John Sandford: Night Prey

"If it gets out and you're already on it, it'd go easier for all of us."

Lucas finally nodded. "You saved my ass from the corporate life," he said. "I owe you."

"That's right," she said. "I did, and you do." Roux pushed her intercom button and leaned toward it. "Rocky? Round up the usual suspects. Get their asses in here."

Roux took five minutes to put together a meeting: Lester, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, his deputy Swanson, and Curt Myer, the new head of intelligence. Anderson, the department's computer freak, was invited at Lucas's request.

"How're we doing?" Roux asked Lester.

"The bodies are piling up. I've honest to God never seen anything like it." He looked at Lucas. "Sloan tells me there's not much chance that Wannemaker got it in Hudson. She was probably transported there."

Lucas nodded. "Looks like."

"So we got another one."

Roux lit another cigarette and turned to Lucas. "What do you need?"

Lucas looked back at Lester. "Same deal as last time. Except I want Sloan."

"What's the same deal?" Roux asked.

Lester looked at Roux. "Lucas works by himself, parallel to my investigation. Everything he finds out, and everything from the up-front investigation, goes into a book on a daily basis. Anderson does the book. He essentially coordinates."

Lester hooked a thumb at Anderson, who nodded, then turned to Lucas. "You can't have Sloan."

Lucas opened his mouth, but Lester shook his head. "You can't, man. He's my best guy and we're fuckin' drowning out there."

"I've been off the street…"

"Can't help it," Lester said. To Roux: "I'm telling you, pulling Sloan would kill us."

Roux nodded. "You'll have to live with it, at least for a while," she said to Lucas. "Can't you use Capslock?"

He shook his head. "He's got something going with this deputy that was killed. We need to stay on it."

"I could let you have one guy," Lester said. "He could run errands. Tell you the truth, you could help him out. Show him how it's done."

Lucas's eyebrows went up. "Greave?"

Lester nodded.

"I hear he's an idiot," Lucas said.

"He's just new," Lester said defensively. "You don't like him, give him back."

"All right," Lucas said. He looked at Anderson. "And I need to know where a guy is. A knife guy from years ago."

"Who's that?"

"His name was Junky Doog…"

When the meeting broke up, Roux held Lucas back. "Meagan Connell is gonna want to work it," she said. "I'd appreciate it if you'd take her."

Lucas shook his head. "Rose Marie, damnit, she's got a state badge, she can do what she wants."

"As a favor to me," Roux said, pressing him. "There's no way homicide'll take her. She's really into this. She's smart. She'd help you. I'd appreciate it."

"All right, I'll find something for her to do," Lucas said. Then: "You know, you never told me she was dying."

"I figured you'd find out by yourself," Roux said.

Roux's secretary had a dictation plug in her ear. When Lucas walked out of Roux's office, she pointed a finger at Lucas and held up her hand to stop him, typed another half-sentence, then pulled the plug out of her ear.

"Detective Sloan stopped by while you were talking," she said, her dark eyebrows arching. She took a manila file-folder from her desk and handed it to him. "He said fingerprints confirm that it's Wannemaker. She had a piece of an unfiltered cigarette in her hand, a Camel. They sent it to the lab in Madison. He said to look at the picture."

"Thanks." Lucas turned away and opened the folder.

"I already looked at it," she said. "Gross. But interesting."

"Umm." Inside the folder was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a body in a snowdrift. The faceup attitude was almost the same as that of the Wannemaker woman, with the same massive abdominal wound; pieces of a plastic garbage bag were scattered around in the snow. The secretary was looking over his shoulder, and Lucas half-turned. "There's a state investigator who's been in and out of here, name of Meagan Connell. Could you find her and ask her to call me?"

Lucas's office was fifteen feet square, no window, with a door that opened directly to a hallway. He had a wooden desk and chair, three visitor's chairs, two file cabinets, a bookcase, a computer, and a three-button phone. A map of the Twin Cities metro area covered most of one wall, a cork bulletin board another. He hung his jacket on a wooden hanger and the wooden hanger on a wall hook, sat down, pulled open the bottom desk drawer with his toe, put his feet on it, and picked up the telephone and dialed. A woman answered.

"Weather Karkinnen, please." He didn't recognize all the nurses' voices yet.

"Doctor Karkinnen is in the operating room… Is this Lucas?"

"Yes. Could you tell her I called? I might be late getting home. I'll try her there later."

He punched in another number, got a secretary. "Lucas Davenport for Sister Mary Joseph."

"Lucas, she's in Rome. I thought you knew."

"Shit… Oh, jeez, excuse me." The secretary was a novice nun.

"Lucas…" Feigned exasperation.

"I forgot. When is she back?"

"Two weeks yet. She's going on some kind of dig."

"Goddamnit… Oh, jeez, excuse me."

Sister Mary Joseph-Elle Kruger when they had gone to elementary school together-was an old friend and a shrink, with an interest in murder. She'd helped him out on other cases. Rome. Lucas shook his head and opened the file that Connell had put together.

The first page was a list of names and dates. The next eight pages were wound photos done during autopsies. Lucas worked through them. They were not identical, but there were inescapable similarities.

The wound photos were followed by crime-scene shots. The bodies had been dumped in a variety of locations, some urban, some rural. A couple were in roadside ditches, one in a doorway, one under a bridge. One had been simply rolled under a van in a residential neighborhood. There was little effort to hide them. In the background of several, he could see shreds of plastic garbage bags.

Going back and forth from each report to the relevant photographs, Lucas picked up a thread that seemed to tie them together in his mind. The women had been… littered. They'd been thrown away like used Kleenex. Not with desperation, or fear, or guilt, but with some discretion, as though the killer had been afraid of being caught littering.

The autopsy reports also showed up differences.

Rippedwas a subjective description, and some of the wounds looked more like frantic knife strikes than deliberate ripping. Some of the women had been beaten, some had not. Still, taken together, there was a feel about the killings. The feel was generated almost as much by the absence of fact as by the presence of it.

Nobody saw the women when they were picked up. Nobody saw the man who picked them up, or his car, although he must have been among them. There were no fingerprints, vaginal smears turned up no semen, although signs of semen had been found on the clothing of one of the women. Not enough for a blood or DNA type, apparently; none was listed.

When he finished the first reading, he skipped through the reports again, quickly, looking at the small stuff. He'd have to read them again, several times. There were too many details for a single reading, or even two or three. But he'd learned when he looked back from other murders that the files often pointed at the killer way before he was brought down. Truth was in the details…

His rummaging was interrupted by a knock. "Yeah. Come in."

Connell stepped through, flustered, but still pale as a ghost. "I was in town. I thought I'd come by, instead of calling."

"Come in. Sit down," Lucas said.