John Sandford - Night Prey

"Her stuff does go well with a simple black dress," Lucas said. "'Course, you want to match the earrings."

Roux showed a thin smile. "You can talk that way because you don't give a shit," she said. "You're rich, you're in love, you buy your suits in New York. Why should you care?"

"I care," Lucas said mildly. "But it's hard to get too excited when the victims are already dead… What'd you want?"

There was a long moment of silence. Lucas waited it out, and she sighed again and said, "I've got a problem."

"Connell."

She looked up, surprised. "You know her?"

"I met her about an hour ago, over in Wisconsin, running her mouth."

"That's her," Roux said. "Running her mouth. How'd she hear about it?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don't know."

"Goddamnit, she's working people inside the department." She nibbled at a fingernail, then said, "Goddamnit," again and heaved herself to her feet, walked to her window. She stuck two fingers between the blades of her venetian blinds, looked out at the street for a moment. She had a big butt, wide hips. She'd been a large young woman, a good cop in decent shape. The shape was going now, after too many years in well-padded government chairs.

"There's no secret about how I got this job," she said finally, turning back to him. "I solved a lot of political problems. There was always pressure from the blacks. Then the feminists started in, after those rapes at Christmas. I'm a woman, I'm a former cop, I've got a law degree, I was a prosecutor and a liberal state senator with a good reputation on race relations…"

"Yeah, yeah, you were right for the job," Lucas said impatiently. "Cut to the chase."

She turned back to him. "Last winter some game wardens found a body up in the Carlos Avery reserve. You know where that's at?"

"Yeah. Lots of bodies up there."

"This one's name was Joan Smits. You probably remember the stories in the papers."

"Vaguely. From Duluth?"

"Right. An immigrant from South Africa. Walked out of a bookstore and that was it. Somebody stuck a blade in her just above the pelvic bone and ripped her all the way up to her neck. Dumped her in a snowdrift at Carlos Avery."

Lucas nodded. "Okay."

"Connell got the case, assisting the local authorities. She freaked. I mean, something snapped. She told me that Smits comes to her at night, to see how the investigation is going. Smits told her that there'd been other killings by the same man. Connell poked around, and came up with a theory."

"Of course," Lucas said dryly.

Roux took a pack of Winston Lights from her desk drawer, asked, "Do you mind?"

"No."

"This is illegal," she said. "I take great pleasure in it." She shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter, and tossed the lighter back in the desk drawer with the cigarettes. "Connell thinks she's found the tracks of a serial sex-killer. She thinks he lives here in Minneapolis. Or St. Paul or whatever, the suburbs. Close by, anyway."

"Is there? A serial killer?" Lucas sounded skeptical, and Roux peered across her desk at him.

"You've got a problem with the idea?" she asked.

"Give me a few facts."

"There are several," Roux said, exhaling smoke at the ceiling. "But let me give you another minute of background. Connell's not just an investigator. She's big in the left-feminist wing of the state AFSCME-American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees."

"I know what it is."

"That's an important piece of my constituency, Lucas. AFSCME put me in the state senate and kept me there. And maybe sixty percent of them are female." Roux flicked a cigarette ash toward her wastebasket. "They're my rock. Now. If I pull off this chief's job, if I go four, maybe six years, and get a little lucky, I'll go up to the U.S. Senate as a liberal law-and-order feminist."

"Okay," Lucas said. Everybody hustles.

"So Connell came down to talk to me about her serial-killer theory. The state doesn't have the resources for this kind of investigation, but we do. I make nice noises and say we'll get right on it. I'm thinking Nut, but she's got contacts all over the women's movements and she's AFSCME."

Lucas nodded, said nothing.

"She gives me her research…" Roux tapped a thick file-folder on her desk. "I carried it down to homicide and asked them to make some checks. Connell thinks there have been a half-dozen murders and maybe more. She thinks there have been two here in Minnesota, and others in Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, just across the border in Canada."

"What'd homicide say?" Lucas asked.

"I got the eye-rolling routine, and I started hearing Dickless Tracy comments again. Two of the killings had already been cleared. The Madison cops got a conviction. There're local suspects in a couple other cases."

"Sounds like-"

He was about to say bullshit, but Roux tapped her desk with an index finger and rode her voice over his. "But your old pal Sloan dug through Connell's research and he decided there's something to it."

"He mentioned that," Lucas admitted. He looked at the file folder on Roux's desk. "He didn't seem too happy with Connell, though."

"She scares him. Anyway, what Connell had was not so much evidence as an…" She groped for the right word: "… argument."

"Mmmm."

The chief nodded. "I know. She could be wrong. But it's a legitimate argument. And I keep thinking, What if I ditch it, and it turns out that I'm wrong? A fellow feminist, one of the constituency, comes to me with a serial killer. We blow it off and somebody else gets murdered and it all comes out."

"I'm not sure…"

"Besides, I can feel myself getting in trouble here. We're gonna set a new record for murders this year, unless something strange happens. That doesn't have anything to do with me, but I'm the chief. I take the blame. You're starting to hear that 'We need somebody tough up there.' I'm getting it from both inside and outside the department. The union never misses a chance to kick my ass. You know they backed MacLemore for the job."

"MacLemore's a fuckin' Nazi."

"Yes, he is…" Roux took a drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, coughed, laughing, and said, "There's even more. She thinks the killer might be a cop."

"Ah, man."

"It's just a theory," Roux said.

"But if you start chasing cops, the brotherhood's gonna be unhappy."

"Exactly. And that's what makes you perfect," Roux said. "You're one of the most experienced serial-killer investigators in the country, outside the FBI. Inside this department, politically, you're both old-line and hard-line. You could chase a cop."

"Why does she think it's a cop?"

"One of the victims, a woman in Des Moines, a real estate saleswoman, had a cellular phone in her car. She had a teenaged daughter at home, and called and said she was going out with a guy for a drink, that she might be getting home late. She said the guy was from out of town, and that he was a cop. That's all."

"Christ." Lucas ran his hand through his hair.

"Lucas, how long have you been back? A month?"

"Five weeks."

"Five weeks. All right. I know you like the intelligence thing. But I've got all kinds of guys running different pieces of intelligence. We got the division, and the intelligence unit, and the gang squad in that, and vice and narcotics and licensing… I brought you back, gave you a nice soft political job, because I knew I'd eventually run into shit like this and I'd need somebody to handle it. You're the guy. That was the deal."

"So you can run for the Senate."

"There've been worse senators," she said.

"I've got things-"

"Everybody's got things. Not everybody can stop insane killers," Roux said impatiently. She came and stood next to him, looking out the window, took another greedy drag on her cigarette. "I could give you some time if we hadn't had this Wannemaker thing. Now I gotta move, before the press catches on. And if we don't do something heavy, Connell might very well leak it herself."