Rules of Prey

CHAPTER 5

For the first twenty rings he hoped it would stop. He got out of bed on the twenty-first and picked up the receiver on the twenty-fifth.

"What?" he snarled. The house was cold and he was naked, goose bumps erupting on the backs of his arms, his back, and his legs.

"This is Linda," said a prim voice. "Chief Daniel has called a meeting for eight o'clock sharp and you're to be there."

"'Kay."

"Would you repeat that, Lucas?"

"Eight o'clock in the chief's office."

"That's correct. Have a good morning." She was gone. Lucas stood looking at the receiver for a moment, dropped it onto the hook, yawned, and wandered back to the bedroom.

The clock on the dresser said seven-fifteen. He reached over to Jennifer, swatted her on the bare butt, and said, "I gotta get out of here."

"Okay," she mumbled.

Still naked, Lucas padded back down the hallway to the living room, opened the front door a crack, made sure nobody was around, popped the screen door, and got the paper off the porch. In the kitchen, he shook some Cheerios into a bowl, poured on milk, and unfolded the paper.

The maddog led the front page, a double-deck headline just below the Pioneer Press nameplate. The story was straightforward and accurate as far as it went, with no mention of the Ruiz woman. The chief hadn't talked about survivors. Had lied, in fact-had said the only known attacks by the killer were the three that produced deaths. Nor had he mentioned the notes.

There was a short, separate story about Lucas' involvement in the investigation. He would work independently of homicide, but parallel. Controversial. Killed five men in line of duty. Commendations. Well-known game inventor. Only cop in Minnesota who drove a Porsche to work.

Lucas finished the story and the Cheerios at the same time, yawned again, and headed down to the bathroom. Jennifer was staring at herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror and turned her head when he came in.

"Men have it easy when it comes to looks, you know?"

"Right."

"I'm serious." She turned back to the mirror and stuck her tongue out. "If anybody at the station saw me like this, they'd freak out. Makeup all over my face. My hair looks like the Wolf Man's. My ass hurts. I don't know…"

"Yeah, well, let me in there, I have to shave."

She lifted an arm and looked at the dark stubble in her armpit. "So do I," she said morosely.

Lucas was ten minutes late for the meeting. Daniel frowned when he walked in, and pointed at the empty chair. Frank Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, sat directly opposite him. The other six chairs were occupied by robbery-homicide detectives, including the overweight head of the homicide division, Lyle Wullfolk, and his rail-thin assistant, Harmon Anderson.

"We're working out a schedule," Daniel said. "We figure at least one guy ought to know everything that's going on. Lyle's got his division to run, so it's gonna be Harmon here."

Daniel nodded at the assistant chief of homicide. Anderson was picking his teeth with a red plastic toothpick. He stopped just long enough to nod back. "A pleasure," he grunted.

"He won't be running you, Lucas, you'll be on your own," Daniel said. "If you need to know something, Harmon'll tell you if we got it."

"How'd it go with the media this morning?" Lucas asked.

"They're all over the place. Like lice. They wanted me on the morning show but I told them I had this meeting. So then they wanted to shoot the meeting. I told them to go fuck themselves."

"The mayor was on," said Wullfolk. "He said we had some leads we're working on and he'd expect to get the guy in the next couple of weeks."

"Fuckin" idiot," said Anderson.

"Easy for you to say," Daniel said gloomily. "You're civil service."

"You got some ink," said Anderson, squinting at Lucas.

Lucas nodded and changed the subject. "What about the weapon from the property room?"

Anderson stopped picking his teeth. "We run a list," he said. "We got thirty-four people, cops and civilians, who might of took it. There are probably a few more we don't know about. Found out the fucking janitors go in there all the time. I think they're smoking some of the evidence. Everybody says he's clean, of course. We got IAD looking into it."

"I want to talk to them, the thirty-four people," Lucas said. "All at once. In a group. Get the union guy in here too."

"For what?" Wullfolk asked.

"I'll tell them that I want to know what happened to the gun, and the guy that tells me, I won't turn him in. And that the chief will call off the IAD investigation and nothing more'll happen. I'm going to tell them that if nobody talks to me, we'll go ahead with the shoo-flies and sooner or later we'll find out who it is and then we'll prosecute the son of a bitch on accessory-to-murder and throw his ass in Stillwater."

Anderson shook his head. "I wouldn't buy it, if I was the guy."

"You got a convincer?" asked Daniel.

Lucas nodded. "I think so. I'll outline how the interrogation will go and I'll tell them that I won't read them their rights or anything else, so even if they are prosecuted, the whole thing would be entrapment and the case would be thrown out. I think we could build it so the guy would buy it."

Anderson and Daniel looked at each other, and Anderson shrugged. "It's worth a try. It could get us something fast. I'll set something up for late afternoon. Try to get as many as I can. Four o'clock?"

"Good," Lucas said.

"We've set up a data base in my office, we got a girl typing everything in and printing it out. Everybody working it gets a notebook with every piece of paper we develop, every interview," Anderson said. "We'll go over everything we know about these people. If there's a connection or a pattern, we'll find it. Everybody's supposed to read the files every night. When you see something, tell me. We'll put it in the file."

"What do we have so far?" asked Lucas.

Anderson shook his head. "Not much. Personal data, some loose patterns, that sorta shit. Number one was Lucy Bell, a waitress, nineteen years old. Number two was a housewife, Shirley Morris, thirty-six. Number three was the artist that fought him off, Carla Ruiz. She's thirty-two. Number four was this real-estate woman Lewis, forty-six. One was married, the other three were not. One of the other three, the artist, is divorced. The real-estate woman was a widow. The waitress was a rock-'n'-roller, a punk. The real-estate lady went to classical-music concerts with her boyfriend. It goes like that. The only pattern seems to be that they're all women."

Everybody thought about it for a minute.

"What's the interval between murders?" asked Lucas.

"The first one, Bell, was July 14, then Morris was on August 2, nineteen days between them; then the next was Ruiz on August 17, fifteen days after Morris; then Lewis on August 31, fourteen days later," said Anderson.

"Getting shorter," said one of the cops.

"Yeah. That's a tendency with sadistic killers, if he is one," said Wullfolk.

"If they start coming faster, he'll be doing them off the top of his head, not so careful-like," said another of the cops.

"We don't know that. He may be picking them out six months ahead of time. He may have a whole file of them," Anderson said.

"Any other pattern to the days?" asked Lucas.

"That's one thing, they're all during the week. A Thursday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and another Wednesday. No weekends."

"Not much of a pattern," Daniel said.

"Anything about the women?" asked Lucas. "All tall? All got big tits? What?"

"They're all good-looking. That's my judgment, but I think it's right. All have dark hair, three of them black-the Bell girl, who dyed hers black, Ruiz, and Lewis. Morris' hair was dark brown."

"Huh. Half the women in town have blonde hair, or blondish," said one of the other detectives. "That might be something."

"There are all kinds of possibilities in this stuff, but we gotta be careful, because there's also coincidence to think about. Anyway, look for those patterns. I'll make a special list of patterns," Anderson said. "Bring in your notebooks every afternoon and I'll give you updates. Read them."

"What about the lab, they sittin' on their thumbs, or what?" asked Wullfolk.

"They're doing everything they can. They're running down the tape he used to bind them, they're sifting through the crap they picked up with the vacuum, they're looking at everything for prints. They haven't come up with much."

"If any of these notebooks get to the media, there are going to be some bodies twisting in the wind," said Daniel. "Everybody understand?"

The cops all nodded at once.

"I don't doubt that we're going to spring some leaks," Daniel said. "But nobody, nobody is to say anything about the notes the killer is leaving behind. If I find somebody leaks to the media on these notes, I'll find the son of a bitch and fire him. We've been holding it close to our chests, and it's going to stay that way."

"We need a surefire identifier that the public doesn't know about," Anderson explained. "They knew they had the Son of Sam when they looked through the window of his apartment and saw some notes like the ones he'd been sending to the cops and the media."

"There's going to be a lot of pressure," Daniel said. "On all of us. I'll try to keep it off your backs, but if this asshole gets one or two more, there'll be reporters who want to talk to the individual detectives. We're going to put that off as long as we can. If we get to the point where we've got to do it, we'll get the attorney in to advise you on what to say and what not to say. Every interview gets cleared through this office in advance. Okay? Everybody understand?"

The heads bobbed again.

"Okay. Let's do it," he said. "Lucas, hang around a minute."

When the rest of the cops had shuffled out, Daniel pushed the door shut.

"You're our pipeline to the media, feeding out the unofficial stuff we need in the papers. You drop what we need on one of the papers and maybe one TV station as a deep source, and when the others come in for confirmation, I'll catch that. Okay?"

"Yeah. I'm a source for people at both papers and all the TV stations. The biggest problem will be keeping them from figuring out I'm sourcing all of them."

"So work something out. You're good at working things out. But we need the back door into the media. It's the only way they'll believe us."

"I'd just as soon not lie to anybody," Lucas said.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But if you gotta burn somebody, you burn him. This is too heavy to fool around with."

"Okay."

"You got an interview with that artist?"

"Yeah. This afternoon." Lucas looked at his watch. "I've got to close down my net and get back here by four. I better get moving."

Daniel nodded. "I got a real bad feeling about this one. Homicide won't catch the guy unless we get real lucky. I'm looking for help, Davenport. Find this son of a bitch."

Lucas spent the rest of the morning on the street, moving from bars to pay phones to newsstands and barbershops. He talked to a half-dozen dope dealers ranging in age from fourteen to sixty-four, and three of their customers. He spoke to two bookies and an elderly couple who ran a convenience mail drop and an illegal switchboard, several security guards, one crooked cop, a Sioux warrior, and a wino who, he suspected, had killed two people who deserved it. The message was the same for all of them: I will be gone, but, I trust, not forgotten, because I will be back.

Freezing the net worried him. He thought of his street people as a garden that needed constant cultivation-money, threats, immunity, even friendship-lest the weeds of temptation begin to sprout.

At noon Lucas called Anderson and was told that the meeting had been set.

"Four o'clock?"

"Yeah."

"I'll see you before that. Talk it over."

"Okay."

He ate lunch at a McDonald's on University Avenue, sharing it with a junkie who nodded and nodded and finally fell asleep in his french fries. Lucas left him slumped over the table. The pimple-faced teenager behind the counter watched the bum with the half-hung eyes of a sixteen-year-old who had already seen everything and was willing to leave it alone.

Ruiz' warehouse studio was ten minutes away, a shabby brick cube with industrial-style windows that looked like dirty checkerboards. The only elevator was designed for freight and was driven by another teenager, this one with a complexion as vacant as his eyes and a boombox the size of a coffee table. Lucas rode the elevator up five stories, found Ruiz' door, and rapped on it. Carla Ruiz looked out at him over the door chain and he showed her the gold shield.

"Where's the rose?" she asked. Lucas had the shield in one hand and a briefcase in the other.

"Hey, I forgot. Supposed to be in my teeth, right?" Lucas grinned at her. She smiled back a small smile and unhooked the chain.

"I'm a mess," she said as she opened the door. She had an oval face and brilliant white teeth to go with her dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair. She was wearing a loose peasant blouse over a bright Mexican skirt. The gun-sight gash on her forehead was still healing, an angry red weal around the ragged black line of the cut. Bruises around her eyes and on one side of her face had faded from black-and-blue to a greenish yellow.

Lucas stepped inside and pocketed the shield. As she closed the door he looked closely at her face, reaching out with an index finger to turn her chin up.

"They're okay," he said. "Once they turn yellow, they're on the way out. Another week and they'll be gone."

"The cut won't be."

"Look at this," Lucas said, tracing the scar line down his forehead and across his eye socket. "When it happened, this wire fishing leader was buried right in my face. Now all that's left is the line. Yours will be thinner. With some bangs, nobody'll ever see it."

Suddenly aware of how close they were standing, Ruiz stepped back and then walked around him into the studio.

"I've been interviewed about six times," she said, touching the cut on her forehead. "I think I'm talked out."

"That's okay," said Lucas. "I don't work quite like the other guys. My questions will be a little different."

"I read about you in the paper," she said. "The story said you've killed five people."

Lucas shrugged. "It's not that I wanted to."

"It seems like a lot. My ex-husband's father was a policeman. He never shot his gun at anybody in his whole career."

"What can I tell you?" Lucas said. "I've been working in areas where it happens. If you work mostly in burglary or homicide, you can go a whole career without ever firing your gun. If you work in dope or vice, it's different."

"Okay."

She pulled a dinette chair out from a table and gestured at it, and sat on the other side. "What do you want to know?"

"Do you feel safe?" he asked as he put his briefcase on the table and opened it.

"I don't know. They say he got in by slipping the locks, so the landlord put on all new locks. The policeman who was here said they're good. And they gave me a phone and I have a special alarm code for 911. I just say 'Carla' and the cops are supposed to come running. The station is just across the street. Everybody in the building knows what happened and everybody's looking for strangers. But you know… I don't feel all that safe."

"I don't think he'll come back," Lucas said.

"That's what the other cops, uh, the other policemen said," she said.

"You can call us cops," Lucas said.

"Okay." She smiled again and he marveled at her even white teeth. She wasn't pretty, exactly, but she was extraordinarily attractive. "It's just that I'm the only witness. That scares me. I hardly go out anymore."

"We think he's a real freak," said Lucas. "A freak-freak, different from other freaks. He seems to be smart. He's careful. He doesn't seem to be running out of control. We don't think he'll come back because that would put him at risk."

"He seemed crazy to me," Ruiz said.

"So talk about it. What did he do when he first came after you?" Lucas asked. He thumbed through his copy of her interviews with St. Paul and Minneapolis homicide detectives. "How did it work? What did he say?"

For forty-five minutes he carefully led her through each moment of the attack, back and forth until every split second was covered. He watched her face as she relived it. Finally she stopped him.

"I can't do this much more," she said. "I was having nightmares. I don't want them to come back."

"I don't want them to either, but I wanted to get you back there, living through it. Now I want you to do one more thing. Come here."

He closed his briefcase and handed it to her. "These are your groceries. Start at the door and walk past the pillar."

"I don't-"

"Do it," Lucas barked.

She walked slowly back to the door and then turned, her arms wrapped around the briefcase. Lucas stepped behind the pillar.

"Now walk past. Don't look at me," he said.

She walked past and Lucas jumped from behind the pillar and wrapped an arm around her throat.

"Uhhh…"

"Do I smell like him? Do I?"

He eased up on his arm. "No."

"What? What'd he smell like?"

She turned into him, his arm still over her shoulder. "I don't… he had cologne of some kind."

"Did he smell like sweat? Perspiration? Were his clothes clean or did they stink?"

"No. Like after-shave, maybe."

"Was he as big as I am? Was he strong?" He pulled her tight against his chest and she dropped the briefcase and turned into him, beginning to struggle. He let her struggle for a moment and then she suddenly relaxed. Lucas tightened his grip further.

"Shit," she said and she fought and he let her go, and she turned into him, her eyes wide and angry. "Don't do that. Stay away." She was on the edge of fear.

"Was he stronger?"

"No. He was softer. His hands were soft. And when I relaxed, he relaxed. That's when I stamped on his instep."

"Where'd you learn that?"

"From my ex-husband's father. He taught me some self-defense things."

"Come here."

"No."

"Come here, goddammit."

She reluctantly stepped forward, afraid, her face pale. Lucas turned her again and put his arm around her neck without tightening it.

"Now, when he had you, he said something about not screaming or he'd kill you. Did he sound like this?" And Lucas tightened his grip and pulled her high, almost off her feet, and said hoarsely, "Scream and I'll kill you."

Ruiz struggled again and Lucas said, "Think," and let her go, pushing her away. He walked away until he was near the door. Ruiz had her hands at her throat, her eyes wide.

" New Mexico," she said.

"What?" Lucas felt a spark.

"I think he might be from New Mexico. It never occurred to me until now, but he didn't sound quite like people up here. It wasn't the words. It's not an accent. It's almost, like, a feeling. I don't think you'd even notice it, if you weren't thinking about it. But it was like back home."

"You're from New Mexico?"

"Yes. Originally. I've been up here six years."

"Okay. And you said he smelled like cologne. Good cologne?"

"I don't know, just cologne. I wouldn't know the difference."

"Could it have been hair oil?"

"No, I don't think so. I think it was cologne. It was light."

"But he didn't stink? Like he was unwashed?"

"No."

"He was wearing a T-shirt. You said he was white. How white?"

"Really white. Whiter than you. I mean, I'm kind of brown, you're tan-white, he was real white."

"No tan?"

"No. I don't think so. That's not my impression. He was wearing those gloves and I remember that his skin was almost as white as the gloves were."

"You said when you were talking to the St. Paul police that he was wearing athletic shoes. Do you know what kind?"

"No. He just knocked me down and I was getting up and I remember the shoes and the little bubble thing on the side…" She stopped and frowned. "I didn't tell the other officers about the bubble thing."

"What kind of bubble thing?"

"Those transparent bubble things, where you can look inside the shoe soles?"

"Yeah. I know. Do you go down to St. Paul Center much?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"If you've got the time, walk over this afternoon and look at the shoes, see if there's anything like it. Okay?"

"Sure. Jeez, I didn't think…"

Lucas took out his badge case, extracted a business card, and handed it to her. "Call me and let me know."

They talked for another ten minutes, but there was nothing more. Lucas made a few final notes on a steno pad and tossed the pad and the investigation notebook back in his briefcase.

"You scared me," Ruiz said as Lucas closed the case.

"I want to catch this guy," Lucas said. "I figured there might be something you wouldn't remember unless you walked through it again."

"I'll have nightmares."

"Maybe not. Even the worst ones fade after a while. I won't apologize, considering the situation."

"I know." She plucked at the seam of her skirt. "It's just…"

"Yeah, I know. Listen, I've got to make a call, okay?"

"Sure." She walked back to a stool next to a loom and sat on it, her hands resting between her legs. She was subdued, almost depressed. Lucas watched her as he dialed the information operator, got the number for St. Anne's College, hung up, and redialed the new number.

"Think about something else entirely," he said to her across the room.

"I try, but I can't," she said. "I just keep going over it in my head. My God, he was right in here…"

Lucas held up a hand to stop her for a moment. "Psychology department… Thanks… Sister Mary Joseph… Tell her Detective Lieutenant Lucas Davenport…" He glanced at Carla again. She was staring fixedly out the window.

"Hello? Lucas?"

"Elle, I've got to talk to you."

"About the maddog?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"I was halfway expecting you to call. When do you want to come?"

"I'm in St. Paul now. I've got to be over in Minneapolis for a meeting at four, I was hoping you could squeeze me in now."

"If you come right this minute, we can walk down to the ice-cream store. I've got a faculty meeting in forty-five minutes."

"I'll see you in front of Fat Albert Hall in ten minutes."

Lucas dropped the phone back on the hook.

"You going to be okay?" he asked as he headed for the door. "I was a little rough…"

"Yes." She continued to stare out the window and he paused with his hand on the bolt.

"Will you check downtown for me? About those shoes?"

"Sure." She sighed and turned toward him. "I've got to get out of here. If you can wait a minute, I'll get my purse. You can walk me out of the building."

She was ready in a moment and they rode the old elevator down to the first floor. The elevator operator had plugged a set of headphones into his boombox, but the sound of heavy metal leaked out around the edges.

"That shit can sterilize you," Lucas said. The operator didn't respond, his head continuing to bob with the pounding beat of the music.

"This elevator guy…" Lucas said when they got off the elevator. There was a question in his voice.

"No chance," Carla said. "Randy's so burned out that he can barely find the right floors. He could never organize an actual attack on somebody."

"All right." He held the door for her and she stepped out on the sidewalk.

"It's nice to be out," she said. "The sunshine feels great." Lucas' car was parked a block toward Town Center and they strolled together along the sidewalk.

"Listen," she said when he stopped beside the Porsche. "I get over to Minneapolis once a week or so. I show in a gallery over there. If I stopped in some morning, could you let me know how things are going? I'd call first."

"Sure. I'm in the basement of the old City Hall. You just leave your car-"

"I know where you are," she said. "I'll see you. And I'll call you this afternoon, about the shoes."

She walked off down the sidewalk and Lucas got in the car and started it. He watched her through the windshield for a moment and she looked back and smiled.

"Hmph," he grunted. He rolled down the street until he was beside her, pulled over, and rolled down the passenger-side window.

"Forget something?" she asked, leaning over the window.

"What kind of music do you listen to?"

"What?" She seemed confused.

"Do you like rock?"

"Sure."

"Want to go see Aerosmith tomorrow night? With me? Get you out of your apartment?"

"Oh. Well. Okay. What time?" She wasn't smiling but she was definitely interested.

"Pick you up at six. We'll get something to eat."

"Sure," she said. "See you." She waved and stepped back from the car. Lucas made an illegal U-turn and headed back toward the Interstate. As he pulled away, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her looking after him. It was silly, but he thought he felt their eyes touch.

Sister Mary Joseph had grown up as Elle Kruger on the near north side of Minneapolis, a block from the house where Lucas was born. They started grade school the same autumn, their mothers walking them down the cracked sidewalks together, past the tall green hedges and through the red brick arches of St. Agnes Elementary. Elle still ran through Lucas' dreams. She was a lovely slender blonde girl, the most popular kid in the class with both the pupils and the teachers, the fastest runner on the playground. At the blackboard, she regularly thrashed the class in multiplication races. Lucas usually finished second. In the spelldowns, it was Lucas who won, Elle who finished second.

Lucas left St. Agnes halfway through fifth grade, after the death of his father. He and his mother moved down to the south side and Lucas started at public school. Later, at a hockey tournament, he was warming up, swinging down the ice, and he stopped on the opponents' side of the rink to adjust his skates. She was there in the crowd, with a group of girls from Holy Spirit High. She had not seen him, or not recognized him in his hockey gear. He stood transfixed, appalled.

It had been six years. Other girls, gawky as she had been beautiful, had blossomed. Elle had not. Her face was pitted and scarred by acne. Her cheeks, her forehead, her chin were crossed with fiery red lines of infection. The small part of her face free of scarring was as coarse as sandpaper from attempts at treatment.

Lucas skated away, around the rink toward the home bench, Elle's face bobbing in his mind. A few minutes later, the players for the two teams were introduced and he skated out to center ice, his name booming from the public-address system, unable not to look, and found her grave eyes following him.

After the match he was clumping toward the tunnel to the locker rooms when he saw her standing on the other side of the barricade. When their eyes met her hand came up and fluttered at him and he stopped and reached across the barrier and took her hand and said, "Can you wait for me? Twenty minutes, outside?"

"Yes."

He drove her home after a tour of southern and western Minneapolis. They talked as they had when they were children, laughing in the dark car. At her house, she hopped out and ran up to the porch. The light came on, and her father stepped out.

"Dad, do you remember Lucas Davenport, he used to live down the street?"

"Sure, how are you, son?" her father said. There was a sad edge to his voice. He asked Lucas in and he sat for another half-hour, talking to Elle's parents, before he left.

As he walked out to the curb, she called him from her bedroom window on the second floor of the house, her head backlit against the flowered wallpaper.

"Lucas?"

"Yeah?"

"Please don't come back," she said, and shut the window.

He heard from her next a year and a half later, a week before graduation. She called to tell him that she was entering a convent.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I have a vocation."

Years later, and two days after Lucas had killed his first man as a police officer, she called him. She was a shrink of sorts, she said. Could she help? No, not really, but he would like to see her. He took her to the ice-cream shop. Professor of psychology, she said. Fascinating. Watching minds work.

Did she have a vocation? Lucas wondered. Or was it her face, the cross that she bore? He couldn't ask, but when they left the shop she took his arm and smiled and said, "I have a vocation, Lucas."

A year later, he sold his first game and it was a hit. The Star-Tribune did a feature story about it and she called him again. She was a game player, she said. There was a games group at the college that regularly got together…

After that, he saw her virtually every week. Elle and another nun, a grocer and a bookie, both from St. Paul, a defense attorney from Minneapolis, and a student or two from St. Anne's or the University of Minnesota made up a regular war-gaming group. They met in the gym, played in an old unused room off what had been a girls' locker room. They furnished the room with a half-dozen chairs, a Ping-Pong table for the gaming maps, a used overhead light donated by a pool parlor, and a bad stereo that Lucas got on the street.

They met on Thursdays. They were currently working through Lucas' grandest creation, a replay of the Battle of Gettysburg that he would never be able to sell commercially. It was simply too complex. He'd had to program a portable computer to figure results.

Elle was General Lee.

Lucas parked the Porsche just down the hill from Albertus Magnus Hall and walked through the falling leaves up the hill toward the entrance. As he reached the bottom of the steps, she came out. The face was the same; so were the eyes, grave and gray, but always with a spark of humor.

"He can't stop," she told him as they strolled down the sidewalk. "The maddog falls into a category that cop shrinks call the sadistic killer. He's doing it for the pleasure of it. He's not hearing commands from God, he's not being ordered by voices. He's driven, all right, but he's not insane in the sense that he's out of control. He is very much in control, in the conventional sense of the word. He is aware of what he's doing and what the penalties are. He makes plans and provides for contingencies. He may be quite intelligent."

"How does he pick his victims?"

She shrugged. "Could be a completely adventitious encounter. Maybe he uses the phone book. But most likely he sees them personally, and whether he realizes it or not, he's probably picking a type. There may well have been an encounter of some kind when he was young, with his mother, with a female friend of his mother's… somebody whose sexual identity has become fixed in his mind."

"These women are small and dark-dark hair, dark eyes. One is a Mexican-American…"

"Exactly. So when he encounters one of these types, she somehow becomes fixed in his mind. Why it's that particular one, when there are so many possibilities, I just don't know. In any case, after he's chosen her, he can't escape her. His fantasies are built around her. He becomes obsessive. Eventually… he goes after her. Acts out the fantasies."

At the ice-cream parlor, she ordered her usual, a hot-fudge with a maraschino cherry. A few of the customers glanced curiously at them, the nun in her black habit, the tall, well-dressed male who was so obviously her friend. They ignored the passing attention.

"How long would it take him to fix on a particular woman? Would it be an instantaneous thing?"

"Could be. More likely, though, it would be some kind of encounter. An exposure, a conversation. He might make some kind of assessment of her vulnerability. Remember, this may be a very intelligent man. Eventually, though, it goes beyond his control. She becomes fixed in his mind, and he can no more escape her image than she can escape his attack."

"Jesus. Uh, sorry."

She smiled at him. "You just didn't get enough of it, you know? If you'd stayed at St. Agnes for another two, three years, who knows? Maybe it'd be Father Davenport."

Lucas laughed. "That's a hair-raising thought," he said. "Can you see me running the little ankle-biters through First Communion?"

"Yes," she said. "In fact, I can."

The phone was ringing when Lucas got back to his office It was Carla. She thought the shoes on the maddog were the Nike Air model, but she was not sure which variation.

"But the bubble thing on the sole is right. There wasn't anything else like it," she said.

"Thanks, Carla. See you tomorrow."

Lucas spent ten minutes calling discount shoe stores, getting prices, and then walked up the stairs to the homicide office. Anderson was sitting in his cubbyhole, looking at papers.

"Am I set on the meeting?" Lucas asked.

"Yep. Just about everybody will be there," Anderson said. He was a shabby man, too thin, with nicotine-stained teeth and small porcine eyes. His necktie was too wide and usually ended in the middle of his stomach, eight inches above his belt. His grammar was bad and his breath often smelled of sausage. None of it meant much to his colleagues. Anderson had a better homicide-clearance rate than any other man in the department. On his own time he wrote law-enforcement computer-management programs that sold across the country. "There'll be four missing, but they're pretty marginal anyway. You can talk to them later if you want."

"What about the union?"

"We cooled them out. The union guy will give a statement before you talk."

"That sounds good," Lucas said. He took out his notebook. "I've got some stuff I want to get in the data base."

"Okay." Anderson swiveled in his chair and punched up his IBM. "Go ahead."

"He's very light-complexioned, which means he's probably blond or sandy-haired. Probably an office worker or a clerk of some kind, maybe a professional, and reasonably well-off. May have been born in the Southwest. New Mexico, like that. Arizona. Texas. May have moved up here fairly recently."

Anderson punched it into the computer and when he was done, looked up with a frown. "Jesus, Davenport, Where'd you get this?"

"Talking to Ruiz. They're guesses, but I think they're good. Now. Have somebody go around to the post offices and pull the change-of-address forms for anybody coming in from those areas. Add Oklahoma. Everybody who moved into the seven-county metro area from those places."

"There could be hundreds of them."

"Yeah, but we can eliminate a lot of them right off the bat. Too old, female, black, blue-collar, originally from here and moving back… Besides, hundreds are better than millions, which is what we got now. Once we get a list, we might be able to cross-reference against some other lists, if we get any more."

Anderson pursed his lips and then nodded. "I'll do it," he said. "We got nothing else."

They met in the same room where the press conference had been held the night before, thirty-odd cops and civilians, an assistant city attorney, three union officials. They stopped talking when Lucas entered the room.

"All right," he said, standing at the front. "This is serious. We want the union to talk first."

One of the union men stood, cleared his throat, looked at a piece of paper, folded it, and stuck it back in his coat pocket.

"Normally, the union would object to what's going to happen here. But we talked it over with the chief and I guess we've got no complaint. Not at this point. Nobody is being accused of anything. Nobody's going to be forced to do anything. We think for the good of the force that everybody ought to hear what Davenport 's going to say."

He sat down and the cops looked back at Lucas.

"What I'm going to say is this," Lucas said, scanning the crowd. "Somebody took a piece out of the property room. It was a Smith, Model 15. From the David L. Losse box. You remember the Losse case, it was the guy who lit up his kid? Said it was an accident? Went down on manslaughter?" Several heads nodded.

"Anyway, it was probably somebody in this room who took it. Most of the people with access are here. Now, that gun was used by this maddog killer. We want to know how he got it. We don't think anybody here is the maddog. But somebody here, somehow, got this gun out to him."

Several cops started to speak at the same time, but Lucas put up his hand and silenced them.

"Wait a minute. Listen to the rest of it. There might be any number of reasons somebody thought it was a good idea to take the piece. It's a good gun and maybe somebody needed a backup piece. Or a piece for his wife, for home protection, and it got stolen. Whatever. The maddog gets his hands on it. We're looking for the connection.

"Now, the chief is going to put IAD on it and they're going to be talking to every one of you. They're not going to do anything else until they find out what happened."

Lucas paused and looked around the room again.

"Unless, "he said. "Unless somebody comes forward and tells me what happened. I give you these guarantees. First, I don't tell anybody else. I don't cooperate with IAD. And once we know, well, the chief admits there'd be no reason to really push the investigation. We got better things to do than chase some guy who took a gun."

Lucas pointed at the assistant city attorney. "Tell them about the punishment ruling."

The attorney stepped toward the center of the room and cleared his throat. "Before the chief can discipline a man, he has to give specific cause. We've ruled if the cause is alleged criminal wrongdoing, he has to provide the same proof as he would in court. He is not allowed to punish on a lesser standard. In other words, he can't say, 'Joe Smith, you're demoted because you committed theft.' He has to prove the theft to the same standards as he would in court-actually, for practical purposes, he has to get a conviction."

Lucas took over again.

"What I'm saying is, you call me, tell me where to meet you. Bring a lawyer if you want. I'll refuse to read you your rights. I'll admit to entrapment. I'll do anything reasonable that would kill my testimony in court. That way, even if I talked, you couldn't be punished. And I won't talk.

"You guys know me. I won't burn you. And we've got to catch this guy. I'm passing out my card, I've written my home phone number on the back. I want everyone to put the card in his pocket, so the guy who needs it won't be out there by himself. I'll be home all night." He handed a stack of business cards to a cop in the front row, who took one, divided the rest in half, and passed them in two directions.

"Tell them the rest of it, Davenport," said the union man.

"Yeah, the rest of it," said Lucas. "If nobody talks to me, we push the IAD investigation and we push the murder investigation. Sooner or later we'll identify the guy who took the gun. And if we have to do it that way…"

He tried to pick out each face in the room before he said it: "… we'll find a felony to hang on it. We'll put somebody in Stillwater."

An angry buzz spread through the group.

"Hey, fuck it," Lucas said, raising his voice over the noise. "This guy's butchered three women in the worst way you could do it. Go ask homicide if you want the details. But don't give me any brotherhood shit. I don't like this any better than you guys. But I need to know about that piece."

Anderson caught him in the hall after the meeting.

"What do you think?"

Lucas nodded down the hallway, where a half-dozen of his cards littered the floor.

"Most of them kept the cards. I've got nothing to do but go home and wait."