John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"What?" he snarled. The house was cold and he was naked, goose bumps erupting on the backs of his arms, his back, and his legs.

"This is Linda," said a prim voice. "Chief Daniel has called a meeting for eight o'clock sharp and you're to be there."

"'Kay."

"Would you repeat that, Lucas?"

"Eight o'clock in the chief's office."

"That's correct. Have a good morning." She was gone. Lucas stood looking at the receiver for a moment, dropped it onto the hook, yawned, and wandered back to the bedroom.

The clock on the dresser said seven-fifteen. He reached over to Jennifer, swatted her on the bare butt, and said, "I gotta get out of here."

"Okay," she mumbled.

Still naked, Lucas padded back down the hallway to the living room, opened the front door a crack, made sure nobody was around, popped the screen door, and got the paper off the porch. In the kitchen, he shook some Cheerios into a bowl, poured on milk, and unfolded the paper.

The maddog led the front page, a double-deck headline just below the Pioneer Press nameplate. The story was straightforward and accurate as far as it went, with no mention of the Ruiz woman. The chief hadn't talked about survivors. Had lied, in fact-had said the only known attacks by the killer were the three that produced deaths. Nor had he mentioned the notes.

There was a short, separate story about Lucas' involvement in the investigation. He would work independently of homicide, but parallel. Controversial. Killed five men in line of duty. Commendations. Well-known game inventor. Only cop in Minnesota who drove a Porsche to work.

Lucas finished the story and the Cheerios at the same time, yawned again, and headed down to the bathroom. Jennifer was staring at herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror and turned her head when he came in.

"Men have it easy when it comes to looks, you know?"

"Right."

"I'm serious." She turned back to the mirror and stuck her tongue out. "If anybody at the station saw me like this, they'd freak out. Makeup all over my face. My hair looks like the Wolf Man's. My ass hurts. I don't know…"

"Yeah, well, let me in there, I have to shave."

She lifted an arm and looked at the dark stubble in her armpit. "So do I," she said morosely.

Lucas was ten minutes late for the meeting. Daniel frowned when he walked in, and pointed at the empty chair. Frank Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, sat directly opposite him. The other six chairs were occupied by robbery-homicide detectives, including the overweight head of the homicide division, Lyle Wullfolk, and his rail-thin assistant, Harmon Anderson.

"We're working out a schedule," Daniel said. "We figure at least one guy ought to know everything that's going on. Lyle's got his division to run, so it's gonna be Harmon here."

Daniel nodded at the assistant chief of homicide. Anderson was picking his teeth with a red plastic toothpick. He stopped just long enough to nod back. "A pleasure," he grunted.

"He won't be running you, Lucas, you'll be on your own," Daniel said. "If you need to know something, Harmon'll tell you if we got it."

"How'd it go with the media this morning?" Lucas asked.

"They're all over the place. Like lice. They wanted me on the morning show but I told them I had this meeting. So then they wanted to shoot the meeting. I told them to go fuck themselves."

"The mayor was on," said Wullfolk. "He said we had some leads we're working on and he'd expect to get the guy in the next couple of weeks."

"Fuckin" idiot," said Anderson.

"Easy for you to say," Daniel said gloomily. "You're civil service."

"You got some ink," said Anderson, squinting at Lucas.

Lucas nodded and changed the subject. "What about the weapon from the property room?"

Anderson stopped picking his teeth. "We run a list," he said. "We got thirty-four people, cops and civilians, who might of took it. There are probably a few more we don't know about. Found out the fucking janitors go in there all the time. I think they're smoking some of the evidence. Everybody says he's clean, of course. We got IAD looking into it."

"I want to talk to them, the thirty-four people," Lucas said. "All at once. In a group. Get the union guy in here too."

"For what?" Wullfolk asked.

"I'll tell them that I want to know what happened to the gun, and the guy that tells me, I won't turn him in. And that the chief will call off the IAD investigation and nothing more'll happen. I'm going to tell them that if nobody talks to me, we'll go ahead with the shoo-flies and sooner or later we'll find out who it is and then we'll prosecute the son of a bitch on accessory-to-murder and throw his ass in Stillwater."

Anderson shook his head. "I wouldn't buy it, if I was the guy."

"You got a convincer?" asked Daniel.

Lucas nodded. "I think so. I'll outline how the interrogation will go and I'll tell them that I won't read them their rights or anything else, so even if they are prosecuted, the whole thing would be entrapment and the case would be thrown out. I think we could build it so the guy would buy it."

Anderson and Daniel looked at each other, and Anderson shrugged. "It's worth a try. It could get us something fast. I'll set something up for late afternoon. Try to get as many as I can. Four o'clock?"

"Good," Lucas said.

"We've set up a data base in my office, we got a girl typing everything in and printing it out. Everybody working it gets a notebook with every piece of paper we develop, every interview," Anderson said. "We'll go over everything we know about these people. If there's a connection or a pattern, we'll find it. Everybody's supposed to read the files every night. When you see something, tell me. We'll put it in the file."

"What do we have so far?" asked Lucas.

Anderson shook his head. "Not much. Personal data, some loose patterns, that sorta shit. Number one was Lucy Bell, a waitress, nineteen years old. Number two was a housewife, Shirley Morris, thirty-six. Number three was the artist that fought him off, Carla Ruiz. She's thirty-two. Number four was this real-estate woman Lewis, forty-six. One was married, the other three were not. One of the other three, the artist, is divorced. The real-estate woman was a widow. The waitress was a rock-'n'-roller, a punk. The real-estate lady went to classical-music concerts with her boyfriend. It goes like that. The only pattern seems to be that they're all women."

Everybody thought about it for a minute.

"What's the interval between murders?" asked Lucas.

"The first one, Bell, was July 14, then Morris was on August 2, nineteen days between them; then the next was Ruiz on August 17, fifteen days after Morris; then Lewis on August 31, fourteen days later," said Anderson.

"Getting shorter," said one of the cops.

"Yeah. That's a tendency with sadistic killers, if he is one," said Wullfolk.

"If they start coming faster, he'll be doing them off the top of his head, not so careful-like," said another of the cops.

"We don't know that. He may be picking them out six months ahead of time. He may have a whole file of them," Anderson said.

"Any other pattern to the days?" asked Lucas.

"That's one thing, they're all during the week. A Thursday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and another Wednesday. No weekends."

"Not much of a pattern," Daniel said.

"Anything about the women?" asked Lucas. "All tall? All got big tits? What?"

"They're all good-looking. That's my judgment, but I think it's right. All have dark hair, three of them black-the Bell girl, who dyed hers black, Ruiz, and Lewis. Morris' hair was dark brown."

"Huh. Half the women in town have blonde hair, or blondish," said one of the other detectives. "That might be something."

"There are all kinds of possibilities in this stuff, but we gotta be careful, because there's also coincidence to think about. Anyway, look for those patterns. I'll make a special list of patterns," Anderson said. "Bring in your notebooks every afternoon and I'll give you updates. Read them."