Rules of Prey (9 page)

“That’s a county job. I thought your husband worked for the City of Minneapolis.”

“Well, he did, but you know, people go back and forth all the time, between City Hall and the courthouse. Larry’s job, he knew everybody. Every time something went wrong, they called him because he could fix anything. He used to see . . . the police officer who gave us the gun down in the cafeteria.”

Ruiz was back on the line.

“I was over there three weeks and four weeks before,” she said.

“Before you were attacked.”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. Listen, see you at six, but try to remember everybody you saw in the courthouse, okay?”

“Got something?” asked Sloan when Lucas hung up the phone.

“I don’t know. You got the phone number where this Lewis woman worked, the real-estate office?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sloan got out his project notebook, ran down the list, and gave Lucas the number. He dialed and got the office manager and explained what he wanted.

“ . . . So did she go down there?”

“Oh, sure, all the time. Once a week. She carried a lot of the paperwork for us.”

“So she would have been down there before she was killed?”

“Sure. You people have her desk calendars, but she hadn’t taken any vacation in the couple of months before she died, so I’m sure she was down there.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said.

“Well?” said Sloan.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Two of the women were in the courthouse shortly before they were attacked. Even the woman from St. Paul, and it wouldn’t be that common for somebody from St. Paul to be over in the Hennepin County
courthouse. And Mr. Rice was there all the time. It would be a hell of a coincidence.”

“One of the other women, this Bell, the waitress-punker, was busted out at Target on Lake Street for shoplifting. It wasn’t all that long ago. I remember that from our notebooks,” Sloan said. “I bet she went to court down there. I don’t know about the Morris woman.”

“I’ll run Morris,” Lucas said. “It could be something.”

“I got her house number, maybe her husband’s there,” Sloan said. He flipped open his notebook and read out the number as Lucas dialed. Lucas let it ring twenty times without an answer, and hung up.

“I’ll get him later,” Lucas said.

“Want me to check on this welfare guy?”

“You might take a look at him,” Lucas said. He turned to Rice. “Did the welfare worker have an accent of any kind? Even a little one?”

“No, not that I remember. I know he’s from here in Minnesota, he told me that.”

“Damn,” said Lucas.

“Could be a Svenska,” said Sloan. “You get some of those Swedes and Germans from out in central Minnesota, they still got an accent. Maybe this Ruiz heard the accent and thought it was something like southwestern.”

“It’s worth a look,” Lucas said.

At the office, he called Anderson and got Morris’ husband’s office. He answered on the first ring.

“Yes, she did,” he said. “It must of been about a month before . . . Anyway, she used to work out at a health club on Hennepin Avenue, and about once a week she’d get a parking ticket. She’d just throw it in her glove compartment and forget about it. She must have had ten or fifteen of them. Then she got a notice that they were going to issue a warrant for her arrest unless she came down and paid and cleared this court order. So she went down there. It took most of a day to get everything cleared up.”

“Was that the only time she was down there?”

“Well, recently. She might have been other times, but I don’t know of any.”

When he finished with Morris, Lucas called the clerk of court and checked on Lucy Bell’s appearance date on the shoplifting charge. May 27. He looked at a calendar. A Friday, a little more than a month before she was killed.

So they had all been in the courthouse. The gun had come from City Hall, through a guy who hung around the courthouse. Lucas walked down the hall to Anderson’s office.

“So what does it mean?” Anderson asked. “He’s picking them up right here?”

“Picking them out, maybe,” Lucas said. “Three of them were involved in courts and would have court files. Our man could be researching them through that.”

“I’ll check on who pulled the files,” Anderson said.

“Do that.”

“So what do you think?” Anderson asked.

“It was too easy,” Lucas said. “This cat don’t fall that easy.”

Aerosmith was fine. Lucas sat back in his seat, watching with amusement as Carla bounced up and down with the music, turning to him, laughing, reaching a fist overhead with the other fifteen thousand screaming fans to shake it at the stage . . . .

She asked him up for coffee.

“That’s the most fun I’ve had since . . . I don’t know, a long time,” she said as she put two cups of water in the microwave.

Lucas was prowling the studio, looking at her fiber work. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked.

“Five, six years. I painted first, then got into sculpture, and then kind of drifted into this. My grandmother had a loom, I’ve known about weaving since I was a kid.”

“How about this sculpture?” he asked, gesturing at the squidlike hangings.

“I don’t know. I think they were mostly an effort to catch a trend, you know? They seemed okay at the time, but now
I think I was playing games with myself. It’s all kind of derivative. I’m pretty much back to straight weaving now.”

“Tough racket. Art, I mean.”

“That isn’t the half of it, brother,” she said. The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, dumped a spoon of instant gourmet coffee into each cup, and stirred.

“Cinnamon coffee,” she said, handing him a cup.

He took a sip. “Hot. Good, though.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said.

“Go.”

“I was thinking I did pretty well when I fought this guy off,” she said.

“You did.”

“But I’m still scared. I know what you said the other night, about him not coming back. But I was lucky the first time. He wasn’t ready for me. If he comes back, I might not be so lucky.”

“So?”

“I’m wondering about a gun.”

He thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

“It’s worth thinking about,” he said. “Most people, I’d say no. When most people buy a gun, they instantly become its most likely victim. The next-most-likely victims are the spouse and kids. Then the neighbors. But you don’t have a spouse or kids and you’re not likely to get in a brawl with your neighbors. And I think you’re probably cool enough to use one right.”

“So I ought to get one?”

“I can’t tell you that. If you do, you’d be the most likely victim, at least statistically. But with some people, statistics are nonsense. If you’re not the type of person to have stupid accidents, if you’re not careless, if you’re not suicidal or think a gun’s a toy, then you might want to get one. There is a chance that this guy will come back. You’re the only living witness to an attack.”

“I’d want to know what to get,” Carla said. She took a sip of coffee. “I couldn’t spend too much. And I’d want some help learning to use it.”

“I could loan you one, if you like, just until we get the guy,” Lucas said. “Let me see your hand. Hold it up.”

She held her hand up, fingers spread, palm toward him. He pressed his palm against hers and looked at the length of his finger overlap.

“Small hands,” he said. “I’ve got an older Charter Arms .38 special that ought to fit just about right. And we can get some semiwadcutter loads so you don’t get too much penetration and kill all your neighbors if you have to use it.”

“What?”

“Your walls here are plaster and lath,” Lucas explained. He leaned back and rapped on a wall, and little crumbs of plaster dropped off. “If you use too powerful a round, you’ll punch one long hole through the whole building. And anybody standing in the way.”

“I didn’t think of that.” She looked worried.

“We’ll fix you up. You live about a hundred yards from the St. Paul police indoor range. I shoot over there in competition. I could probably fix it to give you a few lessons.”

“Let me sleep on it,” she said. “But I think so.”

When he was leaving, she closed the door except for a tiny crack and said as he started down the hall, “Hey, Davenport?”

He stopped. “Yes?”

“Are you ever going to ask me out again?”

“Sure. If you’re willing to put up with me.”

“I’m willing,” she said, and eased the door closed. Lucas whistled on his way to the elevator, and she leaned against the door, listening to the sound of him and smiling to herself.

Late that night, Lucas lay in the spare bedroom and looked at the charts pinned to the wall. After a while he stood and wrote at the bottom of the killer’s chart, “Hangs around courthouse.”

He was delighted by the newspapers.

He knew he shouldn’t save them. If a cop saw them . . . But then, if a cop saw them, here in his apartment, it would be too late. They would know. And how could he not save them? The inch-high letters were a joy to the soul.

The
Star-Tribune
had
SERIAL KILLER SLAYS
3
CITIES WOMEN
. The
Pioneer Press
was bigger and better:
SERIAL KILLER STALKS TWIN CITIES WOMEN
. He liked the word “stalks.” It reflected a sense of a continuing process, rather than a historical one; and work that was planned, instead of random.

Purely by chance, on the night the story broke, he saw a nine-o’clock newsbreak promoting it. The station’s top reporter, a tall blonde in a trench coat, rapped the harsh word “murder” into a microphone set up outside City Hall. An hour later, he taped TV3’s ten-o’clock news report, which replayed key parts of the press conference with the chief of police.

The conference was chaotic. The chief was terse, straightforward. So were the first few questions. Then somebody raised his voice, cutting off a question from another reporter, and the whole conference reeled out of control. At the end, newspaper photographers were standing on chairs in front of the television, firing their strobes at the chief and the half-dozen other cops in the room.

It took his breath away. He watched the tape a half-dozen times, considering every nuance. If only they’d run the whole press conference, he thought; that would be the responsible
thing. After thinking about it for a moment or two, he called the station. The lines were busy and it took twenty minutes to get through. When he finally did, the operator put him on hold for a moment, then came back to tell him there were no plans “at the present time” to run the entire conference.

“Might that change?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded harassed. “It might. About a million people are calling. You oughta check the
Good-Morning Show
tomorrow. If they decide to run it, they’ll say then.”

When he got off the phone, the maddog got down on his knees with the VCR instructions and figured out how to program the time controls. He’d want to tape all the major newscasts from now on.

Before he went to bed, he watched the tape one last time, the part with Lucas Davenport. Davenport had been shown in a brief cut, sitting cross-legged in a folding chair. He was wearing jeans and an expensive-looking sport coat. Called the smartest detective on the police force. Working independently.

He got up early for the
Good-Morning Show,
but there was nothing but a rehash of the news from the night before. Later, when he was reading the morning papers, he found a short sidebar on Lucas Davenport in the St. Paul paper, with a small photograph. Killed five people? A
games
inventor? Wonderful. The maddog examined the photo closely. A cruel jawline, he decided. A hard man.

The maddog could barely work during the day, impatiently rushing through the stack of routine real-estate and probate files on the desk before him. He spent a few more minutes with two minor criminal cases he was also handling, but finally pushed those aside as well. The criminal cases were his favorites, but he didn’t get many of them. The maddog was recognized in the firm as an expert researcher; but it was already being said that he would not work well before a jury. There was something . . . wrong about him. Nobody said it publicly, but it was understood.

The maddog lived alone near the University of Minnesota, in one of four apartments in a turn-of-the-century house that had been modernized and converted to town houses. He rushed home after work, hurrying to catch the six-o’clock news. There was no more hard information, but TV3 had news crews out all over the city getting reaction from people in the street. The people in the street said they weren’t scared, that the police would get him.

A cop in a squad car revealed that he signed himself “maddog,” and the newscasters picked it up. The maddog liked it.

After the news, he spent an hour cleaning and squaring his meticulously neat apartment. He usually watched television at night or rental movies on his VCR. That night he couldn’t sit still. Eventually he went downtown, from bar to bar, cruising the crowds. He saw a James Dean-wannabe at a fashionable disco, a young man with long black hair and wide shoulders, a T-shirt under a black leather jacket, a cruel smile. He was talking to a girl in a short white dress that showed her legs all the way to her crotch and from the top down almost to her nipples.

You think he’s dangerous,
he thought of the woman,
but it’s all a charade. I’m the dangerous one. You don’t even see me in my sport coat and necktie, but I’m the one. I’m the One.

It was time to begin again. Time to begin looking. The need would begin to work on him. He knew the pattern now. In ten days or two weeks, it would be unbearable.

So far he had taken a salesgirl, a housewife, a real-estate agent. How about one out of the pattern? One that would really mess with the cops’ minds? A hooker, like in Dallas? No need to hurry, but it was a thought.

He was drifting along, deep in thought, when a voice called his name.

“Hey, Louie. Louie. Over here.”

He turned. Bethany Jankalo, God help him. One of the associates. Tall, blonde, slightly buck-toothed. Loud. And, he’d been told, eminently available. She was on the arm of a
professorial type, who stood tall, sucked a pipe, and looked at the maddog with disdain.

“We’re going to the
Mélange
opening,” Jankalo brayed. She had a wide mouth and was wearing fluorescent pink lipstick. “Come on. It’s a lot of laughs.”

Jesus, he thought, and she’s an attorney.

But he fell in with them, Jankalo running her mouth, her escort sucking his pipe, which appeared to be empty and made slurping sounds as he worked it. Together they walked down a block, to a gallery in a gray brick building. There was a small crowd on the walk outside. Jankalo led the way through, using her shoulders like a linebacker. Inside, middle-aged professionals carried plastic glasses of white wine through the gallery while staring blankly at the canvases that lined the eggshell-white walls.

“Who dropped the pizza?” Jankalo laughed as she looked at the first piece. Her escort winced. “What a bunch of shit.”

Some of it was not.

The maddog did not know about art; wasn’t interested in it. On the walls of his office, he had two duck prints, taken from the annual federal waterfowl stamps. He’d been told they were good investments.

But now his eyes were opened. Most of the work was, indeed, very bad. But Larson Deiree did riveting nudes posed against bizarre situational backdrops. Their contorted bodies caught in explicitly sexual offerings, the recipients of the offers, men in overcoats and broadbrimmed hats and wing-tip shoes, their faces averted, shown as alienated strangers. Power transactions; the women as unequivocal prizes. The maddog was fascinated.

“Have a wine and a cracker, Louie,” Jankalo said, handing him a glass of pale yellow fluid and a stack of poker-chip-size crackers.

“Sort of like ‘I argued before the Supreme Court in my Living Bra,’ huh?” she asked, looking at the Deiree painting behind him.

“I . . .” The maddog groped for words.

“You what?” Jankalo said. “You like that?”

“Well . . .”

“Louie, you’re a pervert,” she said, her voice so loud it was virtually a shout. The maddog glanced around. Nobody was paying any attention. “That’s my kind of man.”

“I like it. It makes an argument,” the maddog said. He surprised himself. He didn’t think in those terms.

“Oh, bullshit, Louie,” Jankalo shouted. “He’s just hanging some snatch out there to hype the sales.”

The maddog turned away.

“Louie . . .”

He thought about killing her. All in an instant, he thought about it.

It would have a certain artistic spontaneity to it. It would, in a way, follow the maxim that he not establish a pattern, because it would not be calculated and planned. And it would be amusing. Jankalo, he didn’t doubt, would largely cooperate, right up to the moment the knife went in. He felt a stirring in his groin.

“Louie, you can be such an asshole,” Jankalo said, and walked away. She had said,
Louie, you’re a pervert . . . my kind of man.
An offer? If so, he’d let it dangle too long. She was headed back to her professor. The maddog was not good in social situations. He took a bite of cracker and looked around, straight into the eyes of Carla Ruiz.

He looked away.

He did not want to catch her eye. The maddog believed that eye contact was telling: that she might look him in the eye and suddenly
know.
They had, after all, shared a considerable intimacy.

He maneuvered so that he could watch her from angles, past others. The cut on her forehead looked bad, the bruises going yellow. The maddog was still badly bruised himself, green streaks on his back and one arm.

Maybe he should come back on her.

No. That would violate too many rules. And the need to do her had passed.

But it was tempting; for revenge, if nothing else, like the farmgirl he’d blown off the horse. The thought of killing made him tingle, pulled at him, like a nicotine addict who had gone too long between cigarettes.

The need would grow. Better start doing research Monday. At the latest.