John Sandford - Night Prey

Connell's close-cropped hair was disconcerting; it lent a punkish air to a woman who was anything but a punk. She had a serious, square face, with a short, Irish nose and a square chin. She was still wearing the blue suit she'd worn that morning, with a darker stripe of what might have been garbage juice on the front of it. An incongruous black leather hip pack was buckled around her hips, the bag itself perched just below her navel: a rip-down holster for a large gun. She could take a big gun: she had large hands, and she stuck one of them out and Lucas half-rose to shake it.

She'd opted for peace, Lucas thought; but her hand was cold. "I read your file," he said. "That's nice work."

"The possession of a vagina doesn't necessarily indicate stupidity," Connell said. She was still standing.

"Take it easy," Lucas said, his forehead wrinkling as he sat down again. "That was a compliment."

"Just want things clear," Connell said crisply. She looked at the vacant chair, still didn't sit. "And you think there is something?"

Lucas stared at her for another moment, but she neither flinched nor sat down. Holding her eyes, he said, "I think so. They're all too… not alike, but they have the feeling of a single man."

"There's something else," Connell said. "It's hard to see it in the files, but you see it when you talk to the friends of these women."

"Which is?"

"They're all the same woman."

"Ah. Tell me. And sit down, for Christ's sakes."

She sat, reluctantly, as if she were giving up the high ground. "One here in the Cities, one in Duluth, now this one, if this latest one is his. One in Madison, one in Thunder Bay, one in Des Moines, one in Sioux Falls. They were all single, late twenties to early forties. They were all somewhat shy, somewhat lonely, somewhat intellectual, somewhat religious or at least involved in some kind of spirituality. They'd go out to bookstores or galleries or plays or concerts at night, like other people'd go out to bars. Anyway, they were all like that. And then these shy, quiet women turn up ripped…"

"Nasty word," Lucas said casually. "Ripped."

Connell shuddered, and her naturally pale complexion went paper-white. "I dream about the woman up at Carlos Avery. I was worse up there than I was today. I went out, took a look, started puking. I got puke all over my radio."

"Well, first time," Lucas said.

"No. I've seen a lot of dead people," Connell said. She was pitched forward in her chair, hands clasped. "This is way different. Joan Smits wants vengeance. Or justice. I can hear her calling from the other side-I know that sounds like schizophrenia, but I can hear her, and I can feel the other ones. All of them. I've been to every one of those places, where the murders happened, on my own time. Talked to witnesses, talked to cops. It's one guy, and he's the devil."

There was a hard, crystalline conviction in her voice and eyes, the taste and bite of psychosis, that made Lucas turn his head away. "What about the sequence you've got here?" Lucas asked, trying to escape her intensity. "He was putting a year between most of them. But then he skipped a couple-once, twenty-one months, another time, twenty-three. You think you're missing a couple?"

"Only if he completely changed his MO," Connell said. "If he shot them. My data search concentrated on stabbings. Or maybe he took the time to bury them and they were never found. That wouldn't be typical of him, though. But there are so many missing people out there, it's impossible to tell for sure."

"Maybe he went someplace else-L. A. or Miami, or the bodies were just never found."

She shrugged. "I don't think so. He tends to stay close to home. I think he drives to the killing scene. He picks his ground ahead of time, and goes by car. I plotted all the places where these women were taken from, and except for the one in Thunder Bay, they all disappeared within ten minutes of an interstate that runs through the Cities. And the one in Thunder Bay was off Highway 61. So maybe he went out to L.A.-but it doesn't feel right."

"I understand that you think it could be a cop."

She leaned forward again, the intensity returning. "There are still a couple of things we need to look at. The cop thing is the only hard clue we have: that one woman talking to her daughter…"

"I read your file on it," Lucas said.

"Okay. And you saw the thing about the PPP?"

"Mmm. No. I don't remember."

"It's in an early police interview with a guy named Price, who was convicted of killing the Madison woman."

"Oh, yeah, I saw the transcript. I haven't had time to read it."

"He says he didn't do it. I believe him. I'm planning to go over and talk to him if nothing else comes up. He was in the bookstore where the victim was picked up, and he says there was a bearded man with PPP tattooed on his hand. Right on the web between his index finger and thumb."

"So we're looking for a cop with PPP on his hand?"

"I don't know. Nobody else saw the tattoo, and they never found anybody with PPP on his hand. A computer search doesn't show PPP as an identifying mark anywhere. But the thing is, Price had been in jail, and he said the tattoo was a prison tattoo. You know, like they make with ballpoint ink and pins."

"Well," Lucas said. "It's something."

Connell was discouraged. "But not much."

"Not unless we find the killer-then it might help confirm the ID," Lucas said. He picked up the file and paged through it until he found the list of murders and dates. "Do you have any theories about why the killings are so scattered around?"

"I've been looking for patterns," she said. "I don't know…"

"Until the body you found last winter, he never had two killings in the same state. And the last one here was almost nine years ago."

"Yes. That's right."

Lucas closed the file and tossed it back on his desk. "Yeah. That means different reporting jurisdictions. Iowa doesn't know what we're doing, and Wisconsin doesn't know what Iowa's doing, and nobody knows what South Dakota's doing. And Canada sure as hell is out of it."

"You're saying he's figured on that," Connell said. "So it is a cop."

"Maybe," said Lucas. "But maybe it's an ex-con. A smart guy. Maybe the reason for the two gaps is, he was inside. Some small-timer who gets slammed for drugs or burglary, and he's out of circulation."

Connell leaned back, regarding him gravely. "When you crawled into the Dumpster this morning, you were cold. I couldn't be that cold; I never would have seen that tobacco on her."

"I'm used to it," Lucas said.

"No, no, it was… impressive," she said. "I need that kind of distance. When I said we only had one fact about him, the cop thing, I was wrong. You came up with a bunch of them: he was strong, he smokes-"

"Unfiltered Camels," Lucas said.

"Yeah? Well, it's interesting. And now these ideas… I haven't had anybody bouncing ideas off me. Are you gonna let me work with you?"

He nodded. "If you want."

"Will we get along?"

"Maybe. Maybe not," he said. "What does that have to do with anything?"

She regarded him without humor. "Exactly my attitude," she said. "So. What are we doing?"

"We're checking bookstores."

Connell looked down at herself. "I've got to change clothes. I've got them in my car…"

While Connell went to change, Lucas called Anderson for a reading on homicide's preliminary work on the Wannemaker killing. "We just got started," Anderson said. "Skoorag called in a few minutes ago. He said a friend of Wannemaker's definitely thinks she was going to a bookstore. But if you look at the file when she was reported missing, somebody else said she might have been going to the galleries over on First Avenue."

"We're hitting the bookstores. Maybe your guys could take the galleries."