Mind Prey (14 page)

Lucas told Dunn, "We'll get back."

Dunn swung a large workman's hand across the cherry desk, and the cigar safe flew across the room, the fat Cuban cigars spraying out like so much shrapnel. "Well, fuckin' find something," Dunn shouted. "You're supposed to be the fuckin' Sherlock Holmes. Quit hanging around my ass and get out and do something."

Outside the office, Sloan said, "What was all that?"

"I asked him about the rocketship."

"Oh-oh."

"Whoever it is, he's raping her," Lucas said.

As they stood talking in the parking lot, Greave called from the Minneapolis Public Library. "It's the Bible," he said. "The Nethinims are mentioned a bunch of times, but they don't seem to amount to much."

"Xerox the references and bring them back to the office. I'll be there in ten minutes," Lucas said. He punched Greave out and called Andi Manette's office, and got Black: "Can you bring a batch of the best files downtown?"

"Yeah. On the way. And we got another problem case. A guy who runs a chain of video-game arcades."

"So what're we doing?" Sloan asked.

"You want to work this?" Lucas asked.

Sloan shrugged. "I ain't got much else. I got that Turkey case, but we're having trouble getting anybody who can speak good Turk, so it's not going anywhere."

"I've never met any Turks who didn't speak pretty good English," Lucas said.

"Yeah, well, you oughta try investigating a Turk murder sometime," Sloan said. "They're yellin' no-speaka-da-English when I'm walking down the street. The guy who was killed was outa Detroit, he was sharkin', he probably had thirty grand on the street andnobody was sorry to see him go."

"Talk with Lester," Lucas said. "We need somebody to keep digging around the Manettes, Wolfe, Dunn, and anybody else who might make something out of Andi Manette dying..." He flipped the engagement ring up in the air and caught it, rolled it between his palms.

Sloan said, "You're gonna lose that fuckin' stone. You're gonna drop it and the ring is gonna bounce right down a sewer."

Lucas looked in his hand and saw the ring: he hadn't been conscious of it. "I gotta do something about this, with Weather."

"There's pretty general agreement on that," Sloan said. "My old lady is peeing her pants, waiting for you to ask. She wants all the details. If I don't get her the details, I'm a dead man."

Greave was waiting with a sheaf of computer printer-paper and handed it to Lucas. "There's not much. The Nethinims were mostly just mentioned in passing--if there's anything, it's probably in Nehemiah. Here, 3:26."

Lucas looked at the passage. Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel unto the place over against the watergate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out .

"Huh." He passed the paper to Sloan and walked down the office to a wall map of the Metro area, traced the Mississippi with his finger. "One thing you can see from the river is all those green water towers," he said. "They're like mushrooms along the tops of all the tallest hills. The water gate could be any of the dams."

"Want me to check?"

Lucas grinned. "Take you two days. Just call all the towns along here." He snapped his finger at the map. "Hastings, Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Inver Grove, South St. Paul, like that. Tell them you're working Manette and ask them to swing a patrol car by the water towers; see if there's anything to see."

Black showed up ten minutes later, morose, handed Lucas a file and a tape. "Guy's messing with kids. Somebody ought to cut his fuckin' nuts off."

"Pretty explicit?"

"It's all there, and I don't give a shit what the shrinks say. This guylikes doing it. And he likes talking about it--he likes the attention he's getting from Manette. He'll never stop."

"Yeah, he will," Lucas said, flipping through the file. "For several years... I'll take it to the chief. We want to hold off until Manette's out of the way."

Black nodded. "We got some doozies in the files." He sat down opposite Lucas, spread five files on the desk like a poker hand, pushed one toward Lucas. "Look at this guy. I think he may have raped a half-dozen women, but he talks them out of doing anything about it. He brags about it: breaks down for them, weeps. Then he laughs about it. He says he's addicted to sex, and he's coming on to Manette... right here, see, she mentions it, and how she might have to redirect his therapy."

They were reading files an hour later when Greave hurried in. "They've got something in Cottage Grove."

Lucas stood up. "What is it?"

"They said it's like an oil drum under one of the water towers."

"How do they know?"

"It's got your name spray-painted on it," Greave said.

"My name?"

Greave shrugged. "That's what they said--and they are freaked out. They want your ass down there."

On the way down to Cottage Grove, the cellular buzzed and Lucas flipped it open. "Yeah?"

Mail cooed, "Hey, Davenport, got it figured out?"

Lucas knew the voice before the third word was out. "Listen, I..."

But he was gone.

Chapter
9

>

Six blocks from the water tower, Lucas ran into a police blockade, two squad cars V-ed across the street. The civilian traffic was turning around, jamming up the street. He put the Porsche on the yellow line and accelerated past the frustrated drivers, until two cops ran toward him waving him off.

A red-faced patrolman, one hand on his pistol, leaned up to the window. "Hey, what the hell..."

Lucas held up his ID and said, "Davenport, Minneapolis PD. Get me through."

The cop ran back to one of the squads, yelled something through an open window, and the cop inside backed it up. Lucas accelerated through the gap and up toward the water tower. Along the way, he saw cops in the streets, two different sets of uniforms. They were evacuating houses along the way, and women with kids in station wagons hurried down the streets away from the tower.

A bomb? Chemicals? What?

The water tower looked like an aqua-green alien fromWar of the Worlds , its big egg-shaped body supported by fat, squat legs. Three fire trucks, a cluster of squad cars, a bomb squad truck, two ambulances, and a wrecker were parked a hundred yards away. Lucas pulled into the cluster.

"Davenport?" A stout, red-faced man in a too-tight cop's uniform waved him over. "Don Carpenter, Cottage Grove." He wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating heavily, though the day was cool. "We might have a big problem."

"Bomb?"

Carpenter looked toward the top of the hill. "We don't know. But it's an oil barrel, and it's full of something heavy. We haven't tried to move it, but it's substantial."

"Somebody said my name is on it."

"That's right:Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police . Standard bullshit graffiti-artist spray paint. We were gonna open it, but then someone said, 'Jesus, if this guy's fuckin' with Davenport, what's to keep him from putting a few pounds of dynamite or some shit in there? Or a gas bomb or something?' So we're standing back."

"Huh." Lucas looked up toward the tower. Two men were there, talking. "Who are those guys?"

"Bomb squad. We were all over the place before somebody thought it might be a bomb, so we don't think it's dangerous to get near. A time bomb doesn't make sense, because he didn't know when we'd find it."

"Let's take a look," Lucas said.

The bottom of the tower was enclosed by the hurricane fence, with a truck-sized gate on one end. "Cut the chain on the gate and drove right in," Carpenter said. They were at the crest of the hill, and below them a steady stream of cars was leaving the neighborhood.

"But nobody saw it."

"We don't know--we were talking about a door-to-door, but then the bomb idea came up, and we never got to it."

"Maybe later," Lucas said.

The two bomb squad cops walked over and Lucas recognized one of them. He said, "How are you? You were on that case out in Lake Elmo." The guy said, "Yeah, Bill Path, and this is Jesus Martinez." He threw a thumb at his partner, and Lucas said, "What've we got?"

"Maybe nothing," Path said, looking back at the tower. Lucas could see the black oil drum through the hurricane fence. It sat directly under the bulb of the four-legged water tower. "But we don't want to try to move it. We're gonna pull the lid from a distance and see what happens."

"We've drained the tower," Carpenter said. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve again. "Just in case."

"Can I?" Lucas said, nodding at the oil barrel.

"Sure," said Path. "Just don't kick it."

The barrel sat in the shade of the tower, and Lucas walked over to look at it, and then around it: a standard oil barrel, with a little rust, and a lid that looked professionally tight.

"One of the first guys knocked on it, and nothing happened; so we knocked on it when we got here," Martinez said, grinning at Lucas. He stepped up to the barrel and knocked on it. "It's full of something."

"Could be water," said Path. "If it's full, and it's water, it'd weigh about four-fifty."

"How'd he move it?" Lucas asked. "He couldn't use a fork lift."

"I think he rolled it," Path said. "Look..."

He walked away from the barrel, peered around, then pointed. There was a deep edge-cut in the soft earth, then a series of interlocking rings along with a wavy line. "I think he rolled it to here, then tipped it up, then rim-rolled it to the middle."

Lucas nodded: he could see the pattern in the dirt.

"Hey, look at this, Bill," Martinez said to Path. He pointed at a lower corner of the barrel. "Is that just condensation, or is there a pin-hole?"

A drop of liquid seemed to be squeezing out of the barrel. Path got to his knees, peered at it, then grunted, "Looks like a pinhole." He picked up a dandelion leaf, caught the drop on the leaf, smelled it, and passed it to Martinez.

"What?" Lucas asked.

Martinez said, "Nothing--probably water."

"So let's jerk the lid."

Path fixed a block to an access ladder on the water tower, while Martinez fitted a harness around the lid. Then he tied a rock climber's rope to the harness, ran it up through the block and down to the tow truck. The truck let out all of its cable, and when they finished, they were a hundred and fifty yards from the barrel.

"You ready for a big noise?" Path asked Carpenter.

The chief said, "Don't talk like that. Do you mean that? Do you think?"

They all squatted behind cars, the wrecker rolled forward, and the lid flipped off like a beer cap. Nothing happened. Lucas could hear a plane droning down the river.

"Well, shit," Martinez said after a moment. He stood up. "Let's go look."

They walked slowly back to the barrel. From thirty feet away, Lucas could see that it was filled with water. When they got next to it, they looked carefully inside. A small body was at the bottom of the barrel, a pale oval face turned to look up at them. The water was cloudy with a sediment of some kind, and the body shimmered, out of focus, a white dress floating around it like gauze, black hair drifting around the head.

Martinez looked in the barrel and said, "No. I don't do this." And he walked away.

"Oh, shit. Who is it?" Carpenter asked, peering open-mouthed into the barrel.

The body was small. "Probably Genevieve Dunn," Lucas said. "Are we sure this is water?"

Path, looking in, put his face close to the surface and said, "Yeah. It's water. He could have a big chunk of white phosphorus in there, waiting for us to get rid of the water."

Lucas shook his head: "Nah. This is what he wanted me to see. A jack-in-the-box. The motherfucker is playing games... Is that the Medical Examiner down there?"

Carpenter nodded. "Yeah. I'll get him."

Lucas stepped away and looked down the hill, waiting. There should be something else--or Mail would call again, to gloat. Carpenter, standing beside him, said, "I'd pull the trigger on this guy. How can you kill a kid?"

Lucas said, "Yeah?" He remembered the line from a Vietnam vet, a street guy. How can you kill a kid? Just lead them a little less...

The Medical Examiner was a young man with a thin face, thin spectacles, and a large Adam's apple. He walked up, glanced in the barrel, and said, "What's the shit in the water?"

Nobody knew.

"Well, give me something I can fish around with, huh?" He was unselfconsciously cheerful, even for a Medical Examiner. "Give me one of those fire axes. I don't want to put my hand in there if we don't know what it is."

"Take it easy with the ax," Carpenter said.'

"Don't worry about it," the examiner said. He looked in the barrel again. "That's not a kid."

"What?" Lucas walked back.

"Not unless she had deformed hands and too big a head," he said confidently.

Lucas looked in the water again--it still looked like a child's body. "I think it's some kind of big plastic doll," the examiner said. A fireman came up with a long curved tool that looked like an oversized poker. "Here."