopped. He knew the phrase, but he didn’t want to say it.

The sheriff said it for him. “The gut dump.”

“Yeah. I would think it would be close by,” Lucas said. “He chose this place for display. Look for crows. You should see crows flocking around.”

“I’ll put it out right now.”

“Tell everybody to walk easy. When we find it, we’ll backtrack to where he held her, we gotta see if any of the neighbors saw cars in the night, anybody coming or going. .” The sheriff nodded, and Lucas finished: “Shit, Gene, you know the routine. We know Pope is involved, somehow, so processing isn’t so important. . unless we can come up with a second name. What’s important is the car-what are they driving, where were they headed?”

“I’ll put it out. You gonna be here?”

“No. I’m going home for a while.”

Lucas was walking back down the hill to the parking lot when he saw a brown Chevy slowing at the turnoff; the man inside showed an ID to the cop at the corner, and then the car continued into the parking lot and pulled in a slot down from Lucas. Sloan got out.

“How’re you feeling?” Lucas asked, automatically.

“Tell you in a minute,” Sloan said. He looked pale, and drawn, but he often did, especially in the morning. He headed up the hill toward the hanging bar. Lucas leaned against the truck, watching him go, waited.

As he waited, another familiar face came up. Lucas searched for a name, and the man helped him out: “Lucas-Barry Anderson, Goodhue.” He was the sheriff of Goodhue County, wearing tired civilian clothes, tan slacks, and a red plaid shirt. Like Lucas, he’d been up all night; the chase the night before had started just inside Goodhue County.

“I know where he was going last night,” he said grimly, looking up the hill. “We got a bar at a place called Old Church-there’s no church anymore, burned down twenty years ago, but there’s a bar and they’ve got a deer rack. Wasn’t five miles from where that first deputy jumped him.”

“Ah, jeez. .”

“Wonder what made him pick the one up there?”

Lucas thought about it for a moment, as he watched Sloan sloping back down the hill. “He was going for a deer rack, like you say. He went for the one that was closest to Northfield. Try to increase the shock. Hang her right up in front of her neighbors. When we closed him out of there, he came down here.”

Anderson’s head bobbed. He said, “You know, I’m a good Christian, born again. I accept Jesus Christ in my life and know I will face him at judgment time. But if I caught this. . this cocksucker. . I would cut his head off.”

Sloan was back: “Not something I’d want to see a second time,” he said softly.

“Shouldn’t have come out,” Lucas said. He introduced Sloan and Anderson, and Anderson said, “I better go up.”

Lucas and Sloan stood there for a few seconds, for ten seconds, and then Sloan said, “Now what?”

“Same thing we’re doing. Full-court press. He’s working fast now,” Lucas said. “I called Elle on the way over here, she said he’s breaking, he’s losing control of his own actions. We’re gonna see another dead one in the next few days.”

“If it’s like we think. . if it’s two people. . she thinks they’re both breaking?”

“She doesn’t think it’s two people. Or if it is, they’ve somehow meshed their personalities. One of them has taken over the other.”

Another long silence, cops trudging by, up the hill or down. Lucas said, “I can’t figure out how he’s avoiding us.”

“He’s not. We almost caught him last night,” Sloan said.

“We didn’t,” Lucas grunted.

Sloan said, “Here’s a possibility: suppose he’s in some kind of closed van. The driver is a woman. They come up to a checkpoint, he hides-under a rug, or somehow, so nobody sees him just looking in the window. In the meantime, the woman shows the cop her ID, and they wave her through. We were moving so fast that we don’t know who we stopped; we must’ve stopped ten thousand people last night, all over the state.”

“Wasn’t a van. It was a small SUV. A Subaru, like that. Had vertical taillights.”

After another pause, Sloan said, “I don’t know what to tell you,” and a moment later he added, “I’m talking bullshit. I’m babbling.”

“The next time, we not only stop people, we jot down every single license plate, and run them to see who we get,” Lucas said.

Sloan shook his head: “Man. .”

“What the fuck else are we gonna do?” Lucas demanded, the anger riding on top of his voice. “Look at that fuckin’ woman hangin’ up there. What the fuck are we gonna do?”

Sloan said, “I hate to think that we’re waiting for the next one, to start writing down numbers. There’s gotta be something better than that.”

On the way home, Lucas’s cell phone rang. The incoming call was from a BCA number, and he flipped it open: “Yeah?”

“John Hopping Crow says he’s got to see you, right now,” Carol said, emphasizing the right now. “I told him that you were under a lot of stress, and didn’t sleep last night, and were heading home. He said, quote, ‘I don’t give a fuck if he’s been shot in the balls, tell him to come here before he goes anywhere.’ Unquote. He wouldn’t tell me what about.”

“They got DNA on a second guy?” It was the only thing Lucas could think of that might be important enough. None of the other catalog of current cases amounted to much.

“I don’t know,” Carol said. “He says he’ll be waiting in his office. He sounded scared.”

“Scared?”

“That’s what he sounded like,” Carol said. “And you know how polite he is. He’s never said ‘darn’ around me before, and now I’m getting ‘shot in the balls.’ ”

“Tell him twenty minutes,” Lucas said. “I do feel like shit.”

“With your poor nose, and this poor woman. .”

“Let’s talk about it some other time,” Lucas said. “Like next year.”

Weather called: he told her about Peterson. “Oh, my God. I wish I was there to help you. Do you want me to come. .”

“No. Won’t help. Right now, I just gotta get some sleep.”

Lucas felt like his ass was almost literally dragging up to Hopping Crow’s small office: getting too old for this all-night shit, living on coffee and vending-machine cookies.

Hopping Crow’s office door was closed, and Lucas knocked. He heard a chair scuff back, and the door opened a bit. Hopping Crow’s dark eyes peered out. When he recognized Lucas, he pulled the door open, his eyes flicking up and down the hall.

“Come on in.”

“Jesus, man, you’re in a sweat,” Lucas said.

Hopping Crow pointed at a chair and moved around behind his desk and sat down.

“We’ve got a big, big problem.” He said it with a dark urgency.

Lucas shrugged. Whatever the problem was, it wasn’t as big as Carlita Peterson’s had been. “Well?”

Hopping Crow pushed his chair back to the wall, then sat on the front edge of it. “Three days ago, a couple of guys were fishing for mud cat down in the Minnesota River by Mankato. North of Mankato. Downstream, by the County Eighteen Bridge, wherever that is. Anyway, they hooked onto something. They were using these big hooks and heavy line, and they yanked it up, and they came up with part of a man’s decomposing hand.”

“Surprised that there was anything left, if there’re mud cat in there,” Lucas said.

“Shut up. Just listen,” Hopping Crow snapped. “Anyway, they brought in a dive team, and they looked around, and they found a decomposed body wrapped in a logging chain. They fished it out and sent us some samples for DNA and the medical examiner did some dental X rays, I understand. They’ll be looking for a match. The medical examiner says the body was in there for maybe a month.”

He dropped his head and, with both hands, slicked back his long black hair.

“And?” Lucas was leaning forward now, truly curious.

“We got a match on the DNA. Nobody knows but me and Anita Winter. I shut her up, told her if it gets out, I’d fire her ass. I just. .” He stopped, as though unable to continue.

“Who the fuck was it?” Lucas asked.

Hopping Crow looked up. “Charlie Pope.”

Lucas didn’t register the name for a half second: the words were something like another punch in the nose, leaving him stunned and disoriented. He opened his mouth, realized what he was about to say was stupid, and closed it.

“Say something,” Hopping Crow said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Lucas shouted.

“Don’t yell-it’s not us. We didn’t fuck up. The DNA matches both our bank and the blood we took off Rice’s fingernails. We’re going back right now. .” Hopping Crow snatched the phone off his desk and hammered in a few numbers, listened, and then said, “It’s me. You see anything yet? Well, what do you think you see? Well, when can you confirm that? How much? Call me back.”

He slammed the receiver back in the cradle: “Okay. When we do DNA, we don’t examine the blood cells. That’s not part of the deal. You just don’t do that.”

“So?”

“So I had Anita take some of the back sample from Rice’s fingernails and put it under the ’scope. She says she can see blood cells that have burst.”

“I don’t know what that means. Burst?”

“That means that they could have been frozen. That means that the guy killed Pope, took blood from him, and planted it on the body.”

Lucas looked at Hopping Crow for a long three seconds: “You gotta be shitting me.”

“I shit you not.”

“Charlie Pope was never out there to find,” Lucas said.

“That’s right. The medical examiner says he’s been dead for at least a month,” Hopping Crow said. “How long ago did he disappear?”

“Little more than a month, now.”

“There you are.”

Lucas considered the problem for another long minute, then he leaned forward and tapped Hopping Crow’s desk with his index finger: “If this gets out, there’s going to be hell to pay. The media will look for somebody to drop a brick on. Me, or, maybe, you. Or both of us, or all of us.”

“I know that.”

“So you tell Anita that her job’s on the line,” Lucas said. “Sooner or later, somebody will find out that we didn’t look at the blood cells under a microscope.”

“We never look at them. Nobody does. DNA’s a whole different thing.”

“Think that’ll make any difference to the TV stations?” Lucas asked.

Hopping Crow thought about it for a moment, then said, “If it was presented exactly right. .”

“Bullshit. There’s no way to present it. There’s a kind of Occam’s razor that applies to TV: the simplest answer is the best,” Lucas said. “The simplest answer is we fucked up. People can understand that. All this science shit, they don’t understand. It might as well be magic.”

“So what are we gonna do?” Hopping Crow sounded a little desperate.

“Gotta find this cocksucker.”

“Yeah, right. I can see us holding off on mentioning this for a day or two, but what if he grabs somebody else like this Peterson woman?” Hopping Crow asked. “What do we do then, tell a million cops to look for Charlie Pope? And what do I tell the medical examiner?”

“Tell him you came up negative. That’s what he expects, anyway.”

“Ah, man.” Then: “What are you going to do?”

“I gotta talk to Rose Marie and maybe the governor. Figure something out. In the meantime, you get Anita and you tell her that I personally will run her out of the state if she says a fuckin’ thing to any-fuckin’-body.”

Lucas stopped at his office and made a call to Del Capslock, his lead investigator. Del was working dope with a task force from the suburban town of Woodbury, trying to figure out who was putting methamphetamine into the high school. Lucas called him: “What are you doing?”

“Reading a magazine and watching a house.”

“Could you break off?”

“If I had to.”

“Get in here, quick as you can. I’ve gotta go talk to Rose Marie, just wait in my office. Get Jenkins and Shrake, too.”

On the way to Rose Marie’s office, Lucas thought: What about Mrs. Bird, the old lady from Rochester? She’d identified Pope as making the call to Ruffe Ignace. She’d seen him, on the phone, she said. She’d picked him out of a photo lineup. .

Rose Marie roux had once been a state senator from Minneapolis and knew how the legislature worked, which didn’t always help. The financial crisis had escalated to the point that a special session had to be called if the state wanted to keep the parks open and continue to pay for cops, snow removal, and highway repair.

Rose Marie was in charge of cops, and she was pulling her hair out: when Lucas showed up at her door, she looked like somebody had tried to electrocute her, her parlor-blond hair standing out from her ears like fighter-jet wings.

“Tell me you got good news,” she said.

Lucas groped for words for a minute, then said, “We found Charlie Pope.”

Her eyes lit up.

A few minutes later, she said, “I’ll get even with you, someday, for that ‘We found Charlie Pope’ line.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. “The question is, What do we do?”

“I’ll talk to the governor,” she said. “Usually, it’s a bad idea to keep this sort of thing from the media. They’ll eventually find out, then they’ll start screaming ‘cover-up’. .”

“Which it is. .”

“. . and nobody in public office wants to hear that,” she said. “The media’s their own judge and jury on cover-ups, and we’ve got no say.”

“So you think we should make an announcement?” Lucas asked. He was skeptical, and showed it.

She turned in her chair so she could look out her window, rocked back and forth a couple of times; her face took on the blank expression she assumed when she was plotting. After a moment, she said, “No. . We start talking secretly to a few sheriffs about the white car and the silver car and about a probable second man. You’ve been kicking that idea around for a few days anyway. Sloan will back us up on that. The media already has the white car, and sooner or later they’ll hear about the second man and the silver car. They’ll know that something is going on, and they’ll write about it. .”

“And?”

“And then we tell them that we knew that Charlie Pope wasn’t the guy, and that we were trying to outwit the real killer by not letting him know that we were on to the frozen-blood thing,” she said. “That they-the media-ruined it all by releasing the second-man theory. It’s all their fault.”

“Jesus.” Lucas was impressed.

“I have to run this by the governor.” She poked a finger at Lucas: “In the meantime, you gotta find this guy. Start filtering out the word on the second man, for the media. Then find this motherfucker. If you find him soon enough, all this becomes moot.”

Sloan and Elle had to know.

Lucas didn’t want to tell them on the phone. Sloan hadn’t been officially working that day and had come down to the Blue Earth murder scene on his own hook. Lucas called his office, was told that he was probably at home. Called Sloan’s home and got his wife.

“He’s out walking, Lucas. He’s pretty shook up about Peterson.”

“I need to talk to him about the case. We’ve got a thing going on. . Could you ask him to call me?”

“I will, but listen, Lucas: don’t try to talk him out of quitting,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

“Ah, jeez. .”

“Lucas, he needs to do something else. I remember when you had your little problem, and Sloan’s working on something like that. I don’t know if he’ll go into a full-blown clinical depression, but he’s walking around the edges of it. Work’s making it worse.”

“Is he sleeping at night?”

“No. That’s why this cold got on top of him,” she said. “He’s completely exhausted. He hasn’t slept since he found Angela Larson, and then couldn’t find who’d killed her.”

“All right. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“I’ll have him call you, as soon as he gets back.”

Elle.

Lucas decided that he needed to talk to her in person. He stopped at his office, saw Del, Jenkins, and Shrake gathered around his desk. Carol stopped him in the outer office and said, “You need to fill in some paper on the guys in the co-op center. It can’t wait, and I don’t know the answers; payroll needs it an hour ago.”

As he filled in, signed, and initialed the papers, he could hear the three cops talking through the open door of his office; they were talking about Sloan:

“He’s got the angst,” Jenkins said in his gravelly voice.

“I thought it was the zeitgeist,” Shrake drawled.

Del said, “I thought angst was the zeitgeist.”

After a pause, somebody said, in a midwestern male version of valley-girl-speak, “Well, duh.”

Lucas, a little pissed, signed the last of the documents, stepped into his office, and said with a little heat, “Off Sloan’s back, for Christ’s sake. He’s fucked up.”

“Hey,” Del said. “He’s our friend, too.”

“All right.” Lucas bobbed his head and backed off: “Sorry: I got a problem. It’s biting me. You three gotta find Mike West. Del: Jenkins and Shrake will fill you in. They’ve looked, came up empty, but now: this is critical.”

“What about Pope?” Shrake asked.

“We’re working on a two-man theory,” Lucas lied. “We need West.”

“There wasn’t much. .,” Jenkins began.

“Fuck that. Roust people. Everybody. Take your saps with you,” Lucas said.

Jenkins’s eyebrows were up. “You’re serious.”

Lucas was cold as ice: “Find that fucker. I want you to find him today. You want to know why, ask Crime Scene for some photos of Carlita Peterson.”

“We heard about that,” Del said.

“Look at the pictures. Then get out there. And fuck that take-it-easy shit,” Lucas said.

Ten minutes to St. Anne’s. Lucas parked in an illegal spot, threw a “Police” card on his dashboard, and hustled across campus. The Psychology Department secretary told him that Elle was having office hours and invited him to wait. He sat outside Elle’s door, in a wooden chair of solid brown oak, watching the college girls coming and going in their summer clothes, big and blond and athletic, Minnesota Catholics.

He waited for ten minutes before Elle’s door opened, and another blond Catholic girl popped out, carrying a stack of books. Elle was a couple of steps beside her, saw Lucas, and said, “Oh, no-what happened?”

“We gotta talk,” Lucas said.

He told her about the discovery of Pope’s body, and about Peterson, about the chase the night before, about the phone call, about the hanging stand. She sat silently, intent, nodding, leaning toward him, her rimless glasses glittering in the overhead fluorescents.

When he finished, she said, “Yes. He is intelligent. He is a planner. He is daring. This is the man I told you about.”

“And that’s all you’ve got to say.”

“I can’t give you his fingerprints, Lucas. I can tell you that he is probably physically attractive, in some way, enough to attract the interest of single women. He won’t stop. . and I’d say that something happened to him, to trigger him. . To get him started on this.”

“Like what? You mean, like he was in a car wreck and smacked his head and came out crazy?”

She smiled at him: “No. But something made him start. Something exposed him to a trigger. Oh, one other thing: I think, because the two women were markedly different in age, that he most likely is between them in age-young enough to attract the younger women, old enough to interest the older woman.”

They talked for a few more minutes about the killer, and then Lucas switched the topic to Sloan: “His old lady says he’s depressed. Maybe cycling down.”

“Your job will do that. You should know that, of all people.”

Lucas had suffered through a clinical depression a few years earlier; it hadn’t recurred, though on bad days, he could still feel the beast out there.

“He’s thinking about retiring,” Lucas said.

“Might not be a bad idea. Retirement can sometimes trigger depression, but in Sloan’s case. . Your job is too much. Not many people can take it, and those who can, if they do it long enough, can start to lose it,” she said. “They self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Or they turn into monsters. This is all very complicated, Lucas. Sloan’s wife should get him to a doctor if he really gets down.”

“I’ll get him to go, if he seems like he’s falling off the edge,” Lucas said. “He knows what happened to me-and I’ve told him that if I ever go back down, I’m going on the pills. I’m not gonna try to sweat it out again.”

“That was so foolish. .,” she said.

“I don’t like the idea of chemicals messing with my brain.”

“When you’re depressed, chemicals are messing with your brain,” she said. “You’re just using other chemicals to fight back.”

“Yeah, yeah. .” Lucas’s cell phone rang. “That’s probably Sloan now.”

He met Sloan at the Odyssey, a Greek beer joint and pool hall near the Lake Street Bridge on the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi. Sloan did look tired; Lucas suggested a round of nine ball might wake him up, but Sloan shook his head. “Don’t have the edge,” he said. “I could use a beer.”

They got a couple of Leinies long necks and carried them to a booth. A couple of hard-looking guys were shooting pool in the back, leather vests, oily jeans, fat leather wallets sticking out of their back pockets, tied to their belts with brass chains. They looked dirty, as they should: they were Minneapolis intelligence cops, and they ignored Lucas and Sloan.

Sloan said, “Okay, so something’s up. What is it?”

Lucas said, “Some fishermen down in Le Sueur County snagged a body in the Minnesota River. Actually, all they got was a piece of a hand. Scuba divers brought up the rest of the body, big chain wrapped around it. Medical examiner said the guy’d been in the river for a month.”

Sloan jumped to a conclusion: “Another Rice thing? He did a guy first?”

“No. It was, uh, Charlie Pope.”

Sloan looked at him for a long time over the beer; he seemed almost amused. And smiling, he said, “You gotta be shitting me.”

“I said that exact same thing to another guy about an hour ago.”

Sloan took a pull on the long neck, smacked his lips, sighed, and said, “I’m gonna fuckin’ quit.”

“I talked to Elle when I couldn’t get you. She says this clears up the confusion. The guy we’re looking for is smart, organized, probably good-looking. Probably in his thirties. .”

He ran down the rest of it for Sloan, who then asked, “But what about Mrs. Bird? She saw Pope standing by that wall phone.”

“I thought about that,” Lucas said. Then, “We did it.”

“Huh?”

“We contaminated her. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

Sloan pulled his feet into the booth, onto the seat, closed his eyes, thinking, and finally, reluctantly, nodded. “All she did all day was watch TV. Nobody ever came to visit her. Pope’s picture was on TV every fifteen minutes. So then we came with my photo book, and we treated her like she was important, and she looked in the book and sure enough. .”

“She sees a familiar face, and picks it out,” Lucas said. “That doesn’t mean she didn’t see somebody on the street. She probably did.”

“But not Pope. And now she’s got Pope’s face in her head, and she’ll never think different.”

“We were too fast with the book,” Lucas said. “We should have tried to get a description. We fucked up.”

“So who knows about the white Olds,” Sloan said. “That always seemed a little weird. . she could have pulled that right out of an old movie.”

“So. Pope’s dead. Where does that leave us?”

“First, but not most important, we start covering our asses,” Lucas said. He told Sloan about the second-man theory. “Do you know who’s leaking to Ignace?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Get your group together, leak the second-man thing to him. It’d be nice to have it in the paper tomorrow. Then, the most important thing. . we gotta find the guy. We’ve gotta think about it. We’ve got quite a bit of information, we need more.”

“How about another trip down to St. John’s? See if we can scare anything more out of those assholes?”

“I thought of that, too. That’s where it all starts. Let’s do it tomorrow morning. I’ve got to get some sleep, and I’ve got three guys out looking for Mike West: I’d really like to get that guy.”

“I’ll get my guys working on it, too. Have Del call me.”

“Good. I’ll be at home. Call when anything happens. I’ll call St. John’s right away, set up the trip. Why don’t you come over to my place at, like, seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“See you then.”