Certain prey

Chapter Eight

Lucas and Black followed the Ramsey County medical examiner into the work room, where the body of Rolando D'Aquila was stretched out on a stainless-steel tray.

'They really fucked this boy over,' Black said, with a low whistle of disbelief.

He'd heard about it, but hadn't seen the body. 'Look at his kneecaps.'

'Look at his heels, if you want to see something that must've hurt,' the ME said. He was a dark, hairy man with a beard. A Rasputin, with a Boston accent.

'So what are these letters?' Lucas asked.

'I've got a photograph for you, but I thought you might want to see it in person,' the ME said. He picked up one of the dead man's hands, and turned it over. On the back of the hand were a series of bloody scrapes that looked like: dew

Lucas and Black squatted, got down close: 'What is it?' Black asked.

'I don't know,' the ME said. 'But he did it himself, because we found the skin under his fingernails. He did it not long before he died – he had blood on his fingertips, which would have been worn away if his hands had been free, and he used them for anything.

So: we think he might have known he was going to be killed, and tried to leave something behind.'

'Like the name of the killer,' Black said. 'Which is probably Dew.'

'Really?' The ME bent over the hand and said, 'I never saw Dew. I was looking at it the other way – I saw Mop.'

Black looked at Lucas: 'What do you think? M-o-p or D-e-w?'

'Beats the shit out of me,' Lucas said, standing up. 'Maybe we can actually see it better in a photo…'To the ME: 'What are the chances he cut himself up just thrashing around? I mean, they were drilling holes in his kneecaps…'

'Who knows, if a guy's being tortured? The scratches look deliberate – the skin looks almost ploughed off the back of his hands. And the shapes look deliberate, not like thrashing or involuntary contraction… I think he did it on purpose.'

'Yeah.' Lucas scratched his head. 'Took some balls.'

'You don't see d-e-w?' Black asked.

'Yeah, and I see m-o-p, and I see something else, too, and I don't know what they hell that might mean,' Lucas said.

'What?' Black and the ME turned their heads, trying the scratches at different angles.

'I can see c-l-e-w – like the British spelling of clue,'

Lucas said. 'But there's no clue. Unless it was something back at the house, near his hands.'

'Aw, man, that's too weird,' Black said. 'C-l-e-w equals clue?'

'Don't you see it?' Lucas asked.

'I see it, but I don't think that's it. I think it's initials, I think…

Hey.'

'What?'

Now Black was scratching his head. 'I was talking to the St. Paul guys. They're looking for Rolando's sister – she lives over by the University, but they haven't been able to catch her at home. Her name is Marta Blanca. If you read the scratches backwards it could be an M instead of a W, and a B instead of a D. ..'

'Then what's all that shit in the middle?' the ME asked, pointing at the scratches.

'I don't know, this is just a theory,' Black said. 'But his hands were chained up… how were his hands?'

'Like this,' Lucas said, demonstrating. 'Over his head.'

'Then he couldn't see what he was doing, he was in all kinds of pain, he's panicked because he knows what's coming. I wonder if he was trying to get us to his sister?'

'Or that his sister had something to do with it,' Lucas said.

'Hey,' Black said, 'It's a clew, with an e-w. Let's go knock on her door.'

A little girl was playing with a plastic dump truck in the hallway of Marta

Blanca's apartment house, in front of an open apartment door.

'Hello,' Lucas said. A mommy's voice called, 'Who's that?'

Lucas leaned over the little girl and knocked once on the door jamb:

'Minneapolis police, ma'am. We're looking for a Marta Blanca?'

'Down the hall. Apartment A.'

Black stepped down the hall and knocked on the Paris-green door at the end. A young woman appeared from the back of the open apartment, carrying a dish towel and a pan that she was in the process of drying. 'Is there some kind of trouble?'

Lucas nodded: 'Yes. Her brother was killed. We need to interview her; just a routine thing.'

The woman's eyebrows were up: 'I haven't heard them out this morning – Heather usually has the door open so she can play in the hall, and Marta usually stops to talk to her.' She looked at Black and then back to Lucas and asked, 'Do you have some kind of ID?'

'Yes, I do.' Lucas smiled, tried to look pleasant, took out his ID case, handed it over.

She looked at it, then back up at Lucas: 'I've heard of you. You only do murders.'

'What's that, mom?' Heather asked. 'Talk to you later,' the mother said to the girl, handing Lucas's ID case back. 'This is a policeman. He catches bad men.'

'I didn't see any men at Marta's,' the girl said.

'Okay,' Lucas said.

Black, at the end of the hall, said, 'Nobody home.'

'They were having a party last night,' Heather said.

Her mother frowned: 'I didn't hear a party – I didn't see anybody coming or going.'

'I heard them popping the balloons. Like at a birthday party,' the girl said.

Lucas looked down the hall at Black, whose face had gone tight. Black said,

'That's enough for an entry.'

'Right,' Lucas said. To the mother: 'You better take Heather back inside.'

'What? Why?' She turned her eyes down to the other door. Black had slipped his pistol out of his holster, and was holding it by his side, where the little girl couldn't see it. The woman looked back at Lucas, suddenly understanding, and said, 'Oh, no, no… Heather, c'mon. C'mon inside with mom.'

When they'd gone inside, Lucas nodded at Black, who lined up on the Paris-green door, then kicked it below the knob. The old door punched open, and Lucas,. 45 in his hand, stepped past Black. One step and he saw the Latino man on the floor. Another step, and he saw the woman just beyond. They were both face down.

'Okay,' Black said, from behind. 'Watch me, man…'

The two of them edged through the apartment, looking for anyone else; but the place was empty except for the bodies. Lucas walked back to the living room. No signs of a struggle, nor had the little girl apparently heard any – but she had heard the balloons popping. These were executions, then, with silencers. He'd seen enough bodies in his career that two more shouldn't have affected him, but these did.

The cool efficiency of the killer, swatting human beings as though they were so many gnats.

He shook his head asked Black, 'Got your phone?'

'Yeah, I'll call,' Black said. He was standing over the man: 'Goddamn, look at this guy's head. Same deal: half-dozen rounds.'

Lucas, slipping his gun away, squatted next to the woman's body. Her face was older than its years, he thought: careworn, but with smile-lines, too. The rims of her nostrils were slightly rough, reddened. Cocaine, he thought. 'Same here,' he said. And he added: 'This takes it away from Hale Allen. He might've been willing to kill his old lady for her money, but this isn't that. This is something else.'

'Yeah,' Black said. 'He was too fuckin' dumb, anyway.' He was holding the cell phone to his ear and said, 'Marcy? This is me… yeah, yeah, shut up for a minute, will you? Lucas and I are looking at a couple of more dead ones in an apartment in Dinkytown… No, I'm not. No, I'm not. I need you to get all the shit rolling over here, huh? Yeah…'

While he was telling her about it, Lucas moved quickly through the apartment. He was going through a scatter of paper on the kitchen counter when he heard a quiet, single knock on the door. He looked up just in time to see the mommy take two steps through the door. She said, 'Did you…' and then saw the bodies. 'Oh, God.'

Lucas stepped toward her: 'Please don't come in.'

She stepped back into the doorway, her right hand at her mouth, the other hand feeling for the door jamb. 'Don't touch anything, please, don't touch the door,'

Lucas said urgently. 'Don't touch.'

She backed into the hallway. Lucas followed and said, 'We haven't processed the room yet, we need to bring in crime-scene specialists.' She nodded, dumbly, and

Lucas added, 'I'd like to talk to you. I've got to wait here for a few minutes, until we get this going, but I'd like to see you and your daughter.'

'Heather?' Now she looked frightened.

'Just for a couple of minutes,' Lucas said. 'Maybe your place would be better. ..'

'Why do you want to talk to Heather?'

'She said she heard balloons popping. Those were probably guns. Between the two of you, maybe we can figure out a time that this… happened.'

The woman's name was Jan Davis. She was a small, slender woman with dishwater blonde hair and high cheekbones. Her apartment was pleasantly cluttered with books, scientific reprints and a few music CDs, all classical. She scurried nervously around, picking up magazines, straightening chairs, making lemonade when Lucas went over. Heather bounced in a worn, oversized easy chair, watching Lucas, smiling when he looked at her. Outside, in the hallway, cops were setting up crime-scene lines.

'I have a daughter about your age,' Lucas told Heather. 'Have you started school yet?'

'Yes,' she said. 'I was promoted. I'm in first, now. When school comes back.'

'So you won't be the littlest kids anymore… there'll be kindergarteners who are smaller than you.'

'Yup.' But she hadn't thought of that before, and she slipped off the chair and ran into the kitchen: 'Hey Mom, Mr. Davenport says there'll be kids littler than me at school…'

A minute later, Davis came out of the kitchen with two glasses of lemonade -

'There's plenty more if the other gentleman wants some.'

Lucas nodded, and took the glass. 'I noticed on your mailbox on the way in, your husband, Howard…'

'Howard's not living here now,' she said firmly.

'Not for a while?' Lucas asked.

'About seven weeks. I just haven't taken his name off the mailbox.'

'So… what? You're going to get divorced?'

'Yes. I'm just finishing my thesis at the U,' she said. 'I've got a post-doc offer from Johns Hopkins, and Heather and I'll be moving to Baltimore in

December. Howard won't be coming.'

'Well, I'm sorry,' Lucas said. And he was. After a moment's silence, he turned to look at Heather and asked, 'What were you doing last night when you heard the party at Marta's? Were you in the hall?'

Heather looked guiltily at her mother and then said, 'Just for a minute. I left my truck out there.'

'She's not supposed to go out in the hall at night, after it gets dark,' Davis said. 'But sometimes she does.'

'Do you know what time it was?'

'We were talking about that, before you came over,' Davis said. 'She was out there with her blocks and her bulldozer when I told her to come in. But she left her truck, and a few minutes later I heard her messing around out there, and I went out and got her. It was between eight and nine.'

'Eight and nine. You wouldn't have been watching television, or anything, so you'd know what show was on?'

Davis was shaking her head. 'No, I'm rewriting my thesis, the final edit, and

I'd just shut down…' She cocked her head to the side, then said, 'Hey: I think the word processor has a time thing on it, that shows when the file was closed.' She hopped off the couch and headed for a back room. Lucas and Heather followed.

Davis' study was a converted bedroom, with a single bed still in it: 'Howard slept here the last few weeks he lived with us,' she said, offhandedly. She was bringing the computer up, cycling through the Windows 98 display, then bringing up the word processor.

'Yup.' She tapped the screen, and bounced in her seat a little, the way her daughter had. 'The file was stored at eight twenty-two. I stored it and got up and heard Heather in the hall, and told her to come back inside.'

'All right, that's something,' Lucas said. 'Eight twenty-two.' He looked at

Heather. 'Did you see anybody when you were in the hallway?'

She shook her head. 'No.' Then added, 'I peeked when Mom was gone, and I saw two ladies.'

'Two ladies? This was after you heard the party balloons?'

She nodded, solemn in the face of Lucas's interest. 'How did you see them?'

Lucas asked.

'When I heard them, I opened the door just to peek,' she said. 'I thought it was

Marta.'

'But it wasn't Marta?'

She shook her head again.

'Did you know the ladies?'

'No.'

'Never saw them before?'

She shook her head.

'Do you remember what they looked like?' Lucas asked.

She cocked her head in a perfect rendition of her mother's thinking-mannerism, and after two or three seconds said, 'Maybe I do.'