Rules of Prey (4 page)

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

“Yeah, I see,” Lucas said sourly. “Thanks a lot.”

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

“Okay.”

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

Lucas nodded. “Where’s this one?”

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

“Can you contain it?”

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

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

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

“Yeah.” It had been a nightmare.

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

Lucas nodded and rubbed his jaw with his fingertips. “You’re right. They’ll go berserk,” he admitted.

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

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

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

“I’ve got full access?”

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

“I’ll want to talk to this artist,” Lucas said.

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

Lucas tucked the slip in his pants pocket. “They’re processing this Nokomis killing now?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

“And, Davenport?”

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

“Office of Special Intelligence.”

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

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

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

“Professional?” asked Lucas. “A doctor?”

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

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

“County Cork Cutlery?”

“Forget it. There’s a whole drawer full of it, out in the kitchen.”

“So he got it here.”

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

“Where’s the note?”

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

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

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

“Note looks clean.”

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

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

“Yeah. Print?”

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

“That says doctor again.”

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

“Okay. Good. Thanks, Bill.”

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

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

“Take her,” Swanson said around a mouthful of fries.

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

Like a sack of sand, Lucas thought.

“Nothin’ under her?” asked Swanson.

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

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

“I don’t see any stains.”

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

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

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

“There’s the potato . . .”

“Potato?”

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

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

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

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

“What?” Lucas was puzzled.

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

“So how’d the maddog know about it? He’s gay?”

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

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

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

“That’s the idea,” Lucas said. “You got a problem?”

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

“So what do the other homicide guys think?”

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

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

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

“Just trying to sell the house,” he concluded.

“Where are the owners?”

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

“Anybody gone out to Lewis’ house yet?”

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

“Boyfriends?”

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

“Look in the garage?”

“Yeah. No car.”

“So what do you think?”

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

“Anybody checking her calendars at her office?”

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

“Where’s her purse?”

“Over by the front door.”

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

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