John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"What about the lab, they sittin' on their thumbs, or what?" asked Wullfolk.

"They're doing everything they can. They're running down the tape he used to bind them, they're sifting through the crap they picked up with the vacuum, they're looking at everything for prints. They haven't come up with much."

"If any of these notebooks get to the media, there are going to be some bodies twisting in the wind," said Daniel. "Everybody understand?"

The cops all nodded at once.

"I don't doubt that we're going to spring some leaks," Daniel said. "But nobody, nobody is to say anything about the notes the killer is leaving behind. If I find somebody leaks to the media on these notes, I'll find the son of a bitch and fire him. We've been holding it close to our chests, and it's going to stay that way."

"We need a surefire identifier that the public doesn't know about," Anderson explained. "They knew they had the Son of Sam when they looked through the window of his apartment and saw some notes like the ones he'd been sending to the cops and the media."

"There's going to be a lot of pressure," Daniel said. "On all of us. I'll try to keep it off your backs, but if this asshole gets one or two more, there'll be reporters who want to talk to the individual detectives. We're going to put that off as long as we can. If we get to the point where we've got to do it, we'll get the attorney in to advise you on what to say and what not to say. Every interview gets cleared through this office in advance. Okay? Everybody understand?"

The heads bobbed again.

"Okay. Let's do it," he said. "Lucas, hang around a minute."

When the rest of the cops had shuffled out, Daniel pushed the door shut.

"You're our pipeline to the media, feeding out the unofficial stuff we need in the papers. You drop what we need on one of the papers and maybe one TV station as a deep source, and when the others come in for confirmation, I'll catch that. Okay?"

"Yeah. I'm a source for people at both papers and all the TV stations. The biggest problem will be keeping them from figuring out I'm sourcing all of them."

"So work something out. You're good at working things out. But we need the back door into the media. It's the only way they'll believe us."

"I'd just as soon not lie to anybody," Lucas said.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But if you gotta burn somebody, you burn him. This is too heavy to fool around with."

"Okay."

"You got an interview with that artist?"

"Yeah. This afternoon." Lucas looked at his watch. "I've got to close down my net and get back here by four. I better get moving."

Daniel nodded. "I got a real bad feeling about this one. Homicide won't catch the guy unless we get real lucky. I'm looking for help, Davenport. Find this son of a bitch."

Lucas spent the rest of the morning on the street, moving from bars to pay phones to newsstands and barbershops. He talked to a half-dozen dope dealers ranging in age from fourteen to sixty-four, and three of their customers. He spoke to two bookies and an elderly couple who ran a convenience mail drop and an illegal switchboard, several security guards, one crooked cop, a Sioux warrior, and a wino who, he suspected, had killed two people who deserved it. The message was the same for all of them: I will be gone, but, I trust, not forgotten, because I will be back.

Freezing the net worried him. He thought of his street people as a garden that needed constant cultivation-money, threats, immunity, even friendship-lest the weeds of temptation begin to sprout.

At noon Lucas called Anderson and was told that the meeting had been set.

"Four o'clock?"

"Yeah."

"I'll see you before that. Talk it over."

"Okay."

He ate lunch at a McDonald's on University Avenue, sharing it with a junkie who nodded and nodded and finally fell asleep in his french fries. Lucas left him slumped over the table. The pimple-faced teenager behind the counter watched the bum with the half-hung eyes of a sixteen-year-old who had already seen everything and was willing to leave it alone.

Ruiz' warehouse studio was ten minutes away, a shabby brick cube with industrial-style windows that looked like dirty checkerboards. The only elevator was designed for freight and was driven by another teenager, this one with a complexion as vacant as his eyes and a boombox the size of a coffee table. Lucas rode the elevator up five stories, found Ruiz' door, and rapped on it. Carla Ruiz looked out at him over the door chain and he showed her the gold shield.

"Where's the rose?" she asked. Lucas had the shield in one hand and a briefcase in the other.

"Hey, I forgot. Supposed to be in my teeth, right?" Lucas grinned at her. She smiled back a small smile and unhooked the chain.

"I'm a mess," she said as she opened the door. She had an oval face and brilliant white teeth to go with her dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair. She was wearing a loose peasant blouse over a bright Mexican skirt. The gun-sight gash on her forehead was still healing, an angry red weal around the ragged black line of the cut. Bruises around her eyes and on one side of her face had faded from black-and-blue to a greenish yellow.

Lucas stepped inside and pocketed the shield. As she closed the door he looked closely at her face, reaching out with an index finger to turn her chin up.

"They're okay," he said. "Once they turn yellow, they're on the way out. Another week and they'll be gone."

"The cut won't be."

"Look at this," Lucas said, tracing the scar line down his forehead and across his eye socket. "When it happened, this wire fishing leader was buried right in my face. Now all that's left is the line. Yours will be thinner. With some bangs, nobody'll ever see it."

Suddenly aware of how close they were standing, Ruiz stepped back and then walked around him into the studio.

"I've been interviewed about six times," she said, touching the cut on her forehead. "I think I'm talked out."

"That's okay," said Lucas. "I don't work quite like the other guys. My questions will be a little different."

"I read about you in the paper," she said. "The story said you've killed five people."

Lucas shrugged. "It's not that I wanted to."

"It seems like a lot. My ex-husband's father was a policeman. He never shot his gun at anybody in his whole career."

"What can I tell you?" Lucas said. "I've been working in areas where it happens. If you work mostly in burglary or homicide, you can go a whole career without ever firing your gun. If you work in dope or vice, it's different."

"Okay."

She pulled a dinette chair out from a table and gestured at it, and sat on the other side. "What do you want to know?"

"Do you feel safe?" he asked as he put his briefcase on the table and opened it.

"I don't know. They say he got in by slipping the locks, so the landlord put on all new locks. The policeman who was here said they're good. And they gave me a phone and I have a special alarm code for 911. I just say 'Carla' and the cops are supposed to come running. The station is just across the street. Everybody in the building knows what happened and everybody's looking for strangers. But you know… I don't feel all that safe."

"I don't think he'll come back," Lucas said.

"That's what the other cops, uh, the other policemen said," she said.

"You can call us cops," Lucas said.

"Okay." She smiled again and he marveled at her even white teeth. She wasn't pretty, exactly, but she was extraordinarily attractive. "It's just that I'm the only witness. That scares me. I hardly go out anymore."

"We think he's a real freak," said Lucas. "A freak-freak, different from other freaks. He seems to be smart. He's careful. He doesn't seem to be running out of control. We don't think he'll come back because that would put him at risk."