Rules of Prey (5 page)

On the way back to the station, he crossed the river into St. Paul, stopped at his house, changed into jeans, and traded the nylon jacket for a blue linen sport coat. He thought about it for a few seconds, then took a small .25-caliber automatic pistol and an ankle holster from a hideout shelf in his desk, strapped it to his right ankle, and pulled the jean leg down to cover it.

The television remote-broadcast trucks were stacked up outside City Hall when Lucas got back to police headquarters. He parked in the garage across the street, again marveled at the implacable ugliness of City Hall. He went in the back doors and down to his office.

When he’d been removed from the robbery detail, administration had to find a place to put him. His rank required some kind of office. Lucas found it himself, a storage room with a steel door on the basement level. The janitors cleaned it out and painted a number on the door. There was no other indication of who occupied the office. Lucas liked it that way. He unlocked it, went inside, and dialed Carla Ruiz’ phone number.

“This is Carla.” She had a pleasantly husky voice.

“My name is Lucas Davenport. I’m a lieutenant with the Minneapolis Police Department,” he said. “I need to interview you. The sooner the better.”

“Jeez, I can’t tonight . . .”

“We’ve had another killing.”

“Oh, no. Who was it?”

“A real-estate saleslady over here in Minneapolis. The whole thing will be on the ten-o’clock news.”

“I don’t have a TV.”

“Well, look, how about tomorrow? How about if I stopped around at one o’clock?”

“That’d be fine. God, that’s awful about this other woman.”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow?”

“How’ll I know you?”

“I’ll have a rose in my teeth,” he said. “And a gold badge.”

The briefing room was jammed with equipment, cables, swearing technicians, and bored cops. Cameramen negotiated lighting arrangements, print reporters flopped on the folding chairs and gossiped or doodled in their notebooks, television reporters hustled around looking for scraps of information or rumor that would give them an edge on the competition. A dozen microphones were clipped to the podium at the front of the room, while the tripod-mounted cameras were arrayed in a semicircle at the rear. A harried janitor fixed a broken standard that supported an American flag. Another tried to squeeze a few more folding chairs between the podium and the cameras. Lucas stood in the doorway a moment, spotted an empty chair near the back, and took a step toward it. A hand hooked his coat sleeve from behind.

He looked down at Annie McGowan. Channel Eight. Dark hair, blue eyes, upturned nose. Wide, mobile mouth. World-class legs. Wonderful diction. Brains of an oyster.

Lucas smiled.

“What’s going on, Lucas?” she whispered, standing close, holding his arm.

“Chief’ll be here in five minutes.”

“We’ve got a newsbreak in four minutes. I would be
very
grateful if I knew what was going on in time to call it in,” she said. She smiled coyly and nodded at the cables going out the door. The press conference was being fed directly to her newsroom.

Lucas glanced around. Nobody was paying any particular attention to them. He tilted his head toward the door and they eased outside.

“If you mention my name, I’ll be in trouble,” he whispered. “This is a personal two-way arrangement between you and me.”

She colored and said, “Deal.”

“We’ve got a serial killer. He killed his third victim today. Rapes them and then stabs them to death. The first one was about six weeks ago, then another one a month ago. All of them in Minneapolis. We’ve been keeping it quiet, hoping to catch him, but now we’ve decided we have to go public.”

“Oh, God,” she said. She turned and half-ran down the hallway toward the exit, following the cables.

“What’d you tell that bitch?” Jennifer Carey materialized from the crowd. She’d been watching them. A tall blonde with a full lower lip and green eyes, she had a degree in economics from Stanford and a master’s in journalism from Columbia. She worked for TV3.

“Nothing,” Lucas said. Best to take a hard line.

“Bull. We’ve got a newsbreak in . . .” She looked at her watch. “Two and a half minutes. If she beats me, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’m very smart and you’ll be very, very sorry.”

Lucas glanced around again. “Okay,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “but I owed her one. If you tell her I leaked this to you too, you’ll never get another word out of me.”

“You’re on,” she said. “What is it?”

Late that night, Jennifer Carey lay facedown on Lucas’ bed and watched him undress, watched him unstrap the hideout gun.

“Do you ever use that thing, or do you wear it to impress women?” she asked.

“Too uncomfortable for that,” Lucas lied. Jennifer sometimes made him nervous. He felt she was looking inside his head. “It comes in handy. I mean, if you’re buying some toot from a guy, you can’t be packing a gun. They figure you for a cop or maybe some kind of nutso rip-off psychotic, and they won’t serve, won’t deal. But if you got a hideout in a weird place and you need it, you can have it in their face before they know what you’re doing.”

“Doesn’t sound like Minneapolis.”

“There are some bad folks around. Anytime you get that much money . . .” He peeled off his socks and stood up in his shorts. “Shower?”

“Yeah. I guess.” She rolled over slowly and got off the bed and followed him into the bathroom. The print pattern from the bedspread was impressed on her belly and thighs.

“You could’ve brought McGowan home, you know,” she said as he turned on the water and adjusted it.

“She’s been coming on to me a little,” Lucas agreed.

“So why not? It’s not like you’re bored by the new stuff.”

“She’s dumb.” Lucas splashed hot water on her back and followed it with a squirt of liquid bath soap from a plastic bottle. He began rubbing it across her back and butt.

“That’s never stopped you before,” she said.

Lucas kept scrubbing. “You know some of the women I’ve taken out. Tell me a dumb one.”

Jennifer thought it over. “I don’t know them all,” she said finally.

“You know enough of them to see the pattern,” he said. “I don’t go out with dummies.”

“So talk to me like a smart person, Lucas. Did this killer torture these women before he killed them? Daniel was pretty evasive. Do you think he knows them? How does he pick them?”

Lucas turned her around and pressed his index finger across her lips.

“Jennifer, don’t pump me, okay? If you catch me off guard
and I blurt something out and you use it, I could be in deep trouble.”

She eyed him speculatively, the water bouncing off his chest, his mild blue eyes darkened with an edge of wariness.

“I wouldn’t use it before I told you,” she said. “But you never blurt anything out. Not that you didn’t plan to blurt out. You’re a tricky son of a bitch, Davenport. I’ve known you for three years and I still can’t tell when you’re lying. And you play more goddamn roles than anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t even think you know when you’re doing it anymore.”

“You should have been a shrink,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. He cut the water off and pushed open the shower door. “Hand me that big towel. I’ll dry your legs for you.”

A half-hour later, Jennifer said hoarsely, “Sometimes it gets very close to pain.”

“That’s the trick,” Lucas said. “Not going over the line.”

“You come so close,” she said. “You must have gone over it a lot before you figured out where to stop.”

Two hours later, Lucas’ eyes clicked open in the dark. Somebody was watching. He thought about it. The ankle gun was in the desk . . . Then Jennifer poked him, and he realized where it was coming from.

“What?” he whispered.

“You awake?”

“I am now.”

“I’ve got a question.” She hesitated. “Do you like me more than the others or are we all just meat?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned.

“Say.”

“You know I do. Like you better. I can prove it.”

“How?”

“Your toothbrush? It’s the only one in the bathroom cabinet besides mine.”

There was a moment of silence and then she snuggled up on his arm. “Okay,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

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.