Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 59 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

22

The weather patterns were seesawing across the state, Canadian cold and Gulf heat. Druze felt as if he was breathing water. Thunderstorms prowled western Minnesota; TV weathermen said they’d be into the metro area before nine o’clock. From the interstate, Druze could see lightning to the north and west. The storm was too far away for the thunder to be heard.

Maplewood Mall was the northeastern shopping anchor for St. Paul, out in the suburbs. Low crime, high affluence. Boys in letter jackets, teenage girls trying out their new slinks.

Druze cruised the parking lot, watching the shoppers. He wanted a woman leaving the mall. Forties, so she’d fit the profile. If he could get her at the right place, he wouldn’t have to move her. Do it right in the parking lot, leave her there. The quicker she was found, the quicker the cops would be turned.

He stopped at a cross-drive and a woman walked in front of his headlights; she wore a cardigan, slacks and high heels, held a purse with both hands, a determined look on her face. A little too old, Druze thought, and not in the right place.

He parked, got out and sauntered toward the mall. A bronze rent-a-cop car rolled slowly through the lot, and Druze headed inside. He’d worked on his face with Cover Mark cosmetics and wore a felt hat with a snap brim, so he wouldn’t be particularly noticeable from a range of more than a few feet. Not unless they saw the nose. He pulled the hat farther down on his forehead.

Druze was worried. In the beginning, when he and Bekker had worked through the plan, it had seemed simple. Bekker would take Armistead, and Druze would take Stephanie Bekker. Both he and Bekker would get what they wanted—Bekker his freedom, Druze his security. Both would have solid alibis. If the pressure on Bekker got too great, Druze could take a third. No problem. But then the lover came along . . . .

Was George the right one? He looked like the man in the hall, but the man in the hall had been wearing only a towel, his thinning hair had been wet, his face contorted. Druze had seen him only for an instant. Had he been heavier than George? Now, at this distance, Druze just wasn’t sure. He’d looked at too many pictures of people who were almost right. Contaminated with information, he thought.

Bekker . . . He was no longer sure of Bekker. They’d met after a show, in a theater café, Bekker there with Stephanie and some kind of doctors’ group from the university. Bekker had been out on the edge of the group, left alone. Druze had come in, also alone, looking for a drink. He’d seen the beautiful man immediately, couldn’t take his eyes away: Bekker had so much . . . .

Bekker had been equally fascinated. He’d made the first approach: Hello there, I think I saw you on the stage a few minutes ago . . . .

And later, much later, after they were . . . friends? was that right? . . . Bekker had said, “We’re the opposite sides of the same coin, my friend, trapped by our looks.”

But it hadn’t been their appearances that held them together. It had been something else: the taste for violence? what?

He stood next to the atrium rail in the mall, looking down to the lower floor. Shoppers strolled down the length of the mall, some still in careful winter dress, dark, somber, protective, gloves sticking out from coat pockets. Others, the younger ones, had shifted with the Gulf winds, going into summer, T-shirts under light nylon windbreakers, a few of them in shorts, surfers for the boys, tennis shorts for the girls.

He started picking out women. Forties. Somebody attractive. Somebody who might catch the eye of a psycho. There were dozens of them, singles, twos and threes, tall, small, heavy, slender, scowling, laughing, intent, window-shopping, strolling, paying cash, checking receipts, holding up blouses . . . . Druze unconsciously flipped his car keys in the air with one hand, picked them out of the air with the other, tossed them back to the first, and did it again.

And he chose: Eenie meenie minie moe . . .

Nancy Dunen couldn’t believe the price of jeans. She never believed. Every time she came in, she thought the last time must have been an aberration, a nightmare. The twins always managed to wear out the back-to-school jeans, bought in September, at the same time in the spring. Two twelve-year-olds, four pairs of jeans, thirty-two dollars a pair . . . she stared blankly into the middle distance, her lips moving, as she calculated. A hundred twenty-eight dollars. My God, where would it come from? Maybe Visa would have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

She held the pants up, checking for flaws in the fabric. Noticed the feminine cut. Twelve years old, and they were getting curves in their pants already. Must be hormones in the breakfast cereal.

A man meandered past the open front of the store. Something wrong with his face, though it was hard to tell exactly what it was. He was wearing an old-fashioned brown felt hat, with the brim snapped down. She was looking past the pants when she saw him; she felt the light clink of eye contact, turned away as the man turned away, and she scraped at a knot in the denim with a fingernail. Good eye, Dunen, she thought. She put that pair of jeans back, got another.

Nancy sometimes thought she might be pretty, and sometimes she was sure she wasn’t. She kept her dark hair cut short, skimped on the makeup, stayed in shape with a three-time-a-week jog around the neighborhood. She didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether she was pretty or not, although she claimed she had the best forty-three-year-old butt in the neighborhood. She was settled in her body, in her life. Her husband seemed to like her, and she liked him, and they both liked the kids . . . .

She took the jeans to the cashier’s counter, groaned when she saw the Visa charge slip, folded it, dropped it in her purse.

“If my husband finds it, he’ll wring my neck,” she said to the girl behind the counter.

“Yeah, but . . .” The blonde salesgirl tossed her hair with a smile and made a piano-playing gesture with her hand as she put the jeans in a bag. Husbands can be handled, she was saying. “They’re nice pants.”

Nancy left the store and, bag in hand, window-shopped at a women’s store, but she kept moving. The man with the hat was behind her on the escalator, heading toward the same exit. She noticed but didn’t think about it. Let’s see, I was out the exit by the cookie stand . . . .

A burly high school kid with a letter jacket and a white-sidewall haircut held the door for her. He was wearing an earring and looked at her butt, and she smiled to herself. When she was growing up, in the fifties, there were older boys with sidewalls, but they’d have cut their own wrists before wearing an earring . . . .

Nancy stepped over a curb and stopped at her car, and fished in her purse for her keys. The man with the hat went by. She almost nodded—they’d sort of looked at each other a few times in the mall—but she didn’t. Instead, she popped open the car door, dumped the jeans in the backseat, climbed in and started the engine. She should make it home by eight. What was on TV tonight?

Druze had been ready, the knife-sharpening steel in his pocket, the same one he’d used on George. He had cleaned it meticulously, kept it in his kitchen drawer. And it was ready when he needed it. He followed the woman out of the mall, into the parking lot, ready to close on her, watching for other walkers, for cars turning down the rows, checking the lights. He was ready . . . .

The woman stopped at the first car in the lot, a white Chevy Spectrum. Propped the bag between her hip and the car, began digging in her purse. They were absolutely exposed to the mall. If he moved on her, he would be seen. He glanced back: people on the sidewalk, at the doors, coming, going . . . Shit.

He felt stupid. If he picked a woman inside, there was an excellent chance that she’d be parked somewhere in the open, where he couldn’t get to her. Or even that she’d be picked up at the curb by a husband or son. He’d have to wait outside. He went by Nancy Dunen, unconsciously flipped his keys in the air with one hand, picked them out with the other. The woman glanced vaguely at him, then went back to her purse. He never looked back, he heard the door slam and the engine start . . . .

Druze went back to his car, moved it to the edge of the lot, tried a parking space, found he couldn’t see out of it, tried another. Good. He parked, turned off the lights and waited. He was parked at an acute angle to a side entry. People wouldn’t naturally look at this area, but he could watch them coming through.

He waited five minutes. Nothing. Then a couple crossed the lot, walking toward the cluster where Druze was parked. A single woman followed them by twenty yards. The couple reached their car; the man walked around to the passenger side to open the door, then opened the trunk to put their packages inside. The single woman reached the cluster as the man closed the trunk and popped open the driver’s-side door. By that time, the single woman, unaware that she was being watched, and not more than thirty feet from Druze, was already getting into her car. She backed out at the same time as the couple, and they were gone.

Damn. She would have been a good one, Druze thought. A little young, but that was okay. He slouched in the seat, the hat brim pulled down. People walked in and out of the lighted doors. Eenie meenie minie moe . . .

Kelsey Romm was wearing a scarlet blouse and jeans, with white gym shoes, her hair long, her lipstick dark. She worked part-time at Maplewood and part-time at a convenience store in Roseville, and on weekends at a Target. Sometimes the workload made her sick to her stomach; sometimes her legs ached so bad that she couldn’t bend them to sit down. But full-time jobs were hard to find. Economics, her Maplewood boss told her. You could patch together a bunch of part-time employees and avoid all benefits, he said. And it made scheduling easier. It wasn’t his fault, he said: he didn’t own the store. He was only following orders.

She got the same story at the other places. If she didn’t like it, there were plenty of high school kids looking for jobs. It wasn’t as if she needed a lot of skill. Scan a code, and a number came up on the cash register. Scan another, and the machine told you the change. Kelsey Romm needed the work. Two kids, both in junior high. Two mistakes, running wild, the girl already into alcohol and who knew what else. She didn’t even like them much, but they were hers, no doubt about that.

Kelsey Romm walked with her head down. She always walked with her head down. You didn’t see things that way. She didn’t see Druze, either. She walked to the car, an ’83 Chevy Cavalier, brown, a beater, air didn’t work, radio didn’t work, tires were going bald, the brakes sounded like they had air in them, the front-seat latch was broken . . . .

She stuck her key in the door lock. She saw the man at the last minute and started to turn her head. The steel caught her behind the ear, and the last thing Kelsey Romm saw in her life was the entrance to the Maplewood Mall, and a kid leaning on a trashcan.

If you’d told her this was the way it would end, she would have nodded. She would have said, “I believe it.”

Druze saw her hurry through the entrance and knew instinctively that she’d be coming all the way out. He cracked the car door, so it would open silently. She had her head down and came straight across the lot, heading for the row behind Druze’s car. That was fine. That was good. He got out and sauntered down the row, flipped his keys in the air with one hand, picked them out with the other, did it again. There were still a few people on the sidewalks outside the mall, a kid standing by the entrance, looking the other way. This could work . . . .

She came on, paying no attention to him, turned in at an old Chevy. He’d seen where she was going, and made his own move, cutting between the cars. If she had her keys in her hand, he thought, he might be too late. He put his own keys into his pocket, got a grip on the sharpening steel and stepped a little more quickly. She started digging in her purse as she turned in at her car, her head still down. Like a mole, Druze thought. Digging. He was close now, could see the shiny fabric of her shirt, glanced around, nobody . . .

And he was there, swinging, the steel whipping around, the woman cocking her head at the last minute.

The steel hit and bit and she went down, bouncing off the car as the professor had; but the woman made a noise, loud, like the caw of a crow, air from her lungs squeezing out. Druze looked around: he was okay, he thought. The kid by the garbage can might be looking at them . . . but he wasn’t moving.

Druze stooped, pulled open the woman’s purse, found her keys, unlocked the door, picked her up and shoved her into the Chevy. The car had bucket seats with an automatic-transmission console between them, and she lay humped over the seats, in an awkward, broken position. Druze stood straight, checked the lot again, then got in with her, touched her neck. She wasn’t breathing. She was gone.

He used a screwdriver on her eyes.

Bekker was Beauty tonight, a little sting of amphetamine, just a taste of acid. His mind was moving, a facile, glittering thing, a mink of an intellect, and it worked through the problems in what seemed like no time at all . . . although time must have passed . . . it was light outside when he came home, and now, it was dark . . . How long . . . ? He went away again.

Cheryl Clark had called him at his office.

She wanted to come back, he thought. Knew his wife was gone now. Was trying to ingratiate herself. Had news: A cop had been coming around to see her. They wanted to know about his love life, his personal habits. She thought he should know, she said.

Maybe he would see her again. She’d grown tiresome after a while, but there’d been a few nights . . . .

His mind was like liquid fire, the taste of the MDMA in his mouth, under his tongue. What? More? He really should be more temperate . . . .

When he came back—came back long enough to know that he would be okay—he’d found the solution to the surveillance. So simple; it had been there the whole time. He had a friend with the authorities, did he not?

The surveillance net picked up Bekker as he left the alley, headed down to Hennepin Avenue and took Hennepin to the interstate. He went to the library, parked and went inside. The net was with him. Looked at a book in the reference section. Headed back to the car. One of the cops in the net looked at the book, a cross-reference directory for St. Paul. He noted the pages: if he’d had time to scan the names, he’d have found Lucas Davenport listed about halfway down the second column . . . .

Across the Mississippi and then south. Nice neighborhood . . . Damn St. Paul addresses, the numbers had nothing to do with the streets. Started at 1 and went however high they needed to go . . .

Davenport’s house was not particularly impressive, he thought when he found it, except for the location. One-story rambler, stone and white siding, big front yard. Nice house, but not terrific. Stephanie wouldn’t have given it a second look. Lights in the windows.

He rang the doorbell, and a moment later Davenport was there.

“Officer Davenport,” Bekker said, nodding, pleased to see Lucas. He had his hands in the pockets of his hip-length leather coat. “You said you would see that I’m not harassed. Why am I followed everywhere?”

Davenport, perplexed, stepped out on the porch. His face was like a chunk of wood, and Bekker stepped back. “What?”

“Why am I being followed? I know they’re out there,” Bekker said, flipping a hand at the street. “This is not paranoia. I’ve seen your officers watching me. Young men in college clothes and police shoes . . .”

Davenport’s face suddenly tightened, seized by some sort of rictus, Bekker thought. He stepped close and gripped Bekker’s coat at the lapels. He lifted and Bekker went up on his toes.

“Put me down . . .” Bekker said. He was strong, but Davenport held him awkwardly close and his arms were bent. He tried to push Davenport away, but the cop held him, shaking, apparently gripped by rage.

“You never come to my house,” Davenport rasped, his eyes wide and crazy. “You hear that, motherfucker? The last guy that came to my house, I killed. You come to my house, I’ll kill your ass just like I did him.”

“I’m, I’m sorry,” Bekker stuttered. Davenport was not the cool, rational cop who had walked through Stephanie’s bedroom. His eyes were straining open, his head cocked forward on a tense neck, his hands hard as stones.

Davenport shoved Bekker back, releasing him. “Go. Get the fuck out of here.”

Bekker staggered. Down the sidewalk, ten feet from the porch, he said, “I just wanted the surveillance pulled, I don’t want to be hectored . . . .”

“Call the chief,” Lucas said. His voice was cold, brutal. “Just stay the fuck away from my house.”

Davenport stepped back inside and shut the door. Bekker stood on the walk for a moment, looking at the door, not quite believing. Davenport had been friendly, he’d understood some things . . . .

Bekker was in his car when his own anger caught him.

Treated like a Russian peasant. Kicked down the stairs. Thrown off. He pounded his palms on the steering wheel. Saw himself striking out, the edge of his hand smashing under Davenport’s nose, blood rolling down his dark, bleak face; saw himself kicking, going for the balls . . .

“Fuckin’ treat me like that, fuckin’ treat me like a . . . a . . . Fuckin’ treat me, you can’t, you better think about it . . . Fuckin’ treat me . . .”

As Bekker drove away from Davenport’s house, the net still in place, a teenage boy strolled up to Kelsey Romm’s car and peeked inside. Was she fuckin’ somebody? What was she . . .

He’d been leaning on a trashcan outside the mall entrance, waiting for something to happen, somebody to show up, when he saw something happen. He didn’t know what. There was this guy . . . . He had gotten a videocassette for his birthday, a movie, Darkman, his favorite flick. And this guy looked like Darkman, no bandages, but the hat was right . . . . And something happened.

He saw the guy duck inside the car. He was in it for a moment or two; then he got out, went to another car and drove away. It never occurred to the kid to look at the license plate. And he was not the kind of kid who knew his cars. He was just a kid who hung out and watched Darkman in the afternoons, after school . . . .

The car with the woman didn’t move. When the other car, the Darkman car, was out of sight, the kid considered for a moment, then ambled across the sidewalk, down the long rows of cars. What was she? Was she, like, a hooker, giving blow jobs in the backseat? That’d be something.

He got close, he peeked . . . .

“Aw, Jesus . . . Aw, Jesus . . .” The kid ran toward the mall, his arms milling. Halfway there, he began screaming, “Help . . .”

Lucas, still hot from Bekker’s visit, was working on Druid’s Pursuit when the watch commander called.

CHAPTER

23

A thunderstorm was rolling across Minneapolis when Lucas left his house, lightning crackling through the clouds, storm-front winds lashing the elm branches overhead. He went north, up Highway 280, the lights of downtown Minneapolis to the west, barely visible through the advancing rain. The storm caught him just before he turned east, a few drops splatting off the windshield, and then a torrent, a waterfall, hailstones pecking on the roof, small white beads of ice bouncing off the road in his headlights. He turned east on I-694 and the rain slackened, then quit altogether as he outran the storm front.

From the highway, the mall was screened by an intervening block of buildings, but he could see red emergency lights flashing off window glass. The White Bear Avenue exit was jammed. He put the Porsche on the shoulder and worked his way to the front. A Minnesota highway patrolman ran toward him, and Lucas hung his badge case out the window.

“Davenport,” the patrolman said, leaning in the window. “Stay behind me and I’ll make a hole in this line.”

The patrolman jogged along the shoulder, leading the Porsche to a roadblock. The street was a nightmare tangle of shoppers trying to get out of the mall, gawkers trying to drive past the murder scene, and the normal traffic on and off the interstate. The patrolmen had given up trying to control the crush and had settled for getting as many people out of the mall as possible. At the roadblock, the patrolman leading Lucas said something to the others, and they stopped traffic, directed a car out of the way and let Lucas slip through to the parking lot.

“Thanks,” Lucas yelled as he went through. “I came through that storm—it’s a bad one, with hail. If you got rain gear . . .”

The patrolman nodded and waved him on.

Television vans and reporters’ cars were lined up on the perimeter of the lot, a hundred yards from a battered brown Chevy. All four doors on the car were open and emergency lights bathed it in a brilliant showroom illumination. Lucas left his Porsche in a pod of squad cars and walked toward the Chevy.

“Davenport, over here.” A cop in a short blue jacket, who’d been talking to another cop in a sweater, called to him, and Lucas walked over.

“John Barber, Maplewood,” said the cop in the jacket. He had pale blue eyes and a long lantern jaw. “And this is Howie Berkson . . . . Howie, go on over and tell that TV bunch it’ll be another twenty minutes, okay?”

As Berkson walked away, Barber said, “C’mon.”

“Any question whether it’s the same guy?” Lucas asked.

Barber shrugged. “I guess not. One of your people is running around out here . . . Shearson? He says the technique is the same. Wait’ll you see her face.”

Lucas went and looked, and turned away, and they started a circle around the car. “Looks like him,” he said sourly. “A copycat couldn’t get up that much enthusiasm for it . . . .”

“That’s what Shearson said . . . .”

“Where is he, by the way?” Lucas asked, looking around the lot.

Barber grinned. “He said it looked like we had it under control. I heard he’s looking at shirts over in the mall.”

“Asshole,” Lucas said.

“That’s the feeling we got. By the way, we found a kid who saw the guy.”

“What?” Lucas stopped short. “Saw him?”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Barber said. “He was a hundred yards away and wasn’t paying too much attention. Saw the guy’s car, too, but doesn’t have any idea about make or model or even color . . . Didn’t get anything. Says the killer looked like a guy from some comic-book movie.”

“Then how do you know he saw . . .”

“Because he saw the woman walking out toward her car. He wasn’t paying any attention to her, just hanging out, but a minute later, he saw a man by her car, it looked like he was helping her inside. Then, a couple of minutes later, he really doesn’t know how long it was, he sees the guy walking away. And the woman never backs the car out. So the kid thinks—he told us before his mother got here—he thinks this woman is a hooker maybe, doing blow jobs in her car, or maybe she’s dealing dope. That’s the way his head works. And he kind of casually strolls by to take a look . . . .”

“So he saw the guy for sure.”

“Seems like it,” Barber said.

“Let me talk to him.”

The kid was a slender, ragged teenager with skateboard pads on his knees, fingerless gloves, dirty blond shoulder-length hair and a complexion that was going bad. He wore a long-billed hat with the bill turned down and to the side, covering one ear. His mother hovered over him, throwing severe looks alternately at the kid and the police.

“You got a minute?” Lucas asked the kid, when Barber walked him up.

“I guess so, they won’t let me go nowhere,” the kid answered. He brushed his hair out of his eyes, the same gesture Cassie used, half defense, half necessity.

“We would like to go home sometime,” his mother said, spotting Lucas as an authority. “It’s not like . . .”

“This is pretty important,” Lucas said mildly. To the kid, he said, “Why don’t we take a walk down the mall . . . .”

“Can I come?” asked the kid’s mother.

“Sure,” Lucas said reluctantly. “But let your boy tell the story, okay? Any help you give him . . . isn’t help.”

“Okay.” Her head bobbed: she understood that.

“So what does this guy feel like?” Lucas asked, as they started down the length of the mall.

The kid’s forehead wrinkled. “Feel like?”

“What kind of vibrations did he give off? The Maplewood cop, Barber, says you couldn’t see him too clearly, but you must’ve gotten some vibrations. Barber said you thought he looked like some comic-book guy . . . .”

“Not a comic-book guy, a comic-book movie guy,” the kid said. “Did you ever see the movie Darkman?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You oughta. It’s a great movie . . . .”

“His favorite,” his mother clucked. “These kids . . .”

Lucas put his index finger on his lips and she shut up, her face reddening.

“See, there’s this guy Darkman, who gets his face all fuck . . . uh, messed up by these hoods,” the kid said, glancing at his mother. “He tries to put his face back together with this skin that he makes—”

“Whoa, whoa,” Lucas said. “There was something wrong with his face? The guy in the parking lot?”

“I couldn’t see that much, he had this hat. But he moved like Darkman . . . . You gotta see the movie,” the kid said with wide-eyed seriousness. “Darkman moves like . . . I don’t know. You gotta see it. This guy moved like that. Like, I couldn’t see if there was anything wrong with his face, but he moved like there was. With his face kind of always turned away.”

“Did you see him jump the woman?”

“No. I saw her walking out, then I was looking at something else, then I saw him. Then he got in her car, and then he got out, and then he moved away like Darkman. Kind of glided. With that hat.”

“Glided?”

“Yeah. You know, like, most guys just walk. This guy kind of glided. Like Darkman. You gotta see the movie.”

“All right. Anything else? Anything? Did you see him talk to anybody, did he do a little dance, did he do anything . . . ?”

“No, not that I saw. I just saw him walking . . . . Oh yeah, he was juggling his keys, that’s all.”

“Juggling his keys?”

“Yeah. Toss them up, then go like this . . .” The kid mimed a man throwing his keys up, made a quick little double step, snagged them with his off hand.

“Jesus,” Lucas said. “Just once?”

“Naw, he did it a couple, three times.”

They’d stopped walking outside a cutlery store. In the window, a two-foot-long model of a Swiss Army knife continuously and silently folded and unfolded. “What do you do for a living, kid?” Lucas asked. “Still in school?”

“Yeah.”

“You got a good eye,” Lucas said. “You might make a cop someday.”

The kid looked away. “Naw, I couldn’t do that,” he said. His mother prodded him, but he went on. “Cops gotta fuck with people. I couldn’t do that for a living.”

• • •

Lucas left the kid and his anxious mother with a Maplewood cop and used a pay phone to call Cassie. She was supposed to be off, but there was no answer at her apartment. He tried the theater, but no one answered the phone.

“God damn it.” He needed her. He went back outside and found Shearson and Barber standing at the mall entrance. Shearson had a sack under his arm that might have contained a necktie. Rain swept across the lot beyond them, and the floodlights around the death car had been turned off.

“Find everything you needed?” Lucas asked Shearson, tapping the sack with a finger.

“Hey, I’m out here on my own time,” Shearson said. He was wearing a dark cashmere knee-length coat over a pearl-gray suit, with a white shirt, a blue tie with tiny crowns on it, and black loafers. His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit.

“You talk to the kid?” Barber asked.

“Yeah. I’d like to get a stenographer over to his place tomorrow, take a statement,” Lucas said. “He told me the guy was juggling his keys, and doing a little dance step when he caught them. I’d like to get him on record for that.”

“Give us a call with questions . . .” said Barber.

“You get something?” Shearson asked, eyebrows up.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. He trusted Shearson about as far as he could spit a rat. “What’s happening with this shrink you’ve been looking at?”

“He’s the Loverboy, all right,” Shearson said. “He’s hiding something. There aren’t a lot of loose ends to pull on. I think we oughta just sit back for a couple days. Until something new comes up. But Daniel’s got me covering him like whip on cream.”

“Okay . . . Well, I gotta get one last look at this car,” Lucas said.

Barber went with him, the two of them hurrying through the rain with a kind of broken-field lope, shoulders hunched, as though they could dodge the raindrops.

“Your buddy’s got a great wardrobe,” Barber said, tongue in cheek.

“And he’d lose an IQ contest to a fuckin’ stump,” Lucas said.

The body was being moved out of the car, wrapped in sheets. Another Maplewood cop came over and said, “Nothing in the car that looks like a weapon. Nothing but paper—ice cream bar wrappers, candy wrappers, Ding Dong wrappers. The woman lived on junk.”

“All right,” said Lucas. To Barber, he said, “Can you keep me up-to-date?”

“I’ll fax you everything we got in the morning, first thing. We don’t need this clown killing people out here.”

Lucas hadn’t expected much from the scene itself. If a killer had no relationship with the victim, no apparent motive, no rational method of operation, the only things left to find were witnesses or traceable physical evidence. Because a serial killer could pick the time and place, he could pick a situation that minimized his exposure to witnesses. And evidence left behind—semen, in sex-related cases, or blood or skin samples—didn’t help until after the killer was caught.

This attack had been almost perfect. Almost . . .

The storm was dying as Lucas headed west. There was another thunderstorm cell far down to the south, but from I-35W he could see distant jetliner landing lights, going into Minneapolis-St. Paul International from the south, so he knew the storm must be well out downstate.