Authors: John Sandford
“One last thing,” Fox said. “He’s in your DNA database. They made damn sure of that before he left St. John’s.”
SLOAN CAME IN, with Elle Kruger trailing behind, looking a little abashed. She was wearing street clothes, as she had started to do more often: the full traditional nun’s habit, she said, had started to feel too much like an affectation. “I wasn’t sure I should come,” she said, near-sightedly peering around, checking out Carol. Elle came to dinner twice a month, had become tight with Weather, but she’d never been to his new office.
“Glad to have you, as long as I don’t have to put you on my budget,” Lucas said. He put them in the soft chairs and dropped in behind his desk. “I just got a call from a parole officer . . .”
He filled them in on what Mark Fox had said, and Sloan said, “So Pope disappeared just before Larson was killed? That’s the best lead we’ve had so far. Why didn’t we hear about it?”
“Usual BS. He didn’t know about Larson, nobody knew to ask about Pope, time passes,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I’m getting Pope’s file sent up from St. John’s.” To Elle: “Sloan has you all filled in on the Rice killings?”
“Not so much on the detail, as on the behavior,” she said.
“One important detail,” Lucas said. “Adam Rice apparently tried to fight the guy off, and there was blood and skin under his fingernails. If it’s not his own blood . . . well, we have Pope’s DNA in the database here. We oughta know tomorrow if we’ve got a match.”
“We’re looking for him now?” she asked.
Lucas nodded. “Yes. There’s a bulletin out, I’m sending it to Iowa and Wisconsin, too. We’ve got a six-week-old picture from St. John’s. They took it just before they let him go.”
“Gonna be a black eye for the state, letting him go,” Sloan said.
Elle said, “Could I see Pope’s file?”
“Sure. Don’t tell anybody. It’s supposed to be a confidential medical file . . . I’ll get Carol to make a copy for you. What about behavior . . . ?”
Elle had a simple nylon briefcase with her and said, “I’ve got a note . . .” As she dug into it, it occurred to him that the old nun’s costume, by isolating her face, had kept her young even as she aged. Now, dressed in the gray-and-black garb of her order, she looked like a thin, middle-aged woman who’d lived an ascetic, but sedentary, life. Her hair, which he hadn’t seen for twenty years after she’d gone into the convent, had turned steel gray, and her wrists and ankles seemed frail.
Then she looked over the note at him, and her eyes were as young as a kindergartener’s: “There are some interesting aspects to the behavior of this man. I think, after looking at the material that Mr. Sloan gave me, that he is probably intelligent. A planner. Nothing spontaneous or extemporaneous about this—he chose his victims, he knew when they would be alone and when he could get them without being interrupted. He knew where to leave Angela Larson’s body where it would have the greatest impact, but at a place where he could stop, take a little time to arrange her, and then leave, without being seen or noticed or monitored in any way. That’s not necessarily easy to do in a large city. Security cameras are everywhere, and as far as we know, he has not been seen by a single one.”
Lucas pointed a finger at Sloan: “Security camera at the store where Rice worked?”
“I’ll call.”
Elle continued: “There’s also something interesting in the way he tortures his victims. He’s methodical. I pointed this out to Mr. Sloan . . .”
“She won’t call me by my first name,” Sloan said to Lucas, grinning at Elle. Then, “Sorry, go ahead.”
“He beat both of them with some kind of whip, but not in an uncontrolled frenzy. If he were in a frenzy, he would keep hitting them in the same place, but these victims look like they had been put through a mechanical shredder—some of the slashes cross each other, but most of them are carefully laid in, proceeding down and around their bodies, as though he’s being . . . careful. Thorough.”
“Nuts,” Lucas said.
“He’s crazy, but it’s not an uncontrollable frenzy. Not mechanically uncontrollable, at any rate. He’s like a punisher: remote from his victim. Like a paid torturer in a prison.”
“Is he taunting us? Is he going to call somebody? Will he look for publicity?” Lucas asked.
“He could very well,” she said, nodding. “He’s intelligent, but the way he displays the bodies, he’s looking for attention. I don’t think he’ll call the TV stations—he’ll call a newspaper, if he does call.”
Sloan asked, “Why not TV?”
“Because they would record him, and he wouldn’t want his voice on tape. He will be careful.”
“What else?” Lucas asked.
“He’s strong. Probably attractive. Quite likely charismatic—a person who might attract his victims’ attention in some way. Not necessarily a pleasant way, but somebody they would notice.”
“You think they knew him?”
She considered it for a moment, then nodded: “Maybe. That’s a hard call. These two people were unattached—it’s possible that he seduced them in some way before the attack. Or he might simply be visually appealing to them. That would get him close without a fuss. They may have welcomed his attention—he could very well be soft-spoken, somebody you would trust.”
She looked up at Lucas. “One thing I would do is this: I would check on current and previous relationships that the victims had, and see if the men with whom they were involved are similar in some ways. The same appearance, somehow, the same attitude, or some particular status. Did they both like tall, dark men? Then the killer may be tall and dark . . .”
“You’re assuming . . . a sexual connection with Rice. The sheriff says Rice was absolutely straight,” Lucas said. “A widower with a kid. Nothing we’ve got would suggest that he had any homosexual contacts ever, even as a boy. We’ve talked to people who have known him for his entire life.”
Elle pulled at her lower lip, and Sloan said, “Yeah, but . . . in that culture down there, out in the countryside, an interest in homosexuality might be pretty well hidden.”
Elle nodded: “Very much hidden, especially if a man were essentially bisexual—he would always have his relationships with women as a cover. Even if somebody else knew about it, about any homosexual impulses that Rice might have had, that man might not admit it because of the implication that
he
might be gay . . .”
Lucas to Elle: “One of the crime-scene guys said he’d seen similar violence and it was usually gay, and the specific sexual mutilation usually came from a former lover, a jilted lover . . .”
“This is not like that,” she said quickly. “I know precisely what your technician was saying, but as I said, this was not done in an emotional frenzy. This was cold and calculated and, I think, enjoyed. This does not seem to me to have been done in anger.” She paused: “I could be wrong. Nothing is for certain.”
“Good.” Lucas made a note.
Carol knocked and stuck her head into the office: “The stuff from St. John’s is here, on the Pope guy. You want paper or electronic?”
“Paper. Three copies,” Lucas said. “Right away.”
Carol’s eyes involuntarily ticked over to Elle, raised perhaps a millimeter, and then she said, “Three copies,” and left.
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER twenty minutes, then Elle looked at her watch and said, “I’ve got a seminar.”
“Pick up the copy of the Pope file on your way out,” Lucas said. “I’ll be on my cell phone.”
“I’ll read it right after the seminar,” she said. “I’ll call this afternoon.”
WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas asked Sloan, “Are you going to Owatonna with me?”
“Absolutely, but we got some bureaucratic shit to figure out first,” Sloan said. “Pennington absolutely doesn’t want to be the media face on this. And he doesn’t want me involved. He says you guys gotta do it.”
“Ahhh . . . ,” Lucas said. Pennington was the Minneapolis chief. Lucas didn’t like him. “Nordwall didn’t want to do it, either. Maybe Rose Marie could do it. She can screw something out of Pennington in trade.”
Lucas got Rose Marie on the phone, outlined the problem.
“I’m not going to do it,” she said. “I’m trying to pull the string on this special session. Either you or McCord can do it. I’ll talk to McCord this afternoon and figure it out. I’ll talk to the governor, too . . . Be helpful if you could get the guy before he kills anyone else.”
“We might’ve had a break,” Lucas said. He told her about Pope. “If it’s him, we’ll look pretty good. Otherwise . . . right now, we don’t have anything that would point at anybody in particular.”
“So he’s going to do somebody else; if he’s not this Pope guy.”
“If he’s careful, he could do a few,” Lucas said.
“Goddamnit, we don’t want that. I’ll talk to the governor, I’ll talk to McCord, and we’ll figure something out and get back to you.”
“I’m on the cell,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Sloan: “Let’s go.”
OWATONNA WAS AN HOUR south of St. Paul, straight down I-35, back in the sea of corn and beans. A few miles out of Owatonna, they took a phone call from Nordwall. “Where you at?”
“In my car, on the way to Owatonna.” He told Nordwall about Charlie Pope.
“Okay, that’s something,” Nordwall said. “I got something else for you. Bill James, the guy I got doing the biography you wanted? He says that Rice was almost perfectly straight.”
“Almost,” Lucas said.
“Yeah—almost,” the sheriff said. “There’s a bar in Faribault called the Rockyard. Country bar, bunch of shit kickers, fights in the parking lot, Harleys and trucks, and so on. Live music Fridays and Saturdays. Anyway—a friend of Rice’s named Andy Sanders said there’s a bartender there, named Carl, who everybody calls Booger. If you talk to Booger, he can introduce you to some young ladies who will fall in love with you, if you’ve got the money. Sanders said Rice had been going up for the girls.”
“Hookers.”
“We just have girls down here, Lucas,” Nordwall said mildly. “Some of them have hasty love affairs.”
“But straight: male on female.”
“Straight. Sanders says no-way, no-how would Rice ever have gotten friendly with a gay guy. But I figure, you could meet some bad people at the Rockyard. There’s always a little shit going through there, a little cocaine, a little meth, and you could probably buy yourself an untraceable pistol if you asked just right.”
“All right. We just went past there. We’ll hit it on the way back.”
“Good.”
“Anybody gonna give us shit?” Lucas asked.
“No, no, it’s not
that
tough. It’s just a little . . . sleazy.”
“With some guys who like to fight.”
“Occasionally.”
OWATONNA IS A SMALL CITY known to a few architecture buffs for a Louis Sullivan jewel-box bank. They got lost for a while, running down edge-of-town streets, and finally found Charlie Pope’s trailer in a weedy mobile-home park down a dead-end road.
Pope’s trailer was a mess. An aging Airstream travel-trailer, once silver, it had been hit by something—a falling tree?—that had put a dent across the top; the whole thing sat maybe five degrees off level, the tires shot, steel wheels visible through the rotting rubber. Weeds grew window-high around it, and a box elder tree flaked bark, leaves, and red bugs onto it.
As they pulled into the trailer park’s visitor parking lot, a blade-thin black cat ran out from one of the other homes, paused, one foot in the air, to look at them, and then disappeared into the brush behind Pope’s place. Some of the mobile homes in the park were well kept, with neatly cut yards; most were not. Either way, Pope’s place was the neighborhood slum.
MARK FOX WAS SITTING on the hood of his Jeep, which was tucked in an overgrown parking slot next to Pope’s trailer. Fox was a tall, thin, cowboy-looking guy with a weathered face, black roper boots, a black T-shirt, and a denim jacket and jeans. He was smoking a cigarette when they pulled up. He crushed it into a rust spot on the hood of the Jeep as they got out of the Porsche.
“Must’ve been more money coming out of the legislature than I thought, cops riding around in a Porsche,” he said as they shook hands.
Lucas shrugged: “Guy’s gotta have a four-wheel drive to get around in, this part of the country.”
Sloan rolled his eyes and said, “We know the guy for three seconds and the bullshit starts . . . This is Pope’s place?”
Fox looked at the trailer and said, “Yup. Such as it is. Come on in.”
“I sorta know why he ran for it,” Sloan said. “If I lived here, I’d run for it, too.”
“Ah, it’s different inside,” Fox said. “It’s worse.”
HE TOOK THEM INSIDE. A sour odor of human dirt hung about the place, with a underlying tone of sewage: there might be a cracked sewer pipe somewhere, or something wrong with the septic system. Sloan said, wrinkling his nose, “Smells like an armpit with an onion in it.”
Fox: “Or an asshole.”
“Hold that thought,” Lucas said.
The three of them were too much for the tiny kitchen, and Fox continued six feet down the trailer into a nominal living room. The kitchen was made of dented metal cupboards, a stove the size of a breadboard, and a yellowed microwave. Fox said, “When he cut the bracelet off, he left it here on the floor. No sign of him. I put out a bulletin but never heard back from anybody.”
“Nobody’s seen him here in the park?”
“I checked, nobody’s seen him—and if he’d been here, they would have. He was a hard guy to miss.”
“And the park’s about the size of my dick,” Sloan said.
“Everybody assumes he took off,” Fox said. “But, as far as anybody knows, he doesn’t have a car.”
“No car,” Lucas said. He glanced at Sloan, who shook his head. If he didn’t have a car, how was he moving around?
“Not as far as I know,” Fox said. “He rides the buses. Charlie hasn’t made enough since he got back to buy much. Last time we talked, he said he was spending everything he made on clothes and food. That looked about right to me.”
“How much does a beat-up car cost?”
“You might get something for a grand, but he didn’t have it.”
“Relatives?”
“His mother’s still alive, but she’s poor as a church mouse herself,” Fox said.
“He just walked off the job.”
“Yeah. That’s the story. I went down to see his boss—he worked with a garbage hauler—and he said Pope finished up one day, said, ‘See ya,’ and never came back.”
“They owe him money?” Lucas asked.
“Three days,” Fox said, nodding.
“Huh.” They took their time poking around the trailer. Some clothes must be missing, they agreed, because there was almost nothing left. They did find an open three-pack of black Jockey shorts under the pull-out bed, with one pair left inside, along with a dozen DVDs. Lucas flipped through them:
“Strokemaster Finals, Fantasic Facials, Best of Anal Adventures 24 . . .”
“There’s a violation for you,” Fox said.
“Strokemaster
could be golf instruction,” Sloan said.
LUCAS TAPPED A CHEAP color TV and an even cheaper DVD player that sat on a cardboard box across from the bed. “He didn’t take his movies, his new shorts, or his TV. Maybe he was thinking of going out for a run, but coming back.”
“Maybe he fucked something up and figured he couldn’t come back,” Sloan said.
“What’d he fuck up?” Lucas asked. “He was absolutely clean on the Larson killing, if he did it.”
“Maybe something we don’t know,” Sloan said. He looked at Fox: “Was he smart? Good-looking? Controlled-crazy?”
Fox snorted. “Charlie? Charlie was a pervert. He looked like a pervert. If you saw him walking down the street, you’d say, ‘There goes a pervert.’ Didn’t you get that file from St. John’s? There’re pictures . . .”
“We just got it; haven’t had time to think about it,” Lucas said. “How about smart? Is he smart?”
“He got arrested a block from the Target Center trying to anally rape a screaming woman, two feet from the sidewalk that ten thousand basketball fans were about to walk down. He just grabbed her and started whaling away. Charlie is a dumb motherfucker. He just blew off the best job he ever had.”
“As a garbageman,” Lucas said.
“An apprentice garbageman.”
Lucas and Sloan looked at each other for a moment, then Sloan wagged his head and said, “That ain’t the picture Elle was painting.”
THEY EXPLAINED ELLE to Fox and the image she’d constructed of the killer. “That’s not Charlie. If she’s right, we’re looking for the wrong guy,” Fox said.
“Maybe something snapped when he was in St. John’s,” Sloan suggested.
“I didn’t know him before he was in St. John’s,” Fox said. “I know him now. He’s stupid and ugly now.”
MOST OF THE TIME, thoroughly shaking down a house or an apartment would take hours. With Charlie Pope’s trailer, they were done in half an hour—not only was there not much to look at, there was hardly any paper. They could find no checkbook, no credit cards, no computer, not even a notepad. The state paper he had, involving his imprisonment and parole, was in a state file folder under a six-year-old phone book.
“Nothing here but a bad smell,” Sloan said.
WHEN THEY LEFT, Fox locked the door, and Lucas shook his head: “I had my hopes, but I don’t think so. I can’t get around the car thing.”
“You can steal cars,” Fox said.
“But would you steal a car to transport a bloody body, and then keep it?” Lucas asked. “I haven’t heard about anybody finding a stolen car full of blood. I suppose he could have abandoned it, but it’s been weeks since Larson was killed. Somebody should have seen it by now, if it was stolen.”
“Could be parked out at the airport for a month,” Fox suggested.
“Not with the new security,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Their surveillance system takes your tag number when your car comes in, runs it right there. And if you’re out there for more than a week, they’ll take a look at your car.”
“Could be at one of those twenty-four-hour Sam’s Club places,” Sloan suggested. “Might go unnoticed for a while.”
They all thought about it for a minute, then Fox said, “I don’t know. There are some possibilities, but Charlie isn’t a master criminal.”
THEY WERE STILL STANDING in the parking lot, scuffing gravel, talking about possibilities, when Elle called.
“Lucas, I’ve been reading about this man Charles Pope,” she said. “He is nothing like I expected.”
“I know. We’ve been talking about that. We just went through his trailer . . .” He recapped the search, and then said, “This wasn’t a sure thing, anyway. Just a guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dumb shit caught a bus for California.” He winced: “Sorry about the language.”
“That’s . . . never mind,” she said. “Anyway, I’m skeptical. I’m very interested in what the DNA brings back. I would predict that we don’t have a match. Will you call me when you know?”
“The minute I hear,” Lucas said.
AND TEN SECONDS AFTER ELLE rang off, as they were saying good-bye to Fox, Carol called from Lucas’s office. “Rose Marie wants you to call her,” Carol said. “Right now. She’s going to a music thing tonight so you won’t be able to get her later. And about twenty reporters called.”
“I thought they might. I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said.
FOX AND SLOAN WANDERED OFF, chatting, while Lucas poked in Rose Marie’s number. When she picked up, Lucas told her about the trip to Owatonna, and the bad news: “We came up empty.”
“I talked with the governor and McCord,” she said. “The governor doesn’t see anything in it for him, and McCord said he’s too busy to front for the media. You’re gonna have to do it.”
He looked at his watch: “Ah, man . . .”
“Hey. You’re good at it. Do it.”
“All right. I’ll do it. But I’m laying down some rules, and you have to back me up. I’ll hold a press briefing at five o’clock, but that’s it. Nobody goes around me.”
“Make it four o’clock or they’ll all be yelling at me about missing the early news.”
“Fuck ’em. I got another stop to make. Five o’clock—maybe we can change it to four o’clock on other days.”
“If you gotta—I’ll pass the complaints along to Carol. She’s probably gotten some calls already.”
“About a million of them.”
“So—handle it.”
LUCAS CALLED CAROL BACK, told her to set up the press conference and to call Nordwall and invite him to make a statement. “He might want to get his picture on TV. He’s running this fall.”
FOX LED THEM BACK to the I-35 connection, waved good-bye out the window, and Lucas spun down the ramp and they headed back north. “Sorta like the old days when we were operating in Minneapolis,” Sloan said. “The old days were sorta fucked up, you know? Looking back?”
“You’re just getting cranky,” Lucas said. “What could be better than chasing assholes like Pope? Think of all the guys who never get to do anything. You can’t sit on your ass until you die.”
Sloan cleared his throat. “I’d thought maybe . . . I’d buy a bar.”
Lucas looked at him for ten seconds, then said, “You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not kidding. I’ve been looking into it. Seriously,” Sloan said.
“When did this come up?” Lucas asked. “You don’t know anything about running a bar. That’s a complicated business.”
“Hey, I took a small-business class last semester at the community college,” Sloan said. “The situation I’m looking at, it’s not a big deal. The owner’s getting old, wants to retire, but he’d work with me as long as it took. You know Bernie Berger . . .”
“The Pine place? Out by Golden Valley?”
“Yeah. Don’t piss on it; it’s not that bad a place.”
“I wasn’t gonna piss on it. It
is
a likeable place. Other than the fact that it’s called the Pine Knot. But even if you got a deal, you’re a cop, Sloan . . .”
“I’m tired,” Sloan said.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake.” Lucas took his hands off the wheel and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “If you quit . . . who’s gonna chase the assholes with me?”
THE NEXT CITY NORTH was Faribault. The Rockyard was just outside the city limits on a county frontage road that ran parallel to the interstate. A yellow sign that said
TOPLESS
faced the highway, a beacon to truck drivers, but the paint was coming off the sign and it might not have been current. The bar itself had a gravel parking lot, fake yellow-log siding with a simulated hitching post, and a wooden boardwalk. A barbeque sign flicked an orange
BBQ
-
BBQ
-
BBQ
out toward the county road, and a Coors sign said
COORS
-
COORS
-
COORS
.
Four pickups sat in the parking lot, with an Oldsmobile with hand-sized rust spots down the sides and across the trunk. The Olds’s license plate hung off the bumper on wire loops.
“Good-looking place,” Sloan said, as they got out of the Porsche.
“Ah, if I were seventeen . . .”
“And stupid . . .”
THE SALOON WAS COOL INSIDE, smelling of beer and fried hamburger. A woman bartender in a white blouse, black vest, and ribbon tie was wiping down the bar. A couple of guys were shooting pool in the back, nine ball, and three more watching, all of them with longnecks in their hands. Everybody turned their heads when Lucas and Sloan stepped inside. Sloan muttered, looking at the bartender, “That doesn’t look like a Booger.”
“C’mon,” Lucas said; he’d been checking faces in the back.
They went on to the bar, and the bartender asked, “Gentlemen? What can I do you for?” She was a sturdy dark-haired woman, about fifty, with too-red lipstick and too much rouge. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to the cash register.
“Carl around?” Lucas asked.
“Can I tell him who’s calling?”
“Yeah, the cops,” Lucas said. He held out his ID. “We need a little help.”
She looked at Lucas, then at Sloan, and asked, “Is he in trouble?”
“Can’t tell yet,” Lucas said.
“I’ll see if I can find him,” she said. She walked down behind the bar and out, and into a back room. The pool watchers were now all watching Lucas and Sloan, and Lucas smiled at them. Ten seconds later, the bartender reappeared. A fat man, with hair like a haystack, and who might have described himself as muscular, shambled along behind.
“Hi, I’m Carl,” he said. “You’re police officers? Is there a problem?”
“You know a guy named Adam Rice?” Lucas asked.
Carl blinked rapidly, then said, “Jesus. He
was
the guy. We weren’t sure.”
“Yeah, he was,” Lucas said. Everybody in the bar was listening now. “You gotta place where we can go talk?”
CARL HAD A SMALL OFFICE, a cherry-laminate desk with a swivel chair, and two formed-plastic chairs for visitors. The desk was piled with paper, a well-used desk calculator to one side. Carl leaned back in the chair, which squealed under the load, and said, “I know the guy. He’d come in, have a few beers, cry a little, listen to music. He was a sad guy. How’d you know he came in here?”