Broken Prey (15 page)

“I got her. The next one.”

Ignace started taking notes. “Who?”

“Carlita Peterson. I been watching her for three weeks. Got her in my car and I’m leaving right now, taking her up the thirty-five right into the deep woods. Know where’s this old empty cabin up there, you can camp out.”

“Ah, Jesus, man, you gotta stop. You gotta stop . . .”

“I ain’t gonna stop, Roo-Fay,” the whisperer said. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna spend a little time with her tonight, take the starch out of her. Then I’m gonna kick her out in the woods tomorrow, give her a one-minute head start—I won’t look, either, I won’t look which way she runs. Then I’m going out with my razor. Maybe she’ll get away.”

“Ah, Jesus . . .”

“My other woman drove me to it; I been walking around with a hard-on for three days, the way she talks, she just drives me to distraction. But this’ll fix it for a while. You know how, after you fuck, you don’t have to fuck again for a while? Well, after I take this next one, I won’t have to worry about taking my woman.”

“Ah, jeez . . .”

“Hey, don’t tell me it don’t give you a little tingle in the back of your balls, thinking about it.”

“Listen, Mr. Pope. Please. Let her go. C’mon, you gotta get help, please let her go. I’ll write whatever you want, I’ll write your whole story, whatever you want to say, if you just let her go . . .”

“Hey, fuck you, Roo-Fay. Too late for all of that shit. But I’ll tell you what—you got the rest of today and all of tonight to find us. I won’t do her until tomorrow morning; but that’s as long as I’m gonna go. You tell that to the cops.”

Click.

IGNACE STARED DUMBFOUNDED at the phone for a moment, then pushed himself up, unconsciously brushed the seat of his pants, took a couple of walking steps, then broke into a run, running as hard as he could, arms pumping, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, down to the paper, buzzing all the way:
Man, man-oh-man, Jesus, man.

CAROL STUCK HER HEAD in Lucas’s office and said, “If your nose doesn’t hurt too bad to talk, a guy named Rufus is on the telephone. He says he’s a reporter from the
Star-Tribune
and it’s urgent.”

Lucas picked up the phone: “Davenport.”

“He just called me,” Ignace blurted. “One minute ago. On my cell phone.”

“Ah, shit . . . ,” Lucas said.

“He said he took a woman whose name is Carlita Peterson, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got the number he was calling from . . .”

Lucas sat up and shouted at Carol, “We’re gonna need a phone number run . . . Get Dave, get Dave on the line . . .”

Ignace said, “You ready? Here it is . . .”

He recited the number and Lucas shouted it to Carol, who shouted back, “Dave’s running it . . .”

Lucas went back to the phone: “He said he’s already got this woman?”

“That’s what he said. He said he’s going to take her up north and fuck with her for a while and then tomorrow morning he’s going to turn her loose and hunt her down with his razor.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Same guy as last time.”

Carol shouted, “Carlita Diaz Peterson, Northfield. It’s a cell phone. The address is coming up.”

Lucas yelled back, “Get the sheriff on the line. I think it’s Rice County, but it might be Dakota. Get somebody over to her house. Tell the phone guys I want to know the location of the cell phone when he called . . .”

BACK TO IGNACE, the phone: “Are you at your office?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can. I’ll need a typescript.”

“I’ll have it by the time you get here,” Ignace said. He suddenly left his asshole persona and sounded like a worried human being: “Jesus, Davenport, he said he had her in his car, that he was already heading north.”

LUCAS BANGED OUT the number for the co-op office, talked to Ray Reese: “Pull your socks up. The
Star-Trib
reporter got another call from Charlie Pope; he says he’s taken a woman from Northfield and he’s in his car heading for the Boundary Waters. Pull the trigger on the network. Now.”

“Hang on.”

Ten seconds later, Reese was back: “We’re doing it. Anything else? You know where he’s starting from?”

“Gonna get that in a minute. Tell everybody that Pope says he already picked up the woman. Tell them that: that he says he’s got her, that if we miss him, she’s gonna die. Tell them to be careful.”

HE THREW THE PHONE back at the receiver and realized his hands were slippery with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”

She waved him off.

He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”

She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.

“Damnit. If he’s heading north . . . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W . . .”

“Or city streets,” Carol offered.

“Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”

He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.

Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.

If
he was going north. He’d never gone north before.

Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going north, he’s in the metro area, so move the search area north about as fast as he could be traveling. Then, when the network is set, I want you to call all of the major nodes in the south end. He may be jerking us around when he keeps saying that he’s going north. He didn’t leave his home ground with the others, and from what I’ve been able to tell, Pope doesn’t know anything about the Boundary Waters. So tell the people down south that he may be down there. Tell them that it’s really critical that they don’t ease off because they think he’s going north . . .”

“I can get that out in five minutes.”

“Do that.”

Carol stuck her head in the office: “Two calls—Northfield police and Ruffe Ignace, that reporter . . .”

“I want both of them. Give me Northfield first.”

HE PICKED UP his phone and a voice said, “Agent Davenport, this is Jim Goode down in Northfield. We’ve got a car at the Peterson house, and it doesn’t look good. She didn’t show up at work this morning. She’s a ceramics teacher at St. Olaf, and the guys looked in the window of her house and they saw some cut rope on the kitchen floor. They called that probable cause, went in, they say the house is empty, but there’s a smear of what looks like dried blood on the kitchen floor, not much, but a smear, and that cut rope.”

“Seal the place off,” Lucas said. “I’ll send down our crime-scene crew . . .”

“It’s sealed off now. I’m calling in all our guys, we’re gonna do the streets, and the sheriff is running the county.”

“Don’t quit on it—there’s a possibility that he’s still down there.”

“That cocksucker, if he’s killed Carlita Peterson, he’s a dead man,” Goode said.

“You know her?”

“Yes, a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady.”

“I’m coming down,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a guy to talk to first, I might be a couple of hours.”

IGNACE CAME UP: “Listen, instead of running over here, I got a transcript that I can cut and paste to Microsoft Word and ship it to you. You could have it in one minute.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “I should have thought of it myself. Here’s the address . . .”

HE CHECKED THREE TIMES, five seconds apart, and then the document came rolling in. At the top: “This is verbatim.”

Lucas read down through the conversation between Pope and Ignace. Pope said they had until tomorrow morning. Some time, then. Not much, and he might be lying. Still, there was a chance.

He sent the document to the printer, then looked again at the language, searching for the kind of things he’d pulled out of the first call. Nothing struck him that seemed particularly important. Pope said he had the woman in his car, which implied a sedan or coupe, but not a pickup or an SUV. That eliminated about half the vehicles heading north . . . unless he was lying. Pope said he was “leaving.”

Leaving from Burnsville? Was that where he was hiding? A big town, a major suburb. Lots of people around.

Most likely, Lucas thought, Pope meant that he was leaving the area, not that he was leaving that very minute. Lucas was still mulling over the conversation when Carol came in: “Channel Three just called. They’ve heard about the network alert from their cops reporter. Everybody else will hear about it in the next ten minutes. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell them that we’ve got no comment at this time . . . Do they have Peterson’s name yet?”

“They didn’t say anything.”

Lucas stood up, picked up his sport coat. “Put them off. Tell them you can’t talk without an okay from me, and I’m somewhere in my car. You don’t know where.”

“So where will you be?”

“Northfield. I’ll be on the cell,” Lucas said.

“And you’re okay to drive?”

“Huh?”

“Your nose—your face. You don’t look so good.”

“Nah. I’m fine. Couple more Aleves, I’m good for the day.” He touched his nose, gave it a tentative push, and winced. For ten minutes there, he’d forgotten about it.

He stopped at the co-op center, three guys, three computers, and three telephones in a room the size of a closet. Lucas said, “Probably a sedan or coupe. White, maybe an Olds.”

They all nodded, and he was out the door.

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Carlita Peterson would get together both the energy and the angle to give the backseat a good thump. She was lying on her face, or had been, and it gave him a hard-on thinking about her back there, desperate, trying to kick, feeling the rope cut into her.

Knowing the power.

The Gods Down the Hall always said that was the best part. The killing and the pain were fine, but when you could look into their eyes, and know they were feeling the power . . .

He’d stash her for the rest of the day, take her out tonight, just like he’d told Ruffe that he would. And tomorrow morning . . . He could feel the need coming on him, stronger than ever. The Gods Down the Hall had talked to him about this, about the power and the need, so closely tied together, about the ecstasy that was coming . . .

ONE NIGHT WALKING BACK to Millie Lincoln’s town house, Mihovil said, “Is Sherrie a very close friend with you?”

“Well . . . yeah. I guess,” she said. “I mean, we don’t hang out so much now that you’re around, but we used to, you know. Hang out.”

“I think she watches us make love.”

“What?”

“The other night when I came over and we go back to the playroom and do it, and then we are resting, and I see a spot of light on the door. A minute later, I look back and it’s gone. No light. Then a couple of minutes later, I see the light again. Just a little spot. So then we are doing it again, and I see no light.”

“What was it?” Millie was intrigued.

“There is a very small hole in the door, like a nail hole, right under the bar that runs across the middle of it. When we are done, and you and Sherrie are in the kitchen, I look through the hole. All you can see is the bed, but you can see all of the bed. I think . . . when there is no light, she is watching. When you can see light, then her eye is not at the hole.”

Millie could feel herself going a flame pink. The witch. What did she see? What had they been doing the last time . . . ? Millie thought about it and, if anything, got a little pinker.

“Why didn’t you
say
anything?”

“Well, I am not sure. And you are friends. And I’m not sure she was watching. But I think she was.”

Now a surge of anger. “Goddamnit. We’re gonna have it out right now . . .” She stepped out a little faster.

“Wait, wait wait . . . ,” Mihovil said. “Maybe, let it go this night.”

“What?”

“What can it hurt? She watches, she doesn’t do anything. You can’t take pictures through the hole. She has no boyfriend, she just enjoys herself.”

“You sound like you
liked
it.”

“Well . . .” He shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I did like it . . .”

“God,
Mihovil . . .” But, in fact, his comment produced a little thrill.

That night, when they were doing it, Millie kept an eye on the door—and that meant she had to keep her glasses on, because she couldn’t see the little spot without them. Would Sherrie be suspicious? Millie didn’t know, but she wanted to see if the little spot was there—and before they went in the bedroom, Mihovil had carefully turned on a living-room desk lamp that they’d calculated would provide the light.

And Millie saw the tiny light blink at her. This time, she got more than a little thrill: Mihovil had his head down between her thighs, and her head was propped on the pillow, her eyes cracked just enough to watch the light, and when the light blinked out—when Sherrie started watching—Millie felt a rush so intense that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

She cried out once, and again, and felt her heels drumming on the mattress as Mihovil had said they would, when she
really
got into it, and then an orgasm rolled over her brain like a tsunami. She could remember yipping, a noise she’d never heard herself make before, and then nothing was anything except the feeling of Mihovil’s tongue in the middle of her existence, and her own self, going off . . .

14

LUCAS HAD TAKEN the truck to work, because the softer ride was easier on his broken nose. Now he stuck the flasher on the roof, punched the address of Carlita Peterson’s house into his dashboard navigation system, cut too fast through the traffic on I-35, and got clear of St. Paul.

When the traffic had thinned, he reached into the passenger foot well and fumbled through his briefcase, looking for Ignace’s transcript of the talk with Pope. Someplace, something in the document was not quite right. He wasn’t sure what it was: just a vibration.

He found the transcript, pinned the paper into the center of the steering wheel with his thumb, and read it again. No vibration this time. But he’d picked something up the first time he’d read it . . .

He got on the cell phone and called Sloan at home: “Pope called and said he’s picked up a woman named Carlita Peterson from Northfield. He says he’s taking her north.”

“Ah, no.” Cough. “What’d he say exactly?”

Lucas read the transcript, flicking his eyes between the paper and the traffic he was knifing through. Sloan said, “Find out . . . never mind. If the house listing was to a Carlita Peterson, that probably means she’s single or divorced and lives alone. That’s three single people. We know Rice went to bars looking for women, and Larson used to go into Chaps when she got off work. I bet he’s picking them up in bars or some kind of social activity . . .”

LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT IT: Northfield was a college town just off I-35 and not far from Faribault, where Adam Rice had spent time at the Rockyard. If Lucas had been told that a sexual predator had been hanging out in Faribault and asked to guess where he would next attack, he might have guessed Northfield. A couple of thousand college girls would provide easy prey, and the college town’s mix of student and farm bars, cafés, and stores would provide plenty of camouflage through which to prowl.

“I’ll buy that,” Lucas said to Sloan. “Listen: Any chance that Larson was gay, or had gay contacts?”

“Nobody said anything. She had a boyfriend . . . What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about the second man—or the second woman,” Lucas said. “What if she’s picking them up and Pope just does the killing? Nobody would ever see him in a bar. If she drives, nobody would ever see him in a car.”

“Yeah, but you could make the same argument if it’s a guy—he picks up women as a straight guy, or men as a gay.”

“But: nobody ever saw Larson hanging out with guys in Chaps,” Lucas said. “That paper you gave me said she mostly went in to chat with the bartender. And a woman would be more inclined to walk outside, or get in a car, with another woman, than with a man.”

“Let me call around,” Sloan said. “I’ll get some guys asking questions.”

“We’ve now got two people connected to colleges. Both the women. One a student, one a teacher.”

After a moment of thought, Sloan said, “I don’t see much in that.”

“Neither do I, but think about it,” Lucas said. And, almost as an afterthought, “How’re you feeling?”

“Better. I get these coughing jags that make me think I’m gonna bust a rib, but I don’t feel too bad. Maybe get out tomorrow . . .”

WHEN LUCAS RANG OFF, he realized that he’d become distracted, trying to read, talk on the phone, and drive all at once. He was speeding down a white line between two lanes, still running over a hundred. He guiltily moved back into the left lane; he hated to see other drivers on cell phones . . .

And goddamnit! What had he picked up in the transcript? Something had stuck in his mind like a gooey old song, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Nothing obvious, something subtle . . .

He held the Lexus at a hundred; any faster and the truck felt unstable. As it was, he made it into Northfield in a little more than half an hour from his office. Following the GPS map off I-35 down Highway 19, he buzzed past the Malt-O-Meal plant, across the bridge and a long block up to Division, right on Division and left on Seventh, and up a long rising hill until he saw, on the left, two cop cars outside a small blue-gray clapboard house that stood in a copse of maples.

A couple of cops were leaning against a car and turned to look at his truck as he pulled to the curb. He killed the engine, pulled the flasher and tossed it on the passenger seat, and walked up the drive. A dilapidated detached garage sat just behind the house, and a stack of decorative birch firewood was piled next to a side door.

“Davenport?” one of the cops asked.

“Yeah—nothing?”

The cop shook his head. “Nothing you don’t know about. A dab of blood, a piece of rope. It don’t look good.”

“Who all’s inside?”

“Only our lead investigator, Jim Goode. The chief’s down at the office, coordinating. If you’re going in, you should go in the back.”

LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the back of the house, climbed a short wooden stoop, and looked in through the screen door. Inside, a thin man in a plaid shirt and gray slacks was talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and said into the phone, “Just a minute,” and then, to Lucas, “Lucas Davenport?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Jim Goode. If you hook the edge of the screen with your fingernails, you can pull the door open. The house is contaminated up to where I am.”

Lucas hooked the door open, carefully avoiding the door handle. He was in the kitchen, a small room with laminate cupboards and a narrow, U-shaped counter covered with plastic; a double porcelain sink, chipped and yellowed with age; and a floor of curling vinyl.

The walls were real plaster, and there were pots everywhere, several with flowers, geraniums and cut yellow roses. A small breakfast table, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, sat under a bright window, with two brilliant blue chairs, one on each side. The arrangement looked both tidy and lonely. The house probably dated to World War II, he thought, and had last been updated in the seventies.

THERE WAS A FOOT-LONG smear on the floor, the purple-black color of blood. Somebody had stepped in it and smeared it. Not too much blood, Lucas thought: less than he’d lost when he was hit in the nose. On the other side of the kitchen was a curl of yellow plastic rope, the kind used to tie down tarpaulins. Goode was saying into the cell phone, “I do think we have to get them farther out now. Uh-huh. At least that far. And Dakota has to push down this way . . . Okay. Maybe we could try the Highway Patrol . . . Uh-huh. Okay. Davenport’s here now, I’ll be back pretty quick.”

He rang off, put his hand out, and as Lucas shook it, he said, “We’ve got everybody we can find out on country roads. If he’s really going to hunt her down, and do it around here, he’s got to be moving around. We downloaded pictures of Pope and Peterson, Xeroxed off a few hundred of them, and we’ve got students from St. Olaf and Carleton going out in their cars, leafleting everything inside of twenty miles.”

“Hope nobody stumbles on Pope.”

“They’re out in groups of three, except where they’re putting up public posters in stores and phone poles, and then they’re in twos,” Goode said. “Everybody’s got cell phones.”

“Great,” Lucas said. And it was—somebody had been moving fast. “What about this place?”

Goode pointed: “The blood and the rope. That’s all we’ve got—but it really is blood, it isn’t chocolate syrup or anything. It’s pretty dry, but not completely, so he probably got her this morning.” He was talking quickly, nervously, the words tumbling out. “We checked the house to make sure there was nobody here. Other than the check, we’ve stayed out. We’re hoping your crime-scene crew . . .”

“They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won’t help us find Peterson,” Lucas said. “We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?”

“There’s a little office in the second bedroom.” Goode pointed down a hallway.

“Then that’s where I’ll be,” Lucas said. “What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?”

“Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband’s a teacher at the high school.”

“Check him?”

“At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It’s not a copycat.”

“How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?”

“Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy . . . Hang on. There’s a photograph.” He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. “We’re not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that’s her.”

A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.

Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: “We don’t know if she’s been on the town. She’s been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.”

“Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope’s killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,” Lucas said. “It’s about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here . . . Or not here, but someplace close by.”

“I’ll set something up,” Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I’ll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.”

“Okay.”

Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, “What are her chances?”

“Man . . . ,” Lucas shook his head. “If he’s telling the truth, and she’s still alive? About one in hundred, I’d say. We’re gonna have to take him while he’s moving her.”

GOODE LEFT, and Lucas went back to Peterson’s home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead—
Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon
—sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.

The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.

And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley—something woodland, wild, and light.

THE SCENT CAUGHT HIM by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the “on” button on the Mac, and began going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.

He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be a student? Seemed unlikely—what student would want to hang with Pope? But everything he found, he set aside.

When the computer was up, he went into the mail program and started reading down through the “in box,” the “deleted” and the “sent” listings. More names, with e-mail addresses; most of the e-mail was from students, a few from fellow faculty, one from a woman who was apparently a personal friend who wanted to know if she was going up to MOA Saturday. Mall of America? Two e-mails came from a guy with the initial
Z
who Lucas thought was probably Peterson’s ex-husband, concerning cuts from a jade tree. Most of the rest came from ceramics people scattered around the country. Receipts from Amazon, old travel reservations with Northwest, Hertz, and Holiday Inn, and miscellaneous life detritus made up the rest.

Nothing leaped out at him.

He pulled open the file cabinets: she was meticulous about finances, and one cabinet contained file folders of her American Express and Visa bills. Lucas went through them line by line, noting the few times she’d used her credit cards in what appeared to be restaurants. There weren’t many, and most were out of state.

He made notes on all of it and was still working when Goode called back.

“Marilyn Derech is a friend of hers,” Goode said. “She lives down the street, three houses down. We can use her family room to talk to people. I’ve got them coming here, we’ve got a half dozen coming so far. There are a couple here now . . .”

“I’ll come down. I’ve got some more names,” Lucas said. “Did you ever find her purse?”

“Uh . . . we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.”

“Okay. Give me five minutes.”

He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliché about women’s handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip—forty dollars—from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.

Car keys in the bottom of the bag. A rock; an ordinary black smooth basaltic stone, and he wasn’t the least bit mystified: Weather picked up that kind of stuff all the time. Lipstick. A ChapStick. Another ChapStick. More ibuprofen.

Nothing: he felt like throwing the bag through the fuckin’ front window.

Turned around in the room. She’d just been here, and now, she was God knows where. His eye caught the clock on the stove in the kitchen, through the archway from the living room: as he glanced at it, the display changed, clicking off a minute.

He could feel the time trickling away.