Broken Prey

2

The mist came in waves, now almost a rain, now so light it was more like a fog. Across the Mississippi, the night lights of St. Paul shimmered with a brilliant, glassy intensity in the rain phases, and dimmed to ghosts in the fog.

After two weeks of Missourilike heat, the mist was welcome, pattering down on the broad-leafed oaks and maples, gurgling down the gutters, washing out the narrow red-brick road, stirring up odors of cut grass, damp concrete, and sidewalk worms.

A rich neighborhood, generous lawns, older houses well kept, a Mercedes here, a Land Rover there, window stickers from the universities of Minnesota and St. Thomas and even Princeton. .

And now the smell of car exhaust and the murmur of portable generators. .

Six cop cars, a couple of vans, and a truck jammed the street. Light bars turned on four of the vehicles, the piercing red-and-blue LED lights cutting down toward the river and up toward the houses perched on the high bank above it. Half of the cops from the cars were standing in the street, which had been blocked at both ends; the other half were down the riverbank, gathered in a spot of brilliant white light.

People from the neighborhood clustered under an oak tree; they all wore raincoats, like shrouds in a Stephen King chorus, and a few had umbrellas overhead. A child asked a question in an excited, high-pitched voice, and was promptly hushed.

Waiting for the body to come up.

Lucas didn’t want to get trapped, so he left his Porsche at the top of the street, pulled a rain shirt over his head, added a green baseball cap that said John Deere, Owner’s Edition, and headed down the sidewalk toward the cop cars.

When he stepped into the street, a young uniformed cop, hands on her hips, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, in a translucent plastic slicker said, “Hey! Back on the sidewalk.”

“Sloan called me,” Lucas said.

He was about to add “I’m with the BCA,” when she jumped in, sharp, officious, defensive about her own inexperience-part of the new-cop scripture that said you should never let a civilian get on top of you: “Get on the sidewalk. I’ll see if Detective Sloan wants to talk to you.”

“Why don’t I just yell down there?” Lucas asked affably. Before she could answer, he bellowed, “Hey, Sloan!”

She started to poke a finger at his face, and then Sloan yelled, “Lucas: Down here!”

Instead of shaking her finger at him, she twitched it across the road and turned away from him, hands still on her hips, shoulders square, dignity not quite preserved.

A portable Honda generator had been set up on the street, black power cables snaking down the riverbank where a line of Caterpillar-yellow work lights, on tripods, threw a couple of thousand watts of halogen light on the body. Nobody had covered anything yet.

Lucas eased down the hillside, the grass slippery with churned-up mud. Twenty feet out, he saw the body behind a circle of legs, a red-and-white thing spread on the grass, arms outstretched to the sides, legs spread wide, faceup, naked as the day she was born.

Lucas moved through the circle of cops, faces turning to glance at him, somebody said, “Hey, Chief,” and somebody else patted him on the back. Sloan stood on the slope below, leaning into the bank. Sloan was a narrow-faced, narrow-shouldered man wearing a long plastic raincoat, shoe rubbers, and a beaten-up snap-brim canvas hat that looked like it had just been taken out of the back closet. The hat kept the rain out of his eyes. He said to Lucas, “Look at this shit.”

Lucas looked at the body and said, “Jesus Christ,” and somebody else said, “More’n you might think, brother. She was scourged.”

SCOURGED. The word hung there, in the mist, in the lights. She’d been a young woman, a few pounds too heavy, dark hair. Her body, from her collarbone to her knees, was crisscrossed with cuts that had probably been made with some kind of flail, Lucas thought: a whip made out of wire, maybe. The cut lines were just lines: the rain had washed out any blood. There were dozens of the cuts, and the way they wrapped around her body, he expected her back to be in the same condition.

“You got a name?” he asked.

“Angela Larson,” Sloan said. “College student at the U, from Chicago. Worked in an art store. Missing since yesterday.”

“Cut her throat like she was a goddamn beef,” said one of the cops. A strobe went off, a flash of white lightning. Lucas walked around the body, down to stand next to Sloan.

Because his feet were lower than the victim, he could get closer to her face. He looked at the cut in the throat. As with the wire cuts, it was bloodless, washed clean by the rain, resembling a piece of turkey meat. He didn’t doubt that he could have buried a finger in it up to the knuckle. He could smell the rawness of the body, like standing next to the meat counter in a supermarket.

“The neck wound’s what killed her, I think,” Sloan said. “No sign of a gunshot wound or a stab wound. He beat her, whipped her, until he was satisfied, and then cut her throat.”

“Ligature marks on her wrists,” said a man in plainclothes. His name was Stan, and he worked as an investigator for the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, and was known for his grotesque sense of humor. His face was as long as anyone’s.

“We got a call last night when Larson didn’t get back to her apartment,” Sloan said. “Her roommate called. We found her car in the parking lot behind Chaps; she worked at a place called the MarkUp down the block. .”

“I know it,” Lucas said. Chaps was a younger club, mixed straights and gays, dancing.

“. . and used to park at Chaps because the store didn’t have its own parking, the street is metered, and the Chaps lot has lights. She got off at nine o’clock, stopped and said hello to a bartender, had a glass of white wine. Bartender said just enough to rinse her mouth. Probably about twenty-after she walked out to her car. She never got home. We found her car keys in the parking lot next to the car; no blood, no witnesses saw her taken.”

Lucas looked at the ligature marks on her wrists. The rope, or whatever she’d been tied with-it was rope, he thought-had been a half inch thick and had both cut and burned her. There were more burns and chafing wounds at the base of her thumbs. “Hung her up,” Lucas said.

“We think so,” Sloan said. He tipped his head down the bank. “Give me a minute, will you?”

They stepped away, twenty feet down the bank, into the privacy of the darkness.

Sloan took off his hat, brushed his thinning hair away from his eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”

“Pretty bad,” Lucas said, turning back to the circle of lights. Even from this short distance, the body looked less than human, and more like an artifact, or even an artwork. “He’s nuts. You’ve checked her friends. .”

“We’ve started, but we’re coming up empty,” Sloan said. “She was dating a guy, sleeping with him off and on, until a couple of months ago. Until the end of the school year. Then he went back home to Pennsylvania.”

“Didn’t come back to visit?”

“Not as far as we can tell-he says he hasn’t, and I sorta believe him. He was there when she disappeared, we talked to him ten hours after she dropped out of sight-and the Philadelphia cops called a couple people for us, and he checks out.”

“Okay.”

“He said they were a little serious, but not too-she knew he planned to go in the army when he got out of school, and she didn’t like the idea. Her friends say he’s a pretty straight guy, they can’t imagine that he’s involved. They don’t know she was involved with anyone else, yet. And that’s what we’ve got.”

Lucas was still looking at the body, at the rain falling around the cops. “I’d put my money on a semistranger. Whoever did this. . This guy is pushed by brain chemistry. He’s got something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair. The way she’s displayed. .”

Sloan half turned back to the lights: “That’s what I was thinking. The goddamned display.”

They just stood and watched for a minute, the cops moving around the lights, talking up and down the bank. The two of them might have done this two hundred times. “So what can I do for you?” Lucas asked. Lucas worked with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Minneapolis had its own murder investigators, who would tell you that they were better than any BCA cherry who ever walked the face of the earth.

Lucas, who had been a Minneapolis cop before he moved to the state, mostly bought that argument: Minneapolis saw sixty or eighty murders a year; the BCA worked a dozen.

“You agree he’s a nut?”

Lucas wiped his eyebrows, which were beading up with rain. “Yeah. No question.”

“I need to talk to somebody who is really on top of this shit,” Sloan said. “That I can get to whenever I need to. I don’t need some departmental consultant who got his BA three years ago.”

“You want to talk to Elle,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I wanted to see if you’d mind. And I wanted you to look at the body, too, of course. I’m gonna need all the brains on this I can get,” Sloan said.

“Elle’s an adult,” Lucas said. “She can make up her own mind.”

“C’mon, man, you know what I’m saying. It’s a friendship thing. If you said not to call her, I wouldn’t. I’m asking you.”

“Call her,” Lucas said. “I would.”

Sloan called Elle-Sister Mary Joseph in her professional life. She was the head of the department of psychology at St. Anne’s College and literally Lucas’s oldest friend; they’d walked to kindergarten together with their mothers.

When Lucas became a cop and she became a teacher, they got back in touch, and Elle had worked on a half dozen murders, as an unofficial advisor, and not quite a confessor. Then, once, a crazy woman with a talent for misdirection caught Elle outside at night and had nearly beaten her to death. Since then, Lucas had shied from using her. If it happened again. .

Elle didn’t share his apprehension. She liked the work, the tweezing apart of criminal psyches. So Sloan called Elle, and Elle called Lucas, and they all talked across town for two weeks. Theories and arguments and suggestions for new directions. .

Nothing. The murder of Angela Larson began to drift away from them-out of the news, out of the action. A black kid got killed in a bar outside the Target Center, and some of the onlookers said it had been a racial fight. Television news pushed Larson back to an occasional mention, and Sloan stopped trudging around, because he had no place farther to trudge.

“Maybe a traveler?” Elle wondered. She had a thin, delicate bone structure, her face patterned with the white scars of a vicious childhood acne; Lucas had wondered if the change from a pretty young blond girl in elementary school to a irredeemably scarred adolescent might have been the impulse that pushed her into the convent.

She’d known he’d wondered and one time patted him on the arm and told him that no, she’d heard Jesus calling. .

“A traveler? Maybe,” Lucas said. Travelers were nightmares. They might kill for a lifetime and never get caught; one woman disappearing every month or so, most of them never found, buried in the woods or the mountains or out in the desert, no track to follow, nobody to pull the pieces together. “But real travelers tend to hide their victims, and that’s why you never hear much about them. This guy is advertising.”

Elle: “I know.” Pause. “He won’t stop.”

“No,” Lucas said. “He won’t.”

A week after that conversation, a few minutes before noon, on a dry day with sunny skies, Lucas sat in a booth in a hot St. Paul bar looking at a lonely piece of cheeseburger, two untouched buns, and a Diet Coke.

The bar was hot because there’d been a power outage, and when the power came back on, an errant surge had done something bad to the air conditioner. From time to time, Lucas could hear the manager, in his closet-sized office, screaming into a telephone, among the clash and tinkle of dishes and silverware, about warranties and who’d never get his work again, and that included his apartments.

Two sweating lawyers sat across from Lucas and took turns jabbing their index fingers at his chest.

“I’m telling you,” George Hyde said, jabbing, “this list has no credibility. No credibility. Am I getting through to you, Davenport? Am I coming in?”

Hyde’s pal Ira Shapira said, “You know what? You leave the Beatles out, but you got folk on it. “Heart of Saturday Night”? That’s folk.”

“Tom Waits would beat the shit out of you if he heard you say that,” Lucas said. “Besides, it’s a great song.” He lifted his empty glass to a barmaid, who nodded at him. “I’m not saying the list is perfect,” he said. “It’s just an attempt-”

“The list is shit. It has no musical, historical, or ethical basis,” Hyde interrupted.

“Or sexual,” Shapira added.

Lucas was a tall man, restless, dark hair flecked with gray, with cool blue eyes. His face was touched with scars, including one that ran down through an eyebrow, and up into his hairline; and another that looked like a large upside-down apostrophe, where a little girl had shot him in the throat and a doctor had slashed his throat open so he could breathe. He had a chipped tooth and what he secretly thought was a pleasant, even pleasing smile-but a couple of women had told him that his smile frightened them a little.

He was wearing a gray summer-weight wool-and-silk suit from Prada, over black shoes and with a pale blue silk golf shirt, open at the neck; a rich-jock look. He’d once been a college jock, a first-line defenseman with the University of Minnesota’s hockey team. Lucas was tough enough, but he’d picked up six pounds over the winter. They’d lingered all through the spring and into the summer, and he’d finally put himself on the South Beach Diet. An insane diet, he thought, but one that his wife had recommended, just before she left town.

He leaned back, chewing the last bite of cheeseburger, yearning for the buns. He hadn’t had a carbohydrate in a week. Now he held his hands a foot apart, and after he’d swallowed, said, earnestly, rationally: “Listen, guys. Rock and its associated music divides into two great streams. In one, you’ve got Pat Boone, Doris Day, the Beatles, Donny and Marie Osmond, the Carpenters, Sonny and Cher, Elton John, and Tiffany, or whatever her name is-the chick with no stomach. Anybody that you might snap your fingers to. In the other stream, you’ve got Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Aerosmith, Tom Petty. Like that.” He touched himself on the chest. “That’s the one I prefer. I guess you guys are. . finger snappers.”

“Snappers?” Hyde shouted. A couple of guys at the bar turned to look at him, the bored, heavy-lidded howya-doin’ look. In the back, the manager screamed, “I don’t give a fuck what’s happening on Grand Avenue, I want a fuckin’ truck outside this place in three minutes. .”

“If you’re so much against snappers, how come you got the fuckin’ Eagles on your list?” Shapira demanded. “I mean, the Eagles?”

“Only ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ” Lucas said, looking away. “I feel guilty about it, but how can you avoid that one?”

Hyde sighed, nodded, took a hit on his drink: “Yeah, you’re right about that. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“A piece of country trash, if you ask me,” Shapira said.

“About the best song of the last fifty years,” Lucas said. “Rolling Stone had a survey of the best five hundred rock songs. They had ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Desperado’ on the list, and not ‘Lyin’ Eyes.’ What kind of shit is that? Those guys have got their heads so far up their asses they can see their own duodenums.”

“Duodeni,” said Shapira.

“You ever hear ‘Hotel California’ by the Gipsy Kings?” Hyde asked. “Now there’s a tune. .”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. He took a black hand-sized Moleskine notebook out of his pocket. “I forgot about that one. I got too goddamn many songs already.”

Lucas was looking for the barmaid, for another Diet Coke, when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket, and Hyde said, “They ought to ban those things in bars. They distract you from your drinking.” Lucas put the phone to his ear and stuck a finger in his opposite ear, so he could hear.

His secretary said, “I’ve got Gene Nordwall on the line, and he wants to speak to you. He says it’s urgent. I didn’t know what to tell him: You want me to put him through?”

“Put him on,” Lucas said. He sat through a couple of clicks, and then a man said, “Hello?” and Lucas said, “Gene? This is Lucas. How’s it going?”

“Not going worth a good goddamn,” Nordwall said. He sounded angry and short of breath, as if he’d just been chased somewhere. Lucas could see him in his mind’s eye, a tall, overweight chunk of Norwegian authority, a man who’d look most natural in Oshkosh bib overalls. Nordwall was sheriff of Blue Earth County, fifty or sixty miles southwest of the Twin Cities. “Can you come down here?”

“Mankato?”

“Six miles south, out in the country,” Nordwall said. “We got a killing down here like to made me puke. We called in your crime scene crew-but we need you.”

“Whattaya got?”

“Somebody killed a kid and tortured his dad to death,” Nordwall said. “Tortured him and raped him, we think, and maybe cut his throat with a razor. I ain’t seen anything like it in fifty years.”

Sloan’s case popped into Lucas’s head: “You say it’s a guy?”

“Yeah, local guy. Adam Rice.”

“It’s not a gay thing? Or did he screw around with bikers or. .”

“He was absolutely straight,” Nordwall said. “I’ve known him since he was a kid.”

“And he was raped?”

“Jesus Christ, you want a photograph?” Nordwall said, the anger flashing again. “He was fuckin’ raped, pardon my French.”

Lucas waited for a second, until Nordwall got himself back together. “Are you right there, Gene?”

“I’m out in the side yard, Lucas. Came runnin’ out of there, like to strangled myself to death on this old clothesline.”

“Was the guy’s body, you know, arranged? Or was he just left however he died?”

A pause, and then Nordwall asked, “How’d you know that? What they did with him?”

“I’ll be down there in an hour,” Lucas said. “Don’t let anybody touch anything. Get out of the house. We’re gonna work this inch by inch.”

“We’ll be standing in the yard, waitin’,” Nordwall said.

“Gimme your cell-phone number, and tell me how I get to this place. .”

“What’s going on?” Hyde asked when Lucas punched off.

“Got a bad killing down by Mankato,” Lucas said. He finished his Diet Coke in a single gulp, dropped a twenty on the table. “Pay this for me, will you, guys? I gotta get my ass down there.”

“Too bad,” Hyde said. “I’ve got a closing on a shopping center at two o’clock. I thought you might want to see it.”

Lucas got Sloan on his cell phone as he went out the door: “Where you at?”

“Sitting at my desk reading a British Esquire,” Sloan said. “They got nudity now.”

“You might want to spend some time looking at the clothes. . Listen, get a squad, lights, and sirens, get down to the top of the Twenty-fourth Avenue off-ramp to the Mall of America. I’ll be down there fast as I can make it: twelve minutes. You gotta run.”

“Where’re we going?”

“Mankato. It’s weird, but we might have something on your nut case.”

Off the phone, Lucas jogged down the street to the Marshall Field parking ramp. He’d taken the Porsche to work that morning, which was good. He had a new truck, but the truck was awkward at speed and he was in a hurry. He wanted to see the scene in the brightest possible daylight, and he wanted to see neighbors, rubberneckers, and visitors as they came by the murder scene.

Rubberneckers.

“Goddamnit,” he muttered to himself. He slapped his pockets as he jogged, found the slip of paper with Nordwall’s number on it, and called him back.

“Gene, this is Lucas again. I’m heading for my car. Listen, put a guy down by the road. . How far is this house from the road?”

“Couple hundred feet, maybe. Old farmhouse.”

“Put a guy down by the road and have him take down the license number of every car that comes along. Don’t stop them from coming. Let them go by, let’em rubberneck, but I want all the numbers. Put your guy where he can’t be seen.”

“How about a photographer?”

“That’d be good, but don’t put somebody out there who’ll screw it up, so we get a bunch of out-of-focus pictures we can’t read. Better to write the numbers down.”

“We’ll do both,” Nordwall said.

Then Lucas was into the ramp, into the car, out on the street, slicing through traffic in the C4, to the I-35E ramp, down the ramp and south, running fifty miles an hour above the speed limit, across the Mississippi to I-494, west on 494 across the Minnesota River, and up the Twenty-fourth Avenue ramp.

The Minneapolis squad was sitting at the top of the ramp, lights flashing into the sunshine. Sloan got out of the squad, jogged around the back end of the truck, and said, “The all-time speed record from the airport to Mankato is an hour and one minute.”

“Must have been an old lady in a Packard,” Lucas said.

“Actually, it was myself in a fifteen-year-old bottle green Pontiac LeMans my old man gave me,” Sloan said as he strapped in.

“Do tell.”

Lucas blew through the red light and down the ramp and they were gone west and south into the green ocean of corn and soybeans of rural southern Minnesota.