Broken Prey (3 page)

Sloan shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll find anything looking around. I’ve done everything I could think of with Angela Larson—went over her apartment inch by inch, the place she worked, did histories on her until they were coming out of my ears. I don’t think this has much to do with the victims. They’re stranger-killings. He stalks them and kills them.”

“Trophies?”

“I don’t know. We never found Larson’s clothes or her jewelry, so maybe they were taken as trophies . . . but then . . . Rice’s clothes are right here.”

“Never found out where he killed Larson.”

“No. Probably a basement. The soles of her feet were dirty, and there was concrete dust in the dirt. So . . . could have been a basement.”

THEY STOOD NEXT TO THE BODY for a minute, a strange comradely cop-moment, their shoes just inches from the puddle of blood, a half dozen fat lazy bluebottle flies buzzing around the room; bluebottles, somebody once told Lucas, were actually blowflies. One landed on the far side of the blood puddle, and they could see it nibbling at the crusting blood.

“You can’t really quit,” Lucas said.

“Sure I can,” Sloan said.

“What would you do?” A fly buzzed past Lucas’s head, and he swatted at it.

“Ah . . . talk to you about it sometime. I got some ideas.”

Lucas got up, looked around: a pleasant, homey place, the house creaking a bit, a sound that must have seemed warm and welcome; a glider-chair lounged in one corner, comfortably worn, facing a fat old Sony color TV with a braided rug on the floor in front of it. A couple of nice-looking quilts hung from the walls, between yellowed photographs of what must have been grandparents and great-grandparents.

“YOU KNOW THE PROBLEM,” Lucas said softly. He was looking at a log-cabin quilt; he didn’t know anything about quilts, but he liked the earth colors in it. “We’re not going to pick up much here, not unless we get lucky. Maybe DNA. But where’s that gonna get us?”

“A conviction when we get him.”

“The problem is getting him. That’s the fucking problem,” Lucas said. “A conviction . . . that can always be fixed, when we get the right guy. Getting him . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

“I want all the paper from Minneapolis,” Lucas said.

Sloan nodded. “I’ll get Anderson on it.”

“And I’ll get the crime-scene guys to copy everything to you, from here. You got nothing off the Larson killing?”

“I got names. That’s one thing I got.”

“Okay. That’s a start. I’ll get a co-op center going, get them to set up a database. We’ll pipe in everything from here, from Nordwall’s guys.”

“There’s
gotta
be more from here. There’s gotta be,” Sloan said, looking around, an edge of desperation in his voice. “If we don’t get anything, then we won’t get him before . . .”

Lucas nodded and finished his sentence: “. . . before he does it again.”

OUTSIDE ON THE LAWN, Nordwall and the other deputies were sitting on the grass, in the shade of an elm, looking like attendees at the annual cop picnic. The summer was at its peak, the prairie grasses lush and tall, just starting to show hints of yellow and tan. A mile or so away, across a wide, low valley, a distant car kicked up a cloud of gravel dust.

Nordwall was chewing on a grass stem; when they came up, he stood and asked, “What do you think?”

“Same guy,” Sloan said.

“Sloan did a lot of research on the first one, up in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna set up a co-op center out of the BCA. We need a complete biography on Rice and the kid—who did they know, who had they met recently. The guy knew about him—something about him. He didn’t come out here by accident. And he knew about the first one, too. Maybe the two of them, Rice and Larson, intersect somewhere.”

“You think . . . maybe some kind of boy-girl romance thing?” one of the deputies suggested. “A jilted lover? Rice’s wife got killed in a car accident a couple years ago, he might have been looking around.”

“You get a jilted lover, you get a gun in a bedroom or a knife in the kitchen, but you don’t get the boyfriend raped,” Sloan said mildly.

Nordwall swiveled and looked at another of the deputies and said, “You get right on this biography, Bill. Don’t hold back, and don’t worry about the overtime. I’ll cover anything you need.” To Lucas, he said, “This is Bill James. I’ll get his phone number for you.”

The deputy stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants with a couple of slaps: “I’ll go right now. Get started.”

“What happened with the wife?” Lucas asked. “A straight-up accident, no question?”

“In the winter, winter before last,” said Nordwall. “She came around a snowplow, didn’t see the pickup coming the other way. Boom. Died in the ditch.”

“So . . .”

“Whole goddamn family up in smoke,” a deputy said.

“Here comes a truck,” somebody else said.

A white
Mission Impossible–
style van was rolling down the gravel road toward them. “That’s the crime-scene guys,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you guys get them inside? Me and Sloan’ll go talk to Mrs. Rice.”

LAURINA RICE WAS IN HER SIXTIES, with white puffy grandmother hair and a round, leathery face lined by age and the sun. She was too heavy, too many years of potatoes and beef. She wore a dress with small flowers on it. Her sister, Gloria, was perhaps three or four years older, and the friend about the same.

Laurina Rice struggled to get her feet on the ground and get out of the car as Lucas and Sloan walked over to it. On the other side of the car, a hundred and fifty yards out over the bean field, a flock of redwinged blackbirds hassled a crow, diving on the bigger bird like fighters on a bomber.

As had happened on other crime scenes, Lucas was for a second struck by the ordinariness of the day around him: nature didn’t know about crime, about rape and murder, and simply went on: blue skies, puffy clouds, blackbirds hassling crows.

“You’re the state man, Mr. Davenport, and Mr. Sloan from Minneapolis . . .” Rice said. Her eyes were like a chicken’s, small and sharp and focused.

“Yes. I’m terribly sorry about what happened, Mrs. Rice.”

She twisted the fingers of her right hand in her left, literally wringing them. “I need to see my boy, to see that it’s him.”

Lucas shook his head: “I’m afraid we have to process the scene first. We have to try to catch this man—he killed a young woman up in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, and he’s going to kill more people if we don’t catch him. We can’t move the bodies until we have the crime scene processed . . .”

“Like on the TV show?” Gloria suggested.

“Something like that, but better,” Lucas said. “These people are real.”

“How long?” Rice asked.

Lucas shook his head again. “I can’t tell you. It depends on what has to be done. It would be best if you went home and rested. The sheriff will call you before they move the bodies. That would be the time.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Sloan smiled at her, his best sympathetic smile, and said, “We understand. If you need anything, ask the sheriff. And would you . . . we have some questions about your son.”

“Okay,” she said. She sniffed. “We knew there’d be questions.”

They did the routine biography—who might not like him, whom he had arguments with, debts, women, jealous husbands, where he spent his nights, what he did for entertainment.

Lucas asked the hard one: “Mrs. Rice, as far as you know, did your son have any homosexual friends, or acquaintances?”

She looked to Sloan, then back to Lucas. “Are you . . . he was married. He didn’t hang around with homosexuals.” She started to tear up.

“This is routine,” Lucas said. “We have to ask. There was a good deal of violence here, which sometimes characterizes homosexual murders, especially murders of passion.”

She knew what he was asking. “My boy was not a homo,” she snapped. The women behind her all nodded. “He was married, he was widowed, he would have remarried someday, but he just hadn’t got started since Shelly was killed. He was
not
a gay person.”

“But did he know any gays?” Lucas persisted. “Somebody who might have built up a fantasy about him? He was a good-looking man.”

Laurina looked at Gloria, and they simultaneously shook their heads. “I don’t think he even knew any gays,” she said. “He would have mentioned it. We had supper together once a week, we talked about everything.”

“Okay,” Lucas said.

THEY CHATTED A BIT LONGER, then moved back into the house, leaving Rice and the others in the car.

The next four hours were taken up with the technicalities and legalities of murder: the crime-scene technicians worked the murder scene, the medical examiner came and went, leaving behind an assistant and two men to handle the bodies. A state representative, who lived ten miles away, stopped and talked to the sheriff, said something about the death penalty, wanted to look inside but accepted the “no,” and went on his way.

“Dipshit,” Nordwall said, as the legislator’s car trundled down the driveway.

When the crime-scene techs had decided that the murders took place pretty much in the area of the two bodies, Lucas and Sloan began working through the small intimacies in other parts of the house, looking at bills and letters, collecting recent photographs, checking the e-mail in the five-year-old Dell computer, stopping every now and then for a Diet Coke. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for in the house, but that was okay; they were impressing images and words on their memories, so they would be there if anything should trip them in the future.

“He has a Visa card about due,” Sloan said at one point. “We oughta get the bill and see where’s he’s been.”

“I looked at his Exxon bill out on the kitchen table. He hasn’t been far away, not for the last year or so,” Lucas said. He was digging through Rice’s wallet. “One tank of gas every Friday or Saturday.”

“Had the kid in school,” Sloan said.

“Yeah . . .” He flipped through the register in Rice’s checkbook. “Four hundred dollars in checking, seventeen hundred in savings. He didn’t write many checks . . . mostly at the supermarket, and bills.” He found an address book, but nothing that looked like a particularly new entry, but Lucas set it aside for the database they’d be creating.

A cop stuck his head in: “They’re picking up the kid.”

“All right.”

Two minutes later, the same cop came by: “One of your crime-scene guys says to stop by for a minute.”

They were upstairs, in Rice’s bedroom. They followed the cop down and found a technician working with a small sample bag and some swabs. He looked up when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the room: “Thought you’d want to know. The fingernail blood, I’m almost sure it isn’t Rice’s. There’s skin with it, and a little hair follicle that’s darker than Rice’s. I think.”

“Anything else?”

“The usual stuff—lots more hair around. We’re picking it up, but who knows where it came from? And the guy took a trophy—he cut Rice’s penis off, and there’s no sign of it around here. Just the penis, not the testicles. The anus seems to have some lubricant still on it, so I think the killer or killers used a condom. Probably won’t be any semen.”

Lucas looked at Sloan, who shrugged. “Hard to tell what that is,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t want there to be any DNA, so maybe he knows about DNA and worries about it. Maybe he’s afraid of AIDS, which might mean something if we could show that Rice had some homosexual contacts.”

“The sexual . . . um, aspects . . . really look like a gay thing to me,” the tech said. “The violence and the sexual trophy-taking.”

Lucas and Sloan nodded. “But why was the first one a woman?”

“Maybe there was a gay thing, then Rice went after the woman, and his gay partner blew up,” the tech said. “Maybe he was punishing them, and that’s what all this whipping stuff is about.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said doubtfully.

“It’s a concept,” Sloan said. He didn’t care for the idea either. “We need to get this biography. I need to see if I can link Angela Larson to anything down here.”

“You said she was a student; there’s a state university branch down here.”

“I’ll look,” Sloan said. “But I did all that background on her, and nobody said nuthin’ about Mankato.”

WHEN THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE were done, the medical examiner’s assistants came in and picked the body up, zipped it into a bag, and carried it out. The blood splotch on the floor, which retained the impression of the kneeling body, looked like strange black modern art.

They stood over it for a moment, and then Sloan said, “I don’t think there’s much more here.” They’d been inside, looking for something, anything, for five hours. If they’d found anything useful, it wasn’t apparent.

“This guy . . . ,” Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. He was thinking about the killer. “This guy is gonna bust our chops.”

4

HE WAS SHORT, big nosed, red haired, pugnacious, intense, loud, never wrong, willing to bend any ethical rule, and three years out of journalism school. He had a facility with words admired by some in the newsroom. The admiration was offset by the undeniable fact that he was an ambitious weasely little asshole; and saved, to some extent, by the additional fact that at the
Star-Tribune
, being an ambitious weasely little asshole was not a distinguishing characteristic.

Ruffe Ignace stood on the corner, talking to himself—nothing in particular, snatches of old songs, possible story leads, bits of internal dialogue, comments on the passing cars and the women inside them. He bounced on his toes like a boxer, and talked to himself, all the time, like humming, or buzzing. He called the ongoing dialogue Ruffe’s Radio, and he played it all the time.

Boy in a Bubble, maybe there’s something there; Mmm, Lexus GX470, you old fart; hey, look that, look at that ass. Yes, Pat, there he is, Ruffe Ignace, supposedly the richest man in America. He was with the Special Forces before that, you know, a war hero, in Afghanistan, killed twenty-four Afghanis with a Bowie knife. He’s got more money and had more supermodel pussy than any other six guys in the country. Say, I’d like to get that jacket—that’s a good-looking coat . . .

Like that.

All the time.

A co-worker once complained that sitting next to Ignace was like sitting next to a bad-tempered bee. Ignace ignored her; and now he stood on the corner, bouncing, waiting, and buzzing.

HUBBARD CAME DOWN the other side of the street, bright blue double-knit blazer from JCPenney, gray slacks, brown shoes. From a hundred yards away, he held Ignace’s eyes, then turned and went into the front doors of the public library. Ignace waited through another light, then followed him.

RUFFE IGNACE HATED HIS NAME. Both first and last, but especially Ruffe. Ruffe—Roo-Fay—came from a French word meaning “red haired.” Since he was red haired, and since his parents had been French, he could hardly deny the truth of it. The newsroom people learned early in his career that Ruffe hated being called Rufus, which also meant red haired, so they called him that at every opportunity. A few people even tried Iggy, but that drew a response so violent and poisonous that they decided to leave it alone.

Ignace barely tolerated the
Star-Tribune
, which he considered next of kin to a suburban shopper. He looked forward to his career at the
New York Times
, where virtually all reporters had weird names, and where Ruffe Ignace would be considered distinguished, rather than an occasion for jokes.

To get there, he had to do something
good
. To do something really good, you needed luck and talent.

Ignace had the talent. In addition to his writing ability, he had a nice sense of drama and, more important, knew how to suck when he needed to. As a member of the paper’s Public Safety Team, he applied the suck liberally around the Minneapolis Police Department.

A part-time homicide cop named Bob Hubbard was Ignace’s best inside source. Hubbard wanted a full-time homicide desk, instead of being shuffled off to Sex or Property Crimes whenever they needed more people. Ignace promised, and delivered, attention to Hubbard’s crime-solving talent. Hubbard delivered the goods from the inside.

Luck was an entirely different matter. Luck either kissed you on the ass, or it didn’t. Not much you could do about it but get ready in case it happened.

IGNACE SLIPPED INTO THE LIBRARY two minutes behind Hubbard. They met at the library because Hubbard had never seen a cop there, and back in the Female-Problems stacks, you might go decades without seeing one.

Hubbard was peering into a book called
The Vaginal Perspective
when Ruffe turned the corner. The cop slipped the book back on the shelf and asked, shocked, “You ever see what’s in these things?”

Ruffe looked at the ranks of books and shuddered. “No.” To Hubbard: “Whatcha got, Bob? I got that thing on the Mikasa shop and the Mini-Cooper . . .”

“This ain’t funny,” Hubbard said urgently, pitching his voice to a near-whisper. He was a blond, fleshy man with pink cheeks made rosier by booze. He was holding a manila envelope. “You gotta, gotta, gotta cover for me. Honest to God, I don’t even think I oughta be here.”

Now Ruffe was interested. Hubbard was sweating.

“So whattya got?”

“You owe me big for this one,” Hubbard said.

“What is it?” Ruffe pressed.

“You owe me, and you’re gonna pay,” Hubbard said. “I get to name a story.”

“Whoa, man. That’d depend. What story you want . . . what story you
got
.”

“The story I want is just a nice story for a lady I know. The story I got . . .”

“What?”

“We got a serial killer,” Hubbard said. “You know Sloan?”

“Yeah.” They were close enough that Ignace could smell the afternoon martinis on Hubbard’s breath, and maybe something else—peanut-butter cheese crackers? With martinis? “He thinks I’m an asshole.”

“You are an asshole, Ruffe.”

“Yeah, yeah . . .” Ignace didn’t mind what the small-towners thought, if it got him to the
Times
; he made a keep-rolling motion with his finger.

“Sloan caught this killing a couple of weeks back,” Hubbard whispered. “It was really fuckin’ ugly, but everybody chilled on it, because we don’t want a lot of shit from the TV stations.”

Ignace thought for a second, his eyes narrowing: “Angela Larson, from Chicago. Everybody thinks it’s a boyfriend problem.”

“Well, it wasn’t. It never was. She was tortured, raped, and displayed . . . you know what displayed is?”

“Yeah.” Ignace was hooked now. He could feel Lady Luck puckering up. “But how do you know it was serial?”

“Because this morning, this old buddy of Sloan’s from the BCA calls him up, and they haul ass down to Mankato. The word is—and the word is good—that it’s an identical killing, except for one thing. The victim was tortured and raped, just like Larson. Only it was a
guy
. Then they were both killed the same way: their throats were cut.”

“Throats?” Ignace whispered. They both turned and looked up and down the stacks. “You mean, like with a razor?”

“Just like with a razor,” Hubbard said. “To top it off, the killer also killed the second victim’s child. Swatted him like a fly. Killed the kid, then went ahead and raped and killed the father.”

Ruffe was impressed. “Jesus. You got something from the scene?”

“Not from that one—but I got the inside shit from the Larson case, what they never told anybody. And I got a Xerox of a crime-scene photograph. You can’t use the picture. In fact, I’m not even gonna give it to you, come to think of it. I’ll let you look at it.”

Ignace wet his lips. “I promise you I wouldn’t put it in the paper. Especially not if it was a Xerox.”

“Uh-uh. I can’t take the chance,” Hubbard said, shaking his head. “The thing is, what I’m giving you could have come from lots of people, but the picture had to come from Homicide. They’ll know it was me. You can look at it so you can write up the crime scene. I figured you’d want to do that.”

“Bob . . .”

“You swear to God you’ll cover me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see the goddamn thing. And who do I talk to for on-the-record?”

“Okay. The sheriff down in Blue Earth County. His name is Nordwall. And Sloan, I guess. I’d stay away from the BCA guy, his name is Lucas Davenport. He’s got better sources at the
Star-Tribune
than you do. He’d find out in two minutes who you were talking to.”

“He couldn’t, because I’ve never told anybody. I never will,” Ignace said. “I only use you for the tips.”

“Some of the guys have noticed I get a little print on my cases.” He was carefully holding the manila envelope out of reach.

“Well, tough shit. You can either have it or not,” Ignace said. “Let me see the fuckin’ photograph. Give me a couple names . . . I can always pin it on somebody else.”

“You owe me a story,” Hubbard repeated.

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

HUBBARD SHOOK THE XEROX out of the envelope and passed it over. Ignace looked at it for a moment: the photograph was harshly lit, in the night, giving it a garish vibe. The woman looked like she’d been crucified in the dirt, her body bright white against the short spring foliage. He said, “Huh. Horseshit photo.”

“It wasn’t a goddamn portrait studio,” Hubbard rasped.

“I can tell. Focused right on her pussy. Photo guy probably peddled it out to the Internet.”

“Rufus . . .”

“Fuck you, Bob,” Ignace said. He pulled a narrow reporter’s notebook out of his back pocket, looked at the photo for a few more seconds, then made some rapid notes in perfect Gregg shorthand. When he was done, he said, “Give me some names. I need to start at the bottom and confirm some of this shit from outsiders, before I go to Sloan.”

Hubbard nodded. “Okay: the new victim’s name was Adam Rice, the kid’s name was Josh, and Adam’s mom’s name is Laurina Rice. She’s listed . . .”

“What about a wife?”

“I heard she died a while back, but I don’t know the details . . .”

THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER two minutes, and then Ignace folded the notebook and said, “Bob, I owe you. I truly do.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I want. Write this down in your fuckin’ notebook. There’s a new restaurant named Funny Capers in Uptown. I want a story about it. A good story. What a happenin’ place it is. Like that. They got music on Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Girlfriend? Or investment?” He’d opened the notebook again and was taking it down.

“A friend of mine,” Hubbard said. His eyes flicked away.

“If I need some last-minute comments on the place, can I call you at home?”

Hubbard flinched. “Jesus Christ, don’t do that.”

Ignace said, “One more thing. We got no art for this murder. Suppose we went with a graphic of a straight razor. I mean, would that be fucked up? Are they saying razor, or could it be a box cutter or something?”

“Fuck, I don’t know, I guess a razor would be all right,” Hubbard said. He ducked down a bit, to look through a bookshelf, looking for anyone who might know him. “Do what you want—and give me that Xerox.” He took the Xerox back, stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “Wait five minutes before you come out. Read something, or something.”

“It’s a library, Bob, they might get suspicious.”

“Okay, go look at blow jobs on the Internet. Just give me five minutes.”

RUFFE’S RADIO WAS RUNNING hard on the way back to the paper:
I shall not be moved; that’s what Ignace said, just before he led the attack on the hijackers. Tragically . . . Is that a cashmere sweater? It’s eighty degrees out here . . . Wonder if alpaca comes from alpacas? Four-wheel drift; could you do that in a Jeep? . . .

He took the elevator up to the newsroom, bustled back to his desk. Most reporters dreaded calling survivors in a murder or tragic accident. Ignace didn’t mind. He called Laurina Rice first, got a sober, cold-voiced woman, and asked, “Laurina?”

“Laurina is . . . indisposed,” the cold-voiced woman said. Ignace recognized her immediately: the officious neighbor or relative who was “protecting” somebody the media might want to talk to. “May I tell her who called?”

“I just heard about Adam and Josh, and I really need to talk to her,” Ignace said. Then he pulled out a reporter’s cold-call trick, an implication of intimacy with the target. “Is this Florence?”

“No, no, uh, just a minute.”

Most people involved in tragedies want to talk, Ignace had found, if only you could get through to them. He waited ten seconds, and then had Laurina on the line: “Laurina: I’m terribly sorry about Adam and Josh . . .”

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, they wouldn’t even let me see them . . .”

“Do they know when it happened?” Ignace asked.

“They think yesterday . . . uh, who is this?”

“Ruffe Ignace from the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
We’re alerting people around the state that we have this monster loose . . .”

“He is! He is! He’s a monster.”

She began sobbing and Ignace noted in Gregg, “Weeping, sobbing, disconsolate . . .”

“People tell me that Adam and Josh were wonderful people, no bother to anyone,” Ignace said. “They can’t figure out who would do this. Do the police think anyone he knows . . . ?”

“No, they told me this man is a monster, that he killed a woman in the Twin Cities . . .”

“A beautiful young girl named Angela Larson from Chicago,” Ignace said. “She was just trying to work her way through college.”

“Oh, God. And with Adam, after the tragedy last year . . .”

“Tragedy? The police didn’t tell me about a tragedy.” A disapproving tone, as though secrets had been withheld.

“His wife was killed in an awful, awful accident,” Rice said. “Adam was a widower and poor little Josh lost his mother . . .”

“Did little Josh ever talk to you about her?”

“You know, just last Christmas, he said that he would give up every gift he had if he could have Mommy back. He was so sweet, and smart! He was my only grandchild, I’ll never have a grandchild now.”

She was rolling. Once you got an interviewee rolling, you tried not to interrupt. With an occasional prompt, or short sympathetic question, Ignace had pumped her dry in twenty minutes. He even had the detail about the tire swing hanging from the oak tree out on the lawn.

“But they didn’t let you see them . . .”

“Only their faces. The sheriff told me I didn’t want to, but they came out with him in that black bag and I marched right up and I said, ‘I want to see my grandson!’ I wouldn’t take ‘No.’ So they unzipped it and let me look at his face . . .”

“What did you think when you saw his face? What was your reaction?”

“Oh my God . . .” The bawling started again, and Ignace took it down in Gregg . . .

HE WAS BUZZING when he hung up, Ruffe’s Radio:
There you go, Ooo, the thing about Ignace is, he’s smarter than any reporter in the Twin Cities. You know he used to be an Olympic acrobat . . . Wait, do they have acrobats in the Olympics? Maybe it’s gymnastics. Some hot chick with the big boobs on ESPN: Tell me, Lord Ignace, how does it feel to be knighted by the queen . . . ?