John Sandford - Broken Prey

Karen Beloit, the M.D., agreed: “We’d take him for treatment-he had stomach and hemorrhoid troubles-you could watch him watching the women. The doctors and the nurses, watching them. You knew what he was thinking.”

“But one of the victims was a man,” Sloan objected.

Leo Grant said, “I was one of his therapists, and, uh, mmm . .” He glanced at Beloit, grinned, and said, “Put your fingers in your ears.”

“Spit it out, cowboy,” she said.

“You know that movie, American Pie , where the guy puts his dick in the pie ’cause it’s kinda warm? Charlie was like that. But with a mean streak. He’d just go around and he needed to fuck something. You’d see one of the younger guys go by, and Charlie would kinda look at his ass. . Charlie’d do that. He wouldn’t even consider it gay.”

Hart agreed with Grant. “It’s pretty common in here for the dominant member of a homosexual couple not to consider himself gay. The, mmm, receiver, everybody agrees that he’s gay. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Charlie had a sexual relationship of that kind. I’m a little surprised by this beating, this methodical torture you’re talking about. Charlie might enjoy hurting people but didn’t seem to me to be the kind who’d be methodical about it. To plan it. He might beat somebody to death or strangle somebody-hell, we’re pretty sure he did -but this is a little different. With Charlie, sex was the thing, the violence was the way he got it. With these killings it seems like the violence is the thing, the sex is an afterthought.”

Leo Grant was shaking his head, said, “Nah, nah, Dick, that’s not right. The sex is central. The sex is central. The torture is part of the sex act; the actual penetration is the culmination. I wouldn’t be surprised if the moment of murder, the throat cutting, comes simultaneously with orgasm.”

“Jesus.” Sloan stroked his throat with his fingers.

“You’re saying the torture is the foreplay,” Lucas said.

Grant nodded: “Exactly.”

Sam O’Donnell, the third psychologist, said, “We tried everything we could to hang on to him. I would. . there’s a way of getting to a guy sideways. I’d read a newspaper report to him, a sex crime somewhere, and get him to imagine how they would track down the criminal. He had the reticence of a longtime prisoner, but when you went at him sideways, got him thinking about it, you could watch the control slip away. In the end, giving him potential access to sex would be like putting an ounce of cocaine next to somebody just out of rehab.”

Sloan said, “Okay. So. . where did he go?”

Hart glanced at the others, then shrugged and said, “Fuck if I know.”

Beloit said, “He shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’d start by looking in strip bars and topless places. Someplace where there’s alcohol and women.”

Grant was shaking his head again. “He isn’t as dumb as he looks. He’ll stay away from those too-obvious places. He might try for, like, a college place. Someplace where there are a lot of targets. I’m not sure he’d go for an obvious place like a strip joint. Not if he thinks somebody might be looking for him.”

“We’re already looking at a bar in Faribault,” Lucas said. “They’ve got some hookers working out the back door.”

O’Donnell looked at Grant: “That might be something he couldn’t stay away from. Get off, and nobody to talk about it.”

Grant seemed skeptical: “Maybe.”

Lucas: “Now that we’re gonna put his face all over the place, he won’t be able to hang out in any bar. Where would he hide?”

“Someplace close,” Hart said. “He’s a homeboy. Even Iowa scares him.”

“I can see that,” Sloan said. “Iowa scares me a little.”

“He’s been out for what? Couple months? I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that he has a beard and maybe has dyed his hair,” O’Donnell said. “Maybe even gotten a toupee somewhere. What’s he driving? He didn’t have any money when he left here. Have you looked for stolen cars? Or friends who might loan him a car?”

“That’s one of our biggest questions,” Lucas said, tapping his finger on the tabletop. “How’s he getting around? He had to get a car from somewhere. Do you have any records of him talking about friends? Or did he have any friends here who might have hooked him up?”

“There were a couple of people he sort of hung with,” Hart said. “But they’re all still here, as far as I know.”

“Mike West,” Beloit said.

Grant snapped his fingers: “I never thought of him.” To Lucas: “West is a schizophrenic personality who can’t stay on his meds. He’d get freaked out, you know, sometimes life would get on top of him, and he’d get violent-though it was aimless, more like excitement than rage. He never hurt anyone, maybe a couple of cut lips, but he scared people. Anyway, he knew Charlie on the outside, when they were growing up.”

“That’s good,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”

“He’s right in Minneapolis, at a halfway house,” Hart said. “We can check before you leave. I’m not sure, but it seems to me he might’ve gotten out a couple of months before Charlie did.”

Beloit said, “That’s a possibility, I guess. But you know what bothers me?” She paused, getting her thoughts together, and then again held Lucas’s eyes. “When Charlie was out in the population, sometimes he’d stop and talk to the Big Three. They were friends, I think. Much as those people can be.”

Lucas: “Big Three?”

Hart: “Chase, Lighter, and Taylor. Lawrence Chase, Benjamin Lighter, and Carl Taylor. We think he killed at least two women, Charlie did, so they had something in common.”

Sloan said, “Ah, shit. Biggie Lighter was a friend of his?”

Lucas leaned back and grinned at him. “Your old buddy.” To the others: “Sloan’s the guy who put Biggie away.”

“I’d be more worried about Carl Taylor,” O’Donnell said. “He’s the one who spins out all these theories about why women need to be killed. He’s the preacher. And some of these guys. . I mean, some of them, go along.”

But Sloan looked at Lucas: “Biggie Lighter used to cut the. .” His eyes flicked sideways at Beloit, then back, “. . penises off his victims, after he raped them. I don’t know if he posed them.”

Hart said, “Rice had his penis cut off?” When Lucas nodded, he said, “That does sound like Biggie. His files say that he. . there was some cannibalism involved.”

Beloit: “Oh, yuck.”

“He’s not a guy you mess with,” Grant said. “When we’re dealing with him, we use full protective restraints.”

They all sat around silently for a moment, looking at one another, until Hart picked it up again.

“But you know, when it’s all said and done, none of this really sounds much like Charlie Pope. He’s a crazy killer, but he was clumsy,” Hart said. “Sam is right: that first one, the woman, sounds more like Carl Taylor. He’s the one who goes on all the time about punishment. He told me once, in a therapy session, that if he had to do it all over again, he’d punish the women before he killed them so that they’d have a taste of hell before they went there. He said he’d hang them up naked and whip them like Jesus was whipped. He’s welded together sex and punishment like. .” He shrugged. “Listening to him is like reading the Marquis de Sade.”

“Hang them up naked,” Lucas repeated.

“Yes. You know, so they were dangling and he could whip them all around. .”

“God damnit ,” Sloan said.

Lucas: “Do you guys think Taylor and Lighter could be operating Pope by remote control?”

Dick Hart jumped in: “Couldn’t really be remote control, because they can’t talk to him. These are the most highly restricted prisoners in the state. They have no contact with the outside.”