Broken Prey

6

Owatonna is a small city known to a few architecture buffs for a Louis Sullivan jewel-box bank. They got lost for a while, running down edge-of-town streets, and finally found Charlie Pope’s trailer in a weedy mobile-home park down a dead-end road.

Pope’s trailer was a mess. An aging Airstream travel-trailer, once silver, it had been hit by something-a falling tree? — that had put a dent across the top; the whole thing sat maybe five degrees off level, the tires shot, steel wheels visible through the rotting rubber. Weeds grew window-high around it, and a box elder tree flaked bark, leaves, and red bugs onto it.

As they pulled into the trailer park’s visitor parking lot, a blade-thin black cat ran out from one of the other homes, paused, one foot in the air, to look at them, and then disappeared into the brush behind Pope’s place. Some of the mobile homes in the park were well kept, with neatly cut yards; most were not. Either way, Pope’s place was the neighborhood slum.

Mark Fox was sitting on the hood of his Jeep, which was tucked in an overgrown parking slot next to Pope’s trailer. Fox was a tall, thin, cowboy-looking guy with a weathered face, black roper boots, a black T-shirt, and a denim jacket and jeans. He was smoking a cigarette when they pulled up. He crushed it into a rust spot on the hood of the Jeep as they got out of the Porsche.

“Must’ve been more money coming out of the legislature than I thought, cops riding around in a Porsche,” he said as they shook hands.

Lucas shrugged: “Guy’s gotta have a four-wheel drive to get around in, this part of the country.”

Sloan rolled his eyes and said, “We know the guy for three seconds and the bullshit starts. . This is Pope’s place?”

Fox looked at the trailer and said, “Yup. Such as it is. Come on in.”

“I sorta know why he ran for it,” Sloan said. “If I lived here, I’d run for it, too.”

“Ah, it’s different inside,” Fox said. “It’s worse.”

He took them inside. a sour odor of human dirt hung about the place, with a underlying tone of sewage: there might be a cracked sewer pipe somewhere, or something wrong with the septic system. Sloan said, wrinkling his nose, “Smells like an armpit with an onion in it.”

Fox: “Or an asshole.”

“Hold that thought,” Lucas said.

The three of them were too much for the tiny kitchen, and Fox continued six feet down the trailer into a nominal living room. The kitchen was made of dented metal cupboards, a stove the size of a breadboard, and a yellowed microwave. Fox said, “When he cut the bracelet off, he left it here on the floor. No sign of him. I put out a bulletin but never heard back from anybody.”

“Nobody’s seen him here in the park?”

“I checked, nobody’s seen him-and if he’d been here, they would have. He was a hard guy to miss.”

“And the park’s about the size of my dick,” Sloan said.

“Everybody assumes he took off,” Fox said. “But, as far as anybody knows, he doesn’t have a car.”

“No car,” Lucas said. He glanced at Sloan, who shook his head. If he didn’t have a car, how was he moving around?

“Not as far as I know,” Fox said. “He rides the buses. Charlie hasn’t made enough since he got back to buy much. Last time we talked, he said he was spending everything he made on clothes and food. That looked about right to me.”

“How much does a beat-up car cost?”

“You might get something for a grand, but he didn’t have it.”

“Relatives?”

“His mother’s still alive, but she’s poor as a church mouse herself,” Fox said.

“He just walked off the job.”

“Yeah. That’s the story. I went down to see his boss-he worked with a garbage hauler-and he said Pope finished up one day, said, ‘See ya,’ and never came back.”

“They owe him money?” Lucas asked.

“Three days,” Fox said, nodding.

“Huh.” They took their time poking around the trailer. Some clothes must be missing, they agreed, because there was almost nothing left. They did find an open three-pack of black Jockey shorts under the pull-out bed, with one pair left inside, along with a dozen DVDs. Lucas flipped through them: “Strokemaster Finals, Fantasic Facials, Best of Anal Adventures 24. .”

“There’s a violation for you,” Fox said.

“Strokemaster could be golf instruction,” Sloan said.

Lucas tapped a cheap color TV and an even cheaper DVD player that sat on a cardboard box across from the bed. “He didn’t take his movies, his new shorts, or his TV. Maybe he was thinking of going out for a run, but coming back.”

“Maybe he fucked something up and figured he couldn’t come back,” Sloan said.

“What’d he fuck up?” Lucas asked. “He was absolutely clean on the Larson killing, if he did it.”

“Maybe something we don’t know,” Sloan said. He looked at Fox: “Was he smart? Good-looking? Controlled-crazy?”

Fox snorted. “Charlie? Charlie was a pervert. He looked like a pervert. If you saw him walking down the street, you’d say, ‘There goes a pervert.’ Didn’t you get that file from St. John’s? There’re pictures. .”

“We just got it; haven’t had time to think about it,” Lucas said. “How about smart? Is he smart?”

“He got arrested a block from the Target Center trying to anally rape a screaming woman, two feet from the sidewalk that ten thousand basketball fans were about to walk down. He just grabbed her and started whaling away. Charlie is a dumb motherfucker. He just blew off the best job he ever had.”

“As a garbageman,” Lucas said.

“An apprentice garbageman.”

Lucas and Sloan looked at each other for a moment, then Sloan wagged his head and said, “That ain’t the picture Elle was painting.”

They explained Elle to Fox and the image she’d constructed of the killer. “That’s not Charlie. If she’s right, we’re looking for the wrong guy,” Fox said.

“Maybe something snapped when he was in St. John’s,” Sloan suggested.

“I didn’t know him before he was in St. John’s,” Fox said. “I know him now. He’s stupid and ugly now.”

Most of the time, thoroughly shaking down a house or an apartment would take hours. With Charlie Pope’s trailer, they were done in half an hour-not only was there not much to look at, there was hardly any paper. They could find no checkbook, no credit cards, no computer, not even a notepad. The state paper he had, involving his imprisonment and parole, was in a state file folder under a six-year-old phone book.

“Nothing here but a bad smell,” Sloan said.

When they left, Fox locked the door, and Lucas shook his head: “I had my hopes, but I don’t think so. I can’t get around the car thing.”

“You can steal cars,” Fox said.

“But would you steal a car to transport a bloody body, and then keep it?” Lucas asked. “I haven’t heard about anybody finding a stolen car full of blood. I suppose he could have abandoned it, but it’s been weeks since Larson was killed. Somebody should have seen it by now, if it was stolen.”

“Could be parked out at the airport for a month,” Fox suggested.

“Not with the new security,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Their surveillance system takes your tag number when your car comes in, runs it right there. And if you’re out there for more than a week, they’ll take a look at your car.”

“Could be at one of those twenty-four-hour Sam’s Club places,” Sloan suggested. “Might go unnoticed for a while.”

They all thought about it for a minute, then Fox said, “I don’t know. There are some possibilities, but Charlie isn’t a master criminal.”

They were still standing in the parking lot, scuffing gravel, talking about possibilities, when Elle called.

“Lucas, I’ve been reading about this man Charles Pope,” she said. “He is nothing like I expected.”

“I know. We’ve been talking about that. We just went through his trailer. .” He recapped the search, and then said, “This wasn’t a sure thing, anyway. Just a guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dumb shit caught a bus for California.” He winced: “Sorry about the language.”

“That’s. . never mind,” she said. “Anyway, I’m skeptical. I’m very interested in what the DNA brings back. I would predict that we don’t have a match. Will you call me when you know?”

“The minute I hear,” Lucas said.

And ten seconds after Elle rang off, as they were saying good-bye to Fox, Carol called from Lucas’s office. “Rose Marie wants you to call her,” Carol said. “Right now. She’s going to a music thing tonight so you won’t be able to get her later. And about twenty reporters called.”

“I thought they might. I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said.

Fox And Sloan wandered off, chatting, while Lucas poked in Rose Marie’s number. When she picked up, Lucas told her about the trip to Owatonna, and the bad news: “We came up empty.”

“I talked with the governor and McCord,” she said. “The governor doesn’t see anything in it for him, and McCord said he’s too busy to front for the media. You’re gonna have to do it.”

He looked at his watch: “Ah, man. .”

“Hey. You’re good at it. Do it.”

“All right. I’ll do it. But I’m laying down some rules, and you have to back me up. I’ll hold a press briefing at five o’clock, but that’s it. Nobody goes around me.”

“Make it four o’clock or they’ll all be yelling at me about missing the early news.”

“Fuck ’em. I got another stop to make. Five o’clock-maybe we can change it to four o’clock on other days.”

“If you gotta-I’ll pass the complaints along to Carol. She’s probably gotten some calls already.”

“About a million of them.”

“So-handle it.”

Lucas called Carol back, told her to set up the press conference and to call Nordwall and invite him to make a statement. “He might want to get his picture on TV. He’s running this fall.”

Fox led them back to the I-35 connection, waved good-bye out the window, and Lucas spun down the ramp and they headed back north. “Sorta like the old days when we were operating in Minneapolis,” Sloan said. “The old days were sorta fucked up, you know? Looking back?”

“You’re just getting cranky,” Lucas said. “What could be better than chasing assholes like Pope? Think of all the guys who never get to do anything. You can’t sit on your ass until you die.”

Sloan cleared his throat. “I’d thought maybe. . I’d buy a bar.”

Lucas looked at him for ten seconds, then said, “You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding. I’ve been looking into it. Seriously,” Sloan said.

“When did this come up?” Lucas asked. “You don’t know anything about running a bar. That’s a complicated business.”

“Hey, I took a small-business class last semester at the community college,” Sloan said. “The situation I’m looking at, it’s not a big deal. The owner’s getting old, wants to retire, but he’d work with me as long as it took. You know Bernie Berger. .”

“The Pine place? Out by Golden Valley?”

“Yeah. Don’t piss on it; it’s not that bad a place.”

“I wasn’t gonna piss on it. It is a likeable place. Other than the fact that it’s called the Pine Knot. But even if you got a deal, you’re a cop, Sloan. .”

“I’m tired,” Sloan said.

“Ah, for Christ’s sake.” Lucas took his hands off the wheel and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “If you quit. . who’s gonna chase the assholes with me?”

The next city north was Faribault. The Rockyard was just outside the city limits on a county frontage road that ran parallel to the interstate. A yellow sign that said TOPLESS faced the highway, a beacon to truck drivers, but the paint was coming off the sign and it might not have been current. The bar itself had a gravel parking lot, fake yellow-log siding with a simulated hitching post, and a wooden boardwalk. A barbeque sign flicked an orange BBQ-BBQ-BBQ out toward the county road, and a Coors sign said COORS-COORS-COORS.

Four pickups sat in the parking lot, with an Oldsmobile with hand-sized rust spots down the sides and across the trunk. The Olds’s license plate hung off the bumper on wire loops.

“Good-looking place,” Sloan said, as they got out of the Porsche.

“Ah, if I were seventeen. .”

“And stupid. .”

The saloon was cool inside, smelling of beer and fried hamburger. A woman bartender in a white blouse, black vest, and ribbon tie was wiping down the bar. A couple of guys were shooting pool in the back, nine ball, and three more watching, all of them with longnecks in their hands. Everybody turned their heads when Lucas and Sloan stepped inside. Sloan muttered, looking at the bartender, “That doesn’t look like a Booger.”

“C’mon,” Lucas said; he’d been checking faces in the back.

They went on to the bar, and the bartender asked, “Gentlemen? What can I do you for?” She was a sturdy dark-haired woman, about fifty, with too-red lipstick and too much rouge. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to the cash register.

“Carl around?” Lucas asked.

“Can I tell him who’s calling?”

“Yeah, the cops,” Lucas said. He held out his ID. “We need a little help.”

She looked at Lucas, then at Sloan, and asked, “Is he in trouble?”

“Can’t tell yet,” Lucas said.

“I’ll see if I can find him,” she said. She walked down behind the bar and out, and into a back room. The pool watchers were now all watching Lucas and Sloan, and Lucas smiled at them. Ten seconds later, the bartender reappeared. A fat man, with hair like a haystack, and who might have described himself as muscular, shambled along behind.

“Hi, I’m Carl,” he said. “You’re police officers? Is there a problem?”

“You know a guy named Adam Rice?” Lucas asked.

Carl blinked rapidly, then said, “Jesus. He was the guy. We weren’t sure.”

“Yeah, he was,” Lucas said. Everybody in the bar was listening now. “You gotta place where we can go talk?”

Carl had a small office, a cherry-laminate desk with a swivel chair, and two formed-plastic chairs for visitors. The desk was piled with paper, a well-used desk calculator to one side. Carl leaned back in the chair, which squealed under the load, and said, “I know the guy. He’d come in, have a few beers, cry a little, listen to music. He was a sad guy. How’d you know he came in here?”

“Heck, everybody’s been calling us,” Sloan said. “You ever see him with a guy. .”

Carl’s eyes got thin: “The way you said that-you mean, a gay guy?”

“Yeah.”

Carl snorted and leaned farther back in the chair. “A gay guy would not come in here. Or if he did, he’d sure as shit not let anybody know he was gay. I only saw Rice talking with a couple of guys, and then it was just random guy-shit, sitting at the bar, drinking beer.”

“What about the girls?” Lucas asked.

Carl’s eyes involuntarily wandered. “He’d come in alone. .,” he began.

“Don’t bullshit us, Booger,” Lucas said, scuffing his chair an inch toward the fat man. “We know about the girls, we know you introduced them. We need your help, and we’re gonna get it one way or another. Now. . was there one girl, or more than one? And where could we find them?”

After a moment of silence, Carl said, “They’re gonna give me a ton of shit about this.”

“We’re talking about a serial torture killer. If there’s any hint that he somehow met Rice here, through the girls, they’d want to know about it,” Lucas said.

Carl sighed, put his hands over his belly, twiddled, then said, “He’d try to get Dove, a blondie. If she was busy, he’d take one or the other. But he’d usually ask if anybody had seen Dove.”

“But he hooked up with some of the others, too.”

“Yeah, he did,” Carl said. “They’d go over next door, the girls got rooms. He’d get his blow job, and he’d come back here all weepy, have another beer, and then go on home.”

“How often?” Sloan asked.

“Twice a week, maybe,” Carl said.

“How much?”

“For a blow job? Fifty if you wear a rubber, or seventy without,” Carl said. “The extra twenty is, like, AIDS insurance.”

“That’s a good idea,” Sloan said. “Nothin’ like AIDS insurance.”

“Hey, it’s not me, the girls don’t work for me,” Carl protested. “They come in here, but what am I gonna do? I’m not a cop. I’m not their guardian. They don’t do any business on the premises, and some of the guys. . like to have them around.”

Lucas: “Their names are Dove and. .?”

“Andi and Aix, right now. The one girl’s name is pronounced X, but it’s spelled A-I–X, as she’ll tell you every chance she gets. She thinks she’s speaking French because she once went there with her boyfriend. There were a couple more girls, but they moved away, I couldn’t tell you where. They come and they go.”

“Dove is still here?”

“Should be right next door, unless they’re shopping.” He looked at his watch. “Mornings, lots of times, they run up to the Mall of America, but they’re usually back by two-guys get off work a couple hours early, they like to stop by for an afternooner. You know, before supper.”

“Wouldn’t want a blow job on a full stomach,” Sloan said.

“What rooms?” Lucas asked.

“Usually twenty-three, twenty-five, and twenty-seven, down at the end of the hall. Close enough that they can scream for help.”

“They ever scream for help?” Sloan asked.

“Not lately, but who knows?”

“We may come back and talk to you some more,” Lucas said, standing up. “Don’t call the girls, huh?”

The Y’all Duck Inn’s parking lot was separated from the Rockyard’s lot by a fringe of grass. A shabby two-story building, it showed two long rows of gray-green doors facing the highway, with a small window next to each door. The parking lot was gravel, the stairs and walkways were concrete and outside in the weather: a fifteen-dollar-a-night motel used as a crash pad by truckers and refugees from the Rockyard who were too drunk to drive home.

They didn’t bother with the office; they climbed the stairs and walked south until they got to twenty-five and knocked. They were lucky the first time: Dove answered.

She probably looked good in a bar, in the evening, Lucas thought. During the day, and outside, she wasn’t quite pretty. Twenty years old, maybe, with a pasty face that didn’t like the light, and hips that already ran to wobbly fat. She answered the door wearing a yellow halter top, white shorts, three-inch-thick platform flip-flops, and too much makeup; she was chewing gum.

She saw Lucas first, and a frown flitted across her face: “You don’t, uh. .” Then she saw Sloan and blurted out, “Jesus Christ, don’t arrest me. My mother doesn’t know I do this.”

“Your mother,” Sloan said.

Lucas stepped toward her, and Dove backed into the motel room, and Lucas stepped in after her. Sloan followed and pushed the door shut. A soap opera was playing on the TV. A furry moose doll with crooked velvet horns sat on top of the TV. Lucas found the remote control, pushed the power button, and the noise went away. “Do you know Adam Rice?”

“Ohmagod,” she said. She looked from Lucas to Sloan, chewed once on her gum. “I wasn’t sure it was him.” She sat on the bed, picked up a pillow, and squeezed it around her chest, looking up at them, eyes big.

“We’re running down everything we can find,” Lucas said. “We understand you were his favorite date.”

She stared slack mouthed into the open bathroom. “We were wondering today if it was him in the newspaper.”

“Anything unusual about him?” Lucas asked. “Strange sex stuff. .”

She shook her head. “Nope. Always the same. Wanted me to get naked and go down on him. He’d watch. I mean mostly people watch, but he was like, you know, curious.”

“Never pushed you around, never wanted you to push him around. .”

She shook her head, her hair bouncing around her shoulders. A dark streak ran down the middle of her part: she needed a new blond job. “Nope. When he was finished, he’d tip me, and then he’d wait until I got dressed, and if there was nobody else ready to go at the bar, he’d buy me a beer. He was a sweet guy, sort of. Maybe a little corny.”

Lucas spotted her purse, picked it up. She said, “Hey,” but he ignored her, took out her wallet, looked at her driver’s license. It said Bertha Wolfe.

“Bertha-did he ever talk about friends, ever come in with friends?”

“C’mon, man, don’t mess with my stuff. .”

Lucas put the wallet back in the purse and tossed it back on the dresser.

“Friends?”

“Just one guy, he came along two or three times,” she said. “The friend never went with one of us guys-Adam said he was an old school buddy, they knew each other for years.”

“A name?” Sloan prompted.

She squinted, rolled her eyes, thinking, then, “Larry Masters? That’s not right, but it’s something like that.”

Sloan suggested Andy Sanders, and Dove pointed her finger at him and said, “That’s it. Exactly.”

“Nobody else.”

She turned down the corners of her mouth and said, “Nope. Not that I can think of.”

“Think harder.”

She tried to put a thinking look on her face, but shook her head. “Do you guys. . I mean, do you think whoever did it comes to the bar? This girl up in the Twin Cities, was she working?”

“We don’t know any of that,” Lucas said. “You might think of taking a vacation for a couple weeks, though. Until we get him.”

“You’re sure you’re gonna get him.” A small edge of skepticism?

“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “We just don’t know how many more people he’ll kill before we do.”

She shivered and said, “The paper said Adam was mutilated.”

With Lucas pushing her, Dove took them down to the next two rooms, rented by Andi and Aix; both, like Dove, were thin, a little flabby, and unnatural blondes. Andi claimed that she hardly remembered Rice and wasn’t even sure she’d had sex with him.

Aix had had sex with him, twice, she thought, and with some prodding, said, “I did see him talking to a pretty strange guy, once. Kind of a snaky guy. He looked like a pool hustler, or something, somebody who works at night or maybe was in prison, because he was like dead white. Adam didn’t know him, but he was teasing Adam about being such a fresh-faced guy hanging around with the likes of me. . this guy knew, I guess, you know, even though I never went with him or anything.”

“How often did you see the guy?”

“That was the last time,” Aix said. “I might have seen him once before, shooting pool. He said he used to be a sailor, and sailed yachts. I’m like, right, a yachtsman right here at the Rockpit.”

“Rockyard,” Sloan said.

Her little joke: “Pit. You look at the place?”

“Their idea of culture is a wet-T-shirt contest,” Dove said, snapping her fingers, as though flicking a flea off her shirt.

“This guy, this sailor. . you said he was snaky. How? What do you mean?” Lucas asked.

“Like he was thin, but he looked strong, wiry, you could see these muscles working in his arms. Black hair but really pale white. Oh: he had a tattoo, one of those barb-wire dealies that go around your biceps.”

“A biker,” Lucas suggested.

She nodded and wrinkled her nose: “He might’ve known his way around a Harley,” she said. “But he never mentioned anything.”

They all sat looking at her for a moment, then Sloan said to Lucas, “Not much.”

“No.”

Aix shook her finger at him: “But it was something. You know? There was something going on. One of those things you think might go on and be a fight. The guy kept teasing Adam about his fresh face. . This newspaper story made me think there might have been something gay going on. .”

“What made you think that?”

“Just. . something. You know how you can tell sometimes? And the thing is, the thing that was going on with the snaky guy. . there was something a little gay in that, too. Neither one of them looked gay, or talked gay, but there was something there.”

A few more minutes of pushing got them nothing. Lucas turned to Sloan and said, “You happy?”

“I guess.”

Dove said, “You’re not going to arrest us, are you?”

Lucas shook his head. “Nah. But really-maybe take a vacation?”

And to Aix: “If you see the snaky guy again, call us. And if you see him, get somebody to walk you out to the parking lot. Somebody you know.”

Andi, shivering: “You really think he’s around here?”

Sloan stood up and said, “Listen, if any of you’d seen the woman up in Minneapolis, you wouldn’t want to take any chance. Any chance.”

They all nodded, and Lucas and Sloan backed out of the room. As they walked down to the car Sloan said, “If you wind up in Room twenty-seven at the Y’All Duck Inn, you probably made a bad career choice somewhere.”

“What if everybody in three counties calls you Booger?”

“Another bad sign,” Sloan said. “A bad sign.”