Rules of Prey

CHAPTER 4

The Twin Cities' horse track looks like a Greyhound bus station designed by a pastry chef. The fat cop, no architecture critic, liked it. He sat in the sun with a slice of pepperoni pizza in his lap, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a portable radio in the other. He took the call on the portable just before the second race.

"Right now?"

"Right now." Even with the interference, the voice was unmistakable and ragged as a bread knife.

The fat cop looked at the thin one.

"Christ, the fuckin' chief. On the radio."

"His procedure is fucked." The thin cop was eating the last of a hot dog and had dribbled relish down the front of his sport coat. He brushed at it with an undersize napkin.

"He wants Davenport," said the fat one.

"Something must have happened," said the thin one. They were outside, on the deck. Lucas was on the blacktopped patio below, two sections over. He lazily sprawled over a wooden bench directly in front of the tote board and thirty feet from the dark soil of the track. A pretty woman in cowboy boots sat at the other end of the bench drinking beer from a plastic cup. The two cops went up the aisle to the top of the grandstand, down the staircase, and pushed through a small crowd at the base of the steps.

" Davenport? Lucas?"

Lucas turned, saw them, and smiled. "Hey. How're you doing? Day at the races, huh?"

"The chief wants to talk to you. Like right away." The fat cop hadn't thought of it until the last minute, but this could be hard to explain.

"They pulled the surveillance?" Lucas asked. His teeth were showing.

"You knew about it?" The fat cop lifted an eyebrow.

"For a while. But I didn't know why." He looked at them expectantly.

The thin cop shrugged. "We don't know either."

"Hey, fuck you, Dick…" Lucas stood up with his fists balled, and the thin cop took a step back.

"Honest to Christ, Lucas, we don't know," said the fat one. "It was all hush-hush."

Lucas turned and looked at him. "He said right now?"

"He said right now. And he sounded like he meant it."

Lucas' eyes defocused and he turned toward the track, staring sightlessly across the oval to the six-furlong starting gate. The jockeys were pressing their horses toward the gate and the crowd was starting to drift down the patio to the finish line.

"It's the maddog killer," Lucas said after a moment.

"Yeah," said the fat cop. "It could be."

"Has to be. Goddammit, I don't want that." He thought about it for another few seconds and then suddenly smiled. "You guys got horses for this race?"

The fat cop looked vaguely uneasy. "Uh, I got two bucks on Skybright Avenger."

"Jesus Christ, Bucky," Lucas said in exasperation, "you're risking two dollars to get back two dollars and forty cents if she wins. And she won't."

"Well, I dunno…"

"If you don't know how to play…" Lucas shook his head. "Look, go put ten bucks on Pembroke Dancer. To win."

The two cops looked at each other.

"Really?" said the thin one. "This is a maiden, you can't know…"

"Hey. It's up to you, if you want to bet. And I'm staying for the race."

The two internal-affairs cops looked at each other, looked back at Lucas, then turned and hurried inside to the nearest betting windows. The thin one bet ten dollars. The fat one hesitated, staring into his wallet, licked his lips, took out three tens, licked his lips again, and pushed them across the counter. "Thirty on Pembroke Dancer," he said. "To win."

Lucas was sprawled on the bench again and had started a conversation with the woman in the cowboy boots. When the surveillance cops got back, he moved down toward her but turned to the cops.

"You bet?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Don't look so nervous, Bucky. It's perfectly legal."

"Yeah, yeah. It ain't that."

"Have you got a horse?" The woman in the cowboy boots leaned forward and looked down the bench at Lucas. She had violet eyes.

"Just a guess," Lucas said lazily.

"Is this, like, a private guess?"

"We've all got a couple of bucks on Pembroke Dancer," Lucas said.

The woman with the violet eyes had a Racing Form on the bench beside her, but instead of looking at it, she looked up at the sky and her lips moved silently and then she turned her head and said, "She had a terrific workout at six furlongs. The track was listed as fast but it probably wasn't that good."

"Hmm," said Lucas.

She looked at the tote board for a few seconds and said, "Excuse me, I gotta go powder my nose."

She left, hurrying. The fat cop was still licking his lips and watching the tote board. The odds on Pembroke Dancer were twenty to one. Three other horses, Stripper's Colors, Skybright Avenger, and Tonite Delite, had strong races in the past three weeks. Pembroke Dancer had been shipped in from Arkansas two weeks earlier. In her first race she finished sixth.

"What's the story on this horse?" asked the fat cop.

"A tip from a friend." Lucas gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, up toward the press box. "One of the handicappers got a call from Vegas. Guy walked into a horse parlor a half-hour ago and bet ten thousand on Pembroke Dancer to win. Somebody knows something."

"Jesus. So why'd he lose his last race so bad?"

"She."

"Huh?"

"She. Dancer's a filly. And I don't know why she lost. Might be anything. Maybe the jock was dragging his feet."

The tote board flickered and the odds on Pembroke Dancer went up to twenty-two to one.

"How much you bet, Lucas?" the fat cop asked.

"It's an exacta. I wheeled Dancer with the other nine horses. A hundred each way, so I have nine hundred riding."

"Jesus." The fat man licked his lips again. He had another twenty in his wallet and thought about it. Across the track, the first of the horses was led into the gate and the fat cop settled back. Thirty was already too much. If he lost it, he'd be lunching on Cheetos for a week.

"So you got anything good?" asked Lucas. "What was this thing about Billy Case and the rookie?"

The fat cop laughed. "Fuckin' Case."

"There was this woman lawyer," said the thin one, "and one day she looks out her office window, which is on the back of an old house that they made into offices. The back of her office looks at the back of the business buildings on the next street over. In fact, it looks right down this walkway between these buildings. At the other end of this walkway there's a fence with a gate in it, like blocking the walkway from the street. So you can't see into the walkway from the street. But you can see into it from this lawyer's office, you know? So anyway, she looks down there, and here's this cop, in full uniform, getting his knob polished by this spade chick.

"So this lawyer's watching and the guy gets off and zips up and he and the spade chick go through this gate in the little fence, back onto the street. This lawyer, she's cool, she thinks maybe they're in love. But the next day, there's two of them, both cops, and the spade chick, and she's polishing both of them. So now the lawyer's pissed. She gets this giant camera from her husband, and the next day, sure enough, they're back with another chick, a white girl this time. So the lawyer takes some pictures and she brings this roll of Kodachrome in to the chief."

The first of the horses was guided into the back of the gate and locked. The woman with the violet eyes got back and settled at the end of the bench. The thin cop rambled on. "So the chief sends it down to the lab," he said, "and they're only like the best pictures anybody ever took of a knob-job. I could of sold them for ten bucks apiece. So the chief and the prosecutors decide there's some problem with the chain of evidence and we wind up in this lawyer's office with a video unit. Sure enough, here they come. But this time they got both the spade chick and the white chick. This is like in Cinemascope or something. Panavision."

"So what's going to happen?" Lucas asked.

The fat one shrugged. "They're gone."

"How much time did they have in?"

"Case had six years, but I don't give a shit. He had a bad jacket. We think he and a security guard was boosting stereos and CD players out of a Sears warehouse a few months back. But I feel sorry for the rookie. Case told him this was how it's done on the street. Gettin' knob-jobs in alleyways."

Lucas shook his head.

"Right on the street, in daylight," said the fat cop.

The last horse was pushed into the back of the gate, locked, and there was a second-long pause before the gate banged open and the announcer called "They're all in line… and they're off, Pembroke Dancer breaks on the outside, followed by…"

Dancer ran away from the pack, two lengths going into the turn, four lengths at the bottom of the stretch, eight lengths crossing the wire.

"Holy shit," the fat cop said reverently. "I won six hundred bucks."

Lucas stood up. "I'm going," he said. He was staring at the tote board, calculating. When he was satisfied, he turned to the other two. "You coming behind? I'll drive slow."

"No, no, we're all done," said the fat cop. "Thanks, Lucas."

"You ought to quit now," said Lucas. "The rest of these races are junk. You can't figure them. And, Bucky?"

"Yeah?" The fat cop looked up from his winning ticket.

"You won't forget to tell the IRS about the six hundred?"

"Of course not," the cop said, offended. Lucas grinned and walked away and the fat cop muttered, "In a pig's eye." He looked at his ticket again and then noticed that the woman with the violet eyes was hurrying after Lucas. She caught him just before he got inside, and the fat cop saw Lucas grin as they walked together into the building.

"Look at this," he said to the thin cop. But the thin cop was looking at the tote board and his lips were moving quietly. The fat cop looked at his partner and said, "What?"

The thin cop put up a hand to hold off the question, his lips still moving. Then they stopped and he turned and looked after Lucas.

"What?" said the fat cop, looking in the same direction. Lucas and the woman with the violet eyes had disappeared.

"I don't know much about this horse-race bullshit," said the thin cop, "but if I'm reading the tote board right, this exacta payoff, Davenport took down twenty-two thousand, two hundred and fifty bucks."

The office of the chief of police was on the first floor of City Hall, in a corner. Windows dominated the two walls that faced the street. The other two walls were covered with framed photographs, some in color, some in black and white, stretching back in time to the forties. Daniel with his family. With the last six Minnesota governors. With five of the last six senators. With a long and anonymous chain of faces that all looked vaguely the same, faces that took up space at chicken dinners for major politicians. Directly behind the chief was the shield of the Minneapolis Police Department and a plaque honoring cops who had been killed in the line of duty.

Lucas sprawled in the leather chair that sat squarely in front of the chief's desk. He was surprised, though he tried not to show it. It had been a while since anything surprised him, other than women.

"Pissed off?" Quentin Daniel leaned over his glass desktop, watching Lucas. Daniel looked so much like a police chief that a number of former political enemies, who were now doing something else, made the mistake of thinking he got the job on his face. They were wrong.

"Yeah. Pissed off. Mostly just surprised." Lucas did not particularly like Daniel, but thought he might be the smartest man on the force. He would have been surprised-again-to know that the chief thought precisely the same about him.

Daniel half-turned toward the windows, his head cocked, still watching.

"You can see why," he said.

"You thought I did it?"

"A couple of people in homicide thought you were worth looking at," said Daniel.

"You better start at the beginning," Lucas said.

Daniel nodded, pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, and wandered to a wall of photographs. He inspected the face of Hubert Humphrey as though he were looking for new blemishes.

"Two weeks ago, our man made a run at a St. Paul woman, an artist named Carla Ruiz," he said as he continued his inspection of Humphrey's face. "She managed to fight him off. When St. Paul got there, the sergeant in charge found her looking at a note. It was one of these rules he's leaving behind."

"I haven't heard a thing about this Ruiz," Lucas said.

The chief turned and drifted back to his chair, no hurry, his hands in his pockets. "Yeah. Well, this sergeant's a smart guy and he knew about the notes in the first two killings. He called the head of St. Paul homicide and they put a lid on it. The only people who know are the St. Paul chief and his chief of homicide, the two uniforms who took the call, a couple of people in homicide here, and me. And the artist. And now you. And every swingin' dick has been told that if this leaks, there'll be some new foot beats out at the landfill."

"So how'd it point to me?" Lucas asked.

"It didn't. Not right away. But our man dropped his gun during the fight with the artist lady. The first thing we did was print it and run it. No prints-checked everything, including the shells. We had better luck on the ownership. We ran it down in ten minutes. It went from the factory to a gun store down on Hennepin Avenue, and from there to a guy named David L. Losse-"

"Our David L. Losse?"

"You remember the case?"

"Shot his son, said it was an accident? Thought somebody was breaking into the house?"

"That's him. He fell on a manslaughter, though it was probably a straight-out murder. He got six years, he'll serve four. But there's still an appeal floating around. Because of the appeal, the evidence was supposedly up in the property room. We went up and looked. The gun is gone. Or it was gone, until the killer dropped it."

"Shit." Things had disappeared from the property room before. Five grams of cocaine became four. Twenty bondage magazines became fifteen. As far as Lucas knew, this was the first time a gun had gone missing.

"You had access to the evidence room a couple of times. During the Ryerson case and during that hassle over the Chicago burglary gang. We cross-referenced everything we had from the killings and the witness. Times, places, the artist's description. We could eliminate as suspects all the women who had access to the room. We could eliminate cops who were confirmed on-duty when the killings took place. People have been killed or attacked in all three shifts… Anyway, we got it down to your name, basically. You're the right size. Nobody ever knows where you're at. You're a games freak and this guy is apparently playing some kind of game. And the gun came out of the property room. I never really thought you were the one, but… you see how it went down."

"Yeah, I see," Lucas said sourly. "Thanks a lot."

"Hey, what would you have done?" Daniel asked defensively.

"Okay."

"Now we know you're clean," the chief said. He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and crossed his legs. "'Cause our man did another one. Four to six hours ago. We figure it was just about the time you were sitting out on the lawn eating that apple."

Lucas nodded. "Where's this one?"

"Down by Lake Nokomis. Just west of the lake, up in those hills."

"Can you contain it?"

"No." Daniel shook his head. "This is three. If we tried to contain it, we'd be leaking like a rusty faucet by tomorrow afternoon. That'd cause more trouble than if we go out front with it. I've already called a press conference for nine o'clock tonight. That'll give the TV stations time to make the ten-o'clock news. I want you to be here. I'll outline the killings, appeal for help, all that. And I'm assigning you to the case, full-time."

"I don't want it," said Lucas. "Homicide bores me. You walk around all day talking to civilians who don't know anything. There are other guys do it better. And I got a lot of stuff going on this crack business. I got a half-dozen guys picked out-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely fuckin' wonderful, but the media is going to hang us all by our balls if we don't get this freak," Daniel said, cutting Lucas off in mid-sentence. "You remember back a few years when those two women got killed in the parking ramps? Like two, three weeks apart, different guys? Pure coincidence? You remember how the media went out of their minds? You remember how the TV stations were having seminars on self-defense? How they had reports every night on progress? You remember all that?"

"Yeah." It had been a nightmare.

"This is going to be worse. Those guys in the parking ramps, we grabbed one the same day, we got the other one a couple days after he did it. We still got hysteria. This guy, he's killed three, attacked another one, raped them and stabbed them, and he's still on the loose."

Lucas nodded and rubbed his jaw with his fingertips. "You're right. They'll go berserk," he admitted.

"Guaranteed. This doesn't happen in the Twin Cities. So fuck the crack. I want you on this thing. You'll work by yourself, homicide will work parallel. The media'll like that. They think you're some kind of fuckin' genius."

"What does homicide think about me working on it?" Lucas asked.

"A couple of guys will be moaning about it, because they always do, but they'll go along. Besides, I don't care what they think. Their asses aren't on the line. Mine is. I come up for new term next year and I don't need this sitting on my back," Daniel said.

"I've got full access?"

"I talked to Lester. He'll cooperate. He really will." Lucas nodded. Frank Lester was the deputy chief for investigations and a former head of robbery-homicide.

"I'll want to talk to this artist," Lucas said.

Daniel nodded. "The woman doesn't have a pot to piss in. We had to get her a phone two days after she was attacked. Just in case the guy comes back after her. Here's her number and address." He handed Lucas a slip of paper.

Lucas tucked the slip in his pants pocket. "They're processing this Nokomis killing now?"

"Yeah."

"I better get down there." He stood and started for the door, stopped and half-turned. "You really didn't think I did it?"

Daniel shook his head. "I've seen you around women. I didn't think you could do that to them. But I had to know for sure."

Lucas started to turn away again, but Daniel stopped him.

"And, Davenport?"

"Yeah?"

"Be here for the press conference, okay? Dress just like that, the tennis shirt and the khakis. You got any jeans? Jeans might be better. Those whatdaya call them, acid jeans?"

"I could change on the way back. I got some stone-washed."

"Whatever. You know how that TV puss goes for the street-cop routine. What's your title again?"

"Office of Special Intelligence."

The chief snapped his fingers, nodded, and scrawled "OSI" on his desk pad. "See you at nine," he said.

Jeannie Lewis lay on the narrow bed with her hands bound up over her head, where they were taped to the headboard. A look of inexpressible agony held her face, her mouth locked open by the Kotex pad stuffed between her jaws, her eyes rolled so far back that nothing but the whites could be seen beneath the half-closed lids. Her back was arched from the pressure of the bonds, the nipples of her small breasts pointing left and right, nearly white in death. Her ankles were bound to the opposite corners at the foot of the bed, but she had managed to roll her thin legs inward, a final effort to protect herself. The knife still protruded from the top of her abdomen, just below the sternum, its handle almost flat against her stomach. It had been slipped in at an acute angle, to more directly penetrate the heart without complications of bone or muscle.

"Pushed it in and wiggled it," said the assistant medical examiner. "We can tell more after the autopsy, but that's what it looks like. Just a little entry slit, but a lot of damage around the heart."

"Professional?" asked Lucas. "A doctor?"

"I wouldn't go that far. I don't want to mislead you. But it's somebody who knows what he's doing. He knows where the heart is. We want to leave the knife in place until we get downtown and take some pictures, X rays, but from the look of the handle, I'd say it's about the most efficient knife for the work. Narrow point, sharp, rigid blade, fairly thin. It'd slip right in."

Lucas stepped over to the bed and looked at the knife handle. It was smooth, unfinished wood. " County Cork Cutlery" was branded on the wood.

" County Cork Cutlery?"

"Forget it. There's a whole drawer full of it, out in the kitchen."

"So he got it here."

"I think so. I did the first woman he killed, Lucy What's-her-name. He did her with a plastic-handled knife, nothing like this one."

"Where's the note?"

"In the baggie, over on the chest of drawers. We're sending it to the lab, see if they can print it."

Lucas stepped over to the chest and looked at the note. Common notebook paper. Even if there were six pads of it in a suspect's home, it would prove nothing. The words were cut from a newspaper and fastened to the paper with Scotch tape: Never carry a weapon after it has been used.

"He lives by those rules," the medical examiner said. "He didn't even pull the knife out, much less carry it anywhere."

"Note looks clean."

"Well, not quite. Hang on a second," the medical examiner said. He peeled off the plastic gloves he was wearing, replaced them with a thinner pair of surgeon's gloves, opened the baggie, and slipped the note halfway out.

"See this kind of funny half-circle under the tape?"

"Yeah. Print?"

"We think so, but if you look, you can see there's no print. But it's sharply defined. So I think-" he wiggled his fingers at Lucas-"that he was wearing surgeon's gloves."

"That says doctor again."

"It could. It could also say nurse, or orderly, or technician. And since you can buy the things at hardware stores, it could be a hardware dealer. Whoever he is, I think he wears gloves even when he's sitting at home making these notes, So now we know something else: he's a smart little cocksucker."

"Okay. Good. Thanks, Bill."

The medical examiner eased the note back in the bag. "Can we take her?" he asked, tilting his head at Lewis' body.

"Fine with me, if homicide's finished." A homicide cop named Swanson was sitting at a table in the kitchen, eating a Big Mac, fries, and a malt. Lucas stepped into the doorway of the bedroom and called across to him. "I'm done. Can they take her?"

"Take her," Swanson said around a mouthful of fries.

The medical examiner supervised the movement, with Swanson ambling over to watch. They pulled the bag over her head, carefully avoiding the knife, and lifted her onto a gurney.

Like a sack of sand, Lucas thought.

"Nothin' under her?" asked Swanson.

"Not a thing," said the medical examiner. They all looked at the sheets for a moment; then the medical examiner nodded at his assistants and they pushed the gurney out the bedroom door.

"Lab's coming through with a vacuum. They haven't printed the furniture yet," Swanson said. What he meant was: Don't touch anything. Lucas grinned. "They'll take the sheets down for analysis."

"I don't see any stains."

"Naw, they're clean. I don't think there's any hair, either. Took a close look, but she didn't have any broken fingernails, didn't look like anything balled up underneath them, no skin or blood."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

"I want to poke around out here a little. Anything critical?"

"There's the potato…"

"Potato?"

"Potato in a sock. It's out in the living room." Lucas followed him into the living room, and Swanson used his foot to point under a piano bench. There was an ordinary argyle sock with a lump in one end.

"We think he hit her on the head with it," Swanson said. "First cop in saw it, peeked inside, then left it for the lab."

"Why do you think he hit her with it?" Lucas asked.

"Because that's what a potato in a sock is for," Swanson said. "Or, at least, it used to be."

"What?" Lucas was puzzled.

"It's probably before your time," Swanson said. "It used to be, years ago, guys would go up to Loring Park to roll the queers or down Washington Avenue to roll the winos. They'd carry a potato with them. Nothing illegal about a potato. But you put one in a sock, you got a hell of a blackjack. And it's soft, so if you're careful, you don't crack anybody's skull. You don't wind up with a dead body on your hands, everybody looking for you."

"So how'd the maddog know about it? He's gay?"

Swanson shrugged, "Could be. Or could be a cop. Lots of old street cops would know about using a potato."

"That doesn't sound right," Lucas said. "I never heard of an old serial killer. If they're going to do it, they start young. Teens, twenties, maybe thirties."

Swanson looked him over carefully. "You gonna detect on this one?" he asked.

"That's the idea," Lucas said. "You got a problem?"

"Not me. You're the only guy I ever met who detected anything. I have a feeling we're gonna need it this time."

"So what do the other homicide guys think?"

"There a couple new guys think you're butting in. Most of the old guys, they know a shit storm's about to hit. They just want to get it over with. You won't have no trouble."

"I appreciate that," Lucas said. Swanson nodded and wandered away.

Lewis had been found in the back bedroom by another real-estate agent. She'd had a midafternoon appointment, and when she didn't show up, the other agent got worried and went looking for her. When Lucas had arrived, pushing through the gloomy circle of neighbors who waited beside the house and on the lawns across the street, Swanson briefed him on Lewis' background.

"Just trying to sell the house," he concluded.

"Where are the owners?"

"They're a couple of old folks. The neighbors said they're down in Phoenix. They bought a place down there and are trying to sell this one."

"Anybody gone out to Lewis' house yet?"

"Oh, yeah, Nance and Shaw. Nothing there. Neighbors said she was a nice lady. Into gardening, had a big garden out back of her house. Her old man worked for 3M, died of a heart attack five or six years ago. She went to work on her own, was starting to do pretty good. That's what the neighbors say."

"Boyfriends?"

"Somebody. A neighbor woman supposedly knows him, but she hasn't been home and we don't know where she is. Another neighbor thinks he's some kind of professor or something over at the university. We're checking. And we're doing all the usual, talking to neighbors about anybody they saw coming or going."

"Look in the garage?"

"Yeah. No car."

"So what do you think?"

Swanson shrugged. "What I think is, he calls her up and says he wants to look at a house, he'll meet her somewhere. He tells her something that makes her think he's okay and they ride down here, go inside. He does her, drives her car out, dumps it, and walks. We're looking for the car."

"Anybody checking her calendars at her office?"

"Yeah, we called, but her boss says there's nothing on her desk. He said she carried an appointment book with her. We found it and all it says is, 'Twelve-forty-five.' We think that might be the time she met him."

"Where's her purse?"

"Over by the front door."

Now, wandering around the house, Lucas saw the purse again and stooped next to it. A corner of Lewis' billfold was protruding and he eased it out and snapped it open. Money. Forty dollars and change. Credit cards. Business cards. Lucas pulled out a sheaf of plastic see-through picture envelopes and flipped through them. None of the pictures looked particularly new. Looking around, he saw Swanson standing by the bedroom door talking to someone out of sight. He slipped one of the photos out of its envelope. Lewis was shown standing on a lawn with another woman, both holding some kind of a plaque. Lucas closed the wallet, slid it back in the purse, and put the photograph in his pocket.

It was cold when he left the murder scene. He got a nylon jacket from his car, pulled it on, and sat in the driver's seat for a moment, watching the bystanders. Nobody out of place. He hadn't really thought there would be.

On the way back to the station, he crossed the river into St. Paul, stopped at his house, changed into jeans, and traded the nylon jacket for a blue linen sport coat. He thought about it for a few seconds, then took a small.25-caliber automatic pistol and an ankle holster from a hideout shelf in his desk, strapped it to his right ankle, and pulled the jean leg down to cover it.

The television remote-broadcast trucks were stacked up outside City Hall when Lucas got back to police headquarters. He parked in the garage across the street, again marveled at the implacable ugliness of City Hall. He went in the back doors and down to his office.

When he'd been removed from the robbery detail, administration had to find a place to put him. His rank required some kind of office. Lucas found it himself, a storage room with a steel door on the basement level. The janitors cleaned it out and painted a number on the door. There was no other indication of who occupied the office. Lucas liked it that way. He unlocked it, went inside, and dialed Carla Ruiz' phone number.

"This is Carla." She had a pleasantly husky voice.

"My name is Lucas Davenport. I'm a lieutenant with the Minneapolis Police Department," he said. "I need to interview you. The sooner the better."

"Jeez, I can't tonight…"

"We've had another killing."

"Oh, no. Who was it?"

"A real-estate saleslady over here in Minneapolis. The whole thing will be on the ten-o'clock news."

"I don't have a TV."

"Well, look, how about tomorrow? How about if I stopped around at one o'clock?"

"That'd be fine. God, that's awful about this other woman."

"Yeah. See you tomorrow?"

"How'll I know you?"

"I'll have a rose in my teeth," he said. "And a gold badge."

The briefing room was jammed with equipment, cables, swearing technicians, and bored cops. Cameramen negotiated lighting arrangements, print reporters flopped on the folding chairs and gossiped or doodled in their notebooks, television reporters hustled around looking for scraps of information or rumor that would give them an edge on the competition. A dozen microphones were clipped to the podium at the front of the room, while the tripod-mounted cameras were arrayed in a semicircle at the rear. A harried janitor fixed a broken standard that supported an American flag. Another tried to squeeze a few more folding chairs between the podium and the cameras. Lucas stood in the doorway a moment, spotted an empty chair near the back, and took a step toward it. A hand hooked his coat sleeve from behind.

He looked down at Annie McGowan. Channel Eight. Dark hair, blue eyes, upturned nose. Wide, mobile mouth. World-class legs. Wonderful diction. Brains of an oyster.

Lucas smiled.

"What's going on, Lucas?" she whispered, standing close, holding his arm.

"Chief'll be here in five minutes."

"We've got a newsbreak in four minutes. I would be very grateful if I knew what was going on in time to call it in," she said. She smiled coyly and nodded at the cables going out the door. The press conference was being fed directly to her newsroom.

Lucas glanced around. Nobody was paying any particular attention to them. He tilted his head toward the door and they eased outside.

"If you mention my name, I'll be in trouble," he whispered. "This is a personal two-way arrangement between you and me."

She colored and said, "Deal."

"We've got a serial killer. He killed his third victim today. Rapes them and then stabs them to death. The first one was about six weeks ago, then another one a month ago. All of them in Minneapolis. We've been keeping it quiet, hoping to catch him, but now we've decided we have to go public."

"Oh, God," she said. She turned and half-ran down the hallway toward the exit, following the cables.

"What'd you tell that bitch?" Jennifer Carey materialized from the crowd. She'd been watching them. A tall blonde with a full lower lip and green eyes, she had a degree in economics from Stanford and a master's in journalism from Columbia. She worked for TV3.

"Nothing," Lucas said. Best to take a hard line.

"Bull. We've got a newsbreak in…" She looked at her watch. "Two and a half minutes. If she beats me, I don't know what I'll do, but I'm very smart and you'll be very, very sorry."

Lucas glanced around again. "Okay," he said, pointing a finger at her, "but I owed her one. If you tell her I leaked this to you too, you'll never get another word out of me."

"You're on," she said. "What is it?"

Late that night, Jennifer Carey lay facedown on Lucas' bed and watched him undress, watched him unstrap the hideout gun.

"Do you ever use that thing, or do you wear it to impress women?" she asked.

"Too uncomfortable for that," Lucas lied. Jennifer sometimes made him nervous. He felt she was looking inside his head. "It comes in handy. I mean, if you're buying some toot from a guy, you can't be packing a gun. They figure you for a cop or maybe some kind of nutso rip-off psychotic, and they won't serve, won't deal. But if you got a hideout in a weird place and you need it, you can have it in their face before they know what you're doing."

"Doesn't sound like Minneapolis."

"There are some bad folks around. Anytime you get that much money…" He peeled off his socks and stood up in his shorts. "Shower?"

"Yeah. I guess." She rolled over slowly and got off the bed and followed him into the bathroom. The print pattern from the bedspread was impressed on her belly and thighs.

"You could've brought McGowan home, you know," she said as he turned on the water and adjusted it.

"She's been coming on to me a little," Lucas agreed.

"So why not? It's not like you're bored by the new stuff."

"She's dumb." Lucas splashed hot water on her back and followed it with a squirt of liquid bath soap from a plastic bottle. He began rubbing it across her back and butt.

"That's never stopped you before," she said.

Lucas kept scrubbing. "You know some of the women I've taken out. Tell me a dumb one."

Jennifer thought it over. "I don't know them all," she said finally.

"You know enough of them to see the pattern," he said. "I don't go out with dummies."

"So talk to me like a smart person, Lucas. Did this killer torture these women before he killed them? Daniel was pretty evasive. Do you think he knows them? How does he pick them?"

Lucas turned her around and pressed his index finger across her lips.

"Jennifer, don't pump me, okay? If you catch me off guard and I blurt something out and you use it, I could be in deep trouble."

She eyed him speculatively, the water bouncing off his chest, his mild blue eyes darkened with an edge of wariness.

"I wouldn't use it before I told you," she said. "But you never blurt anything out. Not that you didn't plan to blurt out. You're a tricky son of a bitch, Davenport. I've known you for three years and I still can't tell when you're lying. And you play more goddamn roles than anyone I've ever met. I don't even think you know when you're doing it anymore."

"You should have been a shrink," he said, shaking his head ruefully. He cut the water off and pushed open the shower door. "Hand me that big towel. I'll dry your legs for you."

A half-hour later, Jennifer said hoarsely, "Sometimes it gets very close to pain."

"That's the trick," Lucas said. "Not going over the line."

"You come so close," she said. "You must have gone over it a lot before you figured out where to stop."

Two hours later, Lucas' eyes clicked open in the dark. Somebody was watching. He thought about it. The ankle gun was in the desk… Then Jennifer poked him, and he realized where it was coming from.

"What?" he whispered.

"You awake?"

"I am now."

"I've got a question." She hesitated. "Do you like me more than the others or are we all just meat?"

"Oh, Jesus," he groaned.

"Say."

"You know I do. Like you better. I can prove it."

"How?"

"Your toothbrush? It's the only one in the bathroom cabinet besides mine."

There was a moment of silence and then she snuggled up on his arm. "Okay," she said. "Go to sleep."