Broken Prey

22

On the morning of the third day, Lucas, after a restless night, heard the alarm go off, shut it down, waited; and the phone rang.

“Catch him yet?” Weather asked.

“Not yet. Still thrashing around,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

“Had an interesting case early this morning,” Weather said. “A man was shot in the face. I assisted, putting things right.”

“That sounds British: putting things right.”

“I think I’m becoming British. I like it here.”

“Wish I were there. . sort of,” Lucas said. “So: You fixed the guy?”

“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t that badly hurt-depending on how you define ‘hurt,’ I guess. But what struck me as strange was that in the whole time I’ve been working here, that was the first gunshot wound I’ve seen. In Minneapolis, as quiet as it is, it’s an odd week when we don’t have two or three.”

“You’re starting to sound like a liberal: Want to take away our God-given right to bear arms?”

“No, no. But it’s weird: there are no guns. .”

He was shaving, a half hour later, when the phrase struck him:

There are no guns.

Huh.

He finished shaving, got in the shower, thought about it some more. No guns.

He called the airport cops and asked them to round up all declarations of handguns made the night O’Donnell flew. There were only a half dozen: he got the names and addresses, and phoned them to the co-op group, had them check the people behind the names.

When he got downtown, the co-op people reported that three of the men who checked guns were members of a shooting team who were on their way to a match in Virginia. The co-op had talked to sponsors and spouses of all three men, and then to the men themselves.

“They aren’t O’Donnell,” the co-op guy said.

Two of the other three were going prairie-dog shooting with hybrid single-shot pistols, not the.40 and.45 that Lucas was looking for. The co-op had interviewed a woman in the apartment complex where the two men lived. They were told that neither man looked like O’Donnell, that they lived full-time in the apartment complex, and that they were both members of a gay shooting-sports group that often traveled to Wyoming for prairie-dog shoots. The last guy hadn’t been found, but one of the gun inspectors at the airport said that he was a lawyer and a black guy and that the gun he had checked was an antique.

Lucas called Sloan. “Remember when we found that pistol brass in the basement, I think it was.40 and.45, and the gun safe was open, like something had just been taken out?”

“Yeah?”

“If he flew, if he knew he was heading for the airport to fly, what happened to the guns? He couldn’t get on the airplane with them. He didn’t declare them. The guns weren’t in the car. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay-now try this. What is the great similarity between Sam O’Donnell and Charlie Pope?”

Sloan thought for a few seconds, then said, “They both spent a lot of time in St. John’s. .”

“Something more basic than that,” Lucas said. “We can’t find him. Not only that, nobody’s seen him. He’s invisible, but everything we’ve got points directly at him. Just as everything pointed at Charlie-the DNA, the past record, the calls to Ignace. We even had a witness who thought she saw him, but now we know she didn’t.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t like the killer was trying to lead us to Charlie. The lead to Charlie came from that Fox guy, the parole officer. .”

“That was not quite a coincidence,” Lucas said. “A guy who is suspected of killing women after raping them, and who has been treated and released, disappears, and suddenly a sex killer is on the loose. What parole officer wouldn’t make a call? Then, because we’d figured that out on our own, when the DNA came in-there was never any doubt. No doubt in anybody’s mind, except maybe Elle’s, until the cat fisherman brought up Pope’s hand.”

Lucas continued: “Now, we have the same situation. Guy disappears. Evidence is found both in the refrigerator and in the car. Charlie Pope’s frozen blood and Carlita Peterson’s blood, not frozen. But nobody ever sees the guy. Nobody sees his face. Nobody sees him anywhere. . and Elle says he doesn’t fit.”

“You think we’re being conned?”

“I’m forty-six percent sure of it,” Lucas said.

“Forty-six percent. You gotta go with that.”

“Listen, this is what I think: the guns thing was a fuckup. He’s still out there, and he’s still got the guns.”

“Who?”

“Somebody on the staff,” Lucas said. “Somebody medical. Somebody who could get to Pope, and then get to O’Donnell. I mean, the guy was using O’Donnell’s play voice when we were still looking for Pope.”

“Jesus. I can’t even think about that,” Sloan said. “All the way back then, he was faking us out on something we might not ever figure out.”

“Yeah.”

Sloan said, “But.”

“But what?”

“But all this only works if it really isn’t O’Donnell. Do we stop looking for him?”

“I will bet you one hundred depreciated American dollars right now that it’s not O’Donnell,” Lucas said. “We’ll keep looking-but I think we go back to square one with the staff. Let’s get everybody together again and start tearing up the staff backgrounds. There’s something in there.”

“The guy from California, huh?”

“Yup. The guy from California.”

Lucas himself cleared Dr. Cale, while the coordination staff worked on the other staff members whose records they had. When Lucas was convinced that Cale was clear-he never seriously suspected him, he was too old for a new serial killer-he drove to St. John’s, and he and Cale spent two hours in the personnel office Xeroxing staff records for anyone who might have even an indirect connection to the Big Three.

There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the passenger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.

“Okay,” he told the group, “This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it.”

They called references listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.

They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed “none” under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who’d had an abortion but had listed “none” under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.

One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he’d not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to “explode.” The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.

“Ouch,” said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. “Here’s a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness. .”

He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan’s only appearance in public print. Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn’t figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.

Elle came in late in the afternoon, to look at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.

“The quality of information you’re getting is not the right kind to pull him up,” she said. “You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each person to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of suspects.”

“The list would include them?”

“Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the winners of political races. . All the suspects know one another, and most of them, given their jobs, are intelligent, so you would wind up with dozens of evaluations that would include all kinds of things that you don’t get on paper. Personal feelings, rumor, gossip, personal encounters. . you should probably survey the patients, too. They may have psychological problems, but lots of them are actually hyperperceptive, hypersensitive, to the qualities of other people. .”

“You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people,” Lucas said.

“Not really-you’d just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you’d get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?”

“About eighty.”

“If you were to give questionnaires to all eighty people, and if the killer is one of them, I would bet that his name is in the top five,” she said.

Lucas scratched his chin. “If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don’t you put together the questionnaire, have it ready?”

“Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he’s still out there. .”

“Because we’d have all kinds of legal and labor problems,” Lucas said. “We’re already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We’re gonna hear from the unions any time now. . And the media would go crazy about invasion of privacy and all that. I mean, we are on a fishing expedition.”

“If he kills somebody else. .”

“That’s why I say I’ll do it if we don’t get anything in the next day or two,” Lucas said. “Right now, I think he’s hunkered down. He’ll start moving again, if he’s like you say, if he doesn’t have any choice. .”

“There’s something else. If you let me do this market thing. . it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of Forensic Psychology would be all over it.”

The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.

The co-op center had pretty much closed down by seven o’clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they’d seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn’t done well at a previous job.

Lucas became interested in a staff member named Herman Clousy. He’d been hired as a medical technician, doing routine lab work, including blood tests on Charlie Pope. To get the job, he’d provided a transcript from a “Lakewood Community College” in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, but nobody could find a Lakewood Community College. He’d also provided three references, and none of the three could be reached at the phone numbers he’d listed. On the other hand, he’d worked for the state for fifteen years, and the references were out-of-date.

The next morning, Clousy was at the top of Lucas’s list for almost fifteen minutes. After the daily chat with Weather, he called Dr. Cale, who said that Clousy was an average performer, one of the shadow people whom nobody paid much attention to. He was married, Cale knew, and lived in Mankato. Was there any special reason why Lucas was interested?

“He says he graduated from a Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, and there isn’t one.”

“Really? That would have been checked. . let me ask my secretary, she used to work for the community college down here.”

Cale went away for a minute, then came back and said, “Sandy says there used to be a Lakewood,” he said. “She says it’s called Century College now.”

“Ah. . poop. Let me check that.”

He gave it to one of the co-op staff, who checked and came back five minutes later: “There was a name change, all right. Still can’t find the references. .”

“Take the most uncommon-looking last name in the references and start calling around to all of them you can find,” Lucas suggested.

They spent the rest of the morning tracking more dead ends: the work was tedious and left Lucas feeling stupid. At lunchtime, he went out for a BLT, then returned to his office and told Carol not to let anyone in, short of an emergency.

He closed the door, put his feet up on his desk, and thought about all the activity in the co-op room. Elle might be right: the kind of information they were getting wouldn’t really pinpoint anyone. The other problem was, when you were dealing with so many possibilities, you tended to forget about the facts you already had.

For instance, he thought, somebody had passed the information about Peterson to the Big Three. That was a fact, and they hadn’t emphasized it enough. It had to be one of fewer than a dozen people. They were all on tape.

Did O’Donnell make any small specific move, did he touch all three food trays, did he do anything that might possibly involve the passing of information? How about the guys up in the cage? Was there some way to fiddle with the time code on the tape, or mess with the tape itself, so the guy in the back could have a little chat with Taylor, Lighter, and Chase and nobody would know?

Lucas couldn’t stand going down to the co-op room again, so he dragged out the tapes of the St. John’s isolation wing. He ran through them at high speed, the people coming and going in their silent-movie way.

Here came O’Donnell. Here was the food. He says something to Lighter, and the food goes in. Didn’t touch anything that time. He talks to Chase. Food goes in. .

He couldn’t see it. Maybe O’Donnell put the messages in the food in the hallway? Might he have some power over one of the orderlies who delivered the trays?

He ran back and forth through the tapes, watching people come and go, staffers talking to prisoners, interacting with other staffers. Here’s Beloit, here’s Grant, here’s Hart, here’s O’Donnell, here goes Sennet. .

“What’s he doing?” Lucas asked himself.

He was watching Leo Grant. Hard to pick up, if you weren’t running the tapes at high speed.

Okay: Grant walks down the corridor, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, hands in his pockets. He’s with Sennet. Sennet pushes a button, and they talk to Lighter. While they talk, Grant takes off his sport coat, folds it over his arm.

Lucas couldn’t make out what the conversation was about, but watched as Grant turned his back to the window where Lighter was standing. Grant was facing both the camera and Sennet. They talked some more, and then Sennet punched the window release, and the window closed, shutting Lighter away again.

Sennet steps across the hallway. Grant, still with his coat off, steps sideways across the hall, never turning his back fully to the camera or to Sennet. Sennet opens Chases’s window. They talk, Grant turns his back to Chase, as they talk. He’s facing Sennet. Sennet closes Chase’s window. Taylor’s window is down the hall. Sennet heads that way, and Grant slips his jacket on, and follows Sennet, his back to the camera. They talk to Taylor, and Grant casually slips his jacket off again. He turns his back to Taylor, but never to Sennet or the camera. .

Sennet punched Taylor’s window when they were finished, and he and Grant walked back toward the camera, Grant a step behind so that Sennet had to turn slightly to talk to him. They disappeared under the camera and, presumably, out the door.

Lucas ran the sequence several times. Maybe Grant just couldn’t get the jacket right. Maybe the temperature was uncomfortable. But maybe. . could he have had something written on the back of his shirt? Or a piece of paper or cloth tacked to his shirt?

Lucas dug out the anomalies list and found only one short entry for Grant: a Dr. Peter Baylor, from a clinic in Colorado, had mentioned that Grant had gone to a private psychiatric clinic in Cancun after leaving Colorado. The anomaly was that there were three references from Colorado in Grant’s record, but none from Cancun.

Lucas looked up the telephone numbers for Colorado, called, asked for Peter Baylor, and was told that he wasn’t working that day. “I’m trying to find the phone number for a former staff member of yours, Leo. .” He flipped through the paper. It wasn’t Leonard, it was. . “Leopold Grant. He left your hospital and apparently went to Cancun.”

After being routed around, he talked to a woman in the clinic’s personnel department who didn’t have a number, but had a name: The Coetrine Center. After a hassle with the AT amp;T operator, he got the place. The woman who answered the phone, in Spanish, switched smoothly to English, then forwarded him to another office. The man who answered the phone there, in Spanish, changed to English.

Lucas said, “I need some information about a former employee of yours named Leopold Grant. .”

“You already have some incorrect information,” the man said, pleasantly enough. “Here, you might as well get it from the horse’s mouth. .”

Before Lucas could reply, the man half covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, and Lucas could hear him call out something, but not what he said.

A second later, another phone receiver rattled, and an American man’s voice said, “This is Leo Grant. Can I help you?”