John Sandford - Broken Prey

“Somebody on the staff,” Lucas said. “Somebody medical. Somebody who could get to Pope, and then get to O’Donnell. I mean, the guy was using O’Donnell’s play voice when we were still looking for Pope. ”

“Jesus. I can’t even think about that,” Sloan said. “All the way back then, he was faking us out on something we might not ever figure out.”

“Yeah.”

Sloan said, “But.”

“But what?”

“But all this only works if it really isn’t O’Donnell. Do we stop looking for him?”

“I will bet you one hundred depreciated American dollars right now that it’s not O’Donnell,” Lucas said. “We’ll keep looking-but I think we go back to square one with the staff. Let’s get everybody together again and start tearing up the staff backgrounds. There’s something in there.”

“The guy from California, huh?”

“Yup. The guy from California.”

Lucas himself cleared Dr. Cale, while the coordination staff worked on the other staff members whose records they had. When Lucas was convinced that Cale was clear-he never seriously suspected him, he was too old for a new serial killer-he drove to St. John’s, and he and Cale spent two hours in the personnel office Xeroxing staff records for anyone who might have even an indirect connection to the Big Three.

There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the passenger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.

“Okay,” he told the group, “This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it.”

They called references listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.

They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed “none” under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who’d had an abortion but had listed “none” under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.

One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he’d not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to “explode.” The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.

“Ouch,” said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. “Here’s a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness. .”

He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan’s only appearance in public print. Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn’t figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.

Elle came in late in the afternoon, to look at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.

“The quality of information you’re getting is not the right kind to pull him up,” she said. “You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each person to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of suspects.”

“The list would include them?”

“Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the winners of political races. . All the suspects know one another, and most of them, given their jobs, are intelligent, so you would wind up with dozens of evaluations that would include all kinds of things that you don’t get on paper. Personal feelings, rumor, gossip, personal encounters. . you should probably survey the patients, too. They may have psychological problems, but lots of them are actually hyperperceptive, hypersensitive, to the qualities of other people. .”

“You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people,” Lucas said.

“Not really-you’d just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you’d get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?”

“About eighty.”

“If you were to give questionnaires to all eighty people, and if the killer is one of them, I would bet that his name is in the top five,” she said.

Lucas scratched his chin. “If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don’t you put together the questionnaire, have it ready?”

“Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he’s still out there. .”

“Because we’d have all kinds of legal and labor problems,” Lucas said. “We’re already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We’re gonna hear from the unions any time now. . And the media would go crazy about invasion of privacy and all that. I mean, we are on a fishing expedition.”

“If he kills somebody else. .”

“That’s why I say I’ll do it if we don’t get anything in the next day or two,” Lucas said. “Right now, I think he’s hunkered down. He’ll start moving again, if he’s like you say, if he doesn’t have any choice. .”

“There’s something else. If you let me do this market thing. . it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of Forensic Psychology would be all over it.”

The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.

The co-op center had pretty much closed down by seven o’clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they’d seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn’t done well at a previous job.

Lucas became interested in a staff member named Herman Clousy. He’d been hired as a medical technician, doing routine lab work, including blood tests on Charlie Pope. To get the job, he’d provided a transcript from a “Lakewood Community College” in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, but nobody could find a Lakewood Community College. He’d also provided three references, and none of the three could be reached at the phone numbers he’d listed. On the other hand, he’d worked for the state for fifteen years, and the references were out-of-date.

The next morning, Clousy was at the top of Lucas’s list for almost fifteen minutes. After the daily chat with Weather, he called Dr. Cale, who said that Clousy was an average performer, one of the shadow people whom nobody paid much attention to. He was married, Cale knew, and lived in Mankato. Was there any special reason why Lucas was interested?

“He says he graduated from a Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, and there isn’t one.”

“Really? That would have been checked. . let me ask my secretary, she used to work for the community college down here.”

Cale went away for a minute, then came back and said, “Sandy says there used to be a Lakewood,” he said. “She says it’s called Century College now.”