Rules of Prey

CHAPTER 7

Lucas edged into the briefing room, late again.

"Where the fuck you been?" Daniel asked angrily.

"Up late," Lucas said.

"Sit down." Daniel looked around the room. A half-dozen detectives peered into their working notebooks. "To sum up, what we got is about three hundred pages of reports that don't mean diddly-squat. Am I wrong? Somebody tell me I'm wrong."

Harmon Anderson shook his head. "I don't see anything. Not yet. It might be in there, but I don't see it."

"What about this stuff that you got, Lucas?" asked one of the detectives. "Is it reliable?"

Lucas shrugged. "Yeah, I think so. There're a lot of guesses in there, but I think they're pretty good."

"So what?" said Daniel. "So we're looking for a medium-sized white guy who works in an office. That cuts it down to a half-million guys, not including St. Paul."

"Who recently moved up here from the Southwest," said Lucas. "That cuts out another 499,000 guys."

"But that could be bullshit. Probably is," Daniel snorted.

"We might know a little more in a couple of hours," Lucas said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. "The gun guy called last night. I know where the gun went."

"Well, Jesus!" Daniel exploded.

Lucas shook his head. "Don't get your hopes up." He explained how the gun got to Larry Rice and that Rice was dead. "His wife told my man that she doesn't know where the pistol went. Probably sold. Could have been stolen, I suppose."

"Okay, but it's something," said Daniel. "He had the gun for what, six months? And he probably sold it to somebody he knew."

Daniel pointed at Anderson. "Your best man. Best interrogator. Put him on her. We squeeze every goddamned drop out of her. Everybody her old man saw in the last six months. She must know most of them. The killer should be on the list."

"I'm talking to her this afternoon," Lucas said, looking at Anderson. "One o'clock. Your man could meet me there, we'll go in together."

"So are we going to get the name of the guy who took the piece?" asked Daniel.

Lucas shook his head. "No. I swore. You could probably break it out of Rice, if you want, but you really don't want to know. He was doing a kindness. He's a pretty good guy."

Daniel looked at him for a minute and nodded. "Okay. But if it becomes relevant…"

"You might be able to break it out of Rice," Lucas repeated. "You won't get it from me."

There was a moment of silence; then Daniel let it go. "We've got another problem," he said. "Somebody fed a story to Jennifer Carey that we have an attack survivor. I'm going to talk to her in ten minutes and try to put her off. Anybody know anything about who tipped her off?"

Nobody answered.

"We can't have this," Daniel said.

One of the detectives cleared his throat. "I might, uh, have an idea about that."

"What?"

"She shot that documentary on St. Paul cops, the one that ran on PBS? She's got sources over there you wouldn't believe."

"Okay. Maybe that's it. So now, we don't talk to St. Paul cops any more than we have to. Be polite, but…" He groped for a word. "Reserved." He looked around. "Anything else?"

Lucas opened his notebook and looked at a short list on the back page.

"I'd like to find out about doctors. Did any of these women see the same guy? Ruiz' doctor is a woman, but there may be a few male docs going through her gallery. She could have been picked up there, and we ought to check."

"We can check that," said Anderson.

"How about those change-of-address cards?"

"That's a problem," Anderson said. "We called the post office and they don't have cards for incoming people. Only people moving out. So if we want to check change-of-addresses for people coming to the Cities, we'd have to take the Cities and all the suburb names and go to every post office in the Southwest and check them."

"They're not computerized?"

"Nope. It's done at the local post offices."

"Dammit." Lucas looked at the chief. "What'd it take to check all the major cities down there, ten guys for three weeks? Something like that?"

"Three months is more like it," said Anderson. "I looked in the phone book and there are about eighty post-office branches just in the Minneapolis area, and that doesn't include St. Paul and the St. Paul suburbs. So then I looked at a map and the major cities we'd have to check, and I figure maybe two thousand post offices to cover just the bigger cities. And at each one, we'd have to check for all the different cities and suburbs up here. We'd be lucky if a guy could do three or four a day, even with good cooperation from the post offices."

"Maybe we could work through the post office," Daniel suggested. "Get a list of all the post offices, work out some kind of form they could fill out, and mail it to them. Explain how important it is, call all these places to make sure they're doing it…"

"If we did it that way, we could maybe do it with a couple, three guys full-time," said Anderson.

"They wouldn't have to be cops," Daniel said. "Work up a form and I'll talk to the post office. I'll send a couple of clerks over there to handle it."

"Driver's licenses," said one of the detectives.

"What?"

"If he just moved in, he probably had to get a new driver's license. They make you surrender your old one when you move in. The Public Safety people over at the state should have a record."

"Good," said Daniel. "We need that kind of thinking. Check that."

The detective nodded.

"Anything else?" he asked. "Lucas?"

Lucas shook his head.

"All right," said Daniel, "let's do it."

"Detective Davenport."

Lucas turned and saw her walking down the hall, Carla Ruiz, a smile on her face.

"Hi. What are you doing over here?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Divorce stuff. When I moved out of the house, my ex-husband was supposed to sell it and give me half the money. He never sold it and we're trying to get him moving."

"Unpleasant."

"Yeah. It just drags things out. I've been over here a half-dozen times. I'm tired of it."

"Got time for a cup of coffee?" Lucas asked, tilting his head toward the cafeteria.

"Ah, no, I guess not." She glanced at her watch. "I've got to be in the judge's chambers in twelve minutes."

"I'll walk you down to my corner," Lucas said. They fell in together and started toward the tunnel that led to the county courthouse. "Sorry about that weird call last night."

"That's okay. This morning I almost thought it was a dream. Did it help?"

"Oh, I guess. I was thinking maybe a doctor did it. Maybe all the women had the same doctor or something. You just about eliminated that possibility."

"Bet that made you happy," she said, smiling again.

"It's early," he said. They walked along for a minute and Lucas said, "We might have a problem. Involving you."

"Oh?" She was suddenly serious.

"One of the television stations got a tip about you. A reporter, Jennifer Carey, is in talking to the chief right now. She wants an interview."

"Is he going to give her my name?"

"No. He's going to put her off, but it can't hold up. Carey's got good sources over in St. Paul. Sooner or later, she'll find out, and she'll harass the hell out of you."

"So what do we do?"

"We've been thinking it might be better to give her an interview and then give the rest of the stations a press conference with you. Get it over with. That way, we can control it. You won't have people hitting you by surprise."

She thought it over, her face downcast.

"I don't trust those people. Especially TV."

"Carey's about the best of them," Lucas said. "She's a friend of mine, to tell you the truth. I didn't tell her about you, though. I don't know where she got the information. Maybe from St. Paul."

"Would she really be okay?"

"She'd probably do the most sensitive job. After it was done, we'd get you out of town for a few days. When everything cooled off, you could slide back in quietly and probably be okay."

"Can I think about it?" Carla asked.

"Sure. The chief will probably call you about it."

"If I went out of town, would the city pay? It's not like I'm rich."

"I don't know. You could ask the chief. Or if you want to, you can stay in my cabin. I've got a place on a lake up north, in Wisconsin. It's a pretty place, quiet, out-of-the-way."

"That might be okay," she said. "Let me think."

"Sure."

There was a long moment of silence which Lucas broke by asking, "So how long have you been divorced?"

"Almost three years. He's a photographer. He's not a bad guy. He even has some talent, but he doesn't use it. He doesn't do anything. He just sits around. Other people work, he sits. One of the reasons I'm so anxious to get the money out of the house is that it was my money."

"Ah. Good reason."

"I'm looking forward to Aerosmith tonight," she said, "I mean, if it's still on."

"Sure it's on," Lucas said. He stopped at a branching corridor. "I turn here. See you at six?"

"Yes. And I'll think about the TV thing." She walked on, half-turned to wave, and kept going. Nice, he thought as he watched her go.

Mary Rice was not very bright. She sat slumped on a kitchen chair, looking nervously at Lucas and Harrison Sloan, the second detective assigned to talk to her. Sloan had the ingratiating manner of a vacuum-cleaner salesman.

"It's very essentially important that we get a complete list from you," he purred, scooting his chair an inch closer to Rice's. He looked like a gynecologist on an afternoon soap opera, Lucas decided. "We would like to get a calendar or something, so we could figure out week by week and day by day who your husband saw."

"I won't tell you the man who gave me the gun," she said, her lower lip quivering.

"That's okay. I talked to him last night and that's all worked out," Lucas assured her. "We do need to know everybody else."

"There aren't very many. I mean, we never had a lot of friends, and then one or two of them died. When Larry got his cancer, some of the others stopped coming around. Larry had to wear this bag come out of his side, you know…"

"Yeah," said Lucas, wincing.

"There'll still be quite a few people," said Sloan. "Mailmen, neighbors, any doctors or medical people who came here…"

"There was only a nurse," she said.

"But those are the kind of people we're looking for."

Lucas listened for a few more minutes as Sloan worked to relax her, then broke in.

"I have to leave," he told Rice. "Detective Sloan will stay and chat with you, but I have a couple of quick questions. Okay?" He smiled at her and she glanced at Sloan and then back and nodded.

"I'm looking for a white man, probably about my size, probably works in an office somewhere. He might have an accent, kind of southwestern. Kind of cowboy. Probably well-to-do. Does that jog anything in your memory? Do you remember anybody like that?"

She frowned and looked down at her hands, at Sloan, and then around the kitchen. Finally she looked back at Lucas and said, "I don't remember anyone like that. All our friends are white. There haven't been any colored people in here. Nobody with a lot of money that I know of."

"Okay," Lucas said, an impatient edge to his voice.

"I'm trying to remember," she said defensively.

"That's okay," Lucas said. "Did your husband have people here that you didn't know about?"

"Well, he put a sign in the window for some things he wanted to sell. He had some of those little doll things he brought back from the war against the Japs. Those little carvings? Somebody bought those. He got five hundred dollars for fifteen of them. They were real cute things. Like little pigs and rats, all curled around."

"You don't know who that was, who bought them?"

"Oh, I think so. I got some kind of receipt somewhere."

She looked vaguely around the kitchen again.

"Did you ever see the man who bought them?"

"No, no, but I think he was older. You know, Larry's age. I got that idea."

"Okay. Try to find that receipt and give it to Detective Sloan. Was there anybody else?"

"The mailman would stop and talk, he's a younger fellow, maybe forty. And a young fellow came out from the welfare. We weren't on welfare," she said hastily, "but we had some medical assistance coming…"

"Sure," said Lucas. "Listen, I'm going to run. We appreciate any cooperation you can give Detective Sloan."

Lucas went out through the kitchen door, let it close behind him, and walked down the steps. As he passed the kitchen window he heard Rice say, "… don't like that fellow so much. He makes me nervous."

"Quite a few people would agree with you, Mrs. Rice," Sloan said soothingly. "Can I call you Mary? Detective Davenport is…"

"Pushy," said Rice.

" Lot of people would agree with you, Mary. Look, I really hope we can work together to catch this killer…"

Lucas smiled and walked out to his car, opened the door, looked inside for a moment, then shut it and walked back to the house.

Inside, Sloan and Rice were looking at a steno pad on which Sloan had written a short list of names. They both looked up when Lucas came back in.

"Could I use your telephone?" Lucas asked.

"Yes, it's right…" She pointed at the wall.

Lucas looked in his notebook, dialed and got Carla Ruiz on the second ring.

"This is Lucas. How many times were you in the courthouse on the divorce?"

"Oh, four or five. Why?"

"How about before you were attacked? Right before, or when?"

"Let me go get my purse. I keep an organizer…"

He heard the receiver land on the table and looked over at Rice.

"Mrs. Rice, this guy from welfare. Did you have to go down to the county courthouse to see him, or did he come out here, or what?"

"No, no, Larry was disabled when we found out he could get some medical, so this fellow came out here. He came out twice. Nice boy. But I think Larry knew him from before, from work."

"That's a county job. I thought your husband worked for the City of Minneapolis."

"Well, he did, but you know, people go back and forth all the time, between City Hall and the courthouse. Larry's job, he knew everybody. Every time something went wrong, they called him because he could fix anything. He used to see… the police officer who gave us the gun down in the cafeteria."

Ruiz was back on the line.

"I was over there three weeks and four weeks before," she said.

"Before you were attacked."

"Yes."

"Thanks. Listen, see you at six, but try to remember everybody you saw in the courthouse, okay?"

"Got something?" asked Sloan when Lucas hung up the phone.

"I don't know. You got the phone number where this Lewis woman worked, the real-estate office?"

"Yeah, I think so." Sloan got out his project notebook, ran down the list, and gave Lucas the number. He dialed and got the office manager and explained what he wanted.

"… So did she go down there?"

"Oh, sure, all the time. Once a week. She carried a lot of the paperwork for us."

"So she would have been down there before she was killed?"

"Sure. You people have her desk calendars, but she hadn't taken any vacation in the couple of months before she died, so I'm sure she was down there."

"Thanks," Lucas said.

"Well?" said Sloan.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Two of the women were in the courthouse shortly before they were attacked. Even the woman from St. Paul, and it wouldn't be that common for somebody from St. Paul to be over in the Hennepin County courthouse. And Mr. Rice was there all the time. It would be a hell of a coincidence."

"One of the other women, this Bell, the waitress-punker, was busted out at Target on Lake Street for shoplifting. It wasn't all that long ago. I remember that from our notebooks," Sloan said. "I bet she went to court down there. I don't know about the Morris woman."

"I'll run Morris," Lucas said. "It could be something."

"I got her house number, maybe her husband's there," Sloan said. He flipped open his notebook and read out the number as Lucas dialed. Lucas let it ring twenty times without an answer, and hung up.

"I'll get him later," Lucas said.

"Want me to check on this welfare guy?"

"You might take a look at him," Lucas said. He turned to Rice. "Did the welfare worker have an accent of any kind? Even a little one?"

"No, not that I remember. I know he's from here in Minnesota, he told me that."

"Damn," said Lucas.

"Could be a Svenska," said Sloan. "You get some of those Swedes and Germans from out in central Minnesota, they still got an accent. Maybe this Ruiz heard the accent and thought it was something like southwestern."

"It's worth a look," Lucas said.

At the office, he called Anderson and got Morris' husband's office. He answered on the first ring.

"Yes, she did," he said. "It must of been about a month before… Anyway, she used to work out at a health club on Hennepin Avenue, and about once a week she'd get a parking ticket. She'd just throw it in her glove compartment and forget about it. She must have had ten or fifteen of them. Then she got a notice that they were going to issue a warrant for her arrest unless she came down and paid and cleared this court order. So she went down there. It took most of a day to get everything cleared up."

"Was that the only time she was down there?"

"Well, recently. She might have been other times, but I don't know of any."

When he finished with Morris, Lucas called the clerk of court and checked on Lucy Bell's appearance date on the shoplifting charge. May 27. He looked at a calendar. A Friday, a little more than a month before she was killed.

So they had all been in the courthouse. The gun had come from City Hall, through a guy who hung around the courthouse. Lucas walked down the hall to Anderson 's office.

"So what does it mean?" Anderson asked. "He's picking them up right here?"

"Picking them out, maybe," Lucas said. "Three of them were involved in courts and would have court files. Our man could be researching them through that."

"I'll check on who pulled the files," Anderson said.

"Do that."

"So what do you think?" Anderson asked.

"It was too easy," Lucas said. "This cat don't fall that easy."

Aerosmith was fine. Lucas sat back in his seat, watching with amusement as Carla bounced up and down with the music, turning to him, laughing, reaching a fist overhead with the other fifteen thousand screaming fans to shake it at the stage…

She asked him up for coffee.

"That's the most fun I've had since… I don't know, a long time," she said as she put two cups of water in the microwave.

Lucas was prowling the studio, looking at her fiber work. "How long have you been doing this?" he asked.

"Five, six years. I painted first, then got into sculpture, and then kind of drifted into this. My grandmother had a loom, I've known about weaving since I was a kid."

"How about this sculpture?" he asked, gesturing at the squidlike hangings.

"I don't know. I think they were mostly an effort to catch a trend, you know? They seemed okay at the time, but now I think I was playing games with myself. It's all kind of derivative. I'm pretty much back to straight weaving now."

"Tough racket. Art, I mean."

"That isn't the half of it, brother," she said. The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, dumped a spoon of instant gourmet coffee into each cup, and stirred.

"Cinnamon coffee," she said, handing him a cup.

He took a sip. "Hot. Good, though."

"I wanted to ask you something," she said.

"Go."

"I was thinking I did pretty well when I fought this guy off," she said.

"You did."

"But I'm still scared. I know what you said the other night, about him not coming back. But I was lucky the first time. He wasn't ready for me. If he comes back, I might not be so lucky."

"So?"

"I'm wondering about a gun."

He thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

"It's worth thinking about," he said. "Most people, I'd say no. When most people buy a gun, they instantly become its most likely victim. The next-most-likely victims are the spouse and kids. Then the neighbors. But you don't have a spouse or kids and you're not likely to get in a brawl with your neighbors. And I think you're probably cool enough to use one right."

"So I ought to get one?"

"I can't tell you that. If you do, you'd be the most likely victim, at least statistically. But with some people, statistics are nonsense. If you're not the type of person to have stupid accidents, if you're not careless, if you're not suicidal or think a gun's a toy, then you might want to get one. There is a chance that this guy will come back. You're the only living witness to an attack."

"I'd want to know what to get," Carla said. She took a sip of coffee. "I couldn't spend too much. And I'd want some help learning to use it."

"I could loan you one, if you like, just until we get the guy," Lucas said. "Let me see your hand. Hold it up."

She held her hand up, fingers spread, palm toward him. He pressed his palm against hers and looked at the length of his finger overlap.

"Small hands," he said. "I've got an older Charter Arms.38 special that ought to fit just about right. And we can get some semiwadcutter loads so you don't get too much penetration and kill all your neighbors if you have to use it."

"What?"

"Your walls here are plaster and lath," Lucas explained. He leaned back and rapped on a wall, and little crumbs of plaster dropped off. "If you use too powerful a round, you'll punch one long hole through the whole building. And anybody standing in the way."

"I didn't think of that." She looked worried.

"We'll fix you up. You live about a hundred yards from the St. Paul police indoor range. I shoot over there in competition. I could probably fix it to give you a few lessons."

"Let me sleep on it," she said. "But I think so."

When he was leaving, she closed the door except for a tiny crack and said as he started down the hall, "Hey, Davenport?"

He stopped. "Yes?"

"Are you ever going to ask me out again?"

"Sure. If you're willing to put up with me."

"I'm willing," she said, and eased the door closed. Lucas whistled on his way to the elevator, and she leaned against the door, listening to the sound of him and smiling to herself.

Late that night, Lucas lay in the spare bedroom and looked at the charts pinned to the wall. After a while he stood and wrote at the bottom of the killer's chart, "Hangs around courthouse."